far… I’m damned if I’m going to sacrifice Liam just to keep them happy. We warn Liam and the support unit to abort the scouting trip. We get them back home and then… then… we can deal with any time changes we may have caused! All right?’
Sal nodded. ‘I suppose it’s a plan.’
Maddy turned to the computer screen. ‘All right?’
The ‘›’ cursor blinked thoughtfully on and off in the dialogue box and they heard the computer’s hard drives whirring softly. Finally, after a few moments the cursor flickered forward.
› Affirmative.
‘Cool,’ said Maddy. ‘So, Bob, send that message to five minutes before Chan’s recorded time of death.’
› Affirmative.
As Bob proceeded with beaming the message, Maddy prepared to open a window yet again in the storeroom for the same moment in time and resolved to keep it open for at least ten minutes. That would give them enough time, she hoped, to receive the message, wherever they were in the institute, and make their way back to the storeroom. She was about to activate the time window when Bob’s dialogue box appeared centre screen.
› Information: there is an intense energy feedback loop interfering with the tachyon signal beam.
‘Meaning?’
› 87 % probability that this is an explosion.
Her breath caught in her throat. ‘An explosion?’
› Correct.
‘Oh my God.’ Maddy felt the blood drain from her face. ‘How big?’
› Unable to specify. It is a large signature reading.
She looked at Sal. ‘Oh my God, you don’t think…?’
Sal swallowed nervously and didn’t say anything — her wide eyes said it all.
‘Bob, tell me it wasn’t us that just caused that to happen — our tachyon signal?’
Bob’s cursor blinked silently for a few seconds.
The tachyon signal is the most likely cause of the explosion. The precursor particles may have caused a reaction.
‘Oh God, what have I done?’
CHAPTER 21
Brilliant white, floating in a void of perfect, featureless white. To Liam it felt like hours, staring out at it, hanging motionless in the void as if he was floating in a glass of milk.
It felt like hours, but it could have been minutes, seconds even.
He’d begun to wonder if he was actually dead and hanging around in some pre-afterlife limbo. Then he saw the faintest flicker of movement in the thick milk world around him.
An angel coming for him? It looked like a cloud of slightly dimmer white and it danced around like a phantom, gliding in decreasing circles that brought it ever closer to him. It looked familiar.
I’ve seen that before.
Then he remembered. The day that Foster had pulled him from the sinking Titanic. In the archway, as he’d woken the three of them from their slumber…
The seeker.
There were more out there, faint and far off, drawn to him as if they could smell his presence, like sharks smelling blood. Perhaps the first seeker had silently called out to them that there was something here for them all to share.
Oh Mary-Mother-of-God… they’re going to rip me to pieces!
The nearest seeker swooped still closer to him and the faint cloud of grey began to take form. He thought he could make out the head and shoulders of the indeterminate shape, almost human-like. And a face that took fleeting form.
Beautiful. Feminine.
He almost began to think he was right first time, and that this was Heaven and those swooping forms were angels coming to escort him to the afterlife. Then that vaguely familiar feminine face stretched, elongated, revealing a row of razor fangs and the eyes turned to dark sockets that promised him nothing but death. It lunged towards him…
And then he was staring up at another face, framed with hair dangling down towards him, tickling his nose, with piercing grey eyes staring intently at him. ‘Liam O’Connor, are you all right?’
‘Becks?’
‘Affirmative. Are you all right?’ she asked flatly. ‘You appear undamaged by the explosion.’ He felt her strong hands running up and down his arms and legs, around his torso. ‘No apparent fractures.’
‘I’m OK, I think. Just a little… dizzy, so I am.’ He began to sit up and she helped him.
‘You are disorientated,’ she said.
He looked up at a clear blue sky and a dazzling sun. He blinked back the sunlight — a curious vaguely violet hue to it — and shaded his eyes with a hand. ‘Jay-zus, where are we? Is this another world?’
‘Negative.’ She looked at him, then corrected herself. ‘No. We are where we were,’ she replied.
But when? The spherical chamber and laboratory buildings were gone. Instead of the institute’s water- sprinkled lawns and flowerbeds, there was nothing but jungle. If this was the same place, then it had to be some significant time in the future or the past. It certainly wasn’t 2015.
‘The tachyon interference caused an explosive reaction,’ said Becks. ‘We were pulled through the zero-point window into what is known as chaos space.’
‘Chaos space?’
‘I am unable to define chaos space. I have no detailed data on it.’
‘And then what? We were dumped out into reality again?’
‘Correct.’
He saw another head suddenly appear above a large lush green fern leaf. Somebody else, dizzily sitting up and wondering where on earth they were. It was one of the students: a black girl, her hair neatly thatched into corn-rows. A gold hooped earring glinted in the sunlight.
‘What the — ?’ she muttered as her eyes slowly panned round the tall green trees and drooping vines. Finally her eyes rested on Liam and Becks.
‘Hello there,’ said Liam, waving a hand and smiling goofily.
She stared at him silently with eyes that still seemed to be trying to work out what she was seeing.
He noticed another head appearing out of the foliage several dozen yards away. He recognized the receding scruffy hair and sparsely bearded jowls of the teacher who’d been with the group of students during the tour of the institute.
Other heads appeared, all looking confused and frightened, spread out across a clearing in the jungle, a hundred yards in diameter. Liam recognized the institute’s smartly dressed tour guide, one of the technicians who’d been in the chamber and the rest of the students.
‘Wh-what happened?’ called out the teacher.
The guide’s carefully groomed silver hair was dishevelled, his smart suit rumpled and dirtied with mud. ‘I… I… don’t know… I just …’
Liam looked at Becks. ‘We’re going to have to take charge of things, aren’t we?’
She looked at him blankly. ‘The mission parameters have changed.’
Liam sighed. ‘No kidding.’
He was about to ask her if she had any idea at all of when in time they were when he heard a shrill scream echo across the clearing.
‘What was that?’
It came again. Sharp, shrill and terrified. He got to his feet, as did several others, and pushed through clusters of knee-high ferns towards where the sound was coming from. Becks was instantly by his side, striding
