The Dreamer Chronicles Trilogy Boxed Set Vol I - III: A Sci-Fi Parallel Universe Adventure (The Dreamer Chronicles - Science Fiction For Kids And Adults)

by Robert Scanlon

  The swarthy man waved his hand dismissively. “Then we are already on the same page. The Shadow is attending to this as we speak. Keep channels open and I will alert you when we have them back in our custody—this time with the Professor on hand to lead us to the device. I would expect results in the next twenty-four hours.” He looked at his watch, then back at the group. “This meeting is ended.” He stood and waited for everyone to leave, then as the older man limped through the doorway with the help of a walking stick, he picked up his phone and waited for a response. “Wipe the room please.”

  He followed the others down the hotel corridor.

  ~ 40 ~

  Safe House

  The Chinook helicopter pilot caught Sarina’s eye. He pointed to the red light flashing on the temporary intercom unit Nathan had clipped to a metal bar over the cockpit instrument panel. She snatched it off and elbowed Nathan next to her. “HOW DO WE ANSWER THIS?” The noise-cancelling headset suppressed most of the racket of the massive Chinook, but was still enough to make her want to shout.

  Nathan grabbed the device from her and plugged his headset in. He leaned around to the pilot. “CAN YOU PATCH THIS THROUGH TO THE THREE OF US?” He indicated himself, Sarina, and the Prof on the other side of him. The Pilot nodded, leaned forward and pressed a button.

  A Russian-accented voice broke through and into their earphones. “—ceremony. Everybody safe. Repeat. Attention Clever Boy, this is Princess. Very important guests arrive. Now tied up in welcome ceremony. Everybody safe. Repeat—”

  “Princess, this is Clever Boy.” Nathan thumbed the contraption in his hand. “Please send our regards and our apologies. We are unable to join them for dinner, but we wish them a horribly bumpy and long voyage. Our crew sends our deepest thanks. Over.”

  The crackly voice replied once. “Pleased to be serving. Guests already make bucket inspection. Over and out.”

  Sarina and Nathan laughed.

  As well as swallowing almost fifty kids and still having enough room for a couple of medical staff to check them over during the flight, the Chinook made short work of the return trip to London. The weather and storm had not abated, but the tough aircraft had cut through the squalls with ease, landing at a heliport on a jetty on the banks of the Thames. Soon they were walking across tarmac and into a fleet of dark-windowed minivans organised by Agent Blanchard. A few minutes later, Sarina, Nathan, the Professor and Blanchard were in a special meeting room of a secure safe house. Sarina wondered about the Agent’s definition of safe. To her, looking at the thick walls and security cameras, it was more like a prison. The rest of the kids were in several other rooms, where pizza waited, and then transportation back to their parents.

  Nathan pounced on another slice of pizza. “Thanks, Prof. It’s good to be safe again.”

  Sarina pulled a face. “If the minor problem of the moon falling to earth is safe—but yes, thank you, Professor.”

  Professor Harrison nodded, and gestured to Agent Blanchard. “Thank Bill, really. I still have no idea how he pulled a Chinook out of nowhere in no time and beat our Consortium friends to the Princess Alexandria. But we really should be thanking Nathan for combining the trap with your rescue. Using the satellite-internet to encrypt an uncrackable communication to my phone was smart thinking. Blanchard and I had realised the Consortium was intercepting our communications, and we were already taking steps to be careful. Nathan’s suggestion to send another message as a decoy, this time amateurishly-encrypted, and to send it some time after Blanchard and I had already left to pick you up, was pure genius.”

  Nathan grinned. “I thought so too.”

  “Well you were right. The Consortium cracked it easily and thought they could beat us to the ship. They certainly swallowed the bait; hook, line and sinker.”

  “And by the time they arrived, we were already well-and-truly out of there.” Nathan took a moment to cram another pizza slice into his mouth all at once. “When dith you thind out thath Minithter Denning wath the leak, anyway?”

  “Blanchard came across an operator log in the parliamentary committee building security room. Don’t ask him how he accessed it—but suffice to say the corresponding audio files had been deleted. At the request of a certain Minister.”

  Sarina frowned. “Why was that important?”

  “Because the log was for a temporary room monitor—a bug—in a room where Blanchard and I had a meeting. Certain things were occurring so soon after we had discussed them that I suspected someone powerful on the committee had me under observation. So we—Blanchard that is—tracked back through any supposedly private conversations we had there.”

  Nathan nodded, and picked up another pizza slice. “Smart.” The pizza wobbled in front of his mouth for a moment, then he forced it in. Sarina looked away. Her stomach couldn’t take it.

  She fixed her gaze on the Professor. “When will we pick up Rona? And what will happen to the Minister?”

  “Rona will be picked up as soon as the weather allows. We couldn’t risk a wheelchair into the helicopter with such limited time. But her suggestion about the part she could play worked rather well, according to Captain Ilia’s message. As for Minister Denning and his cronies—what you don’t know, and I’d rather you didn’t know the details, is that they are merely pawns of a much bigger and powerful body. People who buy and sell weapons.”

  “And they want the collider!” Nathan managed to spit out a stream of pizza crumbs on the table, which he tried to cover up by sweeping them onto the floor. “They’re the ones leaving the blackmail messages, aren't they? But won’t they come after us again?”

  Agent Blanchard shook his head. “I don’t think so. From what we understand from our own intelligence, the Minister may have been overextending his place in the Consortium’s pecking order. We’ll put his face all over the TV news and allude to the kidnapping of young children and his involvement in an international arms dealing network. As far as we can tell, it was his cronies sending the messages. We think the big guys will back off to let the heat die down—there’s no way they’ll want to be associated with such a disaster. They’ll let him dig his own hole—and we’ll help.”

  “Which should give us some time to understand what is going on,” the Professor said, levelling his gaze at Sarina and Nathan. “So tell me—I’m curious to know how you arrived at the conclusion that the shift in the moon’s orbit was all your doing?

  Sarina reddened. “We—Nathan—tracked back the exact date and time on Agent Blanchard’s old phone. There’s a photo on there Lena thinks is her daddy”—she saw the Professor’s eyes widen but carried on—“and after that, it was obvious I must have done the wrong thing. Again. I wish you’d never invented that thing.”

  “I do too,” Professor Harrison said, to her surprise. “And I think you’re right. That blast of super-rem may have fixed our previous problem, but it’s knocked the collider somewhere and somehow caused this shift in the moon’s trajectory.” His eyes grew distant. “It’s funny you should mention Professor Malden. Malden and I always knew rem-particles had strong parallels with the so-called graviton, but I wonder if they are even more closely related than we thought? Anyway, my suspicion is you can help us pinpoint where the collider is. Between the two of you there’ll be details buried somewhere in your minds, some kind of clue I expect, if we look hard enough. Perhaps in the way you assembled the plasma energy? You might not think you know exactly—”

  “We do,” Sarina and Nathan chimed together, and exchanged glances.

  Professor Harrison looked stunned.

  “Yes,” Sarina continued, “we do. Lena made contact with both Makthryg and Lucio in her dreams. The collider is in Paolo’s world, and Makthryg is after it.” She leaned forward. “Professor—we have to get to that thing before he does, and you have to fix it!”

  “Fix it? My plan is to shut it down and destroy it. In theory it should halt the progress of the moon.”

  “Oh.” Sarina slumped back. “I thought if
I brought it back here, you could just reprogram it or something.”

  Agent Blanchard cleared his throat. “Whatever we do with the device, we will have to be very careful, Miss. The Consortium—the group buying and selling the weapons—will be desperate to have the device. Not only that, but S.E.E.K.—that Anti-Psi Kids movement—has become quite powerful. If they find out where we are, then I cannot vouch for anyone’s safety.”

  Sarina stared at him. “So much for being safe again. The moon falling out of the sky, but we can’t show our faces around town, just in case a slightly-super-scary weapons club gets a whiff of the machine, or a group of demented conspiracy-theorists tracks us down and burns us at the stake.” She whipped around to glare at Nathan, who froze in the act of picking up another slice of pizza.

  “What?” Panic flickered across his face, quickly replaced by anger. “Oh, I get it. That’s the look you give me when you’re about to say something disparaging about scientists ... again. You’re so predictable. Anyway, I wasn’t the one who blasted the moon off orbit!” He stopped, realising what had just come out of his mouth, but it was too late. “Sorry, I—”

  Sarina felt the tears well up, but she stopped them with a deep inhale. “Yeah, right. I get it. It’s not the inventor that’s at fault, it’s the person that pulled the trigger. Well I mean to fix it.” She slumped. “If I knew how. If only that portal had worked.”

  The Professor watched them both intently. “I feel like I’ve missed all the important scenes of an action film. Would you fill in a few gaps for me? How do you know Lena is communicating with Makthryg? How did he escape? Why does he want the collider? What is this picture on the phone Lena thinks is her real father? What portal didn’t work? Perhaps in briefing Agent Blanchard and me, we might understand where to go from here.” He sat back and raised his eyebrows.

  The Professor was right. So much had happened—but where to start? The Professor caught her confused look.

  “Start at the beginning, Sarina. From the beginning.”

  ~ 41 ~

  Arguments Reveal A Clue

  “And that’s when we tried to make a portal on the ship’s bulkhead—with Lena and Lucio’s help directing us to the exact spot. But it didn’t work. Something else wrong with me, apparently.” Sarina slumped back in her seat. Together, she and Nathan had pieced together the rapid events. She was surprised how crazy the story sounded, even from the point of view of someone who had experienced it. Goodness knows what it looked like from the outside.

  The Professor leaned forward and looked at Sarina intently. “There is nothing wrong with your bravery. Over and over you have tried to fight back, to escape or to fix things that were not your responsibility to fix. As much as you blame yourself for somehow causing our situation, it’s not your fault. I blame myself more for encouraging Malden to push his experimentation with the device before it was ready.”

  “He didn’t even need a machine—all he had to do was study Nathan’s great-great-grandfather. He managed to melt my great-aunts’ brains with his experiments.”

  Professor Harrison looked embarrassed. “Ah, yes. Actually I do know about that. I had certain ... records buried. Blanchard and I were sure The Consortium were snooping around, and we had to take steps to protect anyone involved. I apologise. But Nathan’s distinguished relative only brushed the surface of it, I’m afraid. The fact is, this rem-particle would have been discovered eventually, and it’s better off in ethical hands than those of the likes of nations who would purchase it from The Consortium. I think that’s my sole justification for urging Malden to continue—we had to beat anyone else to it.”

  “What was Professor Malden working on, anyway?” Sarina wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  Harrison shrugged. “All his most recent notes were destroyed in the explosion. I’m certain he’d discovered something new that night, or he wouldn’t have called his wife and baby over to the labs. Quite unusual.” He sighed. “But despite looking over and over at his calculations leading up to the accident, I’ve never drawn any new conclusions. It’s lost to us now I think.”

  “Ahem. Um ... when I was working in the labs on my encryption project”—Nathan shot an apologetic look at the Professor—“I saw he’d been looking at the link between creativity and emotion—”

  “Well, duh! That’s obvious.” Sarina couldn’t help herself. “Anyone who tries to paint using logic would know that. All you get is a pretty picture—like painting by numbers. Of course creativity is emotional.” A pang of guilt made its way from her gut to her heart. She should listen to her own advice. How could she speak with any authority? A brief flash of something crossed her mind—Drysdale; teaching kids to express themselves; the failed portal, then something else—then it was gone. She brushed it away with a shake of her head. “Anyway, all this very interesting conversation isn’t helping us. I sent that machine somewhere, and now we know it’s in Paolo’s world. How are we going to get to it and destroy it, before Makthryg gets his greedy hands on it and makes everything worse?”

  “Worse than this?” Nathan looked out of the window. “I thought it was already bad enough ...” He stopped when he caught Sarina glaring at him.

  No one spoke for a while.

  “It won’t help us to get all emotional—”

  “Shut up, Nathan, before you dig yourself any deeper into that hole.”

  “Shhh, both of you. I think your arguing is the key.” Professor Harrison cupped his chin with his hand.

  “Oh, believe me, she can argue all day long about how creativity is way more important than science; how scientists are ruining art and beauty by trying to deconstruct it; how all scientists are evil—”

  “Be quiet, Nathan. In this case, I believe Sarina is onto something.” He sat back and thought for a moment, as did Sarina, shocked at the Professor’s outburst. His gaze flicked around the room, and stopped on both Sarina and Nathan. He stood and slapped the table. “I knew the two of you would be the missing piece of the puzzle.” His eyes blazed. “Of course I couldn’t find anything in Malden’s calculations—where would you place emotion in a calculation? Rem might be a powerful new particle; one that as we know, is responsible for contributing to our creativity, but its effect is considerably multiplied and shaped emotionally. Which must have been exactly what Malden discovered.”

  He sat down and looked at the two of them. “That spark that happens when the two of you clash sometimes—that gave me the clue. You’re both strong manipulators of rem, the strongest I have yet seen. Both highly creative in your own ways. Both passionate about your beliefs and what you stand for. Both of you are very emotional about your work—yes, I know Nathan”—the Professor had noticed Nathan’s gesture of protest—“on the inside, I know. But I’d bet when you fight, it stirs you up, then shortly after, when you find common ground and your emotions are still running high, you have been able to achieve much more working together. And if for some reason, either of you is disconnected emotionally, it blocks your ability to manipulate rem.”

  “Which explains why we had trouble on the ship.” Nathan looked at Sarina apologetically.

  “Which explains why you had trouble helping me in Paolo’s world on at least two occasions that I would be happy to explain in great detail.” She glared at Nathan, who looked away.

  “Which explains what happened to Malden.” The Professor’s eyes were bright.

  Sarina pulled her gaze away from Nathan and back to Professor Harrison. “Professor Malden was very emotional?”

  The Professor shook his head. “Not as a matter of course—in fact his written work was very dull. But in person he was quite eccentric. A typical Professor—and one who I suspect had a dark side, since he was often tempted to take risks I wouldn’t have. He was also given to quite strong flights of fancy, but stubborn with it. You can tell Lena is his daughter, no doubt about that. The only real fact we know from the night of the explosion was that he’d had a breakthrough with the collider, because we hear
d the message he left on Maggie’s phone. He was clearly excited—very excited, you could hear it in his voice. Excited enough to persuade Maggie to join him. My guess is the two of them were in a volatile emotional state about his discovery, and they got careless, and exposed themselves to the device.” He tapped his finger against his lips. “Perhaps Lena, possessing Malden’s DNA, and even though she was only a baby, somehow added to the rem-manipulation which caused the explosion.”

  “What did he discover though, Professor? Do you have an idea—apart from using the ability of emotions to deliberately influence rem?” Nathan said.

  Before the Professor could respond, Sarina answered haltingly, surprised at her own deduction. “He discovered how to travel between worlds.”

  The Professor and Nathan stared at her.

  “How do you know?” Nathan said.

  Sarina shrugged, and looked back at them, helpless to explain. “It feels right. You know it does, because we’ve done it.”

  Nathan opened his mouth to speak, but a noise from the door distracted them all. It was Lena. Sarina had no idea when Lena had come into the room, nor how long she had been standing there listening to their conversation.

  “It’s true,” Lena said.

  “Do you have the same feeling, Lena?” the Professor asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Then what is it?”

  She smiled. “I know it’s true because he told me. Daddy told me.”

  ~ 42 ~

  Master's Call

  The winds whipped around Valkrog and tore at his cloak. He stood on a craggy peak in what had become mountainous country. He looked at his talons and arms; now he could see through them to the rocky ground below. He had made the trip by foot, unable to transform into his bird-like state, let alone possess the energy to fly.