A sound arose not of the storm, a low rhythmic groaning in the night above—waaaah . . . waaaah . . . waaaah . . . waaaah—as if we were in a pressurized habitat on the floor of an ocean and some leviathan were swimming toward us, calling out to others of its kind with whatever mysterious purpose. As it passed overhead, each bass groan thrummed through the corrugated walls of the Quonset hut.
We fell silent, looking at the ceiling, expecting something to breach our shelter. The groaning faded, and the thing passed, and Panthea said, “It’s an ISA ghost drone as big as a Volkswagen van. A microfusion engine allows it to fly for a year without the need to land or refuel. Cutting-edge stealth technology makes it invisible to the naked eye, but they haven’t been able to resolve the problem of the propulsion noise. Very top secret.”
We all stared at her. Sparky said, “How do you know all that?”
Panthea’s answer was to raise one eyebrow and cock her head, which was as good as asking if he didn’t know the meaning of seer.
“Is it looking for us?” Bridget asked.
“Maybe. But if my perceptions can be trusted, it’s more of a weapon than it is a search engine. Maybe the ISA is so freaked out about your alien genome and your ability to escape their every trap that they’ve decided it’s safer just to kill you when they find you instead of trying to take you into custody.”
“That’s so not right,” I said, as if I were still ten years old. “Okay, yeah, they’re not about what’s right. They’re about control. No surer way to control someone than to kill him.”
To finish dinner, I had taken a cinnamon-pecan roll with a brown icing. Ambrosia. It was so good I almost forgot the ghost drone. “I need this recipe,” I said.
“If you live long enough to make a batch, I’ll give you the recipe,” Panthea said, and that seemed fair enough to me.
Returning to more immediate matters than ghost drones in the sky, Sparky said, “Quinn has never shot a gun. He’ll need training.”
“In fact, he won’t,” Panthea said. “He was born for this. You have no doubt read of prodigies, as young as five, who hear perhaps a Mozart concerto and then sit at a piano for the first time in their lives and play it perfectly. Quinn will be that way with any weapon put in his hands.”
“I needed handgun training,” Bridget said.
“You believed so,” Panthea said, “because your grandfather thought you required it.” She smiled at Sparky. “You must have been surprised at how quickly Bridget was able to put into practice all that you taught her.”
Sparky looked thoughtful, although probably not as thoughtful as I must have appeared when I considered Panthea’s words. Hoping that we might all consider that I had been drafted into this mission in error, I said, “Is it possible that I was maybe meant to be a piano prodigy, but I ended up here by mistake?”
Rising from her chair, our elfin hostess said, “I’ve got a small armory. Let’s get a pistol for you. We need to hit the road soon. We’ve got somewhere we need to be by tomorrow.”
As the rest of us rose to our feet, Winston woke and yawned, and Sparky asked, “Where? Where do we have to be?”
“Beats me,” Panthea said. “I don’t see everything. My gift has limits. I can be surprised, make mistakes. Which is as it should be. Otherwise, I’d be a puppet in a play. I’m not a puppet. You aren’t puppets. But wherever we need to be, that place will find us.”
|?24?|
Panthea gave me a single-action Glock 19 modified with a 3.5-pound connector and New York trigger module, which provided a 5.5-pound trigger pull and eliminated any danger that the manufacturer’s standard trigger spring would break.
I had no idea what any of that meant. However, when I accepted the pistol from her, it felt as natural as if I’d been born with it in my hand. I sheathed it in a sharkskin-and-horsehide vertical belt scabbard, which she also provided. At her insistence, I practiced drawing it half a dozen times; it came out of the holster and into a two-handed grip so slick that I impressed Sparky and scared myself.
After we loaded Panthea’s luggage and her locked ammunition case in the cargo hold of the Explorer, she sat in back with Sparky, Winston between them. Bridget drove, and I sat up front. The moon goddess said, “I’m feeling we should backtrack federal to federal to I-10 eastbound,” and I agreed, and Panthea said, “Then do it.”
“Stay sharp but guard against panic,” Sparky warned. “The ISA might not know for sure we came to Peptoe, might be here on a hunch. Even those bastards aren’t likely to use a ghost drone to incinerate every car that’s out and about.”