“I’m sure you will,” Cleddman said. “But I would much rather have a greater say over how I live and die than I have now. If the problem is with the Engines, then I want to know exactly why. But you’re never going to share that information with us, and that we can no longer tolerate.”

  “Speak for yourself, Alex,” said Dr. DeGroot.

  “I’m speaking for myself and every human being who has died in-transit in the last hundred years. I’m also speaking for you, too. I’m an equal-opportunity pilot. I fly anybody. I just want to arrive in one piece.”

  “The odds of perishing in-transit are still ten million to one,” Dr. DeGroot said. “And I trust the Enamorati and their Engines.”

  A female faculty member from Biochemistry stood up. “Captain, you can’t possibly do this without the approval of the university administration and faculty. We’re a university first, a spaceship second.”

  “The Eos University charter allows me to take control of the ship if or when the vessel is threatened. I’m not invoking that charter now. But, I will if I have to. And if I have to, I want to be ready. This shouldn’t disturb the functions of the university. And, yes, I will consult the administration if or when the time comes for us to break away.”

  “Are we close?” a voice asked from the rear.

  “Not yet,” Cleddman admitted.

  “Then isn’t this a little hasty?” someone else asked. “We don’t know what happened to the Annette Haven. It may have had nothing to do with its Engine.”

  “This has been brewing for quite some time now,” Cleddman told them. “I’m not the only pilot in the H.C. who feels this way.

  But as far as I know, we’re the only ones in a position to test the advances we’ve made so far. And, I might add, if we pull this off, Eos University will be unsurpassed in excellence and fame.”

  “You’re doing this because you don’t like the Enamorati,” Professor DeGroot said.

  “No, I’m doing this because I don’t like to be blown up,” Cleddman said. “And I don’t think you do, either. In any event, when the time comes I will run this through all the proper channels and nobody on the Council will be left out of the debate. But as I said earlier, it’s my job to maintain our safety. This is definitely not a political matter.”

  “Not yet, it isn’t,” grumbled Professor DeGroot.

  With that, the 3D image of the Kuulo winked out. Evidently, the Kuulo had heard all he wanted to hear; so had a number of others.

  The impromptu meeting seemed to be at an end.

  Chapter Four

  In the oval arena of Eos University’s ShipCom center, Cutter Rausch shook his head at the information on the large monitor screen in front of his subordinates. Rausch was a slender, quiet man in his mid-thirties, and calmness had served him well over the years. Chaos and confusion could be everywhere around him, but rarely was the communications chief moved by outside calamities. However, the news of the Annette Haven’s demise had unsettled him deeply. His staff wasn’t taking it well either.

  Their computer, the greatest in the H.C., had massive databases; every book, every journal known to humankind was in storage, and this included all current information on businesses and corporations that was in the public domain. Rausch had found the most up-to-date crew manifest for the Haven.

  “Look at that, Cutter,” observed his second-in-command, Lisa Benn, a fortyish blonde who was frowning at the screen. “The crew all have Ainge names. Turley, Romney, Mullin...”

  Rausch’s third-in-command, dark-haired Maree Zolezzi, saw something else important. “I don’t see any known members of the KMA on the crew. If it’s all Ainge, somebody’s bound to think the KMA blew the ship up.”

  Rausch rubbed his chin as he pondered the list of the ill-fated ship’s crew. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. There are other political factions in the H.C.”

  “But none are as outspoken as the KMA,” Benn said.

  Rausch shook his head. “Even the most radical factions of the KMA would never be this brutal. Even if Jack Killian were still alive, he would never have sanctioned something like this, no matter how many Enamorati might have been on board. He’d lose most of his supporters, including me. We’re just going to have to wait until the final reports come in. In the meantime, let’s just hope the Police Council doesn’t go on a witch-hunt.”

  Maree Zolezzi steepled her fingers before her as she thought at her console. “A ship is going down now about once a year. It just can’t be mechanical.”

  Rausch nodded. “Unfortunately, the energies of trans-space absorb unprotected matter, so there’s no way to know.”

  The other members of Rausch’s crew included three junior officers and an intern from the university. This intern, Clare Kronmeyer, looked more worried than usual. She said, “If the crew and the passengers were entirely Ainge, don’t you think heads are going to roll? I mean, the High Councilor is Ainge and so is most of the H.C. Council. Anybody in the ship corps who isn’t Ainge could be out of work.”

  “Children,” Rausch said. “If Mason Hildebrandt and the High Council want to fire us, they can come all the way out here and get us. The one thing I know for sure is that Alex Cleddman isn’t going to hand the ship over to anybody for any reason.”

  A small row of yellow warning lights appeared along the bottom of one of the monitors on the giant wall before them.

  “Good,” Cutter said, almost relieved. “Something to take our minds off politics for a while.”

  “Unless the ship’s about to blow up,” Lisa Benn muttered.

  “Wouldn’t that be interesting,” Rausch said.

  They set about determining the source for the yellow warning lights.

  ¤

  Ben Bennett walked the halls of Eos University with a dead bear in his arms and trouble on his mind. Friday afternoon and the place seemed unusually quiet. Perhaps there was something to the Ennui. Perhaps it was spreading. Perhaps the little bear in his arms had gotten tired and somehow decided to stop living.

  So what was an Avatka doing in Babbitt Hall?

  Ben went door-to-door through Cowden Hall trying to find this Julia Waxwing person. He did come across several of her friends who recognized Jingle Bear and were sad to see that he had died. But they didn’t know where Julia was. Jingles, Ben learned, was a polar bear from Earth that had been growth-locked in its infancy and gene-engineered to passivity, and had become a pleasant fixture in the dorm. The girls were deeply saddened.

  Ben also learned that the bear was only three years old, so it clearly did not die of old age.

  “Now what?” he muttered, alone at the end of the hallway, having run out of Cowden Hall rooms in which to look for Ms. Waxwing. She was probably on a date, having dinner in the student commons perhaps

  His com/pager chimed out just then. “Go ahead,” he said to the receiver in his collar chevron.

  “Ben, this is Eve Silbarton. How far from a transit portal are you?”

  “About ten feet,” he said, bear in arms. “Why?”

  “Get to Physics as soon as you can!”

  Hugging poor Jingle Bear, Ben walked to the end of the corridor and entered the transit portal. “Physics, alpha lab,” he said aloud to the portal’s computer.

  “Access to Physics, alpha lab, is denied,” the voice said. “May I reroute you to nearest portal that has access to the Physics lab?”

  “Sure,” Ben said, wondering why regular access was blocked. “Why the hell not.”

  An energy tornado swallowed him. He and the dead bear were routed instantly, via fractal compaction, to a transit portal nearest the Physics main lobby and reception desk, a quarter of a mile from Cowden Hall and the other student dorms.

  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 them, but he understood.

  He had just located the elusive Julia Waxwing.

  Chapter Five

  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?”