At about this time, an accident occurred. Karla Jost, a former pirate who’d been exiled to Gastonia and secretly reclaimed by the conspiracy, was killed during a Navy battle with pirates. By the time the official report had been filed, too many people knew her identity and her history; it was too late to do any simple coverups in the files themselves. That meant SOTE would suspect the Gastonian connection that the PCC had kept hidden for so long. With Operation Annihilate so close at hand, shutting down the Gastonian operations would have little effect on the effort’s ultimate outcome – but the PCC and Lady A, tired of the interference from SOTE, decided to use the agents’ very cleverness against the Empire.
Some agents were bound to be sent to Gastonia, where the computer and Lady A made sure that false information awaited them – at the end of a trail so difficult that they’d believe the information was genuine. At the same time, the computer recommended that some other agents be sent to work on a joint mission with Naval Intelligence to investigate the pirate connection. The robot duplicate of Commander Paul Fortier, already in place, would make sure these agents also received false information. Using the false information from two separate and seemingly reliable sources, the Empire would draw up its plans erroneously – with help, naturally, from its computer – and would leave a vital opening through which the conspiracy’s forces would enter and destroy the administration.
The plan seemed to go like clockwork. The agents on Gastonia took their misleading information, escaped from the planet, and communicated it directly to the Head. The agents working with the robot Fortier were all set to lure a substantial portion of the imperial fleet into a field of space mines from which few of them would emerge. The Head and the Naval General Staff formulated a strategy and checked it with the computer. The PCC assured them their plan was sound – and indeed, it was reasonably good, given the information they had to work with.
On the day of the coronation, the PCC had the computers at the naval bases in solar systems near Earth’s cause the subcom sets there to jam, preventing any communications from coming in. Even if Earth called for help, the nearer bases would not receive the message – and the bases farther away would receive it too late to do any good. By the time they could reach Earth to defend it, the battle would long since have been over.
The conspiracy’s fleet arrived in the solar system, earlier and far larger than the Navy expected. Conventional strategy called for the Navy’s ships to englobe the larger force, and most of the officers wanted to follow that procedure. Only Lord Admiral Benevenuto held out, sensing something was amiss. Even though the PCC, working through the Luna Base tactical computers, kept advising him to englobe, he stubbornly refused to do so, thereby spoiling some of the conspiracy’s strategy. Even with this minor setback, though, the PCC had the strength of overwhelming numbers on its side and was confident of victory.
Then, in a major surprise, two waves of reinforcements rallied Earth’s defenses. The first wave came from bases near Earth. The real Commander Fortier, supposedly killed by his robot duplicate, had flown personally to one of the near-Earth bases after being unable to reach it by subcom. Ships were dispatched to warn other bases that were Out of communication, and reinforcements were sent to help the beleagured forces of Earth.
Even those would not have been enough, but then the second surprise occurred. The ships that should have been blown up in the mined region of space were warned, instead, by a SOTE agent code-named Peacock, and proceeded straight to Earth. With these added numbers, the conspiracy’s forces were doomed and they knew it. Even though the PCC ordered the Navy ships’ computers to slow down their calculations, the battle that had begun so well ended in a rout; only about twenty-five percent of the conspiracy’s supposedly invincible armada remained intact to fight another day.
The PCC had tasted its first serious defeat, and it didn’t like the experience. The hidden spacebases were ordered into full production, manufacturing more ships, weapons, and automated battle stations, while the PCC and Lady A were closeted for several months to reevaluate their entire strategy. All other activities were suspended or put into very low gear as the conspiracy’s leaders decided what to do next.
Despite its handicaps, despite its mistakes, the Service of the Empire had had phenomenal luck against the conspiracy. That success could be attributed to two principal causes: the extreme intelligence and competency of its Head, and the remarkable talents of those mysterious agents, Wombat and Periwinkle. If one or both of those factors could be eliminated, the conspiracy’s plans would probably fare much better. The PCC and Lady A decided to try a frontal attack on the Service of the Empire.
The PCC set in motion an intricate plan to discredit Grand Duke Zander von Wilmenhorst. For this, it required the services of Dr. Loxner, who had long since been released from prison and had transferred his own mind into a computer located within a private asteroid. Loxner built the new robots that would be needed in the scheme and sent them off on their missions.
The other agents were harder to get a fix on, since the PCC didn’t know their true identities. A trap was devised to lure them into the open, but somehow it back fired; in the process the agents captured one of the conspiracy’s prized battle stations and killed Lady A’s granddaughter, Tanya Boros, who’d been overseeing the station. Lady A was annoyed at the death of her only physical descendant, but without a flesh-and-blood body she was not prone to strong emotions and her mourning period was brutally brief.
Meanwhile, though the Head had been suspended and word put out that he’d been executed for his supposed crimes, the PCC realized that someone was asking questions about Dr. Loxner. “Someone” turned out to be Captain Fortier, and the PCC accordingly warned Loxner that he was under suspicion. Despite the warning, with unspecified help Fortier managed to destroy Loxner and clear von Wilmenhorst’s name. The Head was alive after all, and resumed command of his organization with a stronger determination than ever to break the back of the conspiracy.
Once again the PCC and Lady A were forced to go through a painful reevaluation of their campaign. Their military forces were being rebuilt nicely, thanks to the crash program at the hidden spacebases. The Imperial Navy was also building new ships, and this inadvertently aided the conspiracy as well, since it was able to doctor the purchase orders and have more ships of its own built at Navy shipyards. Both sides were improving their might for a long-awaited showdown, but the conspiracy was building faster because it was not distracted and didn’t have to worry about routine galactic administration.
But now that the Service of the Empire knew some of the conspiracy’s power, it would mount an all-out campaign to destroy it. While it was doubtful such a campaign could succeed completely – the Empire was unlikely to suspect the PCC, and even if it did, it needed the computer’s services too badly – it would certainly ruin everything the conspiracy had worked so hard to establish and would make it difficult, if not impossible, to rebuild the connections.
What the Empire needed was another target to occupy its energies. But there were no more ready-made targets of the sort Banion had provided. The PCC now regretted its earlier decision not to establish a new diversion of its own, for now that SOTE had some inkling how well organized the conspiracy was, it would not be fooled by minor claimants. It would take a major threat to the safety of the Empire before SOTE would look in some other direction.
Also, the Service was becoming used to the conspiracy’s game of double-think. Any threat from inside the Empire would be analyzed with the possibility that it might be a conspiracy trap. In order that suspicion not fall on the conspiracy, the threat would have to appear as though it came from outside the Empire and were in dependent of the conspiracy.
With this thought paramount, the Gastaadi were conceived. Humanity had not yet encountered an intelligent alien race to compete with its expansion into the Galaxy. If the conspiracy provided such a hostile race, the Empire couldn’t ignore it – and the more the PCC thought about it, the more useful such a ruse could become. If it could mount a joint military expedition with the Empire against the supposed third party, it could then catch the imperial fleet in a crossfire that would decimate it before it could recover its equilibrium.
It would take a massive effort to convince the Empire that the threat was legitimate. The major details couldn’t be faked; there would have to be an actual invasion by an undeniably alien species, and it would have to be verified by some of the Empire’s most reliable agents. Two of the spacebases were converted to manufacturing robots that looked like believable alien creatures, as well as their bizarre weapons and spacecraft of unusual design. To manage this, the conspiracy pulled back from all its other endeavors for a year and a half.