by Jack Heath
The strangest part was, it looked like the shipping container had been ripped apart from the inside.
12:50
No time to think about what that might mean. Oscar heard a stairwell door burst open somewhere in the cargo bay.
A voice echoed: ‘Find him!’
‘You go that way, I’ll go this way,’ the other voice replied.
Heart pounding, Oscar crept through the maze of containers as quietly as he could. He heard occasional scuffles from the agents’ shoes on the metal floor, but the acoustics of the cargo hold made it impossible to tell where the sound was coming from.
11:55
He couldn’t see any open containers. New plan—he would sneak across the cargo hold to the stairwell, get to the upper decks, and take his chances with the lifeboats. But the two agents had split up, so it would be twice as hard to get through the maze of containers without bumping into one of them.
‘Funny,’ one of them whispered, from somewhere to Oscar’s left. ‘Been hearing strange noises from down here all week. But now that we’re actually listening, it’s dead quiet—’
11:20
‘Will you shut up?’ the other guy said.
Oscar rummaged through his pockets and found a muesli bar. It wasn’t much of a distraction. It would have to do.
He leaned around a corner, checking that the coast was clear. Then he tossed the muesli bar as far as he could.
11:00
It skittered across the floor, making a sound not unlike scuffling footsteps.
‘You hear that?’ one voice asked.
‘Over there,’ the other replied.
Oscar waited for their footsteps to fade, then he crept past the huge stacks of containers like a mouse sneaking past a row of tombstones. He was in the darkest area of the cargo hold, a long way from the rip in the hull.
10:30
When he turned another corner, he saw a crack of light—the stairwell door! He was almost there.
As silently as a ghost, he stepped out of the shadows.
A hand grabbed his collar.
08:25
‘Got you!’ a voice snarled.
Oscar tried to slip out of the man’s grip, but it was too tight.
‘See?’ the other agent said. ‘I told you it was a trick. Search him.’
The first man, who had a moustache and scarred hands, hauled Oscar away from the stairwell, back into the gloom. He pinned Oscar to the wall and patted him down.
‘It’s not here,’ he said.
The other agent, who hadn’t taken off his sunglasses, despite the darkness, pointed a menacing finger at Oscar. ‘Where is it?’ he demanded.
‘Where’s what?’ Oscar said. ‘You’ve got the wrong kid.’
‘Nice try,’ Sunglasses said. ‘Tell us where the book is, and maybe we let you go.’
‘Or don’t tell us,’ Moustache added. ‘And we’ll knock you out and throw you into the ocean. Then we find the book anyway.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Oscar protested, because he couldn’t think of anything else.
07:35
‘Be smart, kid,’ Sunglasses said. ‘You can cut a deal. Give it to us, and maybe we never saw you. The vice-president won’t care, so long as he gets his book back.’
This made Oscar too angry to keep pretending. His abuela had survived years in those detention camps, documenting every horror in her journal. It wasn’t enough for the vice-president to pretend the camps had never existed—he had to claim her journal belonged to him too.
07:10
‘It’s not his book,’ Oscar snapped.
‘Ah, some honesty at last,’ Moustache said. A crowbar was leaning against one of the containers. He let go of Oscar and picked up the crowbar. He took a practice swing. ‘Last chance.’
‘You know you’re working for the bad guy, right?’ Oscar said. ‘The journal proves it.’
‘Oh, really?’ Moustache grinned. ‘Show us.’
Oscar bit his lip, but said nothing more.
‘OK. Sounds like someone wants to go for a swim,’ Sunglasses said.
Moustache lifted the crowbar—
06:30
And then a huge, hairy hand shot out of the darkness.
Moustache didn’t even have time to scream. The hand wrapped around his chest and yanked him back into the shadows. The crowbar clattered against the floor.
Oscar stared at the empty space where Moustache had been a second before. He thought about the giant container, torn open from inside. The strange noises down here.
I’ve gone crazy, he thought. That can’t have been real.
The colour had drained from Sunglasses’ face. ‘What the—’
A mighty roar drowned out the rest of his sentence. Whatever was down here, it was mad.
Oscar could see movement in the gloom. A dark silhouette—like a gorilla, but impossibly huge. A giant . . . and it was coming closer.
06:10
Oscar’s paralysis broke, and he dashed towards the stairwell door, running faster than he would have thought possible before now. Another huge hand landed where he had been standing, shaking the floor beneath him. Sunglasses was sprinting alongside him, gibbering with terror.
Oscar hit the stairwell door and shoved it open with a screech. He reached the first flight of stairs and kept running. Sunglasses was right behind him—
But not for long.
There was a scream of horror from behind Oscar. He turned in time to see the giant’s hairy hand reach through the stairwell door and grab Sunglasses.
‘No!’ Sunglasses screamed, and then he was gone.
03:00
Oscar ran up every flight of stairs and out onto the top deck. It was bedlam up there. People were wandering around looking confused, babbling on phones. Crew radios chattered. Land was on the horizon, and people were staring hopefully at it. No-one noticed the fugitive in their midst.
In a way, Oscar wasn’t a fugitive anymore. The two agents from Verde were gone. They wouldn’t bother him again. Land was in sight. He was free.
00:15
Just the same, he didn’t stop running until he had reached the car. He popped open the boot, grabbed the journal and kneeled on the deck, hugging it his chest.
00:00
‘I survived, abuela,’ he whispered. ‘Just like you.’
20:00
‘OK, the sub is in position,’ Ashling said. ‘Everyone at their stations. Transmission in three minutes.’
Storti cleared his throat. ‘I said you could be part of my expedition, Miss Hartigan. I didn’t say you could give the orders.’
Ashling bowed. ‘Of course. Be my guest.’
‘You’re my guest,’ Storti snapped.
‘Figure of speech.’
Storti turned to the room full of technicians. ‘OK people, look sharp. Transmission is in less than three minutes. I want everyone at their stations.’
19:40
Everyone was already at their stations, having obeyed Ashling’s instruction. She smiled and turned back to the test chamber.
She had fought hard to be on this expedition. Her long-suffering parents had said it was too dangerous. It hadn’t helped when President Ocasio-Cortez called it ‘the most daring experiment since the first manned spaceflight almost a hundred years ago’. They were on a submarine just in case they caused a nuclear explosion, which would be devastating on land.
But it was Ashling who had gotten the chronometer working, when all the adult physicists had failed. She had a right to be here. Before her, the chronometer was just a mysterious artefact of unknown origin.
The clock on the wall counted down.
Storti cleared his throat. ‘How does this thing work, exactly?’
Ashling was surprised. ‘You’re the chief science officer. You don’t know?’
‘My specialty is chemistry, not physics,’ Storti said defensively. ‘I streamed the information pack to my implant, but couldn’t quite . . .’ He trailed
off.
‘Understand,’ Ashling said helpfully.
He glared at her.
‘Well,’ she began, ‘it all started with my discovery that heat and time were actually the same substance, at least at a quantum level. After I developed a proof—’
She could already tell from the look on Storti’s face that he wasn’t going to get it. Not in the next ninety seconds.
18:55
‘Never mind. I’ll explain after it works,’ she said.
‘But it will work?’
‘We’ve received several objects from the future. We know time travel is possible.’
‘But you can’t be sure that this specific experiment won’t kill us all by accidentally launching us into space.’
Storti wasn’t exaggerating. The chronometer was designed to move objects through space as well as time, so it could keep up with the earth—which was orbiting the sun at 1800 kilometres per minute. In the last experiment, a poorly-calibrated prototype had catapulted the unmanned vessel into orbit.
‘It’ll work,’ Ashling said. ‘Just watch.’
It has to, she told herself. The whole world is counting on us.
17:25
‘Thirty seconds,’ Storti said. ‘You better get in there. Good luck.’
‘You don’t need luck when math is on your side,’ Ashling said. It was something her professor used to say all the time. Ashling had loved Professor Tibbit, who never made her feel out of place even though she was years younger than anyone else in the class.
She walked into the test unit. The boomerang-shaped chronometer glowed as she approached, responding to the magnetic field generated by the nanomachines in her blood. It was pre-programmed—she just had to turn it on.
‘Ten seconds,’ Storti said.
Ashling took a deep breath. Counted.
Five, four, three . . .
16:55
‘See you all two hours ago,’ she said, and pushed the button.
Later, she wasn’t sure how to describe the sensation. It was like a tingling which started in her toes, and then became a pain as it shot up her legs. By the time it reached her stomach it had become a violent nausea. But before she could throw up, it reached her head. The test unit glitched around her and suddenly she was looking at infinite copies of herself, stretching away into the distance as though she were standing in between two mirrors.
Then it was over. She felt like the transmission had lasted less only a second or two, yet somehow whole lifetimes had passed.
‘Woah,’ she said.
She looked around at all the other technicians. All were still standing, though a few looked vaguely ill. One man was giggling uncontrollably. Another was quietly weeping.
Storti was rubbing his temples, like he had a headache.
‘Are you OK, sir?’ Ashling asked.
He looked up. His pupils were huge. ‘I take it we’re still alive?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And not in space?’
17:25
Ashling looked up at one of the screens. It said something impossible. DATE: FEBRUARY 1ST, 2020. ‘Uh, no. But . . .’
‘But what?’ Storti was rubbing his arms like he was cold. ‘Have we travelled through time, or not?’
‘We have.’ Ashling kept her voice even. She didn’t want to start a panic. ‘But we’ve overshot the target.’
‘By how much?’
Ashling coughed. ‘Forty-two years.’
Storti’s face went grey. ‘Forty-two . . . what happened?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?!’
Maybe the submarine’s fusion reactor overloaded the chronometer, Ashling thought. It’s the first time we tried charging it on fusion power. A foolish oversight.
17:00
There was a tremendous bang. The whole submarine shook. Sirens started wailing.
‘What was that?’ a technician shouted.
‘Hull breach,’ a recorded voice said. ‘Emergency.’
Ashling turned back to screens, speedreading the data almost as quickly as streaming it. Her brain had gone into overdrive.
‘We’re in exactly the right place,’ she said. ‘But we’re forty-two years in the past. So I assume we appeared in front of some kind of obstacle—an iceberg, or a ship.’
Some historical facts about the year 2020 flashed through Ashling’s head. The year the Solar Orbiter was launched. The year of the rat. Ironically, the year fusion power was perfected. Nothing useful.
‘It had better not be a ship,’ Storti stood up. ‘We don’t want to mess with the past.’
‘That’s the whole point of this technology,’ Ashling snapped, without looking away from the screen. She was thinking fast.
‘You know what I mean—’
16:40
Crack. It sounded like thick tree boughs snapping off in a storm. The damage was spreading through the hull of the submarine.
The pressure down here was huge. If the cracks spread too far, the vessel could implode, crushing them all.
‘Karl! Taylor!’ Storti barked. ‘Get to the aft end of the ship. Seal off the affected areas. Now!’
Two engineers nodded and hurried out the door.
Ashling’s mind was racing. Where had she gone wrong? She had thought her calculations were perfect. She had checked them hundreds of times.
‘Miss Hartigan,’ Storti said. ‘Get us back to present-day. We may need rescue.’
Ashling cleared her throat. ‘I can’t.’
Storti looked stricken. ‘Say again?’
‘I can’t get us back to 2062.’ Ashling felt sick. They were stranded forty-two years in the past, and it was all her fault.
16:25
‘Why not?’ Storti demanded.
‘The chronometer only has a large enough capacitor to take us two hours forward in time. It’ll explode if we try to jump forty-two years ahead.’
‘Then how did we end up going forty-two years back?!’
‘Going back is easy,’ Ashling said. ‘Going forwards is hard. Time doesn’t like bending that way.’
Storti was tearing his hair out. ‘“Time doesn’t like—”’
The hull of the sub creaked again. Ashling could feel the water pressing in all around it. Soon they would all be crushed.
16:15
‘Sir.’ One of the engineers was back. ‘We can’t seal off the front of the sub. The impact knocked one of the bulkheads out of shape. It won’t close. And the water could reach it at any moment.’
‘Get the welding equipment from engineering,’ Storti said. ‘And sheet metal from room five.’
That wouldn’t work, Ashling knew. Sheet metal would collapse under the pressure, and the welded section would take too long to cool.
She closed her eyes, blocking out all distractions. The submarine was filling with water. She couldn’t get it back to 2062—not enough charge in the chronometer. She could transport the water itself back in time . . . but more water would just flood in.
There must be a way out of this. If only she had more time to think of it.
More time.
15:35
She opened her eyes. ‘I’m on it,’ she shouted. She snatched the chronometer off its stand and dashed out of the room.
‘Hartigan! Wait!’ Storti shouted. Ashling ignored him, sprinting through the corridors towards the front end of the sub.
As she ran, she hyperlinked the chronometer to her implant, reprogramming it on the fly. It wasn’t designed for this. But she was sure it would work.
You were sure when you hit that button, said a doubtful voice in her head. She ignored it. She always ignored that voice.
She could hear the water crashing through other parts of the submarine. Working its way towards the centre, like poison racing towards a beating heart.
The damaged bulkhead was at the end of this corridor, fizzing and spitting sparks, unable to close. If the water reached it, they were all doomed. There was no way to seal
off the rest of the vessel.
Ashling ducked her head as she ran through the gap, still mentally crunching numbers as she reprogrammed the chronometer.
14:10
She rounded a corner and found herself facing a long corridor. As she watched, the water appeared at the other end, rushing towards her in a dark wall of death. The lights in the corridor died one by one as it drew closer. The roaring got louder and louder.
Ashling did the final calculations. There were dials and buttons on the chronometer, but controlling it with her implant was more precise. Mentally, she adjusted the directional settings, the power level and the time code.
The water raced towards her.
‘Trust the math,’ she muttered, and pushed the button.
14:05
ZZROP! A blast of energy hit the water, and suddenly the flood stopped dead. It was as though someone had hit pause on a remote. The water was completely still, like a sculpture made of glass. Ashling could see her distorted reflection in a motionless wave which almost touched the ceiling.
She resisted the urge to touch it. If she did, she would be frozen too.
The glow of the chronometer flickered and died. No more charge. Now they were truly stuck here, in the year 2020.
Ashling ran back to the control room, where Storti and the engineer were still arguing.
‘I paused the water,’ she said.
Storti looked taken aback. ‘What do you mean, you “paused” it?’
12:05
‘Technically I slowed it down to a speed approaching zero.’ Ashling plugged the chronometer back into the podium to charge. ‘But it’ll go back to normal in twelve minutes. You have that long to try to seal the damaged door.’
‘On it,’ the engineer said, and ran out the door again.
Storti looked like he was about to say something. Then he got a faraway look, like something was being transmitted to his implant.
‘The scanner has picked up activity on the surface,’ he said finally. ‘A boat, loaded with divers. The ship we hit must be sending someone to help us.’ He grabbed Ashling’s arm. ‘What happens if we meet them?’
‘Paradox,’ Ashling breathed.
Everyone in the room looked horrified. A paradox was a time traveller’s worst nightmare. With short jumps, the risks were small. But by leaping forty-two years into the past, they had put themselves in real danger.