Winston Chase and the Theta Factor

by Bodhi St John

  Winston bowed his head and slowly, carefully made the long descent down the ladder. When he finally reached the deck, the two crewmen scowled and directed him into the dim shadows within the freighter’s tower.

  18

  Control Tower Crippling

  The tower’s interior smelled of steel and fresh paint. Winston’s footsteps, as well as those of his two guards, clanged and rattled the corrugated stairs as they ascended several flights back up to the control deck. Winston found himself leaning on the railing and breathing hard when they were only four flights up.

  “Really?” he asked. “You guys couldn’t have told me to stay at the top?”

  The unsympathetic men eyed his backpack warily, but made no move to seize it. One of them nudged his colleague, pointed at Winston’s neck, and mumbled some words Winston couldn’t understand. In response, the second man only frowned more deeply. Winston figured they must be trying to puzzle out the blue glow of his skin. After a moment, the second man nodded toward the stairs, a silent order to keep moving.

  When they reached the top landing, Winston paused to catch his breath and mentally prepare himself not to do anything stupid and juvenile when he saw Shade. His captors wouldn’t respect him if they acted their age. Instead, Winston forced himself to study the room. Shade and several crewmen stood behind the command console. Three laptops rested on the wood paneling, all of them thick, rugged, and at least a decade old. Two smaller upright consoles stood in the far corner of the room, each bearing even more antiquated equipment. Judging by the green screens and knobs, Winston figured they might have been from the 1970s or earlier.

  The captain only differed from his colleagues by his black cap with gold trim. He was accompanied by three other officers — or so Winston assumed from their lack of coveralls and the stylized bars on the breast pockets of their buttoned-down shirts. Two additional officers stood with them, one black and one Caucasian, both larger than the Chinese men but equally somber.

  “Stop!” ordered Captain Gao, raising his hand to Winston in warning. He said a few quick words to the crewmen still flanking Winston. One took a step forward, hands on his hips, clearly conveying that Winston had better not try anything. Another hastily slid Winston’s pack from his shoulders. Winston wanted to object, but he could tell from the arm’s length way the crewman handled the bag that he’d been warned of Winston’s status as a nuclear terrorist — one with glowing skin, no less.

  The crewman walked the pack over to Captain Gao, holding it out to him.

  “I wouldn’t drop that, if I were you,” said Shade in almost a stage whisper, just as the captain reached for the bag. He paused, eyes shifting with distrust to Shade and then Winston. Shade gave a little smile and chuckled. “I’m just messing with you.”

  Winston recognized this for what it was. Shade was loved by just about everybody for his easygoing, helpful, concerned nature. His brown Pacific Islander skin, rounded features, and broad, thousand-watt smile only added to his instant likability. And if that failed, he went for humor. Unfortunately, this crowd seemed immune to both his charm and wit. Winston supposed stowaways, one of them a nuclear terrorist, and an unplanned visit from the Coast Guard might interfere with the crew’s appreciation of Shade’s magnetism.

  Captain Gao seized the pack but didn’t open it. “What is inside?” he asked.

  “A present from my dad,” Winston said. “Metalworking. It’s not harmful. Go ahead and look.”

  Captain Gao undid the two buckles and peered inside. His brow crinkled further as he studied the Alpha Machine. “What does it do?”

  Winston shrugged. “You can pass it around to anyone. I guarantee it won’t do a thing. It’s totally harmless. If that’s a weapon, I’m a Big Mac.”

  “Why does the Coast Guard call you nuclear terrorist?”

  Yeah, that was a little harder to explain. Winston took a deep breath, then winced as the effort sent a stab between his ribs. It hurt, but not as much as before.

  “My dad has said and done some stuff that wasn’t very popular with the government. You guys know how that goes, right?” Winston tried for a smile of commiseration. No one seemed receptive. “He’s in captivity now.” That much was certainly true. “This is literally the only thing I have from him. The government says I’m a nuclear terrorist because I have this weird thing. I guess it’s what they could call me that would get the most attention so I would be found and captured. They want to use me as leverage. To make my dad talk.”

  Captain Gao eyed him with suspicion. At last, he closed the pack’s flap and set the bag in the long console’s shadow next to another bundle — no, two bundles pressed together: Winston’s and Shade’s black backpacks.

  “Your affairs are not our affairs,” said Captain Gao calmly. “We do not become involved with stowaways.”

  “So, that’s it?” Winston asked. “You just hand us over and sail home? Do you know what they’ll do to us? We haven’t done anything wrong!”

  Captain Gao’s nostrils flared slightly, and he stiffened, as if Winston had offended him. “As you say, we…know how that goes.”

  Winston forced himself to sigh with resignation and look about. “I’ve never been on a ship like this before,” he said, only giving Shade the quickest of glances. He casually moved away from the two men who had escorted him up the tower and made his way to the long console desk. “I repair and sell computers at home, mostly to help my mom with the bills. Your systems here are…really interesting.”

  Winston stepped between the men, seemingly fascinated with the equipment. As he drew close, he again caught Shade’s gaze and glanced down meaningfully at their bags. Shade squinted slightly, signaling that he didn’t know what Winston wanted. Great.

  Winston reached for the nearest laptop, but the white crewman intercepted him and grabbed his arm.

  “Whoa, it’s cool!” Winston said, raising both hands. “I’m just curious how all this works. I see you don’t have a wheel or anything, so I assume everything gets controlled through these systems. Is that how it works?”

  Slowly, Winston lowered his arms and only barely touched the laptop screen’s top edge. He ran his fingertip along it, almost as if looking for dust, and then seemed to pause in thought. Since he didn’t move any further, the officer didn’t stop him.

  “I bet this was made in, like, 2001 or 2002, right?” Winston asked. “Man, they built them like tanks back then!”

  Shade took a couple of steps toward the far corner, drawing some of the attention. He pointed. “What do those do?”

  Again, Captain Gao looked between them searchingly, trying to discover their intentions. Yet Shade seemed earnest about getting an answer, so the captain said, “They are old sonar and radio systems we keep as backups.”

  “Cool,” Shade mused. “How long does it take to get from here to — actually, where are you going?”

  “Shanghai,” said Captain Gao.

  “I knew it!” Shade crowed. “How long?”

  And so Shade set about probing the captain with one trivial query after another. Winston tried to appear interested in their exchanges, but his real attention was completely absorbed by his connection to the ship’s computer systems via the laptop.

  As if lost in thought, Winston gradually gazed down at the floor and followed the blue trace lines emerging in his vision. He mentally reached into the system and, as he feared, could only recognize enough of the software to know that it was running some ancient, obscure Linux distribution.

  Winston heard a low, rhythmic sound and couldn’t help but steal a glance out the window. The chopper had come closer and was now rapidly approaching. No, wait. The helicopter he’d seen earlier was black. This one bore white and red markings.

  The Coast Guard.

  Abandoning the laptop’s operating system, Winston followed the power and data conduits out from the computer and into the console’s wiring. He could see a network hub in a recessed cabinet into which all of the counter’s systems
connected. There was no choice. Not knowing which computer controlled which ship functions, Winston realized he had to hit them all.

  He took a deep breath and prepared to push as much energy as he could into the laptops, but something in his gut told him this would be wrong. These computers were old, and they weren’t like heavy-duty servers. They were cheap PCs, probably held together with year after year of upgrades using the flimsiest components. No one in their right mind would trust the navigation of a ship hauling gajillions of dollars’ worth of cargo across the ocean to computers like these. If he was going to create a distraction and give them a shot at escaping, it wouldn’t be through hitting laptops that could barely play Solitaire. He had to find the engine room’s systems.

  “In America, we envy the hard work of your students,” Shade droned on, trying to keep the crew members engaged. “Like, I start classes at 8:45 in the morning. What about you guys? I bet your kids start at 6:30 or something.”

  Winston steeled himself. One of the hub’s data lines ran away from the console, down into the floor, over, down again… That was the one. The tower would be able to issue commands to the engine room’s embedded systems and monitor data coming from them, but Winston bet that if the tower’s systems went offline, the engine room would roll over onto some sort of autopilot system, and that wasn’t good enough.

  The farther the data line ran, the harder it became for Winston to follow it. The blue line resisted coming into focus. If he didn’t keep pouring all of himself into tracking it down, the connection would start to fray and diffuse into a glowing mist.

  At last, though, he had what he wanted…maybe. The feed had branched at several points into smaller, sideways conduits, but Winston felt that whatever point was at the bottom of the ship and closest to being at the aft, almost directly under him, was most likely to be the engine area. He pressed through to the end of the cabling, where it suddenly branched into a web of very small devices.

  Motors. Control boxes. Small embedded stuff. That has to be it.

  It was now or never. Winston could feel the tower starting to sway and grow dim around him.

  “Winston?”

  He couldn’t see much detail about the devices. He probably wouldn’t have known a vibration sensor from a control system, anyway.

  “Winston?”

  Captain Gao was looking straight at him. He took one step toward Winston, then another.

  Winston balled his left hand into a fist, imagining Little e in his grip. He closed his eyes, visualized all that equipment at the end of the network line as one solid object, then fired every last bit of mental energy he had at it. His brain was a generator, a pump, a storm cloud unleashing a bolt of lightning down the long, tenuous line between himself and the engine room.

  Something wrapped around Winston’s arm, tugging on him, and his legs gave way. He felt himself falling and anticipated his nose meeting the floor with a face-flattening crunch. The grip on his biceps tightened, and his body swung dizzily. Pain shot through his chest. The next thing he knew, Winston was staring at the ceiling, noticing how its white paint seemed yellowed with age while black splotches winked in and out of existence all over it. The white crewman floated into view over him, lips moving between his sunken, leathery cheeks, although his words were nothing but a stream of nonsense.

  “Winston!” Shade appeared over him, shoving the crewman back. His brows knitted together, eyes darting all over Winston’s face. “Dude, are you OK? Winston!”

  He wanted to answer, but the only thing left inside him was a dark emptiness that pulsed and ached throughout his head. He’d gone too far. Winston suspected he’d been running on fumes, and now he’d blown away the last vapors. He wanted to apologize to everyone — to Shade for leaving him, to the crew for causing them this trouble, to Theo and his mom and that FBI agent who’d tried to help him, and everyone else. Most of all, he wanted to apologize to his father for letting him down.

  The approaching helicopter’s rotors vibrated the control room. Winston could feel the floor under him trembling in time to their thump-thump-thump. The authorities would be here for him in a minute. It probably wasn’t even the Coast Guard. It would be Bledsoe come to fetch him and stick him in a cage forever.

  And where had that person he’d seen descending the rope ladder gone? Shouldn’t he or she be here?

  The world tilted under Winston again, and he closed his eyes before the sensation could swell into outright nausea.

  Several voices struck up at once in alarm. Winston forced his eyelids apart and saw the crewmen reaching out to hold on to something as they lost their balance. Shade leaned over Winston and put a hand on his chest. Winston noticed that a backpack strap was hooked over his friend’s forearm.

  “What did you do?” he whispered.

  “The end…of the line,” Winston tried to say, thinking this was a clever pun as his eyelids slipped shut again.

  So drained, Winston thought. If I keep using the Alpha Machine, I’m gonna look like my dad.

  From across the room, or perhaps it was from down a long tunnel, Winston heard Shade reply, “Not if I can help it.”

  Then the darkness in his mind billowed, swirled, and coated the world in blissful, silent black.

  19

  French Toast and Photographs

  Alyssa spent nearly ninety minutes taking TriMet all the way across Portland and south to the Oregon City Transit Center. Far from the sprawling, pedestrian-crammed concrete structure she had expected, the Transit Center was merely a triangular building of green trim, brick, and glass smaller than a rest stop and not much larger than the Dutch Bros coffee stand just down the street. The plot sat sandwiched between Main Street and McLoughlin Boulevard, flanked by a large KFC and an unmarked, beige, single-story building with mirrored windows. A scattering of benches adorned the broad cement sidewalk at which TriMet bus 32 now idled. A few people rested on these, reading, checking their phones, or watching the world go by.

  Alyssa stepped off the bus and into the midafternoon sunshine. It remained warm enough to leave her windbreaker in her backpack, although she knew that this early October “heat wave” was nothing but a malicious ruse. This was Oregon. Nine months of bleary, bone-chilling rain would start any minute. Winter was coming.

  Alyssa felt the urge to check the time on her phone. By now, she had missed two classes, and her absence would have been noted by teachers, passed to the Attendance Nazis, and quickly beamed to the primary on-file parent. However, odds were that her mom had a 2:00 appointment and would be tied up for the next hour. That would work. She should be able to find Theo, figure out if either of them needed to be institutionalized, and determine her next steps — and necessary excuses — within sixty minutes. If not…she’d be in a load of trouble.

  First order of business: find Theo. He’d said to meet her at this stop, and Alyssa had assumed that a ninety-something-year-old man wouldn’t be hard to spot. Look for some hunched-over, wrinkly guy with a walker or wheelchair and there you go. Unfortunately, no one within sight of the bus station fit that description.

  Alyssa wondered if perhaps every line in the school had been tapped. Could the FBI have gotten here before her and already nabbed Theo? If this Area X business was that important, they probably wouldn’t stop at Winston’s closest friends.

  “Should we grab some lunch? I’m hungry.”

  The question arose from one of the people on the benches before her. He lay on his back, feet resting on one of the bench arms, his head resting atop a beat-up brown leather messenger bag. The man wore a white baseball cap from which only a few wisps of white hair escaped. He held a folded newspaper almost at arm’s length, blocking the sun and leaving his head in shadow.

  No walker. No wheelchair. The man looked thin, and the bare arms she could see above his T-shirt were tan and wiry. She probably would have pegged him at sixty-five, seventy tops. He set the newspaper down and used the bench back to pull himself upright, giving a slight groan of eff
ort, but only what she would have expected of a man in his fifties.

  “Theo?” she asked, shielding her eyes to see him better.

  He set the newspaper on the bench, grabbed his bag, and sighed. “No, I’m Vincent Lane. Lunch? Yvonne’s a couple blocks down the street does some amazing eggs Benedict, and the coffee is fair trade.”

  Alyssa felt a little nervous about giving up the visibility of being on the street. Then again, did she want to be visible right now?

  “I don’t drink coffee,” she said.

  “Yet,” added Theo. “The day is still young. Shall we?”

  He led them across Main Street, and Alyssa couldn’t help but try to study the old man with sidelong glances. If he really was over ninety years old, calling him well-preserved would have been a huge understatement. He walked bent forward slightly, as if his head were uncomfortably heavy, and he had a small limp. The skin around his neck hung in wrinkled folds. The fleshy bulges of his cheekbones rested between deep, shadowed eyes and a thick, salt-and-pepper mustache that wrapped back to his ears. For all that, his motions might be a bit slower than normal, but they remained smooth and strong. His eyes were keen and observant.

  “Not what you expected?” he asked.

  Alyssa hoped she didn’t blush. Clearly, his peripheral vision was fine, too.

  “Just thinking that you’re in great shape for your age,” she managed.

  Theo smiled. “I can thank the QVs for that. But I have a drawer full of prescription meds, too, same as everybody else.”

  Theo held the door for Alyssa, and the sweet, rich scents of breads, hash browns, bacon, and coffee wafted over them. Yvonne’s was a narrow diner, sprinkled with perhaps ten tables. The cream-colored walls showed the silhouette of a tree crowded with birds launching into flight. Blackboards covered with colorful menus for coffees, teas, and the daily specials dominated the back wall, which stood partly obscured behind a serving counter.