Eubeleus paled with anger. “Take them all away!” he shouted. “They’ve served their purpose. The Ganymeans know we have them.” He looked back at the view of Torres. “Don’t let their frivolity mislead you, Captain. Take your ship outward immediately. Otherwise, I don’t have to tell you what will become of your precious friends there.”
Torres could only nod numbly. But behind him, Danchekker’s face had taken on the enraptured expression of somebody who had just seen a light, as if he had only just realized something that should have been obvious long before.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Eubeleus’s face vanished from the screen on the Shapieron’s command deck. Calazar and Eesyan were left on another, staring gloomily from their capital on Thurien, and Caldwell, in Washington, was still showing on the one adjacent. But Danchekker was already hopping about in the center of the floor, gesticulating excitedly first one way, then another, at the Terrans and Ganymeans around him.
“She just said it! Sandy just said it, on the screen there! In their heads!” He pointed wildly at Keshen, who pulled back in alarm. “He’s still got them!”
Hunt raised a restraining hand. “Chris, calm down, stop dancing about like that, and say whatever the hell it is you’re trying to say.”
Danchekker regained most of his composure, but was still unable to prevent his finger jabbing repeatedly in Keshen’s direction. “The activation codes! Don’t you see? He entered them into the touchpanel in the club! He still has them, subconsciously, inside his head. VISAR can get them out again!”
Hunt stared for a full five seconds. “Is that right?” The question was mechanical. He already knew enough to have little doubt of the answer.
“Yes… with Keshen’s permission, naturally,” VISAR said.
“Of course,” Calazar whispered numbly. It was so unheard of that no Thurien would have thought of it-or a Thurien-oriented computer.
Hunt looked at Keshen. “Is it okay with you?”
Keshen shrugged, still taken aback at having suddenly become the center of things. “Well, I guess so… Sure.”
Hunt turned to Torres. But the Ganymean was shaking his head. “But is there any point? The Jevlenese will be watching our every move. If we so much as take the ship anywhere near a redirector satellite…” He made a helpless gesture and left the sentence unfinished.
A silence fell, broken by the humming and pulsating of distant machinery buried in the ship.
Then Caldwell said, “Maybe there is a point. If the Jevlenese are going to have all their attention fixed on the Shapieron, that might make it an ideal decoy while something else tries for the satellite-one of the ship’s probes, maybe. Some of those probes are fitted with i-space gear and can talk to VISAR. If Keshen says he can get into the planetary net from the satellite, you’d just have to bridge a connection across. How many guys would it take to do it?”
Everyone looked at Torres and the Ganymean crew officers. They were the only ones who could answer that.
“It’s got a chance,” Rodgar Jassilane said at length. “When the stress field breaks down under main-drive acceleration, the entire external electromagnetic environment of the ship is disrupted. If a probe were ejected at the right moment, it might well get away undetected against the background… and there’s nothing else we can try.”
“Who’d need to go?” Hunt snapped. “Keshen for a start, I assume.” He turned back to the Jevlenese engineer. “Will you do it?” Keshen swallowed hard, but nodded.
“I’ll go with him,” Jassilane offered promptly. “That’s all. You won’t get more than two of us into one of the i-fitted probes, anyway.”
There wasn’t time to for any more finesse. Eubeleus was probably wondering already why the ship wasn’t accelerating. Hunt looked at Torres and indicated Keshen with a jerk of his head. “Let’s do it. Get him to a coupler, quick.”
Torres confirmed the order with a brief wave to one of the Ganymeans. “ZORAC, prepare a sounding probe for launch.” He waved to two more of the ship’s officers. “Have two EV suits made ready at the access lock, one Terran model, one Ganymean.”
Keshen was already being speeded through a doorway out from the command deck to the couplers. The other Ganymeans saluted and hurried away.
Chained again, and with guards keeping them constantly covered at spearpoint, the prisoners sat morosely in the bumping, sliding cart as it approached the outskirts of Orenash. It was amazing, Hunt thought. Now that he was adjusting to the crazy dynamics of the place, he could see the change between north-south and east-west lengths every time the cart rounded an approximately right-angle bend. The scientist in him, even in a predicament that made anything else seem pointless, noted it as a detectable alteration in the cart’s length-breadth proportions. No wonder the people here had never made anything beyond a few primitive tools. And the mountains discernible off to the left in the twilight were noticeably closer than they had been when the procession came out onto the plain, although the route was surely more or less parallel to them.
Beside him, Gina was pressed close, fighting to keep her emotions under control. He reached across her lap to squeeze her arm reassuringly. One of the guards growled something threatening. Hunt drew back.
“Well, here it is,” she said. “The world of Earth’s mythology, only real, just like we said. But who’d have thought we’d end up in it?” She drew a long, shaky breath, and the brave face she had been struggling to maintain broke down. “Look, I’m not very good at this. I don’t know what they’ve got lined up at the end of this ride, but-”
“Save it,” Hunt said. “As you said, it’s a mythology become real. Miracles can happen.”
“What miracles?”
“Who knows?”
“You know what a fluke it was for us to get that connection. What chance is there of anything else, anywhere in Shiban? If it got cut off, it must mean either that the club was taken over, or Eubeleus shut down all the links. What else can any of them-” She shook her head, unable in her fear and confusion to sort out the philosophical niceties. “-us, whoever those people still out there are… What can they do? Do you know?”
“Not exactly,” Hunt confessed.
“See!” Possibly from the workings of some inner defense mechanism, Gina became almost belligerent. “You don’t know. But the you out there is every bit the same person, isn’t it? And up to the point where we got detached, he knew as much as you did. So why should he have any better ideas? And the same goes for the rest of us.”
Hunt didn’t have an answer. He could only look away.
They were coming into the city of Orenash. The architecture was massively imposing, and foreboding. Ahead, trumpets sounded as the leading body of soldiers passed through a large gate set between two square towers in a high wall. Crowds were milling around the vehicles, shouting praises to the priests and jeering at the captives.
It was an odd feeling, trying to project how he would feel about himself, Hunt found. To the originals of themselves that they had been derived from, they were just knots of computer code. He wondered how much those originals out there would really care. Right now, he didn’t feel at all like a piece of computer code, and he cared very much. But how much of that was likely to impress itself on other beings in another universe, whatever their superficial resemblances and theoretically coincident identities? They didn’t have the same stake in the outcome of all this.
It was not a very reassuring line of thought to find himself being drawn along.
“Data update from Jevlen,” an operator sang out suddenly. Eubeleus swung to face him from the middle of the floor, his haste betraying a tenseness that he had been striving not to show. “The Shapieron is accelerating out of free-fall now. Readings indicate profile consistent with maximum ramp up to interstellar speed.”