“Fully functional, Excellency,” the familiar voice of JEVEX responded. Reassured looks passed between the others around the control center.
“Before we open the links to Jevlen, I want a final check that we are not registering any attempts at irregular access, either via the i-links, or through the conventional Jevlenese planetary system,” Eubeleus said. “I want the system fully secure on all counts.”
“Commencing core reintegration prior to connection to Jevlen,” JEVEX confirmed.
“Breakdown of Shapieron’s stress field is beginning,” the first operator called out. “Ship is decoupling from normal space… Delta index is fading… Last readings give acceleration as undiminished.”
At last Eubeleus felt safe, and he permitted a smile of triumph to play around the corners of his mouth for an instant. “It is time to proceed,” he announced. He turned to one of the aides. “I shall guide the Prophet personally, as intended. You watch here until Iduane returns.” He allowed his gaze to drift slowly over the company. “When we see each other again, Shiban will be ours.” Applause greeted his words. Eubeleus turned and left the room.
Meanwhile, in the blackness of space twenty thousand miles above the surface of Jevlen, a tiny speck that the tracking sensors had missed in the disturbance from the starship’s departure emerged unseen from the electromagnetic upheaval and disappeared into the starry background.
“Probe away, on course, and checking positive,” ZORAC reported. “Well, that’s it,” Hunt said in the center of the Shapieron’s command deck as the screens showing the external views being picked up by the ship’s scanners blanked out. The vessel was now out of touch with the universe electromagnetically, its sole means of communication being by VISAR, using i-space.
“It’s out of our hands,” Danchekker agreed. “There’s nothing more we can do now but play out our role as decoys.” He thought for a moment and sighed. “It’s not an especially gratifying role to find oneself reduced to, considering what’s at stake. In the situations you’ve landed us in before, we have generally been able to contribute something more positive.”
Hunt was about to reply, but checked himself and looked at Danchekker oddly. “Well, that’s not exactly true, is it, Chris?”
“What do you mean?”
“It isn’t out of our hands-not exactly. A lot depends on what those surrogates who are still down in the Entoverse have managed to pull off. And they’re every bit as much ‘us’ as you and me, aren’t they-if what Calazar and the others are saying is correct?” He frowned and rubbed his chin, finding the thought as bemusing as the look on Danchekker’s face indicated that Danchekker himself did.
“It’s a peculiar situation, when you finally get a moment to think about it, isn’t it?”
A messenger forced his way through the crowds packed into the grounds of the temple of Vandros and went up to the chambers inside. He spoke to one of the priests, who went to the door that led out to the main steps from where the ceremonies were being led, and beckoned Ethendor over.
“Word from the main gates,” the priest informed him. “The Examiner and his caravan are entering the city now. They are bringing more heretics-faces unknown, who claimed to have come from the gods.”
so the celebrations shall be complete,” Ethendor said, nodding. He understood it all now.
“This is why the people were told to be patient?” the priest queried.
“The plan unfolds in its perfection,” Ethendor assured him.
Then the Voice came again into Ethendor’s mind. “The time will come very soon now, Prophet chosen by the gods. Are you prepared to receive the Great Spirit?”
“The last of our enemies are being brought before us to face atonement, and Waroth has been cleansed of its stain,” Ethendor replied. “All is prepared.”
“You have done well. All that was promised shall be yours in Hyperia.”
“I shall rule over vast multitudes? My word shall move armies and my wishes shall be law? Kings shall tremble at my displeasure?” Ethendor’s inner voice shook, and his eyes blazed with the vision. “I shall scatter mine enemies mercilessly before me as dust to the winds, and be mighty as the gods themselves?”
“Thus was our contract.”
“Humbly, I accept.”
The satellite was in the form of a stepped octagonal prism, cluttered with protrusions and antennae. Using manual guidance, Rodger Jassilane moved the probe gradually in until it was hanging a few yards from the rear access port, approaching from the outward direction to avoid interrupting any signal beams directed at the planet. “Arrived and docked,” he announced. The i-space equipment that the probe was carrying gave them a link to VISAR on Thurien. He glanced across at Keshen, also suited up and squeezed awkwardly into the cramped space. “Okay?”
Keshen nodded behind his facepiece.
“Open hatch,” Jassilane instructed the onboard computer.
With a few expert pushes and tugs, Jassilane propelled himself out of the opening and turned on his checkline to collect the tool pack from a stowage compartment that had opened alongside the hatch. Inside, Keshen seemed to be having more difficulty in moving and was extricating himself clumsily.
“Not too much experience in zero-g, eh?” Jassilane remarked, leaning in and unhooking a buckle of Keshen’s pack harness from a projecting hinge of the hatch cover.
“I’ve never been off-planet before,” Keshen told him.
For a second the Ganymean froze, not knowing what to say. “You kind of, er… left it a long time before saying so,” he managed finally.
“Nobody asked me before. I didn’t want to sound like I was chickening out.”
Jassilane thought about it. “Did Hunt, the Terran scientist, get you into this?” he inquired.
“That’s right. How did you know?”
“Oh… I just had a feeling,” Jassilane said as he attached the probe by a tether.
While Jassilane burned open the hatch into the satellite with a plasma torch, Keshen unreeled the cable that would provide a connection for VISAR from the link hardware inside the probe. They entered the satellite, and Keshen located a maintenance and test console, which he used to find the boxes containing the buffer terminals for the output circuits into the planetary communications net. Jassilane set up a terminal back to the probe’s onboard computer, which ZORAC had loaded with Jevlenese interconnection protocols and reference data, as well as the activation codes that VISAR had retrieved from Keshen’s memory.
“You seem to know what you’re doing,” Jassilane remarked, hoping that his relief didn’t show in the translation coming back through VISAR.
“You see? Not all Jevs are meatheads.”
“What did you do before?”
Keshen checked the connectors against the set of Jevlenese standard patterns that Jassilane had collected from the Shapieron’s stores. “Operations supervision-part of the JEVEX remote-input system. When JEVEX was shut down, some people approached me to set up a few connections into the residual core system that was left running-without asking questions about what they wanted them for.”
Jassilane searched through what he knew of the motivations behind the strange things that humans did. “Out of revenge?” he guessed. “To get even with the authorities? Or was it to assert your identification with an ideological principle that you saw as being violated?”
“No. For the money.”
They found a connector combination that matched. Jassilane began fitting it together, while Keshen used the console to isolate one of the satellite’s primary downlink beams. The neat thing about the way they were doing it, he thought as he worked, was that JEVEX could check all it wanted to for somebody trying to break into it; it wouldn’t find anything. VISAR would be connected, via the satellite, to one of the surface nodes-wherever it was located-that Eubeleus himself had ordered to be shut down, and which wouldn’t activate again until JEVEX itself opened its channels to Jevlen for the invasion. It was a bit like dressing the robbers up as the security guards, and waiting for the bank to call them in.