Christopher Nuttall - The Long Hard Road

“Speak softly and carry a big stick,” Stirling said.

“Exactly,” Hanover said. “For us, with four major political parties, compromise is a requirement for getting anything done, even now. Mortimer… was too loud at the wrong time, damaging his own party and they expelled him, merely to make it clear that they had nothing to do with him.” He chuckled. “Break the rules so badly; you get broken.”

Stirling sighed. “Did we really sink an American submarine?”

Hanover looked up at him. “What do you think?” He asked. “Do you believe the story?”

“No,” Stirling said finally. “There are too many holes in the story, too many things that remain unexplained, starting with the fact that nothing else has come out of the future since we did… unless the submarine was there all along, but under the water. We should never have gotten a sniff of it, but if we had, we would have been able to talk to it and…”

Hanover sighed. “The story is impossible to disprove,” he said. Stirling nodded. “That was, of course, something of the point; any American captain, seeing his country’s future threatened by us, might consider firing on London. As a story, it provides an explanation that is just believable enough for people so they don’t dig any further.”

“The Artful sunk the American battleship and our liner,” Stirling said. “Why?”

Hanover sighed. “Thousands of Americans, mainly industrial experts, some nuclear UN personnel, military officers from the bases here, businessmen… all of whom had spent their internment learning all they could about history and technology, were on those ships,” he said. “We needed time; time to ensure that we were in a position to build our own base and industries.”

“They couldn’t have done that much,” Stirling said.

“More than you might think,” Hanover said. “Merely knowing that something is possible is half the battle.” He sighed again. “And, of course, we needed the Americans in the war.”

Stirling nodded. Hanover could follow his thoughts; the moment when it seemed that the Axis powers would break the fragile thin red line and smash any chance of victory before it was too late and Europe would have to be destroyed. They had needed the Americans, and Roosevelt had been reluctant to get directly involved…

“Did you organise the coup in America?” Stirling asked suddenly. “Did you supply Hoover with those bugs?”

Hanover snorted. “You’re thinking wonder-man, the Bond villain who knows everything and does everything according to a grand plan of pure evil,” he said dryly. “Can’t control everything, you know. I don’t know where those bugs came from… and, before you ask, we didn’t have anything to do with New York either.”

“The Germans did that,” Stirling said. That had come out when the SS’s records had been studied. “They wanted to expand the war as well.”

“How nice of them,” Hanover said. “We should have sunk that ship, and would have done if Roosevelt had been able to get his thumb out of his butt.”

Stirling frowned. “Speaking of sunken ships, what really happened to the Artful ?”

Hanover lifted an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“We lost three submarines in this war,” Stirling said. “One was an SAS insertion submarine, one was an Australian submarine that got too close to Japan, and the Artful , which should have been indestructible by anything the Japanese had. I don’t buy it; I don’t believe that the ship that sunk the American ship then went off to the Far East and suffered a critical engine failure.”

“Coincidences don’t work that way,” Hanover agreed. “Irony of ironies; the Artful did indeed suffer an engine failure.”

Stirling blinked. “The story was real?”

“The ship was under security during the mission,” Hanover said. “Only the Captain and two others knew the real targets, all zealots. The others were kept in the dark – later, they would have believed the tale about the American SSBN.” He smiled. “The best laid plans of mice and men…”

Stirling took a breath. “Why are you telling me all this?” He hesitated. “Am I…”

“Going to get out of this room alive?” Hanover asked dryly. “Yes, you are; you’ll keep your mouth shut.”

“Clive Pointing didn’t,” Stirling snapped.

“Pointing was an man responding to an idiotic act,” Hanover said. “Who cares about a enemy ship? Thatcher should have admitted it to the world – that we sunk the Argie cruiser – and that we would press the war with every weapon in our power.” He smiled. “Pointing could have brought down the government and Thatcher should have resigned; you could start a war.”

He looked up at him. “The world at large knows that a German u-boat sunk the ships,” he said. “Those inclined to believe the rumours of the American SSBN will be quietly grateful for the action – and there’s no evidence left to prove anything, one way or the other.” He shrugged. “Everyone would understand us removing the SSBN – it was too dangerous to leave floating around – and the absence of evidence, one way or the other…

“But if you talk, following the line that Hoover and MacArthur claimed, you might start a war,” Hanover said. “Look how much we’ve achieved; is it worth throwing it all away?”

“No,” Stirling said finally. “I’ll keep it to myself.”

“I thought you might,” Hanover said. He sighed. “Now you know what its like to make the big decisions, the ones that choose who lives and who dies.”

“It was a bad decision,” Stirling said flatly, and left. Hanover shrugged; the rudeness was understandable. He returned to cleaning up the room and packing up his merger possessions. He hadn’t made an impact on Ten Downing Street, not really.

“Pity, really,” he mused, picking up a folder from the secured safe. Like the other folders, evidence of actions taken without the knowledge and consent of Parliament, the papers in the folder spoke in riddles. A single line spoke of damaging a tiny component in Artful’s reactor, sentencing the ship and its entire crew to death.

He would never have accepted the deaths of British servicemen , Hanover thought coldly. The shredder activated as soon as he pressed the button; he fed the report directly into its maw and watched as it was chewed up and torn apart. The other reports followed, the death of Admiral Darlen, the assassination of people who would have posed a problem in the future… all went into the shredder. No paper trail, no proof that the operations were ever carried out… had they ever happened?

“Of course not,” Hanover said. The new Commonwealth would grow strong and prosper, using its advantages to build itself a powerful position before the rest of the world caught up, and no one would ever know the price.

“My conscience is clear,” Hanover announced, to no one in particular, and he swept from the office, turning the light out behind him.

According to my computer, I began Second Chance three months ago, around the 19 thof December 2005. The idea had been brewing in my mind for a long time, of course, and writing the entire three volume series, at least the first draft, was the work of roughly a month each. For the record, I finished the last part of The Long Hard Road on 5 thMarch 2006. It’s been something of a wild ride…

I have always been fascinated with stories that place a small group back in time, but as it went on, it struck me that few of the groups had things their own way. Sure, the original – Island in the Sea of Time – had Nantucket enjoying considerable technology advantages, but their tech base was hardly self-sustaining. The same, more or less, goes for the 1632 universe, and the Axis of Time books. In both cases, the time travellers have a very small tech base, one that has to be geared down to allow them to survive, and, of course, it has to be done under high pressure. Alliances with the locals – agreements of mutual interest – have to be made; it’s the only way they can survive.