The Engines of Dawn (27 page)

But the mist kept coming at them.

Meanwhile, everyone in the physics lab was rushing to the fire extinguishers. They had extinguishers filled with water; extinguishers filled with chemical foams; they even had extinguishers that wrapped a vacuum around the combustion source. All of these came into play.

Ben pulled a large floor-model extinguisher from its hidden cubby in the outer hall and dragged it down the hall, joining the others. He held up the wide nozzle to the deadly vapor as it approached. Several streams of water, choking chemicals, and bursts of oxygen-strangling vacuum flowers roared at the mist.

None of it worked. The mist disassembled everything cast at it and it seemed to operate perfectly well in a vacuum, so that extinguisher was of no use to them.

"To hell with this," Ben said in frustration. He lifted the floor model and threw the entire unit into the gray fog.

The red canister flashed once then disappeared. However, the sheer mass of the extinguisher had gouged a massive hole in the mist before it had been entirely dissolved. Ben stared, astonished. Through the hole the extinguisher made, Ben had seen movement on the far side of the fog. Someone was standing there in the opposite hallway, now visible though the gap in the gray mist.

Ben turned to Captain Cleddman beside him. "Did you see that?"

Cleddman said, "I certainly did."

"I think the mist is slowing," Dr. Israel Harlin said, coming up behind them.

The rapacious mist seemed to dissipate into nothingness before their eyes, as if the extinguisher Ben threw took all of its residual energy.

To their surprise, the floor, ceiling, and supporting walls to either side of the hallway survived unscathed, unlike the episode last week with the alpha lab. This bomb was meant for the corridor seal at the end of the hallway: the one Fontenot had locked from his offices in campus security. The wall had been completely disassembled. A big hole in the metal hung there, mist trailing from its edges.

Through the large opening, they could see into the next corridor.

Fragments of the mist still remained, but that didn't stop Ben from getting a better look at the
person
on the other side of the mist-the person who had clearly set off the disassembler.

"Bennett, wait!" the captain called out.

Ben was out ahead of them now, and, fired up with the need to exact some sort of revenge, he simply hurdled through the opening in the gone wall. He felt the ends of his ponytail sizzle slightly as they encountered stray disassembler molecules. But he did not stop.

Captain Cleddman stepped through the newly eaten hole in the wall and followed Ben. The two reached the end of the hallway and they finally saw their attacker.

It had been an Accuser.

Not someone from campus security.

The creature, wearing the distinctive olive green body armor of the
armaz-paava
class, fled down the adjoining hallway, running as well as it could in its environment suit. And the thing
was fast,
faster than Ben thought an Enamorati could run. The Enamorati were used to a .9 Earth-normal gravity, and it should have been encumbered by the extra weight of the humans' gravity as well as its bulky suit.

Ben turned to the captain. "I'm faster than you are. Get everyone out of physics and tell Mr. Rausch to fix the goddamned bullet system. We've got to get word back into the Alley."

Cleddman hesitated, probably realizing that under normal circumstances they could rely on ship's security to chase down the saboteur. But campus security, it seemed, was part of the problem, not the solution.

"All right," Cleddman said. "Report your position when you get him. But be careful. That thing is armed and dangerous."

"Right," Ben said.

Cleddman turned back to the physics wing as Ben raced off in pursuit of the Accuser.

Ben shot around the nearest corner. The Accuser was well out ahead of him, dodging into stairwells, shooting through rooms that were unoccupied at that hour. The creature appeared to know exactly where it was going.

Moreover, things jangled at the alien's belt. Were they weapons? Were they tools? Ben had to be careful as he ran because the Accuser could easily drop one of his disassemblers, and Ben, in his eagerness, might round a corner and plunge right into a disassembler mist and never be seen again.

Though the creature had a head start, Ben was catching up with it. Now the two were approaching the student commons and more than just a few Eos students were left in their wake, mouths open, completely surprised. Some students jumped out of the way, others screamed at the sight of an absolutely new kind of Enamorati being.

Ben noticed that the Accuser did not take any of the transit portals back to the Enamorati chambers. They would have been the fastest means of flight, but the Accuser ran right on past them.

Ben then realized why: Transit portals had computer records and video scans. It could be recognized by the system the humans had made just for an incident like this.

So this guy knew the system well, Ben realized, and had thought through his escape. It had now become a footrace.

The Accuser burst into the main causeway, past the student cinema. Students were filing out of
Mayberry Agonistes
just in time to feel the gusts of wind Ben made as he chased his would-be assassin. Students fell backward; others just dove for cover. Someone punched an alarm and Ben thought he heard a whistle blow.

But now he had the Enamorati on a straightaway where Ben knew he could catch it.

The thrill of the chase soared in his veins. He was his old self again, the person he used to be, the young man who used to play football and soccer, who felt the fires of pure testosterone in his blood, pushing him farther, faster. He couldn't recall being this charged up.

The creature only ran with more determination.

And Ben knew exactly the course the creature would take. It was headed aft in more or less a straight line, regardless of who saw him. It was trying to reach the Auditors' sanctuary, where, if it got there in one piece, it would be safe.

But Ben knew these corridors inside and out. He turned suddenly into a corridor to his right. If he was fast enough, he could cut the creature off. But he had to be fast!

He put on extra speed, feeling his heart pound, his lungs burn. Anger and revenge soared in his blood.

He overshot his goal. He had originally intended to have about five yards of space between him and the Accuser, enough room to capture the alien in his arms before the Accuser could reach for the disassembler globes at its belt, release one, and kill them all. That was the plan.

Instead, Ben came bursting out of the last hallway and collided head-on with the Accuser.

They made an ugly smacking sound, with Ben's nose flattening violently on the faceplate of the Accuser's e-suit. Ben's momentum carried them both to the nearest wall, where they both struck hard-the glass from the Enamorati's helmet falling about them both like stars.

The hall instantly filled with toxic gases as the creature's e-suit automatically started pumping more of the Enamorati's breathable air.

Death hissed around Ben and there was nothing he could do, for he was out of air himself and was forced to take in the deadly fumes the Enamorati breathed.

Death from asphyxiation was just seconds away for both the pursuer and the pursued.

32

Ben saw stars.

His sight filled with phosphenes of intense, pain-generated light and the metallic, putrescent fumes he breathed left him dizzy, his head spinning. He had, perhaps, thirty seconds to live.

Instinctively, he pinched his com/pager, which sent out an emergency distress signal that would also give ShipCom his location in the ship. He scrabbled away from the wreckage of the Accuser and its shattered helmet. The alien, which had taken the brunt of the tackle, seemed just as disoriented. It, too, began gasping for its own air, horrified to discover that its helmet had been obliterated.

Several students had witnessed this and gathered in the corridor but kept their distance. However, one student approached them. This was Mark Innella, chief reporter of the renegade student newspaper. It did not take an ace reporter to see that they had a whopper of a story before them. His shouldercam came alert at his urging.

Ben held up his hand, stopping Innella's approach.

"Get back!" Ben shouted. Glass from the alien's helmet crunched underneath him as he rolled over. He almost vomited from the smell of the Enamorati's air, an odor somewhere between rotten meat, burnt rubber, excrement, and an Earthly camel's really bad breath.

Ben tweaked his com/pager.
Physical plant,
he thought.
They have access to the ship's ventilation grid…

"This is Benjamin Bennett on level twenty-one, corridor eight. Track my position and close all filtration vents immediately. We've got Enamorati atmosphere in here."

More students had gathered at the nearest corridor junction. This time, however, the Bombardiers were among them. Tommy Rosales and George Clock apparently had been in the commons eating when Ben and the alien had shot past them.

Clock and Rosales rushed to Ben's aid, but the other students stayed where they were. The Enamorati's breathing air was drifting toward the ceiling.

"Hey, man, what's going on?" Clock asked, lifting Ben to his feet, pulling him away from the Enamorati.

"What happened to this guy?" Rosales asked. Then he saw the broken helmet, the scattered bits of glass. Then he
smelled
it.

"Well," Rosales muttered, cupping his nose and mouth. "Now we're gonna die."

The three backed away from the alien. "I broke open its environment suit," Ben said. "Get those people out of here."

Some of the students were already backing away, and overhead the air ducts began closing off. Seconds later, the doors to the adjoining corridors clamped shut. The message had gotten through to the physical plant. Unfortunately, at least ten other curious students had remained with them in the corridor with the Bombardiers, Mark Innella being one such.

The humans backed off like a wave advancing in a pond. But the seconds went by, becoming minutes, and the Enamorati atmosphere hadn't done any more than make the humans turn up their noses at the ungodly stench. Curiously, the alien on the floor didn't seem much bothered by
their
air either. By the twitching of its hands and feet, they could see that it was still alive, and its respiration seemed normal.

"So how come we're not dead yet?" Clock asked.

"Beats the hell out of me," said Ben.

Mark Innella came over and the four of them stared at the creature, which lay several yards off, back turned to them, trying to sit up in its olive green e-suit. The humans wouldn't go any closer.

"What the hell kind of Enamorati is
that
?" Innella asked.

"It's called an 'Accuser,'" Ben told him. "Theoretically, the Accuser caste has been flying with us for decades."

"What's it supposed to
do
?" Innella asked.

"It's supposed to be a witness to events," Ben said. "But I think it's a soldier. It tried to kill us."

The air ducts whistled overhead as newer, cleaner air was frantically pumped into their section of the corridor.

"But I
still
want to know why we're not dead yet," Clock stated. "That guy's alive, too," Rosales said, pointing to the Accuser, now sitting up in the ruins of its e-suit.

The Enamorati supposedly found the air humans breathed ten times more toxic than humans found theirs, and the unfortunate Enamorati was supposed to perish if he ever chanced to breathe a single lung-bladder of the nitrogen-rich stuff. This apparently wasn't going to happen. Even more astonishing, the alien slowly began to climb to its feet, the glass of its helmet falling like loose diamonds to the floor. It rose awkwardly, like a stunned insect. It then turned, facing them. The jagged splinters of its helmet's remains jutted up from the suit's collar, and dark blue blood had emerged from a minor scratch, nothing serious.

The Accuser faced its pursuers. But it did not reach for any of the various weapons at its belt-indeed, if they
were
weapons- and it did not perish from the air. In fact, the alien seemed invigorated by it.

Ben stood speechless. This wasn't an Accuser. It was an
Avatka.
More specifically, it was the Avatka Viroo. Ben had spent plenty of time in detention studying the only Accuser he had any experience with. That Accuser had a pronounced reddish crest rising from between its wide eyes over the top of its skull.
This
being, though, was the Avatka Viroo. He never could have mistaken the two. Castes among the Enamorati were like racial features among human beings.

The alien moved toward them. Ben, Tommy, and George spread out instinctively. Mark Innella simply watched, dumbfounded.

"You are in great danger," the Avatka Viroo said in clear, slightly inflected English. He had raised up an arm as if to signal a momentary truce.

So they breathe air and speak English fluently. What else can they do?
Ben wondered. "We're in danger because you keep trying to kill us," Ben told him. The creature's voice sounded a bit wheezy, shrill. The air had
some
effect on him. "I was not trying to kill you. I was trying to set you free."

"That's not what it looked
like
to us," Ben said.

The alien said, "A
vehenta
has a short life span and was dying the moment I released it. None of you would have been hurt. You needed to be free."

"What's that guy talking about?" Rosales asked.

Ben said, "I was in the physics department until this guy here turned loose another disassembler. I chased him from the physics wing to this spot."

"That's about a half of a mile," Clock said admiringly.

"I was in a hurry," Ben said. "This is the second time he's tried to kill me."