Low on fuel, Rodney turned away with the other British battleships and limped home, up through the Irish Sea to anchor off Greenock and begin bunkering on fuel and ammunition. Her torpedo damage had not been significant, and the water that had started to flood her forward holds had been pumped out, the damaged areas sealed, the hidden crates restacked. The American officer had distinguished himself here as well, answering a call for help below decks, saving the lives of Able Seamen, and sealing off hatches at a critical moment until engineers could arrive and take charge of the scene. So read his report on Wellings, which he sent off to the Admiralty and thought little more on until he had completed the long journey to New York, there to deliver the secret cargo his ship had harbored and guarded, even through the danger of that wild action against Bismarck.
The stores of gold bullion, property of His Majesty’s Government, and the sealed crates of the famous Elgin Marbles arrived safe and sound, though a few pieces had been shaken up in the battle. It was not the first time they had been safeguarded by the Royal Navy. Admiral Nelson himself had transported the marbles aboard his flagship HMS Victory in the year 1804 when they had initially been removed from the Greek islands. Shortly thereafter Byron’s curse struck that ship, and she was badly damaged in action and laid up in Gibraltar. The captain was not a superstitious man, but he sometimes wondered if Rodney would ever suffer a similar fate.
It was to be Captain Hamilton’s final cruise aboard the old battleship. She moved to Boston harbor for her refit, and Captain Dalrymple-Hamilton was relieved there by Captain James Rivett-Carnac. It seemed only fitting, he thought. The ship would get new boilers, and a nice major overhaul. Why not a shiny new captain as well? The big Scot returned to England, there to receive instead a new ship and a new post.
He found himself ‘kicked upstairs and sent away,’ assigned to a lowly steamer, HMS Baldur, technically as Admiral commanding Iceland, of all places. The ship was used as an Admiralty Experimental Station, anchored in Adalvik Bay to monitor German U-boat radio traffic and sightings. In fact, she had no engines, and her shell was just a front for a secret base there, which also bore the name HMS Baldur, where the German Enigma signals to U-boats were intercepted and decoded. When the captain first arrived there were just a few men engaged in this work, huddled in frigid Nissen huts heated only by a single small coke stove. Someone was making a very strong point, and it seemed a lonesome and demeaning post to oblivion after having commanded a battleship which took part in the sinking of the Bismarck.
He sometimes wondered if his decision to follow his own good sense in the battle, and not the orders of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Pound, had played a part in marooning him at this desolate outpost. Or perhaps the incident involving Wellings had also contributed to his receiving this lacklustre assignment. As it turned out, however, the assignment was just a way to ‘keep him on ice,’ quite literally, until the Admiralty could arrange a more suitable post. His star was to rise again when he was appointed Naval Secretary in 1942, eventually becoming second in command of Home Fleet.
The Wellings incident remained a mystery to him for years. Arriving at the Clyde a few months after the Bismarck campaign, he was visited by MI-6, the foreign intelligence arm, and questioned about his report concerning the American officer. It seems that Lieutenant Commander Wellings was alive and well after all! In fact, he had flown from Bristol air field on the eve of Rodney’s departure from the Clyde for that fateful mission where she had tangled with Germany’s feared sea raider. After a day and a night layover in Iceland, he flew on to New York. There it was soon discovered that the orders sending him on this eleventh hour journey were counterfeit, and that the man Captain Hamilton had written so highly of in his report was completely unknown, a presumed impostor, and perhaps even an agent of the enemy, or so the man from MI-6 intimated. The big Scot wasted no time tamping down that idea, for no matter who the man was, his actions while aboard Rodney had been of the highest order.
And yet… He had been seen in the forward hold, down where Rodney had secreted away His Majesty’s gold bullion and the coveted and priceless Elgin Marbles. Could the man have been in the employ of the Elgin estate, slipped aboard to see to the safety of this precious cargo? Captain Hamilton never knew, or learned, anything more about it.
Over 60 Year later, and thousands of miles away, the man who had impersonated Lt. Commander Wellings was indeed alive and sound, resting in his quiet cottage in the highlands of Carmel.
It was well after LeGrand and Aziz were gone that Paul thought again on the key in his pocket, where it came from, and what it might mean. For it was no ordinary key. Why he never mentioned it to the Ambassadors from the future escaped him. He might have held it out as evidence of their sloppiness, and the heedless way in which they had operated. Yet some inner instinct told him to remain silent about it, and thankfully none of the other team members had said a word. Sloppy indeed! Considering the team’s own operations over these last days and weeks, that finger could be pointed at all of them as well.
They were children at first, he realized. They thought they would go see a Shakespeare play. They made enormous errors, landing in the late Cretaceous at one point, and bouncing all over the history until they managed to get their methods understood and well honed. Robert was finally convinced of the serious nature of any breach of the continuum. Paul had little fear that he would make another unauthorized jaunt to the British Museum considering what they had seen in recent events.
The effect of information sent back through Time, particularly to Prime Movers, was also firmly impressed on all of them now, particularly in deeply fractured Meridians of World War II. There were so many Pushpoints there, lurking in the Nexus Points of battles, campaigns, and roiling sagas at sea, that even the slightest nudge could set the whole mountain of events tumbling into the sea. A tiny drop of information could cause an immediate and significant change, like a sudden chemical reaction in a lab beaker, and the changes were no longer predictable with any degree of certainty. It might fall like a saving antidote, or fester like a lethal poison, and there was no way to predict all possible outcomes, or to safely restore the Meridian to its former state.
Realizing all this, the presence of this key in the Elgin Marbles was baffling and surprising to him. Why was it embedded in the head of the Selene Horse? Was it evidence of a failed operation by one side or another, or was it placed there deliberately? If so, what did that operation entail and why was it mounted? Or worse, why was it called off in such a way that this object would have been so carelessly left behind? Was it meant to be left behind, and if so, why? And why did they have no inkling of it in the Golem alerts?
Every question led him on to another, a long corridor of unopened doors that perhaps would be breached with this very key if he chose the correct one. First off, how was it that the object itself could have moved forward with him in Time when he returned from his wild ride in the Atlantic ocean? There was no pattern signature in the Arch retraction scheme that Kelly used to pull him out. Yet the more he thought on this the more he was coming to realize that the physics must be doing something in the corona around the tiny bubble in infinity that allowed a traveler to move from one milieu and Meridian in Time to another. It must be creating a safe zone where any object within the corona could be moved. After all, Rantgar had arrived with weapons in hand, though they might have been pattern sampled for that shift. But Nordhausen had snuck back to Reading Station to bring back the lost manuscript of T.E. Lawrence’s book the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. That was clearly not sampled in his retraction scheme, yet it shifted through intact. He had it in his vault, even now… or did he?