ENTOVERSE

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 ~s• 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,” Tones 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 jive’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 Payroll, 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,” Payroll 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.