1943

Chapter 31

Admiral Volsky thought for some time, listening to the quiet hum of the boat, feeling its sleek, stealthy power as it glided beneath the sea. What were they planning to do here? Gromyko was laying out the best possible strategy for his attack on Kirov, on the ship and crew that he felt so close to in his mind and heart. There were memories there, layer upon layer, that he could not push aside. He imagined the string of missiles this sub would fire, emerging from the sea and starting their deadly run in to the target. There was Fedorov, Rodenko, Nikolin, Tasarov, Samsonov, and yes, his dear old friend Doctor Zolkin.

“I don’t like it,” said Volsky. “I know it makes the best military sense to attack as you advise, but I cannot steal up on that ship and unload all these missiles. I cannot sit here, wondering whether they have killed that ship and crew. No, Captain, I think I must first knock on that door.”

Gromyko nodded. He had made his case for how he would attack if pressed, but deep down, he was not eager to do so. “I understand,” he said. “Yet what ammunition do you have that might prevail over Karpov?”

“That remains to be seen. Can they pick up a signal on the secure comm-link?”

“It was designed for extreme long range communications.”

“Very well, I want to use it… Now.”

Gromyko extended his hand, pointing the way as they stepped out of his cabin and went down the narrow passage towards the command sail. Stopping at the bridge, he told Belanov to run shallow and deploy the sail mast for long range communications. They found the signals station, where Lieutenant Alexi Karenin was at his post, head lost in his earphone set, listening. Jr Lieutenant Genzo Gavrilov was at his side, the man the crew called “GG.” Born in Vladivostok, his father had married a Japanese woman from Hokkaido, and Genzo was bilingual, with fluent Japanese as his second language. The two men had been listening to Japanese radio traffic.

“Anything new?” asked Gromyko.

“Sir, we picked up the code phrase 8-E-YU. That’s Admiral Nagumo, and he was ordered to make a course change west into the Solomons.”

“Genzo? What’s up?”

“We think it has something to do with that hit on the base at Truk, sir. The last course track we had on that task force put it heading for Truk.”

“So they don’t want their carriers in harm’s way,” said Gromyko. “Karpov must have shaken them up. Very well, that will be all Mister Gavrilov. Dismissed.”

“Aye sir.” GG Saluted, then gave a nod to Karenin as he left. The Captain cleared out the area surrounding the comm station, and sent several crewmen off to do something or another so they would have some privacy.

“Mister Karenin, fire up the secure command link set and raise Kirov.” That surprised the Lieutenant, but with the Captain and Fleet Admiral standing there he was all business. He sent the coded signal that Nikolin would receive moments later.

There it was again.

Nikolin’s heart jumped when the signal came in. It was two cyphers off the normal EAM command link channel, a special frequency variation that had been pre-arranged by Fedorov long ago. It was the code, and the first time he saw it an avalanche of memories had come tumbling into his head. It seemed to him afterwards, that he had been living in a strange fog, but now everything was clear again. Now he remembered it all, how they had arrived here so long ago on that first ship, and all that had happened to them. But he had not said a single word about it to anyone… except Doctor Zolkin.

His heart racing as before, he looked to find the Captain, glad that it was Fedorov’s shift. “Sir,” he said. “I have a secure authenticated message on the HF Comm-link system.”

Fedorov raised an eyebrow. “It was properly coded?”

“Aye sir. The ID designator has it as Kazan.” He gave Fedorov a wide-eyed look.

Now it was Fedorov who felt his pulse rise. He knew Kazan was out there somewhere, but Gromyko had been last reported in the Barents Sea. The rendezvous he had arranged on his mission to Ilanskiy months ago had never taken place, but there had been no communication with the submarine since that time.

“Thank you, Mister Nikolin. I will take your post for the time being. That will be all.”

“Aye sir.”

“And Nikolin… Say nothing of this communication. Just go have a nice late breakfast. You can return in one hour.”

“Understood sir.” Nikolin saluted and was on his way, a thousand questions in his mind. Then Fedorov settled into his warm chair, placing the headset over his ears, and speaking in a low voice.

“Kazan, Kazan, this is Captain Fedorov aboard Kirov. We receive and authenticate your code. Come back. Over.”

“We read you, Kirov. This is Captain Ivan Gromyko. Something tells me you are still a long way from the Dolphin’s Head. Shall we try this rendezvous somewhere else? Over.”

The two men would have a brief conversation where Fedorov would learn why Kazan had gone silent. “You phased,” he explained. “That happened to us more than once after a shift. It can sometimes take a while for things to settle into the new timeframe.”

“Yes,” said Gromyko. “We also skipped forward a few more months in time. It was September when we made that tryst to meet off the Dolphin’s Head. Then we skipped forward and the year was damn near gone.”

“It happens,” said Fedorov. “Perhaps like a plane taking a hop on landing.”

“Something more occurred,” said Gromyko. “It’s difficult to describe, but perhaps the best way is to let you hear from him. Standby, Kirov.”

Gromyko looked over at Volsky, who was sitting at his side now with another headset. He toggled a switch, but as he did so, he noticed that the Admiral’s eyes were watered over, as if he were overcome with emotion.

“Mister Fedorov,” he said softly. “I cannot tell you how good it is to hear your voice again.”

At the other end of that transmission Fedorov sat there in complete shock. How often do the dead call home to the living? Yet the voice he heard now was unmistakable. It was Volsky.

“Admiral?” his voice quavered a bit.

“One and the same,” Volsky came back.

“But… Sir….”

“Yes, I know you must have received some very hard news of my fate. How I come to be here now is a bit of a mystery, even to me, and particularly since I’m really not sure who I am these days. I was sitting quietly in my office at Fleet Headquarters, when in walked a most remarkable man.”

He told him of the visit from Kamenski, and of the Director’s plan. “So you see, there is still a world out there that is safe and sound from all the changes you worry so much about. I was living in it. Yet now, after this little journey here, that man sits quietly beneath two others in my mind. It is all very strange. I have memories of those last days on the ship, the first ship. Do you know you went missing there, Fedorov? I mourned that a good long while, before fate came calling for me. Then again, I have memories of leaving Murmansk on that British sub after Karpov took the ship. Until the darkness fell on me in the Atlantic when we fought with the Hindenburg.”

“Yes sir… I went through this myself when Kirov returned—memories on top of memories, two lives mingled together in one head. There I was on the bridge, knowing men like Orlov and Karpov should not be there, but unable to realize why I could remember all that had happened before, when no one else could.”

“We’ve been remade,” said Volsky. “The both of us, or so it seems, and I am a most fortunate man. I suppose only one other man has ever made the claim that he has risen from the dead, and I do not presume to be his equal. Yet here I am. Time has put me here, and for a very grave reason. If the Director were here, he could explain it all to you, but I think you have heard some of it before—the dire dilemma we face because of the presence of Kirov in these waters. You recall how we discussed it before?”

“I do sir…” Fedorov was finally getting himself under control, thrilled to have Volsky back, a man that had been like a father to him, his stalwart ally through the travail of all these trials and adventures.

“Well, we have work to do here, Mister Fedorov. Kamenski is convinced that the ship cannot remain here. We must all get home. We tried this before, with Kazan attempting to do the heavy lifting, but it could not carry itself far enough forward with Kirov on its back. Yet we have a new control rod now—a new Rod-25 if you will. It’s a long story, but all Kamenski’s doing, and hear now what he has placed upon our shoulders.”

The Admiral spoke quietly, telling him that the same urgent mission was at hand again. They had to get the ship home, remove its contagion from the time line here, assure that no further paradox might occur, and allow this history to move forward on its own. Yet even as he explained that, they both knew that there was one great stumbling block before them—Vladimir Karpov.

“He won’t want to hear this,” said Fedorov. “He’s an Admiral now—self-appointed, and so much more. He’s taken a liking to his position here, and the power he has gathered to himself. And he’s also quite fond of the little war he’s fighting with the Japanese. We just attacked their naval base at Truk! Now he wants to look for bigger fish at Rabaul.”

“I see…” Volsky considered. “How do you think he would take the news of my return?”

“It would certainly be shocking,” said Fedorov. “Yet remember, he sees himself as evolved beyond any obligation to the authority you represent. In fact, he has flatly stated that he has no intention whatsoever of trying to return to our own time. Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.”

“That sounds very much like Karpov,” said Volsky. “Yet if he cannot be convinced of the gravity of our situation, that will present us with a very difficult choice here—the same choice we had before in the Sea of Japan.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Do you think he can be reasoned with? Do you think if we press the seriousness of this matter on him, the two of us could get through to him?”

“We could try,” said Fedorov. “If he holds the line and refuses to cooperate, then I hate to think of the alternative.”

“Yes, that will be very difficult. It would certainly place you in great danger there. Would not Karpov see you as an enemy?”

“I have been at odds with him for some time, as you well know. But Admiral, things have happened since we learned you were killed. I… I thought all of this was my fault, the danger to this world and all those that follow this time. I thought I could make one last attempt at undoing my many mistakes. You remember what I discovered at Ilanskiy?”

“Yes of course, that stairway.”

“Correct. Well, I wanted to use that to go back and… reclaim that errant whisper. I wanted to try and prevent Sergei Kirov from doing what he did. Karpov and I discussed it at great length. We had a plan, but in the end, he decided against it, even while my mission was already underway. It’s a long story, but I did get to Ilanskiy—to the year 1908—though not the way I thought I would. And I found Mironov—Sergei Kirov. I had steeled myself to do the only sure thing that might absolutely prevent him from killing Josef Stalin. But in the end, I wasn’t man enough to pull that trigger…”

Volsky took a moment to digest that. “No Fedorov, you were man enough not to pull that trigger. I would not have expected anything different from you. The world turned on the mercy you showed that man. It was a world born of that single act of compassion, and it will be what it will be—but not with us here. We must leave—all of us—Kirov, Kazan, the Argos Fire, all those men you met in the desert, the little fleet of transports, everything must go. Those that will not leave of their own accord must be compelled by other means…. or be destroyed. I would speak with Karpov on this, and I am willing to do so if he will hear me. Whether he would heed any order I might give at this point is doubtful. We had every reason to believe that he would not heed my warning, and being faced with this decision, we have steeled ourselves to take a more difficult path if necessary. Yet I could not raise my hand against my old ship and crew without having this conversation first, and I clung to the hope that we might reach an accommodation. It may be our last hope, Mister Fedorov, the last hope of tomorrow. So I must ask you to take this to Karpov. If he will hear us out, perhaps we can avert the doom Kamenski fears.”

Fedorov considered all this, and was inwardly torn. He had thought his mission to Ilanskiy, returning to the source of the first major contamination at that point, would be the last hope, but that slipped from his grasp when he could not bring himself to kill Sergei Kirov. Now here was the Admiral, the man once dead living again, returning from a future that was still there, still intact, his head filled with the recollection of all his other doppelgangers from tangled time meridians.

There was grave danger ahead. The Admiral’s proposal, and his determination that no stone must be left unturned here, was fraught with peril. Fedorov had come to the same place Karpov had, albeit with great reluctance. He had thought that there was now nothing they could do to change the world they were living in. They could only do one thing—win this war. He had set down the impossible burden of thinking he could re-write all the history that had been so badly shattered by their actions, and come instead to do the one thing that remained doable in his mind—they could use the power they had, in the ship beneath his feet, to win the war and at least nudge the world closer to the course that it had taken in the post war history he knew so well.

“Sir,” he said tentatively. “This war… the things we have already done have changed it dramatically. The Allies are finally fighting back, but the issue remains in doubt. The Axis remains very strong, and there is a real possibility that they might prevail. Karpov has been trying to avert that possibility all along. It was his aim to try and reset the conditions that prevailed in our world in the Pacific, and with Kirov, there remains a chance they he might succeed.”

“That may be so,” said Volsky. “With Kazan those odds get longer. Yes, we can certainly weigh in to profoundly affect the outcome of this war, and I suppose we should discuss that. Kamenski believes that will expose us to great peril—not just us, but the future world that follows. He could not say what that peril was—something we do here, or perhaps something we fail to do—who can say? You remember the warnings Tovey’s group received. Beware a ship… Beware Kirov. Those warnings were sent from the future, from men who saw the final outcome of all we are now struggling with. They have seen something we cannot fathom from this point in time. Not even Kamenski can see it; not with all his arcane wisdom and genius for sorting all this time business through. But he can feel it, Fedorov, like a man who senses the impending edge of an event that has not yet come to pass. Call it prescience, call it a hunch, but he can feel the doom that Elena Fairchild first voiced to us, the same shadow and final darkness that professor tried to explain. What was his name again?”

“Dorland,” said Fedorov. “Professor Paul Dorland.”

Chapter 32

Paul Dorland emerged from the great doorway, seeing Maeve and Kelly there to greet him. He had just come through the successful retraction shift in the Arch, returning from the meeting with Tovey and Fairchild in the Azores.

“A welcoming committee,” he said with a grin. “Two out of three isn’t bad. Where’s Nordhausen?”

“Where else,” said Maeve. “He’s up on the history module trying to sort out all the splinter threads that we’re dealing with now. I should be there too to make sure he doesn’t jump to any conclusions we can’t live with.” Maeve Lindford was head of Outcomes and Consequences, the small group responsible for analyzing the conditions resulting from time interventions. Her honey red hair curled onto the shoulders of the white lab coat she was wearing.

At her side was Kelly Ramer, the computer genius responsible for keeping all the equipment up and running, maintaining the live RAM data bank, reviewing the Golem reports, and crunching the numbers required to shift anyone in time, the calculus of infinity, as he called it. Their missing comrade, Robert Nordhausen, was the historian, sleuthing the record of the past to identify key nexus points where the course of events shifted and turned, key push points on the continuum.

“I’ll bet the Golems are going crazy,” said Dorland. He was referring to a widely distributed computer program created by Kelly Ramer that was constantly searching the massive body of generated news on the Internet for references to historical events, and comparing it to the history of those events as permanently recorded in their RAM data bank. Golems would send reports to the Meridian Team computers, which would warn of possible variations or alterations forming in the history, the effects of possible tampering in the past.

“It isn’t just the Golems,” said Kelly. “We’ve got real fragmentation of the Meridian now. It all originated from the Nexus in 1908, but now we’ve identified at least three different threads.”

“Threads?”

“It’s a new term he’s using now,” Maeve explained. “I wanted to call them splinters.”

“Well I can generate new material for the lexicon as well,” said Kelly, raising his chin in mock defense of his creation.

“You certainly can,” said Paul. “Threads… Like threads of a conversation in an online forum?”

“Something like that.”

“And you say we’ve got three? Explain.”

“It’ll be a doozy,” said Maeve. “What it boils down to is that the Prime Meridian has now fragmented, or split apart.”

“More like how the branches split off from the trunk of a tree,” put in Kelly.

“Right,” said Maeve. “We normally monitor variations in recorded history for the Prime Meridian—now we’ve got three.”

“I was afraid of this,” said Paul. “And you say it originated in 1908?”

“June 30, to be precise.”

“The Tunguska Event,” said Paul. “That even caused damage to the integrity of Time itself.”

“Then why didn’t we detect it sooner?” asked Kelly.

“Who knows,” said Paul. “Perhaps it was like a hairline fracture. That happened to me once. I was pushing a massive table in my home years ago, when my feet slipped and my jaw came right down on the table top. It split my chin open on the surface of the skin, though that healed in a week or two. I later found that it did more unseen damage—only I didn’t learn about it for decades after, when I was chewing on a piece of hard pizza crust and broke a molar. That tooth had been bothering me for years, then it finally broke, and the dentist confirmed that it was apparently from a very old hairline fracture in the tooth. So whatever hit the earth at Tunguska may have caused damage at various points in the continuum. We’re only now discovering the extent of the fissures it may have opened, and it also left fragments of some exotic material that can have alarming properties where time is concerned.”

“Yes,” said Maeve. “It’s a mess, and now we’ve got three branches or threads breaking off from what we thought was the Prime Meridian, and they all generate slightly different Outcomes and Consequences. The question is, how do we know which thread to work on?”

“A good point,” said Paul. “Let’s go have a look.”

“I assume you had a satisfactory meeting?”

“You might say so. I’ve learned a good deal in talking with this Admiral Tovey and the woman on that other ship, the Argos Fire. The two are related. When Kirov first arrived, Tovey created a group inside the Royal Navy called the Watch.”

“Right,” said Maeve. “We’ve got that in the Alpha thread.”

“Well this Elena Fairchild and company was a member of that group. In fact, she was promoted to their senior Watchstander, and the ship she was on was ordered to a location where they found a device that was capable of moving the Argos Fire in time.”

“A device?”

“A box, or that’s the way it was described to me. They said it contained a fragment from the Tunguska Event.”

“This is beginning to add up,” said Maeve…. “The Argos Fire…. “We’ve searched all over for older references to that ship, yet we didn’t think it could be the ship we identified here in 2021.”

“Until it was lost the other day off the coast of Greece,” said Kelly. “The Brits thought the Russians were behind that, so they hit a Russian Destroyer with one of their subs in reprisal, then all hell broke loose. The Russians retaliated, it went tit for tat for a while, then the whole thing went tits up yesterday—sorry, Maeve.”

“Tits up?”

“The Russians threw an ICBM at a British Petroleum facility in Southern Egypt—the oil drilling installation at Sultan Apache. I think they were trying to kill two birds with one stone. There’s been a lot of tension around the energy centers, Nigeria, the Caspian Basin, the Gulf of Mexico with that big rig disaster. Well, they smashed that BP facility, and also took out a British Army brigade there. That attack went part and parcel with another in the Atlantic. They targeted a relief convoy the British were sending to Mersa Matruh.”

“I know all about it. That brigade got blown right into 1942, and so did those ships.”

“Yes,” said Maeve. “We’ve been able to piece that together in the research, but only in the Beta Thread. There’s no sign of that brigade fighting in North Africa in the Alpha or Gamma threads.”

“Interesting,” said Paul. “Then I was on the Beta thread, and it certainly turned up there. This is serious. If the situation continues to deteriorate here, these nuclear detonations could continue to rupture time as well as space. Actually, naming them separately is a bit deceptive. It’s spacetime, if Einstein was correct, and there’s only one of it. That meridian I was just on is very skewed. Did you find any evidence of a G3 Class battlecruiser there?”

“You’d have to ask Nordhausen.”

“Ask Nordhausen,” came a voice, and in walked the professor, his eyeglasses shifted up high above his eyebrows, a smile lighting his eyes beneath his balding head.

“G3 Class battlecruiser in the Royal Navy,” said Paul. “Ever turn up anything like that?”

“HMS Invincible,” said Nordhausen.

“That’s the one.”

“The Brits have that ship, but it was never supposed to have been built, at least not on Alpha thread, and then a good many others turned up. Both sides seem to have built ships that never existed. The British have new heavy cruisers, the Germans have carriers, the Americans and Japanese are fusing the two together and building battle-carriers. You’ll have a field day with it all when I show you the research.”

“Those ships are the least of our worries,” said Paul. “the Paradox created a Doppelganger—and that’s just for starters. It also started a causality loop.”

“That’s what gave us the Beta thread,” said Maeve. “Here we thought we were just dealing with an alteration to the Alpha thread, but then we get this incredible branching off to create the Beta thread. Now we’ve got a third.”

“Yes, yes,” said Paul. “This is just what I was afraid of. The damage that Russian ship has done is so profound that the Prime Meridian fragmented. That was predicted to be a forerunner occurrence for a Grand Finality.”

“Grand Finality?” Nordhausen could quote chapter and verse on the history, but he left the time travel physics to Dorland.

“I just got through explaining this to Admiral Tovey and Miss Fairchild. It’s like this… a kind of Gordian knot in time,” said Paul. “These variations and Paradox events get time so doubled back on itself, that an insoluble looping begins to occur.”

“You mean with the ship?”

“Correct. It just arrived there the second time, but I’ve been back in August of 1941. Did it persist on any of these threads?”

“Oh yes,” said Nordhausen. “The whole thing seems to be in flux. I mean I get new Golem alerts all the time now, but I was just looking over some data that has the ship at war in the Pacific. There was an attack at a place called Truk—January of 1943.”

“Truk?” Paul rolled his eyes. “That was Combined Fleet Naval headquarters for Japan, but the Americans didn’t attack it until February of 1944. Who hit it?”

“That goddamned ship, what else.”

“Good Lord.” Paul rubbed his forehead. “So the ship stays there until at least 1943? Well, the longer it’s there, the greater the danger that it will slip again. That’s what happened the first time. It slipped to a point on the continuum before its first arrival. If the damn thing slips again, then we get another Paradox looming on the Meridian where that happens. Time cannot find a way to resolve this, and so it all gets spun into an endless replay. That’s what the finality is. If this happens the future simply ceases to exist, because time cannot progress beyond the point of the finality, or at least that is what the theory predicts.”

“But we’re that future, are we not?” said Nordhausen. “Doesn’t it have to exist for us to know this here?”

“In one sense, yes. Some future may be realized, but to a point.”

“All three splintered Meridians account for all the years between 1943 and this year.” The professor folded his arms.

“Yet we already know that the future beyond this point goes silent,” said Paul, “and with these nukes being lobbed about, I can possibly see why. Since the future cannot be created in the line of causality, it must be destroyed, and that creates a deep shadow that ripples backwards on the continuum like a backwash from Paradox. This may be the reason the voices from our own distant future have all gone mute, for there, the impact of all these changes will be most severe—annihilation—and that is a silence that will eventually roll back upon us all… My god, I just spoke those words to Tovey and Fairchild.”

Maeve cast a furtive glance at the others. “Well, Maestro, you must have been on the Beta thread for that little meeting. We haven’t told you everything. Welcome to the Gamma thread. Wait until you hear what’s been going on with that ship!”

Karpov sat in his stateroom, close by the private cabinet that he always kept under lock and key. It was open now, his eyes searching over the device within, a headset framing his brow as he listened. It was another radio set, of the same kind that they had given to Admiral Tovey. He had it rigged to transfer any signal received on Nikolin’s HF comm-link module, particularly coded transmissions, which would be decrypted if authenticated by Nikolin.

He had been reading at his desk that morning, and looking over maps of the area around Rabaul, considering his plans. Then he saw the special light he had rigged winking off and on above the cabinet, and reached slowly into his pocket for the cabinet key.

He heard everything that was said, profoundly shocked when he first heard the voice of Admiral Volsky. Could the report of his death have been a deception? That was the first thing that came to mind. Yet there he was, apparently out on another mission aboard Kazan, just as before, and its aim was the same as it had always been.

The Admiral’s seemed to be obsessed with this great doom that was looming in the far horizons of these events. Who can say what it might be. Yet the one thing that stuck in Karpov’s mind was that single phrase from Volsky: We must leave—all of us—Kirov, Kazan, the Argos Fire, all those men you met in the desert, the little fleet of transports, everything must go. Those that will not leave of their own accord must be compelled by other means…. or be destroyed.

Or be destroyed….

So there was Admiral Volsky, he thought, alive again, risen from the dead, just as I seemed to return from what seemed like my certain demise. They must have been very surprised when they learned I was still alive. Yet I settled things, didn’t I. Fedorov has been all about doom and gloom from the very beginning of this adventure. First he was manic about his history, then his head was filled with all this paradox business. That is what this must still be all about—the Second Coming.

I must admit that it certainly had some very real effects. I felt them myself during that terrible night aboard Tunguska. Yet I survived them easily enough. Time has been lusting to find a way to redress that. There are two of us now, my brother and I. She cannot abide that, and looks for any way to balance her books.

So here comes Volsky again, just when I thought that man was dead and buried for good. And here comes Kazan…. What should I do about this? Fedorov cozied up to me real good when he returned from that mission. He realized, as I did, the consequences of his tampering at that foundational level of these events. This world rests on the shoulders of Sergei Kirov. He built it, and now he’s fighting to save it, just as I am. I thought I had finally convinced Fedorov of that, but now here comes old Papa Volsky, and he’ll muddle the waters with this business stuffed into his head by Kamenski.

What to do here?

Fedorov will bring this to me, and if I refuse to hear Volsky out, then what? Is he going to turn to his henchman Gromyko? Does he think he can kill this ship that easily? If I do agree to a meeting, how should I arrange it? I suppose it was at least decent of Volsky to make this call. Yet he did not sound like that bumbling old fool I met in Murmansk. No. He spoke of things that man could have never known, and this thing Fedorov said about two lives being mingled together in one head is most interesting.

Perhaps that was supposed to happen to me.

That thought suddenly shook him. Perhaps Time was going to merge the recollections and experiences I lived through into the body and head of my brother self when the Second Coming happened. Yes… That was what was supposed to happen, but Time could not accomplish it. I was in some kind of protective Faraday Cage aboard Tunguska, and she couldn’t touch me. I was elsewhere. There might have been only one version of myself, just like Fedorov, but one who remembered all that had happened on that first loop. Very interesting… If this happened to Fedorov and Volsky, then might it also happen to other members of the crew?

Now he reached a decision.

I must meet with those two rascals, he thought. They have been my enemies in the past, but Fedorov gave me his word that he would stand with me here. Volsky wants to have his little talk, so I will hear him out, but they will hear me out as well. How to best arrange this?

First things first… Fedorov.

Chapter 33

As predicted, Fedorov went to Karpov, his heart heavy and mind very troubled when he knocked on the stateroom door. He could not see how he might persuade Karpov, or how their present situation would be any different than the sortie they made to 1908 if he failed, but he had to try.

“Come.”

He opened the door, removing his cap as he eased in and closed it securely behind him. Karpov was sitting at his desk, his eyes scanning paperwork under an LED lamp. “What is it, Mister Fedorov?”

“Sir, we’ve received a secure message on the EAM comm-link system, and we need to discuss it.”

Karpov looked up, rubbed his eye as if to chase away an annoying tick, and gave Fedorov a look that seemed to indicate he had come to some inner decision. “I don’t feel like theater this morning,” he said. “Yes, Mister Fedorov, we certainly need to discuss this one, don’t we. You see, I have a secure comm-link unit right here, and I have it rigged to alert me to any pass-code level communications. So you might as well know that I was listening in on your entire conversation with Volsky. Amazing, eh? That old man simply refuses to die. I must say, I was as shocked as you must have been when I heard his voice.”

Fedorov raised a brow, surprised again, not so much that Karpov had been listening, but more that he had not anticipated that from a man like the Siberian. “Very well,” he said. “No theatrics. I agree. I told you I would be straight up with you and as you can see, I came to you with this immediately.”

“Who was that man?” asked Karpov? “How did he get here—aboard Kazan?”

“Kazan was in the Atlantic when it last vanished—shifted. Apparently, it went forward again, as far as 2021.”

“So that is where they met Kamenski. My… How would he know about any of this?”

“Good question,” said Fedorov. “He’s a very mysterious man, but very insightful. When I was driven half-crazy trying to sort through this time travel business, it was Kamenski who helped me make sense of things.”

“But I don’t see how,” said Karpov. “Yes, he was Deputy Director of the KGB for many years, but now he seems privy to events that no man on earth should be able to fathom. How it is he can claim to know what the long-term consequences of our presence here will be?”

“Perhaps he’s already seen it,” said Fedorov. “Frankly, I’m beginning to think he may not be from our own time line—not native to 2021, in spite of the fact that he had a long, distinguished life line in our time.”

“What? Then where in god’s name did the man come from—mars?”

“You don’t have to ask me that,” said Fedorov. “I think he may have come from a future time—beyond 2021. How else could he possess the insight he has? He knew about the effects of massive detonations on the time continuum, and he was deeply involved in the black operations that were masked by our nuclear test program. I think he may even have known about Tunguska. It’s clear that he’s been operating on many levels here, for on more than one occasion he’s told me that he holds the recollection of lives lived from more than one meridian of time.”

“Just like we do,” said Karpov. “You’ve got a few versions of yourself locked away up there, don’t you? As for me, the two lives I seem to have lived in this little adventure remain incarnate—one in my head, and one in my brother’s. I have no idea what my brother was doing three days before he went to see with Kirov. Oh, I can take a good guess, but I have no clear memory of that.” Karpov pointed to his head. “Not up here…. And my brother knows nothing of what we did the first encounter—at least he did not have this awareness the last time we spoke, and that was only yesterday. So while you and Volsky may be a salad bowl of different selves, my head is uncontaminated by these layers from other lives. Better that way. I think more clearly. Yet your theory holds some merit. Kamenski knows entirely too much—if the man is to be believed.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Lie? What exactly has he said, Fedorov? Just what is this great doom he warns about?”

“It obviously has to do with the ship—this ship. I suppose it did originate with the warning the Watch received from the future.”

“You’re speaking of this Fairchild woman now—the one on the converted British destroyer?”

“Correct. I can’t recall whether we’ve discussed it, but here’s the gist of things. When we first appeared, we ended up tangling with the Royal Navy—never a good idea, but you seemed to think you would prevail.”

“I would have beaten them easily enough.”

“Yes, with special warheads. Let’s not get into that now. What we do know is that Admiral Tovey’s experience in those encounters caused him to establish a secret group within the Royal Navy—the Watch. They were to look out for any further reappearance of our ship. Some of the original members were Tovey, Alan Turing, who was instrumental in concluding we were not from their own time, and other key Admirals like Cunningham and Fraser. I’m not aware of others. In any case. That group persisted into modern times—even in our own day. Fairchild was a member in our own time.”

“Indeed? How very strange. You realize what this means? If that is the case, then the British must have known…. Why, they must have known that Kirov would go missing in the Norwegian Sea—but how?”

“Now we get to the interesting part,” said Fedorov. “Fairchild claims they received messages while at sea. They were cryptic at first, and they came in over a series of time—intended to establish credibility on the part of the sender. One predicted the events of 9/11 for example. Another was data from the stock market received well before the given day, and the numbers tumbled into position when that day arrived—exactly.”

“Interesting. I suppose that’s just a bit like our telling these people here what they were about to do next.”

“Yes,” said Fedorov. “At least in the beginning. Now this war is so skewed that I can’t easily predict anything that might happen next.”

“Alright, Fairchild is a member of the Watch, and she gets messages from the future.”

“Correct—about us. In fact, they were warnings—beware a ship, beware Kirov. Then those future voices go silent.”

“Very dramatic,” said Karpov. “So now you think Kamenski may have been sent back somehow to reinforce that point. That’s the essence of his beef—beware Kirov.” He waved his hands in a mocking way. “And what I think this comes down to in the end is quite something else—beware Karpov. Isn’t that what Kamenski is really saying? After all, the ship is just a hunk of steel and other exotic materials. Without me, or someone else at the helm, it just sits there.”

“I suppose you have a point with that.”

“Of course I do. If you or Volsky were in command here, would Kamenski be all in a tither about it? No.”

“I would not be so sure about that,” said Fedorov. “After all, Volsky was in command all through the operations in the Med, and I was Captain as well. You were not in charge the first time we hit the Pacific. It wasn’t until you displaced after the Demon volcano that things got really warped.”

“Yes, and you and Volsky had to come chasing after me and spoil things. Did Kamenski put you up to that?”

“It was my doing—I’ll admit it. I convinced the Admiral that we had to intervene. But I did consult Kamenski, and he came with us on Kazan the first time.”

“Riding shotgun,” said Karpov. “Alright, what is this great doom Kamenski is worried about? Are we going to hatch another plan here to try and save the world? You saw how that worked out at Ilanskiy.”

“You heard the Admiral. Kamenski is convinced our contamination of the timeline here will be fatal if we remain. He wants all of us to return to our own time—you, me, the ship, Volsky on Kazan, Fairchild on Argos Fire, that Japanese destroyer, and all the rest. We must remove any contaminate from this meridian, or face the consequences.”

“What consequences? What did Kamenski say would happen?”

“I’m not certain. Volsky said he could feel it, almost like a man who senses the impending edge of an event that has not yet come to pass. But we should already know the danger we pose here. We both faced it once already—Paradox.”

“Yes,” said Karpov. “That was somewhat harrowing, but as you can see, the world did not end. Here we sit, Fedorov.”

“True, this world did not end, but it has been horribly twisted—Stalin dead, our homeland fragmented into three warring states, Ivan Volkov and Orenburg allied with Germany, Moscow burned. God only knows what else will happen before this war ends.”

“Yet you and I have gone over this time and again. I thought we had agreed that our only course was to win here—set things right with force of arms, not some arcane magic worked out on that back stairway at Ilanskiy. Now Volsky rises from the dead with another of these trumped-up crusades, this time spawned by Kamenski.”

“Well,” said Fedorov, “what if our theory is correct? What if Kamenski is from a time beyond our own? From that perspective, he could have seen the outcome of all these events.”

“Then why the cloak and dagger?” Karpov waved his hand. “Why all the melodrama? Why doesn’t the man just come out and make things plain?”

“Who knows? Maybe that would even make things worse. After all, we faced the same dilemma ourselves when we appeared here. Once the locals came to believe who we really were, they naturally wanted to learn what we know.”

“Yes,” said Karpov. “Who could resist looking into a magic mirror that would show him the future?”

“Correct,” said Fedorov. “We held a piece of that mirror, though our vision was far from complete. In many ways, Ilanskiy was also a way to see that future, and Sergei Kirov acted as he did because he went up those stairs to see Stalin’s world.”

“So which one would you prefer to live in, Fedorov? What do you think will happen here if we all take a bow and remove ourselves from this time? Is this world going to transform itself back into the one that led to the building of this ship?”

“Who could know that?”

“You seem to think Kamenski does. He’s so insistent that we do this, and your little theory on his true point of origins cements your belief in the man. Now you want to use that like a whip to compel me to do as the Director suggests, and if I don’t agree, Volsky is out there on Kazan. Well, we saw how that went down before in 1908. Do you honestly think I’ll let that goddamned sub get anywhere near this ship now?”

“But sir… How can you dismiss Kamenski’s warning? How can we dismiss the warning Fairchild reported—from our own future?”

“Yes, yes, very cryptic. Beware a ship… beware Kirov. Well, Mister Fedorov, the first part of that warning might obviously be aimed at us, but the second part might refer to Sergei Kirov himself—the man, not this ship. We came to that same conclusion ourselves, didn’t we, only we both lost our nerve and could not bring ourselves to kill the man in 1908. That would have certainly reset the pieces on the board. Yes?”

“Didn’t you do that for selfish reasons?” Fedorov accused. “You want to carve out your own little empire here, and all those ambitions are thinly masked by a veil you’ve taken from Mother Rodina—all this talk of defending the homeland and taking back what is rightfully ours. That’s why you’ve been hounding the Japanese, correct?”

“And why not? God cast Satan into hell, and so he decided to get as comfortable there as he could. What do you think will happen if we do as Volsky wants? Let’s assume I kiss the two of you on the cheek and we form a nice little alliance here. We have no way of knowing whether these control rods will take us forward, but for the sake of discussion, let’s assume they do. We get Kirov and Kazan back to 2021. How does Argos Fire get there?”

“They have the means,” said Fedorov without disclosing anything more.

“Very well, what about all your friends in the desert that have been Rommel’s bane these last few years?”

That got Fedorov, as he did not know all the details of what had happened at Tobruk. Karpov saw him hesitate, and went on. He already knew about the strange event at Tobruk. Tyrenkov’s network was very good, but he continued.

“Assume all those toy soldiers get put back in the box. As for Takami, I’ll find that damn ship and simply blow it to hell. Then all we have to do is find the replenishment convoy ships and wire them up for a shift to 2021. Yes?”

“It would probably be better to simply destroy them all,” Fedorov put in. “and take the crews aboard our ships.”

“Alright, now comes the clincher. How in God’s name do we get Ivan Volkov to go along with our little plan? Oh, excuse me, Mister General Secretary, but we’ve a ticket for you on the next plane to 2021? You see how thorny this rose is?” Karpov smiled. “Don’t you see how fruitless and futile Kamenski’s plan is?”

Fedorov was silent. When it was only Kirov and Kazan, the task they had before them seemed a doable thing. Now Karpov had laid out the cold logic of it all. Even if they could remove Takami and Kinlan and all the other ships, there was still Ivan Volkov to deal with. Karpov pressed his advantage.

“We leave, and then Volkov rules the roost. You’re already worried that the Allies could still lose this war. Well, if they do, it won’t be here in the Pacific. Japan loses here whether or not I beat them senseless. The American Navy will not be defeated, not unless the Axis finds a way to shut down US production sites. No, if the Allies lose, it will be because Russia is defeated, and right now, this very minute, Ivan Volkov is doing everything in his power to see that that happens. In fact, I would go so far as to say that our little club, you, me, and Volsky, are the only real counterfoil to Volkov’s tampering here. If we leave, let me tell you what is likely to happen. Sergei Kirov has managed to hold on this long, but Volgograd will fall soon, and the Soviet Winter Offensive of 1942-43 has already run out of steam. This year the Germans go for Leningrad.”

“I’ll admit I hadn’t thought about all of this,” said Fedorov. “But Kamenski might be able to sort it through—once we get home.”

“No, Fedorov, he won’t, because home may not even be there from what I’ve already seen. Yes, I’ll let you in on a little secret. As you know, that stairway at Ilanskiy goes both ways. Well I took a little stroll one day—and I went up instead of down. In fact, I got back to 2021 just in time to see the show, like a man slipping into the theater after the movie has already started. You know what I saw from the upper landing of that stairway—a mushroom cloud over Kansk.”

Karpov let that sit there, and neither man spoke for a good long while. Then he inclined his head and continued. “Let me tell you a little joke from that American comedian: ‘A guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, hey doc, my brother’s crazy! He thinks he’s a chicken. Then the doc says, why don’t you turn him in? Then the guy says, I would but I need the eggs.’ Well Fedorov, we can get all our chickens lined up here, but you’ve forgotten one of the eggs. You see, Kamenski aside, you and Volsky haven’t really thought any of this through—but I have. I ran all this through the mill long ago, before I made my decision to stay here and fight. But giving you the benefit of every doubt, suppose we even hatch a mission to kidnap Ivan Volkov and get him home with us, or kill him instead. There’s still one egg that’s fallen from the nest, and you have no idea where it is—Orlov.”