Zeus Orbital Command Station, Circling the Planet Capital

The radio signal came out of nowhere. Long-range in-terferometry placed the source very close, only thirty thousand kilometers away, but radar hadn't detected anything and still couldn't. The radio source, whatever it was, was requesting permission to rendezvous and dock with Zeus Station, but the commodore would have none of that. He didn't want any ship that radar couldn't see getting too near his command. It could be a sneak attack, a trick bomb. He deployed a squad of fighters and ordered them to home in on the radio signal, pick up any crew or passengers, and then leave the ship, or whatever it was, in a stable orbit far from any Guardian installation.

Not only Zeus, but the entire ring of bases and ships around Capital went on alert. There might be more of these invisible ships out there.

The fighters made the personnel pick-up without incident, reporting that there was only one person aboard the strange ship. The fighters hurried home, and their passenger was taken aboard Zeus and hustled straight into the Intelligence section. Captain Phillips himself decided to interrogate this one. There was only one place that ship could have come from. And to get a voluntary defection, flying such an advanced ship—it could be the sort of Intelligence bonanza that changed the course of a war. Captain Phillips took a look at his visitor—tired, frightened, worried. He decided this one required gentle handling.

"All right, son. You gave us a quite a start there for a moment, but now here you are. Who are you, and why did you come here?"

"I came to warn you of the Nihilists' plans," the visitor said. "They'll betray you. They're going to launch a plague attack that could wipe out every person on Capital. My name is George Prigot, and I'm a native of Capital."

After a four-hour interrogation, Phillips was forced to conclude that he had a credible witness. A check with Central Military Records matched this fellow's fingerprints and retinal patterns with one George Prigot, listed as Missing and Presumed Dead on New Finland. And this Prigot knew too many things, his story fit together too well.

"You realize, Mr. Prigot, that by coming here, you place yourself in grave danger. Whatever your reasons for coming here, by your own admission you are a deserter from the Guardian Army, and by your own admission, you have repeatedly committed acts of high treason against Capital. When your case is brought before the proper authorities, the only question left open to debate would be whether to shoot you as a spy or hang you as a traitor."

"I realize all that, sir," George said, his voice steady, only his eyes betraying his agitation. "But whatever my feelings about the government of Capital, I couldn't just sit back and allow the Nihilists to wipe out every human being on the planet. I decided I couldn't live with myself if I didn't try to stop them."

"And you are convinced that the Nihilists mean to turn on us?"

"Yes sir."

"But your only reason for so thinking is the report of this Calder woman, who in turn based her conclusions on what one single Outposter, a member of a Group that opposes the Nihilists, had to say."

“Sir. I don't have to tell you that the truth isn't determined by majority rule. The truth is just as true if no one believes it. And that's not my only reason for distrusting the Nihilists. I saw the tapes of what their foam worms did to the Impervious. Whoever invented those had no love for humanity. And why should they care about us? Their philosophy says intelligent life is an abomination. Alien intelligent life must be a double abomination. They kill their own kind. Why not us, too? And if they wipe us out, they get Capital. A whole world, and all our technology. Think of all the power that would represent, and tell me that wouldn't tempt them.”

"Hang me as a traitor if you like, but listen to me first. Stop the Nihilists, before it's too late."

It was not until this George Prigot character had been led off to a fairly comfortable cell, not until Captain Phillips had befouled the station's air conditioning system with two pipefulls of the most hideously expensive and malodorous out-system tobacco, not until Phillips had sat there in thought for a solid hour, that the Intelligence chief came to the conclusion that he believed Prigot. Not only that, Prigot was telling a story and voicing a warning that he, Prigot, thought was honest. Phillips decided that the story and the warning themselves were legitimate. The Nihilists were going to attack Capital. He had never really trusted them in the first place. The bioweapons deal had been too rushed, too rashly and hurriedly considered.

But Mr. George Prigot, late of both the Britannic and the Guardian armed forces, had sent other messages by coming here, though such had not been his intention.

With Prigot flown the coop, the League forces would be forced to assume that all their plans had been exposed, all their schemes revealed, all their traps turned around. That meant they would be forced to change their plans.

And that meant the enemy would lose time, would be somewhat more vulnerable for a while.

Even though he had not brought a scrap of tactical planning material with him, Prigot, by his very presence, had wrecked all the League's schemes and forced them to start over. Captain Phillips could see the advantages in that great but fleeting advantages. He powered up his terminal, and rattled off a priority preliminary assessment to flag HQ.

But there was another point, a more private one. Prigot had never mentioned the name, never mentioned any Guardian Navy officer involved in the plans that had gotten Calder to the League fleet. But there had to have been one. Phillips knew that. Johnson Gustav, Phillip's former aide in Naval Intelligence, was assigned to Ariadne station. Gustav had dealt with Calder; Phillips had seen action summaries written by Gustav that mentioned her by name.

The connections were tenuous enough, but Phillips knew Gustav, knew what he would do in a given situation. And Phillips had read the report that Gustav had written so long ago. The one that had flatly stated that Capital would lose the war, suffering greater and greater loss of life and political freedom the longer the war was allowed to drag on. The report that had cost Gustav a step in rank, gotten him thrown out of the Intelligence Service, and nearly gotten him shot.

Yes, Gustav's fingerprints were all over the place. He was mixed up in this scheme.

There was only one last important fact that Phillips had kept secret from everyone until now. But now, at last, it was time to act on. For the fact was, Phillips had agreed with every word of that report.

It was time to contact Gustav, privately, over a secure channel. Phillips had a lot to talk about with him.