Anvil of Fate (Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  “How do you greet the rising sun if you’re inside a pyramid?” Paul argued. “There were signs of an obvious staircase in the image of the ruin. Nope. My bet is that he’s on top. I’ll set the first retraction sweep there and we can hope for the best.”

  As to the time, it was a matter of calculating the exact time of sunrise at that location, and narrowing down the day of the year was the great variable. Paul decided to start with the exact date when they had inserted Kelly into that milieu, and then work forward. He was taking a look at each sunrise, day by day, in a series of snapshots that were analyzing mass densities at the programmed coordinates. Day one gave him a baseline, because he knew Kelly would not be there on the day he arrived. If the mass density varied on subsequent days, it could indicate the presence of a person at that location.

  After a five minute sweep he had a steady baseline with no variation until about five weeks after insertion date. Then, to his surprise and delight, he got density variations day by day, like a string of pearls, and the mass was always the same, or nearly so, and more, it closely matched the data from Kelly’s last pattern sweep.

  “He’s there, he whispered,” hoping he was correct.

  He was.

  Paul had his eyes closed, as if he was afraid to look at the screen when he engaged the system to open the continuum again. The professor leaned in over his shoulder to get a look at the monitor. There was a lot of green on the screen, which he took for a good omen, but he could not make any sense of the numbers otherwise. Paul opened his eyes, smiled, and gave him a thumbs up.

  “It’s looking good, professor. We’ve got hold of someone. The pattern match was spot on. Get down there and see what’s up!”

  Nordhausen rushed to the elevator, heading down to the lower level to see if their retraction scheme had worked. The professor approached the thick, yellow event horizon line with some trepidation, and a healthy dose of respect, yet could see nothing in the blue-gray mist. The Arch was thrumming and spinning, and he looked over his shoulder for support, but Paul was still up in the lab working the consoles as best he could.

  Nordhausen stared in awe as Kelly came walking out of the frigid fog, his eyes closed, arms extended, feeling his way like a blind beggar in shepherd’s robes. He walked right in to the professor’s outstretched arms.

  “Got you, my man. Rest easy, Kelly. You’re home, brother. You’re home, by God!”

  Kelly opened his eyes, a bit bleary from the enormous Time shift, but obviously elated that his long shot gamble had paid off. “It’s about time!” he said, ironically.

  Moments later they had him up in the lab wrapped in a warm blanket with a mug of fresh Peet’s coffee—Uzuri blend.

  “Nordhausen,” he was saying, “you’re a genius! I knew you’d find those messages I carved.”

  “Actually it was Paul,” the professor admitted.

  “It was the Golems,” said Paul humbly. “I just gave them a nudge in the right direction and told them to look for any permutation of your name, among other things.”

  “Yes,” said Robert, bowing low. “All homage to the great and powerful Ra-Mer, lord of the sun pyramid!”

  They bantered back and forth a while, and Kelly shared the tale of his mission with them. “Can you believe that?” he finished. “There was a messenger scheduled to leave the archive with a rubbing just as I met Hamza. The bastard shifted out and blew the whistle on my mission, giving the Assassins time to program a counter operation. It didn’t take much—a bit like discovering Achilles and his myrmidons inside the Trojan horse I suppose. A few torches at that moment would have saved Troy. But in this case all they had to do was shift the next messenger in a day early with the news and be sure that they restored their flood gate after I sabotaged it. I suppose they could have just met me as I materialized and said sorry, Mr. Ramer but your mission is bunk and you are now our captive, but they didn’t. They let, me worm my way into the damn sphinx and do my thing. I wonder why?”

  “They were just being careful,” said Paul. “There may have been another Pushpoint somewhere along the way, and they wanted to be sure of your intent. Once you did what you came to do, without mishap or any irregularities, our cards were on the proverbial table and they could then be certain that the floodgate was the Pushpoint, protect it, and brief this Hamza figure.”

  “Yes,” said Kelly. “In about an hour now he’ll be wondering why I haven’t come to the second morning prayer. Things became so routine there that my minder was getting lazy. He didn’t follow me to the Sun Pyramid this morning like he often does. But in time they’ll realize I’m missing…” His mood suddenly darkened, almost as if he could perceive Paul’s subtle disquiet. His friend was looking at the wall clock, a bit distracted.

  “Speaking of time,” Paul said quietly. “You probably should know what’s happened here… on this Meridian.”

  “I know,” said Kelly. “Palma happened again. I trust you have the Arch spinning?”

  “Don’t worry, my friend,” Paul reassured him. “We’re safe in a Nexus Point. But we’ve given the slip to more than Hamza and his merry band of scribes. We’ve pulled a fast one on Time itself by pulling you out, and we’ve got to figure out something here, and fast. Otherwise…”

  “Right,” said Kelly. “I’m the odd man out. Time has no place for me in this Meridian any longer. If Palma happened, as you say, then I’m supposed to be dead and buried. I’ve had nightmares about it for weeks.”

  “Thankfully I’ve worked up a whole set of queries the last few days,” said Paul, “and the Golems have been busy, but we’ve got a few problems. First off, the Internet is still up and running but, as you might expect, there are a lot of servers down on the east coast, all the major hubs there are off line and probably will remain so. The system was originally designed to withstand a nuclear attack, so the redundancy is saving us for the moment. But you know the old saying: ‘Things fall apart…”

  “The center cannot hold,” Nordhausen finished.

  “So the community of Golems has taken a hit as well,” Paul continued. “I reckon you’ve lost 18 to 20 percent of the installed user base.”

  “That still leaves enough for what we have to do,” said Kelly.

  “Good… Now the second problem. Electricity. It’s been holding fairly steady, but the power company was already complaining about the load when I spun up the Arch for the retraction. We’re at 50% power now, just enough to safely maintain the Nexus, but power is going to be an issue if we have to operate again tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Nordhausen had a sheepish look on his face. “But we’ll need research time on an Arion system. You mean to say—“

  “Exactly Robert. Tonight. How long do you think I can keep the Arch spinning at this power level? If anything happens, and we lose power here, I’ve got three backup generators all on emergency standby. The first will kick in the instant we dip below 40% power. It has two hours fuel. The remaining two will sit in the bull pen and I’ll bring them on line when that first one runs out of gas. But I won’t get more than an inning or two out of either one, as the fuel situation is pretty bad. I told Robert that we can siphon the fuel from our cars if we must, and that’s our last reserve. We parked them in the underground garage, well within the sphere of influence of the Arch.”

  “Right,” said Kelly. “It’s a real bitch closing out a game when your starter fails you in the third or fourth inning.”

  “Which is why we have to get busy. I know this is going to be hard on all of us, particularly you Kelly. But we’ve got a lot to do here, and… well, we’ll need Maeve. I’d like to give you both a little time together but I’m afraid we don’t have much to spare.”

  “I’ll call her,” said Kelly. “It’s going to be a bit of a shock to her when she finds I’m alive. I hope this wasn’t too hard on her—on any of you. But thank you for believing in me...in my life.”

  Paul just smiled, and they sat there, quiet for a moment. Then Kelly was up off his
chair, suddenly energized. “Get the Golem reports up on the history module! Let’s see what’s wrong. I’ll call Maeve. And Nordhausen—make some more coffee. It’s going to be a long morning.”

  Paul smiled and flipped a console switch to activate the history module. The Golems had been trawling the Internet for hours now, searching for anomalies and comparing them to the preserved record of the original history in the active RAM Bank. He settled into a chair and turned on the reporting application. The instant the module activated an alarm went off again.

  “Christ almighty!” Paul rushed over to the monitor with Nordhausen on his heels. “We’ve got a major alert. Why didn’t we get a call on the cell net?”

  “The damn phone is in your briefcase, Paul. Remember?” And it did ring, twice, just as we were leaving the Harney Science Center.”

  “Right,” said Paul, but their attention was immediately riveted on the screen. The lines of amber and red on the data chart were a bad sign. Something was terribly amiss, and the Meridians were showing stress fractures all over the screen.

  “Good God,” said Nordhausen. “We’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest when we pulled Kelly out! They must be running some kind of counter-operation, and with a vengeance.“

  Paul thought for a moment. “No, if those cell phone calls were coming from the Golem alert system, then the variations were detected well before we pulled Kelly out. I saw the red warning light on the Golem Module, but there was no time to deal with it until now. Kelly was my only priority. But you may be right that someone’s running an operation.”

  The system was set to display a series of horizontal bars, each one coded by subject: Politics, Sciences, Arts, Religion. The list ran down the left margin of the screen. The top of the chart displayed dates in 100 year increments, the rightmost being set to the early years of the 21st Century, their time. They could know nothing of the centuries beyond this moment, but had a good look at the past. Green lines indicated very little variation in the Meridian for the given subject area, the darker the color the better. Amber indicated minor variations, which would grow progressively darker through the orange spectrum until they turned red, a major variation.

  And the screen was blood red.

  Paul stared at it, aghast. He clicked on the line for religion and a popup box appeared to indicate the percentage of variation. The number was alarmingly high, 87.9% deviation from the RAM Bank data! And even as he watch the figure was ticking deeper into the red. 87.93%...87.95%... He selected a button that would display key missing elements and was stunned by the first few entries. Judaism, Holy Catholic Church, Church Of England, Quakers, Coptic Orthodox, Methodist Church, Reformation, Lutheran Church, Presbyterian Church, Pentecostals, Anabaptists, Baptists, Mormons, Hasidism, Bahai’ism…The list ran on.

  “What does this mean?” Nordhausen was shocked. “It’s listing the Holy Catholic Church in deep red. Does that mean—“

  “It’s gone,” said Paul, equally dismayed. “Along with all the other branches of the religion. Christendom has been literally wiped off the Meridian!”

  Chapter 6

  Arch Complex, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Saturday, 2:10 A.M.

  “That’s impossible!” The professor could not believe what he was seeing. “You can’t just eradicate an entire religious paradigm like that. What could they have done?”

  “Oh? How many offerings have you burned to Zeus lately?” said Paul. “The religions of the Mayans, Romans, and Greeks, were basically wiped out a thousand years ago. I’m sure there are residual elements of Christianity in the world this data comes from, but the organized religions of the Christian West appear to have met their end. Judaism too…but when?” He began to scroll backwards in time, following the line and noting the color lightening to ochre, orange, and amber as he scrolled back through the centuries. He overlaid the political spectrum in another screen layer, seeing the same basic pattern.

  “Looks like Columbus never discovered America either,” he said flatly. He continued to scroll back along the Time Meridians until he saw the lines lightening and color shifting to green around the beginning of the 8th century.

  “There!” Nordhausen pointed to the demarcation of green and yellow. “Zoom in on that century.” A click of the mouse displayed the whole of the 8th century on the screen now. It wasn’t long before the solid green began to fade and resolve to amber.

  “What was going on, Robert? You’re the historian.”

  The professor looked up at the ceiling, digging for facts in his memory now. “Well, Europe was still divided, east and west, with the Byzantine empire still intact and the remnant of the barbarian tribes, Visigoths, Lombards, Franks, Bulgars all in the mix in central Europe, and Nordic influences pressuring England.”

  “What about Islamic history?”

  “The Umayyad Dynasty was building up a fairly significant empire, when they could stop quarreling amongst themselves. They had crossed into Spain and Italy, and were also waging war with the Byzantines… Just a moment,” he had a sudden thought. “What was the date now?” Instead he pointed. Zoom in there, Paul, just where the green resolves to that lime color, then avocado yellow.”

  “What is it?” Paul could not suppress his curiosity.”

  “It has to be that period, make it 730, or there abouts.”

  Paul selected the decade 730-740 and the screen refreshed to display those years. The color coding was much more detailed now.

  “Yes,” said Nordhausen as he stroked his chin. “It was a fairly significant time. The Venerable Bede had written of the signs in the heavens, a comet that appeared in 729 that indicated mankind was threatened with calamities by day and night. But the real threat to Europe was right there,” he pointed. “I did a unit on this for the university. I was basically teaching the history as defined by significant military conflict of the given era. You would have loved it. But, in any case, Odo of Aquitaine had been fending off the Islamic incursions across the Pyrenees into France. He stopped them at Toulouse in the early 720s when he caught them by surprise, but ten years later they were back and he suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of the River Garonne. It was a massacre. The scribes wrote that God alone knows the number that were slain there. Odo had been a bit of a loose cannon, stubbornly independent in Aquitaine, unwilling to ally himself with the Franks to the north, but this setback chastened him severely. He was forced to seek help from Charles, the Frankish Mayor of the Palace, and had to pledge his fealty to secure his support. Together they raised another army and marched south…Can you give me a map?”

  Paul was able to get a Google map up on an adjacent screen, zooming in on central France. “Where?” he asked.

  “Poitiers,” said Nordhausen definitively. “Poitiers! Sometimes called the Battle of Tours as well. It was actually fought about here,” he pointed, “at the confluence of these two rivers between the two cities. Closer to Poitiers, I suppose. Charles and Odo prevailed, and it put a stop to these incursions once and for all, at least in this region.”

  “Which Charles are we talking about?” asked Paul.

  “Why, Charles Martel, of course. The Hammer! He earned that name right here in this battle. Good, old Charles. He established the fiefdom system, trading land for loyalty and pledge of arms, raised a fairly professional army, and he had been squeezing the wealthy church lands and monasteries for money and resources as well. In fact, that’s what brought the Moors north. This was just a raid at first, possibly to avenge their losses of against Odo earlier, and to punish him for allying himself with a rival Islamic warlord, a local Berber called Manuza. Odo had married away his daughter to him seeking to mend fences. As Manuza had a stronghold in the Pyrenees, he served as a breakwater against the Umayyad Caliph, so Odo could settle that front and turn his attention to Charles in the north.”

  “Who was the Caliph?” asked Paul.

  “Zoom in on the time line… There,” the professor pointed. “Abdul Rahman. Yes, it’s all coming back now. Manuza is elimi
nated, probably assassinated, and Abdul’s invasion across the Pyrenees followed right after that. I guess he was out for a little payback against Odo, but also to fatten up on plunder as well.”

  “He was settling all the family business.” Paul put things in terms the Godfather might best understand.

  “Quite so,” said Nordhausen. “The Moors overran Navarre, then stormed up through Aquitaine to Bordeaux, taking that city as well. Odo tried to stop them and was soundly defeated. But Charles Martel was a man of considerable military skill—one of the great strategists of his day I suppose. You know the military history.”

  “Right,” said Paul. “I tend to think he had more will power than military prowess, but the end result was the same. I don’t really know much that happened before, but I remember this battle now. The Moors had the finest heavy cavalry in the world at the time. It was their premier weapon in the attack, the forerunner of the European knights. But the use of the stirrup was not widely adapted in Europe yet, a nifty invention that allowed horsemen to wield heavy weapons and still maintain some control over their mounts. So at this time most European armies were mainly composed of infantry forces, with a few light horsemen in support.”

  “Well, this is it then,” said Nordhausen. “Is there anything amiss prior to this time on the Meridian?”

  Paul quickly zoomed back out and they saw that the lines on the chart remained solid, deep green. He checked politics, sciences, arts, all good.“The battle of Tours,” Paul said softly. “I think we found our crisis point. They’re targeting this event. Probably trying to change the outcome of this battle.”

  Kelly was back, a distressed look on his face. Paul thought to ask him how the call to Maeve went, then decided to let that be still for the moment. Kelly had been through a lot tonight, and things were likely to get very stressful as the morning progressed.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  Kelly nodded. “What have we got?” He composed himself and gestured at the screen, eager to get a look at the Golem report.