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.
For someone who had always labored to define clear and well established borders, this defiant ‘quantum uncertainty’ in time travel was a daunting and frightening prospect. Heisenberg, damn him, was right. He predicted that physical quantities and properties fluctuate randomly, and therefore can never be accurately known. While the effect of this uncertainty was most evident on the sub-atomic level, where things like the speed, spin, and charge of particles could be highly unpredictable, the fact remained that this basic uncertainty was at the core of all reality—if that term could be applied in any meaningful way. Put simply: nothing was written. She realized now that she hated the whole notion inherent