“Tits up?”
“The Russians threw an ICBM at a British Petroleum facility in Southern Egypt—the oil drilling installation at Sultan Apache. I think they were trying to kill two birds with one stone. There’s been a lot of tension around the energy centers, Nigeria, the Caspian Basin, the Gulf of Mexico with that big rig disaster. Well, they smashed that BP facility, and also took out a British Army brigade there. That attack went part and parcel with another in the Atlantic. They targeted a relief convoy the British were sending to Mersa Matruh.”
“I know all about it. That brigade got blown right into 1942, and so did those ships.”
“Yes,” said Maeve. “We’ve been able to piece that together in the research, but only in the Beta Thread. There’s no sign of that brigade fighting in North Africa in the Alpha or Gamma threads.”
“Interesting,” said Paul. “Then I was on the Beta thread, and it certainly turned up there. This is serious. If the situation continues to deteriorate here, these nuclear detonations could continue to rupture time as well as space. Actually, naming them separately is a bit deceptive. It’s spacetime, if Einstein was correct, and there’s only one of it. That meridian I was just on is very skewed. Did you find any evidence of a G3 Class battlecruiser there?”
“You’d have to ask Nordhausen.”
“Ask Nordhausen,” came a voice, and in walked the professor, his eyeglasses shifted up high above his eyebrows, a smile lighting his eyes beneath his balding head.
“G3 Class battlecruiser in the Royal Navy,” said Paul. “Ever turn up anything like that?”
“HMS Invincible,” said Nordhausen.
“That’s the one.”
“The Brits have that ship, but it was never supposed to have been built, at least not on Alpha thread, and then a good many others turned up. Both sides seem to have built ships that never existed. The British have new heavy cruisers, the Germans have carriers, the Americans and Japanese are fusing the two together and building battle-carriers. You’ll have a field day with it all when I show you the research.”
“Those ships are the least of our worries,” said Paul. “the Paradox created a Doppelganger—and that’s just for starters. It also started a causality loop.”
“That’s what gave us the Beta thread,” said Maeve. “Here we thought we were just dealing with an alteration to the Alpha thread, but then we get this incredible branching off to create the Beta thread. Now we’ve got a third.”
“Yes, yes,” said Paul. “This is just what I was afraid of. The damage that Russian ship has done is so profound that the Prime Meridian fragmented. That was predicted to be a forerunner occurrence for a Grand Finality.”
“Grand Finality?” Nordhausen could quote chapter and verse on the history, but he left the time travel physics to Dorland.
“I just got through explaining this to Admiral Tovey and Miss Fairchild. It’s like this… a kind of Gordian knot in time,” said Paul. “These variations and Paradox events get time so doubled back on itself, that an insoluble looping begins to occur.”
“You mean with the ship?”
“Correct. It just arrived there the second time, but I’ve been back in August of 1941. Did it persist on any of these threads?”
“Oh yes,” said Nordhausen. “The whole thing seems to be in flux. I mean I get new Golem alerts all the time now, but I was just looking over some data that has the ship at war in the Pacific. There was an attack at a place called Truk—January of 1943.”
“Truk?” Paul rolled his eyes. “That was Combined Fleet Naval headquarters for Japan, but the Americans didn’t attack it until February of 1944. Who hit it?”
“That goddamned ship, what else.”
“Good Lord.” Paul rubbed his forehead. “So the ship stays there until at least 1943? Well, the longer it’s there, the greater the danger that it will slip again. That’s what happened the first time. It slipped to a point on the continuum before its first arrival. If the damn thing slips again, then we get another Paradox looming on the Meridian where that happens. Time cannot find a way to resolve this, and so it all gets spun into an endless replay. That’s what the finality is. If this happens the future simply ceases to exist, because time cannot progress beyond the point of the finality, or at least that is what the theory predicts.”
“But we’re that future, are we not?” said Nordhausen. “Doesn’t it have to exist for us to know this here?”
“In one sense, yes. Some future may be realized, but to a point.”
“All three splintered Meridians account for all the years between 1943 and this year.” The professor folded his arms.
“Yet we already know that the future beyond this point goes silent,” said Paul, “and with these nukes being lobbed about, I can possibly see why. Since the future cannot be created in the line of causality, it must be destroyed, and that creates a deep shadow that ripples backwards on the continuum like a backwash from Paradox. This may be the reason the voices from our own distant future have all gone mute, for there, the impact of all these changes will be most severe—annihilation—and that is a silence that will eventually roll back upon us all… My god, I just spoke those words to Tovey and Fairchild.”
Maeve cast a furtive glance at the others. “Well, Maestro, you must have been on the Beta thread for that little meeting. We haven’t told you everything. Welcome to the Gamma thread. Wait until you hear what’s been going on with that ship!”
Karpov sat in his stateroom, close by the private cabinet that he always kept under lock and key. It was open now, his eyes searching over the device within, a headset framing his brow as he listened. It was another radio set, of the same kind that they had given to Admiral Tovey. He had it rigged to transfer any signal received on Nikolin’s HF comm-link module, particularly coded transmissions, which would be decrypted if authenticated by Nikolin.
He had been reading at his desk that morning, and looking over maps of the area around Rabaul, considering his plans. Then he saw the special light he had rigged winking off and on above the cabinet, and reached slowly into his pocket for the cabinet key.
He heard everything that was said, profoundly shocked when he first heard the voice of Admiral Volsky. Could the report of his death have been a deception? That was the first thing that came to mind. Yet there he was, apparently out on another mission aboard Kazan, just as before, and its aim was the same as it had always been.
The Admiral’s seemed to be obsessed with this great doom that was looming in the far horizons of these events. Who can say what it might be. Yet the one thing that stuck in Karpov’s mind was that single phrase from Volsky: We must leave—all of us—Kirov, Kazan, the Argos Fire, all those men you met in the desert, the little fleet of transports, everything must go. Those that will not leave of their own accord must be compelled by other means…. or be destroyed.
Or be destroyed….
So there was Admiral Volsky, he thought, alive again, risen from the dead, just as I seemed to return from what seemed like my certain demise. They must have been very surprised when they learned I was still alive. Yet I settled things, didn’t I. Fedorov has been all about doom and gloom from the very beginning of this adventure. First he was manic about his history, then his head was filled with all this paradox business. That is what this must still be all about—the Second Coming.