The Engines of Dawn (11 page)

"You're leading the witness!" Auditor Orem Rood burst out.

"I'm merely getting to the heart of the matter the fastest way possible," Wangberg said. "Besides, we're not in court."

"That's it, exactly," Julia said. "We couldn't find anybody, so we went looking. There's no law forbidding us to enter their chambers without their permission. It's only the Enamorati who have that rule."

"But… these people were
trespassing"
Nethercott sputtered.

Advocate Sammons faced Julia. "Did you announce your presence?" he asked.

"Yes!" Julia said swiftly, defiantly, lying through her teeth. Ben was impressed. This was a side to her character he hadn't seen yet.

"And when they didn't answer," Julia continued, "we went looking for them. We thought they could help us. And now they want to
arrest
us! They're supposed to be the servants of humanity! Now look at them!"

Nethercott stammered. "That's not… they were … don't you understand? They were
trespassing
!" Nethercott was livid with barely contained rage.

"They were in the Inner Temple!" stressed Auditor Rood.

"Are either of you registered members of the Ainge Church?" Kerry Wangberg asked.

Ben knew that he didn't have to answer any question regarding his own civil liberties, but he also knew where Mr. Wangberg was going with such a question.

"No," Ben said. "I'm not."

Julia shook her head.

Wangberg faced the Auditors. "If these two people belonged to the Ainge religion, then you
might
have some jurisdiction over them. But since they aren't, and since you have sequestered them without immediate access to counsel, it seems that
you
can be held on charges of false imprisonment and perhaps attempted kidnapping." Wangberg then turned to Julia. "Did they physically assault you?"

Julia pointed to Auditor Rood. "He did! He
grabbed
me!"

Ben was, frankly, amazed. Jeannie Borland had the personality of a dishrag compared to this extraordinary young woman.

"We now have charges of assault," Mr. Wangberg said.

"Whose side are you on?" High Auditor Nethercott exploded.
"We're
the aggrieved party!
They're
the ones who committed the crime!"

"Then press charges," Sammons said. "But if you do, then I must encourage these two young people to press charges against
you
which are far more serious than your charges."

Nethercott's eyebrows knitted angrily. "If you were Ainge, I would have your job."

"I don't think you'd want it," Sammons said. "The pay is lousy and the hours are terrible and you'd have to deal with people such as yourself."

Ben heard a commotion behind them and he turned around to see a bunch of people enter the auditorium. Lieutenant Ted Fontenot and three of his associates appeared. So did Eve Silbarton and two student reporters from
The Alley Citizen,
and one from the student-run radio station, KEOS. Albert Holcombe was a hell of a cagey old coot, Ben decided. The Marines had landed, and the Auditors saw that the battle was all but lost.

A while later, Captain Cleddman came down from the command deck and the Ainge became so occupied with defending themselves that Julia and Ben were able to slip away to let the adults play this one out.

Julia, however, was still driven by her anger and her need to know what
exactly
had happened to her little bear. An autopsy might have supplied a few answers, particularly if the Avatka had perhaps poisoned Jingles. But Julia abandoned the idea of subjecting Jingle Bear's body to an autopsy, feeling that such an ordeal would be too much for the little creature's spirit. Still, she wanted to know what killed the bear.

It was clear now that she wasn't going to get any answers from the Auditors or the Enamorati. But the arrival on the scene of the student reporters suggested to her that
The Alley Citizen
might have more expertise in seeking out the sources that might supply her with the answers she needed.

So she and Ben went to the offices of
The Alley Citizen.
The
Citizen
was part of the communications department, which also operated KEOS and had its own staff of reporters. Between these two media sources, they could blanket almost the entire student body. What also gave this team their strength was the fact that none of the students or faculty were members of the Ainge Church. They would, therefore, be less inclined to soft-pedal the misdeeds of the Auditors. Assuming there were any.

Julia and Ben met with the editorial staff of
The Alley Citizen
and told them everything they had experienced, from their first meeting in the disassembled physics lab to their explorations of the Ainge Inner Temple-emphasizing that they knocked before entering. They finished with the account of the "dynamo" room. During their recitation, the two reporters who had been sent to the Ainge quarters had finally returned and they had juicy video of the warring parties, particularly High Auditor Nethercott.

The faculty advisor of the student newspaper was a man in his sixties named Kevin Dobbs. He had been present when Julia and Ben walked in, and throughout their interview he merely puffed away at a Red Apple cigarette, Jeannie Borland's brand, saying nothing.

But the senior student editor, a woman named Elise Rutenbeck, and her top reporter, Mark Innella, were all too taken with the story. Their eyes lit up when they sensed that blood could be spilt with the Auditors and quite possibly the administration.

It was at this juncture that Dr. Dobbs spoke up. "Of course this is all anecdotal. We can report it as eyewitness accounts, but we've got to have hard evidence, something corroborative."

"You should have taken a shouldercam in with you," said Mark Innella, a rail-thin boy with ferretlike features. "Then we could have really nailed them. It's about time somebody whittled the Auditors down to size."

Elise Rutenbeck was a heavyset young woman whose temperament was much less incendiary than Innella's-which was probably why she was editor and Innella wasn't. "You said you didn't get close to the window to this 'dynamo' room."

"We didn't have to," Ben said. "There was blood everywhere. On the walls, the floor. And we saw at least a half-dozen bodies on the floor."

Julia nodded at this. "All of the Auditors were there, gathered at the window. It must have just happened."

"Do you know
how
the Enamorati were killed?" Innella asked.

"The bodies looked as if they were hacked up. But the dynamo itself, or whatever it was, was scorched and burned."

"But the Enamorati were hacked up?" Rutenbeck asked.

"That's what it looked like to me," Ben said. "To us, I mean."

"Perhaps this fire in the dynamo room," Dr. Dobbs said, "was part of our Engine malfunction and the Enamorati in the room were killed by it."

"But that was a few days ago," Julia said.
"This
looked like it happened a few hours ago."

"Yes, but," Dobbs observed, "there is the possibility that the aliens you saw today
were
killed by some factor relating to the Engine malfunction. A part could have been blown loose, anything might have happened to them."

"Well,
something
happened in there," Ben said.

Rutenbeck turned to her faculty advisor. "Dr. Dobbs, look what we've got. We had our Engine breakdown, a disassembler weapon went off in the ship, and now we've got an eyewitness account of some kind of slaughter in an engineering room visible from the Auditor's Inner Temple. That's a hell of a story."

"And my dead bear," Julia added. "Don't forget that."

"And a dead polar bear," Rutenbeck acknowledged.

"And nothing to link them conclusively," Dobbs said.

"Connected or not, this should go out in tomorrow's paper," Mark Innella said.

"Only what Ben and Julia have seen themselves," Dr. Dobbs said. "To say they are connected is pure conjecture."

"But we could suggest a connection in a student editorial," Rutenbeck offered. "It would be just my opinion."

"If you do," Dobbs said, "you'll call down the wrath of every Gray in the university. Remember, we exist at the behest of the university charter. In campus struggles on Earth, the journalism department is the first to be purged. On Eos, 'purging' could mean something altogether different. I'd watch it, if I were you."

"But these two people have been
in
there!" Innella insisted. "At the very least we can report that."

In the background, various students were at their design boards working on the next issue of
The Alley Citizen.
Layout, typesetting, ink chemistry, multimedia lithography, even papermaking were required of all journalism majors. Julia had never given any thought as to how the student newspaper was put together-or how fragile its existence was in the eyes of the administration. Now she knew.

"Even if it is the truth," Dobbs said in a nimbus of smoke, "it'll cause trouble. You might want to consider the real possibility that they might disband the newspaper if not the entire department."

"It's worth the stretch," Innella said.

"Incoming!" one of the students announced.

A chime went off and the large wall screen in
The Alley Citizen's
office came alive. The president of the university, Nolan Porter, appeared, and he did not look at all happy.

"Faculty and students. I have an important announcement to make. Until further notice, all classes are hereby canceled and students are restricted to their dorm rooms. Faculty and staff are to stay in their apartments. All classrooms, laboratories, and workstations are closed. This includes the student newspaper and the student radio station. I am declaring a state of emergency, and emergency bylaws are now in effect. If you are not familiar with those, consult your student handbook. Thank you for your attention."

"Well, shit," said an undergraduate at her editing board.

"Looks like something
did
happen back there," Dr. Dobbs said. He stubbed out his cigarette.

"Maybe it's spilling over into the ship," Ben said aside to Julia. "The fighting among the Enamorati, I mean."

At that juncture, a bookish-looking student appeared at the door. Julia had never seen the young man before this.

"This is Scott Nessa," Dr. Dobbs told them. "He's the student manager at KEOS. I'll bet he has something wonderful to tell us."

Nessa walked over to Dobbs's desk and helped himself to an illicit cigarette, which he lit expertly. "You should see it. Campus security is pulling our broadcasting equipment."

"What?" Dobbs said.

"They're pulling it right out of the wall," Nessa said. "They took our keys, music tiles, computer files. Everything."

"Can they do that?" Ben asked.

"Apparently," Scott Nessa said.

Dr. Dobbs stood up, pocketed his cigarettes, and said, "That means that we're next. All right, boys and girls. We're going samizdat. You know the drill."

" 'Samizdat'?" Ben asked. "What the hell is that?"

"You're going to find out," Dobbs said.

14

Whatever had transpired in the Enamorati "dynamo" room, it hadn't spilled over to the rest of the ship. President Porter's campus-wide shutdown might have been a response to the rumors of an Enamorati revolt, but for Ben there was no way of knowing what the Enamorati were up to. At the very least, the Auditors weren't talking.

Also part of the campus-wide shutdown was the data-bullet rail-launch system. Although data bullets could be written and compressed and placed in the rail queue for launch, they could not be sent. The rumor mill suggested that President Porter didn't want Mom and Dad to get wind that the Enamorati might be running amok on Eos. A more reasoned approach suggested that Porter thought the university needed a cooling-down period and opted for a "holiday" period … at least until the ship reached the inner planetary system of Kiilmist. Still, what it meant was that no news was going out and none was coming in.

However, in the communications department, Dr. Dobbs had managed to scatter his journalism students throughout the ship, taking with them what equipment they could. Since all networked computers-and printers had been blocked on President Porter's command, the journalism students had to improvise. They made their own printers as they had been trained to do, and they made their own paper by tapping into the ship's food-processing system in the student commons.

This was samizdat. In the tradition of the anti-Stalinists in the old Soviet Union, the students published
The Alley Citizen
in the Eos University equivalent of basements and backrooms, entirely underground. Copies were then delivered on foot and by hand while the editorial staff dismantled the press and moved it to another locale for the next edition. That Kevin Dobbs was a member of the KMA didn't come out until it was all over.

Ben found a copy of the newly named
The Alley Comrade
before his door the next day. In it were editorials excoriating the administration Grays for hiding the truth about the Auditors and the Enamorati.
The Alley Comrade
printed his and Julia's adventure in the Inner Temple and what they had seen there, but the articles did not mention Ben and Julia by name. They were called instead "reliable sources." None of it was verifiable and all of it libelous. However, no one at the
Comrade
gave a shit.

Still, most of the students were quite happy to have classes canceled and the greater majority of them spent their time in the student commons playing pool, video games, and the like. It was a nice holiday.

Ben, however, was in the grip of a personal dilemma. Part of him wanted to track down Julia and spend more time with her- she was unlike any woman he had ever met. After all, what kind of a girl would have a
bear
for a pet? But another part of Ben knew that the events of the past five days were unprecedented and that he'd had a major role in it. He wanted to know if there was anything new regarding the Enamorati or what the Auditors didn't want him to see in the Inner Temple. Curiosity won out.