Synchronicity War Part 1, The by Dietmar Wehr

anything. We bypassed them altogether. You see, up
until now we’ve dealt with the Board as a whole, and everything was done out in
the open. When I suggested to the Admiral that we consider unconventional
strategies, he took that to heart. After he appeared before the Oversight
Committee, and you joined the SPG, he called me in. We kicked around a few
scenarios, starting with the hijack idea I suggested and gradually migrating to
other less dramatic and less risky possibilities. What we finally came up with
was so damned obvious that we both cursed ourselves for not thinking of it sooner.”
     
    She paused for effect.
     
    “We decided to bribe the Chief Executive Officer of GED.”
     
    Shiloh was stunned by the simplicity and straightforwardness
of the idea, but then he started having doubts.
     
    “Wait a minute. Just because someone takes a bribe doesn’t
necessarily mean that they stay bribed. What happens if the Board finds out
their CEO has sold access to their money machines? They’ll just fire him and
name a replacement who will countermand the previous orders, stop the
production, and transfer of the new UFCs to Space Force control.”
     
    He was about to say more but she beat him to it.
     
    “Skipper, you’re not nearly devious enough. We’re not relying
on the CEO’s honesty to stay bribed. We are going to make him a series of
payments, each one contingent on not only having continued production of the
units, but also contingent on the Board not finding out about it. The key is
that we secretly recorded the whole transaction and all the conversations.
After the deal was done, we let the CEO know that if he double-crossed us, not
only would we would tell the Board that he sold out the company’s monopoly for
a bribe, thereby ruining his career, but we would also see to it that the
recordings were leaked to the appropriate investigative authorities, and he
would eventually be thrown in jail. And because this is too important to risk
something going wrong, we also took the precaution of bribing some of the key
technical personnel to make sure that the correct production orders were being
carried out, as well as to give us a heads up if the CEO tried anything funny.
Naturally we didn’t tell him that we had bribed his staff, too. As far as the
Board finding out the truth, they’ll only know what the CEO tells them. If somehow
they eventually do discover the truth and bring charges against him, we have a
pardon all ready for him, and he knows that it’ll only be implemented if he’s
been cooperating with us.”
     
    It all sounded very plausible to Shiloh, but he still had
questions.
     
    “How do we know that the CEO isn’t just stringing us along?
He may very well want to build more UFCs just like we do, but if he plans on
withholding control of the new units when they’re finished, then what can the
Space Force do about it? We’ll be right back to square one again.”
     
    Johansen was shaking her head. “Part of the deal with him is
that our technical personnel will be present as the new units are built. They’ll
be fully trained in programming the UFCs. When the new units are finished,
they’ll be loaded onto Space Force supply ships and redeployed to different and,
as far as GED knows, unknown locations where our personnel will have complete
control. We can then build anything we want. For a while our UFCs will be
building even more UFCs and their supporting equipment. The dispersal strategy
means that even if an alien attack on our Home system should destroy the
original GED units, they’ll only have destroyed a small percentage of our
productive capacity.”
     
    Shiloh smiled with appreciation. “Very nice. That will make
the Strategic Plan much easier to implement.”
     
    Johansen leaned forward. “I’m dying to know what the Plan
includes. Can you tell me about it?”
     
    “Yeah, sure. I don’t see why not. As far as I know, it isn’t
a classified document. In fact, I