Golem 7 (Meridian Series) Read online

  Meridian V

  Golem 7

  By

  John Schettler

  Awards and Recognition For Meridian

  ForeWord Magazine’s

  S I L V E R M E D A L W I N N E R

  For Science Fiction

  “Book of the Year”

  2002

  &

  “Honorable Mention ~ Judge’s Score 9.5 / 10”

  Writer’s Digest

  Genre Fiction

  “Book of the Year”

  2002

  THE MERIDIAN SERIES

  Book I: Meridian

  Book II: Nexus Point

  Book III: Touchstone

  Book IV: Anvil Of Fate

  Book V: Golem 7

  A publication of:

  The Writing Shop Press

  Meridian V: Golem 7, © Copyright 2012, John A. Schettler

  Discover other titles by John Schettler

  Meridian - Meridian Series - Volume II

  Nexus Point - Meridian Series - Volume II

  Touchstone - Meridian Series - Volume III

  Anvil of Fate - Meridian Series - Volume IV

  Golem 7 - Meridian Series - Volume V

  Kirov – Alternate Military History (Naval)

  Wild Zone - Dharman Series - Volume I

  Mother Heart - Dharman Series - Volume II

  Taklamakan - Silk Road Series - Volume I

  Khan Tengri - Silk Road Series - Volume II

  Steamboat Slough - Mythic Mystery

  Mailto: [email protected]

  http://www.writingshop.ws

  http://www.dharma6.com

  Dedication

  With gracious thanks to Richard, Mark, and Candace

  For being the friends they are to me and

  For inspiring my Kelly, Robert, and Maeve.

  Meridian V:

  Golem 7

  “There are no roses on a sailor's grave,

  No lilacs on an ocean wave,

  The only tribute is a seagull's sweep,

  And the teardrops that their sweethearts weep.”

  - A German Sailor's Poem

  Meridian V~ Golem 7

  By

  John Schettler

  Synopsis of Meridian IV

  Part I - The Plan

  Part II - Out To Sea

  Part III - The Tiger

  Part IV - Red Herring

  Part V - Changes

  Part VI - Clash of Arms

  Part VII - Second Thoughts

  Part VIII - Altered States

  Part IX - The Last Hours

  Part X - Outcomes & Consequences

  Epilogue

  Glossary of Time

  Other books by the Author

  Synopsis

  Meridian IV: Anvil of Fate

  Paul Dorland refuses to believe Kelly Ramer has perished, and he secures the support of Professor Nordhausen for a mission aimed at bringing Kelly home. Marooned over 10,000 years in the past at the site of the hidden archive he was trying to destroy, Kelly has managed to carve his name into a slab of hieroglyphics that survive to be discovered behind a false door in the tomb of Mehu. His message signals his location at the exact hour of dawn, and Paul uses the information to program a successful retraction scheme.

  Kelly is saved, yet even while this mission was underway, the Golems have been signaling an alert warning of a grave and massive transformation in the continuum. When Kelly reveals that the stela uncovered at Rosetta in Book III: Touchstone was actually a set of instructions to agents of the Assassin cult, Nordhausen translates the hieroglyphics as a series a cryptic phrases. Aided by the Golem alerts, the team is soon led to the source of the problem.

  In the year 732 an army of Arabs, Moors, Berbers and heavy Saracen cavalry under the new Caliph of al Andalus (Hispania) crossed the eastern passes of the Pyrenees Mountains and invaded the Frankish province of Aquitaine. They were met and opposed by the Duke Odo of Aquitaine, who was badly defeated on the River Garonne near his principle city of Bordeaux. Odo escaped and fled north to the Austrian Franks, appealing to the Mayor of the Palace, Charles, for support. He managed to persuade Charles to leave off his campaigns in Frisia to the east and raise an army to oppose the Moors.

  As Abdul Rahman ravaged north, Charles marched to the city of Tours to protect the renowned Abbey of St. Martin and all its cultural and religious artifacts. The two armies met along the old Roman road south of Tours near the hamlet of Cenon. The project team is shocked to discover that the Franks were decisively defeated at the battle of Tours!

  Without that victory the Saracens would have gone on to lay siege to Poitiers as well, and quartered for the winter in that city and the nearby city of Tours. The following spring they would have been heavily reinforced from al Andalus. With the Franks defeated and in disarray, their black banners would press on, overrunning the remainder of Gaul and crossing the Rhine as well to overcome the Lombards, isolating the last holdouts of the West in Rome and Constantinople.

  In time these cities would fall, and the Umayyad Empire would claim all of Europe in prize. There would be no “Reconquista,” no Enlightenment to end the dark ages, and no Reformation. The Pope would be captured and slain, and the Holy Catholic church itself would be expunged. Christianity would be harried into distant corners of the world where it would survive only as an insignificant bywater of belief. Islam would spread the world over, even into Asia where it rolled back the migration of Buddhism from India and infiltrated a much weakened China when the Tang dynasty came crashing down, beset with internal strife in the An Lu Shan rebellion in the year 757.

  The ramifications of these events meant there would be no Columbus to sail west across the ocean to discover the New World of the modern day Americas. Instead the voyage was undertaken by a Moslem explorer, and it was not Britain, Spain and France that colonized the new world, but the Umayyads and Abbasids after them. There would be no migration from England, Spain and France to establish colonies; no “United States of America,” no city called “San Francisco” under the temperate California sun, and no place called “Lawrence Berkeley Labs.” The team realizes that their very existence is also now at stake.

  Research reveals that the Assassin cult has operated to spare the lives of two men who were killed in the years before the battle, both strong opponents of Charles. In the real history the Bishop Lambert was assassinated at his villa near Heristal in the year 705, and a cult grew up around that site which eventually became the city of Liege.

  Lambert had denounced the mother of Charles, Alpaida, who was consort to Charles’ father Pippin the Fat. But Pippin’s legitimate wife also bore him a son, Grimwald, and Lambert’s assassination was seen as part of a power struggle between the two women to assure the ascendency of their sons to the throne. Some years later, as Pippin lay dying in the year 714, his son Grimwald went to visit him, stopping at the shrine to Lambert as a symbolic political move, for he was certain that a power struggle would soon follow Pippin’s death. Yet his death came first when he, too, was assassinated while visiting Lambert’s shrine. By ironically preventing these two deaths the Assassin cult hoped to forestall Charles’ ascendency to power, and thus achieve a victory at Tours over Grimwald, a man with inferior military skill.

  After identifying these two deaths as key levers on the outcome of the battle, the project team conducted a mission and Maeve Linford assured the death of Bishop Lambert. Grimwald’s death was assured in a second mission undertaken by Paul. Yet these two interventions were still not enough. Something more was needed.

  Charles Martel, the “hammer” of Christendom and reputed hero of the battle had undoubtedly been a key factor in its outcome, but not the principle reason for the def
eat of the Saracen army under Abdul Rahman. In a sudden epiphany, Nordhausen fingered another man, The Duke Odo of Aquitaine, as the primary lever on those events. It was he who had first opposed the Saracens and Moors, and he who rallied the factious clans of Neustria and Austrasia, the New Land and the East Land, that would eventually be forged into a unified Gaul under Charles and his successors. But first they had to stand as one with Aquitaine, where Odo held a remnant of his most trusted retainers as the sole light cavalry force opposing the vast legions of Abdul Rahman at the battle.

  Tours was a victory in the end, and it marked the high water mark of Islamic incursion into Europe in the early eighth century. If the project team had not acted decisively to assure the Franks were victorious at Tours, the fate of Western Europe, Christendom, and their very lives were at stake on the Anvil of Fate.

  In the third and final intervention, Professor Nordhausen manages to convince the Abbot of the Abbey of Saint Martin, who is an agent of the Order, that Odo of Aquitaine was the real Prime Mover on the outcome of that crucial battle.

  Convincing Odo to act was the dilemma, but the situation was nudged gently by operatives of the Abbey, and Tours was saved. While Charles claimed the victory, taking upon himself the name “Martelus” the Hammer, Odo died three years later unsung, unheralded, and largely unknown to successive historians.

  With fuel for their generators running out, and the quantum singularity driving the Arch wobbling into dissolution, the team must suspend operations and secure new fuel and resources to finish their last mission, the final reversal of the catastrophe caused by Palma. It is this mission which is the subject of Volume V in the series: Golem 7.

  Part I

  The Plan

  “Before beginning, plan carefully.”

  —Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Chapter 1

  Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Arch Complex – Tuesday, 4:15 PM

  “I’ve found it!” Nordhausen exclaimed as he rushed into the lab clutching an armful of notebooks and several heavy volumes. “Spent all afternoon on the Arion system, and you’ll need to get over there soon as well,” he admonished with a wag of his finger at Kelly where he sat at a control console. “We’d better get the system up—turn things on, or spin out the singularity and all. Paul’s going to love this!”

  Kelly Ramer looked over his shoulder at the professor, his attention diverted from the computer screen he was monitoring, eyebrows raised with a wry smile. “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “The research, man! I’ve got the little devil! Oh they were real clever this time, weren’t they. But I found out what they were up to, and they can be damned. Now… We’re going to need to establish a Nexus fairly quickly. I’ve got this in my head now, with considerable data to back everything up, but this might create one of Paul’s certainty effects, and if they get wind of what I’m up to they could start a counter operation. So turn everything on, will you!” He rushed over to a desk near the history console and plopped down the stack of notebooks he was carrying. “Here, I’ll set up at the History Module. I need to run down a few details, but I think I have most everything we’ll need to get started.”

  Kelly’s expression went from mild amusement to perturbed bewilderment. “Would you calm down and make some sense? What research?”

  “Palma!” Nordhausen said, with obvious frustration. “What else, man? I’ve got the whole thing here on a disk! Now, where’s the drive? Ah, there you are.” He thumbed a button on one of the system computers and opened a Blue-Ray drive, eager to feed in a disk and get to work.

  “I was using the Golems to scout out variation data on this altered Meridian. There were a lot of changes after Palma, as you might imagine, but I was looking at time stamped data from the hours just before the event. Everything seemed in order, until I got a strong warning signal from one of the Golem Banks.”

  “Just one?” said Kelly. “I had the system threshold set to require three Golem Banks before an alert was issued.” Each bank was a designated cluster of thousands of remote installations of Kelly’s special search program, quietly running in systems all over the world.

  “Well I wasn’t going to overlook anything,” said Robert. “So I took a closer look at the data from that lone sentry and began to get very interested.”

  “Which Golem Bank was it?” Kelly had segregated the total cloud into nine clusters, and banked these as search teams that would act in unison on a variation, immediately focusing all their attention on that subject if the bank detected a sufficient percentage of deviation.

  “What? Does it matter which bank it was?”

  “Just curious, I suppose.”

  “If you must know, it was Golem Bank number seven, if I recall correctly. Yes, number seven. So I decided to take my initial results and put the Arion system on it.”

  “Golem 7…” Kelly thought for a moment. “Those were the lost sheep.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My lost sheep. When we lost contact with the Golem search cloud on the last mission I had a few stragglers that wandered in from new system boots after that event. They were instrumental in helping us continue that operation. So when I set up my Golem search cloud clusters, I banked that whole group as Golem 7.”

  Robert raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t want to get bogged down with a load of computer mumbo jumbo here, and pressed on.

  “Fine,” he said. “Well, you know the old mystery writer’s credo: who, what, when, where, why. The first thing you do is find out who was involved in the scheme and get your suspect list filled out, and that’s where the Arion system came in handy. It powered through all the searches and the pattern recognition software I was using did a bang up job as well. So I found the bastard! That was no plane crash! It was deliberate. They pulled another D.B. Cooper on us.”

  “Robert!” Kelly shouted now, holding up his hand with some annoyance. “I can’t follow a word you’re saying. You’re talking to yourself half the time anyway. Now what in the world is this all about?”

  The professor looked over the rim of his reading glasses, about to say something. Then he composed himself and spoke in a level, measured tone. “My Dear Mr. Kelly,” he began. “Now what have we all been about the last three days, eh? Paul’s been haggling all over the city for petrol, you’ve been in here nursing that bloody singularity back to life, and Maeve, God bless her, has managed to lay in a store of food and water, and a truckload of emergency supplies and wardrobe as well. So what have I been doing, you might wonder?”

  “Yes, I do wonder,” said Kelly.

  “Well, I’ve been at UCB on the Arion sifting through the history, that’s what I’ve been doing. I scanned virtually every news item and document on the whole damn Internet concerning this latest incident at Palma, and then some. And to put a fine point on it all, I’ve found the man responsible for the attack on Palma.” He paused, fixing Kelly with a steady gaze over his reading glasses.

  “Ra’id Husan al Din?” said Kelly, confused. “We’ve known about him for weeks, but he doesn’t even exist any longer, at least not on this Meridian.”

  “Not him,” said Robert, somewhat annoyed. “I’ve found the new agent responsible. Now… If you would be kind enough to spin up the Arch and establish a Nexus, we can get started.” He waited, folding his arms.

  “Did any of the other eight Golem banks contribute to this data set?” The system as a whole was like a supreme court. When focused on a search, each of the nine banks would do independent analysis and return a weight of opinion. If conflicting data marred the results it would take at least five banks to confirm a result. If Robert was acting on the advice of Golem 7 alone, Kelly was suspicious of his findings.

  “What? How should I know! I just fed the variations into my laptop and carted them over to the university to use the Arion system. That’s where I got my confirmation.”

  Kelly pursed his lips, rubbing his chin and took a deep breath. His lost sheep had found something that al
l the other Golem banks had apparently missed. He had misgivings about acting on the advice of a single Golem Bank, but those units had saved them once already, and Robert did seem to have further analysis from the Arion system. “You’ve got hard data on this?” he asked.

  “Right from the Horse’s mouth—the UCB Arion system. I confirmed it all this afternoon, but I need a Nexus Point here so I can sample resonance and get on with the final research.” He waited, tapping the stack of notebooks with his automatic pencil.

  Kelly frowned. He had been spinning up a singularity in the quantum matrix, and was only just now seeing signs of stability. He had good speed, stable rotation and sufficient quantum fuel in the matrix as well. Yet the thought of activating the Arch impacted all this work and a range of other factors as well, and he hesitated, still uncertain of what the professor was saying.

  “You think you’ve got the man responsible?” he asked, angling for more information.

  “I do indeed,” said Nordhausen.

  “What certainty factor?” He wanted a number, something he could quantify and weigh in an algorithm. Yet more, he wanted to give the professor a jab to be sure he was following sound procedures for a possible mission workup. If Robert had done clean research he should have run an integrity check on his final premise and generated a certainty factor. He was surprised when the professor answered with calm confidence.