James Hogan - Giant's Star

Wylott shook his head in protest. "It can’t be. It was destroyed. I know it was destroyed."

"THEN WHAT IS THAT COMING AT US RIGHT NOW?"

Broghuilio whirled to the scientists. "How long has it been at Jevlen? What is it doing here? Why didn’t any of you know about it?"

The captain’s voice came from the raised section of the bridge above them. "I’ve never seen acceleration like it! It’s vectoring straight after us. We’ll never outrun it."

"They can’t do anything," Wylott said in a choking voice. "It’s not armed."

"Fool!" Broghuilio snapped. "If it wasn’t destroyed, it must have been transferred to Thurien. And Terrans could have been transferred to Thurien. So it could have Terrans on board it with Terran weapons. They could blow us apart, and after your bungling, the Shapieron’s crew won’t lift a finger to stop them." Wylott licked his lips and said nothing.

"Stress field around the Shapieron building up rapidly," the long-range surveillance operator called from one of the stations above. "We’re losing radar and optical contact. H-scan shows it’s maintaining course and acceleration."

Estordu was thinking furiously. "We may have a chance, Excellency," he said suddenly. Broghuilio jerked his head around and thrust his chin out demandingly. Estordu went on, "The Ganymean ships from that period did not possess stress-field transmission correction, and h-scan equipment was unknown. In other words they have no means of tracking us while they’re under main drive. They’ll have to aim blind to intercept our predicted course and slow down at intervals to correct. We might be able to lose them by changing course during their blind periods."

At that instant another operator called out, "Gravitational anomaly building up astern and starboard, range nine eighty miles, strength seven, increasing. Readings indicate a Class Five exit port. H-scan shows conformal entry-port mapping to vicinity of Shapieron. " The tension on the bridge rocketed. It meant that VISAR was projecting two beams to create a linked pair of transfer ports-a "tunnel" through h-space from the Shapieron to the Jevlenese vessels. A Class Five port would admit something relatively small. The operator’s voice came again, rising with alarm. "An object has emerged at this end. It’s coming this way, fast!"

"A bomb!" somebody screamed. "They’ve exited a bomb!"

Consternation broke out around the bridge. Broghuilio was wideeyed and sweating profusely. Wylott had collapsed onto a chair.

The operator’s voice came again. "Object identified. It’s one of the Shapieron’s robot probes . . . matching us in course and speed. The exit port has dissolved."

And the long-range surveillance operator: " Shapieron closing and still accelerating. Range two-twenty thousand miles."

"Get rid of it," Broghuilio barked up at the level above. "Captain, shake that thing off."

The captain gave a set of course-correction instructions, which the computers acknowledged and executed.

"Probe matching," came the report. "Evasion ineffective. Shapieron has corrected to a new vector and is still closing."

Broghuilio turned a furious face toward Estordu. "You said they’d be blind! They’re not even slowing down." Estordu spread his hands and shook his head helplessly. Broghuilio looked at the rest of the group of scientists. "Well, how are they doing it? Can’t any of you work it out?" He waited for a few seconds, then pointed a finger angrily at the screens showing the tracking data of the Shapieron. "Some genius on that ship has thought of something. Everywhere I am surrounded by imbeciles." He began pacing back and forth across the bridge. "How does this happen? They have all the geniuses, and I have all the imbediles. Give me-"

"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," Broghuilio 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?" Broghuilio 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 Jevlenese 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 filaments 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 VISAR’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 were doing it through the Shapieron all the time. . . . We’re running away from a single unarmed ship."