Becks gently tapped his arm again.
‘What now?’ he hissed.
‘I am sensing precursor tachyon particles in the vicinity.’
He looked at her. ‘Uh?’ Their return window wasn’t due yet, not until ten minutes after Chan’s supposed moment of death. That was the arrangement. ‘Are you sure?’
Becks nodded towards the reactor. ‘There. They are appearing…’ Her eyes widened, and her lids fluttered and blinked rapidly. ‘DANGER!’ she suddenly barked at the top of her voice.
Howard was almost beside Chan, his finger on the trigger inside his bag ready to pull the small weapon out and fire it at his back. He wanted to be right beside Chan, right next to him, to know as an absolute certainty he wasn’t going to miss. Too much rested on this. Everything rested on this. He was just a couple of yards from him when a tall girl with distinctive red hair at the back of the knot of students suddenly started shouting.
Mr Kelly stopped mid-sentence. ‘Excuse me?’
‘DANGER!’ shouted the girl again, her voice loud and urgent.
‘Excuse me, young lady,’ replied Mr Whitmore, ‘this is not the place for some sort of stupid prank!’
Howard turned to look at the girl.
Something’s wrong. Someone knows!
‘DANGER!’ shouted the girl again, but her finger pointed directly at the reactor, not him. ‘Tachyon interference with the reactor! The reactor will explode!’
Howard had no idea what the hell she was on about. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, perhaps she was just some flaky goth girl making some sort of a protest against experimenting with zero-point energy. He was with her on that, but now was not the best time. He wasn’t going to be distracted. He pushed his way forward towards Chan as the other students began to step back warily from the reactor in response to her outburst.
At last, standing beside the small boy, he looked down at him, his finger poised on the trigger, ready to whip the gun out and fire.
Chan turned to look up at him. ‘What’s the girl at the back saying?’
Howard found himself shrugging. ‘I… uh… I guess she’s having some kinda fit.’
‘Now stop it!’ snapped Mr Whitmore, pushing his way through the bemused students towards the girl. ‘Nothing is going to explode!’
Chan grinned up at Howard. ‘Crazy girl, huh?’
And Howard found himself smiling back at the kid, somehow not quite ready… not quite ready to pull out the gun and fire at point blank range. He really hadn’t expected to be looking down into a friendly face at the very moment he pulled the trigger on Chan.?
Without a warning Becks grabbed Liam roughly by the shoulders and man-handled him back from the reactor towards the walkway leading to the sealed exit.
‘Becks! What the hell are you doing? What’s going on?’
‘Imminent threat of explosion,’ she said crisply and calmly, and a little too loudly. Her voice spooked the other students nearby who quickly began to join them backing away from it.
‘Everybody, calm down!’ shouted Mr Kelly. ‘Nothing is going to happen!’
Liam looked up at Becks. ‘Are you sure it’s going to — ?’
Becks suddenly stopped dragging him. ‘Too late to escape!’ She yanked Liam’s arm downwards to the floor and he dropped to his knees.
‘Ouch! What are you doing? ’
She knelt down in front of him and wrapped her arms round his shoulders, shielding him from the reactor. Liam peeked over her shoulder and saw the reactor’s thick metal casing suddenly start to ripple like jelly and a moment later begin to collapse in on itself.
‘What the — ?’
Becks reached out one hand and grabbed his nose painfully. ‘You must lower your head,’ she ordered, yanking him roughly down until he was almost doubled over, his head in her lap. Then all of a sudden he felt the oddest tugging sensation. As if he and Becks and the world around them was being sucked into a gigantic laundry mangler, stretched impossibly thin like elastic strands of spaghetti towards the reactor… following the collapsed metal casing into some inconceivable pinpoint of infinity.
‘Ooooooohhhhh Jaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy-zzzzzzussssssss!’
CHAPTER 20
2001, New York
Maddy and Sal stared at the shimmering window in the middle of the archway. Through a curtain of undulating, rippling air they could see the dim outlines of the storeroom they’d sent Liam and the support unit to.
‘Something’s definitely wrong,’ whispered Sal.
Maddy nodded. ‘That’s the third back-up window they’ve missed.’
Five minutes ago they’d been cheerfully prepping the scheduled return window, assuming that the simple scouting mission had been a success and Liam and the support unit would be ready and waiting to come back and tell them what exactly had happened to Chan.
Now, for the third time, both girls were staring at a dark storeroom with no sign of either of them.
‘Oh boy,’ uttered Maddy. ‘I don’t know what we do now. That’s it — we’ve tried all the back-up windows.’
› Maddy?
She stepped towards the desk and leaned over the deck mic. ‘Yes?’
› You should try the six-month window.
‘Yes… yes, you’re right.’
Bob was right, it was worth a try. She clicked the PURGE button on the screen and the shimmering window in the middle of the archway vanished with a soft pop and a gentle puff of displaced air. She entered a new set of time coordinates: exactly five months, thirty days, twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes after the time they’d been sent into the future; exactly five minutes before the support unit’s mission time span was up and it was scheduled to self-destruct. It made sense. It would be the last possible chance to rendezvous with a return window. With the support unit dead, Liam would not be able to receive a tachyon signal to instruct him on a new rendezvous time-stamp. If they weren’t there, in that storeroom six months after arriving and impatient to get back home, then Maddy had no idea what she could do next.
She clicked on the screen to confirm the new time coordinates and then activated the displacement machinery. Once again a twelve-foot-wide sphere of air began to shift and undulate, revealing the storeroom again. Both girls squinted for a while at the dark space beyond. Same store cupboard… a few things had been shifted around; clearly someone had had a spring-clean in there. But no sign of either Liam or the support unit.
‘Oh,’ said Sal. ‘We’ve really lost them.’
Maddy pinched her chin. ‘No… let me think.’ There was a way to communicate with the support unit. A tachyon signal beam. That’s what they’d done last time: aimed a broad beam of particles in the direction in which they’d guessed Liam and Bob were and transmitted an encoded signal back through history. It had worked. Bob had picked it up.
‘Bob,’ she spoke into the mic, ‘can we send a tachyon signal beam forward?’
› Affirmative. We have enough power.
‘Right… what if we send it to, say… five minutes before whatever happened to Chan, happened.’
‘What message?’ asked Sal.
‘I dunno. Something like — abort the mission, something is going to go wrong.’
Sal nodded. ‘Yes, we should do that.’
Maddy sat down in one of the office chairs and purged the open window. It puffed out of existence. She then opened the message interface and quickly tapped in a message.
Return to the store cupboard immediately. We’ll pick you up there. Something is about to go wrong with your mission. Something is about to happen to you. A return window will be waiting for you.
Bob’s dialogue box popped up.
› You wish to send this message?
‘Yes, immediately.’