The Engines of Dawn (18 page)

21

The transit portal took them back to Babbitt Hall, and they walked the short distance to Jim Vees's room. Ben kept a lookout for campus security, but they had moved too quickly, it seemed. If they were
seriously
being tailed, then it would only take a campus security official a few minutes to contact ShipCom to find out where the transit portal 44 had sent them. On the other hand, maybe they were merely keeping an eye on Ben. In that case, they just might have let him go back to the dorm, where he could do little harm.

Ben and Tommy Rosales went straight to Jim's room and knocked softly. There was no answer. Ben pulled out his key and passed it through the lock.

Jim Vees's interest in astronomy went all the way back into his childhood, when he learned how to build telescopes, of both the optical and the radio kind. Jim could make his own equatorial mounts, his own autoguidance systems, his own lenses and billion-channel frequency scanners. His room showed it. Parts of telescopes and CPU boards held together with duct tape lay about the room. One whole wall was a small library of books on every aspect of astronomy and celestial mechanics.

"A clue," Ben said, pointing at a table that held a strange machine resembling a radio transmitter. Wires and cables led from this into the bathroom and into the suite next door. Babbitt Hall's dorm rooms shared a common bathroom facility. A few students, and Jim Vees happened to be one, were lucky enough to have an empty suite next door. Pick the lock and you had a cozy two-bedroom apartment. This is where they found Jim Vees.

"No wonder he didn't hear us knock." Ben said.

Jim sat, eyes closed, in a chair, wallowing in some sort of trance state. Around his head was clamped a headset with multicolored wires snaking back to the unit in the first suite. Jim's mouth hung open and his fingers twitched.

"Unplug this thing," Ben said.

"Right," Rosales said.

Rosales picked up the cluster of wires and gave it a good yank. Things in the first suite fell over.

Ben whapped Vees on the head. "Hey, asshole. Snap out of it!"

Jim jerked in his chair, opening his eyes. It took him a moment or two to realize where he was and who stood before him.

"What the hell are you doing?" Ben demanded. "Do you know we've got campus cops all over us?"

Vees blinked. "Are they here?" he managed to say.

"I don't think so," Ben said. "Tommy told me you're listening in on the Auditors. Is that true?"

Tommy Rosales signaled Ben that he was going to step outside to see if campus security was sneaking up on them.

"Well?" Ben repeated.

"Sort of, I guess," Vees admitted.

"How long has this been going on?"

"A while now."

Vees rose from his chair and went into the bathroom to wash his face in cold water. "I got the last bit of equipment I needed when we were at Chandos 4, several ports back."

Ben had always known of Vees's intense dislike for Auditors. The Ainge civilians he didn't mind; they were as normal as Catholics or Jews or anybody else. But Auditor boxes seemed to generate in the Auditors themselves more than just a confidence in the existence of God. To Jim, the boxes generated arrogance and condescension, and he didn't like it. Even so, as far as Ben knew, he never said he was going to
do
anything about this dislike of his.

Vees ran some cold water in the sink and gave his face a good splash. He then tossed the towel into the sink, where it dissolved and disappeared down the drain.

"Do you know that eavesdropping in on the Auditors is a serious offense?" Ben asked. "In fact, eavesdropping in on
anybody
is a serious offense."

Vees merely nodded.

"I don't think I'll be caught," he finally said. "Besides, I got the boot today. So I don't think it'll matter."

"You got the boot?"

Vees pulled a letter out of his tunic pocket and gave it to Ben. The fact that the letter was sent to Jim on actual paper indicated to Ben the seriousness of its contents.

"Ix," Ben muttered as he read the letter. It said:

Dear Mr. Vees,

We regret to inform you that your persistent refusal to reinstate yourself in your degree program here at Eos University compels us to ask that you be prepared to leave the university at Paavo Juuoko 4. The liner
Hyapatia Lee
will take you back to Earth. We regret writing this letter and we regret losing you as a student. Your intelligence scans and high test scores had put you in the top 2% of the student body. Should you decide to reinstate yourself, you will have to go through the regular admissions procedures and begin your program anew.

We wish you luck in your future endeavors.

The letter bore the official seal of Eos University and it was signed by the chair of the astronomy department, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, the provost, and finally President Porter himself-the major Grays of Eos University.

Vees smiled wistfully at Ben. "As of now, I am the Bombardier par excellence."

Ben handed the letter back. "You can still be reinstated."

"Yeah, well, I don't know if I want to," Vees admitted. Here, he nodded at the strange helmet connected to all the wires leading back into Vees's suite. "Not after that."

"What have you seen?"

"I don't
see
anything," Vees told him. "Mostly I just tap into the same frequencies that are translated to theta waves inside the Auditor box. I'd make a real Auditor box if I could, but the alloys Smith used when he invented his are only found on Tau Ceti 4. This is the best I can do."

"I'm surprised you've gotten this far," Ben said. "People have been trying to duplicate the Auditor technology for a hundred and fifty years."

"Rumor has it that they've killed those who've come close," Tommy Rosales added. "I'd watch it, if I were you."

"They don't know I'm nosing around. Or if they do know, they haven't done anything about it yet."

"How does it work?"

"It's simple, really," Jim said. "I rigged a passive trans-space nexus projector in my room. When the Auditor station is activated, it sends out signals like ripples from a fishing line in a still pond. I pick up the 'ripples' and trace it back to the point of contact. I can't read their minds, exactly, but I can pick the sensations coming from trans-space. You should see them. They fight each other to take a turn in the box."

"They fight each other?"

"It's more like bickering," Vees said. "But it's an incredible high. I can't imagine what the full force of contact is like. I've calculated that I'm getting about ten percent the levels the Auditors are getting. It's better than sex."

Ben was impressed. "Sounds to me as if you've invented a practical means for artificial telepathy. That alone should get you reinstated. Hell, that'll get you an interview with the personnel people of my father's corporation. BennettCorp is always looking for new talent."

Vees shrugged. "Maybe when I get back. Who knows."

Tommy Rosales was standing in the bathroom hallway, taking all this in. He said, "So you've plugged into Mazaru. What's it like? What's the Big Guy have to say?"

"He doesn't say anything," Vees told them. "It's mostly a feeling that comes across. But it's very powerful, alluring. The Auditors can't take more than twenty minutes of it at a time. Any more than that would probably kill them."

"Didn't Ixion Smith die after being in his Auditor box for three days?" Rosales asked.

"It's like having an orgasm nonstop," Vees told them. "Pretty soon, you just implode."

"That's one hell of an addiction," Rosales said.

Ben was thinking. "So this thing basically focuses on the spatial location of theta waves produced by an Auditor box?"

"Actually, I can project the nexus point anywhere," Jim said. "It took me two and a
half
weeks to find the location of the Auditor station. I had to do it at night while the Auditors were asleep. From what I gather, the station is a couch you lie on. Then they surround you with-"

Ben was already along a different track. He couldn't rid himself of the scene of the carnage in the "dynamo" room he and Julia had witnessed just a few days ago. "You know, there's a rumor that the Enamorati are fighting each other. Not bickering, but fighting. Have you picked up anything?"

Jim nodded. "I pick up whatever the Auditor picks up when he's in the box."

"What have you heard?"

"A few days ago I heard an explosion. Yesterday, I heard several loud bangs, but those might have been the Enamorati unbolting the Engine from the ship. There's no way of knowing without actually going over there."

Ben, however, had fallen silent for a long moment. Rosales caught this and asked, "What is it?"

Ben looked at them both. "Let's see if we can find out."

"What?"
Rosales asked.

Ben said, "What if we used a fractally compressed camera probe, put it in an artificial trans-space tube, then sent it back there using Jim's nexus locator? If we can send the probe over there and back fast enough, we might be able to do it without anybody noticing, especially if the probe is small enough."

"What if they
do
see it?" Rosales asked.

"If the probe's source of origin can't be traced, who cares?" Ben said. "Besides, we can yank it back so fast they'll probably think they imagined the whole thing anyway."

Jim stared at him. "So you want to eavesdrop on the Enamorati?"

"Absolutely."

Tommy Rosales frowned. "Now,
that's
trouble. Not the kind that might get you thrown out of school, but the kind that gets you thrown off the
ship."

"Julia and I got far enough into the Ainge compound to see several dead Enamorati inside a chamber that was connected directly to the main Engine. Jim says he's heard sounds, maybe explosions. Something
is
going on in there and I think it's in our best interests to find out."

"At least that's the excuse we can use when they arrest us," Vees said.

"Exactly," Ben replied. "I'm just surprised that no one's thought of it before."

"That's because most normal people don't want to go to jail," Rosales said.

22

No human ever got over the thrill of discovering new worlds. It was ancient and visceral. It inspired awe and not a little bit of fear.

Julia walked several yards behind Professor Holcombe, who led the archaeology team at a somewhat incautious pace down from the tree-lined ridge onto a large field. The nearest set of ruins lay just three hundred yards ahead of them, and their irregular outline was quite visible.

Earlier, one of the students had voiced the opinion that the tall, pink-skinned trees might themselves be "animals." But Professor Holcombe tested a nearby "tree" and it seemed thoroughly rooted into the earth. If something was going to come after them, it wasn't going to be the "trees."

Julia paused with Professor Holcombe at the far end of the field-the ruins just in sight. "A war," she said to Professor Holcombe. "Maybe a war wiped everything out. From the top of the food chain to the bottom. These plants could be all that's left."

"That's what I was thinking," added Marji Koczan, standing just behind Julia and smoking a Red Apple cigarette.

"Except there isn't any residual radiation in the air or on the ground," Bobby Gessner said.

"It wouldn't have to have been a nuclear war," Professor Holcombe said. He wiped heavy perspiration from his forehead. "It could have been biological or biochemical. It could even have been a planet-wide industrial accident, perhaps a toxic spill."

"Like what the Enamorati did to their own planet ten thousand years ago?" Koczan said.

Julia said, "There are probably dozens of ways a civilization fades away."

Professor Holcombe adjusted his helmet. "However, we don't know if there aren't any people left on the planet. The cities in this region might be dead, but its people could be hiding out somewhere."

Shouldercams scanned the terrain while personal voice recorders took in what each of the students was seeing, thinking, and feeling. They were the first on Kiilmist 5. All this would make history.

"You know, maybe the place is just
old.
Maybe the ecosphere wore itself out," someone then said.

"Gaia is not quite dead here," another student said.

"Something
happened here," Marji Koczan said. "It's been desolate for a long, long time."

They moved on, crossing the leafy field of the strange, ground-hugging ivy, heading toward what initially appeared to be a row of immense ivy-covered hedges. They knew, however, from the land-sat pictures, that they were the outer edges of the nearest of the ruins. They weren't hedges. They were very old and very hidden walls.

The slight breeze trembled in the ivy clutching the bricks of a wall ten feet high that appeared to surround the ruins. An opening in the veiled wall led the Holcombe expedition into a random clustering of buildings. Most of the buildings, however, had just one or two walls remaining of their skeleton and none of them seemed to have their roofs intact. The green, leafy everywhere-ivy gave the place a melancholy aura of great antiquity: nothing on two legs- let alone four legs or six-had come here in quite a while.

Cautiously, they moved along a narrow, cobblestoned avenue that ran between two clusters of ruined buildings. The students were agape.

Holcombe pointed to the building on their right. "It looks like they had developed principles of the arch. Notice the doors and windows."

Koczan poked her head in a low window of the building. "No glass," she said. She ran her hand along the base of the window, just inside the sill. "And no place
for
glass. They got as far as the Romans or the early Byzantine Empire."

"That's possible," Holcombe said.

The thick ivy made it hard to tell much about the architecture of the buildings or even what purpose they served. Later expeditions would be given the honor of figuring that out.