The Engines of Dawn (36 page)

"We're not going to," he said. "We're going to run like hell and fight them later."

"Where are we going to run
to
?" Benn asked worriedly.

"Straight to Earth," Cleddman told them. "The Grays have no political clout in the Earth system. Not even the Auditors. Tau Ceti 4 and Ross 244, yes. But not Earth. They'll be the ones standing trial, not us."

"We have to get there first," Rausch said.

"Yes," Cleddman admitted. "That seems to be the next order of business."

42

Julia Waxwing was furious-furious as a Native American, furious as a human being. It seemed that there had never been a time when her people-once the Zunis but now the entire race of
Homo sapiens sapiens
-weren't being subjugated by one party or another. This time, however, there was something she could do about it. She could fight back.

"They killed my bear," Julia said to Ben as the AtChem gondola rose steeply and swiftly from the continent dolloped with the Mounds of the deceased Onesci.

"Not just your bear," Ben said.
"Us."

They managed to get everyone on board the gondola with the exception of the Avatka. Professor Holcombe said he'd take full responsibility for leaving him behind, but no one now believed that relations with the Enamorati would ever be normal again. Not returning with the body of the Avatka was the least of their worries now.

"Vampires," Jim Vees said, sitting beside Jeannie Borland. She happened to be on board the gondola with the rest of the AtChem students. She had seen Ben with Julia and so had decided to sit beside Jim. "That's what those motherfuckers are."

"Which motherfuckers are you talking about?" George Clock asked. "You've got the Ainge motherfuckers; you've got the Enamorati motherfuckers; and you've got those really big Engine motherfuckers. Which ones?"

"All of them," Jim said.

The AtChem students, when they heard of the archaeology team's discoveries, sat in stunned silence. But once identified, the depredations of the Onesci on Kiilmist 5 had been confirmed by the AtChem team. They, too, had seen the Mounds and the grisly accretions of bones surrounding them.

"They're all dead men," Julia said. "This stops
now."

Ben gave her a sly smile. "You sound like Jack Killian. Throw the bomb first; make accusations later."

"That's what Cleddman would do," Tommy Rosales said.

But as the gondola rose, much of the anger and vengefulness had seemingly gone out of them. At first Julia thought it was merely her concern for Professor Holcombe. They had gotten the elderly scholar onto the gondola, but he had remained strangely quiet as they shot into the sky. But now everybody seemed afflicted with it. As the gondola rose into orbit, everyone became silent.

Professor Holcombe suddenly lurched forward. "No!" he burst out. "It's happening again!"

That
startled everybody.

"Professor Holcombe?" Julia said. "What's …"

Holcombe gripped the armrests of his seat and his knuckles went white. "They're doing it to us again! Can't you feel it? Can't
you feel
it?"

His outburst had been like a brick through a window.

"He's right," Ben said. "/ feel it, too. It just started. Maybe ten minutes ago."

"He's right," George Clock said.

The head of the AtChem department, Dr. Reg Chassin, had been monitoring the flight from his seat, following the same readings as their deadman pilot. He said, "Eos is reporting that the Engine has arrived. There's the tug and four support vessels moving into orbit. I'm putting them on your seat screens."

The screens showed merely a cluster of bright objects suspended in the distance, perhaps a thousand miles away. But in Julia's imagination, she envisioned the very stars warping around the fleet… as if the new Engine was sucking in the very light of the cosmos around the vessels.

Holcombe struggling with his seat restraints. "The new Engine," he said, "is already starting to feed-"

Dr. Chassin, a man half Holcombe's age, called out, "There's nothing we can do until we dock. Everybody stay seated!"

Julia didn't like the wide-eyed expression on the professor's face. She had never seen it before.

"Motherfuckers," he said. "They've sucked the life out of us for years…."

The minutes passed as the gondola finally entered the bay and locked itself into place.

"Call for assistance!" Julia shouted out to their deadman pilot. "Professor Holcombe needs-"

Holcombe was out of his seat as soon as the bay doors had sealed themselves.

The main exit hatch opened and Professor Holcombe led the students out into the bay itself. Jim, Tommy Rosales, and George Clock were right behind him. The Bombardiers entered with clenched fists, doing everything they could to fight the somatic call of the new Engine now approaching Eos.

Waiting for them in the gondola bay was Lieutenant Fontenot and as many of his men as he could muster. They wore riot gear and held stunners, the only guns on the ship. In the rear, Julia noted, were about a dozen of the Ainge Auditors, led by Orem Rood. They, too, were armed with crowd-control devices.

And behind
them
stood the Kuulo Kuumottoomaa and two of his aides, also in body armor.

"What is this, Ted?" Holcombe demanded.

"Stand aside, Holcombe," Lieutenant Fontenot barked, waving his stunner. "Bennett! Vees! Step forward right now!"

Professor Holcombe, a big man, walked right up to Fontenot, in full face of the riot guns. Julia followed behind him. Benjamin, though, had moved off to another part of the crowd.

"I have arrest warrants for Benjamin Bennett and James Vees issued by the H.C. High Council and signed by Nelson Porter himself. The rest of you will be detained for questioning."

"You'll have to get through me first, Ted," Holcombe said, apoplectic, his right hand forming into a fist. "And I'm not handing over
anybody
to
those
motherfuckers-" He pointed at Kuumottoomaa and two armored Accusers standing beside him. "Or
those
motherfuckers-" He pointed to Auditor Orem Rood and his junior partners.

Rood stepped forward. "We can have you on charges of blasphemy as well as for harboring fugitives, Brother Holcombe. Do you want to disgrace your family yet again?"

"What I want," Holcombe said, "is for little shits like you to die forever."

Auditor Rood's righteous smirk suddenly collapsed, as did his jaw. Professor Holcombe broke the man's jaw with a haymaker backed by the full strength of his body. Rood lifted off the ground and fell backward, knocked into blissful oblivion.

Holcombe turned to face Lieutenant Fontenot, both fists clenched, grim and determined. "What are you going to do now, you worthless piece of-"

Fontenot raised his stunner and fired it point-blank at him. Almost immediately, the rest of the security force brought their guns to bear on the aged professor and balls of powerful lightning pummeled the old man with a thousand explosions of spectacular light. Julia screamed terribly as Holcombe bounced once off a nearby wall, hair flying wild. He struck the floor with electrified violence.

He was dead before his body quit shaking.

This proved to be a tactical error for campus security. They had emptied their weapons on Professor Holcombe and had nothing left for the tide of students that came at them. Led by the Bombardiers, the once-obedient Ainge students set upon Lieutenant Fontenot and his men for the crime they had just committed against Professor Holcombe.

And Julia Waxwing, shrilling the way her grandmother did on wild horse rides across Hart Prairie in the moonlight, dove into the fray in what became the historic opening moment in Eos University's first fully-fledged and properly executed student riot.

Ben had never played rugby with Bobby Gessner. He had never even known the boy existed before that day. So he had no idea of the boy's physical gifts for the quick moves necessary in sports. But the Ainge youngster had executed one of the most efficient handoffs Ben had ever seen: to him.

Ben had been pushed to the rear by George Clock when Clock saw the searching look on Fontenot's face. At the same time, Bobby Gessner spun around and passed a shouldercam video cartridge into Ben's hands. It was the cartridge from Gessner's shouldercam, the one that had caught the Avatka's dying words.

Ben took the cartridge and spun around just as Fontenot had called his name, then whipped under the gondola's flanges and made for the nearest exit.

Behind him came the explosions of crowd-control stunners, and that was all the diversion Ben needed to make his escape.

Ben shot down the nearest corridor, cartridge in hand, and ran to the nearest transit portal. To his relief, no campus guard stood sentinel before it. Fontenot must have used all of his people in his attempt to corral the disobedient students.

"Command deck," he said to the portal's computer.

However, the portal did not power up. Instead, a mechanical voice, somewhat female, said, "Security override. Transmission to command deck prohibited."

"Well, shit." He then turned on his com/pager and called out. "Com, open. Benjamin Bennett calling Captain Cleddman."

Cleddman's voice returned almost immediately.
"Where are you?"

"I'm standing before transit portal seventy-two, which isn't working," he said. "Lieutenant Fontenot has just killed Professor Holcombe in the gondola bay and now they're killing the rest of everybody else."

"The portal is now activated,"
Cleddman said.
"Get to ShipCom immediately."

The transit portal flashed, sent a euphoric jolt through his body, and moved Ben instantly to the transit portal closest to ShipCom. No guards blocked him; no armor-suited Enamorati waited with their deadly swords.

Ben stepped through the gash in ShipCom's door to find bodies on the floor and a lot of blood to go with them.

Captain Cleddman was apparently controlling the ship from ShipCom.

"Bennett," Cleddman said.

"Listen," Ben said, holding out the cartridge from Bobby Gessner's shoulder camera. "You guys absolutely have to see this."

However, the entire ShipCom crew had patched into a visual and audio scan of the gondola bay, where students were fighting Fontenot's men as well as the Enamorati Accusers. Fists flew, noses flattened, teeth exploded. The Kuulo Kuumottoomaa wobbled around the room, swordless, and with his helmet completely fractured. Somebody had put a fist through it, and most of the Kuulo's face.

"I think," said Cutter Rausch, "that the whole university needs to see our campus-security team hard at work. Ms. Benn?"

Lisa Benn touched a button. Since the university was in the middle of the third shift, almost everyone was asleep. But gentle alarms were now going off and every screen was now coming alive with the riot. Cutter Rausch specifically activated the screens in the dorms and the student commons, making sure that all transit portals led, by default, to the gondola bays where anyone who wanted to could respond to Mr. Fontenot's violence against students. Many did.

While this was being done, Ben told the entire ShipCom staff what had happened down upon the planet, especially the discovery of the fossilized Onesci creature inside the Mound and the Avatka Viroo's confession. Ben then told them the full story of their violation of the Enamorati's
Makajaa
ceremony, concurring with what Professor Holcombe had seen as a young man when he had witnessed an insertion ceremony.

"Every one of their ceremonies has been designed to prevent us from seeing that the Engines are actually newly born
creatures"
Ben said, "and not mechanical engines."

"Sir," Lisa Benn said, "I'm now showing the Engine escort fleet accelerating toward us. They're closing at twelve thousand miles an hour. Is there something we should do?"

"That all depends," Cleddman said.

"On what?" Benn asked.

"On whether or not Eve Silbarton's ready to try out her new stardrive," Cleddman said.

43

In Ben's mind, the greatest mistake the Ainge Church ever made was its indolence. For them to have had-or to imagine that they had-a direct ear to God, through the use of a sophisticated machine, created in the Auditors a misplaced belief that assumed that every human in the H.C. would, in time, come around to their way of thinking. They were the truth and the way, after all. Had more students traveling with Eos University been of the Ainge Church, had more members of the staff and especially the physical plant been Ainge brethren, the Eos riots might not have broken out and Lieutenant Fontenot's forces overcome.

As students rioted and faculty protested, Cutter Rausch activated every screen in the university and ran the confession of the Avatka Viroo, as taped by Bobby Gessner, over and over and over again. Maree Zolezzi and Lisa Benn, meanwhile, began compressing the Gessner video into data bullets. The enormous amount of visual data would take several hours to be compressed before they could start sending it.

The problem they had now was time.

The approaching Enamorati convoy-the tug with the Engine, and four warships-was already making its presence felt. The Engine was young and the Ennui quickly started manifesting. As Ben rejoined Eve Silbarton's team, the rioting students were already calming down. He just hoped that the rioters would fight the Ennui as boldly as they had fought the Grays in the gondola bay. The physics team needed time.

Ben got to work, finding himself crawling down a maintenance tunnel somewhere near the ship's core. There were no temperature controls in the bulkhead compartments, and Ben was wearing only his regular tunic. It was colder in there than he thought possible for a ship. But he had to get to his station as fast as possible. Eve Silbarton was going to need all the help she could get, and the only option left to the dissidents now-besides not responding to the calls of the approaching Enamorati fleet-was to get Eve's engines up and running.