Anvil of Fate (Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  “Here? But given the progress of the work so far, you’ll need more room than you have in this chamber, no matter how many more stones you bring in. There’s only so much room here.”

  “Do not trouble yourself. The stones can be stored in any location. This one, for example, will be moved to the ancient temple site at Zau. See here how we inscribe its name?” He pointed to the base of the stela and Kelly saw how it matched the symbol Hamza had carved into his narrative on the wall.

  “A nifty little card catalog system,” he said. “Etched in stone. Then you can move these anywhere you wish? We thought this had to remain a central library for the whole record of days.”

  “That would be foolish,” said Hamza. “Your presence here has taught us that much. So we will take care to see that certain records of important times are duplicated and dispersed to other locations.”

  Kelly thought for a moment about Paul and Robert, and how they secured his place in the Meridian by essentially doing the same thing with that memorial DVD and publishing duplicate copies in a thousand other locations.

  He could see that people were arriving, and leaving, with armfuls of parchment. They used these to make rubbings from the engraved stone characters, carefully rolling them up and placing them into sturdy round tubes for easy transport. So the record of days was being duplicated and carried away from this place—to who knows where, he thought. Were there other locations where they were carving?

  So it came to pass that he often joined Hamza in the main chamber, and assisted with the work. A quick study, Kelly easily learned many of the hieroglyphic symbols, and was one day surprised to learn his own name could be spelled out by using two simple characters, Ra for the sun, and Mer for pyramid. At times he practiced carving, as Hamza had shown him, and here and there he affixed his signature to things in a characteristic cartouche. One day he had been working a relatively small stone from the quarry when two men came looking for something to complete a stela they had been carving. They had miscalculated the length, and need another foot or two extend their narrative.

  “Take this,” he gestured at the stone he had been carving, turning it over to show them the smooth, uncarved back side would meet their needs. “I was just writing of my morning prayer.” And take it they did. The message he had been writing was that ‘Ra-Mer greets the dawn, eternally, at the appointed place.’

  Slowly, over days and weeks, he carved his name in many other places, but it was that one single stone that would survive intact, its characters perfectly preserved where it was mounted on a temple wall with the reverse side carved by Hamza’s men facing outward to endure the weathering and erosion of years, and his own script neatly preserved intact against the inner wall.

  He remembered watching the two men carry the stone away, whispering to himself and making a promise that he must pray, each and every morning, there on the apex of the Pyramid of the Sun, without fail.

  “Find it, Paul,” he whispered as the men left. And through the long ages his friend was engaged in exactly that endeavor.

  Chapter 2

  Sun Sun Restaurant: Chinatown, San Francisco – 8:15 PM

  “What’s done is done, Paul. He’s gone and we’ll just have to accept it.” Nordhausen leaned forward on the dining table, his heart as heavy as his body felt at that moment. Paul had just finished his meal, but was still picking aimlessly at a few leftovers with his chopsticks.

  The city was humming with energy tonight, especially here on Stockton Street, San Francisco, which was the real heart of Chinatown where all the locals did their grocery shopping daily at the open air markets and food stands while the tourists browsed the Asian nick-knack gift stores a block away on Grant. There were not many tourists tonight, but the trucks still came in from the many central valley growers, making late deliveries for a throng of customers who were haggling at the curb side produce stands, mostly Chinese.

  The women would press their way into the crowded stores, squeezing and sorting and sometimes tasting fruits and vegetables. They would stoop over crates of lychee fruit, dragon’s eyes, jujubes, sorting and sifting to find the very best. They would dig into cartons of fresh shelled peanuts with gnarled hands, scooping them up into plastic bags, an old favorite. They would poke and prod tomatoes, inspect fresh cabbage, hold up bundles of bok choy squinting at the pale green leafage. Here and there, the windows of small cookeries were strung with freshly smoked hanging ducks, plump roasted chickens, and barbecued ribs.

  The old Amahs, gray haired grandmothers with bowed backs would brave the crowds, dragging small rolling tote carts for their bags and leaning heavily on canes as they threaded their way through the crowds. Store clerks chanted up fresh produce, and some harangued customers who seemed overanxious to sample the merchandise. Meanwhile, men stood outside on the street, laden with red plastic bags full of produce. Some smoked, some talked, others simply stood there waiting to be handed yet another burden.

  Paul had shopped here many times himself, immersing himself in the culture and finding the Chinese a simple, friendly, and industrious people. Now there was an added edge to their movements, he noted. The haggling was more intense. The handfuls of string beans and dried nuts seemed more grasping and urgent as they filled the bags. Storekeepers seemed nervous and short tempered, waving and yammering at people trying to taste the ripening fruit, and the prices crept ever higher.

  Normally it was almost impossible to find parking on Stockton, but arriving late they happened by just as a shop owner was leaving for the day, and grabbed his parking spot as he left. Hungry, tired, weary with the news and an equal measure of remorse, they found Sun Sun Restaurant was still open and slipped in for a meal.

  Nordhausen knew there was nothing more they could do. Kelly was gone, lost, annihilated in Time. They had tried to pull him back from that last mission, but failed. He could not explain the theory, but the God shaped hole in his soul was enough to make it plain. They sent him off… to who knows where, a hidden base in the Egyptian desert, lost in the convoluted labyrinth of Time. What chance did he really have anyway? They were not even sure the location and temporal coordinates had been accurate. For all he knew Kelly could have just ended up in the middle of the Sahara, ten thousand years away from home.

  “LeGrand’s numbers…” The professor tapped his plate with a chopstick, stirring through the arguments again like old fried rice. “There had to be something wrong with the numbers, right? And why no pre-programmed retraction scheme?”

  Urged on by LeGrand, an agent from the future group they had come to call ‘the Order,’ they made that last, grasping attempt to end the Time War, as each opposing side sought out moments of seeming insignificance in the long continuum of events, hoping to lever the chain of causality to some clear advantage.

  Kelly was the only team member available for the mission. Yet he failed. They would never know why or how. The one stubborn fact that remained after they struggled to recover him was Palma. It had happened! The volcano blew its top again, helped by a nuclear device buried deep in the unstable western flank. It was as if their first mission aimed at preventing the calamity had never even occurred.

  “How did they do it, Paul? How could they restore Palma to the time line if we prevented Husan Al Din from being born?”

  “I have no idea, but it happened.” Paul was listless, distracted and beset by the heavy burden of loss. A sudden memory returned to him. He was sitting in the parlor of a hair cutting studio, just two doors down here on Stockton, and staring at the full wall mirror that was placed to the left of, and perpendicular to, the open front door. It created an odd effect. People walking down the street were reflected in the mirror as they approached and could be seen from the front as they reached the salon. Then they would suddenly appear in the open doorway, and he would get a side view of them as they passed. As the eye followed, expecting to see them continue on into the mirrored area, they just vanished as they passed the open door! It was an optical illusion, because
the mirror was so clean and reflective that it appeared to be reality. You thought they would just walk happily into the reflection and that you would catch a rear view of them as they continued down the street, but the alternate reality presented by the mirror was just playing a clever trick on him. He sat for twenty minutes, just watching people walk by and vanish. His mind knew what was happening but his eye remained stubbornly ignorant, surprised each time. At one point he was compelled to get up and go to the door to look outside, relieved to see that the real world was all still there and the person he had seen in the reflection was ambling quietly down the street.

  Life played equally cruel tricks, it seemed. People would come into your life, bask in the reflection of your heart and soul, then walk on and sometimes disappear.

  “We lost him,” Nordhausen said with resignation heavy in his voice. “Win, lose or draw, we lose Kelly in this mess. I’ll be damned if I know what happened this time. But we’re going to have to face it and let it go.”

  “No, we’re not, going to simply let it go.” There was a hard edge of determination in Paul’s voice. He had been thinking deeply about the event for the last three days. The chaos sweeping the nation after Palma sent them all into near survival mode, but he had managed to keep his head focused on the problem and things were slowly falling into place in his mind.

  The great destructive waves could not harm them here on the Pacific coast, but the tsunami caused by Palma sent ripples of panic clear across the country. It was a heavy blow. Boston was destroyed. New York City was still under ten feet of water in most low lying areas. The waves swept right over Manhattan, thirty to forty feet high in places, and only those well above the flood tides in the high buildings survived—too few, as the catastrophe struck early in the morning, at 4:11 Eastern Standard time. Most of New Jersey was inundated. The ocean surged up the Delaware Bay and delivered a death blow to Philadelphia and Newark. The Delaware Isthmus shielded Washington D.C. for a time, but the great tide surged up the Chesapeake Bay as well, eventually flooding the nation’s capital, with great loss of life. Every bridge on the Potomac was down and the capital was isolated, though news feeds from overflying helicopters showed that neither the White House nor anything else on Pennsylvania Avenue survived intact.

  In Virginia, the navy base and city of Norfolk were utterly destroyed, and the waters reached as far inland as Richmond. In the Carolinas, Raleigh was spared, but Charleston destroyed, and every city in Florida was virtually wiped off the map when the awesome power of the ocean swept completely over the peninsula in places! The average elevation of Miami was just six feet, and no more than a ground level of 26 feet at its highest location. The initial wave approached a hundred feet in height there. Some of the sturdier concrete buildings remained in the larger cities, but millions died in that state alone.

  It was just too much for the nation to take. Panic spread across the continent as people in the heartland and Midwest instinctively went into survival mode and began stripping the shelves bare in markets and stores. The entire national transportation system ground to a halt. Food and fuel were no longer being delivered through most of the central states. Communications were spotty, though Atlanta based CNN was still on the air chronicling the disaster.

  The ocean surge even swept into the Gulf of Mexico, swamping hundreds of production platforms and flooding major portions of Houston and New Orleans. Pipelines were wrecked, and no oil was reaching the southern states at all. Within 48 hours people had drained every last drop at service stations and, though the waves of destruction did far less damage there, the entire Gulf coast was evacuating inland.

  FEMA was overwhelmed and no aid was reaching survivors virtually anywhere in the damage zones. And after the food and fuel ran down, Paul knew that it would not be long before the power would go off. Rolling blackouts were already sweeping the nation, even in places far removed from the destruction, like Chicago. Husan Al Din, who’s name meant “The Sword of the Faith,” had struck a fearsome and near fatal blow—if indeed he was the man responsible for the catastrophe. His only assumption had been that the Assassin cult had found some way to restore the man to the continuum, and assure his birth. That failing they had managed to find another terrorist to do the job.

  On the Pacific coast the infrastructure remained intact and the abundant natural resources allowed for a brief interval of near normalcy. There was a measure of panic buying, but the national guard had imposed a modicum of order, particularly in California. Some places fared worse than others. There was a day of shocked numbness as people watched their television screens, dumbstruck by the scale of the devastation back east. It seemed that almost every family had lost a relative or friend in the disaster. Maeve, god bless her, had lost her mother that morning, and she was now reeling from the double blow in loosing Kelly as well, not to mention the impending collapse of social governmental infrastructure throughout the nation.

  Then, as stories of evacuation, shortages of essential supplies, and growing civil disorder crossed the airwaves, people came out of their homes to scavenge the stores for things they thought they would need. Food was at the top of most people’s list, and panic buying started to gain momentum a day ago. The situation in Los Angeles was deteriorating, with crime and looting slowly getting out of control, particularly in the poorer neighborhoods. The constitution was suspended there, and martial law declared by order of the new acting president, the Speaker of the House, who had been safe on vacation in Hawaii.

  Here in San Francisco there was still civil order, and civil liberties, though people went about their business with an edge of fear. The roads were drivable, though busier and more jammed than ever, even with gasoline approaching twenty dollars a gallon and nearly impossible to find. Hotels remained open, drawing on emergency supplies stockpiled in the event of a major earthquake. People were weeping in the lobbies, and thousands of tourists from the east coast lamented the loss of relatives and real estate. The banks were still operating, trying to manage a mad rush by thousands trying to get cash when the credit and debit card processing systems collapsed. Most schools and businesses closed their doors in shock, but retail outlets were open, making a hefty profit in sales. The restaurants and markets were open as well, selling off the last of their food before it spoiled, with prices quickly doubling, then tripling overnight. The meal Paul and Robert were sharing tonight had cost them over a hundred dollars for a plate of fried rice, a noodle dish with vegetables, and two beers.

  Nordhausen gave Paul a confused look. “What are you saying? Palma happened, Paul. The whole eastern seaboard is a flooded wreck—all the way from Miami to Portland Maine. Kelly couldn’t stop them and they must have figured out some way to run another intervention that would save their damnable terrorist. Husan Al Din was born, and the bloody radicals got their revenge for that Navy Seal Mission in Pakistan when they bagged Bin Ladin. Then this Paradox thing wipes the slate clean, Kelly and all.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” said Paul. “Because if Kelly failed in his intervention then there was no reason for him to be exposed to Paradox.”

  “Well it damn well took him before,” said Nordhausen. “If they reversed our intervention and restored the Palma event to the Meridian, then Kelly was fated to die, right? Graves never has a reason to come back and save him, for God’s sake. You explained all this to me a hundred times.”

  “Yes, I know I did, and that logic was good in accounting for Kelly’s jeopardy at this moment on the continuum. But think, Robert. He wasn’t on this side of Palma when all this happened. He was over ten thousand years in the past! In that instance Paradox may not judge him harshly, right? Yes, Kelly could not be explained alive here in our time after Palma, but Paradox doesn’t have to account for his presence in that segment of the continuum.”

  Nordhausen gave him a blank stare. “Are you trying to tell me that you think—“

  “Kelly’s alive,” said Paul. “He’s alive, damnit, and by God, I have an idea.�
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  Chapter 3

  Sun Sun Restaurant: Chinatown, San Francisco – 8:30 PM

  Nordhausen had an incredulous look on his face. “An idea? Don’t tell me you’re planning another time jump. How in the world are we going to get the Arch operating without Kelly? Look at it out there, listen to the city! There’s a quiet panic underway, and it’s only going to get worse. We’re lucky things haven’t completely fallen apart by now, but I assure you, they will fall apart. Look at the bill for this meal. It’s going to get very uncomfortable when people start going hungry.”

  “Staying fed is the least of my worries now,” said Paul.

  “That’s an understatement,” said Nordhausen. “I’ll be glad if we make it over the Bay Bridge and get back to Berkley in one piece. It was a crazy to come over here to the City. Damn expensive as well. How much fuel is left in the tank? We’ve barely got enough to get us out of the Bay Area. Let’s get out of here, Paul. Go somewhere safe while we still have some mobility and the roads are open.”

  “Somewhere safe?”

  “How about your place down in Carmel? It’s a perfect refuge, tucked away on a peninsula with only a few roads leading in or out, all easily blocked and defended. There’s a lot of agriculture close by and lots of local growers in the area.”

  “Forget it, Robert. You think we can just retire with the old folks in Pacific Grove and just ride this thing out? Hell, we have to do something. We’ve still got the Arch complex intact at Lawrence Labs in Berkeley. And I didn’t come into the City here for a hundred dollar meal in Chinatown, we’re heading over to the University of San Francisco. They’ve got an Arion system at the Harney Science Center there, and I still have 5 hours booked. I doubt anyone’s using it now.”

  “Five hours? The University is closed, Paul.” What are you going to do, break into the building?”