John Schettler - Anvil of Fate

“My God!” Kelly was scrolling forward, seeing the rapid color change from yellow to orange and then red. “Apparently they did keep on coming.” He moved to a nearby terminal to query the information retrieved by the Golems. “The name Charles Martel produces no search results after this. He was at the battle, but in the altered history he is killed in the fighting, so he never gets that moniker ‘Martel, the Hammer’ attached to his name….”

“There you are,” said Nordhausen. “No Pippin II. No Charlemagne.”

Kelly continued: “The Saracens sack the abbey, get a taste of central France, and then eventually sweep north, heavily reinforced by additional armies coming over the Pyrenees the following spring. Damn-it! Hamza was talking about this very battle. What was it he said? He was going to carve it faithfully so that the errors of Abdul Rahman might be corrected.”

“That’s it, then,” said Nordhausen. “This is where they’re running an operation, and they’ve found one hell of a Pushpoint somewhere in the history.”

“Right,” said Kelly. “Charles gets his ass kicked here, and the invaders sweep all Christendom before them, essentially doing a right hook into the Balkans and outflanking the Byzantines as well. Isolated and besieged from two sides, the Byzantine empire falls twenty years later. The Umayyad Dynasty is now the preeminent power on earth, unchallenged.”

“What about China and India?” asked Paul.

“There are already Islamic campaigns underway in India by this time,” said Nordhausen. “As for China, the Tang Dynasty was nearing its end. In another twenty years it takes a death blow from a dissident general, An Lu Shan, who marches into the capitol at Chang’an, and ushers in a period of great confusion in China. Their old regional enemy, Tibet, comes over the mountain passes into the Tarim basin and chokes off the Silk Road trade routes. China is in no condition to resist anyone at this stage. If the Islamic armies push into Central Asia, and I’ll bet they do in those Golem reports, then Tibet may have held out, but the population of China was reduced by nearly 80% during this period. There’s nothing they could have done to effectively oppose the growing Muslim dominance.”

“So this makes the battle here at Tours an even more significant event,” said Paul, “coming as it does on the eve of the fall of the Tang Dynasty. What about the Mongols? Genghis Khan?”

“Much later,” said Nordhausen, “That’s in the thirteenth century, and we haven’t time to read that period now. We’ve found our crisis point. It’s here! They lose it all! There’s no Enlightenment, no Reformation, no Renaissance. The Assassins, or whoever they are, have found a way to win the Battle of Tours, and the results make the damage caused by Palma look pale by comparison. In fact, they probably have no reason to initiate an operation against Palma after this. Didn’t you say Columbus never discovers America a moment ago?”

“Let me check it,” said Kelly. “Here… It’s discovered by Shams ad-Din, the great Moroccan Berber explorer, and he finds it nearly a century before Columbus does in the history we know. The Americas… well, they wouldn’t be called that in this altered time line. But the new world gets colonized by the Muslims , not the Europeans, who are completely assimilated into Muslim-Islamic culture by that time.”

“So there’s no Washington, or Jefferson, or Adams, and no Declaration of Independence, and no United States of America?” Paul was really shocked now.

“Kaput,” said Kelly, still typing very fast and reading Golem search links. “No references to those keywords at all in this altered historical data stream.”

“Now we know what we were perceiving on the observation deck just after we pulled Robert and Maeve back from the Rosetta Stone mission,” said Paul. “You’re right, Robert. Palma means nothing now, because if this happens they have no reason to try and strike at American power with an operation like that. They already control the whole continent! So they’ve run an even bigger intervention and found something really terrible in the events surrounding this battle. It changes everything, a truly Grand Transformation. This is the most significant alteration of the continuum we have ever seen. It’s utterly catastrophic, at least insofar as Western culture is concerned.”

“Then we’d bloody well better get a handle on what happened at that battle,” said Nordhausen, pointing at the screen. “Forget the Golem reports, Kelly. It’s the RAM Bank we need now. That’s our only record of the history as we know it. We’ve got to find out how Charles gets his hammer and prevails at Tours.”

“I can tell you that right now,” came a voice, and they all spun around to see Maeve standing behind them. Her eyes were red with recent tears and she looked this way and that as she walked slowly into the room, treading lightly, with a soft, halting gait. The look on Kelly’s face was one of agony and deep love as he watched her coming slowly towards them, talking as she came.

“Charles knew he was outnumbered, and that his infantry would be hard pressed against the Muslim cavalry… He was very nearly captured in the first grand charge of the heavy units, but the previous night he had observed the enemy’s preoccupation with the booty they had pillaged…” She was closer now, eyes still strangely distracted. “So he sent out scouts…” Her voice was breaking. “He sent scouts to stir up trouble in the camp. They were worried about the baggage and supply trains, and all… and…”

At that moment she reached Kelly, who stood up as she lunged forward, throwing her arms around him, in tears.

Paul and Robert watched in silence, their own emotions wrenched by the scene. Kelly held her, whispering something in her ear. “A hundred years,” he said softly, reassuring. “Don’t worry Maeve… Don’t worry, I’m home…”

Long moments passedand Kelly and Maeve seemed inseparable, one person melded together there in the lab, Maeve reached into her pocket, and Paul was able to see that she held a small stone that caught the light and gleamed in the shadows between them.

“Heart of gold,” she said as Kelly looked at the nugget in the palm of her hand.

“Heart of gold,” he echoed. Then the two of them turned to the others, all smiles and tears. Maeve was the first to speak.

“Alright,” she said to Paul and Robert. “You get a pass on the operation to bring Kelly home, but God almighty, look what we have on our hands now!” She seemed to grow pale for a moment, swaying a bit and reaching out to Kelly for support.

“A bit light headed,” she said. “I’ll be OK in a minute.”

“It’s the dissonance you experienced when we established the Nexus Point here,” said Paul. “In fact… Where were you when Kelly called? Were you at home? Did you just drive here?” He had no idea what the world outside the Nexus still looked like just now, given the transformation they had just discovered in the Meridian. He was fishing for something.

“An hour ago,” said Maeve. “The Golem alert hit my cell phone and… well, I just couldn’t sit at home any longer. I had to do something . I tried calling both you and Robert, but no one answered. So I got in my car and drove over to see what the problem was. I was down in the RAM Bank checking the reserve power situation there on the lower floors when you and Robert arrived.”