“Sir,” he said tentatively. “This war… the things we have already done have changed it dramatically. The Allies are finally fighting back, but the issue remains in doubt. The Axis remains very strong, and there is a real possibility that they might prevail. Karpov has been trying to avert that possibility all along. It was his aim to try and reset the conditions that prevailed in our world in the Pacific, and with Kirov, there remains a chance they he might succeed.”
“That may be so,” said Volsky. “With Kazan those odds get longer. Yes, we can certainly weigh in to profoundly affect the outcome of this war, and I suppose we should discuss that. Kamenski believes that will expose us to great peril—not just us, but the future world that follows. He could not say what that peril was—something we do here, or perhaps something we fail to do—who can say? You remember the warnings Tovey’s group received. Beware a ship… Beware Kirov. Those warnings were sent from the future, from men who saw the final outcome of all we are now struggling with. They have seen something we cannot fathom from this point in time. Not even Kamenski can see it; not with all his arcane wisdom and genius for sorting all this time business through. But he can feel it, Fedorov, like a man who senses the impending edge of an event that has not yet come to pass. Call it prescience, call it a hunch, but he can feel the doom that Elena Fairchild first voiced to us, the same shadow and final darkness that professor tried to explain. What was his name again?”
“Dorland,” said Fedorov. “Professor Paul Dorland.”
Chapter 32
Paul Dorland emerged from the great doorway, seeing Maeve and Kelly there to greet him. He had just come through the successful retraction shift in the Arch, returning from the meeting with Tovey and Fairchild in the Azores.
“A welcoming committee,” he said with a grin. “Two out of three isn’t bad. Where’s Nordhausen?”
“Where else,” said Maeve. “He’s up on the history module trying to sort out all the splinter threads that we’re dealing with now. I should be there too to make sure he doesn’t jump to any conclusions we can’t live with.” Maeve Lindford was head of Outcomes and Consequences, the small group responsible for analyzing the conditions resulting from time interventions. Her honey red hair curled onto the shoulders of the white lab coat she was wearing.
At her side was Kelly Ramer, the computer genius responsible for keeping all the equipment up and running, maintaining the live RAM data bank, reviewing the Golem reports, and crunching the numbers required to shift anyone in time, the calculus of infinity, as he called it. Their missing comrade, Robert Nordhausen, was the historian, sleuthing the record of the past to identify key nexus points where the course of events shifted and turned, key push points on the continuum.
“I’ll bet the Golems are going crazy,” said Dorland. He was referring to a widely distributed computer program created by Kelly Ramer that was constantly searching the massive body of generated news on the Internet for references to historical events, and comparing it to the history of those events as permanently recorded in their RAM data bank. Golems would send reports to the Meridian Team computers, which would warn of possible variations or alterations forming in the history, the effects of possible tampering in the past.
“It isn’t just the Golems,” said Kelly. “We’ve got real fragmentation of the Meridian now. It all originated from the Nexus in 1908, but now we’ve identified at least three different threads.”
“Threads?”
“It’s a new term he’s using now,” Maeve explained. “I wanted to call them splinters.”
“Well I can generate new material for the lexicon as well,” said Kelly, raising his chin in mock defense of his creation.
“You certainly can,” said Paul. “Threads… Like threads of a conversation in an online forum?”
“Something like that.”
“And you say we’ve got three? Explain.”
“It’ll be a doozy,” said Maeve. “What it boils down to is that the Prime Meridian has now fragmented, or split apart.”
“More like how the branches split off from the trunk of a tree,” put in Kelly.
“Right,” said Maeve. “We normally monitor variations in recorded history for the Prime Meridian—now we’ve got three.”
“I was afraid of this,” said Paul. “And you say it originated in 1908?”
“June 30, to be precise.”
“The Tunguska Event,” said Paul. “That even caused damage to the integrity of Time itself.”
“Then why didn’t we detect it sooner?” asked Kelly.
“Who knows,” said Paul. “Perhaps it was like a hairline fracture. That happened to me once. I was pushing a massive table in my home years ago, when my feet slipped and my jaw came right down on the table top. It split my chin open on the surface of the skin, though that healed in a week or two. I later found that it did more unseen damage—only I didn’t learn about it for decades after, when I was chewing on a piece of hard pizza crust and broke a molar. That tooth had been bothering me for years, then it finally broke, and the dentist confirmed that it was apparently from a very old hairline fracture in the tooth. So whatever hit the earth at Tunguska may have caused damage at various points in the continuum. We’re only now discovering the extent of the fissures it may have opened, and it also left fragments of some exotic material that can have alarming properties where time is concerned.”
“Yes,” said Maeve. “It’s a mess, and now we’ve got three branches or threads breaking off from what we thought was the Prime Meridian, and they all generate slightly different Outcomes and Consequences. The question is, how do we know which thread to work on?”
“A good point,” said Paul. “Let’s go have a look.”
“I assume you had a satisfactory meeting?”
“You might say so. I’ve learned a good deal in talking with this Admiral Tovey and the woman on that other ship, the Argos Fire. The two are related. When Kirov first arrived, Tovey created a group inside the Royal Navy called the Watch.”
“Right,” said Maeve. “We’ve got that in the Alpha thread.”
“Well this Elena Fairchild and company was a member of that group. In fact, she was promoted to their senior Watchstander, and the ship she was on was ordered to a location where they found a device that was capable of moving the Argos Fire in time.”
“A device?”
“A box, or that’s the way it was described to me. They said it contained a fragment from the Tunguska Event.”
“This is beginning to add up,” said Maeve…. “The Argos Fire…. “We’ve searched all over for older references to that ship, yet we didn’t think it could be the ship we identified here in 2021.”
“Until it was lost the other day off the coast of Greece,” said Kelly. “The Brits thought the Russians were behind that, so they hit a Russian Destroyer with one of their subs in reprisal, then all hell broke loose. The Russians retaliated, it went tit for tat for a while, then the whole thing went tits up yesterday—sorry, Maeve.”