“It’s a peculiar situation, when you finally get a moment to think about it, isn’t it?”
A messenger forced his way through the crowds packed into the grounds of the temple of Vandros and went up to the chambers inside. He spoke to one of the priests, who went to the door that led out to the main steps from where the ceremonies were being led, and beckoned Ethendor over.
“Word from the main gates,” the priest informed him. “The Examiner and his caravan are entering the city now. They are bringing more heretics—faces unknown, who claimed to have come from the gods.” so the celebrations shall be complete,” Ethendor said, nodding. He understood it all now.
“This is why the people were told to be patient?” the priest queried.
“The plan unfolds in its perfection,” Ethendor assured him.
Then the Voice came again into Ethendor’s mind. “The time will 4 come very soon now, Prophet chosen by the gods. Are you prepared to receive the Great Spirit?”
“The last of our enemies are being brought before us to face k atonement, and Waroth has been cleansed of its stain,” Ethendor
replied. “All is prepared.”
“You have done well. All that was promised shall be yours in Hyperia.”
“I shall rule over vast multitudes? My word shall move armies and my wishes shall be law? Kings shall tremble at my displeasure?” Ethendor’s inner voice shook, and his eyes blazed with the vision. “I shall scatter mine enemies mercilessly before me as dust to the winds, and be mighty as the gods themselves?”
“Thus was our contract.”
“Humbly, I accept.”
The satellite was in the form of a stepped octagonal prism, cluttered with protrusions and antennae. Using manual guidance, Rodger Jassilane moved the probe gradually in until it was hanging a few yards from the rear access port, approaching from the outward direction to avoid interrupting any signal beams directed at the planet. “Arrived and docked,” he announced. The i-space equipment that the probe was carrying gave them a link to VISAR on Thurien. He glanced across at Keshen, also suited up and squeezed awkwardly into the cramped space. “Okay?”
Keshen nodded behind his facepiece. –
“Open hatch,” Jassilane instructed the onboard computer.
With a few expert pushes and tugs, Jassilane propelled himself out of the opening and turned on his checkline to collect the tool pack from a stowage compartment that had opened alongside the hatch. Inside, Keshen seemed to be having more difficulty in moving and was extricating himself clumsily.
“Not too much experience in zero-g, eh?” Jassilane remarked, leaning in and unhooking a buckle of Keshen’s pack harness from a
projecting hinge of the hatch cover.
“I’ve never been off—planet before,” Keshen told him.
For a second the Ganymean froze, not knowing what to say. “You
kind of, er. . . left it a long time before saying so,” he managed finally.
“Nobody asked me before. I didn’t want to sound like I was chickening out.”
Jassilane thought about it. “Did Hunt, the Terran scientist, get you into this?” he inquired.
“That’s right. How did you know?”
“Oh. . . I just had a feeling,” Jassilane said as he attached the probe by a tether.
While Jassilane burned open the hatch into the satellite with a plasma torch, Keshen unreeled the cable that would provide a connection for VISAR from the link hardware inside the probe. They entered the satellite, and Keshen located a maintenance and test console, which he used to find the boxes containing the buffer terminals for the output circuits into the planetary communications net. Jassilane set up a terminal back to the probe’s onboard computer, which ZORAC had loaded with Jevlenese interconnection protocols and reference data, as well as the activation codes that VISAR had retrieved from Keshen’s memory.
“You seem to know what you’re doing,” Jassilane remarked, hoping that his relief didn’t show in the translation coming back through VISAR.
“You see? Not all Jevs are meatheads.”
“What did you do before?”
Keshen checked the connectors against the set of Jevlenese standard patterns that Jassilane had collected from the Shapieron’s stores. “Operations supervision—part of the JEVEX remote-input system. When JEVEX was shut down, some people approached me to set up a few connections into the residual core system that was left running—without asking questions about what they wanted them for.”