Golem 7 (Meridian Series) Read online

  The Sheik smiled, this time with some warmth and a measure of respect. “You are, indeed, a formidable woman,” he said.

  “You’ll find us all quite formidable,” she emphasized. “We are the Founders, gentlemen. You must heed this warning, or I can tell you the consequences will be darker that any of us here can now imagine. It will not be unopened wine bottles, but people and places will go missing in due course, just as you have shared here. Events will change all on their own, and no one will be able to put things right again. We cannot even be certain of the history we once thought was safe in our Ram Bank, and the same is true for both of you. Interventions in Time under these circumstances would be like a surgeon operating blind. Would either of you care to be the patient on that operating Table? So I beg you, in the interest of humanity and the future you call to so earnestly, to end this war. Every one of us is in agreement, here. Paul?”

  “I call for an immediate cease fire, a truce, and termination of all Nexus Points upon our signal.”

  “Robert?”

  “Gentlemen, leave my history alone, if you please, and do exactly what this woman says.”

  “Kelly?”

  “Shut the damn thing down. Period.”

  Maeve looked at them, a fierce expression on her face now. “That’s all four of us,” she said in a low voice. “We have reached an absolute certainty in our view on this, and four votes from the Founders is one hell of a weight of opinion. What is your decision, gentlemen? Will you comply, or must we take further action?”

  LeGrand swallowed hard. “I am authorized to reach an accommodation with you should all Founders be seen to be in agreement. Yes. You are correct, Miss Lindford. The weight of your combined opinion is duly noted…and respected. The Order is therefore willing to comply to the terms as stipulated.”

  Aziz spoke next. “Then you will not allow Palma to stand? Even if it has a rightful place in the Prime Meridian?”

  “We will not,” said Maeve. “There will be no further intervention, no more damage to the continuum, unless you force us to act again. Play it as it lays. Your decision?”

  The Sheik stroked his beard. “Your message to us said that any emissary sent must have binding authority. I have as much where our people are concerned.” He looked from LeGrand, to Maeve and the others. “Very well. I agree to the terms as stipulated. Provided the Order complies in this manner, by first shutting down all active Arch complexes, save two. Then we will comply and both sides will cease all operations simultaneously upon receipt of your signal.”

  “Fair enough,” said LeGrand. “The Order agrees.”

  “And you’ll also destroy any existing Oklo reaction site you may have in use,” said Paul. “And by recalling your people we mean all of them. Your archival Sphinx site with Hamza and his scribes must be abandoned as well.”

  The Sheik’s chin tightened, but he thought for a moment and then nodded in the affirmative. “We will do as you ask,” he said. “This agreement is concluded, but how will it be enforced?”

  “Leave that to me,” said Maeve. “If nothing else, I’m very tidy.”

  “Gentlemen,” said Robert “Let us drink on it. To the history… And may God forgive us our wanton and selfish ways.”

  “All Gods we may ever know,” said LeGrand.

  “As Allah wills it,” said Aziz.

  Paul stood up, smiling broadly. “Then I swear to you all, on my father’s grave, that I will not be the one to break the peace we have made here today.” His voice strained to imitate Brando, and Maeve gave him an incredulous look.

  “The Godfather,” he said sheepishly. “There’s something in that movie for virtually any occasion.”

  There was a sudden sharp pop, and they turned to see that Robert had hold of a freshly opened bottle of Champagne.

  Epilogue

  “The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.”

  - H. G. Wells

  The Key

  Aboard HMS Rodney, Captain Dalrymple-Hamilton had the satisfaction of knowing his ship had been instrumental in catching and sinking the Bismarck. In spite of her worn engines, dodgy steam boilers, and that fact that her decks and holds were cluttered with crates of supplies and material to be used in her own refitting, she gave a very good account of herself, arriving on the scene at a crucial moment and engaging and holding the enemy until Admiral Tovey could rally the wounded Prince of Wales and team her up with his own ship King George V to join the battle. More than that, Rodney was the first to seriously blood the enemy, scoring vital hits on her gun turrets and striking the blow that killed both Lütjens and Lindemann.

  Clearly the arrival of Tovey’s two formidable ships had made a decisive difference in the battle but, when the action had been sorted out, the captain was pleased to learn that it was his fourth salvo that had struck a hard blow on Bismarck’s forward Anton and Bruno turrets, and later on Rodney also struck and hit her aft Dora turret. Silencing the enemy guns was a large part of any victory at sea, he knew. And all the while, Rodney’s own guns had continued to blast away with her big six foot long shells. The concussion of the guns had ripped up her wooden decks, shaken loose railings and fittings all over the ship, and burst her iron water pipes to flood several compartments. Yet, wheezing and rattling, she had still managed some of her best recorded speeds of the war, lumbering in on the scene at just the crucial moment.

  The old girl still had some life in her, he thought, though he knew that the presence and good sense of the American officer Wellings had also confirmed his own best judgment on how to steer his ship in this action, and enabled him to make the decisive rendezvous in the end. A pity that Wellings did not survive. The report that he had been seen swept over the upper deck railing and out to sea in the midst of the battle was disheartening. A man overboard at such times was all but doomed. The seas were far too high for him to survive very long, and it was hours before the action had finally concluded and the destroyers had set about picking up survivors, and they were all too few.

  A submarine alert had come in while the cruiser Dorsetshire and destroyer Maori were picking up men. The ships were forced to work up speed and steam away, men still clinging to the rescue ropes, dragged off and finally lost to the angry sea again, too exhausted to hold on. Just three men had come safely off HMS Hood, and from Bismarck only 116 of more than 2200 lives had been saved. Wellings’ name was not on the list of those rescued that day.

  Low on fuel, Rodney turned away with the other British battleships and limped home, up through the Irish Sea to anchor off Greenock and begin bunkering on fuel and ammunition. Her torpedo damage had not been significant, and the water that had started to flood her forward holds had been pumped out, the damaged areas sealed, the hidden crates restacked. The American officer had distinguished himself here as well, answering a call for help below decks, saving the lives of Able Seamen, and sealing off hatches at a critical moment until engineers could arrive and take charge of the scene. So read his report on Wellings, which he sent off to the Admiralty and thought little more on until he had completed the long journey to New York, there to deliver the secret cargo his ship had harbored and guarded, even through the danger of that wild action against Bismarck.

  The stores of gold bullion, property of His Majesty’s Government, and the sealed crates of the famous Elgin Marbles arrived safe and sound, though a few pieces had been shaken up in the battle. It was not the first time they had been safeguarded by the Royal Navy. Admiral Nelson himself had transported the marbles aboard his flagship HMS Victory in the year 1804 when they had initially been removed from the Greek islands. Shortly thereafter Byron’s curse struck that ship, and she was badly damaged in action and laid up in Gibraltar. The captain was not a superstitious man, but he sometimes wondered if Rodney would ever suffer a similar fate.

  It was to be Captain Hamilton’s final cruise aboard the old battleship. She moved to Boston harbor for her refit, and Captai
n Dalrymple-Hamilton was relieved there by Captain James Rivett-Carnac. It seemed only fitting, he thought. The ship would get new boilers, and a nice major overhaul. Why not a shiny new captain as well? The big Scot returned to England, there to receive instead a new ship and a new post.

  He found himself ‘kicked upstairs and sent away,’ assigned to a lowly steamer, HMS Baldur, technically as Admiral commanding Iceland, of all places. The ship was used as an Admiralty Experimental Station, anchored in Adalvik Bay to monitor German U-boat radio traffic and sightings. In fact, she had no engines, and her shell was just a front for a secret base there, which also bore the name HMS Baldur, where the German Enigma signals to U-boats were intercepted and decoded. When the captain first arrived there were just a few men engaged in this work, huddled in frigid Nissen huts heated only by a single small coke stove. Someone was making a very strong point, and it seemed a lonesome and demeaning post to oblivion after having commanded a battleship which took part in the sinking of the Bismarck.

  He sometimes wondered if his decision to follow his own good sense in the battle, and not the orders of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Pound, had played a part in marooning him at this desolate outpost. Or perhaps the incident involving Wellings had also contributed to his receiving this lacklustre assignment. As it turned out, however, the assignment was just a way to ‘keep him on ice,’ quite literally, until the Admiralty could arrange a more suitable post. His star was to rise again when he was appointed Naval Secretary in 1942, eventually becoming second in command of Home Fleet.

  The Wellings incident remained a mystery to him for years. Arriving at the Clyde a few months after the Bismarck campaign, he was visited by MI-6, the foreign intelligence arm, and questioned about his report concerning the American officer. It seems that Lieutenant Commander Wellings was alive and well after all! In fact, he had flown from Bristol air field on the eve of Rodney’s departure from the Clyde for that fateful mission where she had tangled with Germany’s feared sea raider. After a day and a night layover in Iceland, he flew on to New York. There it was soon discovered that the orders sending him on this eleventh hour journey were counterfeit, and that the man Captain Hamilton had written so highly of in his report was completely unknown, a presumed impostor, and perhaps even an agent of the enemy, or so the man from MI-6 intimated. The big Scot wasted no time tamping down that idea, for no matter who the man was, his actions while aboard Rodney had been of the highest order.

  And yet… He had been seen in the forward hold, down where Rodney had secreted away His Majesty’s gold bullion and the coveted and priceless Elgin Marbles. Could the man have been in the employ of the Elgin estate, slipped aboard to see to the safety of this precious cargo? Captain Hamilton never knew, or learned, anything more about it.

  ~ ~ ~

  Over 60 Year later, and thousands of miles away, the man who had impersonated Lt. Commander Wellings was indeed alive and sound, resting in his quiet cottage in the highlands of Carmel.

  It was well after LeGrand and Aziz were gone that Paul thought again on the key in his pocket, where it came from, and what it might mean. For it was no ordinary key. Why he never mentioned it to the Ambassadors from the future escaped him. He might have held it out as evidence of their sloppiness, and the heedless way in which they had operated. Yet some inner instinct told him to remain silent about it, and thankfully none of the other team members had said a word. Sloppy indeed! Considering the team’s own operations over these last days and weeks, that finger could be pointed at all of them as well.

  They were children at first, he realized. They thought they would go see a Shakespeare play. They made enormous errors, landing in the late Cretaceous at one point, and bouncing all over the history until they managed to get their methods understood and well honed. Robert was finally convinced of the serious nature of any breach of the continuum. Paul had little fear that he would make another unauthorized jaunt to the British Museum considering what they had seen in recent events.

  The effect of information sent back through Time, particularly to Prime Movers, was also firmly impressed on all of them now, particularly in deeply fractured Meridians of World War II. There were so many Pushpoints there, lurking in the Nexus Points of battles, campaigns, and roiling sagas at sea, that even the slightest nudge could set the whole mountain of events tumbling into the sea. A tiny drop of information could cause an immediate and significant change, like a sudden chemical reaction in a lab beaker, and the changes were no longer predictable with any degree of certainty. It might fall like a saving antidote, or fester like a lethal poison, and there was no way to predict all possible outcomes, or to safely restore the Meridian to its former state.

  Realizing all this, the presence of this key in the Elgin Marbles was baffling and surprising to him. Why was it embedded in the head of the Selene Horse? Was it evidence of a failed operation by one side or another, or was it placed there deliberately? If so, what did that operation entail and why was it mounted? Or worse, why was it called off in such a way that this object would have been so carelessly left behind? Was it meant to be left behind, and if so, why? And why did they have no inkling of it in the Golem alerts?

  Every question led him on to another, a long corridor of unopened doors that perhaps would be breached with this very key if he chose the correct one. First off, how was it that the object itself could have moved forward with him in Time when he returned from his wild ride in the Atlantic ocean? There was no pattern signature in the Arch retraction scheme that Kelly used to pull him out. Yet the more he thought on this the more he was coming to realize that the physics must be doing something in the corona around the tiny bubble in infinity that allowed a traveler to move from one milieu and Meridian in Time to another. It must be creating a safe zone where any object within the corona could be moved. After all, Rantgar had arrived with weapons in hand, though they might have been pattern sampled for that shift. But Nordhausen had snuck back to Reading Station to bring back the lost manuscript of T.E. Lawrence’s book the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. That was clearly not sampled in his retraction scheme, yet it shifted through intact. He had it in his vault, even now…or did he?

  He thought he might ask the professor to have a quiet look inside and confirm that. With all the recent interventions and the odd occurrences reported by LeGrand and Aziz, would he be that surprised to find it had vanished, one of those things that simply shifted or slipped in Time?

  With that thought in mind, Paul put the key on a chain and wore it around his neck, under his shirt at all times from that moment on. He also made an entry in Kelly’s protected RAM Bank, describing the key, how and where he found it, and including a set of images. It was well encrypted, so he had no fear of it ever being discovered. If something did slip, he wanted to know it immediately—at least insofar as this key was concerned. He had the RAM Bank programmed to notify him once a week about the hidden file and ask him a question only he would ever know the answer to so he could view the contents. If the key ever vanished, he wanted to know it immediately--know that it had existed, where he had found it, and what he had discovered about it since.

  Yet how would any of them ever know again what was real, or what was the contorted product of another Time intervention? They would have to keep the Arch spinning on low standby mode at all times, an enormously expensive proposition, and one that also presented challenges involving maintenance and engineering. As to finances, he had a quiet talk with LeGrand about this before the man departed. Just before the timed shutdown for the truce, he received a curious message from the distant future, tucked into a slice in an apple! It displayed two prominent words: “Thank You!” The advice penned below this allowed him to make certain investments that proved to be very timely and he had little concern for money ever thereafter.

  Even so, he worried that, one day, by some means, his machine would falter and fail when it was most needed. It was only the confounding Shadow of Palma that prevented the Assassins from effectively counter
-operating in the missions they had run thus far. Yet the enemy still managed several interventions aimed at preserving their advantage, and making the devastating operation they mounted against Charles Martel stand. Thankfully they had failed.

  Now he wondered if the Golem alert system would be efficient enough to pick up any potential violation of the truce they had just negotiated. What if the warring parties used some unknown technology, or even a principle of physics unknown to his time, to spoof their system and conduct another stealthy operation? Was this key evidence of exactly that?

  He remember something the Sheik had let slip as they argued in the conclave. He had revealed that the Assassins never intended to spare Bismarck as a means of restoring Palma, and that their success in doing so had been an unexpected consequence of that campaign. He said nothing at the time, but kept that thought in the back of his mind for some time. What were they up to, he wondered? Could they have known that the team would intervene…that he himself would be aboard the battleship Rodney as she engaged Bismarck in that final battle, within a hair’s breadth of dying in the cold Atlantic? Was it Rodney they had been gunning for all along? Old lumbering Rodney, with a secret cargo, in more than one way—the gold bullion, the Elgin Marbles, the hidden key…and me!

  What if the Assassins took Maeve’s threats to heart and decided that their next and only mission must be to eliminate the meddling Founders from the continuum in a way that still permitted Time travel to occur in the future? After all, they had reasoned it out themselves one evening—if Columbus doesn’t discover the Americas, someone else was more than willing to do so. Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, Henry Ford—they all had competing inventors working the same technology in their day. Paul had never published his findings in the greater scientific community, but he took note of any discovery or experiment that seemed to wander toward the Elysian Fields he had found himself in one day, and some people were already beginning to walk along some of the pathways of thought that eventually led him to the Arch.