James P Hogan. Giant’s Star. Giant Series #3

“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. zoit~c 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 sys

tern,” 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 Jevien. If the Thuriens could intercept one, or preferably several, of those beams, simulating regular traffic in order to be in-conspicuous, 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 con-

ceded. “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. zo~c could never do it. The only system in existence that would stand a chance is VISAR, but you couldn’t couple VISAR into zo~c 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 Z0RAC 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 zoit~&c can just get far enough into JEVEX to block its jamming capability, we can throw the whole weight of VISAR in behind zoa~&c and hit JEVEX from all directions at once. VISAR would do the rest.”

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