She felt despair well up within her.
A wave of warmth and embarrassment emanated from Winston’s presence.
Alyssa understood. Shade dives and grabs her grandpa. Bernie grabs for Shade. Winston makes contact with Bernie’s foot while still holding on to Alyssa, who has Winston’s mom.
Winston interrupted her.
Alyssa took in the cabin again. The grenade had rolled off the edge of the screen and was now tipping off the edge of the console, heading for the floor. Her grandpa’s hands dug into the seat backs on each side of the aisle as he prepared to throw himself after the weapon. Amanda’s terrified eyes remained fixed on Winston.
Alyssa didn’t participate much in her family’s faith, apart from getting presents at Hanukkah and eating a ridiculous amount of food at Passover. Now, though, she felt the compulsion to reach for some higher help.
Dear God. I know I’m a bad Jew, but I hope you don’t hold it against me. Or my Grandpa. He doesn’t deserve this, and I need him.
All at once, input flooded back into Alyssa’s senses. Wind roared in her ears as her hair smacked her in the face. Beyond Winston to her right, she saw the tall alien lean to his left, opening the way for Shade to lower his body and launch into a sprint.
Her grandpa stumbled, hands seizing the seat backs, stopping his forward step, even as momentum kept his upper body bending forward. He started to turn his head toward Alyssa.
Keeping her right hand clenched on Winston, Alyssa groped for Amanda’s hands, which were held before her chest, as if she too were praying.
Shade cleared Bernie’s frame with his first step.
Alyssa seized Amanda’s wrist and pulled on her, trying to buy Winston the additional inches he might need to reach Bernie.
Shade took one more half step and jumped. He knifed through the air above the seat back, arrow straight, hands extended, eyes locked on his target. His body turned in midair, face and chest toward Alyssa. Bernie, with less space to cover, simply bent at the knees and jumped forward into the aisle, hand reaching for where he expected Shade’s ankle to land.
Colonel Bauman’s left shoulder reversed as he abandoned the grenade and committed to following Winston’s instruction. Not taking that next step toward the cabin was what made the difference in Shade being able to reach him.
Despite turning sideways, Shade’s chest still collided with the nearest armrest. He bounced off it as he descended and landed on his side with a thud that Alyssa could feel through her feet. His fingertips were three inches short of her grandpa’s foot.
For an instant, Alyssa feared that Winston’s plan had collapsed. Shade was pinned on the floor between the seats. He couldn’t recover in time.
Then the colonel’s left foot followed the direction of his shoulder, and he stepped toward Winston before his brain could question whether it made sense to approach someone who had just jumped at him.
Shade’s fingers slipped under the hem of her grandpa’s pants and locked onto his ankle.
Bernie stretched forward and grasped Shade’s ankle.
Seeing his opening, pulling Alyssa along behind him, Winston reached for Bernie’s exposed foot.
Then the grenade exploded.
***
Despite knowing what he expected to happen, Winston struggled to block out nonessential information and stay focused on what had to happen. He couldn’t look at his mother to see if Alyssa had her. He couldn’t check the colonel’s face to see if he had registered Winston’s words and what he would do about them. All that mattered was the timing of his next action.
Shade dove…and fell short. Then the colonel’s brain gave them one shining instant of grace and sent his foot into Shade’s grip. Bernie lunged and gripped Shade’s ankle. That was it.
Winston pulled Alyssa behind him with his left hand while reaching Little e toward Bernie’s foot. In the instant the two made contact, Winston activated their tactile network. All action around him stopped save for the jitter and shimmer of matter and light. The fabric of his jeans seemed to vibrate. Sunlight streaming through the plane’s starboard windows rippled, making the red seat tops it touched shimmer like asphalt on a hot summer day. The plane’s walls and the distant cockpit’s instrument panel jittered as their solidity frayed, consolidated, and frayed again.
Winston wanted to cry with relief as he counted six nodes on their network. All present and accounted for.
Something in the scene before Winston changed. At first, he it was hard to make out a significant difference with everything in such a bizarre state of flux. Then he saw that the grenade, now in mid-roll across the cockpit floor, had grown in size. It was inflating like a balloon, the metal of its green shell expanding impossibly.
Can metal really do that? Winston wondered.
He had the barest impression of a jagged tear spreading across the shell, as if a little fledgling were inside pushing to escape its prison, then the sphere morphed into a ball of white. A shock wave expanded outward, a growing sphere of static within the ball of light. The screens and metal of the instrument panel seemed to pull away from the explosion, pushed outward like ripples on a pond.
In the strangest phenomenon yet, Winston watched the interior of the white ball contract tighter and tighter, warping the space around it, until it formed a black sphere.
A black hole? No, that was impossible. It had to be some strange quantum effect or interaction with the light sensors in his eyes.
The white explosion started to deepen into yellow and consumed the black, making Winston question if he had really seen it at all.
The instrument panel shattered within the shock wave and disintegrated into thousands of fragments. Their speed seemed to accentuate their feeble ability to retain solidity in this half-stilled tactile network state. The cockpit buzzed as if filled to the brim with black flies, all fleeing from the expanding field of white, yellow, and orange gouts of flame now giving birth to an uncountable number of dark pellets.
Not pellets, Winston realized. Shrapnel. The small metal fragments stuffed into grenades designed to inflect maximum damage on the surrounding environment.
If Winston didn’t act now, Colonel Bauman, who still stood in the middle of the aisle directly in the blast path, would die. Winston wasn’t about to ask Shade for the specific mortality radius of a frag grenade, but the ten feet between the grenade and Colonel Bauman seemed like a safe bet.
The first black bits extended beyond the blossoming fireball, at first by a hand’s length and then more and more. They erupted from the explosion in an expanding wave of debris.
The shock wave pushed beyond the cockpit and into the front row of seats. Black waves danced along the edges of the slowly encroaching flames. Just as the grenade had done, Winston saw the upper expanse of cockpit glass he could make out above the flames buckle outward. It seemed to inflate like a dark soap bubble, smooth and hypnotically beautiful. In the next moment, its surface tension fractured, and the glass exploded outward in an infinite spray of shards.
This was the challenge Bernie had described. Winston had to block out everything and focus only on making the jump. Everything in the external world was now a threat to making that happen. He had to forget it all, even though his eyes were locked open and he couldn’t block out what he was seeing.
The time-space controls had never left the corners of his vision. Winston brought up his last location — the living room of his home. From there, he would have to surrender all the artifacts to Bledsoe so the man could kick off his evil reign of destruction and depravity. But if he left them in Beaverton, even if they scattered across the country, would that be enough? Bledsoe only had to stumble across one of them to know to find all of them.
Shrapnel tore into the first row of seats and shredded the thin partition wall dividing the cockpit from the King Air’s main chamber. The nearest shards were only a few feet from the colonel’s back.
Winston saw the green controls. He tightened his grip on Little e’s crossbar. This was an easy jump, only through space rather than time. Even with six people, Winston hoped the impact on him wouldn’t be too bad. The drain from his last jump hadn’t caught up to him yet, but he had a feeling taking a double hit after this one was going to be a doozy.
And yet…he wasn’t going there with all of his people. He didn’t have what he had wanted from the very beginning. His mom would still be lonely, doubly so without Winston beside her. His father would still be dead, unjustly stolen from them because of Bledsoe. Winston would never have his complete family. Ever.
Was there really no other option? Were his people truly safe if he dropped them straight into Bledsoe’s clutches at Area X?
All of which dodged the real issue: Handing the Alpha Machine to Bledsoe was wrong. No matter how smart the Omega Mesh was, no matter what evidence it had from the future, there was no way that putting Bledsoe in power was the right thing to do.
Ever.
Winston felt Bernie’s anxiety spike while he shifted his geoviewer target, but the alien remained silent. There was no time to argue, only act.
Winston saw the colonel’s thigh deform as the first shard collided with his upper leg, sending out a wave of rippling flesh immediately followed by a bursting spray of blood.
Winston saw it, knew that more injury would follow in an instant, but he couldn’t spare it any thought.
He knew the exact moment he wanted. He had seen it.
Hanford. The pool of spent nuclear fuel. The green water lit by eerie rows of tanks glowing blue.
The place where his father’s memory said he was destined to die.
He needed that fifth piece. It was the only way he could go one-on-one with the Omega Mesh and make it understand how wrong this was. And the only time and place he could get it would be right as his father was depositing it in the pool.
Almost at the speed of thought, Winston zeroed in on Hanford, searching for his QV-bearing father as if seeking the one signal in a field of background noise. He found the main reactor, then the storage pool linked to it.
Another shard struck Colonel Bauman, this time in the back of his right shoulder. The impact rocked his upper body and cast off another mushrooming ejection of blood. The expression on the colonel’s face hadn’t changed yet, perhaps because the impulses from his nerves had yet to reach his brain.
Because the grenade had detonated on a hard surface, the explosion’s main force projected upward. Most of the shrapnel ripped through the cockpit’s window and roof. Less expanded laterally, but there was still plenty to inflict massive damage throughout the cabin.
The blast wave scoured Colonel Bauman’s back, and Winston could see the top layer of his silvered hair curl and char, like in those time-lapse videos of flowers shriveling from bloom into dark, dried-out husks. The back of his shirt ruffled in the hot wind. The shock wave began to lift his entire body. Shade would lose his grip almost immediately.
Winston raced through time, knowing what he needed.
There! He found his father operating a crane mounted over the spent fuel pool. The timing wasn’t perfect. Ideally, Winston wanted to get the piece before his father placed it, but there was no time to fine-tune his chrono selection.
The shock wave rolled over Shade’s outstretched arm, tousling his hair and tugging at the fabric of his sweat jacket. More black shards raced toward the colonel, and some were about to strafe along Shade’s back.
This moment would have to do. Winston yelled in his mind, bringing his entire being to bear on making the jump. Every bit of energy he had left poured through him and into Little e. He felt Bernie’s energy pour through him, as well, just as the fireball washed over the colonel’s rising body. For the barest instant, the light and heat bursting from the cockpit leaped to fill the entire plane, swallow their bodies, and envelop the world.
28
Catwalk Convergence
“So, what’s the one thing?” Bledsoe asked Command One.
He was tiring of this conversation. Bledsoe found himself repeatedly checking his watch, and they had been in this Area X dining room for over an hour. At least Command One had been merciful enough to leave the walls transparent, allowing Bledsoe a view of the Area X interior rather than the charred remains of the Giza plateau. Still, if this was supposed to be an educational conversation, Command One was doing an exceptional job of holding back the education. For every question the man answered in his calm, minimalistic manner, Bledsoe had another two or three queries that went unanswered.
“I’m sorry?” Command One asked. He poured more water for both of them from a tall glass carafe.
“The one thing,” Bledsoe repeated. “The one thing the Omega Mesh changed from the last iteration to this one.”
“Ah. I’m not currently at liberty to reveal that.”
Bledsoe’s frustration boiled over, and he swore loudly as he swept his water glass off the table. It sprayed water in a long arc before rebounding off the carpeted floor and shattering against the nearby wall.
“You’re not revealing much at all, friend!” Bledsoe yelled as he pounded a fist onto the table. “How am I supposed to save everyone from this future darkness if no one is going to tell me the rules, hm? Doesn’t seem quite fair, does it?”
Command One took a slow drink before gently setting his glass back on the table linen. “Mr. Bledsoe, the idea of fairness has little place in life, never mind time-space travel. But I assure you that most, if not all, information will be presented to you in time if and when circumstances merit the disclosure.”
“You won’t tell me about the iteration difference.” Bledsoe held up a hand and started counting off on his fingers. “Won’t tell me about the differences between electricity and this nuclear tunneling force. Won’t tell me about why no one seems to care when I kill Management agents. Won’t tell me where the Chase boy went. Won’t tell me what happens twenty years from now, or even tomorrow.”
“Because—”
Bledsoe waved Command One’s interruption away. “Because ‘the future is dynamic and ephemeral,’ so you don’t know — except you do.” He leaned forward over the table, baring his teeth at Command One. “You want me to be a team player, but no one is willing to throw me the ball.
See?”
Command One sighed. “I see how it might appear that way. But I assure you, at the point when—”
He lapsed to silence in mid-sentence and cocked his head slightly, as if listening.
“What?” asked Bledsoe, slumping back into his seat. Command One had done this downloading routine twice already since Winston and Bernie had left. “Don’t mind me. I’ll hunt around for a magazine.”
Bledsoe gazed out the wall that somehow served as a window and watched the hustle of activity he could make out across Area X’s chasm. Command One had said that this place remained shielded from certain types of scanning technology due to its carefully tuned ambient radiation levels, and all entrances to the place had been sealed off long ago. Supplies and even air arrived via special transportation conduits, although Command One wouldn’t reveal what was on the other end or who was sending in supplies — or even who all the people were staffing this place, much less what they were doing.
Bledsoe made himself a promise that, if he ever had the slightest provocation someday, he would drop one of those Q-bombs down that central chasm and finish off the job that Claude had managed to leave incomplete.
Command One blinked and drew a deep breath. “It’s time for us to go,” he said.
Bledsoe clapped his hands and glanced toward the ceiling. “Thank God. Why the sudden change of heart?”
Command One pursed his lips, seeming to measure his words carefully. However, what he said only served to magnify Bledsoe’s sour mood.
“Because Winston Chase elected to proceed straight to the fifth Alpha Machine piece without you.”
At first, Bledsoe found himself speechless. All he could imagine was the boy with a complete Alpha Machine able to go anywhere in time he pleased. Not only had he lied and stolen Bledsoe’s accomplishment, he had made Bledsoe look like a fool — the most easily deceived dupe in the world.
“You said he’d made a deal!” Bledsoe fumed. “Go run some errand then come right back. You didn’t say the errand was to complete our mission without me. I thought that was forbidden! Where’s your all-powerful Omega Mesh in all this? Asleep? Watching reruns?”
Winston Chase and the Omega Mesh Page 25
