The Engines of Dawn Read Free

didn't want to be disturbed.
    "Now what?" he wondered aloud. He could just leave the bear in front of her dorm room, where she would find it whenever she got back from wherever she was. But that wouldn't do. Just because he'd had a dismal day didn't mean that he had to make it dismal for someone else.
    But he had to do something.
    To Ben's left, just a few yards away, the transit portal suddenly came alive with bluish light Almost instantly, two figures fell from the portal's assembly ring and came crashing to the floor, sputtering with laughter.
    These were friends of his, students he'd bonded with when they met at the beginning of the university's tour three years ago. One was George Clock, a gregarious ash-blond young man who used to be a geography major, specializing in satellite mapping techniques. The other boy was Jim Vees. Vees, a black American, had been an astronomy student until the Ennui-or something-got to him and he dropped out of his studies. He slept a lot, now. These were the Bombardiers. Only Tommy Rosales was missing at the moment.
    Since George and Jim had bombed out of their programs, all they seemed to do was play as much as possible. Transit-hopping was one such form of recreation on the ship. Students often transit-hopped in an attempt to get high off the strange euphoric tingle that occurred when a person's molecules were stripped for transport over the ship's network of optical cables, then reassembled again. That's what these two had been doing. Hopping.
    Ben stood above the two laughing Bombardiers with the dead bear in his arms. Clock pointed to the animal. "I'll bet this comes with a real good story," he said. He hadn't yet seen that the animal was lifeless.
    "Believe it or not," Ben said, "an Avatka gave this to me a few moments ago. He found it right here, in front of my door."
    "An Avatka? Here in Babbitt Hall?" Clock asked, climbing to his feet.
    "Say, that animal looks dead," Jim Vees said. He was slower getting to his feet.
    "It is dead," Ben said.
    "Did the Avatka kill it?" Vees asked.
    "I don't know," Ben said. "He said it was dead when he found it."
    "Whose animal is it?" Vees asked, softly caressing its fur.
    "It belongs to someone named Julia Waxwing, over in Cowden Hall. She's not answering her com and she's blocked all forward paging. Ever hear of her?"
    The two dropouts shrugged and shook their heads.
    Clock then said, "You know, she could be in the student commons, in the student media lounge with everybody else."
    "Let's transit there," Vees said, always looking for an excuse to transit.
    "What's going on at the commons?" Ben asked.
    Vees smirked. "President Porter is going to release the contents of the last data bullet we snagged, the one we got right before we jumped into trans-space a couple of weeks ago."
    "What's so important about that bullet?" Ben asked.
    "Inside sources say that another ship exploded," Clock said. "A really big one this time. The bullet has all the information on it, but the administration's been debating whether to share the fully decompressed data with the rest of us. Maybe they think we'll riot if we get the whole story."
    "What ship was it?" Ben asked.
    "The Annette Haven, outward bound to Ross 154," Clock said. "At least that's the rumor. It's got the Grays worried."
    Ben wasn't familiar with the Annette Haven. There were so many Engine-driven ships now in service that it was impossible to keep track of them all-freighters, people carriers, cargo vessels of all shapes and sizes, to say nothing of H.C. exploratory craft looking for new worlds to add to the Alley.
    However, space travel had always been hazardous and ships every now and then still succumbed to systems failures, or even the unseen microparticle that would core a spaceship in a heartbeat. Disasters in space happened to humans and Enamorati alike.
    "Someone at the student newspaper checked the H.C. manifest of ships in our data banks," Clock went on. "The Haven was a passenger liner. Big.