Winston Chase and the Theta Factor

  Winston Chase

  and the Theta Factor

  (The Winston Chase Series, Book 2)

  by

  Bodhi St. John

  Copyright 2018 by Bodhi St. John

  bodhistjohn.com

  Cover art by Roy A. Migabon Artworks

  Formatting by Polgarus Studio

  All rights reserved

  Table of Contents

  1. Plummet to the Past

  2. A Vile Invitation

  3. Sunrise and Supervision

  4. Surveillance and the Space Man

  5. Of Shakes and Shipwrecks

  6. From Beeswax to Bombs

  7. Inside Claude's Cranium

  8. The Curious Curator

  9. Alyssa Enlisted

  10. Plucked From the Past

  11. Sweet and Sour Alien Power

  12. Looking for Lane

  13. Clue Conundrum

  14. Chronoview of Captivity

  15. Midnight March

  16. A Deadly Drop

  17. Crusher and Capture

  18. Control Tower Crippling

  19. French Toast and Photographs

  20. Lynch's Lead

  21. Rock and Roll on the Road

  22. Destination Revelation

  23. Kin and Kit

  24. When Recon Goes Wrong

  25. Have Duck, Will Dad

  26. A Piece and a Pop

  27. Cozy Fires and Blazing Tires

  28. Parting for Punctuality

  29. Drowning and Death

  30. Discussion Denied

  31. Flight to a Better Night

  32. Officer Onboard

  33. Present Peril

  34. Homeless and Heartbroken

  35. A Shoelace…Shocking!

  36. Flight in the Forest

  37. Arrival at Alyssa

  38. Supper and Separation

  39. Council Crest Crisis

  40. Loss and Leaving

  Author’s Note

  1

  Plummet to the Past

  Winston woke to find Shade’s silhouette looming directly over him, unkempt curls of hair dark against an incredibly black and starry sky.

  “Why are you staring at me?” Winston asked. “You’re creeping me out.”

  “Because I want to study the clues,” Shade muttered with obvious embarrassment.

  “I thought we were going to sleep.”

  “We did.”

  “So why’d you wake me up?”

  “I was done.”

  Winston groaned. He remembered closing his eyes after they had taken stock of their food and other belongings. That had been just after sunset, but this looked like the dead of night. They, or at least he, must have been out for a few hours. He felt the vibrating rumble of the cargo ship all about him. They nestled in the cramped protection of a pallet of brown boxes, each stamped with a series of Chinese characters. The boxes formed four encasing walls, right where the boys had placed them before being crane-lifted onto the gigantic ship with its seemingly endless rows of colored steel containers. The ship felt like a filled Tetris screen, with them hidden inside one of the blocks.

  Winston caught diesel in the air mixed with cardboard, paint, and rust. Otherwise, the night air was deliciously fresh with a breeze off the Columbia River and pine-covered Cascade Mountains. Of course, that freshness also came with the chill of early fall, and Winston’s still-damp clothes offered little warmth. He wished he’d been able to keep his spare jacket through yesterday’s chaos.

  The boys knew they would need a new hiding place before the Hanjin Portland II reached the open ocean. Otherwise, their next stop might well be in East Asia. Also, Winston guessed that the crew wasn’t likely to leave a pallet of cardboard boxes exposed to the open air for much longer, clear skies or not. When dawn came, they needed to have a better plan in place. The last thing they wanted was for the crew to report two stowaways and discover that they were wanted by Homeland Security as nuclear terrorists.

  Well, one nuclear terrorist. As far as Winston knew, Shade Tagaloa remained just a missing child with a nationwide Amber Alert posted for him. Either way, they were probably one capture away from disappearing into a prison cell forever and letting the Alpha Machine fall into the hands of people who wanted to go back in time and erase Winston — and who knows what else — from existence.

  Considering this sent another wave of anxiety through Winston. It was more than anyone could handle, least of all one fourteen-year-old who’d just learned from his mom that he was the world’s first alien-human hybrid, spawned sixty years ago by time-traveling parents who used a nuclear bomb to destroy research that might hand humanity over into the hands of power-hungry madmen.

  Winston shook his head. He couldn’t think about the big picture. Just one thing, one little minute, at a time.

  Breathe.

  “OK, OK.” Winston tried to rub the sleep from his eyes. “Give me a second to check for email.”

  “Really?”

  “There could be something from your mom.”

  “Obviously your top priority.” Shade punched Winston in the shoulder. “Do I look that stupid?”

  “Well, it’s pretty dark.”

  That earned a second punch, harder this time.

  “Ow!”

  Shade slumped against their wall of boxes. “Fine. See if Alyssa replied. Make it quick.”

  Winston didn’t need additional urging. He leaned back and closed his eyes. Though it had only been a few days since he’d learned about the gajillions of alien quasi-viruses, or QVs, running around inside him, he felt rather proud of his ability to use these nano-sized things, especially in conjunction with the artifacts he carried. He’d gone from simply having an innate knack with electronics to being able to communicate wirelessly with anything from an elevator to the Internet itself, assuming the receiver in his head could pick up a suitable data signal.

  The Hanjin Portland II connected several Wi-Fi access points to the ship’s satellite uplink. The cryptographic engine baked into Winston’s brain had taken about a half second to crack the local router’s encryption. With that done, the router kindly assumed he was a friendly laptop and issued him everything needed to hop on the Internet.

  He checked his webmail account, searching through the inevitable fifty or sixty messages from his PC repair clients and social media alerts for anything from Alyssa Bauman.

  Sure enough, there was a note from her timestamped a little over an hour ago.

  “She replied,” Winston said quietly.

  He heard Shade stir. “Well?”

  Winston hesitated. What if she thought he was insane? What if she laughed at his message and told him never to talk to her again? He wouldn’t be surprised. Wasn’t that how it always went?

  He opened the note.

  Winston,

  Go drop off a bridge.

  —A

  Winston read it twice to himself. He felt like Brian Steinhoff had just Falcon Punched him in the gut.

  “Oh, no,” he whispered.

  “What?” cried Shade. “What’d she say? Is it about my mom?”

  Winston read the note aloud. He felt sick.

  Go drop off a bridge.

  Could she get any more angry or dismissive?

  “She hates me.”

  Winston expected Shade to deny the idea and talk him out of it. If nothing else, he expected his best friend to try to make him feel better.

  Instead, Shade only sat in silence until he finally hummed, “Hmmm.”

  “Hm, what?”

  “I mean…” Shade gazed up at the stars, searching for insight. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Why
not? I stood her up, basically told her I wasn’t going to see her, and now she hates me.”

  Shade sighed. “Uh-huh. And back on this planet, you sent a heartfelt note to a girl who likes you. It was obvious — totally Hallmark card obvious — that you like her. You tell her you feel really sorry, but something is wrong. Wrong enough that you can’t tell her what. And then…then she tells you to jump off a bridge? No. I don’t buy it.”

  Even to Winston’s sleepy, overwrought mind, he had to admit that Shade had a point.

  “Would your mom have gone to her?” Shade asked.

  Winston dismissed the idea almost instantly. “I doubt it. She’s never met Alyssa and wouldn’t have a reason to—”

  Both boys froze as voices approached them. A beam of light passed over their heads, making them cringe deeper into their cardboard enclosure.

  “Mandarin,” Shade whispered in Winston’s ear.

  Heavy footsteps drew closer. Winston could feel his heart racing and nearly jumped when he saw a dark shape appear over the boxes’ edge. Fortunately, the figure vanished just as quickly. The footsteps receded. Both boys let out huge, quiet sighs of relief.

  Winston intended to drop out of his Wi-Fi connection, but he gave his inbox one last refresh, just out of habit.

  A new message appeared at the top of the list in bold letters. The sender was “D Bledsoe.” The subject line read, “Your mama.”

  Winston blew right past the snide joke as he opened the message and gasped.

  Shade asked, “What? What’s wrong?”

  Distracted and flush with fear, Winston could only say, “Mom.”

  The message body was filled with a head-to-waist photo of his mom. She appeared to be trying to avoid the camera, but Winston could see the dark circles under her eyes, the clumps of hair that draggled about her cheeks and neck, and the haggard hang of her normally erect posture. Her hands were bound before her in handcuffs. She seemed overwrought and afraid.

  Winston found the note under the picture and read it to Shade in a shaky whisper: “I have your two parents and you have 24 hours. If I don’t have the Alpha Machine by then you lose a parent. If we make it to 48 hours, I will kill the other one.”

  Shade took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then said, “We already knew he had your dad. From a tactical perspective, I’m not sure this changes anything.”

  “Doesn’t change anything? Dude, he’s got my mom!”

  “I know. But think about it. What are you gonna do? Show up at the FBI’s front door and ask to see her? He almost killed us yesterday, man. I mean, I did die. And he probably killed Agent Smith. You want to go run up against that again, right now?”

  Winston ground his teeth together in frustration.

  “Do you?” Shade pressed.

  “No.”

  “Of course not. So, nothing changes. The only way to beat this guy is if we have the Alpha Machine and use it against him. Saving your folks is one of the payoffs, not the main objective.”

  “You’re right,” Winston growled. “I know you’re right.”

  “Like there was ever a question.”

  It was Winston’s turn to nail Shade in the shoulder.

  “Oww,” Shade groaned, rubbing the spot. “Big, tough alien kid thinks he can go around beating up on innocent earthlings.”

  Winston ignored the complaint and quietly slid the sandwich bag of pictures from a side pocket in his backpack. “First, we need to figure out these clues so we know where to go next. We’ve got a picture of an old boat—”

  “A galley. Maybe a galleon. I’m not sure.”

  “Candles—”

  “Church candles.”

  “And a shoreline with lightning.”

  Only there was more to the picture than what Winston had seen in his exhaustion earlier. What he had taken for an ocean was, in fact, an undulating sea of trees before which rested a shoreline. And as he peered even closer, he made out an object in the sky. It was black and egg-shaped, easy to miss against the dark sky, and in its center was a red circle with red rays bursting from it.

  Winston tapped a fingertip on it pensively.

  “That’s a Japanese bomb, I think,” said Shade. “That’s the flag symbol for Japan, right?”

  “Yes!” Winston nodded in the darkness, realizing his friend was right. “Although I think it might be an older version. What does that mean?”

  The question hung between them in the darkness.

  “Do we need to go to Japan?” asked Shade. “I love ramen.”

  “Stop. We’ve got an old Japanese bomb…a galley…church candles. What connects them?”

  “Did the Japanese have churches on ships?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Both thought furiously and came up empty-handed.

  “Me neither,” Shade admitted.

  They had hit a roadblock. Winston didn’t think it would be their last, but he couldn’t afford to sit there spinning his wheels. If he had only twenty-four hours, he needed to make the best of them.

  Reaching into his bag, he felt for Little e, the oddly-shaped, tubular device that could turn special blue marbles into blasts of energy and who-knew-what-else. He’d named it after the energy variable of Einstein’s famous e=mc2 equation. Closing his hand around the device’s crosspiece, Winston withdrew the long, slender artifact. Immediately, the device’s six tube tips came to life, bending and groping, obeying Winston’s will. The tips slid across the silver ring and matching metal doughnut also in his bag.

  “Ugh,” muttered Shade. “Little Creepy still freaks me out.”

  “Get over it,” Winston said. “I need to practice with these things if I’m going to use them when the time comes.”

  Shade gave a quiet snort. “When the time comes. Good one.”

  Winston tried to concentrate. When he’d done this with the chronoviewer and Little e, he’d been able to peek decades into the past, albeit from the same physical place.

  After a moment, Winston shook his head. “Nothing. Everything seems the same.”

  “Shoot.” Shade frowned as he leaned over the artifacts and allowed a small beam from his flashlight to fall on the object. “What if you put each piece on a different one of Little e’s arms?”

  Winston drew both pieces from his bag and tried this. Nothing. He tried holding Little e in one hand and using his other to hold the doughnut’s center over the chronoviewer’s small bulge. Still nothing.

  On the point of giving up, Winston used Little e’s flexible metal fingertips to grasp the torus as he pulled the ring over the doughnut. As the torus passed through the circle, Winston felt the pressure in the back of this head expand slightly, like from a slow push on a tire pump.

  “Wait,” he said. “There’s something.”

  “Something what?” asked Shade.

  Winston didn’t answer, but he did increase his physical and mental grip on Little e. As he did so, he felt the ring fight against his other hand, trying to twist and shove. At the same time, Little e’s arms released the silver torus, which remained suspended between them. The ring snapped into position within the bowl formed by Little e’s six outward-swooping arms, and the torus occupied the ring’s center, floating in midair by what appeared to be magnetism.

  “Something…like that?” whispered Shade.

  The pressure continued to build within Winston’s head. It ached but not to the point of outright pain.

  The torus spun slowly within the circle, both of them tumbling end over end in different orientations. None of the artifacts touched each other, but they all clearly worked together. Already, Winston felt the discomfort in his head easing. This must be how the Alpha Machine was meant to operate, not as he’d used it before in the motel room.

  Gradually, Winston saw the world change. The pallets, boxes, Shade, and the ship turned semitransparent. He could see through them into the night and down to the dark river sliding by below. Watching the river was disorienting. If he thought about it one way, he
could see the white waves thrown off by the cargo freighter. If Winston shifted his thinking slightly, though, the waves vanished, leaving only the light of stars sparkling on the river’s shifting surface.

  “I see here,” he said. “This same place, but I don’t know when. No, wait.”

  He did know when. Within that zone of pressure in his mind, he felt a spot of stillness, a pale, wispy point set atop the churning shadows of his attention and energy. The more he focused on that point, the more shapes began to form in the lower corner of his vision. Numbers, he realized. Time. It was a date stamp written in pale red outline through which he could still see the world. Above it formed a thin horizontal line with a small ball resting atop it.

  He was looking into the past of exactly sixty seconds ago.

  Winston knew a timeline scrubber when he saw one. He gave the ball the barest mental nudge to the right. In the space of a heartbeat, the second layer of his vision disappeared and left only the present. He tried pushing the spot to the right again. The ball refused to budge, and the timeline flashed a deeper red. Winston had the impression of pushing against an immovable wall. The future was obviously off-limits. He tugged the time slider, as he thought of it, to the left. Instantly, the second reality before him whipped into a blur of overlapping day and night. Months raced by, then years. The date stamp change from red to green. However, as the distance between present and past increased, Winston felt the pressure in his mind increase. It narrowed and stretched. He couldn’t have described it, but it felt as if the two times rested at opposite ends of a rubber band, and the more he forced the ends apart with the Alpha Machine, the more taut and resisting that pressure became.

  Having the past pull against him only made Winston want to see how far he could go. With massive mental strength, could he span millennia? Could he go back to the dinosaurs?

  The mental effort required to keep shifting the time slider climbed as the years rushed by. The 1990s flipped into the ‘80s. Winston swallowed and redoubled his efforts.

  1977. 1974.

  “Winston, what do you see?” Shade asked.