The Engines of Dawn by Paul Cook Page B

said.
    "Incoming!" one of the students announced.
    A chime went off and the large wall screen in The Alley Citizen's office came alive. The president of the university, Nolan Porter, appeared, and he did not look at all happy.
    "Faculty and students. I have an important announcement to make. Until further notice, all classes are hereby canceled and students are restricted to their dorm rooms. Faculty and staff are to stay in their apartments. All classrooms, laboratories, and workstations are closed. This includes the student newspaper and the student radio station. I am declaring a state of emergency, and emergency bylaws are now in effect. If you are not familiar with those, consult your student handbook. Thank you for your attention."
    "Well, shit," said an undergraduate at her editing board.
    "Looks like something did happen back there," Dr. Dobbs said. He stubbed out his cigarette.
    "Maybe it's spilling over into the ship," Ben said aside to Julia. "The fighting among the Enamorati, I mean."
    At that juncture, a bookish-looking student appeared at the door. Julia had never seen the young man before this.
    "This is Scott Nessa," Dr. Dobbs told them. "He's the student manager at KEOS. I'll bet he has something wonderful to tell us."
    Nessa walked over to Dobbs's desk and helped himself to an illicit cigarette, which he lit expertly. "You should see it. Campus security is pulling our broadcasting equipment."
    "What?" Dobbs said.
    "They're pulling it right out of the wall," Nessa said. "They took our keys, music tiles, computer files. Everything."
    "Can they do that?" Ben asked.
    "Apparently," Scott Nessa said.
    Dr. Dobbs stood up, pocketed his cigarettes, and said, "That means that we're next. All right, boys and girls. We're going samizdat. You know the drill."
    " 'Samizdat'?" Ben asked. "What the hell is that?"
    "You're going to find out," Dobbs said.
     
     

14
     
     
    Whatever had transpired in the Enamorati "dynamo" room, it hadn't spilled over to the rest of the ship. President Porter's campus-wide shutdown might have been a response to the rumors of an Enamorati revolt, but for Ben there was no way of knowing what the Enamorati were up to. At the very least, the Auditors weren't talking.
    Also part of the campus-wide shutdown was the data-bullet rail-launch system. Although data bullets could be written and compressed and placed in the rail queue for launch, they could not be sent. The rumor mill suggested that President Porter didn't want Mom and Dad to get wind that the Enamorati might be running amok on Eos. A more reasoned approach suggested that Porter thought the university needed a cooling-down period and opted for a "holiday" period … at least until the ship reached the inner planetary system of Kiilmist. Still, what it meant was that no news was going out and none was coming in.
    However, in the communications department, Dr. Dobbs had managed to scatter his journalism students throughout the ship, taking with them what equipment they could. Since all networked computers-and printers had been blocked on President Porter's command, the journalism students had to improvise. They made their own printers as they had been trained to do, and they made their own paper by tapping into the ship's food-processing system in the student commons.
    This was samizdat. In the tradition of the anti-Stalinists in the old Soviet Union, the students published The Alley Citizen in the Eos University equivalent of basements and backrooms, entirely underground. Copies were then delivered on foot and by hand while the editorial staff dismantled the press and moved it to another locale for the next edition. That Kevin Dobbs was a member of the KMA didn't come out until it was all over.
    Ben found a copy of the newly named The Alley Comrade before his door the next day. In it were editorials excoriating the administration Grays for hiding the truth about the Auditors and the Enamorati. The Alley Comrade printed his and Julia's