“Damn,” said Paul “It has an odd echo to it as well, doesn’t it? I mean Bismarck gets hit in the rudders later on in the real history, this time it’s Repulse! The Germans then engage Tovey’s reduced battle fleet and damage King George V. She is put out of action when a fifteen inch shell from Bismarck strikes her near the forward main turret. That takes four of her guns out of the fight, and now Tovey finds himself badly outgunned without Repulse to even the scales. I always did think those four-gun turrets on the KGV series were unwise. It’s the only British battleship to mount four barrels in one turret like that. You just loose too much firepower if one gets hit. In any case, Tovey breaks off, two of his cruisers sustaining damage as well. He has second thoughts himself about taking on Bismarck alone, and tries to coordinate an interception where Hood and Prince of Wales can join the fight.”
“Yup! Oh what a tangled web we weave, eh?” Maeve needed to make her point, as this would likely continue and she wanted to impress them with the need for caution here. “Bismarck changes her heading slightly and comes south like a bad storm.“
“Hood and Prince of Wales give chase,” said Kelly, “and the Rodney is taken off escort duty and ordered to try and intercept her so the other ships can catch up.”
“But Rodney is too slow, and she’s alone as well,” said Paul. “That’s one powerful ship, mind you,” but she could just not find or catch the Bismarck, what with 21 knots being her best possible speed in this weather.”
Paul shook his head, bewildered. “Force H is late to the party as well. It’s still in the Med, hastening back from her Malta supply runs when all this happens a day early. I wish I had considered that.”
“It’s a little late now,” said Maeve. “Round one to Fate and the Germans. The British get off a bit easier than the real history, but so does Bismarck. So much for Admiral Dorland!”
Paul shrugged. “I think we’re seeing a whole different game here,” he said. “We’re thinking about this in linear terms, as if one event connects neatly to the next. So we think we can alter one thing and trace its probable outcome, but it turns out that events are connected in unforeseen ways, and the players involved have minds of their own, and second thoughts as well. Lütjens’ choice unhinges everything! He is a Free Radical in the equation, not just a Prime. We cannot assume he will make the same decisions he did in the history we know—this course change to take the Faeroes Gap being a perfect example. Perhaps our error here was trying to intervene too early. My thought was to give the advantage to the British as soon as possible, but intervening this early seems to impact too many things. And Lütjens’ change of heart was a real surprise.”
“Right, and if this intervention holds at this point consider the consequences,” said Maeve. “We’ll have some 1400 new lives on the Hood added to the continuum here, all people who should have died in the battle of the Denmark Strait that was now never fought. Then we have hundreds more subtracted—casualties on the Arethusa and any of the other ships Bismarck damaged. They will be gone, along with all their ancestors. This is no small matter, Paul. I thought we could do something that might just be confined to the outcome of this campaign, but the consequences are going to spill over the dike and ripple out from this now. Has this actually changed? Are we sampling hard variations here or just Resonance, just probable changes?”
“Kelly?” Paul tossed the question to his chief engineer. “Is there any way we can know this from the Golem stream?”
“Nope. It’s all just fish in the stream. The Golems are just indicating the most probable outcomes as a weight of opinion.”
“Well, what’s the verdict?” Maeve wanted to know how the campaign ended. “Pull up some info on the outcome.”
“I’ve been trying,” said Kelly, but just when the Golems seem to coalesce on a probable outcome I get one bank chiming in with a strong minority opinion to the contrary—Golem 7. The little rascals just won’t settle down, and so I can’t be certain of this outcome just yet. The numbers aren’t solid.”
“Then I guess we’d have to shut down the Arch and dissipate our Nexus Point to find that out,” said Paul. “That would allow the Heisenberg Wave to generate and finalize this intervention. Then the history we read would be a new, altered Meridian, and if it was not to our liking we’d have to spin the Arch back up and try again. The only other thing we could do is actually shift in ourselves and have a look at the situation, like I did at Tours.”
“Spook Job? Neither option sounds like a good idea given what’s happened,” said Kelly. “Hey, wait a second. We can still receive incoming media, can’t we? That is information independent of the Golem data stream. Get on the radio. See if we’ve done anything to affect Palma.”
“Good point!” said Paul. “We’ve been so fixated on the fate of the Bismarck that we’ve forgotten it’s the fate of Thomason and Palma that were really concerned with here.”
Maeve brought the shortwave in and they tried tuning in some east coast radio stations first. The wash of static had an eerie, ominous quality to it. There was nothing on the band. Then they tried local stations and quickly learned that events were still on an emergency footing outside the protective safety of the Nexus Point.
“Well we apparently re-arranged the deck chairs on the Titanic,” said Paul, “but I guess whatever we did was not enough. At least not yet.”
“It was enough to raise hell with the Meridian, however. Remember all those extra lives on HMS Hood?”
“Hold on a second!” Kelly interrupted. “I’m getting some real dissonance now on the Golem module. The data stream just won’t coalesce.”
“What do you mean?” Paul was at his side at once.
“Well, I’m still trying to see how the rest of the campaign ended, but all I get is a bunch of contradicting data. One version shows the British sinking Bismarck, another shows her making a safe return to St. Nazaire in France, then another shows her docked at Brest, and a fourth shows her turning out into the Atlantic to link up with a German oiler and raising hell for two months. Then look at this! In this one she is recalled to Germany! See that purple color on the Meridian time line? I coded that color to indicate extreme conflict—a very high degree of contradiction in the probable outcome. We can’t get a weight of opinion under these circumstances.”
“This damn campaign is just too fragile,” said Paul. “Like I said, there are so many Pushpoint clusters here that it’s looking like an intense seismic fracture zone. It appears even the slightest intervention changes things easily enough, but controlling the outcome is extremely difficult.”
“Then how can we operate?” said Maeve. If we can’t get reliable opinions on the probable outcome from the Golems, than how will we know what to do?”
“Well, we do have one clue,” said Kelly. “We know that Palma has not reversed.”
“At least not yet,” said Paul, willing to play the devil’s advocate now. “All we can really say is that the Heisenberg Wave has not altered events at this point in the Meridian.”
“Can we back out of this intervention?” Maeve folded her arms. “You saw how difficult it was to try and find a way to reverse what the Assassins did.”