"No disrespect, but your experts are missing the obvious," Garuth said. "They’ve taken advanced Thurien technology for granted for so long that they can’t think in any other terms."
Calazar raised his hands protectively. "Calm down, stop waving your arms about, and tell me what you’re trying to say," he suggested.
"The way to get in at Jevlen is in orbit over Thurien right now," Shilohin said. "The Shapieron. It might be obsolete by your standards, but it’s got its own on-board power, and ZORAC flies it perfectly well without any need for anybody’s h-grid."
For a few seconds Calazar stared mutely back at them in astonishinent. What they had said was true-none of the scientists who had been debating the problem without a break since JEVEX had severed its connections had even considered the Shapieron. It seemed so obvious that Calazar was convinced there had to be a flaw. He looked questioningly at Eesyan.
"I can’t see why not," Eesyan said. "As Shilohin says, there’s no way JEVEX could stop it."
There was something deeper behind this proposal, Calazar sensed as he searched Garuth’s face. What was equally obvious, and had not been said, was that even if JEVEX could not prevent the Shapieron from physically entering its operating zone, it might well have plenty of other means at its disposal for stopping the ship once it got in there. Garuth had been itching to confront the Jevlenese yesterday, and had been frustrated at the last moment. Was he now ready to risk himself, his crew, and his ship in recklessly settling something that he saw as a personal vendetta against Broghuilio? Calazar could not permit that. "The Shapieron would still be detected," he pointed out. "The Jevlenese will have sensors and scanners all over their star system. You could be walking into anything. A ship on its own, isolated from any communications with Thurien, with no defensive equipment of any kind? . . ." He let the sentence hang and allowed his expression to say the rest.
"We think we have an answer to that," Shilohin said. "We could fit the ship’s probes with low-power h-link communicators that wouldn’t register on JEVEX’s detectors and deploy them as a covering screen twenty miles or so out from the Shapieron. That would give them, effectively, faster-than-light communications back to the ship’s computers. ZORAC would be able to generate cancellation functions that the probes would relay outward as out-of-phase signals added to the optical and radar wavelengths reflected from the ship so that the net readings registered at a distance in any direction would be zero. In other words it would be electromagnetically invisible."
"It would still show up on h-scan," Calazar objected. "JEVEX could detect its main-drive stress field."
"We don’t have to use main drive at all," Shilohin countered. "VISAR could accelerate the ship in h-space and eject it from the exit port with sufficient momentum to reach Jevlen passively in a day. When it got near, it could retard and maneuver on its auxiliaries, which radiate below detection threshold."
"But you’d still have to project an exit port outside the star system," Calazar said. "You couldn’t hide that scale of disturbance from JEVEX. It would know that something was going on."
"So we send another ship or two as decoys . . . unmanned ships," Shilohin replied. "Let JEVEX jam those and think that’s all there is to it. In fact that would be a good way of diverting its attention from the Shapieron. "
Calazar still didn’t like the proposal. He turned away, clasped his hands behind his back, and paced slowly across the room to stare at the wall while he thought it over. He was not a technical expert, but from what he knew, the scheme was workable theoretically. Thurien ships carried on-board compensators that interacted with a projected toroid, compacting it and minimizing the gravitational disturbance created around it. That was why Thurien ships could travel out of a planetary system and transfer into h-space after only a day of conventional cruising. The Shapieron had not been built with such compensators, of course, which was why months had been necessary for it to clear the solar system. But even as the thought struck him, Calazar realized there was a simple answer to that too: the Shapieron could be equipped with a Thurien compensator system in a matter of days. Anyway, if there were serious technical difficulties, Eesyan would already have found them.
Calazar did not have to ask what the purpose of the exercise would be. JEVEX consisted of a huge network similar to VISAR, and in addition to its grid of h-communications facilities possessed a dense mesh of conventional electromagnetic signal beams that it employed for local communications over moderate distances around Jevlen. If the Thuriens could intercept one, or preferably several, of those beams, simulating regular traffic in order to be inconspicuous, there was a chance that they might be able to gain access to the operating nucleus of JEVEX and crash the system from the inside. If they succeeded, the whole Jevlenese operation would come down with it, and the same thing would happen to the whole empire that had happened on a smaller scale to the Thurien Jevlenese a day earlier. But the problem was how to get the necessary hardware physically into a position to intercept the beams. Eesyan’s scientists had been debating it for over a day and so far had produced no usable suggestions.
At last Calazar wheeled around to face the others again. "Very well, you seem to have that side of it all figured out," he conceded. "But tell me If I’m missing something. There’s something else that you haven’t mentioned: the kind of computing power you’d need to bring down a system like JEVEX would be phenomenal. ZORAC could never do it. The only system in existence that would stand a chance is VISAR, but you couldn’t couple VISAR into ZORAC because that would require an h-link, and you couldn’t close an h-link while JEVEX is running."
"That’s a gamble," Eesyan admitted. "But ZORAC wouldn’t have to crash the whole JEVEX system. All it would have to do is open up a channel to let VISAR in. Our idea is to equip the Shapieron and a set of its daughter probes with h-link equipment that VISAR can couple in through, and disperse them to intercept a number of channels into JEVEX. Then if ZORAC can just get far enough into JEVEX to block its jamming capability, we can throw the whole weight of VISAR in behind ZORAC and hit JEVEX from all directions at once. VISAR would do the rest."
There was a chance, Calazar admitted to himself. He didn’t know what the plan’s odds of success were, but it was a chance; and Garuth’s idea was more than anybody else had been able to come up with. But the vision in his mind’s eye of the Shapieron venturing alone into a hostile region of space, unarmed and defenseless, and the tiny ZORAC pitting itself against the might of JEVEX, was chilling. He walked slowly back to the center of the room while the other three Ganymeans watched him intently. It was clear from their expressions what they wanted him to say. "You realize, of course, that this could mean subjecting your ship to what could be a considerable risk," he said gravely, looking at Garuth. "We have no idea what the Jevlenese have waiting there. Once you are in, there will be no way for us to get to you if you encounter difficulties. You would not even be able to contact us without revealing your presence, and even then the channel would immediately be jammed. You would be entirely on your own."
"I know that," Garuth answered. His expression had hardened, and his voice was uncharacteristically tense. "I would go. I would not ask any of my people to follow. It would be for them to decide individually."