Wylott was beginning to nod slowly. “To arm and equip the Terrans as proxy troops,” he said. “Thurien will enlist Earth to fight on its behalf.”
“Exactly!” Broghuilio exclaimed. “But Earth is demilitarized and not competent to match us technically anyway, and at this moment the Thuriens have nothing to arm them with.” He looked around with a triumphant glint in his eyes. “In other words their solution will require time. But we do not need time because right now we have something, and they have nothing. Our forces might be small compared to what they will be in times to come, but that situation gives us a ratio of something to zero, which equates to infinite superiority. That advantage will not exist indefinitely, and
it will never again be in our favor to the extent that it is now. And that is why the time to act is now, and not later.”
Wylott’s eyes gleamed as he began to see what Broghuillo was driving at. “With self-powered ships we can send a task force in and issue an ultimatum to the Thuriens to place vis~a under our control,” he said. “Being Ganymeans, they will have no choice. Then they’d be helpless, and we would assume full control of the combined empires of JEVEX and visAR.”
“And the Terrans will be deprived of their armorers,” Broghullb completed. “In two years they could never hope to match us without the Thuriens. Thus we will have bought the time we need to complete our preparations for dealing with Earth, and for neutralizing Thurien permanently.” He turned to confront Wylott squarely, folded his arms across his chest, and stuck out his chin. “That, General, is the plan-my plan.”
“A stroke of genius,” Wylott declared. A chorus of murmurs from the ranks behind endorsed the statement. “We will commence detailed preparations at once.”
“See to it,” Broghuilio ordered. He turned and glowered at Sverenssen. “And you, if you think you have the ability to redeem yourself, go back to Earth. I want every one of the traitors in your organization uncovered, tracked down, and dealt with. All except Rank B2 and above. Those are to be held while we arrange a landing to bring them back to Jevien. I will deal with them personally.” His voice fell to an ominous growl, and his eyes smoldered. “And if you fail in this, Sverenssen, you will certainly be brought back, even if I have to come physically to Earth myself to do it.”
chapter thirty-one
Several days went by without news from the Shapieron. VISAR analyzed all the available data on the design of JEVEX and gave zoit.&c a five-percent chance of electronically lock-picking its way through the layers of security checks and access restrictions protecting the enemy system. The problem was that JEVEX’S Ganymean-designed molecular circuits worked at subnanosecond speeds, enabling an enormous amount of self-checking to be interleaved with its regular operations. The odds were overwhelming that any chink in JEVEX’S armor that zoa~c managed to slip a wedge into would be detected and closed before vis~ could be brought in to drive the wedge home. In other words JEVEX could scan its own internal processes too rapidly, or as Hunt put it to Caldwell, “It’s got too much instant-to-instant awareness of what’s going on inside itself. If we could distract its attention somehow, even for a few seconds at the speeds those machines work at, ZORAC might be able to neutralize the jamming system and let VISAR in.” But how could they distract JEVEX when the only channel they had to it was through zoit~c, and zo~c couldn’t get in until JEVEX had been distracted?
And then vIsAa reported a series of gravitational disturbances outside Gistar’s planetary system, followed by a steady accumulation of objects that seemed to be ships of some kind being transferred through from somewhere. Shortly afterward, the objects began moving toward Thurien. vjs~ could detect no h-grid power or control beams and was unable to check their progress. They were self-powered, heavily armed Jevlenese war vessels, and there were fifty of them. As they fanned out to maneuver into positions around Thurien, JEVEX reopened contact briefly with vis~ to deliver the Jevienese ultimatum: the Thuriens had forty-eight hours to place their entire world-system under Jevlenese control. If at the end of that period they had not agreed, obliteration of Thurien cities one at a time would commence, starting with Vranix. Those were the terms. There was nothing to discuss.