Golem 7 (Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  “Let them come,” Lütjens said flatly. “We had no trouble with them earlier, and we’ll have no trouble should they be brazen enough to challenge us again.” It was boastful, and the Admiral knew it, but there was little more to be said about it. The situation would play out as fate would have it.

  “Perhaps you are correct, Admiral,” said Lindemann, but he still held deep misgivings about this mission. Assuming no further damage, then it all came down to fuel. His ships might outrange the British, particularly their newer battleships, which were notoriously short legged for a big ship. How long could the enemy keep up this pace in pursuit before these same worries about petrol were dancing in the heads of the British fleet commanders?

  “I suggest we alter course at dusk, sir,” said Lindemann. “Let’s see if we can shake off the hounds for a time.”

  “That’s the spirit, captain. We’ll steam for another few hours on this heading, then you may make your maneuver.”

  Two hours later the watchmen reported all clear behind, seeing nothing on the horizon. The purple sky was deepening slowly to a deeper color of good red wine, and Bismarck signaled ahead to Prince Eugen to make a sudden turn to port, steering due south.

  As the light began to fade Admiral Tovey was still restless on the bridge of King George V. The flight crews on HMS Victorious were gaining experience, but the weather report had taken a severe turn for the worse. The front that had been stirring up the waves and chasing them south all day was finally upon them just after the second torpedo strike they launched at mid-day. Winds were up again, gusting over forty knots and promising worse as the evening came on. The raw air crews were tired, edgy after their first two real combat missions, and needed rest. He gave the order to halt operations for the night, hoping for better weather in the morning. Yet the meteorologist had no good news for him.

  “I’m afraid we’re in for a bit of a rough patch, sir,” the man said. “I don’t expect clearing for another 48 hours.”

  This was the crucial time, thought Tovey. Bismarck would try to shake him off tonight, he was certain of it. The two fleets had already steamed over 400 miles at high speed since the engagement that morning. His guns were all back in operation now, but Bismarck was well out in front of him. He sent the fast light cruiser Kenya out in the van now, more certain that this ship could keep a hold on the big German battleship visually than he could. But Kenya had not yet been fitted out with her Type 271 surface radar kit, only the Type 279 Air radar. Still, she could make all of 32 knots, and her unique camo coloring was best suited for operations near dusk.

  He had no word from the Admiralty, or from Holland on the Hood, though he assumed that this force was still steaming on a parallel course to his own. As evening colored the sky with deep violet, the enemy made their move. Yet thankfully, the keen eyes of the lookouts on Kenya still kept the tall superstructure of the Bismarck in sight—though the inverse was not true. The ‘Pink Lady’ was out in her finest satin mauve dress at this hour, her coloring blending perfectly into the skyline. No one on Bismarck sighted her, or knew they had even been seen as the big ship made her getaway turn to the south.

  The watchman in the high crow’s nest on Kenya’s main mast was shivering with the cold and queasy with the rolling seas. The winds buffeted him fiercely, but he stolidly kept his eyes on the target ahead, until it seemed the shadow of the enemy battleship deepened in hue and grew larger. His first thought was that the ship had turned to confront its pursuers, intent on battle at dusk, and he sent as much down the line to the bridge, warning “Bismarck turning on our position, right ahead!”

  Kenya flashed the news behind her via lamp to the waiting eyes of Captain Patterson on King George V.

  “She’s turning sir, coming round for a fight.”

  “At this hour?” Tovey did not put the prospect out of his mind for a single minute, but the thought that Bismarck would now seek battle jarred him. He gave the order to hold course until Kenya confirmed the sighting. As it happened, a loose cable in the ship’s mast has served to keep the admiral waiting far too long.

  Kenya’s lookout soon realized he had made an error. The big ship was turning, alright, but not coming round for a battle. He marked her new bearing, estimated it at 180 degrees south, and sent this along, though the message was not received on the bridge when the communications cable was jarred loose by a sudden lurch of the main mast in the unsteady seas. By the time lookouts further down had made the same observation, and passed it via voice tube to the bridge, which passed it back to the aft lanterns, and thence off to King George V, nearly twenty minutes had transpired.

  Tovey knew he was not in for another fight ten minutes after the first warning came. If Bismarck had turned they should be seeing her by now, yet Kenya, was barely visible to his own eyes, the only ship on the darkening horizon. He knew in his gut that Bismarck had turned to run south—so they must turn as well. He discussed the matter with Brind.

  “But which way, sir?” his Chief of Staff questioned. “We can’t make a heading change until we have confirmation.”

  “Blast it!” Tovey was angry again. “What in blazes is taking Kenya so long?”

  Minutes later his assumption was proved correct when he got the signal via lamp that Bismarck was headed due south. He immediately gave the order to the fleet to turn as well. “And code it well to the Admiralty. Send that Jerry is out on Whitehall from the Strand. That should do it.”

  If the Germans would think to look closely at a map of London they might put that together and see that a man on Whitehall Street, and coming from the Strand, would be surely walking due south. To an Englishman it would be immediately apparent, and Tovey, ever wary that the Germans could decode his signals, had wrapped his message in yet another grey overcoat, hoping it would confound his enemies for a few precious hours more.

  The Admiralty got his message well enough, as did Sir Lancelot Holland on HMS Hood, and when he heard it the admiral smiled and turned slowly to Captain Kerr.

  “Come sixty degrees to port,” he said quietly. “Assume a new heading, at 180 degrees due south.”

  The chase was still on.

  Part VII

  Second Thoughts

  “Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches”

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  “Among mortals, second thoughts are wiser.”

  —Euripides

  Chapter 19

  Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Arch Complex, 10:40 A.M

  It took some time, but the Golems had begun to sample the Resonance within an hour or so of Kelly’s wireless broadcast. The Arch had pierced a hole in Time and he sent through his thin stream of dots and dashes, the barest trickle of energy it seemed, yet the impact on events was immediate and profound.

  “Good lord!” Paul was aghast. “What a house of cards this is! It seems our first attempt here has done more than we imagined.”

  “I’ll say,” said Maeve. “Care to have second thoughts about this?”

  Their trick had worked alright. British intelligence picked up the faint signal over London and it rattled through the teletypes and message tubes and into the heads and minds of captains and admirals all across the North Atlantic. The ‘Lonesome Dove’ had quickly become an eagle, descending on the course of events and clawing at them with sharp talons of variation. Admiral Tovey had set out a full day early, yet strange unforeseen events had continued to crop up, bewildering in their effect on the outcome.

  “Why would Lütjens decide not to make for the Denmark Strait?” asked Paul. “There was nothing in our message that should have prompted that decision.”

  “He had any number of choices,” said Maeve. “Perhaps he had second thoughts as well.”

  “This time he chose the Iceland Faeroes Gap,” said Kelly, “and that decision had far more impact on what hap
pened than anything else.”

  “I agree,” said Paul. “When Arethusa spotted Bismarck, in this altered history Admiral Tovey could really only steer one heading to best intercept her. Any seasoned commander would have done as much.”

  “So there’s no great variable there,” said Maeve.

  “Right. But he runs afoul of this U-boat and all hell breaks loose!” Paul ran his hand through his hair, still flustered that his first command had come to an untimely and unexpected result.

  “Tovey’s dispositions were sound,” he said, well convinced. “He had Hood and Prince of Wales coming about and back-tracking from the Denmark Strait, and he had King George V and Repulse well in hand. That’s four capital ships that should have easily been able deal with the Germans.”

  “The U-boat was the odd variable in the equation,” said Maeve. “That lucky torpedo hit took Repulse out of the battle and Bismarck brushes aside the British and rages south.”

  “Damn,” said Paul “It has an odd echo to it as well, doesn’t it? I mean Bismarck gets hit in the rudders later on in the real history, this time it’s Repulse! The Germans then engage Tovey’s reduced battle fleet and damage King George V. She is put out of action when a fifteen inch shell from Bismarck strikes her near the forward main turret. That takes four of her guns out of the fight, and now Tovey finds himself badly outgunned without Repulse to even the scales. I always did think those four-gun turrets on the KGV series were unwise. It’s the only British battleship to mount four barrels in one turret like that. You just loose too much firepower if one gets hit. In any case, Tovey breaks off, two of his cruisers sustaining damage as well. He has second thoughts himself about taking on Bismarck alone, and tries to coordinate an interception where Hood and Prince of Wales can join the fight.”

  “Yup! Oh what a tangled web we weave, eh?” Maeve needed to make her point, as this would likely continue and she wanted to impress them with the need for caution here. “Bismarck changes her heading slightly and comes south like a bad storm.“

  “Hood and Prince of Wales give chase,” said Kelly, “and the Rodney is taken off escort duty and ordered to try and intercept her so the other ships can catch up.”

  “But Rodney is too slow, and she’s alone as well,” said Paul. “That’s one powerful ship, mind you,” but she could just not find or catch the Bismarck, what with 21 knots being her best possible speed in this weather.”

  Paul shook his head, bewildered. “Force H is late to the party as well. It’s still in the Med, hastening back from her Malta supply runs when all this happens a day early. I wish I had considered that.”

  “It’s a little late now,” said Maeve. “Round one to Fate and the Germans. The British get off a bit easier than the real history, but so does Bismarck. So much for Admiral Dorland!”

  Paul shrugged. “I think we’re seeing a whole different game here,” he said. “We’re thinking about this in linear terms, as if one event connects neatly to the next. So we think we can alter one thing and trace its probable outcome, but it turns out that events are connected in unforeseen ways, and the players involved have minds of their own, and second thoughts as well. Lütjens’ choice unhinges everything! He is a Free Radical in the equation, not just a Prime. We cannot assume he will make the same decisions he did in the history we know—this course change to take the Faeroes Gap being a perfect example. Perhaps our error here was trying to intervene too early. My thought was to give the advantage to the British as soon as possible, but intervening this early seems to impact too many things. And Lütjens’ change of heart was a real surprise.”

  “Right, and if this intervention holds at this point consider the consequences,” said Maeve. “We’ll have some 1400 new lives on the Hood added to the continuum here, all people who should have died in the battle of the Denmark Strait that was now never fought. Then we have hundreds more subtracted—casualties on the Arethusa and any of the other ships Bismarck damaged. They will be gone, along with all their ancestors. This is no small matter, Paul. I thought we could do something that might just be confined to the outcome of this campaign, but the consequences are going to spill over the dike and ripple out from this now. Has this actually changed? Are we sampling hard variations here or just Resonance, just probable changes?”

  “Kelly?” Paul tossed the question to his chief engineer. “Is there any way we can know this from the Golem stream?”

  “Nope. It’s all just fish in the stream. The Golems are just indicating the most probable outcomes as a weight of opinion.”

  “Well, what’s the verdict?” Maeve wanted to know how the campaign ended. “Pull up some info on the outcome.”

  “I’ve been trying,” said Kelly, but just when the Golems seem to coalesce on a probable outcome I get one bank chiming in with a strong minority opinion to the contrary—Golem 7. The little rascals just won’t settle down, and so I can’t be certain of this outcome just yet. The numbers aren’t solid.”

  “Then I guess we’d have to shut down the Arch and dissipate our Nexus Point to find that out,” said Paul. “That would allow the Heisenberg Wave to generate and finalize this intervention. Then the history we read would be a new, altered Meridian, and if it was not to our liking we’d have to spin the Arch back up and try again. The only other thing we could do is actually shift in ourselves and have a look at the situation, like I did at Tours.”

  “Spook Job? Neither option sounds like a good idea given what’s happened,” said Kelly. “Hey, wait a second. We can still receive incoming media, can’t we? That is information independent of the Golem data stream. Get on the radio. See if we’ve done anything to affect Palma.”

  “Good point!” said Paul. “We’ve been so fixated on the fate of the Bismarck that we’ve forgotten it’s the fate of Thomason and Palma that were really concerned with here.”

  Maeve brought the shortwave in and they tried tuning in some east coast radio stations first. The wash of static had an eerie, ominous quality to it. There was nothing on the band. Then they tried local stations and quickly learned that events were still on an emergency footing outside the protective safety of the Nexus Point.

  “Well we apparently re-arranged the deck chairs on the Titanic,” said Paul, “but I guess whatever we did was not enough. At least not yet.”

  “It was enough to raise hell with the Meridian, however. Remember all those extra lives on HMS Hood?”

  “Hold on a second!” Kelly interrupted. “I’m getting some real dissonance now on the Golem module. The data stream just won’t coalesce.”

  “What do you mean?” Paul was at his side at once.

  “Well, I’m still trying to see how the rest of the campaign ended, but all I get is a bunch of contradicting data. One version shows the British sinking Bismarck, another shows her making a safe return to St. Nazaire in France, then another shows her docked at Brest, and a fourth shows her turning out into the Atlantic to link up with a German oiler and raising hell for two months. Then look at this! In this one she is recalled to Germany! See that purple color on the Meridian time line? I coded that color to indicate extreme conflict—a very high degree of contradiction in the probable outcome. We can’t get a weight of opinion under these circumstances.”

  “This damn campaign is just too fragile,” said Paul. “Like I said, there are so many Pushpoint clusters here that it’s looking like an intense seismic fracture zone. It appears even the slightest intervention changes things easily enough, but controlling the outcome is extremely difficult.”

  “Then how can we operate?” said Maeve. If we can’t get reliable opinions on the probable outcome from the Golems, than how will we know what to do?”

  “Well, we do have one clue,” said Kelly. “We know that Palma has not reversed.”

  “At least not yet,” said Paul, willing to play the devil’s advocate now. “All we can really say is that the Heisenberg Wave has not altered events at this point in the Meridian.”

  “Can we back out o
f this intervention?” Maeve folded her arms. “You saw how difficult it was to try and find a way to reverse what the Assassins did.”

  “Well at least we know where to start,” said Paul, conceding defeat. “I suppose we could try to send another message.”

  “Another message?” Maeve protested. “And poke another big gaping hole in the history while you’re at it?”

  “No, no,” Paul raised a calming hand. “You’re correct Maeve. We’ll have to back out of this intervention as gracefully as possible if we take that course of action. I would suggest we send a message indicating that the independent call sign table has been compromised, and that any message not using an established sign should be disregarded.”

  “I don’t follow you,” said Maeve.

  “Lonesome Dove,” said Paul. “Dove was one of sixteen independent call signs agents could use to transmit under in the event they believed their identity might otherwise be compromised. That’s why I used it. It gave us a kind of carte blanche, because if we used an established agent’s handle, they could have contacted him for verification and discovered he never sent such a message. By signing off independently, with the handle Lonesome Dove, I could at least assure the message had a chance to be believed and acted upon.”

  “So what do you propose?”

  “In effect, we’ll tell them to ignore any message from Lonesome Dove. We open the continuum a few hours before the first message we sent and broadcast that!”

  “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” Maeve waved her hands. “The Great and Powerful Oz has spoken!”

  “Alright, Dorothy,” Paul returned. “You’ve made your point… Kelly, can we work up another quick message? Let’s see if we can reset the board and start over.”