Golem 7 (Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  How in the world did we get this far ahead, he thought? He should still have Renown in sight off his aft quarter, but by the time the watch there reported empty seas it was too late.

  The cruiser heaved over, turning sharply in response to the helm, and at that moment the enemy fired again, this time with deadly effect. A single 11 inch shell struck the cruiser amidships and there was a considerable explosion. One of her stacks was blown clear away and the round splintered the whole area with shrapnel, penetrating deep into the ship.

  Aboard Renown, Captain McGrigor saw the action lighting up the black horizon ahead, and heard the distant boom of heavy guns a moment thereafter. The ship had clamored to action stations and the bleary eyed men were taught at their posts, the cold night air chasing the last remnants of sleep from those who had been lucky enough to find a place in a hammock or bunk.

  “Twenty degrees to port and ready on main batteries,” said McGrigor. Wee Mac was ready for a fight.

  The ship turned and the captain turned to his executive officer. “Give me 28 knots or better,” he said coolly. “I’m afraid the Chief of Engineers will have to keep his ice water handy on bearing number nine.”

  “Aye, sir. All ahead full battle speed.”

  “Now then,” said McGrigor. “Let’s see if Jerry cares to pick on someone her own size.” Moments later he gave the order to fire and the Renown’s six big 15 inch guns growled out their warning salvo. He did not yet know whether he faced one or both of the twin German battlecruisers, but he would let his guns announce his angry presence nonetheless.

  Part IV

  The Red Herring

  “She is neither fish nor flesh nor a good red herring…”

  English Proverb

  — John Heywood, 1546

  Chapter 10

  Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Arch Complex, 8:00 A.M.

  “So we have our answer,” said Paul, leaning heavily on the desk next to Kelly. The two men had been perusing the history for some time now, comparing the narrative to what they had recorded as the actual history in their RAM Bank data.

  “Tiger convoy was a tempting target,” said Kelly.

  “But it doesn’t seem as though the captain of the Gneisenau was much aware of it until he was well out of port. Yet I suspected the answer had something to do with Sheffield. That ship was simply too vital to the sinking of the Bismarck. And now we’ve got a double whammy here—Sheffield out of action and another battlecruiser loose in the Atlantic.”

  “You mean Gneisenau? I didn’t note anything on that. here let me see what happens.” He keyed in a specific Golem search and soon called up a document from the altered time line on the service history of the German battlecruiser.

  “Well I’ll be—“ he began. “She gets hit in the engagement too! Got a little too eager chasing Sheffield and Renown came up on the scene a few minutes later. The Gneisenau wanted no part of her, and turned away, but Renown got off three salvos from her forward guns and scored a hit high up on the German ship’s superstructure. It took out radar and fire control to one of her forward turrets and so the captain wisely turned full about and sped northeast, back to Brest. Then the damn thing gets hit in that same RAF attack that damaged her in our Meridian.”

  “Wow,” said Paul. “The continuum is fairly elastic here.”

  “More like quantum memory foam,” said Kelly. “The German ship never should have left Brest in the first place, and that’s exactly where she ends up again after this little sortie.” Kelly pointed to a passage in the narrative he had been reading.

  “Yes,” Paul agreed. “I like that, Kelly. Time tends to resist change. We’ll have to make a new entry in the lexicon. Gneisenau was supposed to have been moved from number eight dock to a berthing out in the outer harbor and hit by that torpedo attack. Instead it suffers damage in this engagement and returns to port. The only difference is the life of that airman—what was the pilot’s name?”

  “Campbell,” said Kelly.

  “Well he’s one lucky man. I wonder what happened to him, as he was supposed to be shot down and killed in that attack. Yet he held the plane steady enough to deliver a torpedo before he crashed in the real history. The damage was enough to lay up Gneisenau, and the RAF got to her again in short order. She was out of commission for seven months, which is why she was unavailable to sortie to Bismarck’s aid.”

  “Well that’s what happens after Gneisenau returns to port in this altered Meridian,” said Kelly.

  “But while this big cat was out on the prowl she managed to at least take one good bite out of the history, enough to take out Sheffield,” said Paul. “Pretty amazing!”

  “It was that damn fishing trawler,” said Kelly. “He made right for the spot where Gneisenau was to have been berthed in our Meridian—or at least in our old Meridian.”

  “Yes, and it’s suspicious that the harbor police never apprehended the skipper of that boat either.”

  “It does have a smell about it,” said Kelly.

  “Well let’s see if we can put some flesh on these bones,” said Paul. “Suppose that was their intervention, to simply sail that fishing trawler in the night they were planning to move Gneisenau from number eight dock. How do we counter-operate?”

  Maeve had been in the kitchen warming up one of the three loaves of freshly baked bread she had salvaged, and they decided to get her in on the discussion. Robert was off at another desk, doing further research comparisons between the new and old history data. Kelly took a moment to read Maeve some of the altered history they had uncovered concerning Sheffield.

  “Well it’s pretty clear that ‘Old Shiny’ is a fated ship in this scenario,” said Maeve. “Was it badly damaged in the battle with Gneisenau?”

  “Enough to lay it up in Gibraltar and take it out of Force H,” said Paul.

  “Which is why it wasn’t there to be spotted by the incoming swordfish strike from Ark Royal,” said Kelly.

  “Right, right,” said Maeve. “Sheffield is not on station behind Bismarck, and that means no case of mistaken identity and no knowledge of the faulty magnetic pistols on the torpedoes.”

  “So the air attack on Bismarck fails,” Paul finished. “It’s a perfect little line of dominoes, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Maeve agreed, “but a counter operation is going to be difficult here as well. The trawler could have come from anywhere.”

  “Well it would have to be within a reasonable distance of the harbor,” said Paul.

  “True, but what kind of cruising speed does it have? If it could make as much as ten knots then we’re looking at a lot of potential coastline here, either north or south of the harbor. You don’t have any idea when it started on its way either. Suppose the trawler left six or eight hours before it arrives at Brest? In that case we’re looking at over a hundred and fifty miles of coastline, so trying to shift in at its point of origin for an operation is out of the question.”

  “Then we’d have to be at the destination, right there in Brest,” said Kelly.

  “That sounds more plausible, but it will be dangerous,” said Maeve. “Wouldn’t that be a secure area? How would you get to the docks?”

  “We’d just shift in there,” said Kelly. “It would be dark, quiet in the pre-dawn hour. I could put someone right on the money, close enough to that berthing site to intervene.”

  “And do what?” said Maeve. “Are you going to hang a no vacancy sign?”

  Paul pinched the bridge of his nose, fighting off a mild headache. What could they do? He went round and round with it in his mind, considering possible plans.

  “Well… We could pose as fisherman,” he began, and sort of lay claim to the area—“

  “Fat chance,” said Maeve. “You’ll need fishing tackle, rods and reels, bait, and a bad temper if you want to stop a trawler from docking. You’d only stir up trouble for a moment.”

  “Then we’ll need to pose as someone with authority,” said Paul. “A gendarme or harbor patrol officer. We c
ould wave the trawler off as it tried to berth.”

  “And if he plays dumb and just forges ahead?” Maeve was a real devil’s advocate. “Remember, the fire starts when the boat nears the mooring, at least according to the narrative Kelly read me. He could just barge right in, no pun intended, and wait until that oil drum goes up. Then his purpose is achieved. I don’t think the presence of a couple policemen will dissuade him, particularly given the stakes involved.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Kelly. “This is sounding more fishy all the time.”

  “No,” said Maeve. “Methinks ‘tis neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Paul.

  “Just an old English proverb,” Maeve explained. “Fish was eaten by the clergy, pious as they were. Flesh was eaten by those who could afford it, the wealthy classes, and the dried and kippered herrings were left to the poor. The expression lists the foods eaten by every class of society, and it was a therefore metaphor for something that encompassed every possibility. But I don’t see fish, flesh or anything else here. There doesn’t seem to be any possible intervention you could run, short of getting hold of a weapon and firing on the trawler while she was still out in the harbor.”

  “Paul’s got a .22 rifle in the storage cabinet,” said Kelly.

  “I know,” Maeve frowned. “Well you won’t sink it with that! Forget the rifle. That’s not what bothers me about this scenario. It has an odd smell about it. Maybe this whole thing is a red herring.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know…something with a ripe odor that pulls you in and turns out to be rotten,” Maeve said flatly, half serious, half joking.

  “Oh, I know what a red herring is,” said Kelly, “but how does that apply to this situation?”

  “OK, let’s start knocking down Paul’s dominoes,” Maeve folded her arms, the pose she often took when launching into battle over Outcomes & Consequences. “It’s clear that Sheffield is important to the outcome of the air attack on Bismarck, but this scenario is pretty shaky—don’t you agree? I mean, even if the trawler does force Gneisenau to berth elsewhere—“

  “As it obviously did,” Kelly pointed at his computer screen.

  “And even if the Germans do decide to pick this night, of all nights, to sortie out—“

  “As they obviously did,” Kelly countered again.

  “Then how do they have any control after that point? How do they assure that Sheffield is ordered to take the lead in Force H?”

  “She had the damn radar!” said Kelly.

  “True, but that’s still a very wide variable. Wasn’t there another cruiser in Force H? It could have taken the lead, or the whole fleet could have kept station together. Lots of possibilities there. And how would they have known Renown would develop a problem with her number nine bearing on the main turbine shaft and reduce speed? And how could they assure that Sheffield would not be informed of the speed change? That’s another variable a mile wide.”

  “They could have sabotaged that bearing,” Kelly suggested.

  “Which is another kettle of smelly fish altogether,” said Maeve. “Then, assuming all their educated guesses pay off here, how can they assure Gneisenau decides to even attack, and further, that Sheffield is actually hit in the battle that ensued—hit so decisively that she is put out of action.” She raised her chin, fixing Kelly with her patented “I dare you” stare.

  He raised a finger, as if to say something, then simply said. “I’m hungry. Is there any of that bread in the kitchen? A peanut butter sandwich sounds really good about now.”

  “With apple jelly,” said Paul, laughing. “Alright, Maeve. What you say makes sense. The angles on those variables are really too wide here. The dominoes appear to fall neatly onto one another when we look at the outcome of these events, but hindsight is 20-20, and as you so ably demonstrate, getting them to do so is another matter entirely when we push from the other direction. This could be a red herring after all, at least insofar as our efforts are concerned.”

  That thought was very troubling, because this seemed the most obvious Pushpoint of all those Paul had identified in the Bismarck saga. The more they looked at the history, the more difficult things became.

  “This is getting frustrating,” he said. “The history is a house of cards here. It seems all too easy to pull one out and send the whole lot tumbling down, but trying to put things back together again is daunting. For that matter, I still don’t see how they could have known Bismarck would sink the transport carrying Thomason either. The variance angles are just as wide on that as anything we’ve been discussing about Sheffield.”

  “They may not have had a hard and fast plan,” Maeve suggested. “It could be that they are simply running scenarios—effecting alterations—and then looking at outcomes. When they get something they like, they let it stand.”

  The comment spun Paul around, suddenly very interested. “Then you suggest they just decided to intervene like this and save Bismarck, then looked at the consequences? Why pick this battle? There are millions of places on the Meridian where they could intervene. Why Bismarck?”

  “We’ve answered that,” said Maeve. “It’s in the genealogy of our suspected terrorist. “If they discovered how he died, as we easily did, then they would just have to try any intervention that might increase the odds of that ship being sunk, the Prospector. Who knows? Maybe they were just trying to save the German battlecruiser at Brest, and the effect it had on the fate of Bismarck was just gravy. It could even be that they selected this Berber scout—the father—simply because he died in WWII. If they could reverse that, restore him to the continuum and get a son, then they would have a person that simply didn’t exist in our Meridian. Ever try to track down a killer who never lived?”

  “I see your point,” said Paul. “So how would they put things back in order if they didn’t like an outcome? Suppose they save him and he never goes on to sire the terrorist.”

  “You’re worried he might impact future events if left alive? Well…don’t we call them Assassins? They’d simply eliminate the man and move on to another intervention scenario. They can always keep trying,” said Maeve. “We can only assume they succeeded this time. Who knows how many interventions they may have tried before they got this little nightmare to work.”

  “But how could they know—“ Paul cut himself off, struck by a sudden realization.

  “Resonance!” he said excitedly. “If they were in a Nexus Point, and it was deep enough, then we could have a situation much like the one we faced at Tours a few days ago. Remember? The Nexus was so deep that the Heisenberg Wave took a long time to build up. It didn’t take effect immediately. Eventually it became strong enough, as a potential energy, to begin influencing events very close to the intervention point on the Meridian. That’s why there was no battle underway when I first shifted into the historical site at Tours. The Heisenberg Wave was so big it had already altered that part of the continuum, but its main energy release was held in abeyance—perhaps by the very same Nexus Point we established during that mission!”

  “Well if I were Mother Time I would shudder every time someone spun up an Arch facility,” said Maeve.

  “Exactly!” said Paul. “We’re still in defensive mode here now, trying to figure out how they assured the rise of this new terrorist. But on offense it’s a whole different ballgame. We could spin up the Arch to establish a Nexus Point, then run any intervention we choose, sample the Resonance in the Golem Stream, and see if we like what we get. It’s as if you get to make a move against a computer in Chess, see the outcome, and then just reset things to that position again if you make a bad move.”

  On their last mission Paul made the alarming discovery that Kelly’s Golem search programs were able to perceive and report on information from a potentially altered Meridian. Once the Nexus field was operating, they seemed to occupy a kind of safe zone in the stream of Time where they were immune to the effect
s of alterations. The Golems had access to information from all possible Meridians passing through that Nexus. In due course they would come to reach a “weight of opinion” about the outcome of an intervention, which was the most likely outcome based on the total information available. Paul got the idea watching various computer models try to predict the projected path of a hurricane. As the information grew more certain, the various paths converged, and the outcome became fairly predictable. And as they learned from their associates in the future, information was much easier to transmit across Time than objects of mass. The Golems were seeing information from potentially altered Meridians resonating in the data stream.

  “But what if they kill someone—like I killed the bishop on that last mission,” said Maeve.

  “You didn’t kill the damn bishop,” said Kelly, wanting to chase any vestige of recrimination and guilt from Maeve’s mind and heart. “All you did was restore the Meridian. Lambert was fated to die—and you were fate.”

  “Small comfort,” said Maeve. “I suppose I can live with that, but how do they undo a major intervention if they don’t like the results? Look at what we went through at Tours, and what we’re struggling with now with this naval campaign. It’s not as simple as snuffing out the life of one man.”

  “Suffice it to say they do find a way,” said Paul. “We have to accept some givens here. Knowing exactly what they did to change things in the first place gives them a real advantage, it’s much easier to set them right again. For us, it’s a huge guessing game. We can see where an intervention is occurring, but trying to nail down exactly what they did is tough work. This incident involving the fishing trawler is a perfect example. If they did send that boat into Brest with an agent, then they knew exactly where it originated. They can turn that operation off with a single message shifted in the day before the boat leaves. We have to guess, and cover every possible embarkation point—fish, flesh and good red herring, to quote Maeve’s old English proverb.“