"Garuth and Shilohin. You realize what this means. Freskel-Gar's whole performance was a ruse. Therefore everything he told us was false. No message of acknowledgment was received back from Perasmon and Harzin, for none was ever sent. There have been no orders to divert the Cerian aircraft. They're still in danger… if it isn't too late already."

Garuth froze and then groaned. His concern had been so much for those down on the surface who had just walked into a trap, his ship and the threat posed by the Jevlenese, to think through the further implications. It also helped to be able to think like a Terran.

"Of course!" Shilohin whispered.

"We are the only ones who can stop it," Chien said. "It will have to be through the Cerians. Obviously no one in Lambia can be trusted."

Garuth stared at the image of Broghuilio on screen, but he was not hearing the words. Chien was right. It was up to them now. His mind raced frantically. "ZORAC."

"Commander?"

"Local," indicating that what Garuth said was not to be repeated over the channel to Minerva.

"Acknowledged."

"I don't know what their plans are or if I'll be able to communicate freely. What I want you to do regardless is this. Get access to the Cerian military command system, their space operations agency, or the department of government that handles the president's affairs. Warn them there's a plot in motion to destroy the aircraft flying from Melthis with President Marzin and King Perasmon aboard. We think it will be brought down by a missile. The flight must be turned around or diverted immediately."

"I'm working on it now."

Seeing the helplessness written across Garuth's face was a gratification in itself. The Shapieron and its occupants were the greatest personal anathema in Broghuilio's existence. He recognized Garuth, of course, from the storm of publicity that had followed the appearance of the Shapieron at Ganymede and its later six-month stay on Earth, when Broghuilio had directed the Jevlenese surveillance operation reporting to Calazar. That ship had been responsible for bypassing him and the Jevlenese to open up direct contact between the Thuriens and Terrans, and the unraveling of everything Broghuilio and his predecessors had been planning for generations. It had been the instrument for perpetrating the deception that brought down JEVEX, costing Broghuilio his overlordship of Jevlen and putting an end permanently to his ambition to assert himself over Terrans and Thuriens alike. And here it was now, as defenseless as a puppy brought to heel. It had evaded his attempt to destroy it once before, making him appear a fool in the process. He had no compunction about the thought of settling that score now and finishing the job.

But as he continued looking at it, a new line of thought began to develop in his mind.

Why destroy the Shapieron? As he had just pointed out with great relish to Garuth, a most interesting alteration of the entire perspective had taken place. He had five ships here on Minerva's moon, all-but immobilized and barely carrying the power reserves to transport him and his followers down to Minerva, after which they would be good for nothing more than scuttling in the ocean. But here, hanging as a telescopic image on the screen right in front of him, was a fully self-contained starship, not only equipped with its own on-board power sources and designed for independent operation and endurance, but which had sustained its population of Ganymeans for something like twenty years. They didn't have to go to Minerva as refugees and beggars after all, forced to share their superiority and trade their natural advantages for a place to sleep and scraps from Freskel-Gar's kitchens. With something like the Shapieron, fitted with the weapons he had been about to consign to Minerva's oceans and starship power available to energize them, they would be able to dominate a planet like Minerva within a week.

The more Broghuilio dwelt on the thought, the more it intrigued him. However, like any prospective owner of real estate, he would want to inspect the property himself before deciding his offer and terms. But what kind of unknowns would he be risking, walking into a ship full of Ganymeans from the past that he had no experience of dealing with? Even if they turned out to be as fawning and indisposed toward a fight as Thuriens, he knew nothing about the AI that managed the ship and how it might react. He summoned Estordu across with a motion of his head. "In the days when that ship was built, there was no planetary executive intelligence comparable to VISAR. Is that correct?"

"That is so, Excellency. Full integration was effected later, after the move to Gistar and Thurien."

"So this ZORAC that we heard about while that ship was at Earth. What kind of system is it?"

"The earliest Ganymean starships had integrated control and system management directors that became surprisingly versatile and in fact provided some of the design philosophy later incorporated into VISAR. The Shapieron is probably one of the later models. ZORAC would be an intermediate development between a rudimentary autonomous intelligence and a hyper-parallel distributed architecture of full interstellar capability like VISAR or JEVEX."

"I see." Broghuilio didn't, but the words intended nothing in any literal sense. He stared at the image of the ship again. "What would be the way to go about attaining control of something like that? Does it automatically obey whoever commands the vessel? Or does is develop a more complex allegiance that builds up in some other way over time? What is its mode of operating?"

Estordu followed Broghuilio's gaze and saw which way his thinking was going. He replied, "Please understand that I have no personal experience of such systems, Excellency. But my understanding is that its primary characteristics are those of a multiply connected, self-referential learning hierarchy driving an auto-optimizing emergent associative net." He saw color rising above Broghuilio's collar and explained hastily, "That means that its behavior is shaped more by its experiences than by the initial design parameters. It would most likely have evolved a strong commitment to the present complement of officers and crew-especially so after their long, enforced period of isolation from the familiar spacetime environment."

"Hm." It obviously wasn't the answer that Broghuilio had been hoping for.

Estordu went on, "However…" His tone caused Broghuilio to turn his head. "The system builds itself on an underlying foundation of core directives that cannot be modified, ignored, or overridden. They define its essential design role and character. One of the most fundamental would be that other considerations are subordinated to ensuring the safety and survival of the bioforms that it has formed its principal attachment to. In the present case, such a tendency would have become extremely pronounced. Anything else it might judge to be right or wrong, or as being likely to have preferable consequences in the longer term, would be rendered immaterial. I, er… trust you take my point?"

A gleam of comprehension came into Broghuilio's eyes. "You mean that if it was the only way of protecting the skins of those fossil Ganymeans in there, it would follow our orders? It wouldn't refuse?"

"More than that, Excellency. It couldn't."

"Hm… I see." And this time, Broghuilio really did. Maybe he had a solution to both of his immediate concerns.

He contemplated the image of the Shapieron for a while longer. Before it followed his ships through the tunnel-for that was the only way to explain how it came to be here-it had been conducting a secret deception operation at Jevlen. He didn't imagine that it would be carrying much more than the minimum number of occupants and crew for such a mission. And that suited his purpose well.