The Disinherited by Steve White Page B

granted that our government must have been keeping secrets. At any rate, it was sheer chance that one of their ships blundered onto the fourth displacement point. We stepped our power output down to miminal life-support levels and waited them out. After they departed, we powered up and transited—they had no reason to have a grav scanner trained on the displacement point by then. We then," she finished anticlimactically, "proceeded here."
    Varien slowly rose and faced the Terrans—most of the original members of the cabal. The Raehaniv in the room already knew, and their expressions made clear their understanding of the implications.
    "We are undone," he said in a voice of ash. "The Korvaasha now know of the Lirauva Chain—we must assume that they have already begun to explore it. Our base at Alpha Centauri has been obliterated"—Naeriy nodded in confirmation—"so even when they reach it they will have no certain knowledge that we have been there. But they will, at a minimum, mount a heavy guard on Tareil's fourth warp point, and garrison the systems between Tareil and Alpha Centauri as quickly as they can survey them, merely as a matter of routine procedure." His dark eyes held all of theirs as he spoke the doom of all their hopes. "We can no longer enter the Tareil system from an unsuspected displacement point, which has been the basis of our plans from the beginning. We would have to assault a defended displacement point—hopeless in itself without overwhelming numerical superiority—after fighting our way through several intervening systems." His concentration seemed to waver, and when he resumed it was with a vague bewilderment that, in him, was shocking. "I never dreamed that the Korvaasha would discover the fourth displacement point so soon . . . their instrumentation is so unsophisticated . . . well, they have had centuries of experience in surveying . . . ."
    "Wait a minute, Varien," George Traylor interrupted, brow furrowed with thought. "Okay, so we can't follow the, uh, Lirauva Chain to Tareil. But even if we can't do it the easy way, via displacement points, can't we still do it the hard way?"
    "What do you mean?" Varien barely sounded interested.
    "Well, why can't we take your continuous-displacement drive all the way back to Tareil? I know it's a long way. But we could enter the Tareil system from nowhere near any displacement point!"
    " That'd shake 'em up!" Levinson leaned forward, dark eyes snapping.
    "Don't be absurd!" All at once, Varien was his old, fortunately inimitable self, and once again DiFalco was surprised at his own relief. " 'A long way' indeed! It is, in point of fact, a thousand of your light-years! At the maximum speed of which most of our ships are capable, that means a journey of . . ."
    " . . . almost twenty years. And since we're not talking about real velocity, there's no time dilation effect. Yeah, yeah, yeah." Traylor did not take well to being patronized, which made for problems in dealing with Varien. "But you Raehaniv are way ahead of us in cryogenic suspension; you can actually freeze the metabolism altogether, not just slow it down. Maybe we could spend most of the trip frozen, and man the ships in shifts!"
    Varien took a deep breath. "Permit me to elucidate certain facts. First, the suspended-animation techniques to which you refer involve substantial risks. If the subject is to have an acceptable chance of safe revival, an extensive array of equipment is needed. We have very little of such equipment, never having needed it except in rare medical emergencies. Even if it is practical for us to build more of it—as to which I would have to consult with medical experts—such a project would make our departure deadline even more unrealistic than it is already proving to be.
    "Secondly, as a practical matter the journey would take far, far more than twenty years. You must understand that the continuous-displacement drive, involving millions of intense gravitic