Hunt grinned. “Hello, ZORAC. Not a bad piece of detective work. Was it your doing?”
“Elementary, my dear Hunt. I’ve got Leyel Torres for you.”
“Great.”
Torres’s voice came through from the Shapieron. “Vic, you made it. Who else is there?”
“Gina got out with me. And Chris Danchekker made it with Nixie. We don’t know anything about the others.”
“I fear they’re in captivity,” Torres said. “We don’t understand the situation. What are the Jevlenese trying to do. Do you know?”
“We think so, but it’s a long story. And it’s urgent. It needs to go to the top, to Calazar. Can you get him through VISAR?”
“We’re talking to him right now,” Torres answered. “He’s getting together as many of JPC as he can raise. I’ll put you through to the Thurien circuit.”
ZORAC’s voice said something in Jevlenese, and Osaya tapped a code into the tablet. One of the mirrors facing the bed turned into a screen showing Torres standing in the Shapieron’s command deck against a background of crew positions manned by Ganymeans. “It looks as if you’ve found quite a home away from home there, Vic,” ZORAC commented.
“Have they got hold of Caldwell?” Hunt asked, ignoring it.
“He should be arriving soon,” ZORAC answered. “He was playing golf. It’s Sunday afternoon in Washington.”
Then another mirror turned into a view of Calazar in vivid, informal clothes. “Dr. Hunt,” he said without preamble. “I feel that we are responsible for all this. What do these Jevlenese at PAC want? They have deactivated the connection to VISAR there, and we have no access to them.”
To one side, Murray was shaking his head wonderingly. “That’s Calazar, the Thurien head honcho, here in Osaya’s bedroom? I don’t believe this,” he muttered.
“We’re pretty sure they’re only a smokescreen,” Hunt replied to Calazar. “They probably don’t know themselves what’s really going on. We’re certain that Eubeleus is at the back of it.”
The sudden misgivings on Calazar’s face, even with its alien Ganymean features, was unmistakable. “Why? Where does he fit into it?” he asked. Just then, he was joined on the screen by Porthik Eesyan, a Thurien scientific adviser whom Hunt and Danchekker also both knew of old.
Murray nudged Hunt and nodded in the direction of the window. Outside, a police flier had appeared and was buzzing around the probe. The probe had deployed more antennae and drifted away to circle on a leisurely tour of the area, presumably in an effort to obscure the whereabouts of the location that it was communicating with.
“Look, there might not be much time, so these are the facts,” Hunt said, looking back at the screens showing Calazar and Eesyan, and Torres. “The whole JEVEX business has been a fraud for years. JEVEX isn’t on Jevlen at all. The sites here are dummies and remote interfaces into it. The real guts of the system is all concentrated on Uttan. That’s what Eubeleus is really after-the business here is just a diversion. And if he gets control of it, this planet is going to be hit by an invasion of aliens that are stronger than anything any of us has ever dreamed of. We can go into the details later, but for now you have to believe it. Whatever else happens, you must stop him from getting to Uttan and turning that system back on. Tell him anything you like. This is one time to worry about ethics and principles later.”
Hunt’s relief at the chance fluke that had given them this connection so soon, just when everything had seemed lost, was such that he had talked on compulsively. But as he finished, the growing agitation that had been registering on the faces of the two Thuriens finally got through to him. A sudden pang of dread seized him as he guessed, a split second before Calazar spoke, what he was going to say.
“We can’t,” Calazar replied. “He’s already there. Eubeleus and his followers landed on Uttan-when was it, VISAR?”
“Four hours ago,” VISAR’s voice replied through the audio.
For several seconds Hunt could only stare back, his mind too paralyzed for him to speak. “He’s already there?” he repeated numbly.
Calazar nodded miserably. “They’ve made fools of all of us. We Thuriens, I mean. Enough Terrans tried to warn us.”
Hunt put a hand on his head unthinkingly, still in a daze. “Let’s worry about that later. Right now we’ve got an impending catastrophe. This whole planet’s ready to reconnect to JEVEX, which isn’t here but at Uttan. And Eubeleus has got Uttan. What do we do?”
“We can’t simply send ships to reoccupy it,” Calazar said. “It will be defended. To muster enough force would take too long.”
“We have to assume that there are Federation weapons still there,” Torres said from the Shapieron.
Porthik Eesyan, meanwhile, had been thinking rapidly. “It’s true that we can’t get near them from the outside,” he said. “But there is one possibility that I can see, although at this stage I have no idea how it could be implemented. JEVEX was defeated before when VISAR succeeded in taking control of it. If we’re going to do anything now, it will have to be in the same way.”
“You mean by getting VISAR hooked into JEVEX somehow?” Hunt said, sounding dubious. He agreed with the theory, but was equally at a loss to see how it could be done.
Eesyan nodded. “Yes. And quickly, before they get JEVEX back up to full operation. But it’s going to have to be done by you and the others there on Jevlen, Vic. After what happened last time, obviously they’ll secure JEVEX’s i-space links against external penetration. So somehow you are going to have to-”
There was a flash outside the window as a beam directed up from somewhere below destroyed the probe.
And both the screens in Osaya’s bedroom blanked out.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The constructions blended together into a composite pattern of rectangular, hexagonal, rhombic, and irregularly shaped metal geometry, rising in gray tiers to fill a ten-mile-wide rift formed between sheer faces of rock. The top surface of one of the more prominent structures-a squat, seven-sided tower, its upper section terraced in the style of a ziggurat-was equipped as a landing area, with overhead doors to interior docking bays. Standing on the external pads were a number of surface lander craft from the Thurien interstellar transporter orbiting two thousand miles above.
Yet this was just a protruding part of the vast network of integrated manufacturing and assembly facilities that encompassed virtually the entire subsurface of the automated planet, Uttan. Deep below the marshaling and loading complex, in a room where the former director of the resident Jevlenese operations staff had received visitors, Eubeleus and a group of his Axis of Light lieutenants met Parygol, the present commander of the rotating Thurien caretaker force that had been installed since the collapse of the Federation.
“This must be what is called true dedication,” Parygol remarked. “We only remain here for two months at a time, and for me at least that’s quite sufficient. I can’t imagine anyone choosing to live permanently in such an environment.”
“Our preoccupation is with the world that lies within,” Eubeleus replied loftily. “What physical trappings happen to exist on the outside make little difference. In fact, the absence of distractions is beneficial to spiritual development, as has been known to ascetics for thousands of years.”
“Hmm. Yes, well, they tell us that humans and Ganymeans are made of very different psychology.” Parygol had studied the history of Jevlenese and Terran mysticism and believed privately that the whole business was just elaborate self-delusion.
“Is there anything more that you need from us for now?” Parygol’s deputy inquired.
“No, the arrangements are satisfactory,” Eubeleus said. “We shall be on our way immediately. The sooner we begin our work, the better.”
“You’re sure you wouldn’t like some of our officers to accompany you?” Parygol offered again. “Since everything is powered down there’s little to see, but they could show you where we’ll be disbanding the Federation’s military insta
llations. It might help you with your own relocation planning.”
“There’s no need,” Eubeleus replied. “I’m sure that the schedules we have will be sufficient.”
“As you wish.”
Eubeleus’s announced intention was to go with a small group of disciples to conduct a preliminary inspection of some of the places that they had selected as possible habitats. Until he was in full command, he would have to play his role straight with the Thuriens on Uttan, since the zone they were in, plus a few other key locations, had been wired into VISAR. Before occupation by the Thuriens, Uttan’s communications had been integrated into JEVEX, and thus deactivated with the main system. Any premature seizure of overt control would have been signaled back to Thurien instantly, alerting the authorities before Eubeleus could consolidate himself. However, once JEVEX was restored and the secret defenses reactivated-which the Thuriens showed no sign of knowing about-it would be a straightforward matter to disconnect VISAR and lock up the garrison. Then the authorities could do anything they liked. Uttan would be impregnable, and for as long as it remained so, the takeover of Jevlen via i-space would be able to proceed without impediment.
“This is going to be easier than we dared hope,” Eubeleus murmured to Iduane after they left.
They descended a shaft, through levels of intricate conveyor lines and immense machinery, to a terminal where fast-transit tubes converged from all directions along the surface curve of the planet. A capsule traveling noiselessly and without a tremor, riding on a localized gravity wave so that even the acceleration produced no sensation, carried them at more than orbital velocity a quarter of the way around Uttan to a supervisory station located in the midst of a vast, subterranean materials-transmutation complex, where rock was reduced to ion plasmas and rebuilt into other nuclei as required. In a basement level of the complex, beneath pipeworks and supporting structures, where the primary energy converters loomed several hundred feet overhead, they opened a concealed door into a further shaft that gave no outward sign of existing, and which didn’t appear in any of the official plans or construction records.
Two hundred miles farther down, they emerged into a forbidding, steel-walled bunker where the air was artificially cooled and the lighting was a harsh white. Three massive, reinforced doors brought them into suddenly less oppressive surroundings of staff quarters and living space, with warm colors and varied decor, luminescent ceilings, soft carpets, and comfortable furnishings.
A level farther down, the appearance of the working areas was more uniform and cleanly businesslike. The footsteps of the new arrivals echoed briskly across shiny tiled floors and past deserted rows of glass-partitioned workstations and gleaming consoles. Finally, Eubeleus led them through a set of wider doors to an inner floor of control desks, displays, and indicator panels, overlooked by a surrounding gallery with ancillary communications rooms and staff facilities opening off the primary control center of JEVEX itself.
The assistants who were with him were all picked and knew their jobs. With little more than a few words being exchanged, they dispersed to the key monitoring points and began calling up status reports and function charts onto the screens. Eubeleus paced slowly about the room, running a critical eye over the scene and stopping from time to time to observe over the shoulders of the operators. Finally he drew up beside Iduane and interrogated him silently with a look.
“It’s about as we thought,” Iduane said. “The core is running at approximately a half-percent base for archive retrieval, plus minimal system diagnostic and self-check running in standby mode.” He was referring to the operations being performed by the Thurien scientists on Jevlen, who didn’t even know that the machine they were interacting with was light-years away.
“What’s the power situation?” Eubeleus asked.
“Again, as expected. Since the primary grid has been shut down, we’ll have to visit the other locations to assemble a coherent supply that can be redirected into the feeder nodes.”
“How long until full system integration?”
“Half a day, maybe a little more. Say a day at most.”
Eubeleus nodded curtly. “Very well. Leave the rest here to the others. We need to check out the local coupler bank.”
“I’ll see to it now.”
“Update the Prophet while you’re at it.”
“I will.”
Iduane left the console and went out from the main control floor though one of the exits beneath the gallery. Eubeleus watched until he had gone, then turned away and walked through the power control rooms at the rear until he came to another elevator, which took him down through floors of power conditioning and distribution, the I/O and communications subsystem levels, the environmental-control layer, until, finally, he reached the inner containment shell.
He emerged inside a glass-sided bubble, which, although it looked down toward the geometric center of Uttan, seemed because of a warping of the local gravitic gradient to be projecting horizontally out from an immense wall. The wall was a uniform silver-gray, extending away up, down, and from side to side as far as he could see. Twenty feet or so in front of him was another wall, of a milky, translucent texture, parallel to the first and equally unlimited in extent, the two forming a gap that vanished to nothing with the perspective in any direction he chose to look. The space between them was bridged by a forest of data conduits, power busbars, optical pipes, signal highways, maintenance-pod tunnels, and supporting structures. It made him feel like an insect that had found its way between the hulls of an ocean liner.
He was looking at the outside of the processing matrix of JEVEX. The far side of it was more than seven thousand miles away.
Eubeleus usually confined his energies to matters of the present and his plans for the future; the past was a dead affair and of little relevance to his ambitions. But an unusually reflective mood came over him as he stared across at the boundless plane of silent, impenetrable, microlattice crystal. The gap separating him from it held a particular symbolic significance, like a castle moat to an escaped prisoner looking back. It was an appropriate simile.
He believed himself to be an experimental embodiment of the consciousness that JEVEX had fashioned in order to extend its domain to the universe outside. The time for it to commence its expansion in earnest had arrived.
A little under five thousand miles from where Eubeleus was standing, a region of the matrix existed which had differentiated itself by the clustering together of similar activity conditions of the matrix elements into contiguous structures and dynamic patterns. There was nothing that would have distinguished any of the cells from another physically. The differences were purely in the combinations of abstract attributes defining the state of a Thurien processing cell, and the structures had arisen spontaneously through interactions following from the cellular microprogramming.
The region in question had coalesced over time into an oblate sphere, which, as a consequence of complicated processes of pattern propagation that had coevolved with the structures, both rotated and described an orbit through the matrix about one of the primary data-entry ports spaced in a regular grid throughout its volume. It was a little over one hundred fifty miles in diameter along its major diameter, and on its surface there existed a population of mobile, self-directing activity patterns measuring, on average, an inch or so tall, who perceived themselves as self-aware, autonomous beings.
While Eubeleus stood staring at the outside of the matrix, one of those beings found its mind being penetrated by a cosmic flux that carried meaning. The communication flowed from the mind of Iduane, who by this time had linked into the system via one of the neurocouplers located near the control center some distance above, from which Eubeleus had just descended.
“I hear you, Arisen One,” Ethendor intoned in the temple of Vandros, raising his arms and looking skyward as the vision engulfed him. “What is desired? Thy servant awaits.”
And the voice spoke: “Soon now, the stars shall shine again and the skie
s be relit in splendor. Prepare, for the time of the Great Awakening draws nigh.”
“How shall we prepare?” Ethendor asked.
“The earth and the air of Waroth must be cleansed of the deceivers before all can be ready to arise. Nieru must be avenged for harmony to reign once more among the gods, and then shall the Arising be universally blessed. The false prophets who blasphemed the image of the purple spiral must be hunted out and destroyed. Only then will the heavens be appeased. Go therefore to the king and bid him set his forces to the task. Thus has Vandros spoken.”
“They shall be purged from the land,” Ethendor promised.
“And thereafter, when the lands of Waroth have been cleansed, the king shall lead the faithful into the realm beyond, and exterminate the false legions of the Spiral who have gone before.”
The high priest’s eyes widened. “Shall the task continue, even in Hyperia?”
“Hyperia is the task! Waroth has been merely thy proving ground.”
“There, then, shall I go to serve the gods!” Ethendor cried.
“Fail not, and there thou shalt become as one of them,” the Arisen One promised.
It would be a good way of getting their fighting spirits up before they came out to join the real action, Eubeleus had decided.
Hunt leaned back wearily in the chair in Murray’s lounge and felt the contours adjust to his changed posture. “I don’t know, Chris. We came here to evaluate Ganymean science, not to stop a bloody invasion. I’m a physicist, not a general.”
“Well, actually that’s not quite true,” Danchekker said. “It was merely the official story. We came here, if you recall, to help Garuth get to the bottom of his problem with the Jevlenese. I’d say that objective has been accomplished quite effectively.”
“To get to the bottom of it, and see what could be done about it,” Hunt replied. “What have we done to accomplish the second part? Garuth’s locked up, the Ents have got JEVEX back and half the Jevlenese working for them, and they’re all set to take over here completely.”
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