The Engines of Dawn Read Online Free PDF Page A

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