John Schettler - 1943

“Threads?”

“It’s a new term he’s using now,” Maeve explained. “I wanted to call them splinters.”

“Well I can generate new material for the lexicon as well,” said Kelly, raising his chin in mock defense of his creation.

“You certainly can,” said Paul. “Threads… Like threads of a conversation in an online forum?”

“Something like that.”

“And you say we’ve got three? Explain.”

“It’ll be a doozy,” said Maeve. “What it boils down to is that the Prime Meridian has now fragmented, or split apart.”

“More like how the branches split off from the trunk of a tree,” put in Kelly.

“Right,” said Maeve. “We normally monitor variations in recorded history for the Prime Meridian—now we’ve got three.”

“I was afraid of this,” said Paul. “And you say it originated in 1908?”

“June 30, to be precise.”

“The Tunguska Event,” said Paul. “That even caused damage to the integrity of Time itself.”

“Then why didn’t we detect it sooner?” asked Kelly.

“Who knows,” said Paul. “Perhaps it was like a hairline fracture. That happened to me once. I was pushing a massive table in my home years ago, when my feet slipped and my jaw came right down on the table top. It split my chin open on the surface of the skin, though that healed in a week or two. I later found that it did more unseen damage—only I didn’t learn about it for decades after, when I was chewing on a piece of hard pizza crust and broke a molar. That tooth had been bothering me for years, then it finally broke, and the dentist confirmed that it was apparently from a very old hairline fracture in the tooth. So whatever hit the earth at Tunguska may have caused damage at various points in the continuum. We’re only now discovering the extent of the fissures it may have opened, and it also left fragments of some exotic material that can have alarming properties where time is concerned.”

“Yes,” said Maeve. “It’s a mess, and now we’ve got three branches or threads breaking off from what we thought was the Prime Meridian, and they all generate slightly different Outcomes and Consequences. The question is, how do we know which thread to work on?”

“A good point,” said Paul. “Let’s go have a look.”

“I assume you had a satisfactory meeting?”

“You might say so. I’ve learned a good deal in talking with this Admiral Tovey and the woman on that other ship, the Argos Fire. The two are related. When Kirov first arrived, Tovey created a group inside the Royal Navy called the Watch.”

“Right,” said Maeve. “We’ve got that in the Alpha thread.”

“Well this Elena Fairchild and company was a member of that group. In fact, she was promoted to their senior Watchstander, and the ship she was on was ordered to a location where they found a device that was capable of moving the Argos Fire in time.”

“A device?”

“A box, or that’s the way it was described to me. They said it contained a fragment from the Tunguska Event.”

“This is beginning to add up,” said Maeve…. “The Argos Fire…. “We’ve searched all over for older references to that ship, yet we didn’t think it could be the ship we identified here in 2021.”

“Until it was lost the other day off the coast of Greece,” said Kelly. “The Brits thought the Russians were behind that, so they hit a Russian Destroyer with one of their subs in reprisal, then all hell broke loose. The Russians retaliated, it went tit for tat for a while, then the whole thing went tits up yesterday—sorry, Maeve.”

“Tits up?”

“The Russians threw an ICBM at a British Petroleum facility in Southern Egypt—the oil drilling installation at Sultan Apache. I think they were trying to kill two birds with one stone. There’s been a lot of tension around the energy centers, Nigeria, the Caspian Basin, the Gulf of Mexico with that big rig disaster. Well, they smashed that BP facility, and also took out a British Army brigade there. That attack went part and parcel with another in the Atlantic. They targeted a relief convoy the British were sending to Mersa Matruh.”

“I know all about it. That brigade got blown right into 1942, and so did those ships.”

“Yes,” said Maeve. “We’ve been able to piece that together in the research, but only in the Beta Thread. There’s no sign of that brigade fighting in North Africa in the Alpha or Gamma threads.”

“Interesting,” said Paul. “Then I was on the Beta thread, and it certainly turned up there. This is serious. If the situation continues to deteriorate here, these nuclear detonations could continue to rupture time as well as space. Actually, naming them separately is a bit deceptive. It’s spacetime, if Einstein was correct, and there’s only one of it. That meridian I was just on is very skewed. Did you find any evidence of a G3 Class battlecruiser there?”

“You’d have to ask Nordhausen.”

“Ask Nordhausen,” came a voice, and in walked the professor, his eyeglasses shifted up high above his eyebrows, a smile lighting his eyes beneath his balding head.

“G3 Class battlecruiser in the Royal Navy,” said Paul. “Ever turn up anything like that?”

“HMS Invincible ,” said Nordhausen.

“That’s the one.”

“The Brits have that ship, but it was never supposed to have been built, at least not on Alpha thread, and then a good many others turned up. Both sides seem to have built ships that never existed. The British have new heavy cruisers, the Germans have carriers, the Americans and Japanese are fusing the two together and building battle-carriers. You’ll have a field day with it all when I show you the research.”

“Those ships are the least of our worries,” said Paul. “the Paradox created a Doppelganger—and that’s just for starters. It also started a causality loop.”

“That’s what gave us the Beta thread,” said Maeve. “Here we thought we were just dealing with an alteration to the Alpha thread, but then we get this incredible branching off to create the Beta thread. Now we’ve got a third.”

“Yes, yes,” said Paul. “This is just what I was afraid of. The damage that Russian ship has done is so profound that the Prime Meridian fragmented. That was predicted to be a forerunner occurrence for a Grand Finality.”

“Grand Finality?” Nordhausen could quote chapter and verse on the history, but he left the time travel physics to Dorland.

“I just got through explaining this to Admiral Tovey and Miss Fairchild. It’s like this… a kind of Gordian knot in time,” said Paul. “These variations and Paradox events get time so doubled back on itself, that an insoluble looping begins to occur.”

“You mean with the ship?”

“Correct. It just arrived there the second time, but I’ve been back in August of 1941. Did it persist on any of these threads?”

“Oh yes,” said Nordhausen. “The whole thing seems to be in flux. I mean I get new Golem alerts all the time now, but I was just looking over some data that has the ship at war in the Pacific. There was an attack at a place called Truk—January of 1943.”

“Truk?” Paul rolled his eyes. “That was Combined Fleet Naval headquarters for Japan, but the Americans didn’t attack it until February of 1944. Who hit it?”

“That goddamned ship, what else.”

“Good Lord.” Paul rubbed his forehead. “So the ship stays there until at least 1943? Well, the longer it’s there, the greater the danger that it will slip again. That’s what happened the first time. It slipped to a point on the continuum before its first arrival. If the damn thing slips again, then we get another Paradox looming on the Meridian where that happens. Time cannot find a way to resolve this, and so it all gets spun into an endless replay. That’s what the finality is. If this happens the future simply ceases to exist, because time cannot progress beyond the point of the finality, or at least that is what the theory predicts.”