She took a deep breath, then tried to explain the appearance, and subsequent disappearance of the American officer, the man named Wellings who later turned out to be something quite more than he seemed.
“Astounding,” said Tovey. “Just what in bloody hell is happening here? Are you all going to just pop in from the future and sign on with the Royal Navy? Ships and men have been shuffling in and out of the bar, and nobody seems to know the cause. Well I’ll say one thing. I had a number of chats with that young Russian Captain, Fedorov. A good man that one. A pity he’s not here to help us sort things through. So you say this American fellow wants a meeting in the Azores?” Tovey raised an eyebrow. “Well I certainly have no objection. In fact, I believe I’ll send for someone I would like to include on the guest list. You know that Churchill will have to be informed.”
“Churchill?” said Elena. “You’re going to ask him to attend?”
“No my good woman. That would be just a tad too risky given the present situation. I was thinking of another man, a chap from Bletchley Park with a good head on his shoulders. I’ll want his take on all of this, and I can use him as a liaison to Churchill. In that regard, there is something I would like to ask of you. I hesitated to press the matter with the Russians, and I know it may be a rather delicate request, but I’ll ask it nonetheless, since we’re all in the family here. You people have been mucking about for some time now, for good or for ill. Needless to say, it has had quite an effect on the course of this war, and it will likely continue to do so. Well then… In for a penny, in for a pound. As to the course of this war. I’d like to know what we can expect in the years ahead.”
He waited, watching them closely. MacRae looked at Miss Fairchild, obviously deferring to her judgment on a question of this magnitude. “Perhaps I can have Mack here put together some information for you, Admiral. Mack?”
“Certainly, Mum. Any particulars you might be thinking about?”
“My beat,” said Tovey. “A general sense of things would be most helpful. I understand that knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I assure you that anything you may divulge will be kept under my hat, and not revealed to anyone who is not already privy to this… situation we find ourselves in.”
“I understand, sir. Yet from what I’ve been able to determine, things are just a wee bit skewed here. The Germans have already attacked Soviet Russia, and that wasn’t supposed to happen until late June. As for the broad strokes, this war is only just beginning. The Americans and Japanese will be in it soon enough, and at each other’s throats. I’ll fill you in sir.”
“Good enough,” said Tovey. “Now then, as to this American fellow. You say he’s come from your time, and willfully? His presence here was not an accident?”
“Apparently not,” said Elena. “He deliberately infiltrated Rodney in the guise of that American officer, and he was looking for that key we’ve been keen to get our own hands on.”
“Yes,” said Tovey… “The key. Everyone is looking for that bloody key! Strange to think that I have something to do with this, but I can’t imagine what it may be at the moment. Well, I think we better hear this man out. If he can come and go as he pleases, that alone is something we’ll want to hear about. The Russians seemed to believe their arrival here was an accident, until they gained some means of control over their movements. Yet I find it hard to believe they would slip out the back door like this without so much as a by your leave, or a goodbye.”
“Then you believe their disappearance was an accident?”
“It may have been unintentional,” said Tovey. “That is fair to conclude. Yet we also have no word from their submarine. That could mean any number of things, though I can’t say any of them bode well. I think we must assume that this submarine may have either been lost in action, or else it suffered the same fate that befell Kirov. You say there was another interloper out there—another submarine?”
“Astute Class,” said MacRae. “Aye, we got the call on that from the Russian sub. This class is a modern day Royal Navy boat, state-of-the-art, and one of the very best in the world. Miss Fairchild here has explained how this Brigadier Kinlan managed to slip through to this time. That was another of those atomic weapons, Admiral—fired in our day. It seems it blew Kinlan’s boys all the way here, and now we’re coming round on a heading to think the same thing may have happened with these ships, and that Astute Class sub of ours. They would have made a very ripe target in our day. If something similar happened, it might explain how that sub of ours got here. The Russian sub Captain claimed they fired on him, and they wanted us to call in our dogs, but we couldn’t get through to stop what was happening. Once those bloody torpedoes go into the water, you have very little time. In our day, they’re quick as lightning.”
“We figure the Russian sub Captain acted on pure reflex,” said Morgan. “It’s nice that we’ve tipped hats here and had our handshakes, but that reflex runs deep.”
“As to that Astute Class sub,” said MacRae, “whether it’s still out there or not is anyone’s guess. The Russians lit one off on them, which doesn’t surprise me, now that I look at it in this light. If our boat survived, that will be a damn good reason for the Russian sub to be running silent. Remember, in our day the Royal Navy is not so cozy with the Russians. That song we heard your ship’s band playin’ still holds true for the North Atlantic. Britannia still rules the waves on that watch—only it will be the Russians we’ll be lookin’ out for, and not the Germans. In fact, Germany is our ally in the future. It’s the Russians and Chinese we worry about in the next war.”
“Indeed,” said Tovey. “The whole thing gets turned on its head! Well I think Admiral Volsky and Captain Fedorov were dead set on changing that. I know in fact that they were working here to try and prevent that war you speak of in your time. Whether their intervention here may do some good, I suppose we may never know. The arrival of Brigadier Kinlan’s troops, welcome as they are, and now these other ships… Well that all leads me to think things don’t turn out as well in the future as Admiral Volsky might have hoped. Perhaps this American fellow can clue us in. This may make for a very interesting conversation. Just how is he set to return here?”
“We aren’t certain. We were told they have some… technology.”
“Very well. Then we head for the Azores to keep that appointment he made with us. I think the Germans have seen enough of the Royal Navy for the moment, and with Holland and Patterson coming on the scene, I don’t think they’ll want to cause any further mischief out here. Unfortunately, we’ve lost a good ship today, two actually, if we count the disappearance of Kirov. But Jerry has taken his lumps as well. The Russians put the fire to that aircraft carrier of theirs, and word is they also lost Gneisenau—torpedo damage—so that Russian sub may have weighed in on that one. They did their part, but who knows when or if we will sail with them again. Unfortunately the war won’t wait for a happy reunion. Now we must do the lifting ourselves, and I’m grateful you are still with me.”
He sighed, catching his breath as his thoughts ran on. “First things first. I’ll have a good number of thirsty battleships on my hands soon, so I intend to make for the Azores at once. I think it best that we move the newcomers to the rear of our convoy, and I’ll post Repulse in their wake. We’ve another destroyer flotilla in the Azores, and I’ll have them form a welcoming committee straight away.”
He turned to Miss Fairchild now. “Terribly sorry we’ve let the King’s business go into the sea like that. His majesty will be none too happy with the report I’ll have to write this evening, and I daresay Mister Churchill will get up a good head of steam about it as well, not to mention the First Sea Lord. I have a great deal to explain here, and I’ll have to be very discrete about it. I don’t have to tell you that hat bands can change rather easily in this war, and it wouldn’t be wise if Admiral Pound got nosey about all this. I’ll have to make an accounting of this action to the Admiralty, and I don’t think I can hide the existence of these seven
other ships indefinitely. Any objection to my informing the Prime Minister as to what has happened here?”
“My understanding is that he’s in the club,” said Elena.
“Right,” said Tovey. “And he’s very keen to know what we might be facing soon, which is one reason I pressed you for… information. Any bone I can throw Mister Churchill may keep the wolves at bay, at least insofar as my fate is concerned. I think it would keep me in the loop, and that will be all for the best. I have just one more question before we retire to more civil matters and sit down to dinner. Do tell me you have no plans to vanish any time soon.”
“None that we know of, sir,” said Elena with a smile.
“Good,” said Tovey. “I do also understand how difficult all this must be for your crew. If there is anything I can do for you, please let me know. In the meantime, let us go and have a bit to eat, and consider what this American fellow might want our ear for on the first of August.”
“Don’t be surprised, Admiral,” said Elena. “But I think it may have something to do with that key. The man claimed he once had it in his possession, until it pulled the same trick the Russians seem to play about with, and just vanished. Then he disappeared for good measure, and right before my own eyes. I haven’t any idea what he’s really up to, but yes, I think this appointment in the Azores will prove to be very interesting.”
Part V
Nothing Is Written
“Nothing Is Written, and Everything is Permitted.”
- Ismaili Saying
Chapter 13
He emerged in a white mist, effused with glimmering light, with only the reassuring strength of the hard concrete floor beneath him as any point of physical reference. Weak from the sudden return to another time, Paul stooped to his knees, one hand on the concrete floor to steady himself, beset with a queasy sensation of lightness, his mind still a whirl.
The last time he had done this, he was returning from this very same mission, his clandestine infiltration on the battleship Rodney in the assumed identity of Lieutenant Commander Wellings. He had gone to see to the sinking of the Bismarck, feeding crucial information to the Captain of the battleship Rodney to assure he could get that ship into the hunt, for it was Rodney that drew first blood against the German warship, scoring a serious hit on her third salvo. The action then had seen him thrown from the ship into the sea, tossed in the wild waves in the heat of the battle, and only just barely extracted from the scene in time. He had returned out of phase, eventually manifesting, wet and bedraggled, yet with a strange souvenir in his pocket, something he had found in the cargo hold when he went below decks to aid a wounded man.
His return shift had been very difficult, as he had emerged in the Berkeley Arch complex, yet strangely out of synch, there but not there, the barest fraction of a second ahead of them in time, and therefore completely invisible to the others until his own clock slowed enough for him to find harmony with them.
They had come to call it “Attenuation,” a property of an incomplete time shift, where the traveler manifests across a range of several milliseconds, slightly out of sync or phase with his correct target point in time. He was simply out of tune with everything else, and the effects had also been reported by others who moved in time, the walkers from the future who had been striving with one another in the long, deadly time war.
Now Paul was relieved to hear someone calling his name, though the voice seemed strained and distant. The sound slowly resolved, and the sensation of dizziness faded with the mist around him. There, standing a few feet from the thick painted yellow line that marked the event horizon of the Arch, stood his good friend and fellow team member, Robert Nordhausen.
“Ah,” said Nordhausen. “Back in one piece this time. Did you find it?”
“Paul was still a bit dazed from the shift, and for a moment he seemed to have no idea what Nordhausen was talking about. “Find it?” he said haltingly. Then his memory solidified and he remembered why he had taken this risk again, exposing his very being to the strange effects of a time shift—the key.
“I couldn’t get to it,” he said bitterly. “But my god, Robert, you’ll be amazed at what’s going on there now. There’s a goddamned British destroyer there—a Type 45!”
“What’s that?” Nordhausen knew the history inside out—ancient history being his forte, but when it came to military matters he seemed at a loss, particularly concerning anything newer than the 20th Century.”
“A modern warship—from our time!”
“What? In the middle of World War Two?”
“I was aboard the damn thing, and even spoke to their crew. Look, we need to get busy. It was a ship called the Argos Fire. I picked up the name when they pulled me out of the sea.”
“You got thrown into the ocean again? I told you to stay away from the gunwales.”
“Yes? Well I had plenty of company this time. The Rodney was sunk, or at least it was sinking when I left the scene just now. Everyone went into the drink with me.”
“Damn,” said Nordhausen. “Bismarck remains a tough old bastard.”
“That’s an understatement. Look, Robert, that history is completely skewed now. The red lines on the Golem module make perfect sense, and I think it all started with that Russian battlecruiser that went missing in the Norwegian Sea.”
“That’s where we get our first point of deviation,” said Nordhausen.
“Deviation? That’s not half a word for what I discovered there. The whole history of the war has been turned on its head. There are ships at sea that were never supposed to have been built, and I learned that things have happened in the war that never occurred. The Germans took Gibraltar, and that’s just one example. The entire political landscape has shifted as well. It seems Russia never finished its civil war, and the Bolsheviks never united the country.”
“I know,” said Nordhausen. “The Golems have been slowly returning information, but there’s a great deal of haze. I don’t understand why I can’t get clear data.”
“Because this whole thing is in play,” said Paul. “There’s a Grand Nexus open, and it has something to do with that Russian battlecruiser. As to that key, I just learned that there are others, and I think I have a handle on what their purpose was.”
The two men were walking back towards the heavy shielded door now, and into the elevator, ready to take the ride up to the main complex control room where Kelly Ramer sat at the consoles to monitor Paul’s shift pattern on the return. He was the math and computer genius in the group, responsible for crunching the numbers to navigate through time by using the enormous power of an Arion module supercomputer.
“Maeve is going to go ballistic,” said Paul, referring to the last of the four founding team members. Head of Outcomes and Consequences, Maeve Lindford was as fiery as her red hair, and had been a stalwart defender of the established lines of history. On the night before their first planned mission, a simple jaunt back to see the original showing of The Tempest by Shakespeare, she had committed the entire play to memory. In the event they inadvertently did something to affect the history, she wanted to know immediately if a single word had been changed in Shakespeare’s drama, and she would stand ready to grill the offender and defend every last punctuation mark of the play if need be. Through the desperate missions the team had conducted, it was hers to sort through the myriad of possible outcomes of their interventions in time, and find the one course that promised to maintain the integrity of the history they knew, all safely preserved in an enormous database, and kept constantly running in a low grade Nexus Point to prevent it from being altered. They called it their Touchstone Database, the “RAM bank” as Kelly Ramer described it.
The four founders had been standing their watch on the history for some months, the Physicist, Historian, Math Wizard and Maeve Lindford’s hard hand on the tiller of it all. Just as they thought they had concluded their operations, a final alert had come in on the warning system Kelly rigged to keep watch on the history, and th
is time the damage was far more severe than anyone expected.
“Are the Assassins behind this?” asked Robert. “Do we have to hold their feet to the fire again?
“No,” said Paul definitively. “No, it has to do with the disappearance of that ship. That’s where the Golems first led us, to July 28th, 2021, and the direct link to a point of divergence on that same date in 1941. By God, Robert—I think the damn ship moved in time! Who knows how or why, but that is what accounts for these odd Golem fetches that have produced evidence of modern weaponry being used in the war. Those were not fluke prototypes, and I think all those reports you were getting were actually happening—at one point.”
“You mean the evidence I uncovered on the use of nuclear weapons?”
“Correct. I think they were real events, not simply something fetched from the Golem stream—not simply possible outcomes as we first believed. They actually happened, but from what I was able to gather, that Russian ship has been bouncing all over the history! I think that information you uncovered concerning the engagements off Sakhalin Island in 1945 were also real events, and that strange bit about a renegade Russian battleship trying to re-fight the battle of Tushima in 1908.”
“That was real?”
“I think it was this same Russian battlecruiser—Kirov. No, this time it isn’t our warring friends from the future—not the Assassins or the operatives of the Order. This time it was the Russians!”
“What in god’s name are they doing?”
“Hard to say. I think it was an accident, just as it was first reported on the 28th in our news here. But if I’m correct, and that ship did actually move in time, then it’s been ripping the history open from one end to another. Maeve will have a fit.”
“And the British destroyer? What has it got to do with all of this?
“Argos Fire… Look that one up the minute we get to the operations room.”
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