Altered States k-9

by John A. Schettler

  “Try to verify that news feed you heard,” said Volsky, “and nail down our exact position in time. That would help. You must be able to find out what band BBC was broadcasting on. See if you can listen in on that, Mister Fedorov.”

  “I’ve listened on shortwave 6195 and 9740, sir, but atmospheric conditions are not good at the moment. We are also detecting jamming. The Japanese naval facility at Sasebo is uncomfortably close, and if we were reported as an unidentified warship someone is likely to investigate.” The implications were not lost on anyone present.

  “Here we go again,” said Volsky somewhat dejectedly. “They investigate, we try to remain silent and undetected, they get pushy and then we are forced to defend ourselves. The next thing we know we are at war with Japan. Well, I think we should contact Kazan at once and make arrangements to get those spare control rods over here. I believe we must put Chief Dobrynin’s plan into action as soon as possible.”

  “Right sir, but there’s one more thing.”

  “Yes, Mister Fedorov?”

  “If this works, I very much doubt that we’ll both end up shifting to the same place in time, sir. In fact, I would guess that the odds on that would be very slim. I believe the two rods will definitely perform differently as the Chief suggests.”

  “Then we may lose contact with Kazan altogether if we do this?” Volsky was obviously troubled.

  “Yes sir, and Kazan may find itself adrift in time even as Kirov has been. Captain Gromyko is a good man from what I have seen, but Kazan is a powerful weapon, perhaps even more powerful than Kirov now. We have seen what a temptation that has posed.”

  “Yes, he will have to listen to the Siren Song just as we have. Well, I do not think I can put the wax back in his ears, Mister Fedorov. He already knows the truth, even if his crew remains oblivious of our real situation. Everything we propose here now is a grave gamble, and perilous to even contemplate, but we must decide. Either we stay together here, and that will mean we are the most powerful force in the sea if this is the 1940s again. Or else we part ways, and each of us vanishes into the ether again to points unknown.”

  Rodenko returned just as the Admiral was finishing, his face betraying news held in hand. “Whatever you decide, we must be quick about it, sir. Gromyko called to report fast screw noise off to the south and on a bearing to intercept our last reported position. We have no long range radar returns from the south yet, but Kazan’s sonar can actually hear things at a much greater range than the Fregat system.”

  “Then the contacts are still well over the horizon?”

  “Yes sir, but something is heading our way, and in somewhat of a hurry. I believe they may be fast destroyers or patrol boats. Their speed was estimated at just over 30 knots.”

  “How far away are they?”

  “Their sonar man is still listening, but he thinks the range is at least 150 kilometers at the moment. Assuming they are gaining on us at 16 knots, then they could be in visual range in about four hours.”

  “We may not be ready to initiate another shift in that time.”

  Dobrynin spoke up, offering to do what he could to get things moving again. “It will take about three hours to install both rods. I see no reason why we cannot make an attempt shortly after that.”

  “Very well,” said Volsky. “Do what you can, Chief. I will inform Gromyko of the plan.”

  * * *

  Hours later Volsky was weary, though unwilling to take any rest, except for a brief time when he went below to the sick bay to visit with Doctor Zolkin. There the two men had spoken briefly of what they were now attempting to do, and as always, the Admiral sought the council of his close friend and long time confidant.

  “So there you have it, Dmitri, we are about to pull the plug and go down the drain again. We hope to move forward this time, but we could slip into the past again. None of this has ever been certain, and we have never used these new control rods before.”

  “This has been some vacation,” Zolkin joked.

  “The problem is this…If I allow this, the two ships may be separated. One could end up in 2021, the other in 1990, or 1960. We just don’t know. In fact, Fedorov is of the opinion that it is almost certain that the two ships will not shift to the same time period.”

  “He’s a sharp young man. We owe him a great deal.”

  “We owe you a great deal, my friend. I have learned that it was you who gave Fedorov your ear when we were in the Atlantic and Karpov dismissed him from the bridge. You told him to return here for his prescription at 18:00 hours, and it was that happenstance that allowed us to get out of Karpov’s little trap here.”

  “Ah, yes, I had forgotten that.”

  “So you see, if not for your open heart, siding with Fedorov that day, we may have never been able to take back the ship.”

  “Oh I think that the crew would have sided with you in the end, Leonid. Don’t make me out to be a hero or saint. I have too many sins on my soul for either.”

  “Yet it was a matter of seconds in the balance there, and you were the lever on all of that. Then it all comes full circle and Karpov is again on the bridge ready to destroy the entire Japanese Navy in 1908-until you showed up.”

  “Now, now-”

  “Yes, Dmitri, I will call you a hero. You stepped onto the bridge and faced Karpov down, the first good man to stand up and do something.”

  “Yes, and I might have died for it if his aim had been better.”

  “That said, fate saw you at the heart of both these events, and so your part in all this was very significant. Would Samsonov have stood up as he did without your words, or seeing what had happened to you? All I can do is thank you for what you did.”

  “Well I should have acted sooner. Rodenko came to me earlier with his reservations about what the Captain was doing. I told him I would back him up if need be, but I left the matter with him. In all truth, Leonid, I believed we were marooned in 1908 just as we all did. That control rod was not on the ship and I could see no volcanoes about, so there we were, and likely to remain there unless Karpov used another nuclear weapon. Still, I believed Rodenko should make the decision as Starpom. I wanted to give him that choice first.”

  “That was wise, Dmitri. Well…what do I do? Should I go forward with this plan, with the risk that we will be separated from Kazan?”

  “What else is to be done?”

  Volsky hesitated, thinking, his eyes searching, head inclined as if he were listening to something far away. “I know what Karpov was trying to do,” he said at last. “He tried to argue it briefly when I called with the order to stand down here. The man believed he had the power to prevent the rise of the Japanese Empire that eventually led to the war in the Pacific. Fedorov tells me that war killed twenty million people, so this is a hard nut to chew on. I am sitting here with Kirov and Kazan. If we thought we were powerful before, with are twice as strong now. I realize that with these two ships I could do what Karpov was trying to accomplish. We now believe it is June of 1940. That means the Japanese have not yet launched their war plan, but I realized that, if I so desired it, I could stop them right here. I could make sure no Japanese troop ships ever reach their destinations, and there is nothing they could do to oppose me with the power at my command.”

  “So now the devil sits on your shoulder,” said Zolkin. “Yes, I suppose you could do something, but it would mean you would have to sink quite a few ships and kill thousands of more in the process.”

  “To save millions,” said Volsky. “Is that why we are here, I wondered? Is that why Rod-25 delivered us to this time and place?”

  “Leonid…This same bird had been on our plate ever since that first accident with Orel. It has always been a question of whether we should intervene or not to shape the days ahead. Fedorov, god bless him, was trying to put the eggs back in the nest, but I think it is far too late for that now. Save twenty million lives? Yes, it sounds like a noble cause. But we never fought with any of that in mind. I think we just fought to
save our own lives, as any man would.”

  Volsky nodded. “I said as much to the men on the bridge. We were here, then one thing led to another. War is war, so I am not surprised that the moment we were discovered the other side started taking shots at us. This will happen again unless-”

  “Unless you go find your island, eh?”

  “I suppose so. Yes, we need some mysterious island where I can hide Kirov and Kazan away from the woes of the world. I thought I had cut a deal with that British Admiral once, then we vanished again. It was Rod-25, of course, but we did not know that at the time.”

  “Well, do not waste your time looking for that, my friend.” Zolkin shook his head now. “No matter where we go, the world will find us. We will stick out like a loose thread in a well hemmed dress. Yes, it will be obvious to anyone who encounters us that time has slipped a stitch. We can jump from one place to another with these control rods, but one day they will fail us, and leave us somewhere, and on that day we decide all this, for good or for ill. Now, however, if you can take us forward to our own time where we belong, then I think you must try.”

  “Of course….But I am not so sure that world will be the same, Dmitri. Fedorov has been hearing odd things on the radio here. He gathers that the history between 1908 and this time has played out quite differently.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “The revolution seems to have torn Russia apart. In the last hour he has heard radio transmissions from Russia and they call themselves the Soviet Siberian State. There was something about a war being fought on the Volga.”

  “On the Volga? Then the Germans have already invaded Russia?”

  “We do not know yet. The news has been spotty. I have him trying to find a BBC broadcast now. In any case, I am thinking that if the china is cracked this badly here, what will the plate look like in another eighty-one years?”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Yes, and suppose we do try to go home, but it has happened that events were changed so radically that this ship was never built! After all, the original Kirov class missile cruisers were a product of the Cold War. That rests on the outcome of this war, World War Two, so if things change here…”

  “I see what you mean. This is very puzzling, Leonid.”

  “Fedorov thinks that our very presence here is proof that Kirov is built, but Mister Kamenski has plopped another fish into the soup. He has intimated that this world, the air we breathe at this moment, may be a completely different meridian of time-an altered reality that is the product of all our meddling. In that case then we have shifted farther away from home than ever before, even if we are closer to 2021 than we were in 1908. If we have slipped through some indefinable barrier and entered a new reality here and the future that progresses from this point may not be the same as that which built this ship.…Well it is frightening to think of this.”

  Zolkin had a grave look on his face. “I think we have been doing this all along,” he said. “Remember when we first reached Vladivostok and Volkov got hold of that list of casualties?”

  “Yes, I have discussed this with Fedorov and Kamenski. We found out those men were never born!”

  “True, but there were other cases, Leonid. Remember the suicide we had aboard ship after we docked? Voloshin, that was the man’s name. He had come to me with bad dreams after that nightmare when the Japanese ship went right through us while we were shifting.”

  “Yes, I think we all had nightmares after that.”

  “So I gave the man some pills to calm his nerves, but he hung himself-and not because of bad dreams. It seems he and his wife had moved to Vladivostok two weeks before we left Severomorsk for those live fire exercises. As soon as we reached port he and a few other crewmen went to the apartment, but now this is the strange thing-they said they could not find it! All the addresses on the street were changed and the building was not even there! At first I thought the men had simply gone to the wrong address, but they seemed adamant. The city was not the same. So I think we have been breathing the air of a different reality each time we have shifted. This is what I believe.”

  Volsky took a moment to let that sink in. “Then we cannot save it,” he said softly. “We never could save it-put the eggs back in the nest as you say with Fedorov.”

  “Leonid, men have looked to the future for generations with the idea they could build it, shape it, save it for their old age or their children and grandchildren’s sake, but they never could. Most of the time it was all they could do to try and hold it together in the moment they lived. That’s all we can do, my friend. This moment, for most men without ships that travel in time, is the only place they are ever at liberty to be. They say they do things for a better tomorrow, but what they really do is live in the here and now, whether good, bad or ugly, and they try to make it just a little more sane, and a little more comfortable.”

  “But we are at liberty to be somewhere else. That is the mind-numbing thing about our situation. The train is off the tracks, and we no longer have to follow it. We can move to another time-I can order Dobrynin to start the procedure in half an hour, and the moment we do this air we breathe, this sacred moment we once called the here and now everyone else is stuck in, well it just vanishes!”

  “So you get another here and now after the fog clears, yes? It’s no different than going to sleep tonight. You close your eyes, your thoughts linger, images drift through your mind, then you let go and drift away. The next thing you know it is tomorrow, only that day is no longer something waiting to be, it is right there in the palm of your hand. So what do you do? You wake up, get out of bed, and walk into that new here and now. You see, Leonid, we are all time travelers. We get the present in little slices, like a loaf of bread, day by day.”

  Volsky smiled. “Give us this day our daily bread…”

  “And forgive us our trespasses,” said Zolkin.

  “As we forgive those who have trespassed against us…” He took a long breath. “I suppose I had better get things moving. Dobrynin is waiting for the order.”

  “So what have you decided?”

  “Time to go to sleep, Dmitri. We may soon wake up and find Kazan is no longer in bed with us, but I don’t see that there is anything else we can do. If we stay here it will be a very long and sleepless night.”

  The Doctor nodded, smiling.

  Chapter 3

  Fedorov was on the bridge, finally hearing the news he had been searching for on the BBC. Nikolin was translating the English, and the picture of the world being painted was quite astonishing. When Admiral Volsky returned he came to the communications station to see what he had discovered. He saw his young ex-navigator sitting with a pad device, checking references as Nikolin fed him information, a perplexed look on his face.

  “Mister Fedorov, you look as though you are having difficulty balancing your checkbook.”

  Fedorov looked up, scratching his head. “I’m afraid I have bad news, Admiral. We’ve been monitoring BBC as you have asked. The date is June 11, 1940, just as I suspected, but the news is very strange. Some of it makes perfect sense to me. The British have just evacuated Norway, the German Army is in France, Poland has been divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. The big news of the day is the declaration of war by Italy against Britain and France.”

  “And the Soviet Union? What was this business about a Siberian State you heard earlier?”

  “That has also been confirmed, sir. From what I can gather, Russia has divided into numerous factions. One calls itself the Soviet Union in the west and the news from there is centered on Moscow. A second state seems to exist in the heartland of the Urals and south into Kazakhstan. News there came out of Orenburg on the shortwave, something about the 17th Airship Wing and Samara.”

  “Airship wing? That is very odd.”

  “Then we monitored that other source again, the Free Soviet Siberian State. But it wasn’t broadcasting from Vladivostok. The signal signed off at Krasnoyarsk. In fact, we could hear nothing
at all from Vladivostok, at least nothing identifiable in Russian. Nikolin says he has Japanese stations broadcasting on that vector, and the call sign is Urajio.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “I looked it up, sir. It is the Japanese name for Vladivostok. Apparently the Japanese Empire has established itself there, and extends from Korea, through Manchukuo and into the Trans-Baikal and Amur region.”

  “This entire sector is occupied by Japan?”

  “It appears so, Admiral.”

  “So Russia is divided. I cannot say this surprises me. It is a miracle that the nation survived the revolution in one piece after the Tsar fell.”

  “This would have to mean the civil war had a very different outcome. Perhaps the Bolshevik Reds were unable to completely defeat the Whites, and these other two states arose.”

  “That is a reasonable conclusion,” said Volsky. “And what of this fighting on the Volga? Have the Germans invaded?”

  “No sir. In fact, Soviet Russia is a declared neutral in the conflict. Instead there seems to be ongoing fighting between that state and the Orenburg Federation, and there is fighting in Samara, Saratov and the Don Basin along their common border.”

  “Well Mister Fedorov, the history did not survive Karpov’s intervention after all. We did what we could, but Kirov’s engagement there may have caused irreparable damage even before we snuck in with Kazan. Now the only question is what will happen if we try to shift again as planned? If the history is this badly fractured, I cannot imagine what the world might look like in 2021.”