“The probe!” Estordu groaned suddenly. “They must have fitted the probe and the Shapieron with h-links. The probe will be able to monitor every move we make and update the Shapieron’s flight-control system through VISAR. We’ll never lose it now.”
Broghuilio glared at him for a second, then looked across at the communications officer. “We have to make the jump to Uttan now,” he declared. “What’s the status there?”
“The generators are up to power and standing by,” the officer told him. “Their director is locked onto our beacon, and they can throw a port here immediately.”
“But what if that probe transfers through with us?” Estordu said. “VISAR would locate it when it reenters at Uttan. It would reveal our destination.”
“Those geniuses will have guessed our destination already,” Broghufflo retorted. “So what could they do? We can blow anything that comes near Uttan to atoms.”
“But we’re still too close to Jevlen,” Estordu objected, looking alarmed. “It would disrupt the whole planet . . . chaos everywhere.”
“So would you rather stay here?” Broghuillo sneered. “Hasn’t it occurred to you yet that the probe was just a warning? The next thing they tunnel through at us will be a bomb.” He sent a stare around the bridge that defied anybody to argue with him. Nobody did. He raised his head. “Captain. Transfer now, to Uttan.”
The command was relayed to Uttan, and within seconds huge generators were pouring energy into a tiny volume of space ahead of the five Jevienese ships. The fabric of spacetime wrinkled, then
buckled, heaved, and fell in upon itself to plummet out of the Universe. A spinning vortex began growing to open up the gateway to another realm, first as a faint circle of curdled starlight against the void, then getting stronger, thicker, and sharper, and expanding slowly to reveal a core of featureless, infinite blackness.
And then a counterspinning pattern of refractions materialized inside the first. The resultant composite of vortices shimmered and pulsated as ifiaments of space and time writhed in a tangle of knotted geodesics. Something was wrong. The port was going unstable. “What’s happening?” Broghuilio demanded.
Estordu was turning his head frantically from side to side to take in the displays and data reports. “Something is deforming the configuration. . . breaking up the field manifolds. I’ve never seen anything like this. It can only be VISAR.”
“That’s impossible,” one of the other scientists shouted. “VISAR can’t jam. It has no sensors. JEVEX is shut down.”
“That’s not jamming,” Estordu muttered. “The port began to form. It’s doing something else. . . .” His eye caught the view of the Shapieron again. “The probe! VISAR is using the probe to monitor the entry-port configuration. It couldn’t jam the beam, so it’s trying to project a complementary pattern from Gistar to cancel out the toroid from Uttan. It’s trying to neutralize it.”
“It couldn’t,” the other scientist protested. “It couldn’t get enough resolution through a single probe. It would be aiming virtually blind from Gistar.”
“The Gistar and Uttan beams would interact constructively in the same volume,” another pointed out. “If an unstable resonance developed, anything could happen.”
“That is an unstable resonance,” Estordu shouted, pointing at the display. “I tell you, that’s what vis~’s doing.”
“VISAR would never risk it.”
Ahead of the ships, a maelstrom of twisting, convulsing, multiply-connected relativity was boiling under the clash of titanic bolts of energy materializing and superposing from two points, each light-years away. The core shrank, grew again, fragmented, then reassembled itself. And still they were heading directly for its center.
Broghuilio had listened enough. He turned his head up to where the captain was watching him, waiting. Then at the last second, something about Estordu pulled his attention away.
Estordu was standing absolutely still with a strange look on his face as he stared at the view of the Shapieron. He was mumbling
to himself, and seemed to have forgotten everything going on around him. “H-links through the probes,” he whispered. “That
was how VISAR got into JEVEX.” His eyes opened wider, and his
face became ashen as the full realization hit him. “That was how
everything got into JEVEX! It never existed, any of it. They