“You mean Absolute Certainty?”
“That was it,” said Robert. “Yes, I was afraid that once I figured out who the perpetrator was this time around, the other side would get wind of it, because I was damn well determined to do something about it, so I wanted to get inside a safe Nexus Point before I brought you all in on this research and firmed this up.”
“Good man,” said Maeve.
“Yes,” Paul agreed. “Forget the fuel situation, you did exactly the right thing, Robert. But you realize that fingering this Kenan Tanzir is just one end of the stick. Now we have to find out how they could possibly have constructed this scenario, because if what you are saying holds water, then the Pushpoint lies somewhere in that initial sortie by the Bismarck. For the life of me I can’t see how they would be able to determine that saving Bismarck in May would mean she would attack this particular convoy in August and end up killing this otherwise insignificant Berber scout who fathers our newest terrorist, Kenan. It’s mind boggling! Why not just go back and kill this Thomason instead?”
The professor said nothing to that, and they sat with it for a time, each realizing that they were all probably locked into another dangerous and confounding mission here. They knew the operation to try and reverse Palma again was definitely on the radar screen but, coming on the heels of that last daunting journey to the 8th century, the prospect of yet another perplexing Time jump weighed heavily on them now.
“Well,” Maeve said quietly. “It certainly has all the hallmarks of a typical intervention. I understand what you are saying, Paul, but we don’t have to uncover the whole of their operation to reverse this again. Bottom line, all we have to do is make sure this Lieutenant Thomason gets to Alexandria safely.”
“Which means we have to make sure the Bismarck never reaches Brest safely first,” said Paul. “That’s a tall order, particularly given the complexities of the interventions we’ve already uncovered.”
“Why do we have to mess with the battleship?” asked Maeve. “Can’t we just divert the convoy somehow—move it safely out of harm’s way?”
“We could try that,” said Paul, “but we have no guarantee that Bismarck would not still find it and sink this ship. It would be a throw of the dice. Removing Bismarck is definitely more decisive. And remember, Bismarck is not supposed to even be afloat, so it’s clear their operations focused on that campaign if she is. We also have to consider a possible counter operation.”
Maeve wasn’t convinced. “We could arrange for Thomason to receive new orders and go by some other route then. It won’t matter what the Bismarck does in that event.”
“You’re telling me that we’ve got this blatant deviation in the history and you want to ignore it? Thomason wasn’t the only man who dies when that convoy gets attacked. There’s a string of lives cut short. What was it? Four ships are sunk, and none of the ancestors of the men who went down on them were born either. That might cause damage that could go exponential in just a few generations, and who knows what kind of havoc it wreaks on the continuum in future years, even if we can see no ill effects now.”
“Other than Palma,” Robert put in. “That’s one hell of an ill effect, eh?
“These people are a devious bunch, I’ll give you that,” said Maeve. “They ran this right under our noses while Robert and I were off to find the Rosetta Stone. In fact, I think they were working this up even as far back as that little fishing expedition you and Robert took to recover the Ammonite fossil. That’s when Robert first discovered they were using the scroll rubbings and the hieroglyphics to send messages through Time. We get back from our trek to Egypt and find all hell has broken loose, and that it was all part of this major operation—the Rosetta Stone, Palma, and Tours—all a unified plan.”
“Right,” said Paul. “We had to make all those shifts into Egypt, then three time shifts to counter the consequences of their intervention at the Battle of Tours, but it seems the job is still not done. I’m starting to feel like I’m plugging leaks in a dike here. Yet now we see the true breadth and scope of what they actually planned. They hit the Rosetta stone, replacing it with a stela containing instructions concerning the battle of Tours. That may have been happenstance, but it sure rubbed our nose in it, yes?”
“And thankfully so,” said Robert. “They didn’t count on my ability to read the hieroglyphics!”
“Thank god for that,” said Paul. “Well that was just a cover operation. The real one-two punch was reversing Palma to knock the Order back on its heels in the future, so they could then launch the attack on Charles Martel. They may have underestimated our capabilities here. But let’s face it, we were fortunate to stop the worst of this so far, and now we have to finish the job.”
“At least we don’t have to save all of Christendom and Columbus again, as you worried when you first came in here,” said Robert. “But we must do something about Palma. Otherwise we’re all living on proverbial borrowed Time here. We’ve only just managed to lay in a small store of food and fuel, and get some much needed rest. But how long do you think the city is going to remain stable here? Supplies are already scarce as hen’s teeth. The next time we go out for petrol we may very well come back empty handed. And the power is going to go down, one day or another. Then we’re pretty much off line—useless—and the other side has free rein to do whatever they please. In fact, I think they are counting on exactly that happening to us. They don’t see us as a threat now after Palma. Founding Fathers or not they’ll make short work of us, mark my words. So it’s now or never. Yes, we’ve got to finish the job here.”
Paul nodded his head. “Look who’s rallying the troops this time!” he said. “Yet everything you say is true.”
“Golem time!” said Kelly. “You’ve been on that station for an hour now, Robert. What do our little friends say about it?”
“Paul was correct about the amazing scope of their plan,” said the professor. “I was worried we would have multiple interventions to cope with here as well, but the variations don’t start to crop up until the spring of 1941. Everything before that is clean—no variations at all since we beat them at Tours. That helped me hone in on important events in the history, and the Arion system did a lot of work for me. Everything led me back along the breadcrumb trail from Kenan Tanzir at the Le Méridien Hotel in Oran. You pull on a string and you never quite know where it will lead you. In this case I pulled on a thread in this man’s suit and I end up in the North Atlantic ocean, in May of 1941! This is where they’re operating, Maeve.””
“With the battleship Bismarck,” Paul said with a smile, the light of battle glimmering in his eyes now. “Oh, my. This mission is going to be fun. Let’s get started, people!”
Chapter 5
“It was a campaign literally rife with Pushpoints,” said Paul. “In fact, my studies of the second world war uncovered many similar incidents—little moments, quirks of fate we call them, that ended up having major ramifications on the outcome of events. It led me to my whole theory of Pushpoints being these small things, utterly insignificant if taken on their own, but with enormous power to lever events that were massing all around them with this huge buildup of temporal kinetic energy. Well, this campaign has a number of moments like that. Happenstance, errors of judgment, mistakes, and just plain sheer luck as well. Bismarck should have made it safely back to a French port in my opinion, and I can tell you why she didn’t.”