Free The Engines of Dawn by Paul Cook Page B

rather see floating in space without their helmets."
    "Like who?"
    "People who are sympathetic to the KMA."
    "People like you?"
    "Exactly," Eve said. She lowered her voice and looked around the equipment-filled lab. "And I'm not the only one who feels this way. The captain does and so does Dr. Harlin. In fact, most of the science personnel on the ship have KMA sympathies."
    "So?" Ben said. "They can't persecute you for your political beliefs. That's against more laws than I can count. The Ainge haven't rewritten the Human Constitution."
    "Not yet they haven't. But they're trying," Eve said. "The fact is that they can affect the disposition of grant money for the university. They could dry us up if the political winds shift. And if you keep acting like a fourteen-year-old, they'll really come down on us. And that's what we don't want."
    "So what does KMA stand for?"
    "Forget about that!" she snapped. "Politics is the name of the game and you've got to think and act responsibly if you want to survive."
    "I understand that," Ben said. "But no one can convince me that thirteen Ainge Auditors should have more status on this ship than any other religious group. Why isn't the Newman Center or Hillel or the other student religious groups located right up against the Enamorati compound? They should all be there. Who made the Ainge so special? They had no business being present when you activated the discontinuity reactor. Not one of them has any science or engineering experience."
    "You really are an idiot, aren't you?"
    "Only when I start thinking about things."
    "Well, for now, don't. We can't afford to have campus security breathing down our throats. At least I can't."
    In the middle of Eve's harangue, she had begun going about a security check, making sure the doors were locked and that no one was eavesdropping, at least electronically. She then threw a static cloak around them that would have stymied the best eavesdropping device known. Ben couldn't recall having ever seen Eve this intense before.
    "So what's this really about?" he asked.
    Eve turned to him. "What it's about is that Captain Cleddman doesn't want a new Enamorati Engine installed and he's going to do everything he can to prevent one from reaching us. That's what this is about."
    "You're joking," Ben said.
    "I've never told a joke in my life," Eve said. "The fact is we're almost ready to install our own stardrive system and getting to Kiilmist 5 will buy us the time we'll need to install it and get it working properly. That's why we can't have the heat."
    Ben suddenly saw her in an entirely different light. "Dr. Brenholdt was working on an Alcubierre drive system in the alpha lab. Were you the person who took it out?"
    Silbarton opened a locked door leading to an adjoining room, one that Ben never knew existed. He followed her.
    "Are you out of your mind?" she asked fiercely. "That surprised me much as it did everyone else. In fact, I was worried that the disassembler might come this far and destroy this lab."
    In the center of the smaller room, suspended above an antigrav plate where it could be worked on, was a device that looked as if it might have been the drive shaft taken from an automobile. It was seven feet long, two feet wide at one end, tapering off to just a few inches in width.
    "This is the prototype of your engine?" Ben asked incredulously.
    "It's not the prototype," Silbarton said. "This is the real thing."
    Ben's own area of expertise was in fractal-compression technology. It was a technology that took naturally occurring fractal configurations, particularly in metals at the crystalline levels, and arranged them so that there was very little space between their molecules. This machine, however, was a masterpiece of compaction: Eve's engine, size-wise, was to the Enamorati Engines as a flea was to an elephant.
    "This will power a ship as big as this one?" he asked.
    Eve crouched down and inspected the underside of the floating device. "No. It would