But what they don’t know is that all through the night, what looks like regular ferry traffic across the harbor is actually thousands of armed soldiers, disguised like ragmen and coal sellers and Jews and fishermen, sneaking across from the walled city, up the hillside by Pera and into the tower. By dawn we are all packed in like anchovies. It’s a miracle nobody accidentally castrates anyone else, and the stench of all those bodies is so intense, it’s almost psychotropic.
The Crusaders think there’s approximately thirty soldiers inside, when it’s now nearly a hundred times that. In the morning, we wait for the moment when the Crusader knights are getting geared up with their squires’ help, and the grooms are saddling the horses—they all do it at the same time, which is ill-considered, because right at this moment, when they are all vulnerable, we hurl open the gates of the tower and a thousand soldiers burst out and rush the Crusaders, swords and axes swinging, spears flying—and at the same time, thousands more are shooting fire-arrows down the slope at everyone on the ships, who thought they weren’t even in the game today. We had a catapult on the roof of the tower that hurled boulders down into the Bosporus—they didn’t hit any of the ships but they made waves big enough to capsize the smaller ones. The whole Crusader army was almost literally caught with its pants down.
Half of the Crusaders just fled because they were unarmed, or because they were servants whose pay grade didn’t include armed combat. They scattered immediately into the woods beyond the camp. Meanwhile there are hundreds of thousands of citizens of Constantinople sitting on the walls of the city, watching this from across the Golden Horn like it’s reality TV. Most of them don’t actually care who wins because they understand it’s just about who sits on the throne, they know the Crusaders aren’t here to try to actually harm the city itself. All the potential emperors are assholes, and they’re all related to each other, it hardly matters which one wins. So the citizens are literally picnicking and placing bets on who wins the day.
Finally the Crusader knights were mounted, and their foot soldiers got their heads together enough to finish armoring and grab their weapons, and we finally had full engagement. We still had the advantage of topography, because we were coming from the top of the hill and they were down the slope. Two Greek soldiers ran right up to the Crusader army, grabbed a lord, slashed him across the face, and began to drag him back toward the tower, but one of his knights went after him and hacked the heads off both of the Greeks, and brought the lord back to the safety of the crusading army. The whole thing happened in about thirty seconds.
That shifted everything—suddenly the Crusaders rose to the occasion, cheering and catcalling, and Christ, talk about a counterattack. None of our men had horses, and most of them were conscripted—they didn’t want to be there, they had essentially no military training. So as soon as things got really heated, they deserted their stations. Some of them ran down to the harbor chain to try to pull themselves across the Golden Horn on it—it could take the weight, those links were nearly as big as I am—but the Crusader archers picked them off easily. Remember, there’s a quarter of a million people watching this for their morning entertainment. It was surreal.
Abruptly, there’s only a couple hundred of us left, and we start to realize (of course, I knew this all along) that we better close the gates of the tower before the Crusaders come charging in.
To be more precise, they have to close the gates; I have to get my butt out the gates and away from there. As much as it insults my military instinct, I can only meet my KCW if I get away from the tower, because all the Varangians in that tower are going down. So—just like the three times before—I push my way out during that moment of confusion, when the Varangians and Greeks are trying to close the gates while the Crusaders are trying to force them to stay open. I’m wearing Varangian lamellar armor, relatively lightweight, so I have more mobility than the Crusaders whose ranks I have to break through. I jab at a couple of armpits and groins to encourage bodies to get out of my way, but my goal isn’t to terminate anyone, it’s just to get out of there. I know how it ends. My job is not to stick around for it. It’s hard because I know some of those men pretty well now and leaving them to their doom while I slip away to find a witch to Send me home . . . we should consider getting counselors to help soldiers deal with that, it could fester into PTSD.
The only other Varangian I see fleeing the tower is Magnus. He follows me out of the place. He’s got his eye on me. I think he’s expecting me to grab a boat oar and single-handedly mow down a few hundred armed knights or something. But in all of the confusion it’s easy enough for me to elude him.
So I get out, away from the tower, and I watch. I watch the Crusaders barely manage to pry the gates back open, and I watch them stream into the tower, and I hear the carnage inside, and I know what it means.
That’s when it happened.
I knew what was supposed to happen next. The Crusaders were supposed to go down and open up the casing for the chain mechanism, release the chain, and sail into the harbor, to the astonished horror of their quarter million spectators. Then they send across the Bosporus for the rest of their camp—especially the women and the cooks. There’s a KCW in the Crusader army, and she’s supposed to Send me back here. Meanwhile the Jews of Pera are frantically packing their bags and hightailing it out of town to start the well-documented Byzantine Diaspora. All of that is what happened three Strands in a row.
But this time something happens that has never happened before: there is a massive flash of light and an explosion on the harbor side of the hill, right exactly where Pera is. The entire hillside—all of Pera, which was built of stone—is flaming. This has never happened before, I have no idea why it’s happening, obviously at the time I didn’t know that Rachel had come back to 1203 and meddled by telling people what was coming. I realized from the 1601 London DTAP that this has got to be Diachronic Shear and I knew I had to get as far away as possible. So I run toward the woods and wait to see what happens when all the fire and explosions die down. That happens very fast, actually—just like in London.
I come back toward the tower for reconnaissance, and I see at once that two things are different from how they’ve always been. First, because of the explosion and fire and all that hell that broke loose, there’s no way to release the chain mechanism. It’s fused. That thing is never going to open. Ever. And just as I’m thinking about what a massive fuck-up that is—because without the chain being lowered, the ships cannot get into the safety of the harbor, and then literally, history cannot move forward—and then the second thing I notice is that . . . Pera is gone. Gone. Not even any foundation stones. It’s obliterated—a black charred spot, acres of it—on the hillside, as if there was never anything there. And that awful smell I remember from the Albigensian DTAP, that noisome smell of charred bones after an execution. The whole area, which had been walled and locked, went up so fast that nobody there had time to escape. Horrible.
A quarter hour later, while half the army is still walking around in a daze, something incredible happened: the Eagle, the largest and heaviest iron-prowed Venetian ship, rammed into the harbor chain and broke it. They broke the harbor chain of Constantinople! That’s not how it was supposed to happen. Invaders tried for five hundred years to break the chains guarding the Golden Horn. Every generation of that chain was unbreakable. Something about the Diachronic Shear must have had a molecular effect on the metal and weakened the chain. I think the multiverse required the Crusaders to get into the harbor and so made sure it happened, even if they couldn’t do it the way they did on every other Strand.
Anyhow—neither side lost many men to the Shear, but it freaked the hell out of everyone. Even being aware of the Shear, I’m already feeling confused about what happened, so I’m sure all kinds of crazy things will end up getting said about it. I’m willing to bet everyone will say that Pera must have been made of wood to go up in flames like that, and the flames must have come from the fire-arrows—something
like that, even though I know Pera was made of stone and tile, and I also know the angle the fire-arrows came from would never have landed in Pera anyhow. So lots of weird crap is going to get said.
In conclusion, it appears Rachel was reunited with her family and warned them. This changed everything.
Clearly Rachel’s information moved quickly out of the Jewish settlement. There is no way we will ever know what Rachel said, or to whom, or what that person attempted to do with the information. We know only that the multiverse could not bear such a change of course, and eliminated its possibility.
Post by Dr. Melisande Stokes
on “All-DODO” ODIN channel
DAY 1812
All,
Mortimer has requested that everyone please stop checking the wiki for updates on Constantinople, it’s slowing the servers down and it is a waste of time until the GLAAMR dissipates. Lieutenant Colonel Lyons and I believe that over the next few days, history will literally rewrite itself, as the oral accounts of that day’s Diachronic Shear make their way into written testimonials and then eventually history books, and finally the Internet.
Rachel bat Avraham almost certainly died in the Shear. Although she died in defiance of our regulations, it is important to be sensitive to the grief of the many DODO workers—especially her fellow MUONs—who had the fortune and pleasure to have worked with her for the better part of three years.
Respectfully submitted,
Melisande Stokes
Exchange of posts by LTG Octavian K. Frink,
Dr. Constantine Rudge, and Dr. Roger Blevins
on private ODIN channel
DAYS 1810–1813 (MID-JULY, YEAR 5)
Post from LTG Octavian K. Frink:
Blev, (cc Rudge):
I’ve been following the traffic on this system as my schedule permits. Relieved to hear LTC Lyons made it back in one piece. Somewhat confused otherwise. He accomplished the mission on all four Strands? So, how do we know whether it worked?
Reply from Dr. Roger Blevins:
Okie, that is the fundamental question of all diachronic operations—how can we know the success or failure of a campaign such as this one, where the objective is to shift national borders a few kilometers, or even a few meters, to one direction or the other?
In the present case, as you know, what we are trying to achieve is to pry Crimea loose from the Russians and get it back into the full and undisputed possession of Ukraine, all without firing a shot or engaging in military operations as that term is normally understood.
If the project succeeds, then our present-day reality changes; we wake up tomorrow and Ukraine owns the Crimea free and clear. Not only that, but history will have changed as well. We’ll have no memory and no records of Russia ever having marched into Crimea in 2014. So how do we know that anything even happened?
The answer is that the alteration of history doesn’t happen in a flash; it takes a little while to propagate through all of the Strands and whatnot, and during that time there is this thing that Dr. Oda terms GLAAMR (Galvanic Liminal Aura Antecedent to Manifold Rift), which even non-magical people can sense if it’s strong enough.
From Dr. Constantine Rudge:
Just jumping in here with a note that DODO’s R&D division has invented ways of measuring GLAAMR. That’s why we had three spy planes in last year’s budget; we mounted the GLAAMR detection systems in their bellies, and even now they are flying routes over Ukraine gathering data.
From LTG Frink:
Yes, I remember the spy planes now, and the ruckus they caused in the budget hearing. Glad to know they are getting some use.
Why can’t we just draw a map or something, and store it, and then compare it to a current map a few days later? I know you’re going to tell me it would change and there would be GLAAMR, but is there no way to just store a document in such a way that it wouldn’t change?
From Dr. Blevins:
That is being worked on too. Apparently if the map were stored in an ODEC, your idea might work. But because space in ODECs is so scarce and expensive we have done very little of this.
From LTG Frink:
Seems to me we could get a hell of a lot of thumb drives into an ATTO. Give me a sitrep on those.
Oh, and I noticed that when Rachel bat Avraham flew the coop, she used mind control on the witch who Homed her. Obviously psy-ops is a common ability among the historical witches.
From Dr. Rudge:
Just a gentle reminder, General Frink, that we try to avoid using loaded terms such as “mind control.”
From LTG Frink:
Connie, you can call it whatever you want, psy-ops has got to be simpler than what we just went through to get Crimea back.
From Dr. Rudge:
Yes, General Frink, Crimea is part of the Ukraine today. You may share with me a vague memory, rapidly fading, of a Russian invasion that never happened. As if we dreamed it, and the memory of the dream is being dispelled by the more concrete realities of the new day.
Without disputing your opinion that the operation was anything but simple, I’ll point out that to achieve the same result through conventional military operations would have been infinitely more complex and risky.
From LTG Frink:
I’ll give you complex. Risky I’m less sure of. Hard to know what the real risks are.
From Dr. Blevins:
To answer a question earlier in this “thread,” the first ATTO is proceeding through its testing routines more or less on schedule, but it is a device of many subsystems and there are endless delays and complications around procuring special parts, debugging “code,” and so on. We are looking at bringing Gráinne forward in mid-September, once we’re certain the device works. In the meantime we could certainly try some experiments with thumb drives or other forms of document storage, as you suggest.
In the meantime, Okie, I would like to draw your attention to a question we were kicking around earlier, namely what to do with the surplus personnel in LTC Lyons’s department—including LTC Lyons himself—now that the big push in the Constantinople Theater is over. Do we wish to throw them into another colossal operation, or sit back and assess?
From LTG Frink:
Will give you a call in five, Blev.
FROM LIEUTENANT GENERAL OCTAVIAN K. FRINK
TO ALL DODO DEPARTMENT HEADS
DAY 1825 (LATE JULY, YEAR 5)
First of all, I would like to congratulate all DODO personnel for the successful conclusion of operations in the Constantinople Theater. That is not to gloss over the tragic story of the late Rachel bat Avraham, however, to the best of our ability to assess these things, it would appear that DODO was able to “undo” a Russian takeover of the Crimea that, on our Strand, never successfully happened. To have achieved a similar result using conventional Trapezoid-style operations would have been immensely costly in both dollars and blood and would have raised the possibility of opening a wider war.
One of the measures of a successful team is the ability to adapt to unexpected complications that inevitably crop up during the course of a complex operation—the “fog of war,” as it were. Our glitch for this mission was the unexpected advent of “St. Tristan of Dintagel” as blowback from earlier operations in Normandy. While this made it seem touch and go for a short time, the situation seems to have resolved without further repercussions.
Before many of you depart for well-deserved vacations during August, I wanted to supply an idea of top-level direction during the rest of this year, and the year following. The Constantinople Theater has proved that with the help of the Chronotron we can conduct large-scale operations that will reshape history to our advantage without the expense and bloodshed of conventional warfare. As you all know, DODO is also conducting significant operations in five other theaters at this time. All of these are scheduled to wind down over the course of the autumn and early winter. Our general plan is to stand down, stand back, and appraise the results and lessons learned before plunging into additio
nal theater-scale operations.
With that, I wish you all a restful August.
Sincerely,
Lieutenant General Octavian K. Frink
Post by Dr. Melisande Stokes to LTC Tristan Lyons
on private ODIN channel
DAY 1825
I didn’t think Frink could be that smooth.
Reply from LTC Lyons:
Don’t go there, Stokes.
From Dr. Stokes:
No, seriously, that was the nicest “fuck you” letter ever.
From LTC Lyons:
He’s a general. He fights wars. When the war’s over, he stops fighting and puts his army to work training to fight the next war. That’s all this is.
From Dr. Stokes:
Hmm, I think being turned into a saint may have affected your judgment.
From LTC Lyons:
So you’re going to be the little devil on my shoulder?
From Dr. Stokes:
:)
From LTC Lyons:
I’m outta here. Time for some R&R. See you in three weeks.
From Dr. Stokes:
Where you going again?
From LTC Lyons:
Probably shouldn’t divulge this, but I’m going to Normandy.
From Dr. Stokes:
Collinet?
From LTC Lyons:
You got it. It’s a nice place now. There’s a B&B practically right on Thyra’s homesite. Going to go get drunk on cider and light a candle at the chapel of St. Tristan.
From Dr. Stokes:
Light one for me.
From LTC Lyons: