John Schettler - Golem 7

“But there must be something,” said Paul. “That warning is now a noted part of British naval history.”

“Sure, there’s nine million possible documents with those keywords in them. But we’ll need an Arion system to check them all unless you want me to sit here for the next year or so.” The professor’s point was obvious.

“Then refine your search. Add in the keyword Bismarck ,” Paul suggested. “That should narrow down your returns.”

Robert reconfigured his search, but still turned up nothing more than a page after page of unrelated documents. Paul became very worried now. He had counted on the rich documentation of this history to provide him with fertile field of possible Pushpoints, just as he had been able to lay them all out in the Bismarck campaign. But now something had been levered loose from the Meridian and the history was spinning away into realms unknown. He scratched his head, looking at Maeve and then deciding something.

“Look up Sheffield ,” he said. “Kelly, can you get some Golems on this too? We need to understand why she wasn’t attacked—why this famous warning was never sent. Start with Royal Navy Ship’s logs. There are day by day entries in several on-line databases. There’s got to be a Pushpoint in there somewhere that we have yet to see. How about doing some comparison studies between our RAM Bank data and Golem searches. We should be able to run down some variations on this in no time.”

The Golems proved to be an enormous help. They were soon able to return the entire history of HMS Sheffield , and Kelly began to read the broad strokes and set up variation search algorithms while Paul and Maeve discussed possibilities.

“I still like my paper shuffle,” she said. “If the message gets translated then it’s very likely that the flight crews could have been briefed about Sheffield being on station before they took off. In that event there would have been no famous warning sent out in the clear like that, which would account for the lack of search results.”

“You may be correct,” said Paul, willing to admit the possibility now that he had dismissed earlier. “It still seems a bit weak to me, however. How could they guarantee it would be acted upon?”

“Hey, look here, Sheffield ’s out there as well. Better get this down to the air room briefing!” Maeve acted it out for him, and Paul raised his eyebrows, admitting the possibility now that it was presented in terms he could better imagine.

Robert chimed in with some new information. “I’ve got some RAM Bank data on Sheffield ,” he said. “She had been operating with Cruiser Squadron 18, seeing most of her service in the waters north of the U.K. in 1940. Then she was detached to Force H at Gibraltar, and in April of 1941, the month preceding the Bismarck operation, she had been part of the screening forces for supply runs out to Malta. They were ferrying in Hurricane fighter planes using the carriers Furious and Ark Royal . The Sheffield was steaming with that group.”

“Any references to combat action?” Asked Paul. He was worried something may have happened to the ship before her crucial service in the Bismarck campaign.

“At one point they are attacked by 21 Italian bombers… That’s on May 10th. The Italians claim they damaged a cruiser, but the British sources say it was destroyer Fortune , badly damaged by a near miss. There is no further reference to any damage to Sheffield in these records.”

At that moment Kelly looked over his shoulder at them, a serious expression on his face. “Hold your horses,” he said, adjusting the fit of his Giant’s baseball cap. “I hate to disappoint you all but I can tell you why no attack was made on that cruiser.” He immediately had everyone’s undivided attention.

“Golem’s are starting to feed variation data to the module now, but early returns are pretty clear. Sheffield wasn’t attacked because she wasn’t on station shadowing Bismarck .”

“What?” Paul seemed genuinely upset. “Not there?”

“Nope,” You asked for a list of all ships operating with Force H out of Gibraltar earlier, and I set that search up a few minutes ago. Here’s the list :Battlecruisers Renown and Repulse , aircraft carrier Ark Royal , and destroyers Faulknor, Forester, Foresight, Foxhound, Fury , and Hesperus departed Gibraltar May 24th at 0200 hours to intercept Bismarck . Over the next 12 hours most of the destroyers returned to Gibraltar due to high seas and to refuel as well. So Sheffield was technically part of the task force, but I find no reference to her shadowing Bismarck .”

“This is from the Golems? Then it’s from the altered Meridian, the one we’re on now,” said Paul, miffed that someone had been mucking about in his cherished naval history. “Then Sheffield never even sailed with Force H?”

“Apparently not,” said Kelly. “But they did have another cruiser at hand. It came up from the south—light cruiser Edinburgh , patrolling near the Azores and looking for German blockade runners—ordered to close on the German battleship Bismarck ’s last known location. She was the ship detailed to shadow Bismarck , not Sheffield .”

“The Azores?” Paul thought for a moment. “That was southwest of where this incident occurs. If this is the case, then Edinburgh would be arriving on station from a different direction, and be in an entirely different position! No wonder there was no warning about Sheffield . She wasn’t there, and Edinburgh was not on the flight path the Swordfish took to make their attack that evening.”

“So that’s why the planes go right in to strike Bismarck , as Robert said earlier,“ Maeve put in. “And they had those fluky torpedo detonators.”

“The magnetic pistols,” said Paul, more to himself than Maeve. He was deep in thought now. The whole scenario has suddenly slipped from his grasp. The history he had been so comfortably navigating, remember it all from boyhood stories, movies, long hours of war gaming, was now a wild sea of doubt and confusion. Nothing was certain, and the quiet, well riveted facts that he had carried about in his head all these years were all but useless now. But his mind immediately leapt ahead to the next obvious conclusion. He was back to the very same question that had opened this discourse.

“Then what the hell happened to Sheffield ?” he said darkly. “If she wasn’t with Force H then our Pushpoint lies with her.”

Kelly folded his arms over a belly that had enjoyed too many beers in recent years. He removed his baseball cap to scratch his head and then settled it back into place.

“This shouldn’t take long,” he said, swiveling back to his Golem station. “It ought to be right here in the altered history. All we have to do is read about it.”

It wasn’t long before he had their answer.

The battlecruiser Gneisenau rested quietly at #8 dock in the port of Brest, her repairs well in hand as she made ready for operations again. Even as the engineers finished up, tightening bolts on newly patched armor on the foredeck, and laying in pipe below decks, they still marveled at what a marvel of precision she was.