Pacific Storm

EPILOGUE

It took a long time before the crew was able to shake off the terror of that night. It was not simply the heat and stress of battle, the long hours tensely at action stations, the lack of sleep, the meals snatched between endless shifts. All that they could have taken in stride, holding to their discipline and training in spite of severe trial. They had been a ship of raw and untested men, and now they were as seasoned as any crew who ever fought at sea, veterans all.

No. It was that last insane and unbelievable moment, as terrifying as it was astonishing to them all, when heavy cruiser Tone and all her crew of 824 sailors and officers finally caught up with the ship they had been chasing, and drove right through its heart. In doing so they passed right through the minds and souls of an equal compliment of men aboard Kirov, and each crew knew something of the other, in a dark, macabre nightmare meeting at sea that no man among them ever wanted to recall, or speak of again. Ships pass in the night, wrote Longfellow, and speak to one another in passing.

Kirov had sailed east, slipping past Milne Bay at the southern tip of Papua New Guinea, a silent ship on an empty sea. They wanted to know that they would not regress, waiting breathlessly in those first hours and fearing that the ship would again be plunged into the cauldron of battle, scalded further by those turbulent and heated waters, the controlled insanity men now called the Second World War. But the ship seemed stable, the reactors showing no odd neutron flux, even though Dobrynin was now using manual backup controls to keep it running. It slowly dawned on them that the ship had reached some stable time, though they did not have any idea where they were.

The hideous collision with that phantom cruiser had a strange effect on all the equipment on board. The electronics were fitful and computers off line, with systems failing all over the ship. It was all Dobrynin could do to keep the power stable, finally isolating the source of the damage that had caused his cooling problem and fixing it before events turned critical.

Nikolin could not even raise anything on his radio, which did not surprise any man among them. All they had seen, each and every time they shifted away from the horrors of the 1940s, had been an empty world, a blackened world, a world of shadows, destruction and shame. It was all that was left of the world they had left, and each man still carried some hidden doubt that Kirov was somehow responsible.

Admiral Volsky recovered, as they all eventually did, and they decided what to do next. East lay the islands he had yearned to find for so long, scattered peaks of paradise at the top of undersea mountains, surrounded by the pristine blue-green waters of the Pacific. They had sailed that way, slipping past San Cristobal at the tip of the Solomons, past Vanuatu and north of Fiji Island, hoping to ease past Samoa and find Tahiti.

All the while the ship’s systems slowly began to wink back on, basic circuits operating again, lights and power stabilizing. It was as if Kirov was slowly rousing from some long and fitful slumber, a bad dream that had haunted them all these many weeks. Their chronometer read August 28th now, but it was any man’s guess as to what year or day it really was. Then Nikolin tinkered with his radio sets and suddenly reported that he was getting a distant, faded signal!

“What is it, Nikolin?” It was the first stirring of the ship’s higher level electronics. The mechanical things had kept on working. They had reverted to manual controls on many systems while the weary engineers tried in vain to isolate faults and reboot the main computers.

Samsonov turned, leaning on a brawny arm and called out to Karpov. “Captain, I have CIC control once again. My board is rebooting. Missiles green, torpedoes nominal, all systems checking in with good diagnostics, sir. We have teeth again.”

“That’s good to know, but all too few,” said Karpov. It had been most unsettling to be sailing in these waters without computers, sensors or adequate control of their weapons.

With that first remote wash of sound in Nikolin’s radio speaker, they suddenly realized that systems were slowly winking on again all over the ship. Dobrynin called to say he had computerized control of the reactor again and could now give them normal speeds. Rodenko saw his short range radars snap to life again, and the longer range panels of the Phased Array were suddenly active. Tasarov’s passive sonar was suddenly singing to him again, a smile on his face as he listened, indicating thumbs up.

All the officers gathered round Nikolin’s radio station as he struggled to tune in the distant signal. Would they hear the heartless stream of coded signals flashed between men at war? He was hearing words now… English…. And with sinking hearts they first thought they were they back in it once again, in the merciless waters of the South Pacific of 1942, fated to meet the American fleet this time, their arsenals badly depleted and their luck surely running low as well.

Then Tasarov’s elation suddenly became shock and surprise. He had his beloved sonar back again, and he immediately had closed his eyes, listening to the song of the sea, letting its sounds and rhythms and distant tempos enfold him again. He had been like a fish out of water as the ship sailed east, hearing nothing, knowing nothing of the sea around him, alone and struggling with the memories of that awful phantom ship and the reality of his own immediate uselessness. Now he could hear again, even as Rodenko could see again, but what he heard sent a rising pulse of fear through his system, and he was tensely alert, sitting up straight as he always did when he had hold of something, one hand on his headset, the other on his newly awakened sonar controls.

Karpov caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, turning his head quickly, watching the sonar man closely.

“Conn… Sonar contact… Possible submarine… No! Definitely a submarine, sir. Confidence high! He’s very close. Two thousand meters off our stern and deep. Sir, I think this is an American boat—”

“Alert one! Rig for ASW defense!” Karpov reacted like a coiled spring, suddenly snapping and releasing all the pent up energy and tension that had been stored in the trial of their recent battles. A submarine! Another damn submarine! They were back in the thick of it again, and this time it was the Americans, even as they had feared.

The claxon sounded its shrill warning, and weary men rushed to battle stations, their brief reprieve in the silence and emptiness of the open sea now over.

“We will not give this bastard a single moment to breath,” said Karpov tersely. “Can you see it yet, Samsonov? Shkval! Put it right up his ass the minute you have a firing solution!” The Captain rushed to the CIC, Volsky in his wake, leaving Nikolin suddenly abandoned with his radio again.

Then Tasarov spoke up in a loud voice. “I have acoustic profile readings! A hull number resolution!”

Karpov was a single minded fist of anger now. “Feed that data to the CIC. Let’s get him before they have a chance to fire. Ready on my command, Samsonov.” He was all business, a deadly serious look on his face now, and his God of War was moving quickly, with clock like precision, opening toggle guards, enabling warheads, keying the lethal super-cavitating torpedoes for battle.

As Karpov watched he was suddenly shaken by the memory of that awful face, the ghostly visage of Sanji Iwabuchi as the dour commander had passed right through him, the dreadful sense of doom he had felt when the man’s mind touched his, and the hopelessness of living in a world where such men were at large and at war with one another. Something broke through his fear, tugging at his mind with a certain desperation, a voice of warning and caution and alarm. My God! He thought, seeing how he had reached his own hand towards the firing switch even as Samsonov was fingering the kill button. His hand shook, his eyes widened, and then in a sharp instant he grabbed Samsonov’s hand and yanked it away from the controls.

“Wait!” he said. “Belay that order!”

Three words had penetrated the blind surge of anger and thrum of fear in his chest, stopping the reflexive urge to fight and kill. They leapt in his brain past that reptilian root of his mind and up to a higher place where beast became man, and man became reason and choice. Hull number resolution! That meant they had the ship in their database!

Fedorov suddenly realized what was happening as well. A hull number resolution! Tasarov had listened to this ship before, and its unique signal return patterns and acoustic characteristics were already stored in his computers. It could not be an American submarine from 1942. It had to be from another time. But when?

“Hull number? What, Tasarov? What boat is it?”

“Boat 722, sir. Los Angeles class American attack sub.”

“My God, said Volsky. Los Angeles class? Then this can’t be 1942. We have moved forward again, back into the world this ship once knew, and it has just remembered a long lost friend.”

“Or an old enemy,” said Karpov darkly, his hand still poised near the firing button, hovering over the switch, shaking with the realization of what he was just about to do, what he might yet have to do if this boat was hostile. But his mind was working now, the well honed tactical sense in his head telling him that the sub must have acquired them long ago when their systems were still dark, and it had crept up on them in a silent, stealthy watch that was all too typical of the old cold war days. It could have easily fired and killed them in those long, dark hours, and yet it did not.

Fedorov was at his station with a book, his hands a blur as he flipped pages to look up the reference. His eyes were wide as he looked at the line he had thumbed: Boat 722, Los Angles Class Attack submarine. USS Key West out of Naval Forces Marianas. Home Port: Apra Harbor, Guam.

With a sudden energy he leaned over Tovarich, shoving navigation charts aside to get at something he had stored in a drawer at that station. It was the newspaper the Marines had brought back from those abandoned bungalows on Malus Island. He had it, rushing to the CIC, his face alive and excited.

“Key West!” he said. “Look! That’s the boat mentioned right here in this article. Nikolin, get over here! Translate this again.”

Nikolin, eased away from his radio, still struggling to tune in a distant, undulating signal, and then took the newspaper again, looking to the lines where Fedorov was pointing.

“The attack followed the controversial sinking of the sole Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning on September 7th—”

“No,” Fedorov pointed. “Farther down… Here!”

“Alright…Analysts believe the attack may have been a reprisal for the sinking of the American attack submarine USS Key West by a Russian cruiser on August 28th in the Pacific, as well as a warning to the Chinese not to press their demands for full integration of Taiwan—”

“USS Key West! The sinking of that boat by a Russian cruiser in the Pacific was the trigger point that set the war off. Look at the chronometer—this is August 28th! And by God, if this isn’t a Russian cruiser, then I’m a donkey.” He smiled broadly, his astonishment giving way to relief.

“You mean to say…” Volsky raised a finger, equally surprised.

“Yes! It has to be. Later in that same article I remembered they said something about a Russian ship lost in the Arctic Sea. We were so busy I forgot about it. Look for that, Nikolin.”

“Here it is, sir.” Nikolin read again. “Tensions between SinoPac and the West have been high since the loss of a Russian ship in the Arctic Sea in July and several incidents involving both Russian and British planes in the waters around Iceland.”

“Why didn’t we see it before? A Russian ship lost in the Arctic Sea… in July of 2021. That was us, sir. That was Kirov! Our live fire exercises were scheduled for July 28. Then boom. We find ourselves back in 1941, eighty years in the past on that very same day. We thought Orel exploded, and that Slava was sunk as well. But don’t you see? From their point of view it was Kirov that vanished—vanished just as we have been pulling that same damn disappearing act every time Dobrynin ran his maintenance routine on the reactors! And we end up here, exactly one month later in our time.”

“And we start the war…” Admiral Volsky’s face was grave and sad, realizing that it had been Kirov all along. His ship, his crew, his weapons of war.

Karpov’s hand slowly eased away from the weapons firing switch, and it was shaking. His face had a look of pain and agony on it now, eyes wide and glazed over with tears, cheeks taut.

“Then I did it….” He struggled to control his breath now. “I was going to do it again, just this very second! I was going to blow that submarine to hell without a second thought. I did it! The war, those burned out cities all over the world, the whole damn thing!”

Volsky’s face reflected the Captain’s pain and distress, and he stepped forward, his big arms taking Karpov’s shoulders, drawing the other man closer. “No, Karpov,” he said quietly, softly, as a father might comfort his own child. “We did it. This ship; this crew. You have no idea who may have given the order. For all you know you could have been sleeping in your bunk and it may have been my fat finger on the trigger, or Fedorov’s order. You can’t take this on yourself. We are all equally responsible.” He released the Captain, and Karpov struggled to compose himself.

Yet even as he did so he knew Volsky was wrong. It was him. He did it—in some other iteration of this same terrible journey they had all been on. Or perhaps he was set to do it, set like a coiled spring given the man he was back then, where a merciless and callous reflex for battle still dominated his mind; set like a clock about to jar the world awake to the terror and destruction of yet another world war. In some other life and time he had fired that nuclear warhead at the Americans without a moment’s hesitation or regret. He had fired it with anger, and yes, with hatred too. When it came to war he had been a man without scruples, whether it was the petty infighting in the chain of command or the grander sweep of battle at sea. He did what they had to do, what they must do, what a man like Sanji Iwabuchi would have done to them all if he had ever been given the chance to really get his cruiser in position to ram the ship.

But something had grown up around that twisted root of violence in his mind, even while he commanded the ship in battle. He fought for another reason now, to protect his ship and crew and no longer with the ruthlessness that had driven him in the past. And that thing, that flower that had bloomed on the vine of death and war in his soul, had been the one saving grace that had enabled him to stay his hand this time—and it saved the world.

He saw the eyes of the bridge crew on him, but there was no reproach in them, no hint of blame or recrimination. All he saw on the faces of the others was relief and understanding, a quiet sympathy and a silent awareness that they had finally come to the end of the terrible mystery and nightmare that had haunted them all these many months. Fedorov, God bless him. Fedorov had always been a guardian angel too, yet not so quick to the flashing sword of battle; restrained, thinking, feeling. Fedorov had been a real man, and now Karpov finally had the hope that he was going to be one as well.

He saw the young officer smiling at him now, and a surge of relief flooded through him. It was as if he had just set down a burden he had carried all his life, so alone, even as he walked through the crowded ranks of the ship, shunned by the men, never spoken to, always at the cold edge of any group that may have gathered and hiding behind his Captain’s stripe. Now he saw the one thing he had always yearned for in the eyes of the men, comfort, understanding, acceptance, and yes, even admiration. They were his brothers now. They were all his brothers.

He knew, deep down, that as he fought these last weeks it had not been to strike a blow for Mother Russia, or to even the score of history, wrong perceived injustice in the wayward course of events. No, he had fought for Kirov, for the ship, for these men around him, and the crew struggling on below decks in surely the most impossible situation any sailors at sea had ever faced. He had fought for his brothers in arms.

“Yes,” Fedorov explained, still excited by his discovery. “We did it, or rather we were going to do it just now. But I think that has all changed. We may have done it once before, and we have seen the result, but perhaps that was in some other life, some other universe, some other time. We may have done it a hundred times for all we know. Yes, we did it. The ship vanished on July 28, 2021, and then appeared here in the Pacific one month later, the Russian cruiser that killed Key West and started the holocaust. But something sent us sailing through time and the fire and madness of war so we could have this one second—this one brief chance to ask a question before we fired our weapon this time. Here we are, battered, lost and right in the curious sights of an American Los Angeles class submarine—boat 722, the Key West. And with reflexes honed sharp by a thousand hours at battle stations these last months, we killed it. Then everything went to hell. But not this time. Not this time!”

He smiled. “Don’t you understand? We’re home! This is the year 2021 again, but the war hasn’t started. It doesn’t have to start now. We can avoid the future we’ve already seen. We’re home!”

Volsky remembered how they had all felt that first time they shifted away from the past and into that bleak future, seeing the ruin and destruction of Halifax Harbor. “It looks like we stopped it this time,” he said. “That alarm clock bomb you talked about, Mister Fedorov.” It looks like we heard it ticking, and reached a hand out to turn it off just before that jarring sound could rattle our brains.”

Karpov smiled. It had been his hand that stopped it, pulling Samsonov’s away. It had been his hand.

Then they heard something that astounded them all. It was Nikolin’s radio set, finally winning its struggle to tune in a distant channel, and it was music. Nikolin’s eyes gleamed as he heard it, rushing to the radio to adjust the dial further and turn up the volume as the song faded in and out. The beat was steady, and every man among them knew the tune. It was the Beatles, beloved in Mother Russia for decades, and they were singing Back in the U.S.S.R.

Admiral Volsky was smiling ear to ear, Fedorov broke out laughing. Nikolin started to dance. They were home—but not in the U.S.S.R, they hoped. That old, reeking structure had collapsed decades ago, and this was a new Russia. Yes, now there was SinoPac, the Sino Pacific alliance initiated by the Chinese, and the spring of war was still coiled tight. But they knew what was going to happen now, what might happen if the world kept steady on the course it had been sailing, and they could do whatever they might to forestall it. They were men of real power now. God may have died in this world, but this was now a ship of angels.

Admiral Volsky smiled, an idea in his mind. “Mister Nikolin,” he said in a calm voice. “When you have finished crushing those grapes would you be so kind as to call that American submarine on the radio? We were about to send them a nice, fat super-cavitating cigar, but I think I would like to offer their captain a box of fine Cuban cigars instead. If I can parley with Admiral John Tovey, then by God I can speak with this man as well. Get them on the radio.”

And he did.

The world Kirov left behind in 1942 had a long time to consider the mystery of this strange interloper on the high seas. The code word Geronimo was kept a quiet secret, but the mysterious ship was never seen again. This time it had vanished for good. The British Admiralty locked away the files in a deep, deep cellar beneath Hut 4 in Bletchley Park, and few knew what happened to them once that facility was eventually closed after the war. Admiral John Tovey was one of them, following the reports of unaccountable engagements that week in the Coral Sea, and smiling to himself, then crumpling the decrypts and putting them to the fire.

He spent the next years serving ably in spite of Churchill’s desire to remove him for his transgressions, and was eventually promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, retiring from service in 1946 to pursue ‘other matters.’ Few ever knew what scope and scale of those matters actually were, but those close to him said he had been fond, in his later years, of reading novels by Jules Verne and the work of H.G. Wells. No one ever really knew that he still remained in the hunt for the mysterious ship that had once been code named Geronimo, keeping a silent, vigilant watch on the world.

Alan Turing continued his amazing work as a cryptanalyst, eventually trailblazing the development of the computer with his “Turing Machine,” and laboring on in logic and number theory. His work on artificial intelligence and encrypted speech transmission was also groundbreaking and well ahead of its time—and for good reason. The startling discovery that Geronimo had left one thing of great importance behind when it vanished set him on a search that was to consume him for the remainder of his days, and there were all too few left to him.

As for Novak and Osborne at FRUMEL Headquarters in Melbourne, they kept chewing on the rind of the orange they had been peeling that week. They did learn enough to know a great battle had been fought off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a battle the Japanese had apparently won, or so they read the tale when this strange enemy ship simply vanished, presumed sunk. But they knew it didn’t go without a fight. A plane out of Milne Bay had managed to get a photo of a large and dangerous looking Japanese battleship, obviously bearing the scars of a major battle as it slipped by, escorted by a gaggle of cruisers and destroyers. It was Admiral Yamamoto and Yamato, bound for Rabaul and then Kure. The Americans never knew much about the Yamato incident, for they knew very little about the ship itself, or its sister ship Musashi, until many years later.

On the Japanese side, when the cruiser Tone made port at Rabaul, the crew was so distraught with the tale of a demon ship from hell that they were relieved to a man, scattered throughout the empire, and the ship was re-crewed. Yet ever thereafter the Tone was whispered to be a ghost ship, and men reported seeing strange lights in her dark and twisting corridors, and they had bad dreams. The ship would survive until July of 1945 when she was sunk in Kure harbor by planes off the USS Monterey. The final stroke was a rocket attack by planes from the resurrected carrier Wasp, on July 28, 1945, exactly 76 years before Kirov had first vanished.

Captain Sanji Iwabuchi was sent to the Philippines in some disfavor. He would never recant his story, that his ship had finally found and rammed the phantom enemy they had come to call Mizuchi, and sunk it that night. And he went on to stubbornly disobey his orders to withdraw from Manila years later, leaving tens of thousands massacred in the fighting there. No one else much believed his tale, though they never dared say as much to Iwabuchi’s face. Yet the odd thing that no one had been able to explain was the slightly crumpled bow of the cruiser Tone, damaged in that first split second of her harrowing encounter with Kirov, before the Russian ship slipped out of phase, sailing away on the cold drafty seas of time.

The Japanese never knew what had so bedeviled them in the Coral Sea. They sailed Yamato home, casting a cloak of shame and secrecy over the ship again as they set about to repair the extensive damage. No announcement was ever made to the public about the disaster, or the greater loss of three fleet carriers in the Solomons. Strangely, Kirov had restored the balance of power to what it might have been after the Midway battle that had never been fought. In some bizarre calculus known only to herself, Mother Time had balanced her books.

A young Ensign named Mitsuo Ohta had been deeply impressed by the dreadful “suicide rockets” the enemy had deployed. Watching them dance over the sea in their evasive maneuvers, and knowing nothing of computer controlled guidance systems, he could only conclude that they were piloted. He soon approached students of the Aeronautical Research Institute at the University of Tokyo for help in designing a similar weapon. His plans were submitted to the Yokosuka research facility, and the Navy Air Technical Arsenal began to produce prototypes of a rocket powered piloted cruise missile they would call the Okha, or Cherry Blossom. Its only liability was that the three solid fueled rockets it used were not yet powerful enough to launch it from a ship.

Instead the rocket had to be carried by a twin engine bomber to within 37,000 meters, and then it could launch to make its daring and final high speed run to the target, with a human pilot standing in for the missing computer and radar controlled brain that had guided Kirov’s missiles. These developments saw the weapons deployed months early in the Pacific, though they were too few and still too late to tip the balance of power and salvage Japan’s lost war. The pilots who flew them damaged and sunk several US Ships, the last cherry blossoms falling from the dying tree of Japanese empire, but American gunners at sea came to call them by another name: Buka, the Japanese word for ‘fool.’

And so the war, the long terrible Second World War, played out much as it had in the old history that Fedorov once knew. The industrial might of the U.S. put one carrier after another into the Pacific, and the steady advance of the Allies was once again a certainty—only things ended differently this time. The Americans had seen firsthand what the horror of nuclear weapons would be, though the public never knew about it. The loss of the Mississippi and the other ships in TF-16 was not enough to prevent them from building their own bomb, but it was enough to prevent them from eventually dropping it on Japan in 1945.

For his part, Admiral Yamamoto did not die in a plane crash, shot down by P-38s in April of 1943. The soup of the history was stirred just enough by Kirov to change his personal fate, and it also changed the whole character of the war in the Pacific as well. When Germany was finally defeated, Yamamoto had been instrumental in persuading the Army and High Command, and the Emperor himself, that Japan should lay down its sword, now and forever.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happened. Task Force 16 had been enough of a peek inside Pandora’s jar. Instead the men of that brave new world reached in and drew out that one last thing at the bottom of the jar, Elpis, the Spirit of Hope.

Time had a way of smoothing over and healing the wounds the ship had made in the history of WWII, like the endless waves on the shoreline slowly blotting out the footprints of a solitary man. Only one thing remained to be done, or undone, and this time Kirov had passed the test. It was to be a new world now.

Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan was thousands of miles away, giving Admiral Volsky and his officers a good long time to think how they might explain the damage to the ship, her hull number and insignias all painted over, her weapons inventory depleted, and the presence of old twenty millimeter rounds in her hide, weapons that had not been fired for almost a century. In the end it was determined that the rounds could be found and removed, the hull number and insignia restored, and the ship would claim damage from the accident that did, indeed, send the submarine Orel to her death.

As for the missing missiles, Volsky had his story well in hand: live fire exercises. That was what the ship had been sent out to do in the first place, and then it was to have sailed to Vladivostok in any wise to replace an old cruiser there and become the new flagship of the Pacific Fleet. In fact, Admiral Volsky had been slated to assume command there when the ship arrived in any case, replacing Admiral Abramov.

Radio failure was a convenient icing on the cake they baked to explain why they never called for help until they arrived in the far east, a long month later. As to why they did not simply sail their damaged ship home to Severomorsk, Volsky’s power and prestige was enough. The Admiral passed it all off to the Russian Naval Command as a perfect opportunity to train his crew under more exacting conditions, simulating circumstances of a real wartime footing. He had simply chosen not to return, and continue his mission to the Pacific. An Admiral at sea is second only to God himself, and no one could question him and prevail. Suchkov could criticize him roundly, and demand his resignation, but old “Papa Volsky” was too well established to be easily pushed around, and too well loved and respected.

There was, however, considerable mystery surrounding the fact that Kirov had managed to complete her journey undetected by the normally vigilant forces of NATO. Volsky suggested that they claim to have tested and deployed a new regimen of special jamming signatures to hide the ship, but alas the system had been damaged in a small electrical fire while they were in the Pacific. “They’ll probably end up calling us the Ghost Ship,” said Volsky, “and it would not be too far off the mark.”

Before they returned to Mother Russia, they had a long discussion about the reactor core, and Rod-25, and why it might have caused the strange displacement in time. In the end it was left a mystery, something they knew they could never determine on their own, and something they definitely decided could never be revealed to the engineers back home. Admiral Volsky told Dobrynin that he would stay in close contact with him on the matter, and the engineer devised a plan.

Then the Admiral sailed resolutely east to find his island, and the crew took a much needed shore leave on a mostly deserted speck in paradise, to their great satisfaction.

Days later they made a careful inspection of the ship, held long discussions with the crew about what had happened, and let it generally be known that the whole event was to be forgotten and never spoken of again. They were a select legion of ghosts and goblins now, and the crew of Kirov became an elite and exemplary unit, never breaking ranks on the secret pact they had made with one another. What would anyone believe if they ever attempted to explain it with the truth of what had happened? They would be thought insane. As the ship approached Vladivostok they purged their logs, video footage and anything else that might have left an odd fingerprint of time on their intrepid ship. It was said to be a residual effect of the “Orel incident,” the files damaged by EMP burst that had darkened the ship’s systems for many days.

Fedorov secreted away a digital copy of the log books in a small memory key, and also carefully removed the newspapers they had found on Malus Island. A clever man, with much foresight, he went to the ship’s library and quietly “took care” of any volume that might reveal a history that might not be in accord with the record written on the world they were returning to. He did keep a very few cherished volumes, however, in a dark and secret place. In particular, he coveted his old copy of the Chronology of the War at Sea, for he found its version of the history was markedly different from the narrative described in the very same book as published in the “new world.”

Admiral Volsky thought he might retire some years after his return and lived out the remainder of his days on one of the Pacific islands he had yearned for all his life. Vladimir Karpov also found that idea appealing, tired in the service of war. He thought he might slip quietly away into a life of his own, a changed man, and some years later look for a wife, having finally found the capacity to love. Doctor Zolkin would leave the ship In Vladivostok, and take up a residency in the Naval hospital there. Many of the ship’s officers and crew also found they wanted nothing more to do with mishmanny, missiles and the military. They had seen all too much of the fire and heat of war, and now sought out the better things of life, meaningful work, good friends, good food and drink, a love if they could find one, and time with a good book, or in a garden.

There was only one loose end that they could not account for, though Anton Fedorov spent many long hours trying. What had happened to Chief Gennadi Orlov? Where did he go? What effect, if any, did he have on the history that Fedorov could now spend long quiet years re-reading, re-learning, much to his delight? His curiosity and diligence would become a saving grace for the world, though he did not yet know that as he stood on the weather deck when the ship first returned to Vladivostok harbor. Kirov was coming home, but it would not be the last time she would see the fire of war.

As it turned out, fate was not so kind to Orlov. Yes, he found a new life as well after he jumped from the KA-226 that day, yet it was not the life he had imagined. Time, fate, and the British Special Intelligence Service had other plans for him. But that, dear reader, is another tale.