The Engines of Dawn (22 page)

At the top of the stony ridge, they could now see the Mound quite clearly. It seemed to squat directly on the top of a large rectangular plaza that, to Julia, resembled some of the classic landsat photographs she'd seen of the buried Mayan cities in eastern Mexico. Farther to the west were low hills covered by the same ivy. The irregular contours of the hills suggested to her the obvious remains of buildings long abandoned.

Professor Holcombe finally reached the top of the rocky outcropping, breathing hard from the climb. He had been trailing Bobby Gessner, making sure every last student was accounted for.

When he caught his breath, he said, "We're going to have to get the landsats to radar-map this whole region. I want to know how deep the bones are."

"
I
would like to know what killed them," Julia asked.

"And when," Marji Koczan said.

"We can probably find out from the maps," Holcombe told them. "But it looks like the surrounding topsoil is made up of bones. And no telling what else."

The bones of the plain were dry, but were not yet compacted to dust. That suggested to Julia that only a few centuries had passed since they were laid down. Radiocarbon dating would help nail down the exact time.

Julia watched as Professor Holcombe considered the "plaza" and the Mound on top of it.

"What do you think it is?" Julia asked. The other students looked on.

"It's too big for a burial mound," Bobby Gessner said.

"And it's at the center of this 'plaza' area," Holcombe told them. "There's never been a culture that's buried their dead on top of a market place or shopping mall."

"Or even in the center of their main village," Julia said.

"Except that we don't even know what the 'plaza' is," Holcombe observed.

"More bones, I bet," Bobby Gessner said. The Ainge students had clustered together and were generally silent, sipping water from their canteens.

"Could be," Holcombe said. "Let's find out."

The lower level of the ivy-covered plaza appeared to be approximately ten feet thick, to judge by the ground immediately surrounding it. It had gently sloping sides and it was thoroughly draped with the strange ivy. The Mound itself sat on top and in the exact center of the plaza, looking to be easily a hundred feet tall.

They left the outcrop and walked to the plaza-stepping on bones all the way.

The sloping sides of the plaza weren't as steep as they had thought they would be, and a number of students were already racing for the top of the plaza. Once at the top, several students discovered that the plaza was also made of bones and cartilage, but was much older. It had the density of limestone. The bones in this area, they decided, had been laid down much longer ago than the outlying bone fields.

Again at the top of the plaza they had to stop for Professor Holcombe. Julia and Marji Koczan exchanged worried looks between them, but Holcombe himself said nothing when he finally mounted the roof of the plaza.

As the rest of the students fanned out to examine the Mound up close, Julia remained behind with Dr. Holcombe.

"Should you be doing this, Dr. Holcombe?" she asked. "You don't look well."

"I'm all right," he said. "Too much time cooped up in the ship. That's all it is."

Julia watched Holcombe walk toward the Mound. He seemed hypnotized by the Mound the moment he saw it up close.

So, too, had Julia. The Mound would tell them everything they would need to know about these people and what happened to them.

She could feel it in her bones.

Cutter Rausch sat on a tatami mat in his quarters, legs crossed, hands in a
zazen
mudra, and wondered if he would ever see the Kobe Gardens of Hokkaido again. On the other hand, it was possible that he would never see
Earth
again, if the laws weren't changed soon. He missed the Gardens, he missed the temple, and he missed his teacher. Rausch had never married and had little family left in the H.C. The Kobe Gardens were all that he ever called home, all that he ever
wanted
to call home.

An incident one fateful day in those Gardens had forced him into exile, and all because he hadn't acted appropriately. Or in time. He would never again let that happen.

"Cutter"
came Lisa Benn's voice over the com.
"I'm sorry to bother you, but we 've got a problem here. I think you should see this."

"Are we getting data-bullet replies yet?" he asked, eyes still closed.

"We're decompressing some of them now,"
Benn said.
"But something's gone wrong. You'd better see for yourself."

He rose with a sigh and readjusted the folds of his kendo gi, leaving his slippers off for the time being.

The ShipCom Arena was nearing the end of the first shift, so most of the staff had gone home. The only ones remaining were Lisa Benn, his second-in-command, and their lone intern, TeeCee Spooner, a former Bombardier recently reinstated after she had cleared her academic probation period successfully.

"What have you got?" Rausch asked, still a little light-headed from his meditation.

Lisa Benn held up to him three hard-copy sheets that she had just printed out. "We're starting to get replies from the first bullets we sent back to the H.C. when the accident happened."

"And?" Rausch squinted at the printouts.

"I think our bullets are going out scrambled. Three messages in a row arrived at their destinations D.O.A."

"Were the destinations ships or outposts?" Rausch asked.

"Ships," Lisa Benn said. "But if they went out scrambled, all of the others we've sent since then might have gone out scrambled, too."

"Ix on a stick," Rausch muttered as he examined the printouts of the three messages.

The printouts were standard "Fatal Error In Transmission" responses indicating that a bullet had not arrived intact and had thus been untranslatable at the receiver's end. The three reports in question had to do with bullets sent from Eos several days ago to three relatively nearby ships. The first was to an Ainge missionary vessel, the
Lili Marlene;
the second went to a cargo ship named the
Ginger Lynn;
the third went to the
Shelene,
a newly commissioned exploration vessel. They were private bullets, and should have been routine.

Rausch sat at his console. "Lisa, bring up the Bullets Out file. Let's start there."

A list appeared on their monitors. Rausch studied it carefully. "It looks like these bullets went out within hours of each other. But they all arrived D.O.A."

TeeCee Spooner considered her console. She was a tall young woman with bright orange hair cut very, very short. She said, "The target spread in real-space was only a few degrees of arc. Could something have gotten in the way of the bullets that might have distorted them?"

Lisa Benn shook her head. "When data bullets travel through trans-space, they pass right through anything in real-space."

"What about in trans-space itself?" TeeCee Spooner asked. "Could these bullets have been deflected there?"

Rausch shook his head. "Trans-space is all energy. It exists only as potential to any other moving object. Collisions can never occur."

TeeCee considered the arrival times of the return messages. "These three messages were returned to us almost one on top of the other. Isn't that significant?"

Lisa Benn shook her head. "An error-in-transmission note would have been instantly returned if our bullet came in scrambled. It would be an automatic computer response. No one at the receiving end would probably have noticed its arrival in the first place."

"Is this common?" TeeCee asked.

"It happens, now and then," Benn responded. "Usually when the target is far away. Bullets have been known to degrade at extreme distances."

Rausch added, "We use a Thompson-Kwaitkowski rail gun with a Cochran queue suspension system for the data bullets themselves. It's the best there is. So the fault shouldn't be ours."

Rausch pondered the printouts. "Did you do a systems check on the Kwaitkowski?" Rausch asked.

"Right before I called you," Benn said. "From my board here, it looks like it's working fine."

"What about bullet compaction in the rail queue?" Rausch then asked.

"Checked that," Benn responded. "BennettCorp hardware is top-of-the-line, including their fractal-compression software. It's all working according to specs."

TeeCee Spooner then asked, "Could it be a reception problem, and not a transmission problem?"

Rausch thought about this. "If it was a single message going to a single source. But we've got three different sources reporting the same phenomenon. And these sources are separated by several light-years."

"The only thing I can think of is that something happened to our bullets
before
they went into trans-space," Benn said. "At our end."

"But how could anyone get at the rail gun?" Spooner asked. "I thought that was impossible."

"It's supposed to be," Rausch said.

He consulted the entire BULLETS our list. Forty-four data bullets had been sent from Eos University from the moment their Engine broke down and they had to return to real-space. The first bullet had been sent directly to the Enamorati Yards to apprise the engineers there of the condition of the ship. After that, Eos started sending out bullets to dozen of sources including all nearby ships in case a massive rescue operation was needed.

Rausch brought up the BULLETS IN file. The very first bullet received by Eos University was a reply to the may day sent to the Enamorati Yards right after the accident. It had arrived twenty hours after it had been sent. It was a ten-hour transit one way, and it took the smallest, tightest data bullet BennettCorp's software could compress in the rail queue. The Engine Makers in orbit around Virr would have responded almost immediately in a bullet of smaller size. It would have said something simple, such as "Acknowledged. Engine is on its way."

However, the next three data bullets sent out after that first may-day had apparently arrived at their respective destinations D.O.A.

"But the reply from the Engine Makers came back intact?" Spooner asked.

Rausch leaned back in his chair. "Several days ago, in fact."

"Who decompressed the return bullet?" Spooner asked.

"The Enamorati did," Rausch said. "All we do is send the bullets out or catch them when they're sent at us. The Enamorati decompress and decode their own messages."

Rausch turned in his chair and saw that Lisa Benn had already leaped to the obvious conclusion that they might now be in very serious trouble. He said to her, "How many bullets are being decompressed now?"

"Two," Benn said, consulting the monitors at her station. "One arrived just as I called you, the other just a few seconds ago."

Rausch had seen the last reception register on his computer screen and thought nothing of it. Until now.

Rausch brought up the data on the fifth bullet, the one now being decompressed.

Lisa Benn, seeing the same thing on her screen, said, "It's a reply from one of the bullets sent by President Porter back to Ala Tule 4, our last port of call. The one that just came in seconds ago is a reply to the bullet Porter sent to Vii Vihad 4 right after the Ala Tule 4 message."

Rausch didn't have to consult his monitor screen to see the report on the bullet from Ala Tule 4. It came on screen: FATAL ERROR IN TRANSMISSION.

Rausch sped up the decompression of the bullet that had just arrived. An accelerated decompression of a bullet often compromised the data quality of the message, depending on the terabytes of information stored in it. But Rausch didn't think the message from Vii Vihad 4 had anything more than the few data bits it took to say FATAL ERROR IN TRANSMISSION.

Which it did.

TeeCee Spooner was only now getting the picture. "Bullets two through six went out damaged," she said hesitantly. "Then only the Enamorati at the Engine Yards know what happened to us. Or where we are or what we've done since. They don't know about the Hollingsdale maneuver or about Kiilmist 5."

"That," Rausch said slowly, "seems to be the case."

"Ix," Lisa Benn breathed. "We're out here. All alone."

"I'll take this to the captain myself," Rausch said. "It looks like we're in a bit of trouble."

27

The eager undergraduates of the Eos archaeology department circled the mysterious Mound on the leaf-carpeted roof of the "plaza." They had out their cameras and shouldercams taking snapshots and scans of the structure from every angle. Several students attempted to pull back the ivy-grass shroud that covered the Mound to see if they could find steps or some sign of masonry that would tell them what purpose the Mound originally served.

Julia, meanwhile, stood beside Professor Holcombe, watching the man closely. He was seventy-two, long past his physical prime, but he nonetheless had a lifetime of field experience on several planets and dozens of different climates, environments, and altitudes. Hiking
should
have been second nature to him. But he seemed exhausted, drained now; whereas on their last field trip, on Vii Vihad 4, he had seemed much more vigorous, much more outgoing.

But then he hadn't lost a clone-son, he hadn't survived an unprecedented Engine breakdown that could have killed us all. And he's been using wayhighs.

Julia did not like what this foretold.

Bobby Gessner and Marji Koczan had been taking core samples of the hardened surface of the plaza just underneath the layer of ivy-grass.

"We've got a preliminary reading on the composition of the plaza," Koczan announced. She pulled a printout from the field kit's computer. It was the results of a series of electronically induced seismic soundings.

"First of all," she said, "it's a much more compacted version of the surrounding field of bones. Not much of a surprise there."

"But," Bobby Gessner added excitedly, "the scans show that there are three distinct layers of debris under us and between each layer is strata of lighter material."