James P Hogan. Giant’s Star. Giant Series #3

“They survived that?” Eesyan stammered. “Where is it? Where in space did they emerge?”

“I don’t know,” VISAR answered. “They must have been trying for Uttan, but anything could have happened. I’m trying to match the starfield background with projections from Uttan now, but it could take awhile.”

“We can’t risk waiting,” Calazar said. “Even though Uttan might be defended, I’ll have to send in the reserve ships from Gistar to try and cut Broghuilio off before he reaches that planet.” He waited for a few seconds, but nobody could disagree. His voice became heavier. “VISAR, connect me to the reserve-squadron commander,” he said.

“There is nothing more for us to do here,” Garuth said in a voice that had become very quiet and very calm. “ZORAC, return the ship to Jevien. We will await the arrival of the Thuriens there.”

While the Shapieron was turning to head back, a set of toroids opened up briefly some distance outside the planetary system of Gistar, and the squadron of Thurien vessels that had been held in reserve there transferred into h-space, then reemerged outside the system of Uttan. The Jevlenese long-range surveillance instruments detected them as a series of objects hurtling inward at a speed not much below that of light. The commander at Uttan decided that a portion of the Terran strike force had been diverted, and within minutes every emergency signal band was carrying frantic offers of unconditional surrender. The Thuriens arrived at Uttan some hours later and took over without opposition.

That result had been unexpected. The reason for it was even

more unexpected: Broghuilio’s ships had not, after all, appeared at Uttan, or anywhere near it. Uttan control had lost contact when they vanished from the vicinity of Jevlen, and had been unable to relocate them. Without their leaders, the defenders at Uttan opted to capitulate without a fight.

So where had the five Jevienese ships gone? VISAR reported that they had not rematerialized anywhere inside the regions of space that it controlled, and when it projected small transfer ports to the scores of worlds previously run by JEVEX and sent search probes bristling with sensors and instruments, the ships were not to be

found at any of those places, either. They seemed to have vanished entirely from the explored portion of the Galaxy.

The Thuriens did find something else at Uttan, however-something that left them shaken and mystified. Hanging in space, all at various stages of construction, they found lines of immense engineering structures. Each was in the form of a hollow square that measured five hundred miles along a side, and carried at its center a two-hundred-mile-diameter sphere supported by bars extending diagonally inward from the corners.

chapter thirty-nine

“I don’t understand this,” Calazar said as he stared out from one of the Thurien vessels floating near Uttan. “Those are full-scale quadriflexors, exactly as we designed them. The Jevlenese have been building hundreds of them.”

“I don’t know,” Showm replied, shaking her head beside him. “It makes no sense.”

Heller, Caidwell, and Danchekker looked at each other. “What’s a quadriflexor?” Caidwell asked.

Calazar sighed. There was no point in being evasive. “They are the devices with which we were going to enclose the solar system,” he said. “They were to be positioned at a considerable distance outside Pluto at points defining a quasi-spherical surface around the system. Every quadriflexor would couple through h-fields to the four adjacent to it in the grid, and collectively they would create a cumulative deformation of spacetime at that boundary which would equate to an escape-proof gravitic gradient.

“We performed preproduction testing on some scaled-down prototypes, and we did in fact begin building some of the full-size versions, but we are still a long way from being in a position to implement the final plan.” Calazar waved at the view outside the ship. “But the Jevlenese have obviously been copying our designs in secret, and their program was far more advanced. I can’t understand why.”

Danchekker was blinking behind his spectacles and frowning to himself while he wrestled with the riddle. Somehow he had the feeling that the last layer of the enigmatic onion that seemed to surround everything connected with the Jevienese was about to be peeled away. By at first exaggerating Earth’s aggressiveness and later manufacturing false evidence, the Jevlenese had persuaded the Ganymeans that Terran expansion had to be checked, and nothing short of physical containment would check it. The Ganymeans had, until very recently, been convinced, and had set the necessary preparations in motion accordingly. But the Jevienese

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