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