Golem 7 (Meridian Series) Read online

“You’d best get topside and fetch engineers,” said Paul. “I’ll just see that the last hatch is shut and be along after.”

  The man ran off. Paul was drenched and cold, but he slogged off down the corridor where a last open hatch was swinging loose and banging against the bulkhead when the ship would roll. He reached it and looked inside. The dim red lighting revealed an amazing scene. Wooden packing crates had been stored here from floor to ceiling, and they had come tumbling down in a jumbled mass. One had split open and he found himself staring at an elegantly carved horse’s head, obviously a work of art. the pearly wet white marble gleamed in the red light. Overhead pipes had burst with the concussion of the guns and the hold was drenched with leaky water from above as well.

  He stood amazed, seeing several more broken crates, glimmering with the telltale shapes of yellow bars of gold bullion. Still others held more large segments of carved marble, like a relief of ancient art that had been segmented away and stored for safekeeping, piece by piece.

  The ship rocked and the case with the horse’s head was flung to the slowly flooding deck where it splintered further and cause the marble steed’s head to come spilling out. It tumbled into the grey green seawater, its rougher bottom scraping on the edge of another case as it fell, and Paul saw a segment break away. There, in the gouged area he spied a dark object that he immediately recognized as a thick metal key. He reached for it, instinctively, seeing how it was wedged into the base of the marble figure itself, and managed to pull it loose.

  “Make way, make way!” A master chief was laboring down the hall leading a team of engineers. “Close that hatch there, man!”

  Paul shoved the key in his pocket, then backed out of the hatch and pulled it closed. “The hold is taking water,” he said, and when the Chief saw he was wearing an officer’s uniform his mood lightened.

  “Good show, sir. We’re here now. You’d best get up above and I’ll have my men on this bit here in a wink. We’ve taken two torpedoes, sir. Bloody U-boats about as if that damn Bismarck weren’t enough, sir.”

  The news stunned Paul. Torpedoes? There had been nothing at all in the Golem reports about a torpedo strike on Rodney, and the realization struck him that something had again shifted off axis with this intervention.

  “Very well,” said Paul. “See to it, Chief.”

  “Aye, sir. Thank God you closed that hatch forward as well. Otherwise we would already be up to our ears in the torpedo room there. On your way now, sir. We’ll set things right here soon enough.”

  Torpedo room? Paul thought for a moment and then remembered. Rodney still incorporated a couple of hidden torpedo tubes on her forward bow! It was a throwback from the days of WWI when capital ships routinely fired torpedoes at one another when they closed to short distances. The very long range of the big guns made the weapons a bit of an anachronism now, and he doubted his effort had made any difference…but he was wrong.

  Thinking nothing more on it, Paul resolved to get up topside as fast as he could to see what was happening in the fight. He climbed several ladders, coughing with the rising smoke from fires and weighted down by his sodden clothing. Breathless and bedraggled he finally reached the upper decks, where he had the presence of mind to press his palms tightly against his ears just before Rodney let loose with another booming salvo.

  The concussion was so great that it knocked him near senseless, flinging him to the deck where he saw that the Douglas fir wood planks were literally torn loose by the intense vibration of the main guns. He stared, dumbstruck, and saw that the monstrous black shape of Bismarck in the distance was alight with fire, an angry orange glow on her forward segment. Rodney had struck at least one hard blow there, hitting ‘Anton’ turret and blasting through its thick armored siding with the weight of her awesome shells.

  Then the ship rolled violently and his slight frame was tossed up and over the siding into the furor of the sea. It was as if a wave had willfully reached up and swept him away. He vaguely remembered seeing another seaman pointing at him as he went over the edge. Then the sea took him, pulling him under the shoulder of a thick green wave and then swelling him back up to the crest of another.

  For one awesome moment he took in the whole scene as the wave topped out, Bismarck, her forward turret aflame but her other guns still firing, Rodney, listing to port, the black smoke still belching from her huge guns as well, and the odd thin running streak of a torpedo whooshing by, fired from the hidden bow tubes of the big ship, her secret weapon put to use after all! He had witnessed the first ever instance of a battleship firing a torpedo at another ship in its class. It was as if Rodney had taken the strike from U-556 on her sides and then angrily spat it back out her forward tubes. She was giving as good as she got.

  Then, off in the distance, he saw the hardening silhouettes of two more ships, identical in shape, their squared forward superstructures unmistakable to his well trained eye. White fire lit them up when their guns fired in anger, and he knew that King George V and Prince of Wales had arrived at last. Their 14 inch guns were soon ranging on the stalwart enemy from behind her left rear quarter.

  Then the cold shook his frame, and he thought he was breathing his last. His eyes rolled and an incredible sensation of feathery lightness swept over him. What was he in the midst of all the raging turmoil of this great battle? He was no more than a rag doll tossed into the sea, a bit of useless flotsam, and the last thing he saw was the rising swell of a thirty foot wave looming up over him, ready to come crashing down on his tiny soul and drag him into the depths of the angry sea. Yet when the wave curled and broke Paul was not there….

  Part X

  The Truce

  “When envoys are sent with compliments in their mouths, it is a sign that the enemy wishes for a truce.”

  - Sun Tzu

  Chapter 28

  Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Arch Complex, 01:25 P.M

  The mists of acrid fog still hung in the air, and they could perceive a noticeable chill. Maeve blinked, looking this way and that. “Paul?” She called, leaning forward to peer into the cold blue haze.

  No one answered.

  She walked boldly up to the yellow event horizon line in the Arch Bay, waving her arms through the mist, groping at infinity as it were, but felt nothing. Thinking he may have fallen in a swoon of nausea, she knelt quickly her arms smoothing in wide arcs over the cold concrete floor.

  No one was there.

  The main lights came on in the bay as the Arch spun down to a quiet 50% power. Maeve had an anguished look on her face. She could both clearly see that the room was empty, and was up and at the intercom in a heartbeat.

  “Kelly,” she shouted. “Are you sure the retraction sequence is finished?”

  “Yes, it’s fine. All green on my board and the sequence is closed,” came Kelly’s voice.

  “Are you sure? … Something’s wrong,” said Maeve. “He’s not here!”

  “What?”

  She wasted no time, running to the elevator to get up to the lab where she found Kelly frantically checking an incompressible wall of numbers on the retraction module screen.

  “I’m telling you the system is showing he made a safe shift. I have no warning flags, no loss of pattern integrity. There was a brief vibration during the shift, but it was just a second and it stabilized immediately. The computers show they brought him in, lock, stock and barrel.”

  “Then where is he, man?” Nordhausen raised his eyebrows, clearly upset.

  “He should be in the damn Arch Bay,” said Kelly, deathly afraid that he had made another error in the numbers. The look on Robert’s face said exactly that, though the professor didn’t say anything more. The tormented look in Kelly’s eyes dissuaded him.

  “Think,” said Maeve. “What could have happened?”

  “I’ll check the shift program, but the Golems assisted with the processing, and I had really strong integrity, well over 99.875% That’s better than we had on any shift we’ve made.”

  “We
ll, hell,” Nordhausen could not hold it in any longer. “The first time we shifted into the God damn pre-Cambrian!”

  “I got you back on target,” said Kelly.

  “Then we ended up arriving at different times in the desert.”

  ”That was just a sequencing problem. I had to bring you in one after another due to the power situation.”

  “Then Maeve and I missed our target time for Rosetta by a full year, and damn near fell afoul of Napoleon’s guardsmen.”

  “I got you back to the correct target date in five minutes,” said Kelly.

  “Then where in blazes is Paul?”

  The question lashed at all of them. Kelly sat with it, deflated and deeply troubled. He gave the screen a wan look, unwilling to believe he had made yet another error.

  “I don’t know…” he said quietly. “Damnation, he should be here!”

  He was there.

  The instant he felt solidity return to his frame again and perceived the hard concrete flooring of the Arch Bay cold on his cheek, Paul opened his eyes. He was lying in a wet puddle just over the event horizon line, and the dizzying lights and roaring sound of the Arch had abated. He thought he caught something out of the corner of his eye, and looked to see the roiling mists stirring near his legs. It was very cold, and he still had a strangely odd feeling all through his body.

  Then, to his amazement, he saw a dim shape looming before him, slowly receding into the shadows of the Arch Bay. An odd echoing sound resounded, more in his mind than the chamber around him.

  He watched as the apparition seemed to vanish into the elevator, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes to be certain he was OK. Everything had a strange hue. There were tinges of blue and vermillion running along the hard, straight edges of the walls. His head ached, and his ears were still ringing with the concussion from Rodney’s guns. He thought he might be having a migraine, complete with the characteristic visual aberrations.

  Some welcome, he thought, still shaken by what he had seen and experience after he had been thrown over the gunwale into the wild sea. He looked around, expecting to see Kelly and the others, but apparently they were all still up in the lab, so he composed himself, sat up, and eventually rose on unsteady legs, walking slowly to the elevator. The button was icy cold, and he rubbed his fingers together to ease the discomfort.

  The elevator seemed to take forever, but the doors finally slid open and he entered. This time he shielded his hand with the sleeve of his uniform before he pressed the floor button that would take him to the lab. Emerging a few moments later, he was in the long ascending tunnel that would lead up to the heavy pressure sealed door. What were they so pre-occupied with that no one could come down to meet him, he wondered?

  As the heavy door eased open he thought he could hear people talking, but their voices were completely unintelligible. He had an odd feeling of déjà vu, thinking he had already come up this tunnel and gone through the door, a thousand times.

  He stepped into the lab, dismayed to see three dark shadows hovering near the retraction module. The sounds around him reverberated again and again, and he felt a sudden stab of pain all through his body. He could not help but flatten his palms against his ears to muffle the sound, and his eyes puckered, closing with the pain. Then, to his great amazement the tortured sound resolved in timbre and tone, and he could hear definite voices, hard on the dead air of the room.

  “…He should be here!” It was Kelly, nearly shouting at the others as he gestured at the screen.

  Paul opened his eyes. The shadows suddenly sharpening to clear shapes, and he could see Kelly staring at him, his jaw slack with disbelief.

  “He…he is here!” Kelly pointed, and Robert and Maeve looked over their shoulders to see the bedraggled figure of Paul standing there in his Navy whites, drenched from head to toe. He forced a wan smile, swaying a bit.

  “Dissonance…” he breathed, and the others rushed to his side.

  They took hold of each arm and eased him down onto a swivel chair. The color came back into his face and his smile seemed warmer, his eyes brightening as he looked at them.

  “That was very uncomfortable,” he said, telling him where he had been just before the retraction kicked in. “One more wave and I think I would have gone under for good,” he breathed, shivering.

  Maeve had a thick wool blanket and she wrapped it around him. “But what in the world just happened?” she asked.

  “I was surprised no one came down to the Arch to meet me,” Paul began.

  “I did!” said Maeve. “The retraction finished and you weren’t there. Nothing but fog in the Bay. There wasn’t a sign of you anywhere, so I came up to check on things with Kelly.”

  “Very strange,” said Paul. “I thought I saw someone in the bay, a shadow, a formless shape really, and it moved directly to the elevator.”

  Kelly had a serious look on his face. “I had solid green on the numbers here. The system was telling me you were home safe and sound,” he said.

  “Apparently I was,” Paul seconded him, but told them what he had experienced coming up through the tunnel and through the final door into the lab. “I could see the three of you, indistinct figures, with a strange aura outlining each one of you. Your voices were oddly distorted, then it hurt like hell and when I opened my eyes you were all here!”

  “Swear to God, Paul?“ said Nordhausen. “Tell me you aren’t just pulling our legs here.”

  “I swear!” Paul protested, placing the palm of his hand on his chest.

  “Then could you have manifested late, just after we left the Arch Bay?”

  “No, I had power down to 50% by that time,” said Kelly. “That’s not enough to hold a shift pattern together.”

  Paul thought for a moment. “I think I came back OK,” he said. “But I may have been slightly out of phase with your exact time locus.” It began to make sense to him now as he thought of the shapes and sounds he had seen. “I was slightly ahead of you—in Time—perhaps no more than a few milliseconds.”

  “Ahead of us?”

  “Ever so slightly,” Paul explained. “I think you were obviously the formless shadows I saw, and I could hear your voices, such as they were. I must have been slowing down to sync with your time. God, it’s painful. It’s like I was being pulled into this moment by Time gravity. The place I was, just an instant ahead of you on the continuum, could not hold me. It didn’t seem solid enough. The color of things was all wrong. Nothing sounded right.”

  “But you could see us?” Robert was stunned. “Why couldn’t we see you then? I didn’t see any shadowy shape in the Arch, did you Maeve?”

  “Well, the lighting was fairly dim, but I ran my arms all through the area where you should have manifested, and there wasn’t a hint of solid mass there.”

  “There’s no way you could have seen or felt me,” said Paul. “Even a millisecond ahead of you in time, I would be completely invisible; simply not there. I was in a place, or rather at a location in space-time, that you had not yet reached—but I was moving too. By the time you did reach it, a millisecond later, I would have moved forward, again just beyond your time. God,” he thought, “If I hadn’t slipped back into sync I might have remained there forever, here, but just beyond the edge of your awareness.”

  “Arriving somewhere, but not here,” said Kelly. “I know the feeling.”

  “Then how could you see and hear us as you think you did?”

  “I guess I was still actually moving in Time,” said Paul. “I overshot the target ever so slightly, but for all intents and purposes, the margin was so slim that I was in the present, just slightly out of phase. But I was slowing down, moving closer to this instant, and seeing it manifest as I came into sync. You can look at the past, Robert, think Spook Job. The shift back here must not have resolved properly. I was attenuated across several milliseconds of space-time, until one of those instants, the one I was destined to manifest in, asserted enough gravity to pull me into sync.”

 
The evidence of his experience was all he had to go by. The theory of Time travel was yet in its nascent hours. Perhaps they would encounter many more anomalies like this, slowly filling in the lexicon of possibility as they did so. Paul made a note to make yet another entry: Attenuation.

  “Well whatever happened, thank God you’re safe,” said Kelly. “I mean, you guys pulled me over ten millennia without a hitch. I should have been able to manage 70 years or so for you. I was scared shitless that I had made some minor error in the calculations, so minor that even the Golems could not bother with it. We had over 99.987% certainty, but I guess you never get to that 100%, not on the level of quantum mechanics at least. And you weren’t helping, Robert, dredging up every last bump in the road we’ve had. You want to program the numbers? Be my guest!” Kelly gestured to the terminal, but Robert extended a hand, placating him.

  “Forgive me. I shouldn’t have thrown that broadside at you, Kelly. Let’s just be glad our lost sheep is back in the fold and be done with it.” Then he looked at Paul. “Are we finished?” he asked. “Was Bismarck sunk?”

  “Speaking of broadsides,” said Paul. He took a deep breath, folding his arms. “That phase shift was really unnerving, but wait until you hear this…”

  Chapter 29

  U-556 Celtic Sea, 12:40 Hours, 25 May, 1941

  Wohlfarth watched the action with growing distress. He had fired off his last two torpedoes, watching them run true and strike Rodney. One hit full amidships, the other forward. The first torpedo suffered a minor malfunction and became a ‘surface runner’ losing its assigned depth and hitting the ship much too high, exploding harmlessly against her main belt armor, some 14 inches thick.

  The second hit struck the thin 1.5 inch forward torpedo armor, breached it, exploded inward through the hull void and introduced flooding in the compartment beyond. Were it not for the presence of a few engineers and officers on the scene, including an American officer who smartly closed off the inner hatches, the flooding would have spread and cause the ship to list. More importantly, the last torpedo room on Rodney would have been put out of action as well. One of her two torpedo doors was already jammed by a shell from Bismarck. This last operational tube was to have a great impact on the events that followed.