Linkage: The Narrows of Time by Jay Falconer

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back into place. He pushed a neighboring red CHARGE button
and waited for the capacitor’s power meter to increase. When it
reached capacity, a green READY light lit up on his panel.
He looked back. “Are we ready?”
    Kleezebee nodded. Trevor scrunched up his
face and took a giant step backward, as if he expected the chamber
to explode.
    Lucas steadied his finger and pressed the
green READY button. A short, pulsating whirr resonated from
deep inside the chamber, signaling that the capacitor had released
its stored energy. “Almost there,” he mumbled with excitement. He
could feel his chest tightening, making it difficult for him to
breathe. Soon, the monitors began to stream multiple columns of
numerical data up from the bottom.
    When the final set of results appeared, Lucas
stood up and yelled, “Shit!” and threw his safety glasses across
the room with a side-armed throwing motion.
    Abby flinched. “What’s wrong?”
    Lucas raised his hands against the sides of
his head. While looking to the heavens, he said, “Nothing. That’s
what happened. Not a goddamn thing. Two years of work, and
then— DICK. ”
    Kleezebee touched Lucas’ shoulder. “Patience.
It’s only our first attempt.”
    The professor turned to the other Ramsay
brother. “What’s the status of the core?”
    Drew checked the reactor instruments. “Looks
good. E-121 remains viable and the core’s adequately pressurized.
Should we try again, possibly at full power?”
    “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At this
point, there’s no guarantee that doubling the power will accomplish
anything.”
    Kleezebee began to pace the room while
everyone else remained silent. He shuffled to the far wall and
back, looking immersed in thought, his hands folded behind his
back. Then he stopped pacing and addressed the group. “Before we do
anything, I need you to perform a complete systems analysis of the
available data. Let’s see if we can tell what, if anything,
happened. For now, let’s power down the EM system but leave the
core pressurized.”
    Kleezebee’s cell phone rang. He opened the
phone’s flip cover. “Go for DL.” Partway through the conversation,
he held his hand over the phone’s microphone and told the crew, “I
need to take this call outside. I’ll be back in a few.”
    * * *
    Half an hour later, the team was huddled
around the center worktable after concluding their detailed systems
analysis. Kleezebee still hadn’t returned.
    “So what do we have?” Lucas asked.
    Drew read from a list of notes. “I checked
the core’s internal data feeds and didn’t detect anything
anomalous. The core’s material remained viable throughout the test
and the internal housing was structurally sound. The core’s
internal pressure held steady and was right on mark. Yet, our
instruments failed to show any notable change in E-121’s EM
field.”
    Lucas sensed his brother had more to report.
“Anything else?”
    Drew nodded. “The really odd thing is that,
with all the energy released, you’d think our instruments would
have recorded something. If nothing else, it should have at least
registered a power spike when the core was bombarded. But zilch.
All that energy had to go somewhere. It’s as though the beam never
fired.”
    “Drew had me review the operational logs,”
Abby said. “According to the project specs, the capacitor’s power
level was precisely where it was supposed to be, and the beam
frequency was tuned perfectly. All readings indicate that the
energy was discharged and the beam fired.”
    “I check magnets and calibration matched.
Power okay. No failure,” Trevor added.
    “Okay, then, let’s recap what we know,” Lucas
said. “Everything was calibrated perfectly. The core and the E-121
were stable. We had the proper amount of power. All our readings
were normal before, during, and after the test. The capacitor’s
energy discharged and engaged the core, but no power was
registered.”
    Lucas rubbed his