The Engines of Dawn Read Free Page A

It could transport at least nine hundred humans at a time. It had an Enamorati crew of twenty. If the Engine blew, there'd be nothing left but a trans-space ripple."
    Both the Ainge and the Enamorati happened to believe that trans-space was the actual body of God, and that their duty was to lead pilgrims through it. Most of the H.C. didn't see it that way, but used the Engine-run ships anyway. Trans-space, however, did act like the Old Testament Jehovah and saw fit to remind humans and Enamorati alike of the dangers of space travel. Fiction had made space travel seem effortless, even safe. But the truth was that faster-than-light travel was just as hazardous as slower-than-light travel, and many thousands of lives had been lost in the last two and a half centuries of space travel. Many more would be lost in the future.
    "How many Ainge Auditors were on the ship?" Ben asked.
    Clock laughed. "The Haven probably didn't have more than one or two. It was just a liner."
    "Darn the luck," Jim Vees said soberly, his transit high having worn off. "Our Auditors should be so lucky."
    There was no love lost between Jim Vees and the Ainge. Though Jim had come from Earth, part of his family had converted to the Ainge religion and had spent much of their efforts trying to get the rest of the family to join. The Ainge, because of their relationship to the Enamorati, represented the fastest-growing religion in the H.C. But fifty million followers of Ixion Smith were not enough reason for Jim Vees to check his brain at the door.
    "But get this," George Clock continued. "The student newspaper says that one of our archaeology professors had a clone-son on the Annette Haven. Somebody famous, but they won't say who. Maybe Porter is going to tell us."
    "An archaeology professor?" Ben asked.
    "That's what they're saying," Clock affirmed.
    Ben stepped back to the wall and called up the student directory once again. He came up with JULIA WAXWING, then asked for any kind of declared MAJOR.
    On the screen appeared the word ARCHAEOLOGY.
    "Figures," Ben said.

3
     
     
    Confirmation of the space death of the Annette Haven spread quickly through the halls of Eos University. There were no specifics. The data bullet had to travel light-the lighter, the faster. Undoubtedly, when Eos arrived at their next port of call, specifics regarding the passenger manifest and details of the cause of the ship's destruction would be much better known.
    To Albert Holcombe, Regents Professor and chair of the archaeology department, the news was particularly devastating. As he had already shared with his colleagues, the clone of his second son, Joshua, a boy named Seth, had been on the Annette Haven.
    Not that progeny mattered much to Albert Holcombe. The human race now numbered around ten billion, and a billion of those were clones, or the clones of clones. But Seth, at least as Holcombe remembered him, seemed to be the only Holcombe to have any life left in him, any esprit, joie de vivre. Even when Seth was a youngster on Tau Ceti 4, he would run circles around the fuddy-duddies of the Holcombe camp. It was no surprise to Holcombe when the boy became a StratoCaster, one of the BronzeAngel sky-runners, in fact. Holcombe always glowed with pride, thinking that a member of his family had pursued a disreputable career and actually made something of himself. But now the boy was dead-nothing more than blasted atoms in the indescribable vacuities of trans-space.
    Unfortunately, Eos University was more than one hundred light-years from the Sol system at its farthest point on its four-year Alley tour. Holcombe didn't imagine that either Alex Cleddman-Eos's pilot-or any of the Grays would turn the university around just to accommodate his grief. In fact, the first thing that Captain Cleddman had announced at the hastily convened University Council meeting was that the ship would be continuing on its course to its next port of call. Holcombe merely nodded, accepting the grim ways of