And the voice spoke: “Soon now, the stars shall shine again and the skies be relit in splendor. Prepare, for the time of the Great Awakening draws nigh.”
“How shall we prepare?” Ethendor asked.
“The earth and the air of Waroth must be cleansed of the deceivers before all can be ready to arise. Nieru must be avenged for harmony to reign once more among the gods, and then shall the Arising be universally blessed. The false prophets who blasphemed the image of the purple spiral must be hunted out and destroyed. Only then will the heavens be appeased. Go therefore to the king and bid him set his forces to the task. Thus has Vandros spoken.”
“They shall be purged from the land,” Ethendor promised.
“And thereafter, when the lands of Waroth have been cleansed, the king shall lead the faithful into the realm beyond, and exterminate the false legions of the Spiral who have gone before.”
The high priest’s eyes widened. “Shall the task continue, even in Hyperia?”
“Hyperia is the task! Waroth has been merely thy proving ground.”
“There, then, shall I go to serve the gods!” Ethendor cried.
“Fail not, and there thou shalt become as one of them,” the Arisen One promised.
It would be a good way of getting their fighting spirits up before they came out to join the real action, Eubeleus had decided.
Hunt leaned back wearily in the chair in Murray’s lounge and felt the contours adjust to his changed posture. “I don’t know, Chris. We came here to evaluate Ganymean science, not to stop a bloody invasion. I’m a physicist, not a general.”
“Well, actually that’s not quite true,” Danchekker said. “It was merely the official story. We came here, if you recall, to help Garuth get to the bottom of his problem with the Jevienese. I’d say that objective has been accomplished quite effectively.”
“To get to the bottom of it, and see what could be done about it,”
Hunt replied. “What have we done to accomplish the second part?
Garuth’s locked up, the Ents have got JEVEX back and half the
Jevlenese working for them, and they’re all set to take over here
completely.”
Murray sent a puzzled look from one to the other. “Ents? What Ents? I’ve never heard of them. What the hell are Ents?”
“It’s an involved business. But you can think of them as the personalities that people here are sometimes taken over by,” Danchekker said by way of some kind of an answer.
Murray didn’t follow. “I thought that was just headworld freaks getting their brains scrambled,” he said. “That’s what most of the Jevs think.”
“It gets rather more complicated than that,” Danchekker told him. Gina, listening from a chair at the table and thinking to herself that
none of this talk was going to get them anywhere, stood up abruptly. Attention focused upon her. For a moment she hesitated, unsure of how she wanted to continue. Hunt was watching her, his eyebrows raised questioningly.
“I’m not sure I understand all this.” She moved over to the door,
then turned to face back at them. “This whole planet is wired to operate as a fully computer-managed environment, like Thurien, right? Before the Pseudowar, VISAR ran Thurien, and JEVEX ran Jevlen.”
“Can’t argue,” Hunt agreed, nodding.
Gina tossed out a hand. “VISAR connects all over the Thurien system of worlds via its network of i-space links. JEVEX used the same technology. So, there has to be Thurien-designed i-space hardware all over this planet, which can talk to JEVEX, which turns out to be on Uttan. Have I got that right?”
“Pretty much,” Hunt said. “The i-space connections come in through a number of trunk-beam termination nodes scattered around Jevlen. Those are where the black-hole triodes are generated that give you the I/O ports. You can have smaller ones, too, for special purposes, like the one we’ve got at Goddard. There are a couple inside the Shapieron, too.”
Gina nodded. “Okay. But just sticking to the regular trunk nodes, won’t they have to be reactivated to talk to Uttan when Eubeleus turns JEVEX on again?”
“Yes, I assume so. Otherwise there wouldn’t be much point to the whole business, would there?”