John Schettler - Anvil of Fate

“How do you greet the rising sun if you’re inside a pyramid?” Paul argued. “There were signs of an obvious staircase in the image of the ruin. Nope. My bet is that he’s on top. I’ll set the first retraction sweep there and we can hope for the best.”

As to the time, it was a matter of calculating the exact time of sunrise at that location, and narrowing down the day of the year was the great variable. Paul decided to start with the exact date when they had inserted Kelly into that milieu, and then work forward. He was taking a look at each sunrise, day by day, in a series of snapshots that were analyzing mass densities at the programmed coordinates. Day one gave him a baseline, because he knew Kelly would not be there on the day he arrived. If the mass density varied on subsequent days, it could indicate the presence of a person at that location.

After a five minute sweep he had a steady baseline with no variation until about five weeks after insertion date. Then, to his surprise and delight, he got density variations day by day, like a string of pearls, and the mass was always the same, or nearly so, and more, it closely matched the data from Kelly’s last pattern sweep.

“He’s there, he whispered,” hoping he was correct.

He was.

Paul had his eyes closed, as if he was afraid to look at the screen when he engaged the system to open the continuum again. The professor leaned in over his shoulder to get a look at the monitor. There was a lot of green on the screen, which he took for a good omen, but he could not make any sense of the numbers otherwise. Paul opened his eyes, smiled, and gave him a thumbs up.

“It’s looking good, professor. We’ve got hold of someone. The pattern match was spot on. Get down there and see what’s up!”

Nordhausen rushed to the elevator, heading down to the lower level to see if their retraction scheme had worked. The professor approached the thick, yellow event horizon line with some trepidation, and a healthy dose of respect, yet could see nothing in the blue-gray mist. The Arch was thrumming and spinning, and he looked over his shoulder for support, but Paul was still up in the lab working the consoles as best he could.

Nordhausen stared in awe as Kelly came walking out of the frigid fog, his eyes closed, arms extended, feeling his way like a blind beggar in shepherd’s robes. He walked right in to the professor’s outstretched arms.

“Got you, my man. Rest easy, Kelly. You’re home, brother. You’re home, by God!”

Kelly opened his eyes, a bit bleary from the enormous Time shift, but obviously elated that his long shot gamble had paid off. “It’s about time!” he said, ironically.

Moments later they had him up in the lab wrapped in a warm blanket with a mug of fresh Peet’s coffee—Uzuri blend.

“Nordhausen,” he was saying, “you’re a genius! I knew you’d find those messages I carved.”

“Actually it was Paul,” the professor admitted.

“It was the Golems,” said Paul humbly. “I just gave them a nudge in the right direction and told them to look for any permutation of your name, among other things.”

“Yes,” said Robert, bowing low. “All homage to the great and powerful Ra-Mer , lord of the sun pyramid!”

They bantered back and forth a while, and Kelly shared the tale of his mission with them. “Can you believe that?” he finished. “There was a messenger scheduled to leave the archive with a rubbing just as I met Hamza. The bastard shifted out and blew the whistle on my mission, giving the Assassins time to program a counter operation. It didn’t take much—a bit like discovering Achilles and his myrmidons inside the Trojan horse I suppose. A few torches at that moment would have saved Troy. But in this case all they had to do was shift the next messenger in a day early with the news and be sure that they restored their flood gate after I sabotaged it. I suppose they could have just met me as I materialized and said sorry, Mr. Ramer but your mission is bunk and you are now our captive, but they didn’t. They let, me worm my way into the damn sphinx and do my thing. I wonder why?”

“They were just being careful,” said Paul. “There may have been another Pushpoint somewhere along the way, and they wanted to be sure of your intent. Once you did what you came to do, without mishap or any irregularities, our cards were on the proverbial table and they could then be certain that the floodgate was the Pushpoint, protect it, and brief this Hamza figure.”

“Yes,” said Kelly. “In about an hour now he’ll be wondering why I haven’t come to the second morning prayer. Things became so routine there that my minder was getting lazy. He didn’t follow me to the Sun Pyramid this morning like he often does. But in time they’ll realize I’m missing…” His mood suddenly darkened, almost as if he could perceive Paul’s subtle disquiet. His friend was looking at the wall clock, a bit distracted.

“Speaking of time,” Paul said quietly. “You probably should know what’s happened here… on this Meridian.”

“I know,” said Kelly. “Palma happened again. I trust you have the Arch spinning?”

“Don’t worry, my friend,” Paul reassured him. “We’re safe in a Nexus Point. But we’ve given the slip to more than Hamza and his merry band of scribes. We’ve pulled a fast one on Time itself by pulling you out, and we’ve got to figure out something here, and fast. Otherwise…”

“Right,” said Kelly. “I’m the odd man out. Time has no place for me in this Meridian any longer. If Palma happened, as you say, then I’m supposed to be dead and buried. I’ve had nightmares about it for weeks.”

“Thankfully I’ve worked up a whole set of queries the last few days,” said Paul, “and the Golems have been busy, but we’ve got a few problems. First off, the Internet is still up and running but, as you might expect, there are a lot of servers down on the east coast, all the major hubs there are off line and probably will remain so. The system was originally designed to withstand a nuclear attack, so the redundancy is saving us for the moment. But you know the old saying: ‘Things fall apart…”

“The center cannot hold,” Nordhausen finished.

“So the community of Golems has taken a hit as well,” Paul continued. “I reckon you’ve lost 18 to 20 percent of the installed user base.”

“That still leaves enough for what we have to do,” said Kelly.

“Good… Now the second problem. Electricity. It’s been holding fairly steady, but the power company was already complaining about the load when I spun up the Arch for the retraction. We’re at 50% power now, just enough to safely maintain the Nexus, but power is going to be an issue if we have to operate again tonight.”

“Tonight?” Nordhausen had a sheepish look on his face. “But we’ll need research time on an Arion system. You mean to say—”

“Exactly Robert. Tonight . How long do you think I can keep the Arch spinning at this power level? If anything happens, and we lose power here, I’ve got three backup generators all on emergency standby. The first will kick in the instant we dip below 40% power. It has two hours fuel. The remaining two will sit in the bull pen and I’ll bring them on line when that first one runs out of gas. But I won’t get more than an inning or two out of either one, as the fuel situation is pretty bad. I told Robert that we can siphon the fuel from our cars if we must, and that’s our last reserve. We parked them in the underground garage, well within the sphere of influence of the Arch.”

“Right,” said Kelly. “It’s a real bitch closing out a game when your starter fails you in the third or fourth inning.”

“Which is why we have to get busy. I know this is going to be hard on all of us, particularly you Kelly. But we’ve got a lot to do here, and… well, we’ll need Maeve. I’d like to give you both a little time together but I’m afraid we don’t have much to spare.”