The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] (16 page)

Every few hours he checked by satellite relay to New Chicago, and for weeks the message had not changed. First Nora Londi had stumbled into the hidden canyon; then Security, hoping to trap the conspirators of fugitive Anton Takk, tricked the warehouseman into fleeing cross-country from New Chicago; now, against regulation, Kerbaugh was not reporting in. Could Takk have doubled back somehow and killed him? He may have killed that Badger sergeant in a fit of fury—but was he capable of a calculated slay?

The Monitor grunted. Takk, once thought to be a dim-witted crate lifter, now appeared to be a crafty and lethal reprobate. How could Security not have known this? Maybe Kerbaugh had suffered the brunt of his own department’s failing. Hmm. Yes.

There could not be a more meticulous and efficient Inspector than Kerbaugh. But even at his last report by wireless something was going wrong. The Monitor opened a folder and shuffled through a thin stack of computer printouts to find it:

Code: A02-33 Kerbaugh

Destination: Monitor/Eyes only

Routing: SATline II/Scramble

Origin: Fallstown Inn wireless/Linex 44E94

Message: Takk covering tracks. Subject murdered inn owner Moberly and Transportation escort Papier at last stop. Building and press burned per procedure. In pursuit.

Murdered the inn owner? Really?

Takk. Papier. Kerbaugh. All were faceless names that the Monitor had manipulated from hundreds of miles away. Something like a chess match, no? There was power in that anonymity, and safety in distance. But these recent events would not do.

The Monitor pushed his chair back, rolled onto the bed, and studied the minute crystals in the ceiling rock. The thought of relocating his hidden headquarters made him tired. He had done it dozens of times, of course—forty years here, fifty there—and each time the logistics grew more complex. Exhausting. He must be mortal after all.

But if he must eventually abandon the canyon, what about his beautiful Bullet? It must fly soon. And perhaps it actually was ready to fly. Trajectory was programmed and guidance systems seemed operational. Warhead was intact, from what he could tell. Fuel was purified and reloaded. Engine and electronics all seemed fine in hands-on inspection.

All that he lacked was confirmation from the computer diagnostics programming left behind by the ancients. The Monitor had spent months reviewing the yellowed manuals line by line, rechecking the diagnostic linkups with the Bullet, and running the program again and again. The terminal screen would blink and flash with a rapid-fire array of component diagrams, a blizzard of algebraic nonsense, and then a sequence of geometric shapes. Finally the computer would blip up the single intelligible message to be gleaned from the program, one infuriatingly unspecific evaluation:

Abort launch.

Nothing more. Aaag. He made a mental note to pressure the salvagers to find new Bullets. If time allowed, perhaps he could substitute each part—gyro by gyro, circuit board by circuit board—until the diagnostics gave him the go-ahead to launch. That could take many months at best, perhaps more than a year. Hmm.

But what if the fault were with the diagnostics program itself? Perhaps the Bullet had really been in top form, even on Big Bang Day, but a reluctant computer had grounded it. A comma out of place. A typographical error buried in the muddle of base coding. A flub of the fingers recognizable only to a button pusher who died more than 400 years ago.

Perhaps the Monitor could just bypass the diagnostics and punch in the launch sequence—fire the bastard off. Was it that much of a risk?

Or perhaps he could find one more person to run through the entire assembly, top to bottom. One more mind capable of analyzing the most sophisticated piece of weaponry ever produced by the ancients. And then he would launch it.

Mmm. Cred Faiging, of course. He would never come willingly, so this assignment would have to be his last. Could his services, his inventive genius, be sacrificed afterward?

The Monitor exhaled and decided to surrender to sleep.

Slowly he drew a hand down his moist snout, wondering if there would ever be a time, say in 200 years, that he could rule civilization face to face. And then he laughed: “Huh. Never.”

If only he could produce offspring. It was an irony with which he had long ago made peace: long life, genius, and power—but a sterile body. How nice it would be to populate the world with little bull-faced immortals. He did his best, though, with breeding lesser beings, the soft and fragile humans. They would have to do.

As his breathing slowed and his eyelids drooped, he made another mental note: Find a fine mate for Nora Londi.

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Two armored trucks groaned over the hill, down past the lightning-damaged oak, and stopped mumbling at the gate to Cred Faiging’s secluded compound. The driver of the first truck leaned onto his horn impatiently, blaring into the morning fog.

There was no motion in the entire five acres of rutted clay, trees, and buildings. Too early. The yard was encircled by a tall scramble of electrified steel-frame fencing and barbed wire, and was dotted with gray wood-frame structures, all one-story. Off to the left, set away from the fence, were the hulking garages, loading docks, and warehouses. To the right, farther down the hill, were the long, awkward-looking manufacturing huts with frosted side windows and solar boxes covering the roofs.

Straight ahead was the largest structure, the lab and living quarters, and just as the truck horn shrieked again, the front door sprang open. Kim, the inventor’s skinny assistant, danced down the brace of steps as she ducked into the loop of her second bandolier. She shouted irritably in the direction of the trucks as she crossed the clearing—unintelligible from that distance, but no doubt an admonishment about patience or silence. With her left hand she tucked a flannel shirt into her snug denims, while a sawed-off shotgun swung in her right. Puffs of vapor trailed back from her face. An enlarging cloud of truck exhaust crept through the gate to meet her.

Kim propped the tip of the stubby shotgun on a wooden cross-beam in the gate, careful of the electrified metal. It was a pose calculated to be authoritative but not threatening—until necessary.

“IDs, boys,” she shouted. “Step down here—badges and IDs. State yer business.”

The truck doors fell open and two jumpsuited men strode to the gate. Each wore the yellow rectangle of Inspectors and produced cards from their hip pockets. They hadn’t shaved in days. The smaller of the two, dark-haired, had one continuous eyebrow—no break at the top of his nose. His companion, a muscler, wore thick glasses that distorted the look of his face.

“We’re Government,” the first said, holding the card higher.

“I see dat.”

“This is Faiging, right? We were routed in for an unscheduled stop—since we had open cargo space. Anything for Transport going northwest we can take. This’ll count for next month’s inspection, too. It’s part of the efficiency program.”

“Ficiency.” Kim contemplated the word, in no hurry. “Fish-in-sea. I ain’t been fishin’ for weeks.”

One-Eyebrow laughed, seemed friendly now. “Come on, let us warm up. You can check inventory.” He poked a finger tentatively at a strand of wire weaving through the gate.

“Hey!” Kim screamed. One-Eyebrow stopped, surprised.

Kim stepped back and let the shotgun fall to her side. “You know how many wild dogs I gotta clean off’n this fence every mornin’? Shoot.”

“I know it’s electric. Just wondered how powerful.”

“You wanna check an electric fence,” she said, exasperated, “you don’t do it with an open hand. Electricity makes ya muscles contract—you’ll end up grabbin’ a hot one till you’re cooked through, boy. You touch a hot wire with the back of yer hand—that’s how ya do it. That way yer hand closes away from the wire. Shoot.”

One-Eyebrow nodded thankfully and tapped the back of his fingers on the wire. There was a flash, and a crackling like an overheated griddle slapped with fresh sausage. The Inspector recoiled, and lines of singed flesh gleamed red across each finger. His friendliness had evaporated.

Kim giggled and seemed for a moment almost effeminate. She fit a key into a centerpost of the gate, pulled up the ground bolts, and slid a cross brace aside. She pointed with the shotgun. “Garage number two, gentlemen. Please close the doors after ya—the outdoors is a bit much to heat this time a day. Meet ya at the house.”

The pock-faced inventor was fussing over a plank with forty-eight small holes drilled into its face—four rows of twelve. Wires trailed from each hole, ending in a tiny horseshoe clip—electrical connections to be completed some other day. Set into the top of each hole was a light coil spring, and Faiging was placing buttons (sawed pieces of dowel) on top of each of them. Soon the contraption would be a crude electric keyboard.

Kim kicked through the spring door to the lab, and the two strangers followed. “Inspectors,” she announced in a formal tone. “IDs are proper. Say they can pick up Transport shipments if we’re ready. They been frisked.”

Cred Faiging dropped a peg into its hole, consulted his diagram, then picked up his ink brush to paint the proper letter on its top—H. He regarded the newcomers.

“Unusual,” he said.

The shorter of the two Inspectors was rubbing his right hand. “Unusual. Huh? Whatcha mean?”

“I see clearly that you are Inspectors—yellow badges, humph. We see Inspectors alla time. Got to, if we’re gonna do business, no? Ya say ya can do Transport duty. Unusual…” Faiging selected another peg, placed it in a hole, and painted a letter—J.

“Efficient,” said the shorter man, the one with the continuous eyebrow.

“My point exactly,” said Faiging, returning his brush to its bottle and standing erect for the first time. He faced the men. “It would be quite efficient to allow Inspection service trucks to perform Transport duties, especially when you had vehicles up the mountains, this far from any city. My point precisely, fellows. I thought of that long ago—had suggested it to many Inspectors and Transporters. Efficient, yes. But Government, no. They don’t go for it.” He sighed. “I don’t enjoy deceit—please tell me why you have really come.”

One-Eyebrow consulted his wristwatch, exchanged glances with his cohort, and they both nodded. “You are right, Mr. Faiging, that we are not here to pick up shipment,” he said. He poked a burned thumb toward Kim. “You will please ask your guard to give us her guns and ammunition. We had fifteen armed men in the back of each truck—tommies, hand bombs, nice Faigings, you’d wanna know. And as we speak they are taking control of the compound.”

Faiging stared at his feet, and he looked weary, old. His lungs were emptying through his nostrils in a slow, steady hiss. When the sound stopped, his chest heaved again, and he asked, “Will you allow me a short speech?”

One-Eyebrow nodded, and his companion did the same, his thick lenses cutting visual swaths out of the sides of his face.

“I ask you to think apart from the Government for a moment,” the inventor said. “Take that part of you which is the Government and set it here on the table, away from your human reason.” This drew blank stares.

“Umm. How to say this? The Government needs me, for one thing. My production, my invention, they must be ongoing.”

This time the tall one, the muscler with the glasses, responded. “None of that is our concern. The Monitor himself wants you.”

“For what?”

“He said to tell you this, and that you would understand: He has a large Bullet, an ancient one that stands upright in the ground. He wants to be absolutely sure it will fly—a final check before he fires it. You, with your electrical genius. You will come with us, or you will die. We will pack into the trucks any equipment that you need.”

“I have heard of these Bullets,” Faiging said. He was staring again at the floor. “But a final time: Is there room in your mind for anything but the Government? Anything but the Monitor? You can even live here if you like—there is warmth and food and sex and—”

The sentence was broken by two peals of laughter. One-Eyebrow and his sidekick pushed out the door and motioned for Faiging and Kim to follow.

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Anton Takk hadn’t made a move in twenty minutes, and much to his irritation, Pec-Pec maintained a constant conversation as they pored over the chessboard.

Takk’s more forward knight was trapped in an impossible crossfire. It could move nowhere, not even retreat, without being snared in Pec-Pec’s clever web. And once that horseman fell, Takk knew, his defenses would steadily crumble. There was no way to save the knight, he was sure, unless he could find an ingenious diversion—a side skirmish that might eventually change the tenor of the game.

“…and I certainly can understand why you are having trouble reconciling the concepts, but you have no reason to fear the Rafer man,” Pec-Pec was saying. His braids, a few of them gold-tipped, hooded his face as his eyes danced over the chessboard.

“Just as you and I and Webb and the llamas and Gregory and the Inspector have been indispensable to our mission, Tha’Enton is playing an integral part as well. Daily he swags through an edge of existence that you will never see. He seems dangerous, and often he is. But the Rafers are my children, and I think they will not harm anyone, especially while we are interdependent for our task.”

Takk glanced up wearily and looked down again. A pawn, perhaps, he was thinking. Advancing the queen bishop’s pawn could well establish a protective base from which to launch a diversionary attack. If only the fatal onslaught would not come in Pec-Pec’s next move…

The two had stationed themselves on a rocky clearing with a panoramic mountain view. Pec-Pec had produced the chess set from his leather backpack, an astoundingly small container for all of the objects it seemed to carry. It was an intricately carved set of chessmen done in ebony and beech, and the comfortably worn board was a mosaic of the same woods. The pieces felt familiar to the touch, like old friends, and were weightless between the fingers as they were moved to each new position, as if they were quite aware of their assigned tasks. As the tension of the game mounted, they felt warmer.