Entoverse g-4

by James P. Hogan

  “Let’s check that first,” Cullen said, and hurried away with Koberg and Lebansky following.

  The lieutenant in Cullen’s office was not the only Jevlenese equipped with a Ganymean communicator to have been overwhelmed by a loud, high-frequency tone suddenly injected into the audio. Elsewhere in the building, other squads were running this way and that to contradictory orders. Half a dozen were trapped in an elevator that had stopped between floors. In the lobby area, a contingent that had gone outside to investigate a nonexistent threat were stranded there when the doors closed, and more than a few in various places were stuck in half-closed doors that refused to budge. From the numbers, it was evident that additional forces had been let in by confederates already inside.

  In Garuth’s office and the room outside, the lights had gone out. Hunt, who had worked himself as far as the doorway, heard muted, high-pitched tones in the darkness, and then confused yelling. He dropped to the floor and moved through to just beyond the door.

  There was scuffling and confused mutterings. Then Langerifs voice called out something in Jevlenese from inside the office-he had evidently disposed of his Ganymean communicator. The translation came through the earpiece that Hunt was wearing: “Spread out. Cover all the exits. Abrintz, take three men out to the concourse and secure the elevators.”

  Another voice responded. “Werselek, Quon, Fassero, come with-“

  Then Langerif again, from inside the office. “I didn’t say that. It’s some kind of trick. Stay where you are.”

  Only to be countermanded by, “This is Langerif speaking. Do as I say.”

  “Don’t listen. That’s a fake.”

  “No, I’m not. He is.”

  “What do we do?” a voice pleaded somewhere in the blackness.

  Then ZORAC’s voice said quietly in Hunt’s ear, “Move about eight feet to your right along the wall, and then across an alcove to a door in the far wall. It’s open, and leads into an equipment room.”

  Hunt began worming his way along the base of the wall as ZORAC had indicated. Sounds of shooting and cries of panic came from the direction of the doorway leading out to the elevator concourse, accompanied by Terran voice shouting commands. A Jevlenese voice shouted, “All right, we surrender!”

  “Come out with your hands up,” a Terran voice ordered. “Is that all of them in there, Sergeant?”

  “All cleared here, sir. Three hostiles dead.”

  “What’s going on out there?” Langerifs voice demanded.

  “PAC security is outside,” a voice replied. “They’ve taken over the whole floor. We’re trapped.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “That wasn’t me speaking,” Langerif’s voice said again.

  Reaching the door that ZORAC had indicated, Hunt felt his way through. Del Cullen’s voice called out, “You calculated wrong, Langerif. Half your men were working undercover for us. We’ve got the rest of the building tied up. It’s over. Throw down your guns and come out.”

  “Do as he says,” Langerifs voice instructed.

  “Take no notice,” another Langerif said.

  Hunt bumped his head painfully on an edge of projecting metal. Feeling ahead with his fingers, he hauled himself carefully to his feet, tracing the shapes of equipment racking and supports around him. It came to him then, what was happening. ZORAC was a ship’s computer. Its first priority was the safety of the Shapieron’s crew. Seeing them being rounded up at gunpoint had spurred it into the only action that it was capable of.

  Langerif had grasped it, too. “Very clever, for a machine,” his voice snarled in the darkness. “But if the idea is to protect your Ganymeans, you’d better quit right now. We’ve got two of them here and a bunch more outside the door. If the lights aren’t back in five seconds, we shoot.”

  “Hear that, you men?” another voice called out. “There aren’t any Terrans. It was the computer.”

  Hunt heard the door close, and then the light came on to reveal him alone in a space crammed with electronics cubicles and cabling.

  “Great special effects,” he complimented.

  “It was the best I could do,” ZORAC said. “I’ve got some of them shut up here and there around the place, but they’re starting to sort themselves out. Some of PAC security came out on the other side, too.”

  “What’s the general situation?”

  “A mess.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Garuth and Shilohin are still there in his office. I got Danchekker into an elevator across the hall while the lights were out. Nixie took off and lost herself somewhere.”

  “And the rest?”

  “Cullen and his guys are in the middle of a fight down in security. Duncan and Sandy have been grabbed by police in the UNSA labs. Gina got away from her quarters before they arrived. She wants to talk to you.”

  “Put her through.”

  “And so does Langerif. He’s demanding that you give yourself up, otherwise he’ll shoot Garuth.”

  Hunt drew a long breath. There were some things that the Jevlenese might be able to explain away when this got back to JPC, he thought; but not murdering the planetary governor. Even Langerif had to be smart enough to know that.

  “He’s bluffing,” Hunt said.

  “You think so?”

  “Yes. Tell him you’re not getting a response. My headset must have been knocked off in the dark, right?”

  “I hope you’re right,” ZORAC replied, in a masterfully contrived you’re-supposed-to-understand-these-people tone of voice. “Here’s Gina.”

  “Vic? ZORAC’s told me the score. It’s no use heading this way. They’re everywhere. Right now I’m in an empty suite that ZORAC found.”

  Hunt thought quickly. There would be no point in trying to get to any of the Thurien couplers into VISAR, since those would have been the first places to be secured. And the next thing the Jevlenese would do after getting the complex’s backup systems running would be to cut ZORAC’s connection into PAC. He should get to Gina first, while ZORAC was still available to help.

  “ZORAC, can you get us together somewhere?” he said.

  “You can’t get back out through Garuth’s office. Head through the compartment at the rear. There should be a way down. It looks as if you were right about Langerif, by the way.”

  Behind a partition at the back of the equipment room, some runs of cabling and ducting went down a well to the level below, where a maintenance hatch gave access to an engineers’ inspection gallery. From there, Hunt came out through a machinery compartment into a tool room, and thence into a stairway that seemed clear for the moment. One level down, he entered a passage that led to an elevator, which ZORAC already had waiting to take him down to a level where several large dining rooms were situated. A lot of Jevlenese office workers were milling around, while frantic police officers tried to tell the managers what was happening. In the general confusion, Hunt managed to slip through into the warren of kitchens and passages at the rear, where ZORAC had also directed Gina. Hunt found her in a space behind a water-heating system and a pumping compartment. She seemed shaken but in good shape.

  “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “ZORAC, what are the options? Can we get out?”

  “That’s probably the best bet. Look, there are Jevlenese engineers in the control section right now, switching in the backup communications and monitoring systems. I could be cut off at any moment. I’ll give you directions, now, to a way out through the basement that I’ll unlock. It leads into the city’s freight-moving system. First, you need to go down through the back stairs from the passage outside where you are, to a garbage-compacting plant…

  They lost ZORAC shortly after, but found their way down through the route that it had described. The exit was unlocked, and they entered a system of tunnels and shafts, much of it collapsing from disrepair, which brought them into the automated sublevels of Shiban. When they had gone what they judged to be a safe distance from PAC, they beg
an ascending via catwalks and stairways to reemerge into habitation. A short distance farther on, Hunt recognized the street outside the hotel that Nixie had taken him to. “Okay, I think I know where we are,” he told Gina.

  “That’s great. But where do we want to be?”

  The Shapieron was the obvious place-assuming ZORAC or whoever was in charge aboard the ship didn’t decide to take it up from the surface for some reason. But with the police possibly on the alert for them, Hunt put their chances of getting to Geerbaine as slim. And even if they did, access to the pad where the Shapieron stood would surely be impossible.

  “Well, there’s only one American I know in town,” Hunt said.

  “What we do when we get there, I’m not sure. But keep your voice down on the streets. There’s probably an order out to watch for Terrans.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  There were plenty of police about, but from the way they were positioned they seemed to be a reserve force drawn up around PAC rather than a cordon sealing it off. At any rate, they hadn’t cleared the surrounding precincts, and Hunt and Gina were able to blend in easily enough. Green crescents were everywhere, and the ayatollahs were out in force delivering perorations to excited crowds. Although none of what was being said was comprehensible to the two Terrans, the fever of excitement in the air was impossible to mistake. It was as if the city was alive with anticipation of some imminent event.

  As they passed through the buzzing arcades and plazas, Hunt tried to make more sense out of what had happened. He didn’t believe that the real motivation could be simply a straight takeover of the administration for the reasons Langerif had claimed. JPC was already talking about winding the existing administration up, and the obvious thing would have been to wait and see what came of it.

  The only other possible aim was to prevent details getting back to JPC and the powers behind it of what was happening at PAC. But all that anyone outside could know was that the Ganymeans were checking out the main JEVEX sites, and all that could tell anyone was that a lot of JEVEX was not where it was supposed to be. That meant that whoever was behind it did not want people making the connection with Uttan; which was another way of saying that they were very anxious not to give JPC any grounds for reconsidering its decision to let Eubeleus go there.

  The street they were following crossed a small square in which a wildly gesticulating ayatollah clad in a yellow tunic and green smock was haranguing a crowd pressed from wall to wall. There was no quick way through. They could either work their way across to where the street continued on the far side, or back up and find another way around. Hunt looked resignedly at Gina. She shrugged back. He turned and began edging his way between the waving, applauding Jevlenese.

  What he sensed wasn’t the uplifting, jubilant kind of excitement that went with carnivals and festivals. It was more intense, fervently passionate. The faces around them were inflamed, mouths writhing mindless slogans, eyes glazed, oblivious to all but some inner rapture. This was the beast that made lynch mobs and Nuremberg rallies out of the same people who brought their children to Sunday-afternoon parades.

  No, Hunt told himself after they had gone a few yards. The beast wasn’t in the crowd. It was up there, on the makeshift platform of packing boxes fronted with banners. It didn’t belong to the rational universe. It was a product of another place, another reality.

  He looked at the crowd again: unaware, unseeing, incapable of knowing. Nothing would ever change of its own accord there. And he looked at the shrewd, hawklike features of the speaker, scanning, alert to every feedback and cue, trying to grasp the alienness staring out from behind the glittering eyes.

  The eyes seemed to meet Hunt’s for an instant, and even at that distance Hunt had the eerie feeling that his thoughts were being read as plainly as his face. He wondered how long ago the being inside the body he was looking at had found itself staring out at this new world. Whether his initial reactions had been of terror or otherwise, he had come to terms with his new existence and its irreversibility, and mastered the survival skills of the niche in which he found himself. And all the while, the mass of those who had been born there and belonged there immersed themselves in fantasies and waited for the Thuriens to repair their decaying cities. And from their unwitting ranks, the intruders had recruited the followers that they needed around them to make them feel secure. Just as was happening right now, in front of Hunt’s eyes.

  Just as had been happening on Earth all through its history because of the agents that the Jevlenese had sent there. Those were the ones whose insecurity had appeared as paranoia or the craving to control others, in a way that normal people were incapable of comprehending. And now Hunt could see why that should be so. The agents that had infiltrated Earth to perpetrate some of its worst episodes of brutality and inhumanity had not been human at all. Their only goal had always been what Hunt was witnessing right now: to secure themselves against other rivals from the Entoverse by reinforcing their own army of fanatics. The simple, undeveloped peoples of Earth became what misplaced Thurien benevolence had turned the bulk of the Jevlenese into: a ready-made pool of exploitable recruiting fodder.

  Exploitable recruiting fodder… The phrase kept running through Hunt’s mind all the way to Murray’s.

  “Who is it?” Lola’s voice inquired from nowhere identifiable around the purple door with the white surround.

  “It’s Vic. Is Murray in there?”

  Murray’s voice came on the line at once. “What do you want this time? You’ve already got me a bad reputation. My friends don’t like the company I’ve been keeping.”

  “Let us in. It’s important.”

  “Us? Oh, shit, not again. Have you brought those two walking tanks back?”

  “There’s just me and a friend called Gina. She’s a journalist- American.”

  “My life story isn’t for sale yet. I haven’t figured out the ending.”

  “Look, PAC’s been taken over by a Jevlenese coup of some kind. The Shiban police are in on it.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “It could be planetwide. I don’t know. But maybe the Federation isn’t dead yet. We have to get in off the streets.”

  The door opened. Hunt nodded at Gina, and she went through ahead. Murray was waiting for them in the lounge. “Gina Marin,” Hunt said. “This is Murray. He’s from the West Coast, too. San Francisco.”

  “Yeah. It’s a small galaxy.” They nodded, then shook hands loosely.

  “Hi. I’ve heard about you, Murray. I’m another friend of Nixie’s.”

  “I guess we can swap all the questions about home later. Is she okay? From the amount I’ve seen of her lately I figured she’d shacked up there at PAC or joined the Marines.”

  “She’s been a big help,” Hunt said. “She was okay the last time I saw her. We got separated in the commotion. Gina and I only just managed to get out.” He spotted the COM panel and screen in front of the chair that Murray normally used and moved across to it. “Mind if I try something?” He tapped pads to activate it and call up channel fifty-six in the way he knew by now for Jevlenese units. “ZORAC, can you read?” He waited a moment. “Anything here?” There was no response.

  “Bad news?” Murray asked.

  Hunt nodded resignedly. “They’ve cut the connection via PAC from the Shapieron.”

  Murray said something at the panel in Jevlenese, and a short message appeared on the screen.

  “What’s that?” Hunt asked.

  “It says they’re on an emergency system. Services are restricted,” Murray said. He motioned with his head to indicate a cabinet with bottles and glasses, at the same time raising his eyebrows questioningly.

  Hunt nodded. “Thanks. I could use one.”

  “Me, too,” Gina said without caring what it was, and sank into a chair.

  Murray squatted down and opened the cabinet door. “So what gives?” he asked over his shoulder as he poured.

  “The Jevlenese sprang a surprise at PAC. The
y’ve turned out the Ganymeans and taken over. I’m not really sure what happens next.”

  “Jesus!” Murray doubled the measure that he had poured into his own glass and downed half of it at a gulp. He straightened up and passed out the glasses, then propped himself against the edge of the large table. “Is the jolly Green Giant who took off yesterday with the shipload of rollers mixed up with it?”

  “If so, it hasn’t come out into the open yet, but we’re pretty sure, yes,” Hunt said. He downed a draft from his glass, then asked in turn, “What’s going on in the city? The place is electric. Green crescents out everywhere. They seem to be expecting something.”

  “It started yesterday. The big rumor out there is that JEVEX is coming back. The head freaks are delirious about it. Nobody around here’s gonna spill too many tears if the Gs do have to walk.”

  Gina let her arm fall slackly to rest on the arm of the chair and looked across the room. Her tension had eased now that they were secure for the time being, allowing the full impact of what had happened to get through. Her face was drawn, sapped of vigor by her acceptance of the hopelessness that she had been putting off.

  “So that’s it,” she said, her voice flat. “It’s over. We wait around until the cavalry limps in, and go home with what’s left of the pieces-if we don’t get picked up in the meantime.”

  “Shit, isn’t there anywhere they’ll leave a guy alone?” Murray muttered. “Does this mean they’re gonna be setting up the IRS here?”

  “That might be the least of your problems,” Gina said humorlessly.

  “What about the others back there?” Murray asked.

  “We’re not sure. We only just got out.”

  “So… what happens next?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think, Vic?” Gina looked over at Hunt. But he was sitting with a strange, faraway look on his face and hadn’t heard. “Vic, are you okay?”

  “Recruiting fodder,” Hunt said, still distant. “That’s what it’s all about.”