400 Minutes of Danger

by Jack Heath

  21:30 Flakes of ancient metal floated away and landed on one of the transparent panels. The magnet underneath held them in place. When she thought she had enough, Iresha placed the other panel on top, squashing the scrapings. Then she fired the laser through the panels.

  The laser analysed the content of the metal and transmitted it to the helicopter automatically.

  ‘First scraping’s done,’ Iresha said. ‘Did you get it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Zobel said. ‘Processing now.’

  Iresha waited. The computer wouldn’t take long.

  20:20 ‘Too much carbon,’ Zobel declared finally. ‘And the iron’s oxidised.’

  Iresha’s heart sank. ‘So the ship is useless?’

  ‘Just that part of it. Take another scraping from somewhere else.’

  19:00 Iresha walked around to the far side of the desolate ship. From this angle she could see through the window frames to the shadowed corridors inside. It was hard not to imagine people on board, pounding on these windows, screaming as the ship sank.

  She took some scrapings from a safety rail. The humming became louder.

  ‘Can you hear that?’ she asked Zobel.

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘A vibration. Coming from the ship, I think.’

  ‘You’re mistaken,’ Zobel said after a pause. ‘There’s no electric field. Nothing’s running on board.’

  18:35 ‘Didn’t they use petrol engines in those days?’

  ‘That’s even more impossible. Petrol needs oxygen to burn. And even if any pockets of air had survived inside the ship, there would be no fuel left after all this time. Where’s my second scraping?’

  Iresha fired the laser through the two panels. ‘Sending it up now.’

  Please, she thought. Please let there be enough.

  18:10 ‘Same again,’ Zobel said. ‘The composition is wrong. Take some from the other end of the ship.’

  She would have to cross the chasm somehow. If she fell in, she might get trapped and never be seen again. Who knew how deep it was, or what lay at the bottom?

  ‘Why would the other end be different?’ she asked.

  ‘The magnetic signature is very strong,’ Zobel said. ‘I’m looking at the readouts right now. There’s iron down there—hundreds of tonnes of it.’

  ‘Could it be interference from the Earth’s core?’ There was lots of iron inside the planet, but it was thousands of kilometres down and as hot as the sun.

  ‘No, it’s closer than that. You just need to find a workable sample.’

  17:40 Iresha peered into the chasm. She thought she could see a faint light at the bottom, but perhaps her HUD had added it.

  She couldn’t jump the gap—but the ship lay across the chasm. If she went inside the ship she could walk from one end to the other, using it as a bridge.

  ‘I’m going inside the wreck,’ she said. ‘We may lose radio contact.’

  ‘Understood,’ Zobel said. ‘Be careful. You have less than twenty minutes of air left, and removing the weights from your shoes won’t do you any good if you get stuck in there.’

  17:00 ‘I’m all too aware of that,’ Iresha said. She clambered through one of the smashed windows into the darkness.

  It was like stepping into a dream. The corridor was sideways, with strange objects floating through it. No doubt they had looked ordinary in 2017, but to Iresha they were a complete mystery. Her exoskeleton made the corridor feel much smaller than it was.

  16:40 About halfway along the length of the ship she stopped to take another scraping. The walls were made of metal. Maybe this was where the iron reading was coming from.

  ‘Iresha,’ Zobel said, his voice even more muffled than before. ‘The ship is in the wrong place.’

  ‘I noticed. Cruise liners are supposed to go on top of the sea.’

  ‘This is serious. The helicopter didn’t drop you off at the wrong co-ordinates, and the currents didn’t take you off course. The ship has moved since we scanned it last month.’

  16:05 A chill ran up her spine. ‘How?’

  ‘I think the vibrations are …’ The signal was too garbled to hear the rest of what Zobel said.

  ‘I didn’t catch that,’ Iresha said. ‘Can you repeat?’

  Zobel kept talking as though he couldn’t hear her. Iresha strained to understand the muffled words, but it was hopeless.

  15:50 She was on her own.

  Iresha kept walking up the gloomy, lopsided corridor. The ship had moved, and Zobel thought this was somehow connected to the vibrations. What did that mean?

  The answer came to her as the hum grew to a deep rumble, like distant thunder.

  It wasn’t the boat that had moved. It was the ground beneath it—and that ground was still moving. The oceanic plates were diverging. She was in the middle of an undersea quake.

  15:00 The heart-rate monitor in Iresha’s HUD accelerated and turned red. She dropped the scraping equipment and tried to run through the water. This was why the chasm was wider than she had initially thought. It was opening. And if it opened far enough, it could swallow the ship whole!

  Iresha moved quickly up the corridor, looking for a way out. But all the doors had rusted shut. Her HUD was worse than useless, sketching outlines all over her face plate but not indicating which squares were doors or windows. The software had been designed for open water, not a ship’s interior.

  14:10 The rumbling became a terrible groan as the chasm widened under the ship, putting a strain on the hull. The walls buckled and cracked around her.

  Iresha turned a corner and saw a way out. There was an open door at the other end of the corridor. Beyond the doorway was another broken porthole. She could crawl out to safety—

  12:30 And then, with a ghastly shriek, the ship snapped in half.

  11:10 Iresha found herself tumbling backwards as the giant vessel tilted and fell, both halves plummeting into the chasm. She hit the wall behind her and clung to it dizzily as water blasted past her like a hurricane.

  The pressure gauge shot up as the elevation statistics dropped. If she was still inside the ship when it hit the bottom of the chasm, she would be squashed like a car in a compactor.

  Her suit registered 110 mPA of pressure. 120 mPA. 130 mPA. Warning lights flashed all over her HUD.

  09:55 Iresha crawled up the wall, grabbing every handhold she could find. She was moving towards the exit, but too slowly. The ship was sinking faster than she was climbing. She was going to be trapped inside, crushed …

  Her boots! She scrabbled at the catches, releasing the weights from the soles. Suddenly she was lighter than the water. She didn’t need to climb. She could swim up out of the ship.

  She kicked and kicked, pushing herself upwards towards the porthole, hoping a few seconds of stupidity hadn’t cost her her life—

  09:25 The porthole got closer and closer—

  And then she was out! She burst out of the ship and floated in the chasm. Looking down, she watched the cruise liner drift away, making its final journey into the darkness, never to be seen again.

  There was no way to recover the iron inside now. It was too deep. The mission was a failure.

  08:15 Iresha saw the strange glow reappear in the bottom of the chasm. It flared as the ship hit it. The ship vanished like butter on a hot pan. She stared stupidly at the light for a moment, hypnotised. Then she realised how much danger she was in.

  07:40 This wasn’t just an earthquake. This was an underwater volcano. It was about to erupt—and she was floating halfway down its mouth.

  The temperature gauge in her HUD was going up and up. Forty degrees Celsius. Fifty. Sixty. Soon the ocean would be boiling around her.

  Iresha swam upwards, desperate now. No wonder Zobel had detected a massive magnetic signature. Liquid iron was rushing up from the earth’s core, and it was about to roast her alive.

  Her arms and legs were tired, but she kept kicking and flailing at the water. The suit chafed against her armpits and thighs. She was breathing so
heavily the face plate kept fogging up. Even when it cleared, the visibility wasn’t good. The water was full of bubbles and billowing white clouds. Her temperature gauge had reached ninety degrees now.

  05:20 She risked a look down—and shrieked in terror. The lava was right below her, flooding towards her kicking feet like a gigantic demon. Sizzling blobs of molten rock exploded out of the darkness and shot up at her. The seawater cooled and hardened the blobs into small pillow-shaped rocks which tumbled away to the sides of the chasm, but more white-hot liquid was right behind them. More and more rocks built up—it was as if a mountain was growing underneath her.

  Iresha reached the top of the chasm and kept swimming up. Everything hurt. Her muscles were screaming. Her lungs ached, and she was dizzy. But if she stopped, she was dead. The molten lava would burn right through her suit, or worse, harden around it, trapping her inside an underwater mountain.

  Zobel was yelling in her ear, but she couldn’t make out the words over the roaring volcano. Maybe he was apologising for sending her on such a deadly mission.

  04:10 Suddenly she realised she should be swimming sideways. The volcano was erupting straight up. If she could get out of the lava’s way, she would be safe.

  She changed her trajectory, paddling to the side—

  A bubble of hardened lava slammed into her.

  It didn’t connect with enough force to bruise, but Iresha felt the heat even through the suit. Another rock hit her helmet. With a faint crack, the face plate fractured.

  02:45 ‘No!’ Iresha screamed. Her HUD flickered and vanished. Hot water sprayed her face through the fracture, stinging her nose and lips. Her helmet filled with steam. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t breathe.

  Hot rocks were slamming into her constantly now, carrying her higher. It was no use trying to swim. The water was evaporating around her, and she couldn’t even tell which direction she should be swimming in.

  02:00 The pile of rocks carried her up and up until—

  Splash! She was out of the water. The eruption had breached the surface.

  Iresha found herself rolling down the side of a hill even as it rose out of the water. More pillow-shaped rocks cascaded past her as she tumbled and bounced down the growing slope and splashed back down into the water, which suddenly wasn’t very deep.

  01:25 Through her cracked face plate she saw that she was in the shallows of a stony beach. A beach attached to an island which hadn’t been there only minutes ago.

  An enormous black cloud billowed above the mountain of warm stone. It looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off here.

  Iresha still couldn’t breathe. She fumbled with the sides of her helmet until she found the release catches, and then tore it off her head.

  00:45 The air was scorching hot and smelled of sulphur. She breathed it gratefully. A fine mist of dirt rained down on her hair.

  She kicked a rock beside her foot. If she was remembering her geology classes correctly, that was basalt—an iron-rich igneous rock. This whole island was made of it. A grin spread across her face.

  00:15 Zobel’s helicopter hovered in the distance, just out of reach of the black cloud. She waved her arms to get his attention, and then held her helmet to her ear. The radio was still working. She could hear Zobel swearing in alarm.

  She momentarily felt sorry for him. An old man who got stuck with all the boring jobs. Whose life had no adventure. Maybe Iresha would keep diving, even after she turned twenty.

  00:00 ‘Hey,’ she said, pointing at the island. ‘Did someone order some iron?’

  CRUSHER

  40:00 ‘Dan,’ Mrs Jeffords shouted. ‘You know where the crusher is?’

  Daniel looked up from his work. He had been down to the crusher, but it frightened him. The noise, the darkness, the movement of the blades …

  ‘Sort of,’ he said.

  Mrs Jeffords raised an eyebrow. ‘Sort of,’ she repeated. ‘Is that ayes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Daniel admitted.

  ‘Well, get out the back. We need someone to do a rubbish run.’

  39:40 Daniel turned back to the stack of books he had been putting price stickers on. ‘Sure thing,’ he said. ‘As soon as I finish this.’

  ‘The trolley’s full,’ Mrs Jeffords said. ‘It needs to go now. The repricing can wait.’

  Daniel nodded. This bookstore received resumes from hopeful teenagers every day. His job was in high demand—he didn’t want to look lazy.

  39:15 He put the roll of stickers down and walked through the rows of shelves into the back room, where the ordered cleanliness of the bookshop gave way to total chaos. Boxes of books were stacked haphazardly on top of one another. Customer orders were tucked in a corner with hastily scrawled names on them. Rubber bands were scattered across every flat surface.

  38:45 The rubbish cart was indeed full. There was so much flattened cardboard that Daniel would have to push it slowly or risk it spilling.

  ‘Thank goodness,’ Leela said. She was unpacking more boxes on a crowded workbench. ‘I was running out of space.’

  ‘So I see,’ Daniel said. He pushed the trolley to the back door that led directly outside. ‘I’ll be right back.’

  38:20 Out on the footpath he took a deep breath of the fresh air. Within the polished glamour of the shopping centre there were no windows. It was easy to forget that the outside world existed—but here it was, windy and bright, although clouds hid the sun from view.

  Daniel pushed the trolley around the corner and through a door marked STAFF ONLY. It was like entering another world. The floor was dirty concrete. Cracked bricks lined the walls. Neon tubes fizzed overhead. This was the side of the shopping centre customers were never supposed to see. Signs displayed pictures of security guards and cameras. THIS AREA IS MONITORED, they said. IF YOU SEE ANYONE LOITERING OR TAKING PICTURES, CONTACT SECURITY. Even the phone number was in a big, scary font.

  37:55 Daniel rode a gigantic cargo lift down to the loading dock on the bottom floor. It was like a big underground car park, where enormous boxes were delivered by even more enormous trucks. Coming down here always made Daniel feel tiny, like one of Santa’s elves.

  On weekdays the loading dock was full of people scurrying back and forth in hard hats and high-vis vests—people nothing like the polite, well-groomed staff who greeted customers upstairs. But today was Sunday, and there was only Daniel, his shuffling footsteps echoing around the cavernous space.

  36:25 Daniel pushed the rubbish cart past a row of huge locked doors painted with logos for electronics shops, supermarkets and toy stores. Soon the crusher came into view.

  The crusher was a steel box about six metres long and two metres high. There was a gate at one end and a small chute at the other. Usually there was an operator who would open the gate so Daniel could throw the cardboard inside. When the crusher was full, the operator would lock the gate, start the mechanism, and remove the crushed cardboard from the other end when the process was over. It came out looking like brown bales of hay.

  35:40 But today the operator was missing. Daniel looked around. A disposable coffee cup was balanced on a nearby rail. Daniel touched it. Still half full, and warm. The operator must have been called away.

  Daniel couldn’t stand around waiting for him to return. The bookshop was expecting him back. He supposed he could load the crusher himself while he waited.

  Daniel pulled back the bolt, opened the mesh gate and started throwing cardboard into the crusher. It landed piece by piece atop the rubbish from all the other stores in the shopping centre.

  33:30 Soon the trolley was empty. There was still no sign of the operator. Daniel closed the gate and locked it.

  Then he heard movement in side.

  Daniel peered through the mesh. It was dark inside the crusher. The scuffling sound had been so quiet that he might have imagined it, and it was gone now. The crusher was silent.

  Perhaps it was just the cardboard shifting. Maybe it was a rat. Perhaps it was nothing at all.

&
nbsp; 32:50 But he could see a sign next to the gate: DO NOT CLIMB INTO THE CRUSHER. Why would there need to be a sign, unless someone was likely to try it?

  ‘Hello?’ Daniel called.

  His voice echoed around the inside of the crusher. There was no response.

  Daniel hesitated. He could almost hear his father telling him that he read too many gruesome books and that he should focus on his work. But he couldn’t go back to the bookshop. The steel walls of the crusher were thick and the frame was solid. There was no way anyone could escape once the door was closed. They would be flattened by the enormous metal plates. If someone was inside, Daniel had to warn the operator.

  32:20 Daniel looked around. There was still no-one else in the dock. He turned back to the crusher.

  ‘Hello?’ he called again.

  No answer. There was probably no-one inside.

  Probably.

  Daniel was still trying to decide what to do when he heard the rumbling of tyres behind him.

  He turned to see a big truck entering the loading dock. Daniel exhaled. Finally someone else was here—someone he could ask for help. He peered past the grubby windscreen to get a look at the driver.

  31:45 31:20 What he saw instead was a shapeless, convulsing mass, slumped over the steering wheel. White-knuckled hands twitched behind the glass. By the time Daniel realised what he was looking at—a driver having some kind of seizure—the truck was already speeding towards him at a deadly pace. The engine screamed even as the brakes shrieked, as if the driver was pushing one foot down on the accelerator and the other on the brake.

  Daniel bolted as the truck careened towards him. He could smell the diesel cooking in the engine.

  He dived out of the way just in time and hit the concrete as the truck sped beyond him. The vehicle ploughed through the empty rubbish cart, glanced off the crusher and smashed into the wall behind it with a deafening bang. Bricks shook loose from the ceiling and rained down around it. The truck overbalanced and came crashing down on its side.

  29:25 Daniel scrambled to his feet. He stood staring dazedly at the carnage for a moment, before running over to the truck. Through the cracked windscreen he could see the driver, unconscious and surrounded by deflating air bags. He was a young man with a stubbled chin and thick brown hair.