The Engines of Dawn (16 page)

Kuumottoomaa paused and spoke to someone at his side, someone out of the camera's eye. He then faced outward.
"Please don't think I'm being evasive. We, too, have suffered from the Engine malfunction and we want to make sure that no further lives, human or Enamorati, are lost. Any interruption of the
Sada-vaakaa
ceremony might caught further distress among us, especially among our remaining Avatka class, whom we need so desperately."

Porter nodded.
"If it will expedite matters and help with the new Engine's installation, then I say we stay put and let the Enamorati do what they have to do so we can get out of here. Because of the new time dilation caused by the Hollingsdale maneuver we are already two months behind schedule."

Julia, who had remained silent all this time, stepped forward. "Sir, why not substitute Kiilmist 5 for our next port of call? How hard could it be to fashion our spring curriculum around Kiilmist 5? That's what Eos University is for."

"But the parents of our students expect us to be at Paavo Juuoko 3 for the entire semester,"
President Porter argued.
"And many of our staff and faculty have relatives there. We are already missed."

Holcombe countered with, "We can take both in. Split the semester. Besides that, I don't want to wait up here until the insertion ceremony is over. We're wasting time and the opportunity to do what we do best. The folks at Paavo Juuoko can wait. The planet below is a gold mine. We should probably stay and colonize it."

"This is not advisable,"
the Kuulo insisted. "/
must protest in the strongest possible terms."

Holcombe then said, "Doesn't the Enamorati Compact say specifically that we can go wherever we want and do whatever we want, just as long as it doesn't involve anything illegal?"

The Kuulo hesitated.
"That is correct. All I wish to suggest is that our present circumstances require caution and a bit of patience until the new Engine arrives."

"Fine," Holcombe said. "We'll exercise caution. Down on the planet. When the Engine arrives, we'll just stay grounded."

True to his word, Porter took the proposal before the University Council that evening and the Council voted. The majority of votes went for the change of port of call to Kiilmist 5.

President Porter was not at the Council meeting, nor was the Kuulo Kuumottoomaa. Nor were any of the new "sentinels," the Accusers.

It made Ben wonder what the Grays were now up to.

19

Like any schoolgirl, Julia Waxwing had grown up studying the great adventures of the Human Community in space. The discovery that life once existed on Mars spurred further explorations of the solar system's other planets and moons. They found life within the seas beneath Europa's ice mantle. On Ganymede and lo they found a kind of lithoautotrophic bacteria similar to that found on the Earth in deep-sea vents. But those environments were extremely hostile to life as it had evolved on Earth. Only Tau Ceti 4, Ross 244 3, and Paava Juuoko 3 came close to being Earth-normal.

Now they could add Kiilmist 5 to that list.

To Julia, the discovery of a human-habitable planet wasn't quite as interesting as discovering a planet that once had a civilization advanced enough to have built cities and roads. More than that, for Julia and the rest of the archaeology team the signs of life-the patterning of their farming tracts and the layout of some of their building structures-indicated that Kiilmist 5 had produced a race of beings remarkably similar to
Homo sapiens sapiens.
It was a veritable gold mine of knowledge they would be studying for years to come.

Now Julia could feel the excitement of the other students and faculty when the various gondolas of Eos left the bays of the enormous vessel, carefully avoiding the sacred spaces around the empty Engine chamber-particularly the now-empty Engine nacelle. Everybody seemed buoyed by the mere fact that they were getting
out.
Julia only wished that Ben and his friends could have come along with them.

Well, Ben anyway.

The chatter among the students in the main viewing bubble rose excitedly as the gondola dropped out of orbital space and began its careful antigravity descent to the planet's surface. Professor Holcombe came in from the cockpit holding what appeared to be a printout. He, too, was clearly excited.

"I've got some reliable statistics on the planet," Holcombe said to the group. "Gravity is point nine Earth-normal; atmosphere, however, is nearly half again as thick as the Earth's. The lighter gravity we'll feel will be countered by a slightly higher specific gravity at sea level. From the planet's weak magnetic field, we estimate that the world is about five or six billion years old. She would be an older sister to the Earth."

Nearly all of the undergraduates in the archaeology department were from prominent Ainge families, most of whom came from Tau Ceti 4. One of these was Bobby Gessner, a blond boy of nineteen with a nearly invisible blond beard. Gessner interrupted Holcombe's recitation. "Dr. Holcombe, the planet would need an active magnetic core to generate a field strong enough to deflect cosmic rays. Life can't exist without a shielding upper atmosphere."

Holcombe nodded. "Sediment samples taken from lakes at different altitudes will help us figure that mystery out. Or perhaps the atmosphere is so thick that it's able to block out cosmic rays. That's one of the things we'll be looking into."

Holcombe consulted his watch. "We'll be making landfall in about forty minutes and we'll start our hostile-environment check immediately after that. If it turns out that we'll have to wear our Van Houten suits, you can add another hour."

The students groaned. Van Houten suits were extraordinary environment suits, but they were difficult to put on and messy to remove. They had to be dissolved with a chemical spray that was also a bactericide and the removal process took about forty minutes. Julia hoped it wouldn't come to that.

"So are we going to land near a city?" one of the eager undergraduates asked.

Holcombe nodded. "We've located a city that has a river next to it and some structures that look like bridges which seem to be intact. We've chosen a level area between the river and the city to set up our base camp. The gondola will stay behind as we explore on foot. If it's safe, we'll set up camp there and make excursions into the city's outskirts. But
only
if it's safe. If it isn't safe, we'll move somewhere else."

Bobby Gessner wore an old-fashioned pith helmet. "How do we know that the cities down there are dead, Dr. Holcombe?"

The twenty students in the gondola stared expectantly at the Regents Professor. Holcombe said, "Recon photos and bioform scans from the landsats didn't find signs of animal life higher than what we would call rodents. Its flora, however, is quite extensive."

"Maybe the rats
are
the intelligent life," Gessner said jokingly, and everybody laughed.

"Yes, but why would rodents build buildings a hundred times larger than their own nests?" Julia said.

"Or roads," another student added.

"Maybe they're really
big
rats," someone else said.

"Let's hope they aren't
that
big," Holcombe said.

"What about reptilians or mammalian forms?" a young woman asked.

"Nothing," Holcombe told them. "Not even in the seas, at least as far as our cursory scans were able to detect. Of course, there could be life in the deep benthic regions of the oceans. But we're decades away from exploring the oceans here."

The only other graduate student besides Julia on the expedition was a brown-haired, full-figured young woman in her early thirties named Marji Koczan. Like Julia, Koczan was not from an Ainge family, but, unlike Julia, she was much more cosmopolitan, having traveled widely on Earth and other worlds. Ms. Koczan said, "The city builders would have to have evolved from a long chain of biological ancestors. If the world is a billion years older than the Earth, maybe they're a civilization that just ran out of energy, or just wound down. It could happen to us."

Proudly, young Gessner said, "Humans are firmly established on three Earth-like worlds and have habitats on dozens of moons. We're not going to devolve into lobsters at the end of time."

"Not unless the Ennui is real," Julia said. "Maybe it's true that empires run out of steam. Maybe
these
people ran out of steam."

"Perhaps we'll be able to find out," Holcombe said. "If we do commit ourselves to a whole semester here, there's no telling what we might come across."

The descent seemed to take forever.

The students, Julia included, couldn't take their eyes from the viewscreens. Holcombe's strategy was to set down at their target location sometime before sunrise, local time. This was done with the expectation that if anyone (or anything) was down there to do them harm, they would more than likely be asleep, assuming that sleeping was something "they" did.

The gondola dropped down through the predawn darkness. Ground radar easily penetrated the haze of the thick atmosphere, and they found a treeless plain next to the river they had originally chosen from space.

Then they saw the "highway." Or what was left of it.

The thoroughfare, if it was such, seemed to be fashioned from a dull gray substance similar to concrete. It led directly to the city that, by their estimation, began about a mile or so to the north of their position, easily within walking range.

The gondola set down carefully next to the road in the mauve light of dawn, the antigravity engines of the gondola purring softly. Out went the landing gear, and the gondola settled gently in the loam of the ground beneath them.

Their deadman pilot went through a quick systems check to see how the descent had affected the small craft and also to see if the engines were able to lift them back off the planet. The deadman then signaled Professor Holcombe, telling him that the descent check was complete and that their systems were in good shape.

"Now, boys and girls," Dr. Holcombe said as the gondola's bio-hazard analyzers went to work sucking in air and scooping samples of soil to sift through for nasty creepy crawlies.

"Now, we wait."

Ben had never seen the university so close to unraveling, with students wandering the corridors more boisterous than usual. Even the students from Ainge families were mixing it up more than usual. Students played transit tag and chased each other all over the place. The only thing that kept the university functioning was the levelheadedness of the day-to-day staff-the secretaries and the physical plant employees, most of whom couldn't care less about politics or religion. They rather enjoyed the sight of the students running loose in the halls, something they had never seen in all the years of Eos University life.

The faculty, however, were becoming as unruly as the students, and Ben did not know what would happen if
they
decided to protest. Learning institutions much older than Eos University had gone up in flames over much less than had befallen them.

Thankfully, the rest of the student body, those who stayed behind, did not seem to be aware that tensions had risen between the Ainge and non-Ainge adults on the ship. None seemed aware that, if the rumors were true, they might be bound for a place called Wolfe-Langaard 4 instead of Paava Juuoko 3. More worrying was that the most influential professors from the hard sciences and engineering-and Eve Silbarton was one-were conspicuously absent during the last twenty-four hours that saw the exodus of six research gondolas.

Ben was in the middle of lunch, brooding about all this, when he received a call from Eve. She was in her lab in the physics department and she needed to see him right away. She wouldn't go into details, but the tone of her voice seemed uncharacteristically grim. He abandoned his tray, hoping that this didn't mean that another disassembler was loose in the ship.

In the physics wing, repairs were proceeding on the alpha lab. A dozen techs were positioning great plates for the floor. Many of the severed wires, cables, and pipes had already been replaced. The hallway also had several security officers, who frowned at Ben the moment he emerged from the nearby transit portal but did not prevent him from seeking out Eve Silbarton.

Ben went directly to the gamma lab and found Eve and several other individuals standing around Eve's stardrive. The drive was floating above its antigravity plate, making it easier for everyone to examine it. Which a number of people were doing.

Eve turned around when Ben entered. He couldn't read her mood. She did seem hostile. "Have you been working on the prototype here without my permission?" khe demanded.

Everyone stared at him.

"Good God, no," he said. "Why do you ask?"

Dr. Cale Murphy, the youngest full professor in the department-he was twenty-four and absolutely brilliant-said, "We've got a fog that lasts fifteen minutes on the security tape."

Murphy nodded at the ceiling, where their security camera was hidden. "Someone blanked out the camera so they could get at Eve's drive."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. And it had to have been someone smart enough to get around our security system as well as someone who could get past the guards out there," Dr. Murphy said.

"Do you have any idea who that person might be?" Ben asked.

"It could have been you."

"Well,
it wasn't"

"Where were you yesterday?" Cale Murphy asked.

Ben glared at him. "In jail. I've got witnesses who'll vouch for me."

"Well,
somebody
got in here," Cale Murphy said.

"Maybe it was campus security," Ben suggested. "If they're in with Fontenot, they'd have reason to sabotage Eve's work."

"If they could get past our security systems," Dr. Israel Harlin, the department chair, said. "Which we doubt."

"So I was the first one you thought of?" Ben asked.