Hunt swallowed and sat back abruptly, looking stunned. Sandy raised a hand to her brow disbelievingly. “Oh, my God…

Cullen rapped his fingers on the desk, then turned to flip a switch on the COM panel to one side. “ZORAC?”

“Sir?” Cullen liked being addressed in the way he was used to.

“Have Koberg and Lebansky arrived at Geerbaine yet?”

“Just under ten minutes ago.”

“Okay, get a message on a secure channel to one of them, would you? Ms. Marin is not to overhear it. They’re to keep her under observation at all times, and she isn’t to communicate to anybody, repeat anybody. Anyone attempting to contact her is to be apprehended-they can use help from the police there if they need it. They’re to report directly here as soon as they get back.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gina, Lebansky, and Koberg returned to the car, Koberg carrying Gina’s two bags. Lebansky, who had been in the lobby while the other two went up to the room, saw her into her seat, closed the door, and then went around to exchange a few words with Koberg as he stowed the bags. Gina saw Koberg nod, say something in reply, and indicate with a nod a group of police with an officer, standing nearby. Lebansky waved back toward the hotel, and they both nodded again. Then they came around and climbed into the car.

“Is everything okay?” Gina asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Koberg replied impassively. But something in their manner had changed.

They pulled out and drove back around the open square. But as soon as they were out of sight from the hotel, Lebansky ordered the autodrive unit, which had been reprogrammed to understand English, “Change destination. Park anywhere.” The car slid out of the throughway and halted.

“What’s going on?” Gina asked, looking from one to another.

“Just take it easy, ma’am. There’s nothing to be worried about,” Lebansky said. Koberg got out and began walking back in the direction of the hotel, keeping close to the walls.

“Why have we stopped?” Gina demanded. “What’s he doing?” She reached for the door catch. “Look, I’m going-”

Lebansky laid a restraining hand lightly but firmly on her arm. “Just take it easy. We had a change of orders, that’s all. I don’t know what it’s about, either, but I figure you could be in some kind of trouble.”

At the reception desk inside the Best Western, a redheaded woman with a yellow coat and flowery scarf smiled at the clerk and fluttered her eyelids. “Excuse me. My name is Marion Fayne. I believe there might be something for me to collect. Would you look for me, please? It’s an envelope that I left here earlier.”

“I’ll see.” The clerk turned away.

“That looks like it, up there… Yes, that’s the one. Thank you. Do you need to see some ID or something?”

“That’s okay.”

“Well, I just thought. Anyone could say anything, couldn’t they? Oh, thank you. It’s a book that I left to be signed, you know. One of my favorite writers. Did you know she was staying here? Ah, yes, there, she’s changed the name.”

As the woman moved away from the desk, a tall, broad-shouldered man in a navy suit who had been watching stepped in front of her and held out a hand. “I’ll take that, if you don’t mind.”

The woman froze. Suddenly her face hardened, and sizing up the situation in an instant, she reached inside her coat. She was fast, but Koberg was faster and slapped the gun from her hand as she pulled it out.

She turned for the door and ran-straight into the police officer and two men who had been waiting there. “Bastard!” she managed to spit back at Koberg as the policemen hauled her outside.

But she had been watched, and the news reached an office in the Axis’s Shiban Temple within minutes.

The woman who called herself Marion Fayne had no knowledge of the tiny implant that had been placed in a neural plexus at the base of her brain a long time previously. It responded to a radioed code. She collapsed suddenly in the police van that she was traveling in, and was found to be dead on arrival at headquarters.

CHAPTER FORTY

A Ganymean short-haul flyer, one of the Shapieron’s complement of daughter vessels, landed on the rooftop pad of a low, burnished copper-colored building fifteen miles east of the city. Duncan Watt got out, accompanied by Rodgar Jassilane and a Ganymean computing specialist. They were met by two more Ganymeans and a small group of Jevlenese technicians who had been waiting. The party entered through a reception lobby in a superstructure and descended by elevator through the building to a subterranean level. There they emerged into a circular vestibule with molded pastel walls interspaced with glass panels, and began walking along one of several corridors extending away radially at forty-five-degree spacings.

From outside, there was nothing remarkable about the building. But this was one of the primary communications-processing and traffic-control centers for the entire Shiban sector of the JEVEX network. In the galleries beneath the unprepossessing, squat, reddish-brown structure, in the days when JEVEX had been operational, the stupendous streams of data had poured through unceasingly, carrying the rhythms of life that pulsed through an organism not only encompassing a planet, but extending outward across a dozen stars. This was the location of one of the concentrations of mind-defying computing complexity that had made Jevlen virtually a self-managing planet and endowed its citizens with the ability to know anything at will and to cross the cosmos in an instant like galactic gods. This was one of the hubs, a final inner sanctum where the immensity that was JEVEX resided.

Or at least, that was what the construction plans that had been handed down for centuries said.

The party came to the control center, with rows of consoles on rising tiers, banks of displays, and rooms on all sides filled with auxiliary equipment. And they descended to the vast halls below, where rows of huge, cubical cabinets, and luminescent blocks of molecular-array crystal, each the size of a boxcar, stretched away into the distance in tight, geometric formations. Just from looking, Duncan could sense the stupendous scale of the operations it was all brought together to manage.

But it was all an illusion. For what the Ganymeans had discovered was that the entire installation was a dummy. The massive runs of lightguide cables and databeam buses leading from the communications level above went nowhere. The arrays of densely stacked holocrystals in the cabinets endlessly recirculated meaningless patterns of numbers. The displays and status indicators flickering and changing around the control floor were simulations. The whole portion of JEVEX that was supposed to reside here, in other words, didn’t exist.

The Ganymeans showed Watt an opened cabinet in the control center. It was empty except for a few arrays of optronic wafers in a partly filled rack maybe three inches high. “This is what’s generating all the images that you can see in this room,” one of the Ganymeans said.

“But… this is impossible,” Watt stammered, staring incredulously.

“I know. That’s why we wanted you to see it for yourself.”

Jassilane wheeled around to confront the Jevlenese chief engineer responsible for the site, who was staring straight ahead, blank-faced. “What do you know about this?” he demanded.

“I don’t know anything.”

“How long has it been like this?”

Silence. Another part of the conspiracy. They weren’t going to get anywhere.

Watt looked at another empty cabinet that was winking a few lights and shook his head uncomprehendingly. All the calculations said that JEVEX had to be much bigger than the official designs showed. Yet if this was typical of the general situation, it hardly existed at all. But something had to have been supporting the Jevlenese-managed worlds.