Read The Engines of Dawn for Free Online Page A

sack of shit. And nobody is conspiring against you!"
    "We can start, though," Ben said, surprising even Julia. "If that'll make you feel better."
    Julia punched Ben as hard as she could, but the boy with the ponytail and the mischievous grin merely smiled up at the security chief.
    Julia had read Ben's character correctly from the start.
    And Fontenot took them all to jail, Jingle Bear included.

6
     
     
    What originally started out as arrest and detention turned out to be nothing more than an "investigative interview" wherein nobody was actually charged with anything and no one had to spend too much time in campus security's holding cell. Julia and Ben had the Cloudman to thank, for he had intervened on their behalf, once he got wind of it.
    Julia had never met their pilot before, but Cleddman in action was a wonder to behold. The captain stormed into the campus security offices, read Mr. Fontenot the riot act for being such a cretin, and subsequently got everybody released.
    Jingle Bear also helped in getting their release. Julia wouldn't let anyone take him away from her and it seemed to make their guards uncomfortable with Jingle Bear's eyes rolled up in his head, his small pink tongue hanging out. As a consequence, Julia was the first of the prisoners to be let go.
    Back in Cowden Hall, Julia began thinking about how she was going to dispose of her little bear. She found a small blanket her mother had made for her years ago and this made a perfect funeral shroud.
    On her bookshelf stood a line of animal fetishes Julia had made when she was a teenager. She found a whale she had carved from black serpentine just two inches long. A whale would make a good otherworld companion for an Arctic bear, she thought. She took the serpentine whale and, along with some dried herbs and two peregrine feathers, she placed them in the shroud next to Jingles and began sewing up the whole affair.
    Once the shroud had been sewn, Julia gave some thought as to how she was going to dispose of it. Incineration was out of the question. So was dumping him into the ship's recycler. Jingle Bear deserved a much better fate. Julia then decided she would return his body to the soil somewhere on their next stopover.
    However, Eos was not scheduled to leave trans-space for another two weeks. Their next port of call was to be an Earth-like world of an M-type star. This world, discovered long ago by the Enamorati, was in a late Cambrian stage of biotic development, with most life still being submerged in its murky seas. Because of this, there was no plan for archaeology to go down to Paavo Juuoko 4's surface. There was nothing for them to do.
    Nevertheless, being a graduate student, Julia could get a pass on just about any gondola heading to the surface. There, she could inter Jingles, perhaps dropping him in a stainless-steel canister into one of the oceans. The canister would not affect the planet's biosphere any, and if intelligent life managed to evolve on Paavo Juuoko 4 aeons hence, the canister would probably be so metamorphosed that it would be unrecognizable to those future fossil hunters.
    In the meantime, she was going to have to keep the body preserved. For this, she transited to the archaeology department, where she found an unused vacuum chamber in one of their forensic labs. The vacuum chambers were designed to hold artifacts in a perfect vacuum where destructive bacterial or chemical agents could not get at them until they were ready to be analyzed.
    So with a very heavy heart, Julia placed Jingles's coffin into the chamber and sealed it. She then put her name onto the lock's panel so the other students would not open it by mistake.
    Julia stepped out into the hallway and walked the short distance to the area the disassembler had taken out earlier that day. Campus security, however, had sealed the region off.
    She turned and started looking for the nearest transit portal.
    That was when she heard the music. The pulsating rhythms of a