John Schettler - Golem 7

“Then they would want to time it perfectly if it was a ruse to dissuade Wohlfarth from wasting a torpedo,” said Robert. “There were two explosions on Darlington Court , in the RAM Bank history, fore and aft. But this really big explosion happened well after that in our data. Look at the times noted in the reports. Darlington Court is hit twice at 09:38, and the explosion is reported at 10:50. That’s seventy-two minutes later, well after Wohlfarth’s attack should have been concluded.”

They sat with that for a while, trying to imagine scenarios where the explosion could be fit neatly into an intervention plan. “Could they have planned to blow up Darlington Court , and just botched the timing?” Paul suggested.

“Or could it have been aimed at causing damage to the German U-Boats, a very powerful undersea explosion,” Kelly put in. “In that case it would be the other side involved—the Order.”

“Well whatever it was, they botched it on both counts,” said Maeve. “If they smuggled a bomb on board they should have detonated it the instant a U-Boat was sighted. The convoy would assume it was torpedoed, but they blew it. Wohlfarth got to the ship too quickly, sunk it, and their bomb went off later, accounting for the underwater explosion as Paul suggests, at least in our history.”

“Yet none of this happens on the altered Meridian,” said Robert. “That’s the time line we’re dealing with now.”

“This is some serious shit here,” said Kelly. “What do you mean, in our history? You’re talking like the Assassins or the Order were at work on our timeline. There are signs of intervention all over this attack on the convoy.”

Robert didn’t catch the full implications of what Kelly had said, being caught up with his own train of thought. “Now reason this out,” he said. “Any ship that survives here is at least one more torpedo for Wohlfarth and U-556 to use elsewhere. All three go down in our RAM Bank data. Yet one survives when we look at altered history. On the surface you might conclude an intervention like this would have been run by the Assassins. As for the bomb, I’ll go along with Paul and Maeve and agree they may have had a bomb aboard Darlington Court , possibly to get rid of her before she enters Wohlfarth’s periscope sights and thus remove at least one potential target. But the Assassins wouldn’t have done that.”

“This is getting very curious,” said Paul. “I wondered what you were up to, and it seems you dug up some fairly interesting research here. Yet this bit about Darlington Court still has a lot of haze around it. This was a fairly large convoy. There would have been no shortage of potential targets here.”

“Yes,” said Robert. “I must say that I have an odd feeling about all of this. I can’t quite put it together in my mind yet, but I found other signs of what looked like obvious tampering concerning these ships. Darlington Court was moved from column seven in the Convoy to the lead ship in column four just before the U-boat attack. Wohlfarth attacks column four. Could someone be moving her into harm’s way, I wondered? Then there was a lot of shenanigans concerning that third ship.”

“Cockaponset?”

“Yes, she was supposed to have been assigned to convoy HX-123, but that assignment was cancelled. Then she was to sail with convoy HX-125—cancelled, then HX-125—also cancelled. Finally she gets assigned to HX-126, the fateful convoy Wohlfarth finds.”

“It’s as if someone really wanted that ship in convoy HX-126,” said Maeve.

“I considered that,” said Robert. “But why? There was no shortage of ships, as Paul says. Why does this one have to be in the convoy? And if the steaming position of Darlington Court was moved deliberately, putting her right ahead of British Security in column number four, then that would be the Order at work. They want her to get hit…” He let that fall like a stone in still water, and waited for their reactions.

Maeve seemed to pale with that thought, finally picking up on the thread Kelly had hold of a moment earlier. “But this all happened in our history—the cancelations regarding Cockaponset , the repositioning of Darlington Court , the odd explosion. Robert was reading data from our RAM Bank in those ship reports. If this bomb theory holds up, then it means someone was operating against our Meridian before we even became aware of this!” The conclusion was obvious. “If that is so, then… By God! Do you realize what that would have to mean? Our history, the RAM Bank data, all of it would have to be—“

“An altered Meridian,” said Paul, and the silence following his words was profound.

“It’s a real possibility,”said Paul. “I’ve considered it many times before this—every time I run across an oddity in our own history. I know, I could be imposing my own inner fears on external events, but don’t you all agree that this looks like deliberate intervention?”

“It does, but you can’t judge a book by its cover,” said Maeve, unwilling to think that the world and history she knew so well was the creation and result of a conflict that had been raging in Time, unbeknownst to her and the others. She considered what Paul suggested. Once they demonstrated Time travel to the past was viable, that possibility instantly migrated forward on the continuum as well. How hard would it have been for someone to take action to alter events affecting the history they knew? Any moment they spent outside the protective influence of the Nexus Point they were vulnerable.

Kelly’s RAM Bank idea, and the Golems, had been created to try and immediately warn them when tampering was occurring. The Golems would sample available information and it would be continually compared to the RAM Bank, with all variations noted and color coded and charted in a chronological Meridian. Yet she realized that if anything had changed before he built the RAM Bank, they would not know about it. Though their Touchstone database was an enormous accumulation of data, was it comprehensive? Was it all encompassing? No, it was merely a record of what was known to happen, and 95% of all that actually had happened remained unknown, unwritten, lost in Time. Changes could occur and they would not be aware of it. The world would seem to be normal, but it would not be the world they were born to. Was it so even now? It was an uncomfortable feeling to think that their hold on reality depended on the thin stream of battery power that constantly fed the live RAM Bank data.

How did it work? Kelly had explained it to her before. There was a low level Nexus constantly in force, limited in size and scale, yet surrounding and protecting the bank, their touchstone on the history as they believed it should be. But what if it had been contaminated by an earlier intervention? Or worse, what if it failed one day? Look what had just happened to the Golems! With multiple Nexus Points open, and interventions being run by all sides in the conflict, they could no longer reach a sure weight of opinion. So instead of knowing the outcome of their interventions, it was coming down to simple human judgment now, fraught with the endless possibility of error and compounded by too many cooks, spoiling the broth of Time.