The Engines of Dawn by Paul Cook Page A

the student newspaper was a man in his sixties named Kevin Dobbs. He had been present when Julia and Ben walked in, and throughout their interview he merely puffed away at a Red Apple cigarette, Jeannie Borland's brand, saying nothing.
    But the senior student editor, a woman named Elise Rutenbeck, and her top reporter, Mark Innella, were all too taken with the story. Their eyes lit up when they sensed that blood could be spilt with the Auditors and quite possibly the administration.
    It was at this juncture that Dr. Dobbs spoke up. "Of course this is all anecdotal. We can report it as eyewitness accounts, but we've got to have hard evidence, something corroborative."
    "You should have taken a shouldercam in with you," said Mark Innella, a rail-thin boy with ferretlike features. "Then we could have really nailed them. It's about time somebody whittled the Auditors down to size."
    Elise Rutenbeck was a heavyset young woman whose temperament was much less incendiary than Innella's-which was probably why she was editor and Innella wasn't. "You said you didn't get close to the window to this 'dynamo' room."
    "We didn't have to," Ben said. "There was blood everywhere. On the walls, the floor. And we saw at least a half-dozen bodies on the floor."
    Julia nodded at this. "All of the Auditors were there, gathered at the window. It must have just happened."
    "Do you know how the Enamorati were killed?" Innella asked.
    "The bodies looked as if they were hacked up. But the dynamo itself, or whatever it was, was scorched and burned."
    "But the Enamorati were hacked up?" Rutenbeck asked.
    "That's what it looked like to me," Ben said. "To us, I mean."
    "Perhaps this fire in the dynamo room," Dr. Dobbs said, "was part of our Engine malfunction and the Enamorati in the room were killed by it."
    "But that was a few days ago," Julia said. "This looked like it happened a few hours ago."
    "Yes, but," Dobbs observed, "there is the possibility that the aliens you saw today were killed by some factor relating to the Engine malfunction. A part could have been blown loose, anything might have happened to them."
    "Well, something happened in there," Ben said.
    Rutenbeck turned to her faculty advisor. "Dr. Dobbs, look what we've got. We had our Engine breakdown, a disassembler weapon went off in the ship, and now we've got an eyewitness account of some kind of slaughter in an engineering room visible from the Auditor's Inner Temple. That's a hell of a story."
    "And my dead bear," Julia added. "Don't forget that."
    "And a dead polar bear," Rutenbeck acknowledged.
    "And nothing to link them conclusively," Dobbs said.
    "Connected or not, this should go out in tomorrow's paper," Mark Innella said.
    "Only what Ben and Julia have seen themselves," Dr. Dobbs said. "To say they are connected is pure conjecture."
    "But we could suggest a connection in a student editorial," Rutenbeck offered. "It would be just my opinion."
    "If you do," Dobbs said, "you'll call down the wrath of every Gray in the university. Remember, we exist at the behest of the university charter. In campus struggles on Earth, the journalism department is the first to be purged. On Eos, 'purging' could mean something altogether different. I'd watch it, if I were you."
    "But these two people have been in there!" Innella insisted. "At the very least we can report that."
    In the background, various students were at their design boards working on the next issue of The Alley Citizen. Layout, typesetting, ink chemistry, multimedia lithography, even papermaking were required of all journalism majors. Julia had never given any thought as to how the student newspaper was put together-or how fragile its existence was in the eyes of the administration. Now she knew.
    "Even if it is the truth," Dobbs said in a nimbus of smoke, "it'll cause trouble. You might want to consider the real possibility that they might disband the newspaper if not the entire department."
    "It's worth the stretch," Innella