200 Minutes of Danger by Jack Heath

Author:Jack Heath
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760979201
Publisher: Scholastic Australia
Published: 2020-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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