The Engines of Dawn (37 page)

Ben's com/pager was open and he listened to the traffic between Captain Cleddman in ShipCom with Eve and her team strung along the ship's inner core.

The captain asked,
"How much time until you're ready?"

"Twenty, thirty minutes, tops,"
Eve said.

"We may not have that kind of time,"
responded the captain.

Even deep inside a four-thousand-foot-long ship, Ben could feel the new Engine's pull. The convoy was closing into a matching orbit at eight hundred miles out.

Halfway along the beta spine of Eos, Ben found one of the drive units, manned by a grimy and greasy Cale Murphy. The unit had been molecularly welded to the spine shaft, and next to it was a small computer and communications unit all aglow.

"Glad you could make it, Dr. Bennett," Murphy said. "We need you four doors down. That way. The shaft is unsealed. When you get inside, lock yourself in. You'll find the unit online and the computer set, but we have to coordinate your unit and mine with Eve's. Wait for Eve's signal. Do you understand?"

There was a look of undisguised desperation in the young physics professor's eyes.

"Right," Ben said.

Ben scrambled back the way he came and found the correct shaft seal. Inside was a unit, already attached to the massive alloyed bulkhead but waiting for the proper synchronization commands from Eve's station about a half mile out ahead of him.

Ben put on earphones and got Eve Silbarton on the line.

"Jesus Christ, it's cold in here!" Ben said as soon as he was plugged in.

"Good,"
Eve returned.
"It'll keep you alert. On your screen, Ben, should be a graph with the bar heading to the yellow area."

"I see it," Ben responded, shivering.

"Adjust the calibration carefully until the bar hits the yellow and make sure it doesn't go further than that. My computer can't hold the position and factor in the power exponentials at the same time. You will have to make the adjustments on your own, manually. But that's all you have to do. The program I've just installed should keep us from flying into a thousand pieces."

Ben heard the voices of several of the other members of Eve's team as they worked feverishly to calibrate their units with Eve's station. Some were disgruntled; some were downright scared. Some were even for giving up.

Alone in his tunnel, sitting down against the cold steel of the shaft, Ben knew what was going on and he shouted into his mike: "It's the Ennui! It's the new Engine coming!"

But nobody on Eve's team knew about the treacherous Engines and their effects on the human mind. So Ben told them what he and his friends had learned, telling them not to give in. "We can do this," he said. "We can do it."

Cleddman came on-line.
"We're showing the Enamorati escort at seven thousand eighty-two miles. What's your status?"

"We need more time!"
Eve called out.
"We're processing the trans-space tunnel to the C-graviton separation point and we can't leap across it until the computers match our present real-space location to the transfer's nexus-destination point. And for that, we need much more time."

Dr. Israel Harlin came on-line and said,
"What we really need is a few weapons. Something we can throw at them, keep them at bay
-"

Ben watched his monitor as the calibration graph kept readjusting itself to the calculations Eve was programming into her unit. Pushing a ship nearly a mile long through a nonexistent trans-spatial tube to a theoretical destination point on the other side of the star-sun Kiilmist was going to be
very
tricky….

Then suddenly a new voice came over the com.
"This is the Very High Auditor Joseph Nethercott. In the absence of Lieutenant Theodore Fontenot, I am asking that all students, faculty, staff, and ship's crew stand down immediately. We will be docking with the new Engine in sixty-five minutes and I want this time spent constructively in preparing for Engine insertion.

There is no need to panic. We are still governed by the rule of law."

"Nethercott, you boob,"
Captain Cleddman snarled at his end of the com.
"Haven't you been watching your screens? The Enamorati are out to kill us! They 've been feeding us to their goddamned Engines. The Engines are alien beings, you son of a bitch!"

"What?"
came from Nethercott.

Ben said, "They hypnotize us, robbing our brains one molecule at a time! It's the Ennui! You're probably experiencing it yourself right now."

The Very High Auditor said,
"My children. The day will come when you will see
-"

Nethercott's voice ceased in midsentence. Cutter Rausch or Captain Cleddman-Ben didn't know which-had cut him off.

"Not enough time
-" Eve Silbarton continued to mumble from deep in the bowels of the ship.

And Cleddman asked,
"A question: Will we be able to move if the Engine docks with us?"

"If it is attached, yes,"
Eve said.
"Except that the added mass will throw off our settings and shorten the trans-space leap."

Ben quickly checked to see Eve's primary target. She was shooting for the same orbital position, but on the opposite side of the sun. It didn't take a genius to figure out that with the new Engine attached they would emerge somewhere inside the sun or very close to it. POOF!

Cale Murphy added:
"And we could never outrun an Onesci Engine with the Hollingsdale. Our acceleration would be too slow and if those are warships, they'd shoot us out of the sky like we were ducks or geese."

Ben sat up. "That's it. That's our weapon."

"What?"
someone asked.

And Ben said, "What if we use the Hollingsdale to project a discontinuity point somewhere
behind
the approaching Enamorati convoy? If we can project a microparticle somewhere in space behind the fleet, it just might slow them down with its gravity well or destroy them outright. If the gamma radiation doesn't kill them, it just might suck them in."

"You can't be serious,"
Cale Murphy said, aghast.

"Now
that
I like," came Captain Cleddman's voice.

Then Eve Silbarton came on-line.
"But who's going to operate the Hollingsdale breeder? All qualified personnel are down here
-"

Captain Cleddman said, "/'//
handle it. But I want you to get us out of here the minute your system is ready. Don't wait for my signal. Once you're ready, go. Got that?"

"Yes,"
Eve Silbarton said.
"Got it. Gentlemen, let's get this thing configured so we can go home."

Julia had never been in a riot before.

And it probably could have been fun if so many people hadn't been hurt or killed. The screaming and the punching and the pounding managed to convince campus security that fighting the students wasn't a good idea-particularly when the dorms emptied themselves of students who came into the gondola bay with baseball bats and enough rope to tie their aggressors up.

The Enamorati, however, had taken the worst of it. The Kuulo Kuumottoomaa and his companions were confused-and not a little bit frightened-by the rampaging human beings, and they were set upon before they could raise their deadly swords. The Kuulo died almost instantly when his face was punched in; the other aliens perished when their fragile bones broke under a rugby scrum started by Tommy Rosales. A dozen human males piling onto each of the Enamorati didn't leave much left, other than flexible insectlike armor, which remained intact. Everything inside became mush.

Also among the human casualties was Orem Rood, who had jumped into the fray thinking that his college-days boxing skills would serve him well. They didn't. Somebody put an elbow into Rood's face and the man fell backward, landing on the sword that the Kuulo Kuumottoomaa clutched in a death grip where he lay on the floor.

Julia stood beside George Clock, who had a black eye; Tommy Rosales, who had a torn tunic; and Jim Vees, who seemed unharmed but was bathed in a bright sheen of sweat. She herself had a fistful of hair and part of the scalp taken from Mr. Fontenot's head. But Fontenot himself was nowhere to be seen among the subdued campus-security people. Apparently, he and a number of others had managed to retreat back to the Auditor compound, where, Julia presumed, the Very High Auditor Joseph Nethercott waited to pronounce judgment on them all.

Suddenly, overhead came an authoritative voice.
"This is ShipCom Chief Cutter Rausch. We are preparing to leave orbit and we need everyone in their rooms and at their transit couches, now. Captain Cleddman has evoked the Aniara Charter, taking back control of the ship, and will retain control of the ship until it returns to the H.C., at which time it will be turned over to the regents of the university in Earth orbit. Get to your transit couches now!"

Then the hall screens changed. They had been showing Bobby Gessner's video cartridge results, but now these were taken over with exterior shots of the approaching Enamorati convoy, magnified in the distance.

Marji Koczan, who had a bruised lip, pointed to the screen. "Look!" she said.

The Enamorati had released the new Onesci Engine from its confines inside the tug vessel. The Engine was a bluish gray creature shaped like a giant almond-a
creature,
not a piece of advanced technology-edging toward the ship. It was streamlined, its "legs" trailing from beneath it, waiting for their anchoring posts. And its mouth was an oval almost a hundred feet wide, utterly dark inside, a vacuity whose purpose was only to dram life for miles and miles in all directions around it.

The escort vessels were now backing off.

"I don't think it has any plans on docking with us," George Clock said.

"The thing's going to feed," Tommy Rosales whispered. "Just like the
Annette Haven."

It moved slowly, as if savoring the moment, getting nearer, nearer, nearer….

Then the lights dimmed in the hallway … as if the ship had just lost about two-thirds of its power.

"What's that on the screen?" someone else then asked.

The hall screens ran riot with static, but then came back on-line showing the giant Onesci creature moving through orbital space toward them.

But
behind
the creature and its convoy a wavering whirlpool of distorted light seemed to appear-it was a rend, a
vacuity,
appearing at some distance behind the Enamorati vessels. The phenomenon was only visible by the swirling distortion of the stars behind it.

"I think," Jim Vees said, squinting at the screen, for it was difficult to make out, "that someone's thrown a black hole somewhere behind the fleet. Look!"

The Enamorati fleet seemed to waver in the distorted light of the discontinuity. One by one, the ships started to break up and elongate as the discontinuity's powerful event horizon sucked them in. They exploded violently even before a single molecule was consumed by the black hole. Even then, the gamma radiation of the discontinuity would have fried the Enamorati crew in their ships.

The entire convoy disappeared into the speck of darkly compressed matter.

The Onesci creature began to slow in its advance. It had been too far out ahead of the discontinuity to be pulled apart by its gravity well, but it
was
slowing down. Had the juvenile creature
known
that it was now alone? Had it known for the first time in millions of years another intelligent race had found a way to hold off its kind?

There was no way for the humans to know because the screen suddenly burned white and everyone was knocked to the floor. A massive wave of euphoria swept through the students-a wave similar to that of a transit-portal hop, but magnified a thousandfold.

"Whoa!" Julia said. "What the hell was that?"

The screen came on with the answer: the planet of Kiilmist 5 was gone from view. So was the Onesci. Eos had shifted its position in space by a hundred and eighty million miles-to the other side of the sun.

Quiet Jim Vees found himself lying upon a heavily breathing Jeannie Borland who, looking deep into Vees's dark eyes, said, "Boy, we've got to do that again
real
soon."

"I'd say so," Jim Vees said.

The transit jump Eos University just made had awakened, and magnified, long-lost sensations in all of them. Big time.

The students looked at one another-as undoubtedly everyone else on the ship was doing as well-and quickly began dispersing, by twos, male to female, heading back to the dorms as fast as they could.

And Julia went looking for Ben. The new Silbarton drive, it seemed, had an unusual, unexpected, and
very
delightful side effect.

Epilogue

Ben and Julia did not surface for three days. Nor did most of the students and faculty, and many of the staff. Eos just sat in space until everyone could catch their collective breath. Which was probably a good thing as far as the captain and piloting crew were concerned.

They didn't need anyone underfoot in those historic first hours of the Silbarton drive. Their main interest was to determine how well Eos had made its jaunt to the opposite end of the Kiilmistian system and if the Onesci creature had been able to follow them.

Which, apparently, it hadn't. Whether it had been fried by the radiation of the dissolving black hole or not, they didn't know. When later they crept back to Kiilmist 5, the creature's body could not be found.

What also couldn't be found were the Enamorati of Eos University. Most had apparently fled into space just as the Silbarton drive pushed Eos across the solar system. They were undoubtedly consumed by the young Onesci. But the ranks of the Auditors were decimated by the rioting and, much to his surprise, Lieutenant Fontenot was demoted and put in detention when his apartment was found to be full of boxes and boxes of the illegal Red Apple cigarettes as well as jars containing several thousand wayhighs. Messrs. Wangberg and Sammons saw to that.