James Hogan - Giant's Star

"I don’t know." Hunt shrugged and reflected for a second. "I suppose it’d have to tag them with some kind of header-label system."

"That’s what I thought," Lyn said, nodding. "Now suppose VISAR did manage to get inside JEVEX, and it scrambled those labels around so that JEVEX couldn’t tell the difference anymore. It could make JEVEX really believe all those stories were true. Imagine what would happen if it started saying things like that. Braghuilio and his bunch would go bananas. See what I mean-it’d be nice to watch."

"What a delightful thought," Danchekker murmured, intrigued. An evil smile crept across his face as he pictured it. "How unfortunate that we never mentioned it to Calazar. War or not, the Ganymeans would have been unable to resist it."

Hunt was smiling distantly too as he thought about it. The idea could be taken a lot further than Lyn had suggested. If VISAR got into JEVEX’s memory system sufficiently to change the labels, it would only be a short step from there for it to add in some extra fiction of its own devising. For example, if it could gain access to the part of JEVEX that handled the incoming surveillance data from Earth, VISAR could probably make JEVEX think anything it wanted about what was happening on Earth-such as a whole armada being readied to blow Jevlen out of the Galaxy. As Danchekker had said, a delightful thought.

"You could fake an agreement with Thurien to use their toroids to transport a strike force to Jevlen," Hunt said. "That way you could have JEVEX saying it would arrive in days. And if you’d already scrambled its records from way back, that would be fully consistent with what it would think it had been reporting for years. The Jevlenese would know it hadn’t . . . . but then if they’ve never questioned it all their lives, maybe they wouldn’t know what to think. What do you think Broghuilio would make of that?"

"He’d have a heart attack," Lyn said. "What do you think, Chris?"

Danchekker turned serious all of a sudden. "I have no idea," he replied. "But this is an example of precisely the kind of thing I was referring to. The idea of finding ways to bewilder a foe is something that comes naturally to humans but not to Ganymeans. They are going to attempt the straightforward approach of simply crashing JEVEX-direct, logical, and without any thought of deviousness. But suppose that the Jevlenese have prepared themselves by providing backup systems capable of operating autonomously even without JEVEX. If so, the Shapieron could still find itself exposed to considerable dangers when it reveals itself by bringing down JEVEX, assuming it succeeds. I trust you see my point." Danchekker directed a solemn stare at the other two, then continued: "But on the other hand, if their plan had been to control JEVEX rather than disable it, and to disorient the Jevlenese by subterfuge of the kind you have been describing, then perhaps all manner of opportunities to exploit and exacerbate the resulting situation further might have presented themselves, which as things stand will never be created." He looked up at the sky again and shook his head sadly. "I can’t for a moment imagine our Ganymean friends adopting such a tactic, I’m afraid."

The amusement of a few minutes earlier had drained from Hunt’s face as he listened. He had tried, Caldwell had tried, and Heller had tried, but still he couldn’t escape the lingering discomfort that perhaps they could have tried harder still. Now that Danchekker had voiced them, he recognized the same thoughts that he had been suppressing. "We should have gone with them," he said in a heavy voice. "We should have made Gregg bully them into it."

"I doubt that it would have made any difference," Danchekker said. "Couldn’t you see that Garuth had a personal score to settle with Broghuilio? He didn’t want anybody else involved as a matter of principle. Calazar knew it too. Nothing we could have said would have made any difference."

"I guess you’re right." Hunt sighed. He looked toward Taurus again, stared at it for a while, then suddenly snapped out of his reverie and looked from side to side at the others. "It’s getting cold," he said. "Let’s go inside and get some coffee."

They turned and began walking slowly back across the apron toward the mess hall.

Many light-years away, the Shapieron slipped quietly out of orbit above Thurien. For a little over a day VISAR tracked it to beyond the Gistar system and monitored its transfer through h-space to a point just outside JEVEX’s zone of control on the fringe of the Jevlenese star system. The power and control beams to the two unmanned decoy ships sent with it were promptly jammed, and while they drifted helplessly on the edge of JEVEX-space, the Shapieron continued moving inward and vanished from the view of VISAR’s instruments into the cloak of impenetrabifity that surrounded the enemy star.

The construction floating in space was in the form of a hollow square. It measured over five hundred miles along a side. From each of its corners a bar, twenty miles thick, extended diagonally inward to support the two-hundred-mile-diameter sphere held in the center. The surfaces of the outer square bristled with angular protuberances, sections of ribbing, and domed superstructures, all etched harshly in black and shades of metallic gray, and immense windings girded parts of the central sphere and its supporting members. Receding away into space behind it, a line of identical objects spaced at two-thousand-mile intervals diminished in size with distance until they were lost in the background of stars.

Imares Broghuilio, formerly Premier of the Jevlenese faction of Thurien and now Overlord of the recently proclaimed Independent Protectorate of Jevlenese Worlds, stood in his black Supreme Military Commander’s uniform, his arms folded across his chest, and scowled out at the scene from inside a blisterdome on the hull of a spacecraft riding several thousand miles off. Low to one side, the dark, rugged sphere of the planet Uttan hung as a crescent against the blackness, appearing the size of a tennis ball held at arm’s length. Wylott and a number of generals from various commands of the Jevlenese military were standing behind him with Estordu and a handful of civilian advisors. To one side, not looking very happy, were Niels Sverenssen and Feylon Turl, technical coordinator of the quadriflexor construction program.

Broghuilio waved an arm at the scene outside. " We have been forced to revise our timetables just as drastically and in just as little time," he said curtly, glaring at Turl. "I expect you to do at least as well."

"But engineering on this scale can’t be accelerated by that kind of factor simply by ordering it to be," Turl protested. "We are still short by fifty units. It will take two years at least, even with round-the-clock shifts in all critical-"

"Two years is unacceptable," Broghuillo said flatly. "I’ve given you our requirement, and I want your confirmation, today, that it will be met as stipulated. Tell me what can be done for a change. The Protectorate is now operating on a war economy, and whatever resources are needed will be made available."

"It isn’t simply a question of production resources," Turl insisted. "The power to transfer that number of quadriflexors to the target won’t be available for two years. Crallort’s latest estimates show that-"

"Crallort has been removed," Broghuilio informed him. "That office is now under military control. The generator battery will be expanded under an emergency program that is already in effect, and the power requirement will be met as stipulated."

"I-" Turl began, but Broghuilio cut him off with an impatient motion of his hand.