The soldiers moved in to separate the two groups. As they began moving, Hunt trod on a piece of one of the runners from the disassembled coach. His foot skidded sideways as if he had stepped on a ball, throwing him off balance and causing him to fall down painfully onto one knee.
“See he who calls himself a messenger from higher gods!” the Examiner called to the crowd, pointing. “Doesn’t even a child know that shoe leather is repelled by mobilium?” The crowd laughed derisively.
Shingen-Hu stooped to help Hunt back to his feet. As he did so, he surreptitiously picked up a couple of slivers of the broken skids of mobilium metal and hid them in a fold of his robe.
From Thurien, Calazar was able to contact Parygol on Uttan through VISAR. But Parygol discovered then that his Thurien caretaker force was cut off from the rest of the planet, and that the facilities they occupied, which they had believed controlled both the planet’s industrial complex and its links to a Jevien based JEVEX, were suddenly inoperative. Eubeleus had gained control of the system from elsewhere.
Porthik Eesyan, who was occupying a coupler still connected to
VISAR and had “joined” Calazar and the others, confirmed their understanding of the situation. “Yes, that’s the way it would work. There’s another version of me still functioning in the Entoverse at this moment—and of all the others, of course. It’s a strange feeling to know it.”
“And you don’t have any idea what’s been happening since you— the other one of you—was transferred in?” Caldwell checked.
“No. The updating was to have been effected when the surrogates were erased and the originals reactivated,” Eesyan said. “But the disconnection happened too abruptly.”
There was a long, brooding silence.
“They’ll be in trouble there, without VISAR,” Calazar said quietly at last.
“I am aware of that,” Eesyan replied. The edge to his voice was unusually sharp for a Thurien. “I happen to have a rather personal stake in the matter.”
“My apologies,” Calazar acknowledged.
Caldwell sat with his craggy jaw clamped in a downturned line, saying nothing. The knowledge that the original Hunt, and Danchekker, and the Marin woman, and the Jevlenese girl were intact and walking about somewhere on Jevien was not comforting. As Calazar had said, the surrogates were now every bit as real. Caldwell didn’t like the thought that was nagging at the edge of his awareness and which he knew he was refusing to face up to fully: the implication of their being somehow “expendable.” He didn’t like it at all.
Leyel Torres, the Shapieron’s acting commander, looked from one to another of the faces. “We have to do something,” he said simply.
“Without another link into JEVEX, I’m not at all sure there’s much we can do,” Calazar answered.
Torres fidgeted, clearly not satisfied. “How did Hunt manage to get the link that we did have?” he asked.
“Through the Jevlenese criminal ring somehow,” Eesyan replied.
“Could they do it again if we restored contact with them?”
“Only they know that. And they’re loose in Shiban somewhere.” Torres thought for a moment. “VISAR, when you had the connection, did you know where Hunt was in Shiban?”
“Almost certainly the club that they found Baumer in,” VISAR answered. “ZORAC has located it on the city plan from its communications routing codes.”
Torres stared hard at the floor, then looked up suddenly with a resolved air. “There is something that we can do,” he said. “Excuse me, gentlemen. VISAR, disconnect.” And at once he was back in one of the neurocouplers that had been installed aboard the Shapieron. He got up, left the room, and walked through into the ship’s command deck. The crew, who were on standby, stirred at their stations.
“ZORAC, report the ship’s status,” he called. “Flight ready, as instructed.”
“Prepare for immediate takeoff.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Inside the Planetary Administration Center in Shiban, Garuth had been brought to the communications room next to what had recently been his own office suite. One of the main screens of a bank standing in the center of the floor showed Eubeleus’s control center deep beneath the surface of Uttan. Eubeleus had gained control of JevEX, which was now operational and directing the i-space link carrying the channel into PAC; the Thurien occupying force had been fooled with a dummy system and was now isolated.