The Engines of Dawn (5 page)

Eve Silbarton scowled at the lieutenant. "Only if someone turned loose a disassembler while we were operating it."

"Are you absolutely sure?"

"Look, Ted," Silbarton went on. "The energy created in a Casimir vacuum would be sucked back into trans-space if it ever got out of control. It's the cleanest form of energy we know. And it
can't
blow up."

"What is your separator for?" Fontenot asked.

"It's to power the stardrive I'm working on in the gamma lab," she said.

"Whose projects were being tested in the alpha lab?"

"Gan Brenholdt and his students have exclusive use of the alpha lab," Eve said. "He was apparently at Friday-night services. He's on his way here now."

"What was he working on?"

"A stardrive system based on modified Alcubierre equations."

"Which is… ?"

Eve said, "You'll have to ask him, Ted. He can explain his work better than I can."

"What you're saying is that you don't think I could understand it," Fontenot said.

"No, I don't. But maybe Dr. Brenholdt can explain it to you, who knows?"

The security chief did not seem particularly perturbed by Dr. Silbarton's manner. He then asked, "How many of these star drives are you people working on?"

Silbarton said, "Mine, Gan Brenholdt's, and one by Dr. Ossam Hamdeen, but his is still in its design phase. He's at evening prayer, but he will be here shortly, too."

Julia and Ben watched as the adults pondered the extent of the damage and wondered who or what had caused it.

After a long pause, Eve Silbarton voiced a question they were all thinking, including Julia. "So who would have done such a thing? Who would even
want
to?"

"Well," Fontenot said, looking at her.
"You
might."

Several onlookers gasped at the remark.

Eve Silbarton glowered blackly at the man. "The men and women who work here are
colleagues,
Ted, and I wouldn't think of sabotaging their work any more than they would think of sabotaging mine. So get that stupid notion out of your head right now."

"Let me ask you this," Fontenot said. "How important would you rate your project over those of your colleagues?"

"Fuck you, Ted," Eve responded. "I'm not going to answer any more of your dipshit questions."

Lieutenant Fontenot surveyed all that was before him-the technicians going over the crime scene, the various witnesses to the event being interviewed at the far end of the hallway-then nodded as if agreeing to his own thoughts. "Of course, if this was a
political
act, it might look very bad for someone who has publicly expressed sympathies for the policies of the KMA,"

"What?"
Eve Silbarton stammered. "What are you implying?"

Fontenot's assistant switched off his shouldercam, taking a signal from the lieutenant's wink.

Dr. Silbarton saw this. "Turn that damn thing back on! I want a record of this!"

Fontenot said, "We have to consider all possible motives here. And we all know where the KMA comes out on the Enamorati Compact
and
the Ainge, don't we?"

"Hell, Ted, you just got here!" Eve said. "You haven't even
begun
your investigation. Who knows who did this or why? Forget Jack Killian's Mobile Army or his Mad Assassins or whatever the hell they're called. We've got a situation right here, right now. This thing might have eaten through a bulkhead, and if that had happened, you wouldn't be standing here right now looking like an idiot."

"You think I look like an idiot?" he asked.

Eve Silbarton put her hands on her hips and gave Fontenot the evil eye. Two of them, in fact. "You
are
an idiot, Ted," she finally said. "Get used to it."

Fontenot turned to his crew of investigators. "Gentlemen, escort our witnesses to security detention so we can get their stories in a more comfortable setting."

"Lay a hand on me, Ted," Dr. Silbarton snarled, "and I'll break all eight of your legs."

"Are you resisting arrest?" Fontenot asked.

Eve Silbarton's eyes went wide. "You're
arresting
me? What the hell for?"

"For resisting arrest," Fontenot said. "Among other things. Conspiracy would be another."

Dr. Silbarton said, "You can't arrest anybody for resisting arrest if you haven't
arrested
them yet, you worthless sack of shit. And nobody is conspiring against you!"

"We can start, though," Ben said, surprising even Julia. "If that'll make you feel better."

Julia punched Ben as hard as she could, but the boy with the ponytail and the mischievous grin merely smiled up at the security chief.

Julia had read Ben's character correctly from the start.

And Fontenot took them all to jail, Jingle Bear included.

6

What originally started out as arrest and detention turned out to be nothing more than an "investigative interview" wherein nobody was actually charged with anything and no one had to spend too much time in campus security's holding cell. Julia and Ben had the Cloudman to thank, for he had intervened on their behalf, once he got wind of it.

Julia had never met their pilot before, but Cleddman in action was a wonder to behold. The captain stormed into the campus security offices, read Mr. Fontenot the riot act for being such a cretin, and subsequently got everybody released.

Jingle Bear also helped in getting their release. Julia wouldn't let anyone take him away from her and it seemed to make their guards uncomfortable with Jingle Bear's eyes rolled up in his head, his small pink tongue hanging out. As a consequence, Julia was the first of the prisoners to be let go.

Back in Cowden Hall, Julia began thinking about how she was going to dispose of her little bear. She found a small blanket her mother had made for her years ago and this made a perfect funeral shroud.

On her bookshelf stood a line of animal fetishes Julia had made when she was a teenager. She found a whale she had carved from black serpentine just two inches long. A whale would make a good otherworld companion for an Arctic bear, she thought. She took the serpentine whale and, along with some dried herbs and two peregrine feathers, she placed them in the shroud next to Jingles and began sewing up the whole affair.

Once the shroud had been sewn, Julia gave some thought as to how she was going to dispose of it. Incineration was out of the question. So was dumping him into the ship's recycler. Jingle Bear deserved a much better fate. Julia then decided she would return his body to the soil somewhere on their next stopover.

However, Eos was not scheduled to leave trans-space for another two weeks. Their next port of call was to be an Earth-like world of an M-type star. This world, discovered long ago by the Enamorati, was in a late Cambrian stage of biotic development, with most life still being submerged in its murky seas. Because of this, there was no plan for archaeology to go down to Paavo Juuoko 4's surface. There was nothing for them to do.

Nevertheless, being a graduate student, Julia could get a pass on just about any gondola heading to the surface. There, she could inter Jingles, perhaps dropping him in a stainless-steel canister into one of the oceans. The canister would not affect the planet's biosphere any, and if intelligent life managed to evolve on Paavo Juuoko 4 aeons hence, the canister would probably be so metamorphosed that it would be unrecognizable to those future fossil hunters.

In the meantime, she was going to have to keep the body preserved. For this, she transited to the archaeology department, where she found an unused vacuum chamber in one of their forensic labs. The vacuum chambers were designed to hold artifacts in a perfect vacuum where destructive bacterial or chemical agents could not get at them until they were ready to be analyzed.

So with a very heavy heart, Julia placed Jingles's coffin into the chamber and sealed it. She then put her name onto the lock's panel so the other students would not open it by mistake.

Julia stepped out into the hallway and walked the short distance to the area the disassembler had taken out earlier that day. Campus security, however, had sealed the region off.

She turned and started looking for the nearest transit portal.

That was when she heard the music. The pulsating rhythms of a StratoCast drifted down the hallway, a strange kind of music for any adult in the archaeology department to play.

It seemed to be coming from one of the faculty offices, specifically Dr. Holcombe's office.

Julia found the Regents professor staring at a 2D screen, which depicted a forested landscape. But this was not an Earth forest. The trees were much, much taller, and the sky was a brilliant, luxurious green, filled with floating chlorophyll clouds. The music was synthetic, minimalistic, and energetic-not at all the kind of music a man of Holcombe's years normally listened to.

Dr. Holcombe turned in his chair, lowering the audio. "Hello, jailbird. I see they didn't keep you long. So how did it go?"

"Fine, I guess," she said. "They decided that we didn't look like saboteurs so they let us go."

"You kids should
really
give them something to worry about. Stage a student riot. Take over the administration building. Have a panty raid. They deserve to have their gray feathers ruffled."

Julia could hardly believe what she was hearing. Was this the way the man grieved? He seemed more angry than sad.

"Is that a StratoCast you're watching?" Julia asked.

Holcombe nodded. "It's one my clone-son had made about three years ago."

"What group was he in? Anybody famous?"

Holcombe leaned back in his chair. "Well, I don't know how famous he was, but he sure made a hell of a lot of money. More money than I'll ever see working on this boat. He was a BronzeAngel. I guess they were one of the best."

Julia had heard of the BronzeAngels. They were a "sky-runner" group who recorded their feelings while skimming treetops and racing down small canyons on antigravity shoes. The technostrobic music that accompanied their emotional highs was implanted on data tiles and the tiles sold in the millions, as did the technology that came with them. StratoCast tiaras amplified the theta waves underneath the music, which, in turn, magnified the feelings the StratoCaster imprinted onto the tile. StratoCasts were particularly popular for people on lonely outposts or on faraway planets for whom a bit of escapism was essential.

Julia was impressed that Professor Holcombe had a StratoCaster in his family.

"This was done on Lehi," Holcombe said, indicating the 2D screen. "Lehi's the southernmost continent on Tau Ceti 4. I camped in that very forest with my father and my brothers."

He said nothing for a moment. He then switched off the 2D. "So what are
you
doing here? Shouldn't you be out on a hot date or what?"

"My bear died," she said in a low voice. "I put him in one of our storage chambers until I can give him a decent burial."

Professor Holcombe sat forward. "Your bear died? How?"

"I don't know," Julia said. "A student found him lying before his door in Babbitt Hall."

"I'm so sorry to hear this, Julia."

"Actually, Ben said that one of the Avatkas found him."

"Ben? Who's Ben?"

Julia brightened. "Ben Bennett. He's a lecturer in the physics department. He teaches two courses in Van Flandern physics. I just met him."

"Ah," said the professor, and ran a hand through his shock of white hair. "Well, this month will probably go down in the record books. All sorts of people dying. And bears."

"What are we going to do about the hole in the lecture hall's floor?" Julia then asked.

"I've been thinking about that. The only people using that hall this semester are Chad Rutledge and Raymonda Moore. We'll shuffle them around to other rooms until we can repair the damage. We're lucky this happened on a Friday. We've got the whole weekend to make repairs."

"You're not going to cancel classes?"

"I don't think so," he said. "They might down in physics, where the damage was, but-"

A sudden fist of nausea bit Julia in the stomach and Professor Holcombe suddenly lurched forward in his chair.

"Oh!" she said, gasping in pain. It was as if a hand had bunched her intestines and suddenly twisted them.
Hard.

It seemed as if something had struck the ship like a clapper to a bell and now the sound, though inaudible, was ringing throughout the spaceborne university.

Holcombe turned a whitish green. He stood up. "What the
hell
was mat?"

"I… think it's the ship," Julia said. "Something's happening to the ship!"

The chorus to those remarks came in the form of a series of alarms that Julia had never heard before, not even when the gray mist ate away part of the physics department just a few hours earlier.

Another wave of nausea hit her and this time she thought she was going to throw up.

Dr. Holcombe braced himself against the edge of his desk as all sorts of items rattled and crashed to the floor.

"Dr. Holcombe!" Julia cried.

"We've been blown out of trans-space!" Holcombe said. "It's the Engine! I think the Engine's going to explode!"

7

Ben had never been in trouble before, at least the kind of grownup trouble that required the intervention of lawyers. Thankfully, Eos University had an aggressive Rights Advocacy Office whose lawyers took umbrage at just about everything university Grays- or Grays anywhere-did. Eve Silbarton instantly summoned Captain Cleddman, who, in turn, called on the Rights Advocacy Office, who, in their turn, sent Messrs. Kerry Wangberg and Winn Sammons, who came
tout de suite.
They demanded that Mr. Fontenot show cause for his arrests, and since Mr. Fontenot really couldn't, he was forced to downgrade the charges to a mere reprimand, which Ben didn't like either. He told Fontenot so, but Mr. Fontenot was persuaded to let them all go anyway.

Once Ben's interview with campus security ended, he found himself half a mile from Babbitt Hall with nothing to do. It was, by then, late Friday night and it was far too late to see about finding a female for companionship. But considering his recent performances-or lack thereof-it was probably just as well that the women he'd had in mind were out of range. Melissa Lozinski, a math major; Colleen Lamb, a seriously sexy Navy ROTC student; and Peggy Shumaker, a mask-maker in Fine Arts whose breasts, when unmasked, were said to be legendary. They would remain such, thanks to the Ennui or saltpeter or whatever it was that plagued him.