LITMIR.BIZ

      Madrid, Spain

      March 18

      2:06 a.m.

      Thin, pale, and slightly bent, the brilliant physicist Ebner von Braun stepped wearily inside a nondescript building buried in a warren of backstreets off the Plaza Conde de Barajas in old Madrid.

      Madrid may well be one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Ebner thought, but that entry hall was disgusting. It was dismal and dark, its floor was uneven, and its grotesquely peeling walls were sodden with the odor of rancid olive oil, scorched garlic, and, surprisingly, turpentine.

      Breathing through a handkerchief, he pressed a button on the wall. The elevator doors jerked noisily aside. He stepped in, and the racket of the ancient cables began. A long minute and several subbasements later, he found himself strolling the length of a bank of large, high-definition computer monitors.

      Here, the smell was of nothing at all, the pristine, climate-controlled cleanliness of modern science. Ebner gazed over the backs of three hundred men and women, their fingers clacking endlessly on multiple keyboards, text scrolling up and down, screen images shifting and alive with video, and he smiled.

       Such busy little bees they are!

      Except they are not little bees, are they? he thought. They are devils. Demons—Orcs!—all recruited, mostly by me, for the vast army of Galina Krause and the Knights of the Teutonic Order.

      The round chamber, one hundred forty feet side to side, with multiple tiers of bookcases rising to a star-painted ceiling, reminded him of the main reading room in the British Museum.

       Except ours is better.

      In addition to the NSA-level computing resources collected here, the bookshelves and glass-fronted cases alone were laden with over seven million reference books in every conceivable language, hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, many more thousands of early printed works, geographical and topographical maps, marine charts, celestial diagrams, paintings, drawings, engravings, ledgers, letters, tracts, notebooks, and assorted rare or secret documents, all collected from the last five and a half centuries of human history for one purpose: to document every single event in the life of Nicolaus Copernicus.

       Behold, the Copernicus Room.

      After four years, the massive servers had at last come online, and this army of frowning scientists, burrowing historians, scurrying archivists, and bleary-eyed programmers was now assembled to collect, collate, and cross-reference every conceivable atom of available knowledge to track Copernicus’s slightest movement from the day of his birth, on 19 February 1473, to his fateful journey from Frombork, Poland, in 1514, with his assistant, Hans Novak, to his discovery of the time-traveling, relic-bejeweled astrolabe in a location still unknown, and every moment else, all the way to his death in Frombork Castle, on 24 May 1543.

      All to determine the identity of the twelve first Guardians.

      Now that the modern-day Guardians had invoked the infamous Frombork Protocol, which decreed that the relics be gathered from their hiding places around the world to be destroyed, Ebner found himself wondering for the millionth time: Who were these original protectors, the good men and women whom Copernicus asked to guard his precious relics? One was Magellan, yes. They knew how his relic was secreted in a cave on the island of Guam. Another was the Portuguese trader Tomé Pires, who brought the poisonous Scorpio relic to China, a relic nearly recovered in San Francisco two days ago. But who were the other ten? And what of the mysterious twelfth relic?

      If it was possible to know, the Copernicus Room would tell them.

      And yet, Ebner mused as he strolled among the Orcs, at such a cost.

      The rush of the Order’s recent renaissance, their rebirth at light speed over the last four years under Galina’s leadership, had not been without blunders. The unprecedented and impatient Kronos program, the Order’s secret mission to create its own time machine, had resulted in catastrophically botched incidents:

      The ridiculous Florida experiment, an ultimately insignificant test that was still trailing its rags publicly. The spontaneous crumbling of a building in the bustling heart of Rio de Janeiro. And, perhaps worst of all, the strange, half-promising, half-calamitous episode at the Somosierra Tunnel, a mere hour’s drive from where he stood right now.

      Somosierra was particularly troublesome.

      Ebner drew the newspaper clipping from his jacket.

       The incident remains under investigation by local and federal crime units.

      Of course it does! A school bus vanishes in a tunnel and reappears days later, bearing evidence of an attack by Napoleonic soldiers from 1808? To say nothing of the disappearance of two of its passengers or the subsequent deadly illness of the survivors?

      To Ebner, these mistakes meant one thing: only Copernicus’s original device—his Eternity Machine, as a recently discovered document referred to it—could ever travel through time successfully.

      Every effort otherwise seemed doomed to failure.

Скачать книгу