Three Kings

“In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”

Henry David Thoreau

Chapter 28

The waters of the Strait ofArtemisium were high that day, a sudden storm brewing up in the narrow channel that heralded another warrior arriving from a doomed world. It blew down from the craggy heights of MountParanassus, stirring the waters to a fitful state until the waves were capped with frothing white spray, and the tides crashed hard against the tiny Isle ofArgyronison at the outlet of the strait.

There sat a fisherman, who had seen the rising clouds and pulled hard to reach the safety of the island, knowing he could never get back to his mainland village ofKatadika in time. He would be the only human eyes to witness the coming, and when he saw it he first believed the Italians had come to add naval gunfire to the torment already underway in his homeland. Germans and Italian troops had invaded a month earlier, and were now relentlessly driving the stalwart Greek Army back towards Athens.

If Regia Marina is here, he thought, then they mean to cross the Strait ofArtemisium, and my home town is right where they will land. He knew he had to get there as soon as possible to warn his friends and family, but now he stood, transfixed when he saw the ship in the grey rain, its tall white mainmast crowned by a spherical dome the like of which he had never seen. It shimmered with a strange glow, Saint Elmo’s Fire crackling from the lines and masts, outlining the sharp fighting edges of the warship in stark relief with an eerie green light. He did not really know what he saw that day, and he would never know that it had come from the fire of one great battle to this one, arriving like the hard steel of the Spartans of old, as if hearing the drumbeat of war and marching in this grave hour.

The high pass of Thermopylae was very close, but it was notLeonidas and his 300 Spartans, marching to the doom foretold by the Oracle of Delphi so long ago:

O ye men who dwell in the streets of broad Lacedaemon!

Either your glorious town shall be sacked by the children ofPerseus,

Or, in exchange, must all through the wholeLaconian country

Mourn for the loss of a king, descendant of great Heracles.

Another warrior had lately visited that shrine, and found their a talisman that would describe the lines of fate that would set a new doom in motion. But the fisherman knew nothing of this, for it had not yet come to pass, nor would it happen for another eighty years when a young woman would find the weight of the world on her shoulders, and the doom of the Oracle in a strange metal box.

Elena Fairchild had been truly puzzled when she found no further doorway in the hidden passage beneath Delphi. There was nothing but that strange black box. She had inserted her key, but it would not turn or open. Could other members of the Watch help her solve the riddle? Protocol now required her to report the incident. That was mandatory, but there was so little time and only one place she could do that-back on Argos Fire, the corporate HQ and security ship cruising out beyond the Strait of Artemisia. Its sleek lines and soft white paint scheme belied its true purpose, for the ship was a Daring class British destroyer, purchased by the Fairchild company and refit for the role it now served, and it was every bit as deadly as any of the other warships in its class.

It was well past the eleventh hour, on a hard night in 2021. The missiles were about to fire in the war that had been building to a terrible climax for the last nine days. Her only thought now was how they could possibly survive it, and where they could go. This place was not likely to be on any immediate target list, but on one hour or another, a warhead might come that would end all their days on this earth. The answer she desperately needed had to be inside this box, but how to open it?

“Get the men to the helicopters,” she said firmly. She was obviously meant to find what she now had in hand. Why else would she have been sent here? The box may not open with her key, but it might be opened with another. She had to report this! She had to get back to the ship, re-enable her secure command line to the Watch and report. They had precious little time, but enough to get there and back again if need be on the fast X-3 helos.