“What are you talking about?” Hunt asked.
Danchekker tapped his watch. “We coupled into VISAR at approximately 1420 hours, did we not?”
“That’s right,” Murray confirmed, catching the gist as he strove to move them along after the others. “Is that a problem?”
“How long were we in those booths?” Hunt asked.
“An hour, hour and a half. Why? What’s all the mystery? Let’s move our asses outta here while we’ve still got ‘em.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Slowly, it came to the Examiner, as he gazed up at the heavens, what the signs meant. Anger rose within him as he realized how he had been deceived. It was Ethendor who had prophesied that the stars would return to the skies. And no sooner had the stars begun returning than the powers of these strangers who claimed to be emissaries of yet higher gods deserted them.
So the tricks and toys could not have been the works of higher gods at all. It had been an attempt by the lesser gods to deceive the people of Waroth into abandoning the Great Awakening that was their rightful destiny. For the legions of the faithful would destroy the followers of the false gods who were tarnishing Hyperia, and the false gods were afraid. It was all clear to him now. The events that had taken place here in the village of Rakashym had been permitted as a final test of the Examiner’s faith before the Great Awakening. He would not fail.
He turned his eyes back toward the puppets that the false gods had thrown in his path to deflect him from his course. They looked clumsy and foolish now, exposed in their ineptness-”gods” who hadn’t heard of the Great Awakening or of Ethendor, and who didn’t know where Orenash was. Across the square the priests and soldiers, freed from the spell that had bewitched them, were coming back, while the villagers closed in behind them, surly and resentful.
“The power that we use flows into here through channels that-” the first to have arrived began in what sounded like the beginnings of a plea.
“Silence!” The Examiner cut him off with a contemptuous wave. “Thou stands exposed in thy perfidy and helplessness.”
The female who had appeared with him made an imploring gesture. “Look, you have to believe what these people say. I know. I am one of you, from Waroth. I emerged and have come back by the powers they control.
The Examiner turned his back. “These are deceivers who stand exposed before us,” he called to the crowd. “Indeed did Ethendor speak truly.”
The crowd responded:
“Deceivers!”
“Servants of evil!”
“Rakashym must be purged of its taint.”
“Take them! Take them!”
The Examiner spoke to Agamenmon, who had appeared at the front of the soldiers and was waiting for orders. “Seize them and bind them. Rebuild the pyres-one for each of the false prophets who were captured, except those two.” He pointed at Shingen-Hu and Thrax. “Rakashym shall have its fill of burnings.” He indicated the two that he had singled out, and the five impostors sent by the lesser gods. “They shall return with us to Orenash, for the special festivities that Ethendor has prepared. It should be very entertaining.”
The soldiers moved in to separate the two groups. As they began moving, Hunt trod on a piece of one of the runners from the disassembled coach. His foot skidded sideways as if he had stepped on a ball, throwing him off balance and causing him to fall down painfully onto one knee.
“See he who calls himself a messenger from higher gods!” the Examiner called to the crowd, pointing. “Doesn’t even a child know that shoe leather is repelled by mobilium?” The crowd laughed derisively.
Shingen-Hu stooped to help Hunt back to his feet. As he did so, he surreptitiously picked up a couple of slivers of the broken skids of mobilium metal and hid them in a fold of his robe.
From Thurien, Calazar was able to contact Parygol on Uttan through VISAR. But Parygol discovered then that his Thurien caretaker force was cut off from the rest of the planet, and that the facilities they occupied, which they had believed controlled both the planet’s industrial complex and its links to a Jevlen based JEVEX, were suddenly inoperative. Eubeleus had gained control of the system from elsewhere.
Porthik Eesyan, who was occupying a coupler still connected to VISAR and had “joined” Calazar and the others, confirmed their understanding of the situation. “Yes, that’s the way it would work. There’s another version of me still functioning in the Entoverse at this moment-and of all the others, of course. It’s a strange feeling to know it.”
“And you don’t have any idea what’s been happening since you-the other one of you-was transferred in?” Caldwell checked.
“No. The updating was to have been effected when the surrogates were erased and the originals reactivated,” Eesyan said. “But the disconnection happened too abruptly.”
There was a long, brooding silence.
“They’ll be in trouble there, without VISAR,” Calazar said quietly at last.
“I am aware of that,” Eesyan replied. The edge to his voice was unusually sharp for a Thurien. “I happen to have a rather personal stake in the matter.”
“My apologies,” Calazar acknowledged.
Caldwell sat with his craggy jaw clamped in a downturned line, saying nothing. The knowledge that the original Hunt, and Danchekker, and the Marin woman, and the Jevlenese girl were intact and walking about somewhere on Jevlen was not comforting. As Calazar had said, the surrogates were now every bit as real. Caldwell didn’t like the thought that was nagging at the edge of his awareness and which he knew he was refusing to face up to fully: the implication of their being somehow “expendable.” He didn’t like it at all.
Leyel Torres, the Shapieron’s acting commander, looked from one to another of the faces. “We have to do something,” he said simply.
“Without another link into JEVEX, I’m not at all sure there’s much we can do,” Calazar answered.
Torres fidgeted, clearly not satisfied. “How did Hunt manage to get the link that we did have?” he asked.
“Through the Jevlenese criminal ring somehow,” Eesyan replied.
“Could they do it again if we restored contact with them?”
“Only they know that. And they’re loose in Shiban somewhere.” Torres thought for a moment. “VISAR, when you had the connection, did you know where Hunt was in Shiban?”
“Almost certainly the club that they found Baumer in,” VISAR answered. “ZORAC has located it on the city plan from its communications routing codes.”
Torres stared hard at the floor, then looked up suddenly with a resolved air. “There is something that we can do,” he said. “Excuse me, gentlemen. VISAR, disconnect.” And at once he was back in one of the neurocouplers that had been installed aboard the Shapieron. He got up, left the room, and walked through into the ship’s command deck. The crew, who were on standby, stirred at their stations.
“ZORAC, report the ship’s status,” he called. “Flight ready, as instructed.”
“Prepare for immediate takeoff.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Inside the Planetary Administration Center in Shiban, Garuth had been brought to the communications room next to what had recently been his own office suite. One of the main screens of a bank standing in the center of the floor showed Eubeleus’s control center deep beneath the surface of Uttan. Eubeleus had gained control of JEVEX, which was now operational and directing the i-space link carrying the channel into PAC; the Thurien occupying force had been fooled with a dummy system and was now isolated.
“I wanted you to be here to witness the futility of your fool’s errand on Jevlen, and the first stage of our final triumph,” Langerif gloated from the center of his entourage of officers. “Our reports are that the fervor we’ve been building up among the followers of the Axis has served its purpose well. There are thousands of them out there in couplers right now, eagerly waiting for JEVEX’s promised restoration. And tens, hundreds of thousands more will follow as soon as it becomes known that the promise has been fulfilled. By tonight we will have taken Shiban. By tomorrow, Jevlen.”