Second Front

Chapter 28

Fedorov was deeply worried. It wasn’t the sudden appearance of the Takami, which should have been enough to rattle him given all he knew. What else might the eruption of Krakatoa have shaken loose? Was Takami the only aberration that may have resulted from that massive explosive event? Beyond that, what further damage did it do to the integrity of the continuum as a whole? Time was very fragile now, he knew, though he also knew he was speaking metaphorically to think this.

Time was a dimension, like length, height or depth in the three dimensions that defined space. How does one fracture depth, or length? The answer, of course, was that such a thing could not fracture in the normal sense of the word, but it could change. The length of something could be shortened, depth could be made greater or lessened. These dimensions were not simply concepts, they were physical realities, measurable, and subject to a creed of arcane laws that came to be called physics.

Yet time did not sit apart from those other three dimensions. It was intimately woven together with them to produce what Einstein came to call “Spacetime.” While it still seemed strange for him to consider it, Einstein had theorized that spacetime could be warped, bent, curved, and in events like black holes, it might even break to the extent where movement from one point in spacetime to another was possible, vast distances covered with only minimal movement in time. Physics had proven all of this to be true, if anything mankind knew of the universe could ever be said to be a definitive truth.

So it was that the location of a process in spacetime could also change, or so his presence here in 1942 seemed to declare. It could move forward, or slip backwards along the continuum of the line of causality, something conveniently perceived by humans with their predilection for order. For men, one thing led to another, one moment to the next, even if that was merely a convention of thought, and the notion of future and past were only ways to describe what the universe was doing at a point relative to what it was doing now, in the “moment” anyone might choose to call their present. Words did not easily describe any of this, nor could the mind clinging to words and logic easily grasp it, but there it was.

All Fedorov knew was, that for the whole of his life, this progression from now, to now plus one, had been the slow sedate passing of the days… tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Nothing had ever disturbed it, but that was no longer the case. Now things were sliding all over the continuum, and the stability of their place in any given “moment” was no longer certain. Nothing was solid or predictable, and so he thought of time as being cracked, broken, fragile, and tending to even greater fragility with every slip.

The moment Fedorov was calling his present was now 1942, and he was deeply concerned over something. It wasn’t Takami, or the war, but time itself that he was musing on now. He looked about him, seeing a world that was clearly the result of actions he, himself, and others had taken in the past. Yes, there was Ivan Volkov and his Orenburg Federation, and here he was aboard Kirov fighting the Japanese in the Pacific—Japanese that now still occupied all of Primorskiy Province, including Vladivostok itself!

Karpov was trying to correct that historical aberration. He had already taken back Kamchatka, and was now successful in covering his invasion of Sakhalin Island. Then came the unexpected challenger, the hot missiles flying in a duel of 21st Century ships—certainly surprising and very dangerous, but not even a shadow compared to the peril he was contemplating now.

It came to him again, amid the jumble of things he dealt with each day, when Karpov had asked him whether there was any further risk of paradox ahead. He told him this seemed to be a safe time, because the ship did not vanish in August of 1941 as it had the first time around. He remembered how he explained it to Karpov.

“We vanished in August of 1941, sailed through that broken future to the Med, and then reappeared a full year later, in August of 1942, right in the middle of Operation Pedestal. With Malta gone, that history isn’t likely to repeat, let alone the fact that we are still here in the Pacific. We never vanished last August like the first ship.”

“Should we fear that date, August of 1942? Might there be another paradox there?”

“No… I don’t think so….”

Karpov nodded. “So then, if there’s no paradox to worry about come this August, what has you so spooked?”

“Just what I discussed with you earlier. We could do something, cause a change here that would knock out a key supporting beam holding up the future that built this ship. I’ve been thinking about that, and trying to discover what it could be, where the key event is that we must not disturb, and I think I may be on to something.”

At that point their discussion had disintegrated into a search for the real Prime Mover on all these events. Was he to blame, or was it Orlov, or Karpov? Everyone had an opinion. But what was time doing here? Orlov’s sudden awakening to the knowledge of events they had lived through in the Med was also disturbing, and as Fedorov considered those things, he lined up the dominoes in his mind, getting more anxious with each one he placed. Orlov jumped ship… I tried to kill him to erase him from the continuum, but he survived. Then, once we got back to Vladivostok in 2021, I tried to go back and rescue him, all with the aim of preserving the integrity of the history I knew.

That was a story that spun off in entirely unexpected directions, and it all had to do with Ilanskiy. It was there that I fell through to 1908, the Tunguska event, and there that I met Mironov. I effectively killed Josef Stalin with a single whisper in Mironov’s ear. Volkov’s pursuit also brought him to Ilanskiy, and in that, the Orenburg Federation was born. All of that depended on Orlov jumping ship, but that won’t happen now, even though it was a root cause that gave rise to the world we’re sailing in here.

Orlov jumped ship, and now he tells me how he leapt out of that helicopter, and I remember the ship’s logs on that clearly—18:30 hours, on the 13th of August, 1942. This entire world depended on him surviving that jump… and I put five S-300s in the air to try and kill him before he could leap to safety. My god, this is what happens when a missile fails to get its target. This whole broken world is the result. Now the real problem asserted itself in his mind.

It’s already late September. Orlov should have already jumped ship by now, but the world is still here. If this history is re-writing the old, like the Mona Lisa painted over some older image on the canvas, then how can this world still persist? It depends entirely on Orlov’s jump, but that didn’t happen. Could I be wrong about the importance of that event? Then something struck him like a thunderclap. He was wrong. It wasn’t August 13 that mattered!

His heart was racing, and a queasy feeling of utter peril clamped down on him. Orlov’s jump didn’t matter. That’s not where the history really changed. It was something he did after that, and something I did in response.

I’ve been worried we would come to some essential pillar holding everything up, and then take some action to topple it, and this entire world along with it. But that’s not how it will happen. It will happen by inaction, by Orlov failing to do something he did in the past… by me failing to react. then all the dominoes that fell from his earlier act come tumbling down. There would never be a reason for me to go after him, to ever meet with Sergei Kirov, or for Volkov to ever pursue me on the Trans-Siberian Rail. There could never be an Orenburg Federation.

His heart was pounding now, for time was creeping silently toward the real moment of truth. Tomorrow was the 27th of September, 1942. The world here held together until now because Orlov was just reveling in the bars and brothels of Spain this last month. He was picked up, put on a ship, and made his way to the Black Sea. But soon, in just a few days, he does something that truly matters, and when it is decidedly clear that can’t happen, then time is in a real quandary. Then the meridians of fate diverge, and the history of these events moves forward on a line that takes it farther and farther from the time line that created it. How far can it go before Time realizes it is an impossible dead end, a line of causality that leads nowhere—a world that must end? My god, I was wrong! I told Karpov there was no risk of paradox here, but I was wrong. We’re facing it all again—another Paradox Hour—September 30, 1942!

What can I do? The question pulsed at his temples. What can I do to create a situation here, on this timeline, that might justify or underpin its continuation? Yes, that was the key. Where Orlov failed to act, I must act in his place. In fact, I’m the only one who can act now to preserve this line of fate. I’m the reason things haven’t already fallen apart here, because I know exactly what I would have to do. Time has been waiting for me to choose.

With that thought he was off at a run, heading for the officer’s dining room where he knew he would always find Karpov at this hour. There was so little time, and so far to go, but if he failed to act, if he failed to get there in time….

“Settle down Fedorov, you’re working yourself up into a fit. Here, drink some wine and catch your breath. Now what is it that has you so upset?”

He went over the whole thing with Karpov, his unreasoning fear, and then the desperate attempt to discover where the key lever was on these events. It was just days away now, on the 30th of September.

“More of your crazy time theory? You are saying that this date is some kind of trip wire, and the whole world is about to blow up? How can I believe that?”

“Yes, it is crazy, and I’m not sure what we can expect. All I know is that the last time we faced a situation like this, bad things happened. The ship itself vanished!”

“I thought you said that was because of the imperative of its first coming. We don’t have that now in this situation. We steered north for Murmansk, not south into the Denmark Strait. That was a major point of divergence—yes? You see, I’ve thought about all of this as well. Remember, I faced the wrath of time alone aboard Tunguska, and… well… here I am, enjoying this nice cut of meat. You should try it, Fedorov. It would do you some good.”

“Eat? With all this in the air? No, we’ve got to work this through—determine what we can do about it. I have a plan.”

“A plan? Good Lord, Fedorov, I’ve heard that one before. It was your crazy plans that set all this in motion.”

“I thought that once myself, but no longer. In one sense, yes, what you say is true. But a man must have a reason to take action, and without Orlov jumping ship as he did, I would have had no reason to go after him.”

“Alright, I argued this myself when you were looking so glum the other day. So what are you saying—Orlov caused everything, and now he can’t raise havoc here by jumping ship?”

“Yes.”

“And because of this, the world we’re in has no basis to even exist? What? Do you expect it all to simply vanish tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow,” said Fedorov, settling down now, and taking Karpov’s advice to quaff down some wine. “In three days we reach a critical point in this whole story. It wasn’t simply Orlov’s doing, it was mine.”

“There you go again.”

“Hear me out,” Fedorov raised a hand. “Alright, Orlov jumps ship. I fired those five S-300s at him, on your urging, and we think we got him. So what reason did I have to take any further action at that point? None. It wasn’t until I was doing that research back in Vladivostok, and came across that letter he wrote, that I had reason to suspect he was alive.”

“Letter? Ah… I remember now, the letter from a dead man. Orlov kept a journal, and somehow a page turned up on the Internet.”

“Exactly! In that letter he talked about where he was, and what had happened to him. And he dated it—30 September, 1942. That was the critical act, the writing of that letter. On that day, Orlov created evidence of his existence in the past, and as fate had it, I found that evidence. We had other clues as well—remember what Nikolin said about that card game he played with Orlov before he jumped ship?”

“Yes, yes—Nikolin, Nikolin, Nikolin, you lose.”

“Correct. So we got clues of his existence, but that letter was the real key. It gave us an exact time and place where we could find him—Kizlyar, on the 30th of September, 1942, and with that evidence, I hatched the plan to go rescue him. So you see, the key date is September 30. That’s the day I was convinced we had to take action, and we both know how that all turned out.”

“Alright, so what are you saying now, that the world will end on September 30 if we take no action? Let me humor you and grant you the fact that we may be facing some kind of paradox here. How can you be sure anything will happen on the 30th of this month? Why not on the day you actually did take action, the day you put the plan in motion and shifted back from the Primorskiy Engineering Center? Even then, your arrival in 1942 was prone to any number of outcomes at that point. Anything could have happened. You might not have even stopped at Ilanskiy as you did.”

“But I did stop there, and something tells me that was fated.”

“It was mere happenstance, Fedorov.”

“Was it? Think… What are the odds that Ivan Volkov also stops at that inn in 2021. I used the back stairway, and so did he, not once, but twice to reach the year 1908, just as I did. And why did the ship fall all the way back to that same year when that Demon Volcano erupted?”

“I ended up in 1945,” said Karpov.

“And after that? You got into trouble there, didn’t you, and you used a nuke.”

Karpov pursed his lips. “What of it?”

“Then where did the ship go? To 1908, that’s where. Don’t you see? Shifts to this time in the 1940s are linked in some odd way to 1908. It’s as if that year is a kind of magnet. Everything falls through to 1908, but we’ve never gone back any farther than that, not in all the many shifts we’ve tried. It’s always somewhere in the 1940s, and then back to 1908, just like the stairway at Ilanskiy. Well, I think I know why—the Tunguska event. That’s what set all this time business in motion. I think that was the blow that first shattered the meridian. We’ve got residue from that explosion right here aboard ship, in Rod-25, and we both know what it causes when we mix it with a nuclear reaction. And when I sent Troyak and the Marines to try and destroy that railway inn, who finds something odd in the taiga when their airship gets blown off course and ends up on the Stony Tunguska? Orlov! See how all of this is wound up together?”

Karpov nodded. He was beginning to see Fedorov’s point now, as he had thought about all this for many hours himself. “You know,” he began, “I once contemplated simply going down those stairs and finding Volkov—killing him there in 1908. Then again I also contemplated going up the stairway and killing him in 2021, before he ever discovers it. Then I changed my mind, and decided it would be so much better to fight him here—kill him here, and then live with that. You see, I have no intention of ever leaving this world—not to go back to the future. If I never see our time again that will suit me just fine”

Fedorov nodded. “Then you should realize that if I don’t take action to prevent it, everything here could be… compromised. I can’t say I know what might happen, but I can certainly feel it. Don’t you? Can’t you sense impending doom in all of this? All I know is what Kamenski once told me. Time is tidy. She likes things neat, a zero sum game when it comes to changes and variations in the meridians. She will find a way to punish those who challenge her order, and those who have cut through the loom of fate where she’s been weaving.”

“How very colorful. Well, she had every reason to get rid of me when we faced that last paradox, and look now—I am redoubled!”

“At the moment,” said Fedorov, feeling more than thinking in expressing that. “Hitler once did a jig in Paris. Berlin burned five years later. Have you considered what your situation would be now if one of those missiles had struck us?”

“Certainly, but none did. Our defenses were simply too good—I was simply too good, and if this Mother Time you speak of so fancifully wants to pick a fight with me, she’ll regret it. That said… what is it you propose?”

There was always a crack in Karpov’s brave outer face, and Fedorov perceived one here. He understands what I’m saying, he thought. But what should we do?

“Admiral,” he began, “unless you want to see our situation here fatally compromised, you had better heed what I’m telling you now. Here is what I have in mind.”

Chapter 29

“Ilanskiy,” said Fedorov. “That’s the key to this whole situation. We both know that. From there we have absolute power to effect changes in the timeline.”

“I have absolute power, not you, Fedorov. I control Ilanskiy. All you could think of doing there was sending in Troyak and his Marines to blow the place to hell. Well, I remedied that. It’s been rebuilt from the original plans, and I had the advantage of taking some very accurate measurements… in 1908. Yes, I was there myself, Fedorov. There are things I haven’t told you.”

“You went down those stairs?”

“Not exactly. But you realize I spent a good long while in 1908 before you showed up with your submarine.” Karpov lied now, leading Fedorov to think that he went to Ilanskiy after the ship took him back to 1908 to have his argument with Admiral Togo. He did not want to get into the strange shift he made aboard Tunguska, or how he consequently flew to Ilanskiy at that time.

“So what would you do if you could utilize that stairway again? How do you propose that we can somehow shore up the reality of this world? Yes, I understand your logic. Orlov doesn’t jump ship, you never go back after him, and you never meet Sergei Kirov. Volkov never goes after you. Stalin survives, and this world looks entirely different. Russia is not divided, and we get a situation that looks very much like the world we came from. Well isn’t that what you might wish for? Isn’t that what you’ve been striving to re-create all along as you defended your precious history?”

“It’s too broken now,” said Fedorov with a shrug. “I realize I can never restore things as they once were.”

“But you believe time can do this? You think it will rearrange all the pieces on the board and this little chess game will look quite different come the 1st of October, with Stalin crowned King again? That should suit you fine, because the position would be much like the one we left behind in Severomorsk. Then again, you might just get your wish and save your history by doing nothing here. Let the impossibility of this meridian stand, and leave it all up to time to fix things. If you are correct, them this meridian, as you call it, leads time nowhere. There is no foundation for it at all. Yes, I understand the threat quite well. It’s just that I can’t see how time could do anything on such a grand scale to alter this world like that—eliminate it, annihilate it, start everything new. That is what would have to happen here—complete and utter annihilation. That’s not very tidy, Fedorov. Do you really foresee something like that?”

“Hasn’t it already happened once?” said Fedorov. “Where is Stalin? The world we came from, that entire history, is completely gone. If that isn’t annihilation, then what is?”

“Not completely gone,” said Karpov. “Remember your analogy of the cracked mirror. Yes, in places we will look at this history and it will be impossibly wrong. Yet in others, it remains remarkably consistent. The Allies are launching their Operation Torch even as we speak.”

“It’s drastically different this time.”

“And yet they called it Torch, just as they did in the old history. That may seem like an inconsequential detail, but there are thousands of things like that which remain consistent.”

“But the longer this goes on,” said Fedorov, “the more distorted the history gets. Take the fighting on the Volga. That will look nothing at all like the old battle of Stalingrad. I tell you, it’s a line that diverges from the original, and the farther it goes, the wider that divergence becomes. Soon the world will be so completely changed, and that I cannot see any way this ship would have ever been built, and that is a real paradox. Is it not? How could this world exist, it the ship that caused it to come into being was never built? No, this time line leads to an impossible dead end. Time must deal with that—unless we do something first. We can possibly sustain it a little longer, if I go warn Kirov of his fate like I did before. That at least buys us some time, until the next paradox crops up.”

“The next Paradox? There’s more?”

“Oh, there’s more alright—you made certain of that when you ended up in 1908.”

“That was happenstance. I had no intention of ever going there when I took the Red Banner Fleet out in 2021. It was that damn volcano—”

“And that damn little nuke you threw at the Americans in 1945.”

“They deserved everything they got.”

“That isn’t my point!” Fedorov could not help just a little anger in his tone. “Suppose I warn Kirov and buy us some time. We were supposed to shift forward to 2021 soon, which sets that entire series of events in motion.”

“None of that has to ever happen,” said Karpov. “For example, knowing what I know now, I could easily avoid the Demon Volcano. You see. Free will, Fedorov. This isn’t all fated to reoccur. What happens is entirely up to me.”

“You misunderstand me. I’m saying that if it doesn’t reoccur, then nothing you did in 1908 will have happened. You don’t duel with Admiral Togo, Japan never invades Siberian territory in 1908, nor do I have any reason to go after you with Rod-25 aboard Kazan—so you don’t shift forward to 1938 as you did here. Understand? Your existence in your present position becomes unsustainable. You face Paradox again—did you enjoy it that last time?”

“Alright. I see your point. Saving Kirov just buys us a little time. We then have more hurtles to jump, and if we don’t? If I do nothing to try and resolve these problems, what then? You can’t believe this will all just end, come to a stop, vanish. It seems preposterous to even contemplate such an outcome.”

Fedorov thought, his eyes suddenly alight with realization. “No,” he began. “It won’t just end—it will loop! That’s what’s happening here now. This is the middle of a time loop. It’s the second time the ship has arrived in the past. The history is repeating, only it’s very distorted now. Time didn’t end, it just looped back on itself.”

“Interesting,” said Karpov, also thinking now. “Then you believe this is what will happen again? July 28th of 1941 is long gone. How could it start all over again?”

“Because in the course of these events Kirov shifted to a time prior to that first coming. That’s what set up the first paradox, and now we’re facing another. If I take no action, this time line becomes impossible in just three days, unless Sergei Kirov survives. Then it at least has some rational underpinning for a little while longer—perhaps long enough for us to deal with what comes next. But in three days, if I don’t act, Sergei Kirov’s existence here has no foundation. He shouldn’t be alive, because I will not have warned him of his fate. That becomes an insoluble problem for time, and its only solution is to loop the history back on itself, play the game again, and see if it can reach an alternative solution.”

“And if it fails to do so, what then? Checkmate?”

“No… Stalemate, a game where neither side can win. The old time line cannot be restored, the new one can have no basis for existence, and so round and round it goes—forever.”

“That may be our fate, Fedorov. This may be inevitable. What gets you so hot to do anything here? You yourself admit that saving Kirov is just a temporary measure. Is that what you have in mind? You haven’t even said anything about your plan.”

“Ilanskiy,” said Fedorov. “Yes. If I go there, and retrace my steps down those stairs, I believe I will return to 1908.”

“What makes you so certain of that?”

“I’m not sure, but I think there is a kind of connection with each traveler on those stairs to a given time. I went down once, and returned precisely to the point in time I had just left.”

“I did the same,” said Karpov, “only I was going up, and I saw what was happening in 2021 when the missiles started to fly.”

“So you retreated, just as I did, and you ended up exactly where you started. Who can say why? Yet it happens that way. So I think I would end up the same place if I went down those stairs again—1908—and on a very special day that year. I saw the burning light of the Tunguska event. I saw it happen, Karpov. And I sat down to breakfast with Sergei Kirov that morning, if only for a very brief moment. He was calling himself by an alias at that time—Mironov.”

“Then you think you would meet him there again?” Now Karpov leaned forward, his voice a near hush, and he was suddenly very interested. His flippant manner had evaporated, and the edge of bravado was gone.

“You think you would find Kirov there as before?”

“Yes.”

“And what would you do?”

Fedorov waited a moment. “If I told him about Stalin, revealed the date of his death by assassination, then he might act just as we know he has. He might kill Stalin again, and then we build one strong pillar of iron beneath the world we’re sitting on here.”

“Yes…” said Karpov, thinking it through now. “But what about Volkov? He’s the one who builds the Orenburg Federation. If what you said earlier is true, and we do nothing, then there is no reason for Volkov to even exist in this time line. He should vanish, or meet some other untimely end if time gets its way, and that would be a well deserved fate for him.”

“I’m not certain about Volkov, but remember, each person that walks that stairway gets somewhere, unerringly, and they are linked to a very specific time. For some, there is no effect at all. Troyak told me he followed my footprints down those stairs but nothing happened to him at all. He just met Zykov at the bottom and they continued their search for me.”

“Interesting,” said Karpov. “Volkov came down and said he met NKVD there at the inn. Then he went down a second time to reach 1908. I wonder, Fedorov. What day was that? Might his younger self be fated to come down this year, just as before? I must tell you that I sent Tyrenkov up once to see what we could discover about Volkov. We saw him, right there, getting off the train with his men in 2021. So what if he appears here in 1942 on the same day he did before he went to 1908? That would mean the version of himself here is facing paradox, just as we all were. Can there be two versions of Volkov here, just as I survive in this world with my brother self?”

“Hard to say,” said Fedorov. “Everything I once believed told me that things, people, could not co-locate. That’s why I think our ship vanished before Paradox Hour, to make way for the imperative of this ship’s arrival.”

“Yes,” said Karpov. “Time certainly shuffled the deck there, didn’t she? Someone slipped an extra Ace into the cards.” He smiled. “And we end up with you here, yet remembering everything that happened, a strong King in the deck, while everyone else on the ship is still in the fog of unknowing.”

That wasn’t true, Fedorov knew, but he said nothing about the fact that Orlov was also a Jack of Fate now, knowing all the things he lived through in the first coming of the ship. He got back to the question at hand.

“Then again….” Fedorov eyed Karpov, as if looking to gauge his mood. “There is another alternative, the opposite side of the coin. I could also see that Kirov never survives.” He let that stand there for a moment, again, watching Karpov closely.

The Admiral’s eyes narrowed, for this was something he had also considered. “You are suggesting we eliminate Sergei Kirov? Then we get Stalin back.”

“More than likely.”

“Why would we want that?”

“Because it’s what happened, at least in the history we know. And considering how this war is going, I have real doubts as to whether we can prevail in Russia. The Germans have linked up with Volkov’s troops, and now everything south of the Don is cut off. Those troops will have to live off the land, and there will be no reinforcements, supplies or equipment replacements.”

“Yes,” said Karpov darkly. “Volkov is already starting to shift divisions back to the Siberian front. He’s beefed up his position on the Ob River line, and started construction on five new airships. To make matters worse. We lost Angara last week. The reports are hazy, buy my Tyrenkov says he had information that the Germans have an airship program underway now as well. There was a raid north of Kansk, but the enemy ship slipped away before we could get stronger units up there to see about it.”

“Can you hold along the Ob?”

“For the moment. I sent a lot of manpower west to the Soviets—five Shock Armies. We’re raising more divisions, but the ranks are thinner now, and the factory relocation program is still underway. Production is starting to gain some momentum, but we’ve a long way to go. The Germans already have new tanks, much stronger than in the old history, or so I’m told.”

“Everything is accelerated in terms of weapons development,” said Fedorov. “I would not be surprised to see the Germans deploying rocket weaponry by mid 1943, and perhaps even jet fighters. This war is far from over, and we could still lose it.”

“Hence your suggestion concerning Sergei Kirov.”

“Correct.”

“How could we be certain that would restore the balance?”

“Stalin,” said Fedorov. “He was the strong hand on the back of the commissars necks. It was Stalin’s utter brutality that held the Soviet Union together as we knew it.”

“No argument there, Fedorov, but if he came back into this history, what would things look like here?” Karpov gave him a searching look.

“It’s likely that Kolchak would have been killed long ago, and all of Siberia and the far east would be Soviet controlled.”

“Which puts me out of a job,” said Karpov. “I’m not sure I like that. It hasn’t been easy to get where I am today.”

“Of course, but that is a likely outcome. As for Volkov, he was able to knock off Denikin and seize control of the White movement, but then he would be up against Stalin. In spite of Volkov’s edge in knowing the future course of the history, I might bet on the Man of Steel in that matchup. Suppose Stalin defeats him, treats Volkov like any of the other rivals he faced, and eliminates him?”

“That would solve our problem with the Orenburg Federation.”

“Perhaps. Stalin was a massive force in the history. Bringing him back will certainly change things, but it is impossible to predict everything from this vantage point. We’d only be guessing.”

“Yet this Mother Time you speak of might like such a change. She’d get her boyfriend Stalin back, and he might clean up a good deal of the mess we’ve created for her.”

“Right,” said Fedorov. “But with Stalin come the purges, assassinations, the gulags and slave labor camps. These were all the things that Sergei Kirov saw when he went up those stairs at Ilanskiy. His single act in killing Stalin was perhaps the bravest thing ever done in the 20th Century. But this is the result.” Fedorov extended a hand to the unseen world beyond the bulkheads of the ship.

“And what happens to us—you, me, the ship and crew?”

“I don’t know, but if I had to guess, I think we would phase shift.”

“What is that?”

“Remember how the ship pulsed in time on the earlier missions? We moved in and out of 1942, particularly when we were in the Pacific. Remember the cruiser Tone sailing right through us during one of those shifts?”

“How could anyone forget that nightmare.”

“Well, if we take any action in 1908, we must also act on this end of things. This ship still has Rod-25.”

“I’ve told Dobrynin to remove it from the maintenance cycle and store it.”

“Yes, but that order can be rescinded.”

“You’re suggesting we use Rod-25 and attempt another time displacement?”

“We must put the ship in play at the very same moment I go down those steps. Then all the cards are in time’s hand, and she can shuffle the deck and deal.”

Karpov shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not sure I like that idea.”

“What you mean to say is that you don’t like casting your fate to the wind like that, and putting yourself at the mercy of time.”

“I stared her down once before,” said Karpov, his tone heavy with determination.

“Yes, you may have, but no man ever escapes her final judgment. You are here for a while, Karpov, but not forever. Time is the fire in which we all burn—no exceptions.”

Karpov rubbed his chin, his eyes shifting about. He never liked to consider his own mortality. He had worked out ideas like this, thinking how he could eliminate Volkov with the stairway at Ilanskiy, but always decided against it. He told himself that he wanted to settle that affair man to man, and defeat Volkov here. He told himself that this was the world he built, and he was determined to Lord over it to the end of his days. Now he was looking at the prospect of losing everything—giving it all back to Stalin. He was once reduced to mere flotsam in the ocean until that Japanese fisherman pulled him out. Now he could lose everything he fought and strived for if Fedorov did this thing.

“And if you do this, and we choose life for Sergie Kirov? Then what?”

“I’m not sure how, but I think if I begin this task, and secure the rise of Sergei Kirov in place of Stalin, then time might find a way to account for Volkov here. She’d have to. I’ll be the culprit again if I do this. Who knows, perhaps I will not even survive the attempt. Time might find a way to get rid of me, and end my feckless tampering. As it stands, the 30th of September was the day I decided to act last time, and so we have only three days to work this out. I can choose to act, or not act. I can choose Stalin or Kirov. It’s all on me again.”

Chapter 30

“Not exactly,” said Karpov, folding his arms. His meat was long cold, but the wine was still good, and he took a long sip. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Fedorov. I decide what happens here, not you. My word is final, but let’s consider it from a practical standpoint first. How would you carry out this mission.”

Fedorov thought for a moment. “I take a KA-40 inland over Siberia, and rendezvous with one of your airships. I board that, and then it’s off to Ilanskiy. Easy enough.”

“Suppose you did this—repeated your warning to Kirov. How can you be sure he would ever act on it, or go so far as to kill Stalin?”

“Because I could explain all that to him, reinforce how important it would be. He was already pre-disposed to act that way. I think a little nudge in the right direction would do the job. If I do this, I have at least given Time some justification for the continuance of these Altered States, at least for a while.”

“Alright, and suppose we leave the matter of Volkov to time. What about the situation we’re facing here? I’m invading Sakhalin Island because the Japanese are sitting on a good chunk of Siberian territory, and all that happened long ago, after my sortie with the ship to 1908. How does time deal with that?”

“One step at a time,” said Fedorov. “First we save Kirov, then we work out how to deal with the paradoxes you set up with your shift to 1908.”

“We already know that Sergei Kirov fails to defeat Volkov or unite Russia. He didn’t fix it, so let’s consider the other side of the coin—you don’t warn Kirov, and he dies. Are you saying Stalin would correct all this? Would he take back the territory we lost in 1908, and do so before this war begins?”

“You’re asking me things I cannot answer.”

“But is that what you would want? Here I am trying to undo all the damage that happened from my ill fated sortie to 1908 and do exactly that. Don’t you want to get the train back on the tracks, Fedorov?”

“I don’t think that’s possible now.”

“Ah, you don’t think it’s actually off the tracks, but only diverted to another rail line.”

“Yes,” said Fedorov, “and it’s heading for a cliff. The Japanese are going to be more of an adversary than you think. They’ll fight you tooth and nail, even in defeat. They’ll force you to expend every last missile you have, and each time you confront them, you get weaker and weaker. Face it, Karpov. It will take the Americans to truly defeat them. You may take Sakhalin after a long slog here, but Vladivostok is quite another matter, and don’t think you’ll ever invade Japan successfully. That is what it would take to force their capitulation.”

“You’re forgetting I have three nuclear warheads aboard this ship. All it took was two in the old history. The Americans chose Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could choose Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka.”

“Chaos,” said Fedorov. “If you use those weapons we have no way of knowing what might happen. Time is so fragile now that it could shatter completely. You talked about that Japanese cruiser reaping the whirlwind. That’s what we would be facing.”

“Doom and gloom, Fedorov. All this talk of time shattering is mere speculation. You said yourself that you can’t really say what might happen, no matter whether we act or not. However, I do like one thing you said here. I like this time loop business.”

Fedorov widened his eyes. “What?”

“Yes, and don’t look so surprised. If that were to happen, how might it play out?”

“What do you mean?”

“How would the loop start again this time?”

“Well… I suppose the ship would have to move again, to a time before it first arrived. We all would.”

“Might we prevent that?”

“We might, but don’t underestimate time. If I’m correct, and this is the only choice time has, then it will find a way. Many of our shifts were involuntary.”

“In that case, what you said a moment ago would not be true.” Karpov smiled.

“What are you talking about?”

“I would survive. I wouldn’t die, would I? Perhaps you would survive as well. We would all just start things over, only just a little wiser—just as you did, remembering everything that came before. Don’t you see. This is what has already happened! If this loop repeats, then it happens again… and I live forever….”

Fedorov just stared at him, unable to believe he could be so selfish. “You mean you would let this time loop occur simply to sustain your own personal life indefinitely? My God, Karpov. You can’t be serious.”

“Now don’t get all huffy on me. I was only speculating. Yet you must admit, that this endless time loop might not be so bad, as long as we survive each time. A man could drink a lot of good wine—forever. He could eat well, have the finest women on this earth, over, and over, again and again.”

“Yes, you might see it as your nice private heaven,” said Fedorov “always in the know, satisfying every appetite, while the world spins through the loop, oblivious. Well, let me tell you that some very strange things could happen in that event. Your little heaven could start disintegrating before your very eyes. I’ve seen this. And beyond that, nothing would ever resolve. Your life would never reach a point of fulfillment. You would loop through these years, the struggle to win, but that final victory would never be grasped. If you ask me, that’s a nice private hell… over and over again.”

“Oh, you never know, Fedorov. Give me enough time, and I’ll find a way to win.” Karpov smiled, then set his wine down, considering the situation further.

“There is still the second alternative,” he said. “We could help time along and just kill Kirov where he sits there in 1908. If we go with the honey, and spare Kirov, then he might kill Stalin to justify this world. But then we’d still have all the other unresolved paradoxes to deal with. Furthermore, even if you do warn Kirov, there’s no guarantee he’d follow through as before and kill Stalin. You see? There is no certainty to that alternative. Too many things remain outside our direct control.”

“I see your point,” said Fedorov.

“On the other hand, if we go with the vinegar to catch our flies, we just make sure of things, and do Stalin’s work for him a little early by killing Kirov in 1908. Then Stalin survives by default. The history rolls forward from that point. He takes power, probably unites all Russia, gulags and all. That solves our problem with the Japanese, and he’ll probably get rid of Volkov for us in the bargain. As sad as it seems, Stalin could simply be our best move here. Could you do it, Fedorov? Do you really think you could go down those stairs and kill Sergei Kirov if I were to make that decision?”

“Decisiveness is often the art of timely cruelty,” said Fedorov. He was quoting the French dramatist Henry Becque when he said that, but still wondering whether he could master that art. That was what Sergie Kirov had mustered the courage to do when he went into that dank prison cell in Baku with a revolver and fired the shot that changed all history. Could he do that—and to Kirov himself?

What about the alternative? What if he simply repeated what he had already done once before in warning Kirov of his fated death by assassination. That would suit his temperament quite well, but he swallowed hard to think that he would be the man who made the same mistake twice to write this history. If he did that, and it was enough to justify the continuance of this time line, could they solve all the other paradoxes, and then find a way to win this war? If he chose the honey instead of vinegar, he knew that he was abandoning, forever, any hope of returning the history to its old course. Yet to do so, to kill Kirov and return Stalin to the meridian as Master of the Soviet Union, would cause wrenching, all consuming change here. He had no idea how that would all play out, but he had experienced some inkling of it on a smaller scale. It frightened him to even think on it.

“Timely cruelty,” said Karpov. “Yes, I like that, but I wonder if you have that in you, Fedorov. If you are correct, and we do nothing, then you say this time line is doomed to wither and die, or to simply loop about in circles forever. How can you be so sure of that?”

“Because I’ve seen how it happens—the withering—on the ship when we faced the last paradox. Men went missing. The ship itself seemed like it was having difficulty remaining stable. Even the structure began to warp and change. We phased and my boots got stuck in the deck, right there on the bridge. We had one man who was found half embedded in the deck of the galley—Lenkov. His torso was visible, but below that deck, there was no sign of the rest of him—until the Marines found his legs in a locker on the helo deck. Things were happening all over the ship like that. Then men started to go missing. Orlov disappeared, and others too.”

“He disappeared?”

“Yes… and I think I ended up vanishing as well. Time must have picked me up like a chess piece, and dropped me here, on this ship. Who knows why? I’ve asked myself that a hundred times. Perhaps it’s because I was fated to make this choice—to figure all this out.”

“So we either make our choice in this matter here, and carry it out, or do nothing and possibly suffer these strange effects you describe?”

“Not just us—everyone—everything. If we do nothing, and this meridian has no basis for continued existence, then it will begin to disintegrate. That’s what I think was beginning aboard the ship, but it would happen everywhere. Who knows how long it would take, the slow withering of this reality. And in that instance, it matters little whether we win or lose this war. Things fall apart, and that’s what could happen here.”

Karpov took a deep breath. Was this possible? It seemed utter lunacy, but Fedorov seemed so deathly serious. He had sorted through the consequences of their actions here many times, and he was often correct with his theories. But this? The whole world on the chopping block of time?

He considered the choice before them now. His inclination was to simply do nothing, and see what would happen, yet there was a part of him that had been tempted to take decisive action at Ilanskiy, and for a very long time. He had never quite mustered the courage to do so, and always found excuses to justify his timidity. Now, here was Fedorov, brave hearted Fedorov, ready to take on all Fate and Time.

Timely cruelty… Could he do this thing?

“If I send you,” he began, feeling like a man who was edging out to a precipice, “then you will not go alone. I will come with you.”

“You? And leave the ship? Who will coordinate the shift here? We need someone who knows the history of all we’ve done. If the ship reappears in some other time, it will take a well educated head, and a steady hand on the tiller to judge what to do—could you do that, Karpov? Could you do what is right for a change, instead of only acting to further your own interests? You wonder if I have that ounce of cruelty in me, as I wonder whether you would have an ounce of reason—or compassion, if it was needed.”

“Touché, Fedorov. Let me correct myself. I will go with you, but it will be my brother that makes this journey in my place. He’ll be on Tunguska when you get inland, and I’ll speak with him via encrypted radio to explain what we are going to attempt to do. As for timely cruelty, I have my doubts about your ability to follow through. But my brother will have no such scruples. Yes, timely cruelty will come easily for him. All in a day’s work.”

“I see… Then you’ve decided. You want me to kill Sergei Kirov, or at the very least to refrain from warning him as I did. You want me to leave him to Stalin.”

“You should want the same. It’s the only decision that brings us towards a solution here. It bends the history back as it was, gets the train back on the right track again. Unfortunately, Stalin will be back in charge, but I’ll find a way to deal with him later.”

“What? You? Deal with Stalin?”

“Believe me, Fedorov, that will not be as difficult as you might think. In fact, I think it would be much easier than trying to sort out all these impossible paradoxes. Yes. I said so earlier, and now I’m inclined to feel this is our only clear choice. Sergei Kirov has to die. He’s a maverick, an aberration, and because of the power he wields, history is all bent out of shape. I’m betting that one trip down those steps does us a world of good here. I’m betting we come out of our shift, find Volkov and his damn Orenburg Federation gone, Stalin back in charge, and the Germans on their way to certain defeat in Russia. There’s no other way, Fedorov. This is what we have to do, and I’ll send my brother self along with you to make sure it gets done correctly.”

“There’s only one problem,” said Fedorov. “Remember what I said. We never quite know where a person ends up when he uses that staircase. In some instances, it is like Old Faithful, and I’ve already stated that I think it will take me right back to the same time—June 30, 1908. But will it send your brother there as well?”

“I see your point…. We’ll just have to handcuff the two of you together. Where you go, my brother goes. Would it work?”

“I have no way of knowing,” said Fedorov.

“Well, is there any reason I could not shift back to that date?”

“That depends. You could not go to a time when you already existed in 1908. When did you first arrive there?”

“Let me see…” Karpov tried to remember, but even that was difficult. He did not want to think back on it, back through the pain of Armageddon, back to that time when he betrayed Volsky’s trust, and led the ship and crew like Satan leading his fallen angels in a war against heaven. Yes, he had fired his nuke. That’s when it happened…. He felt stunned at first, light headed. Then his numbed brain began to work again, and his senses began to assemble the clues in his mind—the light, the changing color of the sky, the eerie luminescence of the sea, and the hushed silence of the enveloping fog. He knew what had happened. They had shifted again.

“Yes… We ran across an old clipper ship, and they were sending us Morse Code. I had Nikolin signal that we had lost our ship’s chronometer, and asked for a current reading of the date and time. It was 10 July, 1908.”

“My God,” said Fedorov. That is just ten days after I arrived there.”

“Then if my brother goes with you, and you both arrive June 30, he has at least ten days to get the job done—correct?”

“I suppose so, said Fedorov, wishing he had never come to Karpov with this. He had thought he would be off to shore up Sergei Kirov’s life here, a man he admired greatly, in spite of the fact that he gave this ship to Karpov, betraying the trust of Admiral Volsky. Now he was going to murder him….