The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle]

by Jeff Bredenberg

  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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  31

  The Inspectors

  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 nostri
ls 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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  32

  The Chess Game

  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.

  If Takk found the conversation irritating, Pec-Pec had a distraction of his own. His eyes habitually wandered to a canyon in the western distance. Its walls were reddish rock, perhaps painted more red than usual by the falling sun. There was a scattering of scrubby trees, which grew thicker and larger at the rims of the canyon, and the narrow lake at its bottom was a sheet of blue glass. Pec-Pec was experiencing a new emotion: dread. He reached into his backpack, bunched several sunflower seeds into his fingers, and popped them into his mouth.

  “Rosenthal Webb is over his fury now,” Takk murmured. “We spoke this morning. Even asked how my lip was healing.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “He tells me,” said Takk, taking on an accusing tone, “that he gullies not this new land, but knowledge of it comes to him as if by magic. He says foreign ideas jump into his head out of nowhere—people to contact, direction of travel, that sort of thing. He says some new bugger has taken residence in his heart, a new kind of compass, one with no north or south. A dream compass vaning him across unknown territory.”

  Pec-Pec looked up at him with wide-open eyes, inviting Takk to continue.

  “I did not have to ask who this was—what person could possibly enter another man’s mind, suggest that he do things he might not normally…”

  “Ah,” said the magic man. “Well. I am thinking that you deserve to know some of these things. Of course—you are not here merely by your own choice. Not you, or the others. You have been lured and dangled for things more important, yes. Yet this also is the world as it is, and you are playing your part in it, the only part you can possibly have. Stop and think: What man, really, can look down at his boots and say they are standing precisely where he wants them to be? Hmm?

  “You worry about a few friends in trouble, you have small and private motives; I have a foreknowing—the purpose here is the undoing of a large evil. But we are making danger—there are no guarantees. Any of us could die.”

  Webb appeared on the outcropping. He was bare chested, showing the silvery pink scars mottling his right forearm and chest. The gray revolutionary sullenly lifted field glasses to his eyes with both hands.

  “Hoy, Webb,” Takk cried, “how does she look? Has Tha’Enton returned from the scout run?”

  Webb lowered his glasses slowly. His eyes were rimmed in red, and his face, covered in ragged new beard, looked tired.

  “Ya. The Rafer is back from running the canyon rims.” The old revolutionary somberly limped off of the outcropping, and when he returned he was hefting one of the cartons that had been stacked near the llama hitch. He threw the case to the ground, a rough handling that made Takk twitch.

  The revolutionary tore the top open and pulled out a six-inch steel cylinder. “This is the charge,” he said. “The blaster seal—I keep those in a separate carton—ya fit over one end. Then”—he rapped on the side of the hand bomb—”any hard impact will set her off. Dynamite.”

  “Couple hunnerd of those,” Takk said cheerfully, “would clear any canyon, ya?”

  Webb was looking even older. “No. They’re useless.”

  “What!” Takk was on his feet. “We hauled ‘em a week across the mountains!”

  “And afore that,” Webb noted, “I hauled ‘em across the continent. But Tha’Enton has done a thorough scouting, and we have a problem. If the Monitor is in the canyon, there’s no way to tell where—not a structure to be seen, nothing to hit with a banger.”

  “No buildings? It must be the wrong canyon,” Takk said. “Is the ‘dream compass’ a little off, ey?”

  “It’s the right canyon. There’s a turbine, protected by a net, under a waterfall. She’s got to be turning electricity, which means humans are about down there somewhere.”

  “We’ll blow the turbine then.”

  “That might help, but it’d be a minor damage. And with that done, the bird people would hack us to spaghetti sauce. The birders, they’re the guards what can fly, half a hunnerd of ‘em round top of the canyon, the Rafer says.” Webb flipped the cylinder in his hand and caught it by the opposite end. “And with these pokers to attack with, well, ya’d have to score a direct hit on one of the fliers to do any good.”

  “Fliers,” Takk said, “not humans, ya mean?”

  “Yes. Humans. On wing.”

  “Rifles would have worked nicely.”

  “Mayhap. But then, how would I have known what we were walking into?”

  Pec-Pec glared up at the two from the chessboard.
“This banger talk makes my gut turn,” the magic man said. “Those bangers, all bangers, are a rot.” He waggled a finger toward the chessmen. “The game. Your move now, half an hour.”

  Takk returned to his side of the board, folding his legs in front of him. “We go north now, I guess?”

  Pec-Pec sighed and Webb about-faced and stalked off toward camp. “You still are determined to follow your penis to Blue Hole. But I tell you, I have a foreknowin’ that your Nora Londi is not there, she is down in that canyon where the fliers swarm.”

  “But the fliers—ya didn’t foreknow them too good, did ya?”

  “Hmmph. I will go down into the canyon myself tomorrow. Then we will see what next.”

  Takk examined the chessboard anew in the dimming light, then looked up to meet Pec-Pec’s eyes. “I have just realized…” Takk said.

  “Oh?”

  “I can checkmate you in two moves,” the Northlander said, scratching under his beard.

  “Oh, that. I was hoping you wouldn’t see.”

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  33

  Tea

  Nothing.

  The two Inspectors stood perplexed in the empty compound outside Cred Faiging’s lab house. They huffed short-lived little vapor clouds into the morning air and strode nervously into the clay yard.

  There was supposed to be a battalion of Government men dispersed across the installation. Machine guns, grenades. The factories and lab surrounded. Garage No. 2, nearer the fence, stood silent and closed.

  Kim pushed through the door and down the steps, Faiging lingering behind. “Sorry, fellas,” she said grinning. “Guess I messed up. I’d heard a noise in the back of one of yer trucks. Figured it to be a rat or somethin’, so I had the whole garage gassed with the trucks in ‘er. Best way to exterminate—most thorough.”