Golem 7 (Meridian Series) Page 19

  How did it work? Kelly had explained it to her before. There was a low level Nexus constantly in force, limited in size and scale, yet surrounding and protecting the bank, their touchstone on the history as they believed it should be. But what if it had been contaminated by an earlier intervention? Or worse, what if it failed one day? Look what had just happened to the Golems! With multiple Nexus Points open, and interventions being run by all sides in the conflict, they could no longer reach a sure weight of opinion. So instead of knowing the outcome of their interventions, it was coming down to simple human judgment now, fraught with the endless possibility of error and compounded by too many cooks, spoiling the broth of Time.

  “It looks like tampering,” she said, “at least from our perspective, but it may not be that at all. We can sit here and discuss this all day until the power fails again and the generators run dry, but this is something we cannot know to a certainty. We just have to proceed on faith, as it were. We already know that if we shut down the Arch and dissipate the Nexus Point we’re living in an altered Reality. This whole effort is to try and reverse that, but don’t be surprised if I tell you that looks to be nigh on to impossible now. This damnable Time war is causing too many fractures in the continuum. Look at this situation here! We’ve changed things, they’ve done the same—both sides. If the Order is involved in this operation as well, then we have at least three open Nexus Points impacting these events. Who’s going to have the final say here?”

  “We are,” said Paul.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because our position on the continuum antedates any Nexus that may be open in the future. Any change they make can never be certain as long as we’re here in their past capable of making an alteration to counter it before any of them were even born! Yes, there’s a damn war on, and it’s clear to us that both sides are trying to manipulate these events. We may see demons in every corner of the history now, but we know this is likely—they are tampering here, and it may involve more than we think or realize at the moment. I mean, why not just blow up the transport this Lt. Thomason is on? Why go through all these hoops involving the fate of the Bismarck? Hasn’t that occurred to any of you?”

  “I must say,” said Robert. “We’ve been going round and round about magnetic pistols on the torpedoes, but a good Glock pistol with a silencer would be a much simpler solution than the things we’ve been planning here. The Assassins got that name for a reason. Yes, why couldn’t they just go back and find this man and kill him before he leads his raid at Bardia, and make an end of it that way? For that matter, why don’t we just go and arrange the unfortunate demise of an ancestor to this terrorist, Kenan Tanzir. We know who his father is, and I’ll bet we can find his grandfather as well. See what I mean?”

  “The grandfather problem,” said Maeve. “If you kill his grandfather he never existed, and therefore you never had a reason to do so. Time’s solution seems to be to prevent that from happening, by some means.”

  “Except in the case of a Zombie,” said Paul.

  “A Zombie?” Kelly laughed. “What are you talking about? You’ve been watching too many movies, Paul.”

  “Yes, a Zombie,” Paul explained. “The walking dead. Kenan’s father is supposed to have died, but the Assassins did something to prevent his death. He’s alive, a walking dead man now, and we’re trying to put him back in his grave so that the Heisenberg Wave that generates will re-arrange the quantum state of the universe to our liking. You can’t do the grandfather thing because in that instance you deny his existence completely and Paradox prevents your action. But you can kill a Zombie by restoring the moment of his natural death to the continuum. We did it with old St. Lambert and Grimwald just a few days ago. They were both Zombies created by interventions taken by the Assassin cult.”

  “What about Ra’id Husan al Din?” asked Kelly. “We prevented his birth to reverse Palma the first time. We denied his existence completely with that act.”

  “Did we? I’m still not sure exactly what we did on that mission, though we clearly got an outcome that reversed Palma. We certainly went nose to nose with Paradox in that event. You’re right. If we prevented his birth that what reason did we ever have to do so? I think Paradox made a compromise with us. It wanted you as wergild, Kelly. It accepted our intervention, but the price was your life, until Mr. Graves and his associates reneged on the deal when they snatched you away into a safe Nexus Point in the future. I’ve been thinking about that and it comes down to this: Time is not a zero sum game. It has rules, principles, yes, and it tries to enforce them but it doesn’t always succeed, and it never gets an absolutely perfect balance sheet. Like DNA itself, it makes mistakes, glorious and magnificent errors, and sometimes catastrophic ones, from our limited perspective. When they pulled you out, as far as Paradox was concerned, you were gone. It moved on, closed the wound in the continuum, and that was that.”

  He tapped Kelly on the shoulder. “You’re supposed to be dead, if you’ll forgive my saying so again, my friend, but you are not just anybody. Orwell was correct, some animals are simply more equal than others. You’re a Prime Mover, Kelly. We all are. While that does not make us invulnerable where intervention is concerned, Time has difficulty getting its change orders filled when a major Prime is involved. Prime Movers and Free Radicals are particularly problematic where Paradox is concerned. They weigh heavily on the scale of possible outcomes. Time tries to balance her books, but sometimes she simply cannot do so. In that instance Paradox does what it can, an annihilating force. But we have clearly seen that certain factors can stand, even in the face of that awesome power.”

  “You mean us?”

  “Not just us, but any major Prime has power to resist change—even face down Paradox itself. Remember all those near miss assassination attempts against Napoleon in the mission we ran to uncover the Rosetta Stone? Remember how they took shots at him, but each and every one misfired?”

  “Remember all the knives that went into Julius Caesar?” Maeve jibed. “He didn’t get a hall pass.”

  “True, but we do not know his true status. We may think of him as a Prime Mover, but Time may regard him otherwise. And everybody dies, Maeve. That was his fate. Yet this I do know… A Prime Mover, particularly one protected in a Nexus Point, is like a rock in the stream. This is not always the case for Free Radicals like Ra’id Husan al Din. Given the intervention we made, Time looked at what was left of the situation, and sometimes she just has to take what she gets. She’s not all powerful. The alteration we worked was achieved by Grand Primes in a Protected Nexus. We have power too, and we’ve proved that over and over again. You are here, Kelly. Your life persists, in spite of the fact that Paradox would rather have you dead.”

  Kelly shrugged, “I’m a Zombie!”

  “Yes, but you’re a fairly good looking one as Zombies go,” said Maeve, relieving the tension. “Alright. It’s clear that we have an altered state now. We’re starting from an altered Meridian, and struggling to make changes that suit us to create yet another altered Meridian. Yet we’re slowly losing integrity on the Time line we came from, what we like to call the Prime Meridian. There have been so many interventions since we let this genie out of the bottle that I doubt if we will ever be able to put things back the way they were on the eve of the first experiment. And may I remind you that by attempting to reverse Palma we are not restoring anything, we’re simply creating something new. We knew that the minute Kelly stole up on us at his own memorial service. We’ve known it all along, so let’s dispense with this notion that we are the defenders of the continuum, trying to preserve its integrity. We’re not. We’re simply trying to push reality into a shape we like, relying on the nostalgic memory of that old world and the data in out RAM Bank to guide us. It’s as if we were dreamers, concocting our own private world.”

  “All men dream,“ said Paul quoting T. E. Lawrence, ”but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to
find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible… We are the dreamers of the day,” he concluded, “and that,” he pointed at the massive titanium security door that led down to the Arch, “that gives us the power to make our dreams come true. Yes, we cannot imagine every circumstance, or foresee every consequence of what we do, but we act because we can, and then we, like Mother Time, will have to simply look at what we get and live with it.”

  They were silent for a moment until Nordhausen cleared his throat. “Alright, then how are we going to proceed? Do we back out of this intervention or do we go forward? And if we proceed where to we act—with the convoy captain, with Darlington Court, with the U-boat and torpedo thing, or something else? Or do we just blow this whole thing off and go back and arrange the death of Kenan Tanzir’s father?”

  “Something tells me that last option is off the table,” said Paul. “A man’s life has roots where he is planted, yet sometimes they become entwined with the roots of other events and become so knotted that to change his fate you must confine your gardening to a given plot of holy ground. That’s all we really are in the final scheme of things, gardeners. We water here, prune there, pull up weeds when we find them. These events all seem knotted together with the history of this battle and the fate of the Bismarck. The vengeance that was born in the heart of Kenan’s father resulted from a bombardment by British battleships—some of the very same ships, commanded by the very same officers in this campaign against Bismarck. I don’t see all the connections yet, but there is obvious entanglement here, even on a quantum level, and there may be something else involved that we have yet to see, some worm in the loam of the soil we are all tilling at that has some profound effect in the future.”

  “He waxes poetic,” said Kelly. “But I suppose Paul has a good point. Our research led us here, to this campaign. If the Assassins and the Order are also running interventions in this history, then their research led them both here too. We can make all kinds of assumptions, but this appears to be where the action is at the moment, and so I say we march to the sound of the guns. Let’s kick some ass! Bismarck is supposed to be sunk, whether our take on reality is valid or not. It’s a ship full of Zombies, Maeve. We’re Prime Movers, and we think she belongs at the bottom of the sea, so let’s put her there!”

  “Bravo,” said Paul. “We’re in an altered state to begin with, an altered Meridian, but as long as we’re here, we may as well be comfortable. I simply will not accept the world out there if we let Palma stand. So let’s change the history as best we can here and see what we end up with. We may not ever again get all the pieces of this puzzle put back together again, Maeve, but we can try. I vote we let the intervention we’ve made thus far stand and continue to try and sink the Bismarck. I don’t know what we can do about Hood if she survives—all those lives moving into the continuum—another ship full of Zombies. I don’t know what we can do about Arethusa and the lives lost there, may they rest in peace. That’s up to the Heisenberg Wave and Paradox to decide when we finish.”

  “Yes,” said Maeve sourly. “Let’s hope nobody aboard Arethusa goes on to have any significant ancestors—is that what you’re saying? And let’s hope everybody off HMS Hood goes on to lead saintly lives. It would be a shame if we inadvertently set loose a future axe murderer, right?” The sarcasm in her voice was obvious. “I vote we swat down Lonesome Dove and see if we can start over.” She folded her arms, frowning.

  Everyone looked at Robert.

  “I take it Kelly and I want to operate further,” said Paul. “That’s two votes. So it’s all on you for the moment, Robert. This is your research. Do we proceed now or turn this off and try for something better? If you vote no, then we have a stalemate here, a 2-2 deadlock, and we’ll just have to talk it through until we reach a consensus on some other way to operate.”

  “Well… I hate to incur the wrath of Maeve,” said the professor. “But I’ve invested a lot of time digging in this little garden already, to use your own metaphor, Paul. I say we pull the weeds, dig up this worm Kenan Tanzir, and then see what we get. I vote we proceed now, one way or another.”

  “Then it’s decided,” said Paul looking at Maeve. “We’ll act from where we are, as discretely as possible, Maeve. I understand how you feel, but we’re in this far and we need to follow through. Here’s how I see it. I don’t see how shuffling the shipping order on these steamers in Convoy HX-126 is going to help us, or anyone else, for that matter. Wohlfarth has demonstrated himself to be an unstable variable here, a Free Radical. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. We could line all the ships up for him and he might just decide to take a pass. Nor do I think we’ll have much luck if we try to sink or eliminate U-556 from the scenario. It’s Bismarck we’re after. If she survives she’ll cause havoc to the history. This we’ve already seen. We have to sink her, so it’s time for another intervention. We may not have the Golems to guide us, but we can send practical and sound information as to her movements as we know them now.”

  “But we don’t know them,” Maeve protested.

  “Wait a second…” said Kelly, sitting up in his chair, his attention suddenly drawn to the Golem module. My, my. Yes we do!” He pointed to the Golem screen, active again, lights winking on and off, colors migrating on the chronology line indicating fresh new data was resolved from the stream and coalesced into a valid potential outcome. “It looks like Golem 7 is leading the charge again, and the others have finally reached a weight of opinion,” he said excitedly.

  “No,” said Paul. “But three Prime Movers in this very room just did, and I think our resolution here has just broken the log jam. As long as we were in doubt, unresolved, with no clear path ahead, the Golems were lost in confusion as well. But we just set our minds on a course of action, and it’s already had an effect.”

  “God help us,” said Maeve.

  “Alright then,” said Paul. “You say you have an old US officer’s steamer trunk, Maeve? Drag it out. Here’s what I propose we do…”

  Chapter 23

  Battleship Bismarck, Western Approaches, 25 May, 1941

  “We are fifty miles ahead of them by now,” said Lindemann. “It’s not a safe margin yet, but the initiative is ours, sir. We can turn southwest into the Atlantic at any time and meet up with a tanker.”

  It had been a long 24 hours since that first brief engagement with the British fleet. Bismarck and Prince Eugen had steamed south at good speed, slowly pulling away from the British main body, though a pesky light cruiser had dogged their heels for some time. At dawn and dusk she seemed to disappear, and Lütjens took heart, thinking they had thrown off the pursuit at last. But by mid day she was there again, re-directed by Swordfish off of HMS Victorious equipped with Type 279 air to surface search radar.

  “Those antiquated planes haven’t dared to try and mount another attack,” said Lütjens. “I doubt if they will try again today.”

  “They are using them as search planes now,” said Lindemann. “But I think we must turn again, Admiral, and soon. We have two choices. Either we make for Brest and join Scharnhorst and Gneisenau for a major operation in the months ahead, or we go it alone in the Atlantic. Our fuel situation will determine the wisest course. If we shake off the enemy for certain, then a rendezvous with a tanker is a practical choice. We could ask for a U-boat screen in that event.”

  “But if they still have our location, the time it would take to refuel both ships would give them a very good chance of catching up.”

  “I don’t think they know where we are, sir,” said Lindemann. “That cruiser has disappeared again.”

  Lütjens considered his options. “And what if we fail to find a tanker in short order? How much fuel do we have for regular operations?”

  “Two days, sir,” said Lindemann. “We must rendezvous with an oiler or reach a friendly port in 48 hours.”

  The admiral thought for some time on this. Bismarck had
broken out, at little cost, but she had no laurels to take home should they turn for a French port now. Yet the prospect of leading his old battle fleet of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau out, this time with Bismarck as the flagship, was a powerful lure.

  “This latest signal from Group West,” he said, holding up the translated cable. “It seems the British have put together another heavy convoy with reinforcements bound for Alexandria. We’re beating them about the head and shoulders on Crete and the rush is on to get reinforcements to that theater. Group West is of a mind that this convoy is now lightly defended.”

  “Sir?” Lindemann found it hard to believe that the British would take such risks.

  “Yes, Convoy WS-8B was spotted and her position fixed. We lost a big Kondor seaplane tracking her. The convoy put to sea and was joined by HMS Britannic, the fast troop ship that has been running to New York. The Georgic is also steaming in that convoy. What trophies they would make, eh Lindemann? And there are other prizes to be had there, numerous troop ships were reported. There were no battleships spotted with the convoy either, most likely reassigned to look for us! But now we will be more than happy to take on that duty for the British. Group West gives her position and heading to the east of us, between our position and Brest. I want to turn 70 degrees to port and head east at your earliest opportunity. We will catch this convoy, get our just laurels, and then refuel at Brest with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. When next we set sail, there will be no force on the sea capable of threatening us.”