Estordu was turning his head frantically from side to side to take in the displays and data reports. "Something is deforming the configuration. . . . breaking up the field manifolds. I’ve never seen anything like this. It can only be VISAR."
"That’s impossible," one of the other scientists shouted. "VISAR can’t jam. It has no sensors. JEVEX is shut down."
"That’s not jamming," Estordu muttered. "The port began to form. It’s doing something else. . . ." His eye caught the view of the Shapieron again. "The probe! VISAR is using the probe to monitor the entry-port configuration. It couldn’t jam the beam, so it’s trying to project a complementary pattern from Gistar to cancel out the toroid from Uttan. It’s trying to neutralize it."
"It couldn’t," the other scientist protested. "It couldn’t get enough resolution through a single probe. It would be aiming virtually blind from Gistar."
"The Gistar and Uttan beams would interact constructively in the same volume," another pointed out. "If an unstable resonance developed, anything could happen."
"That is an unstable resonance," Estordu shouted, pointing at the display. "I tell you, that’s what VISAR’s doing."
"VISAR would never risk it."
Ahead of the ships, a maelstrom of twisting, convulsing, multiply-connected relativity was boiling under the clash of titanic bolts of energy materializing and superposing from two points, each light-years away. The core shrank, grew again, fragmented, then reassembled itself. And still they were heading directly for its center.
Broghuilio had listened enough. He turned his head up to where the captain was watching him, waiting. Then at the last second, something about Estordu pulled his attention away.
Estordu was standing absolutely still with a strange look on his face as he stared at the view of the Shapieron. He was mumbling to himself, and seemed to have forgotten everything going on around him. "H-links through the probes," he whispered. "That was how VISAR got into JEVEX." His eyes opened wider, and his face became ashen as the full realization hit him. "That was how everything got into JEVEX! It never existed, any of it. They were doing it through the Shapieron all the time. . . . We’re running away from a single unarmed ship."
"What is it?" Broghuilio snapped. "Why are you looking like that?"
Estordu looked at him with a bleak stare. "It doesn’t exist. . . . The Terran strike force doesn’t exist. It never did. VISAR wrote it into JEVEX through the Shapieron . The whole thing was a fabrication. There was nothing there but the Shapieron all the time."
The captain leaned over from above. "Excellency, we have to. . ." He stopped as he saw that Broghuilio was not listening, hesitated for a second, then turned away to call to somewhere behind him. "Disengage forward compensators. Cut in emergency boost and reverse at full power. Compute evasion function and execute immediately."
"What?-What did you say?" Broghuilio turned to face the semicircle of cowering figures behind him. "Are you telling me the Terrans have been making fools out of all of you?"
From above the synthetic voice of a computer came tonelessly: "Negative function. Negative function. All measures ineffective. Ship accelerating on irreversible gradient. Corrective action now impossible. Repeat: Corrective action now impossible."
But Broghuiio didn’t hear, even as the craft plunged into the knot of insanely tangled spacetime looming around them. "You imbeciles!" he breathed. His voice rose and began shaking uncontrollably as he lifted his fists high above his head. "Imbeciles! IMBECILES! You IM-BE-CILES!!"
"My God, they’re going straight into it!" Hunt gasped from a screen on the Command Deck of the Shapieron. The view on the main screen was being sent back from the probe two hundred thousand miles away, still clinging doggedly to the heels of the Jevlenese ships. A horrified silence had fallen all around.
"What’s happening?" Eesyan whispered from the center of the floor.
"An oscillating instability is coupling positively to an h-frequency alias caused by discrepancies in the beam spectra," VISAR answered. "The properties of the region created are beyond analysis."
On another screen Calazar, openmouthed with shock, was shaking his head in protest. "I never intended this," he said in a strangled voice. "Why didn’t they turn away? I just wanted to deny them the port."
"ZORAC, cut the main drives and decelerate," Garuth instructed in a voice that was clipped and expressionless. "Present an optical scan of the area as soon as we reintegrate."
A background of turbulent light and blackness now filled the entire main screen. The five dots grew smaller in front of it . . . and were suddenly swallowed up in the chaos. The turmoil seemed to rush out as the probe followed in after them, and then the view changed abruptly as the Shapieron’s stress field dispersed and ZORAC switched through the long-range image from the ship’s own scanners. "The instability is breaking down," VISAR reported. "The resonances are degenerating into turbulence eddies. If there was a tunnel there, it’s caving in." On the screen the patterns broke up into swirling fragments of light that spiraled rapidly inward, at the same time growing smaller, dimmer, and redder. They faded, and then died. The region of the starfield that was left shimmered for a few seconds to mark where the upheaval had been, and then all was normal just as if nothing had happened.
For a long time an absolute silence gripped the Command Deck, and nobody moved. The faces on the screens showing Earth and Thurien were grim.
And then VISAR spoke again. There was a distinct note of disbelief in its voice. "I have a further report. Don’t ask me how right now, but it looks as if they got through. The probe was still transmitting when the tunnel closed in behind it, and its last signal indicates that it reentered normal space." While surprise was still evident all over the Command Deck, the view on the main screen changed to show the last image transmitted by the probe. The five Jevlenese ships were hanging in ragged formation in what looked like ordinary space sure enough, studded with what looked like ordinary stars. And up near one corner was a larger speck that could have been a planet. The image froze at that point. "The transmission ceased there," VISAR said.
"They survived that?" Eesyan stammered. "Where is it? Where in space did they emerge?"
"I don’t know," VISAR answered. "They must have been trying for Uttan, but anything could have happened. I’m trying to match the starfield background with projections from Uttan now, but it could take awhile."
"We can’t risk waiting," Calazar said. "Even though Uttan might be defended, I’ll have to send in the reserve ships from Gistar to try and cut Broghuilio off before he reaches that planet." He waited for a few seconds, but nobody could disagree. His voice became heavier. "VISAR, connect me to the reserve-squadron commander," he said.
"There is nothing more for us to do here," Garuth said in a voice that had become very quiet and very calm. "ZORAC, return the ship to Jevlen. We will await the arrival of the Thuriens there."
While the Shapieron was turning to head back, a set of toroids opened up briefly some distance outside the planetary system of Gistar, and the squadron of Thurien vessels that had been held in reserve there transferred into h-space, then reemerged outside the system of Uttan. The Jevlenese long-range surveillance instruments detected them as a series of objects hurtling inward at a speed not much below that of light. The commander at Uttan decided that a portion of the Terran strike force had been diverted, and within minutes every emergency signal band was carrying frantic offers of unconditional surrender. The Thuriens arrived at Uttan some hours later and took over without opposition.