The Engines of Dawn (33 page)

However, Eve quickly discovered that this particular tunnel was occupied.

She came across two students, a male and a female, bundled against the cold, working over various machines. What they were doing, Eve couldn't quite tell.

Trailing wires over her shoulder, Eve appeared at the lock and found the two students sitting in the semidarkness with laptop computers connected to what looked like a BennettCorp data-bullet compression unit. Several containment cubes, each holding a suspended microparticle data bullet, lay stacked to one side. The two students were making queue-ready, and quite illegal, data bullets.

"What are you doing here?" Eve asked.

They might have asked
her
that, but she had more rank than they did. "Well, uh," started the young woman.

Eve squirmed into the tunnel as Dr. Harlin came in behind her.

"Eve, what's holding us up?" he asked. He then caught sight of the two. "Oh, I see."

The two students sagged as
if
they were balloons with the air just let out of them.

"I'm Elise," the young woman said. "This is Mark. We're the student newspaper. We were putting together the next issue. Do you want to see our IDs?"

The two conspirators were surrendering, finally, after four days of being hounded by campus security. A small food unit lay off to one side. What they were doing for bathroom facilities, Eve didn't want to know.

"That's all right," Eve said, stopping them as they rummaged in their tunic pockets for their ID cards. Eve pointed to the data-bullet compression unit "What are you doing with that?"

"We're making data bullets of the student newspaper. Or at least the Alley edition of it," Elise told her. "Mr. Rausch said that he would send them out as soon as we could get them made."

"Does the captain know that you and Mr. Rausch are doing this?" she asked.

"I don't know," Rutenbeck admitted. "Probably not."

"Why are you doing it in here?" Dr. Harlin asked.

"It's the only place we could think of where campus security wouldn't look," Rutenbeck admitted. "We've had to relocate five times now. They've already shut down the journalism department and they've taken Kevin Dobbs into custody. Is it true that they're taking over the ship?"

"That appears to be the case," Silbarton said.

"You aren't going to report us then?" Rutenbeck asked.

"No," Eve said. "We're hiding, too. But you will have to find another place to do your newspaper. We've got to have these tunnels free."

The prospect of not going to jail was immensely more acceptable to the two students than having to relocate. That, they would happily do.

"Are data bullets are going out now?" Dr. Harlin asked them from inside his arctic parka.

"Every fifteen minutes," Rutenbeck told them. "The Human Community is going to get an earful in a few hours. The whole truth and nothing but the truth."

One of the graduate students behind Dr. Harlin in the tunnel shaft asked, "Using the rail launcher to send unscheduled data bullets takes a lot of power, Dr. Silbarton. Will we have enough for our units?"

"We should," she said. "But power to the rail guns will go offline once we get started."

"Where are we going?" Mark Innella asked hopefully.

"You
are going somewhere else," Eve told them. "And wherever it is, you will be sure not to mention the fact that you saw us in
here.
Got that?"

"Yes, ma'am," they said.

George Clock gripped the controls of the lifepod as it glided to the planet's surface. The one engine disabled by the axe was causing some drag -- a cowling more than likely was exposed -- and it took all the physical strength Clock had just to keep the pod's glide path aimed at the right continent.

From what little they could see from the pod's windows, the place they chose to land was currently suffering the rage of a massive thunderstorm. However, Clock had picked up a distress signal about three hundred miles to the east of them and he was using that as a homing beacon.

In the copilot's seat, Ben fiddled with the receiver, getting a better fix on the signal. "Looks like there's enough electricity in the air to fry everything in sight. Radio traffic is impossible."

"Are we near one of the gondolas?" Tommy Rosales asked.

"That's probably where the signal is coming from," Ben said.

"But it's a
distress
signal," Rosales pointed out.
"We're
in distress, too. Don't you think we should go to a gondola that
isn 't
in distress?"

"It's a little late for that," Clock said, wrestling the controls. "One of the comsats will relay the signal to Eos, if they aren't already receiving it. They can send down a gondola to get us any time after that."

"It won't matter if you turn us into wreckage," Rosales quipped.

"Eat my shorts," said Clock.

The storm seemed to be moving north-northwest of the beacon's signal. Ben gave George instructions to bank farther to the north of their glide path, and took them in the opposite direction of the storm.

However, within minutes the signal suddenly got stronger and they sighted land through an unexpected break in the clouds.

"Land, ho!" Clock announced. "Signal source dead ahead."

" 'Dead,'" Rosales said. "Don't like that word."

The wide front windows of the pod showed them a landscape covered in green for miles in all directions. Ben could also make out the lines of ancient highways and the fractured ruins of a civilization.

"Cities," Rosales said. "Look, buildings!"

"Sit down," Clock admonished. "And strap yourselves in!"

Clock eased the pod down and for the first time they could make out the Mounds. Every ten or twenty miles in every direction were huge masses covered in deep greenish growth of some kind.

"Hey," Tommy Rosales asked, pointing through the window. "What's that?"

Clock leveled off the pod and extended the air brakes. All they needed now was a stretch of flat land near the beacon where they could enter into a hover mode and set down. Or lumber down.

"Isn't that a gondola?" Rosales asked.

They caught sight of what appeared to be a crumpled gondola glinting in the afternoon sun. The remains of the gondola were horribly battered, now smoldering and spitting fire, having been knocked out of the sky.

"Can't see any bodies," Clock said.

"The distress signal wasn't coming from there," Ben said, playing with the directional finder on the console.

"Maybe they got out," Rosales speculated.

"Those structures a mile off," Clock said. "They could be there. Dead ahead."

"That word again," Rosales said.

"That's the signal source," Ben said. "Put the pod down as close as you can to it and let's take a look."

What appeared to be an artificial "plaza" with a pyramid-shaped hill in the center of it rose before them. George Clock slowed the lifepod into a hover, using all the power the lifepod had left in it for the antigravity plates underneath.

"It's going to be rocky!" Clock said.

The lifepod came down on the surface of the "plaza" a dozen yards away from the Mound, landing gear sinking up to its hull. But they had landed in one piece and the storm seemed to be heading off to the west, to the far side of the sky.

39

The last of Holcombe's archaeology students had filed into the Mound's interior, carefully crowding along the ledge that circumscribed the enshrined object before them. The object had a deep blue sheen with traces of green here and there. It could have been made of stone. It was hard to tell. It could just as easily have been ossified chitin or skin or shell.

"What
is
it?" a student behind Julia asked in a whisper.

The floating lanterns provided sufficient light for them, but they still probed it with their flashlights.

"A Sphinx, maybe," Marji Koczan said in a low voice.

"It's organic," someone then said. "And it's dead now."

"Maybe
this
was the biggest creature on the planet," another student said. "The people here might have worshipped them!"

"No," insisted another. "This thing's made out of rock. Look at it! It's solid!"

Professor Holcombe remained silent through all of this.

Bobby Gessner, who had been attending the field kit, returned to the chamber very excited. "The storm's over!" he announced. "I think it's safe to go outside!" Then the Ainge boy caught sight of the Mound's treasure. His beam went up like a brilliant rapier. "And we have got to tell someone about this."

Professor Holcombe slowly sat down on the ledge, his boots extending just a few inches over the edge. "I don't think we're going anywhere for a while," he told them.

At the bottom of the abyss, they discovered, were more bones of Kiilmistians, highly ossified, covered with aeons of dust. Julia wondered if these were the remains of sacrifices.

Some of the students, unsettled by the artifact's eeriness, turned and headed outside. Julia remained with Dr. Holcombe, who seemed profoundly depressed. He sat on the ledge as if all his strength, perhaps even the will to live, had left him.

Holcombe closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall. He said, "I'd like to stay here for the rest of my life."

"What?" Julia asked, not quite understanding. Marji Koczan and several other students looked on.

"The wayhigh," he said. "It must be wearing off. I'm coming back to the real world and I don't like what I see there."

Even the sunny blue of his eyes seemed to be fading, like the onset of night.

"He's been on wayhighs?" Marji Koczan whispered to Julia.

"For years," Julia said.

Holcombe dreamily pondered the artifact as several students crouched close by. He said, "Children, try to imagine a predator that has learned to disguise himself as something benign or better yet beneficial to its prey. He tells you he's good for you, he's your friend. Then he gobbles you. Or perhaps he doesn't gobble. Perhaps he just… sips. He's even elegant about it, civilized. The next thing you know, you're working your way through his intestinal tract, making him strong, happy… fulfilling his destiny, confirming your fate."

Holcombe held them enthralled. "What do you think of that, boys and girls?"

"I don't understand," Julia said, probably speaking for them all.

He smiled weakly. "Your friend Benjamin … he'd know what I'm talking about."

"He would?" she asked.

Holcombe nodded. The hovering lanterns on the ledge gave a spectral glow to the artifact. He stared at it. "I guess I could rephrase the question and ask, 'When is a predator not a predator?' " he said.

No one knew what to say.

"When?" Julia asked.

And he answered: "When he charms you to sleep through your life as he consumes you. The art of it, though, is that he gives you a feeling of contentment… that this is the natural order of things; that he is good for you … until you're bone-dry and as dead as you're ever going to get. Sort of like the Church."

A couple of students from Ainge families gasped at the blasphemous insinuation.

Holcombe looked at Julia. "You knew that I had been given a writ of excommunication when I was young."

Julia nodded. "It was a rumor. Nobody knew for sure."

"Do you know
why I
got excommunicated?" he asked.

Julia shook her head. A dozen dimly illuminated faces leaned in.

"When I was in college, three friends of mine and I witnessed an Engine-insertion ceremony. The whole thing, from beginning to end, and the Enamorati had no idea that we were there."

"You
saw
an insertion ceremony?" Julia asked. "When?"

"Fifty years ago," Holcombe said. "My friends were inside the shell of
Bountiful Bound
in orbit above Tau Ceti 4. We had gotten permission to study its architecture for a class project. The
Bountiful
was the ship that brought Ixion Smith and his followers to Tau Ceti 4 two hundred years ago.

"But we had forgotten to tell anybody
when
we were going to study it. We didn't think it was important. So we left the alpha moon by shuttle, pulled into orbit, and docked with the
Bountiful,
whose orbit had it on the night side of the planet. As it turned out, the Enamorati had decided to move the
Seka
also to the dark side and they ended up about two hundred miles behind the orbit of
Bountiful Bound."

"I thought they cleared space for thousands of miles before Enamorati ceremonies," Julia said.

"Usually," Holcombe said. "But this time the Enamorati made a last-minute change and decided to tow the
Seka
to the dark side, where it met the Engine convoy."

"And you saw it?" Julia said.

"All of it. The Enamorati pulled the new Engine from the cargo ferry. We saw them insert it into the
Seka.
It took just under three hours and we watched it through powered binoculars from inside what was left of the
Bountiful Bound."

"How did they catch you?" Julia asked.

"They didn't."

"Then who did?" Julia asked.

"My roommate confessed. The four of us were then pulled through a secret heresy court where they decided not to tell the Enamorati High Council. Instead, the Very Highest Auditor, the number one man himself, had me excommunicated because I was the oldest and should have known better. The other three were sent to Ross 244 3, which is almost all desert and the part that isn't is all swamps. As far as I know, they're still there."

One of the female Ainge students asked, her voice filled with awe, "So you actually
spoke
with the Very Highest Auditor?"

"Had to," Holcombe said. "He was my father. And not only was I kicked out of the Church, I was kicked out of my
family.
He never spoke to me again."

"But you went on to college," Julia said. "You did well."

"I had a dozen relatives who hated my dad, hated the Ainge, and helped me out, just to spite him. In fact, my mother's youngest brother was a close friend of Jack Killian.
He
was excommunicated, too. But that was before my time."