“You’re wondering why the death of my clone doesn’t bother me,” Command One continued.
“Sort of.”
“It does. In a very real, psychological way, he was a part of myself. I am employing emotion dampening methods to help with the current situation, but there will come a time when I must absorb the loss and feel it. However, we have known for a very long time that this moment was coming. We accept this fate for the same reason that the bee accepts its own role.”
“Which is?”
An odd cross of sadness and humor tugged at Command One’s features. “Which is for you to figure out.”
Bledsoe sighed, making it clear that he was tired of these games and moral lessons. “Sounds like I have hundreds of years to think it over. For now, though, can we move on?”
“If you wish.”
The bees completed their conical hive, which spanned nearly the whole table and stood at least two feet above the tablecloth. Command One brought his hands together, and the hive, along with its black swarm, vanished. Only one small bee remained on the white linen, meandering aimlessly about, perhaps searching for crumbs.
Why leave that one bee? Was there a message here? Did the bee represent Bledsoe somehow, an individual without a hive?
Feeling his anger flash anew, he bent forward and slammed his palm down on the table. He felt the small body crunch and collapse under his hand, and he quickly withdrew his palm, examining it frantically for any sign of a sting. There was no bee body, nor was there any sign of a dead insect on the table.
“The Australian Tetragonula carbonaria is a stingless bee that pollinates orchids,” said Command One. “Before striking, perhaps it is better to know if your enemy is really an enemy at all.”
Bledsoe spun away, fist clenched around a sting he’d never received.
His enemy. If this was a not-so-subtle dig at Bledsoe’s treatment of Winston, Command One and everyone connected to him was in for a rude awakening. Winston was just some punk kid. Bledsoe wanted to teach him a lesson — quite a few, in fact — but that could wait. Bledsoe now understood that Winston was not his true enemy. Maybe that was the lesson in all this.
He gazed beyond the walls, down into the new Area X, wishing frantically that Winston would hurry up with whatever he was doing and return the Alpha Machine. He needed to get out of here. Whether he had passed or failed whatever stupid test Command One was trying to give, it was time to get on with his life’s true mission.
That obviously meant getting hold of the last Alpha Machine piece so that he could meet and understand his real enemy. It was time for him and the Omega Mesh to get acquainted.
26
Rote by Mote
Of course, there was only one place where Winston felt he could relax and think. He needed home, in his true present, at the center of what he thought had been his secure universe.
Winston and Bernie appeared in the center of his bedroom. Sparks rained down on the area rug that filled most of the space between his bed, desk, and workbench. For a moment, Winston worried that they would catch the fabric on fire and burn the house down, but he didn’t see so much as a wisp of smoke. Whatever energy this was, it obviously wasn’t based on fire.
“Oh, no…” Winston said as he stepped to his bench.
Four computers lay there in various states of disassembly, including Mr. Mendoza’s server. Winston hadn’t given any of these jobs a second thought since that first morning. As soon as Brian Steinhoff had snapped him with that towel, Winston’s life had gone from a rolling snowball into an avalanche. PC repairs now seemed hopelessly small and insignificant, but people were still depending on him to help them with their needs. They had trusted him, and he hadn’t even checked his email since that night. They probably thought he’d taken their gear and fled the country.
He ran a hand over the server tower’s front face, remembering that he’d been in the middle of running diagnostics on its motherboard’s ECC memory.
“I made a promise to these people.”
Winston frowned at Bernie and sucked his upper lip between his teeth. After a moment, he said, “I don’t think you’re going to give the best man’s speech at my wedding.”
Bernie blinked several times, apparently unsure how to respond.
Winston shook his head and walked about his room, seeing it in a new light. It felt smaller than before. He gazed at the posters of inventors tacked across his ceiling. The ever-grouchy Edison caught his eye, and Winston offered him a smirk.
Well, Mr. Edison, you might have gone through ten thousand filaments to get the light bulb, but I bet you never had to bounce around in time trying to save the world. Top that.
Nicola Tesla, on the other hand, with all his wireless and super-large coil work… Winston pondered the image of him as a tiny figure sitting behind his magnifying transmitter, which threw off electrical bolts over twenty feet long. Yeah, Tesla might have been a time-bouncing adventurer.
“If we get out of this alive,” Winston said, “I want to go back and…”
Bernie shook his head at Winston.
“No? No what?”
“Right. OK. I need food.”
Winston gaped at the alien and resisted the urge to sniff himself. “Well…snap.”
He didn’t have to be told twice. Winston kicked off his shoes, let his jacket and backpack slip to the floor, and rolled into his bed. The feel of his own cool, lumpy pillow under his cheek was sublime, and the background whisper of the home’s water heater in the corner was the next best thing to his mother’s heartbeat. He pulled the top blanket to his chin and closed his eyes.
Bernie woke him two hours and forty-one minutes later, proclaiming that Winston had received enough deep and REM sleep to satisfy his body’s short-term needs. Winston wasn’t sure that was true. He felt dizzy and discombobulated, as if he’d been hit in the head with a bat, only it didn’t hurt.
Winston blinked and rubbed at his face, then realized that Bernie was nowhere to be seen. He stood and called out.
Winston allowed himself fifteen minutes for a blissfully hot shower, then found a change of clothes much like what he’d worn before: blue jeans and a gray, collared shirt to go over his black T-shirt bearing the 8-bit, green, ox-pulled wagon from The Oregon Trail, under which were the words “YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY.” No doubt, Alyssa would approve. Then again, she might not find it as ironic once the QV sickness caught up to her.
At last, Winston strode from his room down the hallway and into the kitchen. He found two chicken thighs in the fridge, devoured them in seconds, and washed it down with a can of Coke. He spotted the leftover mixed salad his mom had made, but it now looked wilted and unappetizing. Baby carrots would have to do instead. His mom would approve of him having some vegetables. He smiled, imagining what she would say seeing him grab healthy food of his own free will. The smile faded when he realized he was only doing it because she was gone.
Best not to fill up. He needed to be sharp and fast, not stuffed and letha
rgic. Already, he could feel the food hitting his bloodstream and rebooting his brain.
“All right,” Winston said to Bernie, who continued to stare pensively at the apparently turned-off TV. “Ready?”
Bernie rose and looked about the living room, seeming to focus on the walls and corners.
As the alien shoved the spindly coffee table away from the couch and against the wall, Winston asked, “What are you doing?”
Winston thought he understood where Bernie was going and shoved their one plush chair — a threadbare thing that still bore the shredded reminders of the family’s one attempt at cat ownership a few years ago — into the corner between the front window and the door.
“So, what? Do we need some stuff to make a map with on the floor?”
Winston surveyed the living room, slightly embarrassed that they’d gained so little space by shoving everything to the walls. “Which is?”
“Well, ASAP, of course.” Then Winston understood. “Oh. Well…hm.”
Winston played back events in his memory as best he could. The QVs needed time to take effect. They had agreed that the waiting period pushed them at least to Council Crest. There was no apparent way to save Theo, so that put them on the helicopter with unconscious Winston. He had seen that much. They had transferred him to the plane somewhere outside of Portland. Winston guessed there had been one refueling for a plane that size. Then the approach to Area X…and the grenade.
“You wouldn’t let me intercept them getting on the plane,” Winston mused.
In that moment, Winston had a flash of insight. He found himself staring at Bernie, motionless, as his mind whirred ahead.
“What if he couldn’t locate me because I was never in the same time as him? What if none of us were here in this time? We would just stay and live in a previous time. He would never be able to see us, because he doesn’t have the chrono pieces.”
Winston’s heart leapt. All he had to do was go back to that moment when they were about to unload the helicopter.
Bernie shook his head and started at Winston as if he had answered a calculus question using stick figures.
“In a reset,” Winston finished. “Right. I suck at this.”
He was stuck. There was no solution to be found by hiding in the past. Whatever Winston did, it might start in the past, but his solution had to stick in the present.
“Hold on,” he said as the cold realization hit him. “Bledsoe’s just going to come after my friends. As soon as he gets the Alpha Machine back, he’s going to hunt them down.”
“No. Dude, are you stupid?”
Winston caught himself. Bernie had done nothing to deserve being insulted. But obviously, the alien still didn’t understand who he was dealing with. He remembered Bledsoe’s wink, the sound of that sing-song rumble in his ear. No matter what, boy, I will find them and end them. I owe you that. Bernie wasn’t there. He didn’t get who this monster was on the inside, because all the Omega Mesh knew was its precious end date and Bledsoe’s voice on that recording.
said Bernie as he stood in the middle of the room, calm as ever, but perhaps a bit slumped through the shoulders.
“I’m sorry, Bernie. I didn’t mean to say that. But I don’t think you get who you’re dealing with. Bledsoe is crazy. Certifiably unhinged. He’s got all the time in the world — or he will once he gets the Alpha Machine — to do this nuke-Russia-and-save-the-future thing. I guarantee you he’s going to go after my friends as his very first move. You know why?”
Winston stepped toward Bernie, shaking his head. “Because you said he couldn’t go after my mom and couldn’t kill me. That’s it. You took away the two things he wanted most, so he’s going to make me suffer in every way he can think of to punish me for it.”
Bernie raised his hand and set the tip of his index finger gently against Winston’s chest. As Winston had seen once before, the faintest outlines of a smile played at the corners of Bernie’s mouth.
“But they’re not gonna be dead if I rescue them.” Winston gripped his hair in a fist, trying to solve the puzzle.
It hit him. He thumped Little e against his forehead repeatedly.
“Bledsoe has to believe they’re dead.”
“Which means he has to see them die.”
Winston replayed the events in his mind again. He was on the plane, about to jump out with his parachute. He said goodbyes. Alyssa kissed him. Final instructions from her grandfather. And then…Bledsoe materialized and pulled the pin on his grenade. Winston tried to make a deal. Alyssa shoved him out the door. He fell. At some point, the plane blew up. By the time he had a good chute deployed and could see the ground, Bledsoe was there waiting for him.
Obviously, Bledsoe had not been on the plane when the grenade exploded. He could not have seen everyone die. But he did see the explosion and the plane falling. That meant he had to leave the plane…
“Oh, you’re kidding,” said Winston, raising his hands as if to push the idea away. “That’s impossible.”
“Would the Omega Mesh give me an exception for that?”
Bernie showed the barest hint of a smirk.
“Nice!” That wasn’t a plan yet, but Winston thought he saw a crack of light widening in the darkness. “So, there’s this time between when Bledsoe disappears and when the grenade explodes. That’s what we have to work with?”
Winston began to pace about the living room, trying to work through options. He stopped before Bernie. “What if I intercept the grenade? Bledsoe throws it, teleports away, then I show up right next to it and throw it out the door?”
Bernie nodded once and raised his left hand, palm up. All around Winston, the air started to ripple. Dark mists formed in bands and waves. These lines overlapped, and the places where they joined thickened, sometimes growing and sometimes condensing into darker points. After several seconds, Winston made out the ghostly outlines of people, seats, and curved walls filling his living room. He made out six people, and quickly they took on the rough appearances of Bledsoe, Winston’s mom, Winston himself, Shade, Alyssa, and her grandfather.
Wide-eyed, Winston mentally kicked himself for assuming that Bernie had cleared the room’s middle for making a rudimentary model out of cutlery and cooking supplies.
The mote figures stood motionless, but Winston could sense the alarm from their postures. Winston and Alyssa stood by the open plane door, with her body shielding Winston from Bledsoe. Amanda and Shade both had their knees bent, hands held out and separated, as if ready to leap. Bledsoe held a round object in his right hand while the ring and torus geo pieces floated above his left hand. Win
ston couldn’t make out much detail in any of their faces, but he could at least see that Bledsoe was smiling.
Winston knew what would come next. He sat in the threadbare plush seat, elbows on his knees, heart in his throat. He nodded at Bernie.
The Bledsoe figure tossed its grenade down the center of the fuselage. Colonel Bauman made a grab for the orb but missed. It landed in the cockpit and bounced around the controls. Before mote-Winston could react, Alyssa jammed both hands into his chest and shoved him out of the plane. Mote-Winston gently dissolved into a fine mist on the rug and disappeared.
Bledsoe’s head turned to see what had become of Winston just as Colonel Bauman lunged down the aisle for the grenade. Shade dove for Bledsoe, and Bledsoe vanished, with the mote mist doing a fair job of imitating falling sparks.
Shade straightened in surprise. Alyssa turned from the open door, one hand clasped on the doorframe. Only Amanda remained essentially motionless.
It felt like ten seconds as Winston tried to take in the entire scene. He knew he should be focused on the timing and people’s positions — the logistics — but all he could see was the ghosts of people he loved. People who had died for him.
The grenade exploded, and in unison every mote shape disintegrated into nothingness.
Winston closed his eyes tightly and bowed his head. He got the point even before Bernie explained it.
“How long?” croaked Winston, lifting his head.
“No, this one.”
Bernie thought for an instant.
Winston Chase and the Omega Mesh Page 23
