“Does that talk to the city net?” Hunt asked Murray.

“It should.”

“Tell her to try fifty-six.”

Murray passed it on, and Osaya tried again. Then a familiar voice said, “Ahah! We seem to be through. Hello, is anybody there?” Then it repeated itself in Jevlenese.

Hunt grinned. “Hello, ZORAC. Not a bad piece of detective work. Was it your doing?”

“Elementary, my dear Hunt. I’ve got Leyel Torres for you.”

“Great.”

Torres’s voice came through from the Shapieron. “Vic, you made it. Who else is there?”

“Gina got out with me. And Chris Danchekker made it with Nixie. We don’t know anything about the others.”

“I fear they’re in captivity,” Torres said. “We don’t understand the situation. What are the Jevlenese trying to do. Do you know?”

“We think so, but it’s a long story. And it’s urgent. It needs to go to the top, to Calazar. Can you get him through VISAR?”

“We’re talking to him right now,” Torres answered. “He’s getting together as many of JPC as he can raise. I’ll put you through to the Thurien circuit.”

ZORAC’s voice said something in Jevlenese, and Osaya tapped a code into the tablet. One of the mirrors facing the bed turned into a screen showing Torres standing in the Shapieron’s command deck against a background of crew positions manned by Ganymeans. “It looks as if you’ve found quite a home away from home there, Vic,” ZORAC commented.

“Have they got hold of Caldwell?” Hunt asked, ignoring it.

“He should be arriving soon,” ZORAC answered. “He was playing golf. It’s Sunday afternoon in Washington.”

Then another mirror turned into a view of Calazar in vivid, informal clothes. “Dr. Hunt,” he said without preamble. “I feel that we are responsible for all this. What do these Jevlenese at PAC want? They have deactivated the connection to VISAR there, and we have no access to them.”

To one side, Murray was shaking his head wonderingly. “That’s Calazar, the Thurien head honcho, here in Osaya’s bedroom? I don’t believe this,” he muttered.

“We’re pretty sure they’re only a smokescreen,” Hunt replied to Calazar. “They probably don’t know themselves what’s really going on. We’re certain that Eubeleus is at the back of it.”

The sudden misgivings on Calazar’s face, even with its alien Ganymean features, was unmistakable. “Why? Where does he fit into it?” he asked. Just then, he was joined on the screen by Porthik Eesyan, a Thurien scientific adviser whom Hunt and Danchekker also both knew of old.

Murray nudged Hunt and nodded in the direction of the window. Outside, a police flier had appeared and was buzzing around the probe. The probe had deployed more antennae and drifted away to circle on a leisurely tour of the area, presumably in an effort to obscure the whereabouts of the location that it was communicating with.

“Look, there might not be much time, so these are the facts,” Hunt said, looking back at the screens showing Calazar and Eesyan, and Torres. “The whole JEVEX business has been a fraud for years. JEVEX isn’t on Jevlen at all. The sites here are dummies and remote interfaces into it. The real guts of the system is all concentrated on Uttan. That’s what Eubeleus is really after-the business here is just a diversion. And if he gets control of it, this planet is going to be hit by an invasion of aliens that are stronger than anything any of us has ever dreamed of. We can go into the details later, but for now you have to believe it. Whatever else happens, you must stop him from getting to Uttan and turning that system back on. Tell him anything you like. This is one time to worry about ethics and principles later.”

Hunt’s relief at the chance fluke that had given them this connection so soon, just when everything had seemed lost, was such that he had talked on compulsively. But as he finished, the growing agitation that had been registering on the faces of the two Thuriens finally got through to him. A sudden pang of dread seized him as he guessed, a split second before Calazar spoke, what he was going to say.

“We can’t,” Calazar replied. “He’s already there. Eubeleus and his followers landed on Uttan-when was it, VISAR?”

“Four hours ago,” VISAR’s voice replied through the audio.

For several seconds Hunt could only stare back, his mind too paralyzed for him to speak. “He’s already there?” he repeated numbly.

Calazar nodded miserably. “They’ve made fools of all of us. We Thuriens, I mean. Enough Terrans tried to warn us.”

Hunt put a hand on his head unthinkingly, still in a daze. “Let’s worry about that later. Right now we’ve got an impending catastrophe. This whole planet’s ready to reconnect to JEVEX, which isn’t here but at Uttan. And Eubeleus has got Uttan. What do we do?”

“We can’t simply send ships to reoccupy it,” Calazar said. “It will be defended. To muster enough force would take too long.”

“We have to assume that there are Federation weapons still there,” Torres said from the Shapieron.

Porthik Eesyan, meanwhile, had been thinking rapidly. “It’s true that we can’t get near them from the outside,” he said. “But there is one possibility that I can see, although at this stage I have no idea how it could be implemented. JEVEX was defeated before when VISAR succeeded in taking control of it. If we’re going to do anything now, it will have to be in the same way.”

“You mean by getting VISAR hooked into JEVEX somehow?” Hunt said, sounding dubious. He agreed with the theory, but was equally at a loss to see how it could be done.

Eesyan nodded. “Yes. And quickly, before they get JEVEX back up to full operation. But it’s going to have to be done by you and the others there on Jevlen, Vic. After what happened last time, obviously they’ll secure JEVEX’s i-space links against external penetration. So somehow you are going to have to-”

There was a flash outside the window as a beam directed up from somewhere below destroyed the probe.

And both the screens in Osaya’s bedroom blanked out.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

The constructions blended together into a composite pattern of rectangular, hexagonal, rhombic, and irregularly shaped metal geometry, rising in gray tiers to fill a ten-mile-wide rift formed between sheer faces of rock. The top surface of one of the more prominent structures-a squat, seven-sided tower, its upper section terraced in the style of a ziggurat-was equipped as a landing area, with overhead doors to interior docking bays. Standing on the external pads were a number of surface lander craft from the Thurien interstellar transporter orbiting two thousand miles above.

Yet this was just a protruding part of the vast network of integrated manufacturing and assembly facilities that encompassed virtually the entire subsurface of the automated planet, Uttan. Deep below the marshaling and loading complex, in a room where the former director of the resident Jevlenese operations staff had received visitors, Eubeleus and a group of his Axis of Light lieutenants met Parygol, the present commander of the rotating Thurien caretaker force that had been installed since the collapse of the Federation.

“This must be what is called true dedication,” Parygol remarked. “We only remain here for two months at a time, and for me at least that’s quite sufficient. I can’t imagine anyone choosing to live permanently in such an environment.”

“Our preoccupation is with the world that lies within,” Eubeleus replied loftily. “What physical trappings happen to exist on the outside make little difference. In fact, the absence of distractions is beneficial to spiritual development, as has been known to ascetics for thousands of years.”

“Hmm. Yes, well, they tell us that humans and Ganymeans are made of very different psychology.” Parygol had studied the history of Jevlenese and Terran mysticism and believed privately that the whole business was just elaborate self-delusion.