Doppelganger (15 page)

He sighed, catching his breath as his thoughts ran on. “First things first. I’ll have a good number of thirsty battleships on my hands soon, so I intend to make for the Azores at once. I think it best that we move the newcomers to the rear of our convoy, and I’ll post
Repulse
in their wake. We’ve another destroyer flotilla in the Azores, and I’ll have them form a welcoming committee straight away.”

He turned to Miss Fairchild now. “Terribly sorry we’ve let the King’s business go into the sea like that. His majesty will be none too happy with the report I’ll have to write this evening, and I daresay Mister Churchill will get up a good head of steam about it as well, not to mention the First Sea Lord. I have a great deal to explain here, and I’ll have to be very discrete about it. I don’t have to tell you that hat bands can change rather easily in this war, and it wouldn’t be wise if Admiral Pound got nosey about all this. I’ll have to make an accounting of this action to the Admiralty, and I don’t think I can hide the existence of these seven other ships indefinitely. Any objection to my informing the Prime Minister as to what has happened here?”

“My understanding is that he’s in the club,” said Elena.

“Right,” said Tovey. “And he’s very keen to know what we might be facing soon, which is one reason I pressed you for… information. Any bone I can throw Mister Churchill may keep the wolves at bay, at least insofar as my fate is concerned. I think it would keep me in the loop, and that will be all for the best. I have just one more question before we retire to more civil matters and sit down to dinner. Do tell me you have no plans to vanish any time soon.”

“None that we know of, sir,” said Elena with a smile.

“Good,” said Tovey. “I do also understand how difficult all this must be for your crew. If there is anything I can do for you, please let me know. In the meantime, let us go and have a bit to eat, and consider what this American fellow might want our ear for on the first of August.”

“Don’t be surprised, Admiral,” said Elena. “But I think it may have something to do with that key. The man claimed he once had it in his possession, until it pulled the same trick the Russians seem to play about with, and just vanished. Then
he
disappeared for good measure, and right before my own eyes. I haven’t any idea what he’s really up to, but yes, I think this appointment in the Azores will prove to be very interesting.”

Part V

Nothing Is Written

“Nothing Is Written, and Everything is Permitted.”

- Ismaili Saying

 Chapter 13

He
emerged in a white mist, effused with glimmering light, with only the reassuring strength of the hard concrete floor beneath him as any point of physical reference. Weak from the sudden return to another time, Paul stooped to his knees, one hand on the concrete floor to steady himself, beset with a queasy sensation of lightness, his mind still a whirl.

The last time he had done this, he was returning from this very same mission, his clandestine infiltration on the battleship
Rodney
in the assumed identity of Lieutenant Commander Wellings. He had gone to see to the sinking of the
Bismarck
, feeding crucial information to the Captain of the battleship
Rodney
to assure he could get that ship into the hunt, for it was
Rodney
that drew first blood against the German warship, scoring a serious hit on her third salvo. The action then had seen him thrown from the ship into the sea, tossed in the wild waves in the heat of the battle, and only just barely extracted from the scene in time. He had returned out of phase, eventually manifesting, wet and bedraggled, yet with a strange souvenir in his pocket, something he had found in the cargo hold when he went below decks to aid a wounded man.

 His return shift had been very difficult, as he had emerged in the Berkeley Arch complex, yet strangely out of synch, there but not there, the barest fraction of a second ahead of them in time, and therefore completely invisible to the others until his own clock slowed enough for him to find harmony with them.

They had come to call it “Attenuation,” a property of an incomplete time shift, where the traveler manifests across a range of several milliseconds, slightly out of sync or phase with his correct target point in time. He was simply out of tune with everything else, and the effects had also been reported by others who moved in time, the walkers from the future who had been striving with one another in the long, deadly time war.

Now Paul was relieved to hear someone calling his name, though the voice seemed strained and distant. The sound slowly resolved, and the sensation of dizziness faded with the mist around him. There, standing a few feet from the thick painted yellow line that marked the event horizon of the Arch, stood his good friend and fellow team member, Robert Nordhausen.

“Ah,” said Nordhausen. “Back in one piece this time. Did you find it?”

“Paul was still a bit dazed from the shift, and for a moment he seemed to have no idea what Nordhausen was talking about. “Find it?” he said haltingly. Then his memory solidified and he remembered why he had taken this risk again, exposing his very being to the strange effects of a time shift—the key.

“I couldn’t get to it,” he said bitterly. “But my god, Robert, you’ll be amazed at what’s going on there now. There’s a goddamned British destroyer there—a Type 45!”

“What’s that?” Nordhausen knew the history inside out—ancient history being his forte, but when it came to military matters he seemed at a loss, particularly concerning anything newer than the 20th Century.”

“A modern warship—from
our
time!”

“What? In the middle of World War Two?”

“I was aboard the damn thing, and even spoke to their crew. Look, we need to get busy. It was a ship called the
Argos Fire
. I picked up the name when they pulled me out of the sea.”

“You got thrown into the ocean again? I told you to stay away from the gunwales.”

“Yes? Well I had plenty of company this time. The
Rodney
was sunk, or at least it was sinking when I left the scene just now. Everyone went into the drink with me.”

“Damn,” said Nordhausen. “
Bismarck
remains a tough old bastard.”

“That’s an understatement. Look, Robert, that history is completely skewed now. The red lines on the Golem module make perfect sense, and I think it all started with that Russian battlecruiser that went missing in the Norwegian Sea.”

“That’s where we get our first point of deviation,” said Nordhausen.

“Deviation? That’s not half a word for what I discovered there. The whole history of the war has been turned on its head. There are ships at sea that were never supposed to have been built, and I learned that things have happened in the war that never occurred. The Germans took Gibraltar, and that’s just one example. The entire political landscape has shifted as well. It seems Russia never finished its civil war, and the Bolsheviks never united the country.”

“I know,” said Nordhausen. “The Golems have been slowly returning information, but there’s a great deal of haze. I don’t understand why I can’t get clear data.”

“Because this whole thing is in play,” said Paul. “There’s a Grand Nexus open, and it has something to do with that Russian battlecruiser. As to that key, I just learned that there are others, and I think I have a handle on what their purpose was.”

The two men were walking back towards the heavy shielded door now, and into the elevator, ready to take the ride up to the main complex control room where Kelly Ramer sat at the consoles to monitor Paul’s shift pattern on the return. He was the math and computer genius in the group, responsible for crunching the numbers to navigate through time by using the enormous power of an Arion module supercomputer.

“Maeve is going to go ballistic,” said Paul, referring to the last of the four founding team members. Head of Outcomes and Consequences, Maeve Lindford was as fiery as her red hair, and had been a stalwart defender of the established lines of history. On the night before their first planned mission, a simple jaunt back to see the original showing of
The Tempest
by Shakespeare, she had committed the entire play to memory. In the event they inadvertently did something to affect the history, she wanted to know immediately if a single word had been changed in Shakespeare’s drama, and she would stand ready to grill the offender and defend every last punctuation mark of the play if need be. Through the desperate missions the team had conducted, it was hers to sort through the myriad of possible outcomes of their interventions in time, and find the one course that promised to maintain the integrity of the history they knew, all safely preserved in an enormous database, and kept constantly running in a low grade Nexus Point to prevent it from being altered. They called it their Touchstone Database, the “RAM bank” as Kelly Ramer described it.

The four founders had been standing their watch on the history for some months, the Physicist, Historian, Math Wizard and Maeve Lindford’s hard hand on the tiller of it all. Just as they thought they had concluded their operations, a final alert had come in on the warning system Kelly rigged to keep watch on the history, and this time the damage was far more severe than anyone expected.

“Are the Assassins behind this?” asked Robert. “Do we have to hold their feet to the fire again?

“No,” said Paul definitively. “No, it has to do with the disappearance of that ship. That’s where the Golems first led us, to July 28th, 2021, and the direct link to a point of divergence on that same date in 1941. By God, Robert—I think the damn ship moved in time! Who knows how or why, but that is what accounts for these odd Golem fetches that have produced evidence of modern weaponry being used in the war. Those were not fluke prototypes, and I think all those reports you were getting were actually happening—at one point.”

“You mean the evidence I uncovered on the use of nuclear weapons?”

“Correct. I think they were real events, not simply something fetched from the Golem stream—not simply possible outcomes as we first believed. They actually happened, but from what I was able to gather, that Russian ship has been bouncing all over the history! I think that information you uncovered concerning the engagements off Sakhalin Island in 1945 were also real events, and that strange bit about a renegade Russian battleship trying to re-fight the battle of Tushima in 1908.”

“That was real?”

“I think it was this same Russian battlecruiser—
Kirov
. No, this time it isn’t our warring friends from the future—not the Assassins or the operatives of the Order. This time it was the Russians!”

“What in god’s name are they doing?”

“Hard to say. I think it was an accident, just as it was first reported on the 28th in our news here. But if I’m correct, and that ship did actually move in time, then it’s been ripping the history open from one end to another. Maeve will have a fit.”

“And the British destroyer? What has it got to do with all of this?

“
Argos Fire
… Look that one up the minute we get to the operations room.”

The elevator door opened and they started the long walk up the gradually inclined corridor, eventually passing through the heavy titanium door that stood like the entrance to a great bank vault—a bank that held the fate of time and history itself within its hidden chambers. Once through, Paul watched the great door slowly swing shut and seal itself, the heavy metal locking mechanism clinking into place.

“Well, Admiral Dorland? Did you find it?” It was Maeve, hands on her hips, staring them both down with the light of battle in her eyes.

“Oh, he made it there and back again alright,” said Nordhausen. “But wait until you hear this!”

* * *

Maeve
Lindford was truly shocked by all she had heard. A Russian ship at large in the history of WWII, and wreaking havoc with every missile it fired. The consequences that could result from this were overwhelming, and the thought that it was her job to sort that through was maddening.

Outcomes and consequences—that was her mission in life these days. The dangers inherent in the enterprise of time travel, once only speculation about contamination and fateful effects, had suddenly been made painfully obvious to her. She had an odd feeling that there was something amiss in this whole equation—something she could not quite work out in her probability algorithms, and it irked her like a shirt that needed ironing. It sat like unwashed dishes on her kitchen countertops, and waited like an unpaid bill on her desk—things that she would never allow in the carefully managed space of her own personal life, for Maeve Lindford was a most meticulous woman.

She kept everything in quiet order, and the structure of her world was wholly predictable at any given moment. The steady certainty of her life had been something in which she took great solace—something of her own making. It was an extension of her considerable will power, and the determined competence she thrust against any problem the world would dare to concoct for her. Up until now she had been quite content in her world, with outcomes that were wholly satisfactory—until this latest incident threatened to turn the entire project on its head, and the world right along with it.

Time travel, it seemed, could be quite untidy.

Something was happening now that none of them had a handle on. That uncertainty had become a real feeling for her at that moment—not just a nagging, misplaced cipher in her math. It settled into her with a pulsing beat of anxiety, and it never quite went away, like a thrumming of adrenaline in her chest. The world was not the way she always fancied it to be. Now, nothing was certain; nothing fixed and determined—not even the past.