In the course of ten months humanity had been threatened, saved and put on a martial footing again for the first time in sixteen centuries.  If not for the phenomenal luck of the Terra Twin’s discovery, and the help of an orphaned alien machine, humans would have been another subject race of the Vegan’s empire.  Russell Carlin was made Admiral of the UWSS before leaving for Alpha Centauri.  Fourteen new RACE centers were set up six on Earth and eight on colonies of Luna, Mars and Venus.  The human race was reproducing itself at the rate of ten million persons per week above its normal population’s birth rate.  The troops were trained through high speed, direct input with their mentors, ‘duplicates of ADAM’ without his mind reading abilities.  They emerged functional citizens of the UW government with full rights and privileges.  Millions of conventional humans joined the UWSS and the newly formed UWMC (United Worlds Marine Corp.) to defend the newly liberated colonies from future Shaper attacks.


    Russell Carlin and his tiny fleet of eighteen ships (all that were ready when he left for the first colony world) won victory after victory against the forces on the Shapers outpost worlds.  Only when they encountered a Sphere ship was the battle challenging, and four of Russ’s ships were sent home damaged from such engagements.  The Shaper craft however, were poorly commanded and seven were destroyed by the ‘green’ fleet before they adopted the tactic of time shifting immediately when fired upon.  This saved some Sphere’s but Russell’s commanders soon learned to follow their quarry and finish them while dormant, thirteen Sphere’s were thus removed.


    The Shaper hierarchy on Vega was incensed, their fleet of once two hundred Sphere’s was now seventy two craft in strength, a dozen and five colony worlds had been lost and attempts to retake three of them were repulsed.  Never before had the Shapers been so hampered by another race.  Panomes and Saromes met in the palace of the Grand Sarome daily and quarreled in private groups at night, several envisioned themselves ruler, and plotted accordingly.  By the twelfth year after Kla Na Suleg’s Sphere was captured, Vega was under a new Grand Sarome, not of Suleg line, and united to stamp out the inroads of humanity’s expansion.  The captive Panome himself died on Luna, three years later, by biting off his intravenous feeding tube (he had been refusing nourishment for several weeks) and blowing air into his blood stream.  After having perfected the sleep gas for the Shapers and several bacterial agents to attack them, Chamber’s Vegan guinea pigs were lined up and executed at the close of the twentieth year since the Mars victory, Russell’s fleet of fourteen finally captured an intact Sphere by blanketing it with the reflective compound and fusing the photon gun and displacement field bars simultaneously.  The ship tried to escape on its drive but Russell’s craft pursued until all power even life support was exhausted.  The beaten Sphere was towed to Earth in triumph.  Nearby, at the original RACE center in the Rocky Mountains the Sphere was cleaned out and refitted under ADAM’s supervision, for a secret mission to Vega Four itself.  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    The purpose of ADAM’s ‘Trojan Sphere’ was critical, only on Vega itself did the Shaper brood females reside, huge, blind, immobile creatures raised for centuries to produce more and larger offspring and do nothing else, they were both the Shaper’s strength and its weakest link.  Their destruction would end the Shaper’s reign of force forever.  The normal sized concubine females could reproduce but no giant Panor or Panuit offspring would be possible.  From the Panome’s captive years, ADAM had learned all he could of Vegan life.  The methods of breeding the warriors for special characteristics were forgotten long since, most of th Panuits and Panor bred now were just the same as ten generations before.  Subject races were no longer experimented on (Kla Na Suleg having been the last able to fathom his ancestor’s work).  So if ADAM’s mission could destroy the brood mothers Earth and every other world should be safe from future Shaper invasion.