The sleeve panel indicators registered activity again. VISAR having remained locked on to the beacon throughout, had reformed the bubble. "Control checking. Your readings look good."
"All fine," Eesyan reported.
"Fine," Hunt echoed.
"I suppose you realize you've just made history?" Caldwell's voice came in, judging with perfection that Hunt was in a sociable mood again.
"It seems to be becoming a daily thing here these days, Gregg," Hunt told him.
"Seen enough?" the supervisor at MP2 inquired.
"One could never see enough of this," Eesyan replied.
"Well, it will have to do," the other Thurien quipped. "It's all we have scheduled, and there's this very meticulous boss I have to deal with. Sorry, people, but it's time to bring you home."
After that, there were trials that involved sending the Shapieron with occupants to a succession of targets progressively "farther" away in the Multiverse. There were no new surprises. At last the time came to put final touches to the planning for the mission that it had all been leading up to, which had been proceeding at its own pace in parallel with the engineering. Eesyan and Hunt had a final meeting with Calazar, Showm, and a deputation from the Assembly that was reporting on the project. There seemed no reason why everything shouldn't be ready for a departure in two weeks.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Imares Broghuilio experienced the feeling close to panic that comes with being aware of having regained consciousness, but of nothing else. He didn't know where he was, or what had preceded the present instant. He just… "was." Peculiar patterns of light seemed to shrink and grow and whirl in his head. It was if his mind had somehow disintegrated into a billion fragments and was now only beginning to form itself together again. He was lying on a hard, uncomfortable surface and felt stiff and cold, as if he had been there for some time. The only sounds were the muted hum of machinery and a steady whoosh of air blowing from a ventilator.
He opened his eyes. For an indeterminate time that could have been anything from a few seconds to a matter of minutes, the farrago of objects, shapes, patches of color, and centers of light that he found himself looking at refused to take on a coherence that conveyed meaning. The side of his head hurt, as if he had struck it. Then a flat, synthetic, voice from somewhere intoned, "Unstable resonance condition abating. Reintegrating to normal space after unscheduled h-transfer. Arrival coordinates unknown. Locator call not being acknowledged. No grid activity detected. Evaluating."
The words cued the pieces of visual imagery to assemble themselves together to become the interior of the bridge deck of a Jevlenese spacecraft. A groan from nearby completed the process of nudging Boghuilio's mental faculties back into motion. Crisis… Local JEVEX nodes down… Thuriens and Terrans have thwarted the plan… Get away and regroup… Emergency transfer to Uttan.
It was coming back to him now. Five Jevlenese ships carrying Broguilio, recently proclaimed premier of what had turned out to be the short-lived Federation of Jevlenese Worlds, his immediate circle of accomplices, and a hard core of followers, had taken off from Jevlen in a bid to escape to their secret fortress-factory planet, Uttan, where they would be able to hold out while they reconsolidated and made new plans. But the Shapierion, which by rights shouldn't have been anywhere near Jevlen, had appeared out of nowhere, bearing down in pursuit. After the underhanded dealings that had evidently been going on for some time between Calazar and the Earth, the Shapieron could have been carrying Terrans with Terran weaponry. The Jevlenese ships would never outrun an old Ganymean, self-powered starship in normal space. Broghuilio had ordered immediate h-space transfer to Uttan.
Uttan was where the real JEVEX system had been secretly relocated. The activity supported at Jevlen, which was all the Thuriens had known about for years, was a shell operation. But when JEVEX attempted to project a spinning black-hole transfer port for the five ships, some other force attempting to counter it had intervened, causing the vortex to go unstable and creating conditions of violently tangled and convulsing spacetime. It could only have been VISAR, trying from light-years away to block the transfer, but with nothing to guide it apart from inadequate information from one of the Shapieron's reconnaissance probes dogging the Jevlenese's heels. Attempts at evasion came too late. Impelled on an irreversible gravity gradient, the five Jevlenese ships had plunged on, into the turmoil of scrambled Relativity.
The groan came again. Broghuilio mustered his energies, winced as his head lifted from the deck plates, and hauled himself up sufficiently to turn and sit with his back against the base of a console. Wylott, the former Jevlenese Secretary of the Exterior, since appointed Commanding General of new Federation's military forces, was hunched over in one of the operator-station seats, holding his face in his hands. A trickle of blood had run down from between his fingers onto his sleeve. Broguilio brought a hand up to feel his own face and his beard. He found nothing wet or sticky. Garwain Estordu, the scientific advisor who had been with them, was lying along an aisle between cabinets and equipment panels, still unconscious. Around them, the captain and other members of the crew who had been in the vicinity were either motionless in assorted crumpled and splayed positions, or slowly beginning to move and show signs of life. "Full evaluation not possible at this time," the computer that had spoken before reported. "Matrix and system files have been disrupted. Necessary to run deep-scan diagnostics, repair linkages, and reconstruct. Acknowledgment requested… Repeat, acknowledgment requested… Proceeding."
Broghuilio registered the situation dully. His eyes drifted upward to take in the main display screen overlooking the bridge deck. It was showing a view of space and stars. So at least that much was still working… To one side of center was the disk of a planet. It was not Jevlen. Nor was it Uttan. It wasn't a world that Broghuilio recalled seeing before at all.
There was no doubt about it. The planet was Minerva, accompanied by its moon. The spectrum, size, and mass of the parent star, something like three hundred million miles away, were identical to that of Sol, and then a telescopic survey of the surroundings had picked out Jupiter. The star pattern was as projected from that point in space-except that it had to be corrected to allow for the passage of fifty thousand years. There was no signal of any kind to indicate any presence of the Thurien h-grid, and nothing on any of their communications, navigation, or data bands. Nor should there be. There was no Thurien presence in this part of the Galaxy. VISAR, as such, didn't yet exist. The Jevlenese ships were back at Minerva, before the time of its destruction.
Even Broghuilio was too numbed by the realization slowly seeping into his brain to show much of his customary bellicosity. "How is this possible?" he whispered to Estordu, now recovered sufficiently to sit in one of the crew stations, but still shaky.
The scientist ran his gaze over the displays for the umpteenth time as if a part of his mind still retained a hope that their message might have changed somehow. "What we entered was a total dislocation of spacetime. It has jumped us to another region of the quantum totality. I can't tell you how. Nothing in physics has ever predicted anything like it."