"Perfectly."
ZORAC had no surprises waiting. Even if it had conceived any, with the Ganymeans and their human friends in jeopardy it would have been unable to act on it.
Frenda Vesni sat listening to Negrikof bellowing in the next room. She had just put a call through from a secretary at the Lambian embassy in Osserbruk, saying that a message purporting to be from an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of Minerva had warned that President Harzin's plane was going to be shot down. Ironically, the Lambian had ended up being routed through to the same desk as the alert from NAD earlier.
"Look, what is this? Doesn't anyone have any sense of discrimination left anymore?… No, I don't take it seriously… Because we've had it going on all day. There's some hackers loose who are having what they think is fun, and that people like you and me have got nothing better to do… No, because if I did that every time…"
Another indicator flashed on Vesni's desk. The head and shoulders appeared of a man in Army uniform. "This is Frenda Vesni."
"Is that Intel Dir? I was told I need to speak with Zumo Negrikof. It's very urgent."
"He's on a call to the Lambian embassy right at this minute. I'm his second. Can I help you?"
"I'm not sure it can wait. I really need to talk to someone in the President's Office, but I was told we have to go through you. Can you interrupt him, please?"
"What's it about?
"I'm with Chief of Staff Headquarters. We've received a warning through one of our locations that has contacts in Lambia that the plane that's on its way here with the President and the Lambian King aboard is in imminent danger. The President's Office has direct contact with the plane and also with ground control. They need to know."
Vesni turned her head for a moment. Negrikof was still yelling. If this had come through on its own, she would have let Negrikof deal with it. But there had been three warnings now. And this one wasn't claiming to be a talking starship. Her terms of office authorized her to act on her own initiative if her chief were unavailable and it was a matter of national security or an emergency. Well, this certainly qualified. She thought about the probable reaction from Negrikof if it turned out to be a hoax or a misunderstanding of something. Then she weighed that against the consequences if the warning was genuine. She took a deep breath. There were times in life when you just had to hope you were right.
"Taking all the details would just lose more time," she said. "I'll connect you through to the President's Office directly."
In the Lambian communications room, the views being sent back by ZORAC of the five Jevlenese ships positioned around the Shapieron were distributed across several screens. A daughter craft of some kind was detaching from one of them. It was obvious to Hunt now. The Jevlenese had to have been on the Moon somewhere. His spirits sagged as he watched. Even at this early stage, the alliance between Broghuilio and Freskel-Gar had proved itself durable enough and flexible enough to seize a new opportunity when it presented itself, virtually without even faltering in their stride. Now they had a functioning starship as well as Jevlenese weaponry. So much for the mission and its hope of averting a planetary war. About the only consolation Hunt could see was that at least this way, the advantage would be so devastatingly to one side that it might be over sooner, without spreading to dimensions that would engulf the whole of Minerva. So the mission might have created a new reality after all that was at least an improvement, if not the ideal they had hoped for. And that was something, for with the beacons gone and the Shapieron now taken over by Broghuilio, it was beginning to look very much as if they might be stuck in it.
He stared at the images of the Jevlenese craft seen from the Shapieron, hanging seemingly motionless in the void against the background of stars. Different stars-not a pattern that would have been visible from the Solar System of the time that he belonged to in a different universe. How many ships and constructions against a backdrop of space had he seen since that first trip from Earth to take part in the investigation after the discovery of "Charlie" on the Moon?
The last time had been when he went out physically to MP2 with Chien to observe the first tests involving on-board bubble generation out at the Gate. The blunt, boxy shapes of the Jevlenese vessels reminded him of the raft that it had been installed on. They'd thought they had the convergence problem solved, only to have it reappear once more when the local bubble at the raft was detached. That had been their second encounter with convergence-induced craziness-involving not virtual objects that time, but real ones. The versions of the raft multiplying and vanishing before their eyes had been solid, material bodies. The bubble had to be deactivated after stabilization to suppress the effect.
Convergence suppression. The words repeated themselves in Hunt's mind. Something insistent was trying to make itself heard from his unconscious. Something significant.
Convergence suppression… The bubble generator that the Shapieron was fitted with had to be deactivated for the same reason, when the umbilical was broken to allow the ship to operate autonomously. Otherwise the resulting imbalance would expand the local bubble along with its core convergence zone. Out to what kind of radius? Hunt didn't know. But the raft's on-board power source had produced one extending far enough to materialize multiple versions of it. And dematerialize them…
The bubble generator aboard the Shapieron was driven by a starship's power.
Like something materializing from another realm, an impossible thought took shape in Hunt's mind. He had to find a way of getting through to ZORAC!
Hunt turned to the Lambian who seemed to have been assigned as his handler. "I have known Broghuilio before," Hunt said, speaking better Lambian than he had effected before. "Not to be trusted. You make a mistake."
"You talk when we tell you," the Lambian said.
Hunt nodded at the console still showing Wylott protesting about being abandoned. Presumably he was at some other location. "Look. They don't even trust each other."
"Quiet!"
In the room that Hunt had been brought from, the rest of the party from the Shapieron sat resignedly under the watchful eyes of the guards standing inside the door. In the nearest alternative to action that offered itself, Danchekker wiped imaginary smears from his spectacles for the umpteenth time. He had tried to initiate some kind of communication with the guards but decided they were robots. An interesting conundrum, he reflected. Minerva had no military history worth talking about, and yet the mind-set was the same as he had encountered everywhere on Earth, and when he was on Jevlen. Did the military do it to people, or were certain kinds of people drawn to the military? He observed that he was making an unwarranted assumption of a dichotomy-that the two answers were mutually exclusive. ZORAC would have pulled him up on it.
He realized that he was playing mind games with himself to evade facing the feeling of isolation that was trying to steal up from some lower recess of consciousness and seize him with something akin to panic. They were marooned on an alien planet in a remote era of a past that wasn't even of their own universe, with apparently no way of getting back. Now even the link back to the Shapieron was gone. He had no idea what Hunt was trying to achieve, since they hadn't been permitted to talk. There was little Danchekker could see that he could achieve. It had all the marks of an act of desperation about it-Hunt's way of avoiding a confrontation with the same issue in his own mind. What the Ganymeans were thinking was lost to Danchekker behind their inscrutable expressions. He removed his spectacles and took his handkerchief from his pocket to wipe them.