Paradox Hour

by John Schettler

  Break off? He was not happy with the order, folding the message and slipping it into his pocket, eyes narrowed with thought. He raised his field glasses, looking to find the British carrier, but it was lost in a heavy roll of black smoke. The cruiser action had done one thing in buying Wells a little time, and now, to his surprise, Kapitan Heinrich saw an aircraft rise above the distant smoke, then another.

  That damn carrier is launching planes! Where are our own fighters? He could send a message and ask about that, but it would reveal his situation plainly to Lütjens, who would realize his Kapitan was not in compliance with his last order. Heinrich considered the consequences of that, and what might be gained if he maintained his turn and came around to continue the pursuit. With Schirmer still dueling with that last British cruiser, it would be some minutes before he could get around and fix his attention on the carrier again, and the action had seen his prey slip away over the horizon. But it was there. He had the speed to get after the damn thing, and clearly had the guns to sink it in due course. There was Gloucester, her speed down to no more than ten knots, and yet still afloat. He decided to claim his kill, report, and see if he could obtain permission to continue.

  “Torpedoes!” he said loudly. “Finish that cruiser!”

  Kaiser Wilhelm also had six 21-inch torpedo tubes, in two triple mounts to either side of the ship. He had come a full 180 degrees, and was lined up well for a good shot on Gloucester now. The three fish fired, and two would find their target.

  The resulting explosions would be enough to seal the fate of the light cruiser, battered by four heavy rounds, and now two good torpedo hits. Of the 807 men aboard, only 85 would get into the sea and survive in the wreckage.

  “Send to Lütjens. Sunk enemy cruiser and requesting permission to proceed against carrier on my horizon.” He folded his arms, looking at Schirmer now, who was beaming jubilantly with the performance of his guns.

  “We cannot spot the carrier through that smoke,” he said. Then the first of the Fulmars launched by Glorious came in low like an angry hornet from the hive, its guns blazing as Kaiser’s twenty 2cm AA guns got their chance to get into the action. They were joined by eight 3.7cm guns, and eight more bigger 10.5cm guns, a considerable flak defense for a single ship. The first Fulmar made its strafing run, but the second was blown out of the sky. Yet Heinrich knew the carrier would soon be launching everything it had, and the lumbering Swordfish torpedo bombers would be his next foe.

  For him the choice was simple. He could either obey his orders, break off, and find himself swatting at these British planes and dodging torpedoes for the next two hours, or he could go right to the source, here and now, and end this with Kaiser’s guns. He looked at the ships chronometer, seeing the time at 17:20 hours. Then he decided. He would obey his order, but ever so slowly.

  “Helm, come five points to starboard and ahead full.”

  He would come five points to starboard again in another five minutes, and make a slow turn while he continued to run for the enemy on the horizon. By his calculation, the greatest part of that slow arc would still see his guns in range of the enemy, and he would have his cake and hopefully eat it too. He had one last message to send—Coming round on 300. Enemy launching planes. Request fighter support. He knew he needed those Messerschmitts up there now, or his day would get very tiresome, very soon.

  * * *

  Aboard HMS Glorious, the news that Gloucester had been badly hit was not unexpected. Desperate times required desperate actions, and the first six Fulmars spotted on the aft deck roared right through the smoke and fire forward as they took off. They were going to be too late to help Gloucester, and could only make one angry pass at the enemy ship before climbing up to take station on overwatch. Now the torpedo planes of 823 Squadron were coming up on the elevator, and they would soon run the same gauntlet of fire and smoke, with the only headwind for takeoff being that provided by the carrier’s headlong rush at her top speed of nearly 30 knots.

  Wells could feel his pulse rising, and the heat of the action had sent that surge of adrenaline through his system. He wanted to move, get his limbs in motion in response, and remembered that hectic moment when he was an intern on Admiral Tovey’s staff aboard HMS Invincible. No need to run, Tovey had cautioned him. A brisk gait will do. He looked for that well of calm that Tovey seemed to draw from, but could not find it within himself. It was all he could do to keep himself in one place, hands clasped behind his back as he watched the Swordfish come on the flying off deck. It was only later, when the urgency of the moment had ratcheted up yet another notch, that the Admiral had given him a wry look, and the words he spoke still echoed in Wells’ mind. “Mister Wells, now you may run.”

  It was that time now, time for every expedient measure against the hour, and the enemy that continued to bear down on him like the shadow of death. It was his hour again, as the first Swordfish sputtered to life and went careening down the long deck to wallow aloft through the smoke. There he stood, icy heat on him, commander of Force H. There went the second plane, up through the licking flames and aloft. Now they will do the running, he thought.

  Thunder rolled on the far horizon, and he knew his enemy was reaching for him again. The cold steel was in the air, rising up, plunging down, and soon it would find the sea, very wide and long, but a clear warning that Glorious was still in the gravest danger here.

  * * *

  Aboard Hindenburg, Admiral Lütjens received the message and frowned. Heinrich has the bit between his teeth, he thought, but he smells a kill here, and he wants to attack. That engagement was forced. The British reacted only to his own advance, that much is clear, and they’ve been hurt. So Kaiser Wilhelm has sunk a destroyer, and now a cruiser! Clearly there is nothing wrong with her guns, but now we have a carrier launching planes, the last thing I wanted here.

  “Some news, Admiral?” Adler was at his side, a curious light in his eyes. He could smell a battle as well, and the man was already quite perturbed that Hindenburg was nowhere near the action.

  “Kaiser Wilhelm has engaged as ordered, but they have not broken off. It looks like Heinrich has sunk an enemy cruiser to go with that destroyer.”

  “Great news, Admiral! Heinrich is pouring the brandy today. I knew that ship would do the job.”

  “Yes? Well unfortunately, it is not doing the job I asked of it. Kaiser was to break off if challenged strongly by the British. Now they are launching aircraft.”

  “Sir, we have the Goeben right off our starboard beam. Let me get word to them at once.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Adler. I can count. We have had three Messerschmitts up over us for the last three hours. She should have three more aboard, and the Stukas. Those six planes are there to prevent the British from using their air units to spot and shadow us. Now Kaiser Wilhelm has stuck its finger in the bee hive. Very well, signal Goeben. Tell them to send half their fighters to cover Kaiser, and then tell Heinrich to get his ship out of there at once. He says he is turning on 300 now, but I have a feeling he may be seeing stars with the success of his gunnery officers.”

  “But if he can get to that carrier, sir… It’s just the victory we’re needing now.”

  “And if those planes put a torpedo or two into his ship? What then, Adler? Then we are forced to turn about and go to his aid. We lose this perfect chance to slip by the British and get out into the Atlantic. Instead we could be tied up here for hours, and if Kaiser Wilhelm is seriously damaged…” The look on the Admiral’s face indicated his concern, and his displeasure over the zealotry of his subordinate officers.

  * * *

  Marco Ritter was just off his ME-109T when he saw a flurry of activity on the flight deck of the Goeben. The news reached him quickly enough. He was going back up to relieve the pilots flying top cover. Those planes were now heading south to cover the Kaiser Wilhelm, where a battle was said to be underway and rumors were flying as high as the planes.

  “Have you heard, Marco? Kaiser has sunk two
British cruisers, and now he’s after that carrier!”

  “Well don’t just stand there gawking at me,” said Ritter. “Is my plane refueled?”

  “Give me ten minutes. The crews are reloading your guns.”

  Just enough time to grab some hot tea, thought Ritter. Then there is still plenty of daylight for hunting. I’m supposed to fly top cover, but I think I’ll ease over to see what Kaiser is up to. Heilich and Ehrler landed earlier, and they are already top side waiting for their planes. I won’t keep them long.

  The crews were working feverishly on the three Messerschmitts, but it was all of twenty minutes before they finally got Marco’s plane on the elevator. He took the ladder up. Wanting to get the blood flowing in his legs before he strapped into the cockpit again. Already a legend over Poland and France, his term as a carrier fighter pilot had only served to further enhance his reputation. But the work crews had been a little too hasty turning his plane around, and that was going to be another of those small little things in the stream of events that would have a subtle effect on the flow.

  Marco Ritter would find that out very soon.

  Part III

  Keeper of the Keys

  “Who goes there?”

  “The Keys.” answers The Chief Warder

  “Whose Keys?” the sentry demands.

  “King George's Keys.”

  “Pass King George's Keys. All's well.”

  ― 21:53 Hours, Bloody Tower Archway, London

  Chapter 7

  Fedorov could sense the veiled animosity from Miss Fairchild in the beginning, but as the meeting ensued, she came to regard him differently. Their mutual frankness, and the revelations they shared, had done much to ease the tension, and he soon came to feel she was now regarding him as an ally after all.

  Yet that last statement had shaken him, deepening the feeling of guilt he carried within. Calamity… that was quite a word for all they had seen. Was that what they had glimpsed in the empty, cinder black world the ship had visited when they first displaced forward in time? The shock of seeing that world certainly fit the description she had first shared—Grand Finality.

  The thought that Admiral Tovey had established this group he called the Watch was damning enough. A select group of people in the know, all nested within the Royal Navy, had kept a long vigil waiting and watching for the return of Kirov at some future point in their time line. They had given the ship a special code name—Geronimo, the name of a renegade Indian Chief in the American West. It was a bit disturbing to think of his ship and crew as a renegade, something to be chased after, hunted down, destroyed. But that is what the Watch was established for, and now this odd new circumstance that saw Kirov steaming side by side with the Argos Fire, a ship of the Watch, was an unexpected twist. Was it the first step in possibly healing and mending the damage they had done to the history? He could not know, though he hoped as much.

  Fairchild had told him many things that only deepened the sense of mystery and doom he felt. The revelation of how those messages and signals had come to members of the Watch from the future was most alarming. Yet now that he thought on it, he realized it was only his own sense of self-important arrogance that made him think time went no further than the era of his own life.

  We all know and believe in the past, he thought, because it is still alive in our memories. The future was another matter, always a great unknown, never seen but always predicted, and hidden with a shroud of darkness and uncertainty. We have the feeling that we are riding the crest of time, he thought, perhaps like a man or woman surfing on the shore. Our lives are carried inexorably forward by the wave of time, until we reach that final breakwater and the surf crashes to the distant shore. But at least a surfer has the eyes to see that shoreline ahead of him. In our case, we ride the waves blind, never really knowing what lies ahead, though we can hear the churning chaos of the wind and water.

  Yes, it never occurs to us that the future is out there somewhere, where billions of souls, unborn at this hour, are destined to walk the world, each wrapped up in their own lives, and creating events that others after them will regard as “history.” Kirov had already shown it could move forward in time. They had safely returned to their own time in the Pacific, with the foreknowledge of how the war would begin.

  It was then that I took it upon myself to try and fix everything we broke with this ship, and it started with fetching Orlov. Yet what else could we do? It was clear that the war was ramping up, even if we did spare the life of the Key West. There had to be something else that was acting as the seed of doom, and I foolishly thought that might be Orlov, the only thing from our world we left behind.

  No… He was not the only thing. We also left behind downed aircraft, battered ships, thousands of dead men, and the lethal haze of radiation over the sea. And we left behind a history that was perhaps fractured beyond hope of repair, even before I took that daring journey along the Trans-Siberian Rail to find Orlov. I did that as much to try and preserve that unseen future as to mend the broken past.

  That chance encounter at Ilanskiy was the great unexpected wrinkle in all of this. So now I learn there are other places like that, rifts in time, cracks and fissures in causality, so deep that a man can slip right through to another point on the continuum. They may have all been caused by that initial impact at Tunguska, and one by one, they were discovered, sealed off, and put under lock and key.

  Strangely, the Watch was knighted with the task of minding those rift zones, and each one had a key that could open the doors and allow access. The men and women of the Watch became the Keyholders, or so Elena Fairchild had told him. Yet they were not the ones who built the doors and set the locks. They were not the makers of those keys. They had come from the future, just as those strange signals had come to ships at sea during their long, lonesome patrols. And with those keys there had come a warning—beware another ship, beware a phantom intruder on the high seas of time and tide, beware Kirov.

  That was enough of a shock to him, to realize that his ship and crew were regarded as pariahs, outlaws, brigands. Now the revelation that those future voices were finally stilled was chilling to the bone. It meant that they would fail here, in spite of every effort. This time they had tried to make amends, first with Admiral Tovey and the Royal Navy, siding with Great Britain as an ally instead of allowing themselves to be drawn into confrontation. It seemed the only reasonable thing they could do, to try and preserve the Grand Alliance that had been forged here to defeat Nazi Germany and the other Axis powers, and by so doing, to preserve the future world that would be born of that alliance.

  But if it all fails, he thought, if those future voices fade into silence, then what do we do wrong here? What do we overlook? Elena Fairchild seemed to think it had something to do with that missing key, and by extension, that hidden rift in time that the key might reveal. The keys were important, crucial, and they must all be found. Yet she was as shocked to learn about Ilanskiy as I was to hear all of this. That must be the answer! Ilanskiy! Yes, she said the Watch knew nothing of that place, or its perfect alignment along a rift in time. If that was true, then perhaps those unseen men and women of the future knew nothing of it as well. That could be the one rogue element that results in the chaos she was trying to describe—calamity.

  A sudden heat was on him when he realized that he was the one who had discovered that rift. No one in the future knew about it—there was no key for that door. It was not locked away and guarded. But how was that possible? I have just told Elena Fairchild about it, and others know of it here. Certainly Sergei Kirov knows about it, as he walked those stairs to see the world Josef Stalin built, and made an end of that monster. And that was all my fault…

  Again the sense of shame and guilt was on him. He wanted to save the life of one good man, and that took the life of one of the greatest demons ever to live on this earth. Stalin killed and tortured more souls than any man who had ever lived. Some say Mao Zedong’s policies killed more, but for pure
deliberate murder, Stalin claimed the laurels. It was Stalin who said that death was the solution to all problems—no man, no problem, and he went about solving his difficulties by simply eliminating any man he perceived as a threat. Wasn’t it a good thing to rid the world of a man like that? How could it lead to this Grand Finality?

  He realized that there was no way he could learn the answer to that, yet at the same time he felt compelled to try. What are we here for, he thought, if not to try and find a solution to this mess we’ve created? But did we cause it? Is all this my doing, or simply the inevitable result of Stalin’s death? Did it take a man as ruthless as Josef Stalin to hold the Soviet Union together through the revolution and long civil war?

  That thought led him nowhere, because he had to believe that his efforts here had some hope of saving those future lives, and preventing the calamity that Fairchild spoke of. What was this Grand Finality? How could it be avoided? Did that possibility rest on the finding of these strange keys? Where were these other rift zones in time? Were they all caused by the Tunguska Event? Where did they lead? How deep were the fractures? How far back into the history did these rifts go? Did the fractures also extend into the future? Was it possible, for example, to get to that inn at Ilanskiy in 2021 and go up the stairs to another future time?

  His mind was flooded by a hundred questions like this, and the feeling that the sheer magnitude of this problem was beyond him. I tried to seal off that breach in time at Ilanskiy with that raid staged by Sergeant Troyak. Yes, I’ve led Troyak and his Marines about these last months thinking I could find some moment in the history that would make a difference. I suppose I did some good with that, and the presence of Brigadier Kinlan here was the great unexpected dividend—or curse. The consequences of his intervention here remain to be seen. Yet that all has something to do with Orlov, doesn’t it?