The Engines of Dawn (4 page)

Ben's area of expertise, which he had studied at the University of Fresno-by-the-Sea and finished on board Eos, was in the field of data-bullet fractal compaction technology. In fact, he had come up with entirely new mathematics for fractal compression which made it easier to compress data to nanometer widths, increasing their lightness and speed. This same technology was also used in the operation of transit portals, making them much more efficient. One unexpected by-product of the new system was a very strange and as yet unexplainable euphoria.

This rush of the portal's energies was the first sensation of pleasure Ben had had all day.

The portal delivered him and the bear to the main reception area of the physics department. However, when the portal's sensational energies dissipated, he was met by harsh fire alarms and spinning red and yellow emergency lights.

Still carrying the bear, Ben raced through the reception area, stepping into an opposite hallway that led to the various physics labs.

He practically collided with Eve Silbarton and two of her research assistants as they were rushing out.

"Whoa!"
Ben said, backing off.

Dr. Evelyn Silbarton stood five feet one and wore her black hair pulled behind her head in a girlish ponytail. She was sixty-one, but looked thirteen, a product of fierce anti-aging programs in her youth.

"Get back!" she shouted, pushing him out of the hallway.

The two research assistants-Brad Navarro and Peg Thiering- were in retreat right beside her. They were Dr. Silbarton's top grad students, and all three were frightened at what they had left behind them in one of the labs.

Shouting above the fire alarms, Dr. Silbarton said, "It's a disassembler! Someone turned loose a disassembler in the alpha lab when we weren't looking! It's spreading fast!"

"What?" Ben asked, not sure if he had heard correctly.

"Campus security's on their way, and so are the fire department and people from the physical plant!" she shouted.

"It's
that
bad?"

"It's
that
bad!" she said.

Disassemblers were the rarest of weapons and historically one of the most feared. To Ben's knowledge, the only known molecular disassemblers were supposed to be stashed in an arsenal of forbidden weapons somewhere deep inside an icy Pluto vault back in the Sol system. What was one doing here?

Several campus-security individuals quickly appeared at the opposite end of the hallway, having taken a different transit portal to the physics wing.

Because of the portals, there wasn't a place in the ship that could not be reached in less than four seconds. But four seconds in the life of a disassembler was a virtual lifetime of gorging and doing all sorts of damage to anything in its way.

The alpha lab, where the physics department did most of its grant work for the H.C. Science Council-multimillion-dollar grants were the mainstay of most universities-was presently dissolving in a cloud of sparkling gray mist. Ben watched as the mist stuck a deadly tentacle into the outer hallway, and Eve pulled him and his bear back. Molecules hissed and disappeared in nuclear fury. Structural supports in the floor and the ceiling began vaporizing as the cloud grew and grew.

At the opposite end of the corridor, a transit portal spouted several fire personnel who carried both compressed water packs and chemical foam packs. They saw instantly that there was little in their arsenal that could stop what they saw growing before them. Tiny iridescent sparkles danced in the air of the corridor, looking for something to destroy.

"Evacuate the floor!"
shouted the fire chief.
"There's nothing you can do here!"

The mist emerging from the wall of the alpha lab wasn't so thick that Ben couldn't see through it. Beyond it, very little remained of the lab-floor, ceiling, everything was gone.

Ben tried to recall how far the physics department was from Eos's outer hull. A hull breach in regular space would be bad enough. A breach while they were in trans-space would cause them to end up like the
Annette Haven.

"How did this happen?" Ben asked.

Peg Thiering responded. "We don't know. We were in the beta lab when the alarm went off. Brad opened the door and almost walked right into it!"

"Was anybody in the lab when it happened?" Ben asked.

"No," Thiering said. "The place was deserted. Even the secretaries had gone home."

Ben watched. The police and fire crew at the other end of the hallway watched. There was nothing they could do
but
watch.

Some of the other fire crew had gone to the levels immediately above and immediately below the physics department to evacuate them. But the rest watched the coiling, roiling, voracious gas eat away at all it encountered.

To their relief, however, the deadly mist seemed to expend itself, easing back its ravenous advance. Moments later, it had ceased growing entirely and had begun to dissipate.

No one approached the area for a good five minutes, waiting for the crackling of disassembled molecules to die down completely. When this happened, everybody crept in for a closer look.

The mist had taken an enormous, completely spherical bite out of the alpha lab, taking with it part of the floor above and the floor below it.

"Wow," Brad Navarro said. "That's a
real
nasty weapon."

Clusters of pipes, bundles of wires, and packed optical fibers that were once hidden in the floors were now exposed and neatly severed. Water gushed, electricity sparkled, and gases bound for the chemistry labs on the floor below hissed into the air uncontrollably.

On the floor below in the chemistry department, several people were gazing up, just as startled as their colleagues in the physics department.

On the floor above them, only one person had witnessed the event. She was a slender, attractive young woman with commanding brown eyes quite unlike anything Benjamin had ever seen before.

The young woman looked directly at Ben from up above. She pointed to the animal in Ben's arms. "Is that my bear?"

Ben could only read her lips, since the fire alarms were still clamoring about mem, but he understood.

He had just located the elusive Julia Waxwing.

5

Julia Waxwing, a mixed descendant of Apache and Zuni Indians from distant Earth, had almost vanished. She had almost been swept into the arms of Death-like a titmouse taken in the claws of an Arizona sparrowhawk.

The twenty-three-year-old archaeology student had escaped that fate. But the incident with the disassembler did remind her how her grandfather, Stan Chasing, had once described the death of a human being: a fading from human memory, with nothing to show that he or she had ever walked the Earth.

Julia understood the manifold perils of space. Ships blew up, colonies died out, explorers soared into the abject blackness of the unexplored Alley, never to be seen or heard of again. But a
man-made
catastrophe was something no one should have to put up with. That was just bad manners, totally unbecoming of the dignity of
Homo interstellaris.

However, the strange silver fog that took out nearly all of the physics department below as well as part of the archaeology department above was no longer of interest to her. Her little bear, a going-away present from her family, had been her only link to that familiar world. Now that link had been destroyed.

As the ship's crisis-control people surveyed the damage done by the weapon's bite, interviewing those who had witnessed the event, Julia descended into grief. She hugged the body of Jingle Bear where she sat next to the corridor wall in the physics department.

The young man who had brought the bear to her stood by, as if not knowing what else to do.

"Listen, I'm sorry about your bear," the young man said to her.

His back to the wall, he slid down beside her. "I tried looking for you in your dorm, but your pager was switched off and nobody knew where to find you."

An intentionally disengaged com/pager was, theoretically, a university misdemeanor. The com/pagers in the chevrons on the collars of everyone's tunic were
supposed
to be turned on at all times. This was for cases of emergency where university officials might need to know where their three thousand wards were.

But Julia honored her American background by defying authorities in minor, but annoying ways, and she had taken some of that with her when she came to Eos University two years ago in order to study with the famous Albert Holcombe. This was to be Professor Holcombe's last Alley circuit and Julia couldn't pass up the professional opportunity of studying under so famous a scholar. The death of Jingle Bear, however, had taken some of the wind out of her sails, leaving her demoralized.

"My name's Ben," the boy with the ponytail said. "I teach in the physics department. Or what's left of it, anyway."

"I'm Julia," she said softly, cradling her bear. She did like his smile. And his eyes. They hinted of intelligence and the possibilities of great mischief. He seemed more like a jock than a physics teacher.

"I'm a lecturer," he said, as if feeling the need to qualify his last remark. Or perhaps just to make conversation.

"I'm just a research assistant," she said. "It pays my way." Ben nodded.

People kept arriving to assess the damage, the Grays of the administration as well as campus security, some of whom were armed with the ship's only weapons-crowd-control stunners.

Off to their right, a transit portal glowed and a major Gray appeared in the iridescent ring. Julia recognized the head of campus security, Lieutenant Theodore Fontenot. He sported a black mustache of military smartness, and his snappy gray tunic had nary a wrinkle or crease. He was accompanied by an assistant with a shouldercam already sweeping the area. The story was that Lieutenant Fontenot was a lineal descendant of Ixion Smith himself- Smith and his eleventh wife. Mom and Dad often sent their kids to Eos University
because
of Mr. Fontenot's pedigree. They knew Bobby and Suzie would be safe in his care.

"This should be interesting," Ben whispered, also seeing the lieutenant appear on the scene.

"Why?" she whispered back.

"That woman there?"

"Yes?"

"That's Eve Silbarton," Ben said. "She was my advisor on my dissertation."

"So?"

Ben looked at her. "So, Fontenot is supposed to have had a 'thing' with Dr. Silbarton some time ago. She hates him now."

They watched Mr. Fontenot survey the damage. Eve Silbarton stood beside him, arms crossed.

"Do you have any idea what happened here?" Mr. Fontenot asked.

Silbarton gave her account, mentioning specifically how the work seemed to be that of an outlawed disassembler. Her two graduate students then gave their account of what happened. Meanwhile, Fontenot's assistant with the shouldercam diligently took everything in. The camera, to Julia, looked like a parrot on the shoulder of a pirate.

Fontenot then glanced down at Julia and Ben on the floor. He pointed to the bear in Julia's arms.

"Is that animal dead or alive?" the lieutenant asked.

"He's dead," Julia told him.

Fontenot indicated the spherical cavity that used to be the physics alpha lab. "Did he die in this accident?"

"I found him dead in my dormitory," Ben said. "I was bringing it to her. Actually, that's not entirely true. Eve called me and-"

"What is your name?"

"Benjamin Bennett," Ben said. "I'm a-"

"And what's your business here?" Fontenot said, interrupting.

Ben rose to his feet with surprising agility: he
was
a jock. "What do you mean 'what's my business here"? I
work
here."

Fontenot seemed unimpressed. He stared down at Julia. "And who are you? What are you doing here?"

Ben moved closer to Fontenot. "Hey, man, what the hell kind of question is that?"

"Ben-" Eve Silbarton said, rushing over.

Julia watched and said nothing.

"She's in the archaeology department. Up there," Ben said heatedly, indicating the offices of the archaeology department visible through the eight-foot hole in the ceiling.

Lieutenant Fontenot glared at Ben. "Sit down and cool off, son. I'm just asking questions."

Ben relaxed, then sat back down beside Julia.

Fontenot again addressed Dr. Silbarton. "You said you thought this was the work of a disassembler. What made you think that?"

"I've worked with them before," Eve Silbarton said.

"Really?" Fontenot seemed truly surprised.

"Yes," Silbarton said. "I was a research technician at Europa DuPont for three years."

"They gave a common
tech
security clearance to work with disassemblers?" Fontenot asked.

"Stranger things have happened, Ted," Silbarton responded.

"Hmm," he said, deep in thought. "Was someone working on a matter disassembler in the lab?"

"If they were," Eve said, "they would have been breaking about twelve laws, all of which are felonies."

"They're probably dead, too," Ben added.

"There's that," Eve acknowledged.

"We're in the process of doing a head count now through the computers," Fontenot told them. "Did the lab contain any kind of project or experiment that could have
resembled
a matter disassembler?"

Dr. Silbarton shook her head. "We have nothing in any of our five labs that even comes close. Dr. Harlin wouldn't sign on with a project that could cause this much damage, or any damage for that matter."

"Tell me again what
you
were doing when this happened," Fontenot queried.

"My students and I were in the beta lab checking the results of some of the work we did yesterday on our Casimir field separator.

We had propped the separator, but its energy levels were well below the start-up phase. Then the alarms went off."

"This 'Casimir field separator,'" the lieutenant said. "Could it have done this?" He waved a hand at the damaged lab.