The Tomorrow Code

by Brian Falkner

  Not that long ago, a red-haired professor with a big bright smile had opened this door for them and welcomed them into the lab. But nobody was here to welcome them this time. The light from inside spilled outward from the doorway, clearly illuminating the smashed doorjamb and ruined hinges.

  “Something’s really wrong here,” Tane whispered. “That door’s been smashed open. Someone’s broken in before us!”

  Rebecca grabbed his arm and pulled him down into a crouch beside her. Enough light spilled out from the broken doorway for him to see her eyes, stark, wide, and terrified inside the scuba mask.

  “No,” she said. “It’s worse than that. Much worse. We’ve got to get off this island now!”

  “What is it?” Tane asked, wondering what had her so spooked.

  “Look at the door, Tane,” she said. “Look at the hinges. Someone—or something—has smashed that door open from the inside!”

  All the breath in his body suddenly froze. What the heck…

  He rose slowly and took a step backward. Rebecca’s hand slipped into his. Another step, then another. Walking backward, unable to take their eyes off the smashed door and the carelessly spilling light.

  They were just back past the gate when the bright spotlights crashed on all around them, twenty or more, brilliant white lights that hurt his eyes, which were still adjusted to the darkness. He spun around and instantly recoiled, shielding his face with his arm, desperately frightened, unsure whether to turn and run or to stand still.

  Rebecca screamed and clutched at him. In that single instant, he felt like a possum on a highway at night, transfixed by the headlights of an onrushing car, knowing that this was certain death but paralyzed beyond saving himself.

  A voice—deep, authoritative, American—shouted at them from behind the screen of lights, “Drop your weapons. I say again, drop your weapons and lie on the ground, facedown, toward my voice. Drop your weapons, or we will open fire.”

  Weapons?! Tane tried to scream, “It’s just a flashlight!” but his throat wasn’t functioning.

  “We are unarmed!” Rebecca shouted. “We are unarmed.”

  Tane found his voice and joined in. “We are unarmed,” he called, lying facedown as he did so. “We’re just kids!”

  He saw only dark dirt as strong boots thundered around him and strong arms twisted his arms up behind his back before some tight plastic wire was pulled harshly around his wrists, and he was hauled to his feet.

  His mask was wrenched down and left hanging around his neck. One of the bright lights was shone in his face. He winced from the pain of the glare. Even with his eyes tightly shut, it was bright enough to hurt. It felt like a dream, like he was in some strange bright fantasyland where nothing made any sense and nothing was expected to.

  “Where are the others?” the same voice shouted. “Where are the rest of you?”

  If he could have, he would have helped them willingly. “On the submarine,” he would have said. But his throat had closed up again and he couldn’t speak.

  Beside him he heard Rebecca’s voice. “There are no others! We are just kids!”

  The man’s voice again, talking, not shouting this time. “Crawford, this is Crowe. Any more warm spots showing on the scope?”

  As he spoke, the soft chop of a helicopter—a very quiet helicopter—slid smoothly through the dark sky overhead.

  Then the man was back a few inches from Tane’s face. It was strange how muffled his voice was, in the midst of all the fear, darkness, bright lights, and confusion. As if the man were talking from behind a glass window. Or a mask of some kind.

  “Where are the others? Where are the hostages?”

  What others? What hostages?

  When there was no answer from either of them, the man’s voice softened a little. “Get them back to the boats. We’ll interrogate them properly on board the ship. Crawford, remain in position. I want to know if a mouse farts on this rock. Red and Blue Teams exfil now.”

  Strong hands gripped their arms, at least two fully grown men to each child, wrenching their arms up behind their backs so high that it brought tears to Tane’s eyes. He heard Rebecca cry out in pain, and a fierce anger flared inside him. How dare they do that to a girl. To Rebecca. But there was nothing he could do.

  The frigate was the Te Mana. Her name was stenciled in huge letters on her side, near the stern. She looked very different from the side than she had from beneath the bows. They boarded her via thick rope netting hung down the side of the ship, a quick clip of some cutters behind them freeing their hands for the climb.

  Compared to the darkness of the island, the deck of the frigate was a city of light. Men and women in naval uniforms kept their distance from the black-clad soldiers who had arrested them.

  “Take them below?” one of the soldiers wanted to know.

  “Not till we’re a hundred percent that they’re clean.” The soldiers all looked the same, but the voice was the first one they had heard on the island, obviously the leader of the team. “What does the RPAD say?”

  A large man was scanning them with a handheld device connected to something on his back. All of the men were armed with an unusual, rounded-looking rifle, with some sort of sprayer attached to the front of it. They wore black, armored space suits, with oxygen masks covering their faces and a small flat TV screen pulled back over their heads, some kind of night-vision system, Tane thought.

  “Nothing,” the man said. “No pathogens.”

  There was a hiss and a click and the man with a red “1” on his shoulders pulled his mask away from his face. He was thin, with a face that looked to have been chiseled out of granite. Even when he spoke, there was no expression, no movement on his face except for his mouth.

  “Where are the rest of your people? And where are the hostages?”

  Tane looked at Rebecca. None of it made any sense. No sense at all. What people? What hostages? How had the soldiers known they were coming? Rebecca’s jaw was clenching and unclenching, and veins stood out in her neck. As long as we don’t get caught. That was what they had said from the very beginning. As long as we don’t get caught. I can’t afford to go to jail.

  The man continued, “Where are you holding the scientists? Have they been harmed in any way? And what about the fog? How did you create that?” He glared at Tane for a moment, then switched his gaze to Rebecca. “Cooperate with us now, or things are going to get real ugly, real fast.”

  Fog? What fog? It wasn’t making a whole lot of sense, Tane thought. Perhaps if they told them the whole truth, they would understand. They wouldn’t believe them at first, but they could show them the Lotto numbers and the other messages, and they would have to believe them, wouldn’t they? And they hadn’t actually committed any crime yet. They were about to, but they hadn’t had the chance to go through with it.

  “We got a message from the future,” he said quietly.

  “What?!” the leader asked.

  Tane looked him in the eye and continued a little more strongly, “We found a way to detect—”

  “Oh my GOD!” Rebecca screamed, staring wild-eyed at the island and holding up her hands to shield herself.

  Tane jumped out of his skin and stared past the soldiers to the black shape of the island behind. He strained his eyes, desperately seeking the cause of the alarm but could not see what Rebecca was seeing.

  He wasn’t the only one. There was not a man on the deck of the ship who did not instinctively turn to face the island. Those with weapons already had them raised, seeking targets, in an awesome display of instant reactions.

  It all happened at once—the scream, the men turning to face the island, the slap on his arm—that he hardly noticed that Rebecca was running. Running away from the soldiers, away from the island, straight toward the side of the ship.

  The leader shouted, “Hey!” But Rebecca was already three or four yards away from them and moving fast. A split second later, Tane was moving, too. One of the soldiers made a grab for him,
but Tane ducked out of his reach and sprinted after Rebecca. The tall man with the scanner was there, but he had to drop the device to grab at Tane and that slowed him down, just enough. There were running boot-steps behind him but Tane didn’t look back.

  Rebecca reached the railing at the edge of the ship and leaped up lightly, one-footed, onto it before diving down into the darkness.

  Tane didn’t risk anything so fancy. He just grabbed the railing with two hands and hurdled it. Then he was falling, and falling, and falling.

  The deck of the frigate was a long way from the surface of the ocean, and in the dark, it seemed to take forever to reach the water.

  In that fraction of an instant before he splashed deep beneath the waves, he saw what Rebecca must have already seen, or perhaps had just guessed would be there. The dim, underwater glow of the Möbius, and the raised flat platform of the periscope buoy, just visible in the moonlight.

  WAEWAETOROA PASSAGE

  The shock of landing felt like a car crash; then dark water enveloped him.

  His nose filled with salty water. It seemed to take an age to kick back to the surface, but then he shot up above the waves like a cork, the wet suit giving him buoyancy. He gasped in a huge lungful of air and coughed and spluttered the water out of his sinuses.

  Then there was a loud splash nearby. Someone had followed him over the side of the ship!

  He jackknifed in the water and began to swim down. It was hard. Harder than he had realized. The wet suit kept trying to drag him back up to the surface.

  He opened his eyes despite the sting of the salt and saw the bright lights of the Möbius, barely a few meters away, the submarine itself just a dark smudge in the water behind the glare of the lights. A couple more strokes and he was nearly at the sub. The top hatch was open, he saw, and Rebecca was already inside, silhouetted against the hatch lights.

  She was waving frantically at him, and he suddenly realized that she had been down there, holding her breath, waiting for him to come so she could close the hatch.

  Suddenly a strong hand closed around his ankle pulling him backward in the water. He kicked frantically but the grip was viselike. Desperately, he kicked out with his free foot and felt it connect solidly with something soft, like a person’s face. The steel ring on his ankle loosened, and he kicked away down toward safety.

  The hatch neared, and then Rebecca’s hand reached up and pulled him closer.

  He dived down into the hatch. Rebecca was already spinning the wheel to close it, but she seemed tired, listless. He swiveled around inside the narrow compartment and grabbed the wheel off her, twirling it around. The hatch snicked shut and locked, and in the same instant, Tane’s hand found the flush lever.

  Compressed air roared and the water level dropped, an inch, two inches, then enough for him to get his mouth and nose above water. He sucked in the tinny air and thought it tasted wonderful. Rebecca, where was Rebecca? She was just floating in the chamber and had not raised her head.

  The water level continued to drop, and Tane grabbed Rebecca by the hair, wrenching her head above the water. She didn’t breathe in.

  “Oh crap!” Tane muttered. There was nowhere to lie her down in the narrow chamber, so he pressed her body against the rounded wall with his, the black neoprene suits clinging to each other. He pressed into her stomach with his fists and a torrent of seawater poured out of her mouth. She still wasn’t breathing.

  They had done this stuff over and over in first-aid classes at school, but that all seemed like a million years ago. Finger in the mouth, check for obstructions. He remembered that much at least. There were none. Seal the nostrils. Her mask, still hanging around her neck, was getting in the way, so he tore that off over her head. He gripped her nose tightly between two fingers. The rest of the training was a blank, so he just sealed his mouth on hers and blew. He counted to three—was that in the training?—and blew again. The water was around his waist by then. He breathed into her lungs again, and by the time the chamber was empty, she was breathing on her own.

  The only thought in Tane’s mind was, It works. That stuff they taught us. It really does work.

  He spun the wheel for the side hatch and dragged Rebecca’s semiconscious body out onto the floor of the main cabin. He could hear the engines of the Möbius running at full speed.

  Fatboy looked back through the open door from the control room. “What’s wrong?” he shouted.

  “She’s okay,” Tane yelled back.

  Rebecca coughed and spluttered and her eyes began to open. He was wedged against the side of the sub. Her head was in his lap.

  “Tane,” she said weakly.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She just nodded and closed her eyes again. A moment later, she said, with her eyes still shut, “I couldn’t hold my breath any longer.”

  “You did great; you did great,” Tane reassured her. She had been holding her breath for him.

  She tried to get up, and Tane put an arm underneath her shoulders to assist. He helped her lie down on one of the bunks and fastened the Velcro safety strap around her waist. He unstrapped the torch from her wrist and loosened the wet-suit jacket to help her breathe.

  “I need some help up here!” Fatboy yelled from the cockpit, and Tane scurried forward.

  Water rushed past the steering dome as he strapped himself into the codriver’s seat.

  Fatboy said, “Grab Rebecca’s chart, the one she marked the rocks on. We’re going back through the Waewaetoroa Passage.”

  “At night?” Tane asked incredulously. “At this speed?”

  “Got no choice,” Fatboy said, and as if to prove him right, there was suddenly a loud pinging sound against the metal of the hull.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “Sonar,” Fatboy said. “I knew that was coming. They’re chasing us. Now they know exactly where we are. They’re much faster than we are, but they’re big and heavy and it’ll take them a while to get moving.”

  “We can’t go through the passage at night.” Tane was horrified.

  “They can’t go through it at all. They draw too much water. They’ll have to go all the way around Okahu Island, by Whale Rock. And they won’t be able to ping us through the passage—too much rock for the sound to bounce off. I’m thinking that we run the passage and try to make it to the Hole in the Rock before they round the island. We can hide from the sonar behind Motukokako Island, and they won’t know which way we’ve gone.”

  The pinging sounded again and again, vibrating against the little hull.

  “Get that chart ready,” Fatboy said. “Here we go.”

  The rocky mouth of the passage loomed, and then they were between the two rock walls. It was much faster this time, and not just because Fatboy was driving the boat hard. The current must flow in this direction, Tane realized. The last time they had been fighting against it. This time it was dragging them along.

  “What happened up there?” Fatboy asked, not taking his eyes off the rushing rock walls ahead of them. “I was watching the ship on the periscope when it came back into the bay, and I saw them take you on board.”

  “I don’t know,” Tane replied. “Ridge coming up on your right. Better come up a bit and steer a bit left.”

  The ridge, a gnash of jagged, hull-piercing teeth, growled away rapidly to their right, a school of dark fish scattering in all directions as they burst through the middle of them.

  Had they known that they were coming? If not, why were the soldiers there? Had something bad happened on the island? There was no time to talk or even think about that now.

  The pinging reverberated off the walls of the underwater canyon, bouncing around and around in echoes of echoes of echoes, creating its own wall of sound and shielding them from the ship. In here they were invisible to the sonar, just as Fatboy had said.

  “Big rock, center of the passage,” Tane said calmly, and Fatboy pulled the steering back, swerving up over the seaweed-covered behemoth as it loomed in
their lights. Both of them scanned the water ahead intently. Their lights did not reach far enough ahead to give them enough warning of obstacles, and if not for Rebecca’s map, they would have smashed into the rock of the seabed many times already.

  “Ridge to your right, no, your left, your left!” Tane called as Fatboy almost steered them into a pancaked rock formation.

  “Get it right, Tane.” Fatboy gritted his teeth.

  A large shark, apparently dozing near the exit of the passageway, twirled its tail and spun out of their way as they shot out the end of the canyon, and the seabed began to drop away beneath them.

  “Now the race is on,” Fatboy murmured. “If we can’t make Motukokako in time, they’ll pick us up on the sonar and haul us in like a fish on a line.”

  The pinger behind them fell silent. They were shielded from the Te Mana by the islands of Waewaetoroa and Okahu.

  They said nothing, lost in their own thoughts. Tane checked on Rebecca once, but she was resting and just smiled up at him.

  Only when they had passed Motutara Rock did Fatboy relax a little. “I think we’ve got a good enough head start,” he said.

  Almost immediately, the pinging started again, but this was long off and distant: just a faint echo against the hull.

  Tane looked at his brother in concern, but Fatboy shook his head. “I think we’re okay. The sound has to reach us and then travel all the way back to the ship like an echo. That pinging is too weak. I reckon we’re out of sonar range for them at the moment.”

  The pinging, faint as it was, grew steadily louder as they continued on toward Motukokako and its famous Hole in the Rock.

  “They’re chasing us,” Tane said worriedly.

  “No. They don’t know where we are. They’re just guessing. If we can make Motukokako, we can lose them.” He patted the control console. “Come on, little submarine, you can do it.”

  Tane didn’t smile. He felt sick.

  Motukokako rose suddenly out of the seabed before them. A huge rock wall in the lights of the Möbius. The pinging was getting louder now.