SANCTUARY

On Boxing Day, while other kids all over the country went swimming or cycling on new Christmas bikes or were just playing with their Game Boys and other presents, Tane, Rebecca, and Fatboy planned for the apocalypse.

“How long do you think we will be underwater?” Tane asked.

“However long it takes,” was Rebecca’s answer. “Months, maybe years.”

The Chronophone plans had finally finished with a last long list of numbers, followed by the single word END. They had printed out the schematic and pored over it.

“Why even bother?” Fatboy had asked at one point. “It’s too late. It’s no use to us now.”

Rebecca had looked at him incredulously. “Are you insane? If we don’t build the Chronophone, then we can’t send the messages back through time. If we don’t do that, then we won’t know anything and we’ll just be out there like everyone else, playing with our Christmas presents and lying on the beach, and not even knowing that we are about to be wiped off the face of the planet.”

Fatboy had looked at Tane in alarm, but Tane had said, “She’s right. No Chronophone, no Lotto, no nothing. We’d better get it built.”

That had been three days ago. That day, Tane had opened the front door to possibly the thinnest person he had ever seen in his life. Goony seemed to be made of just cling-film wrapped around a skeleton. He introduced himself shyly with a big droopy grin and lugged inside a huge plastic toolbox that looked heavier than he was. He was supposed to be a genius at electronics and, according to Fatboy, had once built a guitar amplifier out of an old kitchen mixer just to prove he could do it.

The Chronophone plans had given him no trouble at all.

“It’s a transmitter,” he had said after a cursory look at the diagram. “What’s it for?”

“It’s a time transmitter,” Fatboy had answered with a smile. “We’re going to send the winning Lotto numbers back to ourselves in the past and win the Lotto.”

“Yeah, right!” Goony had just given one of those big droopy grins and got on with his work.

It had been three days of intensive work. Rebecca helped analyze the plans, and Fatboy helped solder components into place. Tane just stayed out of the way and made lots of tea and coffee.

Now, nearly at the last day of the year, the Chronophone was a waterproof aluminum box the size of a briefcase sitting in the garage. It was more than just a transmitter, according to Rebecca. Built into it was a radio receiver, which received the signals they would transmit from the submarine and retransmitted them through the gamma-rays bursts.

“Don’t we take it with us in the Möbius?” Tane asked.

“No. It needs a much more powerful aerial than the small one on the buoy,” Rebecca explained.

The signal they transmitted, she told them, was not the one that would be received back in the past. It was a disruptor signal, which would disrupt the gamma-ray burst that was already on its way to Earth from the depths of the galaxy and imprint their message on the radiation of the burst. That burst of radiation would somehow seep through the quantum foam, through the fabric of time itself, into the past.

The signal from the Chronophone wouldn’t even reach the gamma-ray burst for another two years. It was a hard concept to grasp. They sent a signal to the future, which ended up in the past.

By far, the hardest part of building the Chronophone was the location of the transmitter, when they had finally deciphered the schematics and worked out where that was. On the plan it showed just a tall, thin spike, with what looked like a satellite dish at the top, a serial number, and some coordinates.

As usual, it was Tane who had put two and two together.

“It’s the Skytower. The top of that thing is stuffed with satellite dishes of all shapes and sizes. I think we’re supposed to connect the Chronophone to one of those dishes, one with this serial number, and aim it at these coordinates.”

“I hope the owner of the dish doesn’t mind,” Fatboy had said.

“Tough,” had been Rebecca’s answer. “We have no choice.”

Tane steered the Möbius through a cloud of sludge, whirled up by a passing freighter from the bottom of the harbor. There had been no danger of collision, but the murky water was unsettling all the same.

Rebecca was intently watching a readout on one of the control panels. “We’re getting close,” she said.

The next batch of messages had proved quite informative. It was a series of numbers, each with an exactly specified time. It was Rebecca who figured it out.

“This is the final piece of the puzzle,” she said. “I was expecting this.”

“What is it?” Fatboy asked.

“It’s the timings. Each message has to be sent at an exact time, to hit the gamma-ray burst at the right moment and end up in the past at the right moment.”

The tail end of the last message had been interesting, too.

GPS,-36,50.999,174,49.876

GPS map coordinates, Rebecca had recognized at once, and a detailed map of Auckland had shown the spot defined by those coordinates to be on the edge of Rangitoto, a large island volcano, long extinct, that dominated the view from the shoreline of most of Auckland.

They were on their way to that spot now, while Fatboy and Goony continued working on the Chronophone.

It was daylight, but time was considered to be more important than discretion. The unspoken question was always, Had they wasted too much time before they had made their move on Motukiekie? If they had been earlier, could they have stopped the Chimera Project in time?

“What’s in front of us?” Rebecca asked. “We are almost right on the coordinates.”

The GPS readout on the control panel flashed red numbers in the dim light of the cockpit.

“Nothing yet,” Tane said. “The seabed is starting to slope up. We must be just about at Rangitoto by now. There’s…oh crap!”

A cliff face reared up suddenly in front of the Möbius. Tane flicked the craft into reverse for a moment, slowing the craft quickly, and they coasted up to the wall of rock.

“Just nudge a bit to your right,” Rebecca murmured, and Tane complied, drifting a little in that direction.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Try going down,” Rebecca suggested.

“We’re just about on the seafloor,” Tane said.

“Then try going up.”

A few yards higher up the cliff face, it became immediately apparent what the GPS coordinates were for. The wide mouth of a cave, almost oval, except on the left where a section had broken away from the top and made a mound on the bottom rim of the cave. It was well big enough for the Möbius.

“Want to take a look inside?” Tane asked, not waiting for an answer.

He touched a few buttons on the control panel, and the interior of the cave lit up like a cathedral in the glow of the underwater spotlights of the Möbius. The cave was huge.

“Probably a volcanic vent,” Rebecca said, her voice full of wonder. “It could go on, or down, for miles.”

Tane remembered stories of underground water channels that ran between Rangitoto Island and Lake Pupuke, just inland from Takapuna beach, and wondered if this was anything to do with that.

The cave was filled with marine life. A haze of tiny silver fish filtered past the glass dome of the driver’s bubble.

“This is it,” he said, maneuvering the craft around inside the underwater cavity in the side of the mountain. “This is our hideout. This is where we tuck ourselves away from whatever hell is coming for the rest of the human race, and wait until it is safe to emerge.”

Rebecca nodded, examining the roof of the cave through the dome. “If we set her down close to the entrance, we’ll be able to run the buoy up outside the cave to the surface. We can suck down as much air as we want and stay here indefinitely, if need be.”

“I hope it’s not that long,” Tane said quietly. Indefinitely sounded like too long a time to be living in a tiny tin tube on the floor of an underwater cave. “We can bring in supplies, food, diesel, whatever, in airtight drums and stack it up on the cave floor.”

“I think we’re going to get mightily sick of tinned ham and peaches,” Rebecca said, trying to make light of it, but the darkening circles under her eyes wiped away any trace of humor.

“God, I hope we’re wrong about all this,” Tane said. But he had a terrible feeling that they were right.