1943 (Kirov Series Book 27)

by John Schettler

  “What about Fiji? You were all dead set on clearing that before I went to Noumea.”

  “That will take time. I intend to squeeze them hard, and I’ll damn well contest the movement of any supplies to that island from this point forward. They know that, and the Kido Butai isn’t finished with us yet either. So a lot of this planning with the Marines will depend on what the Japs do. In the meantime, there was an incident at Truk yesterday.”

  “Truk? That’s their main Pacific support base.”

  “Correct,” said Halsey, “and it got hit—but we had nothing to do with it, and it certainly wasn’t the British.”

  “Well then who?” MacArthur tamped down his tobacco, and relit the pipe.

  “Intel thinks it’s that Siberian raider, the ship that was covering their landings on Kamchatka and Sakhalin. They’ve tangled with it twice already, but haven’t put it under, which surprises me, given the carrier power they could use.”

  “Interesting… How much damage did they do?”

  “Just a knock on the door,” said Halsey, “but the fact that they could even do that much is pretty amazing. This is the ship that is using those hot new naval rockets. Japs have them too, which is worrisome, because they’re pretty damn lethal against our planes. The odd thing is that no one can figure out how the Russians and Japanese could get so far ahead of us with that stuff.”

  “Russians?”

  “Well, we figure they were the ones that really built this Siberian ship. There isn’t a shipyard worth the name in all of Siberia.”

  “Well, it’s likely no more than a nuisance,” said MacArthur. “I don’t see how it could impact our operations here.”

  “True,” said Halsey. “But that damn ship could start an arms race and we don’t even have a ticket to the stadium. If the Japs start popping off fireworks and put missiles on all their cruisers and battleships, this war could look really different. At the moment, the deployment of those weapons seems very limited. In fact, our pilots report they were fired from only one ship. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. We need to be vigilant on this.”

  That was to be an understatement.

  Chapter 29

  “Admiral,” said Gromyko. “It’s time we came to a decision as to what we will be doing on this sortie. I think the boat has settled down now.”

  As far as they could tell, it had been September when they first arrived, making contact with Fedorov to arrange that rendezvous off the Dolphin’s Head. He never showed, but even if he had, Kazan would not have been found there. As it happened many times with Kirov, the shift back was somewhat bumpy. They appeared, then pulsed again, apparently vanishing into the ether. When the boat finally reappeared, months had passed. Their return to the past had been like a rock skipping on a pond, taking a short hop before it finally settled, and during that hop, they had taken on a new crewman, and a very important one—Admiral Volsky himself. 1942 was waning, and on New Year’s Eve, Volsky remembered everything.

  Since that time they had been up under the ice for a good long while. Even though they had excellent charts of navigable channels from the Kara Sea to the Pacific, they all dated to the year 2021, where global warming had thinned out the ice considerably. This was 1943, and for some reason, the winter was unusually severe. Gromyko had consulted the historical records, and found temperatures much colder than those recorded, most likely due to the eruption of a volcano in the South Pacific. His radio man had picked up talk of that, but he could find no historical reference for it either. Clearly they history, as they once knew it, was no longer reliable—nor were their charts for submerged transit under all that ice.

  Channels that should have been open were much narrower, and the ice was far thicker and deeper than they had believed it would be. This made for very slow going, easing along at five or six knots, and often slowing to a near crawl while sonar probed the way ahead. The only benefit of the process was that he would build all new charts for the ice in January 1943, though he did not see how he might ever use them again. So averaging no more than 120 nautical miles per day, it was going to take them over two weeks to make the transit. They would be under ice until they got all the way through the Norton Sound, and then down the coast of Kamchatka to the approach to Petropavlovsk.

  Gromyko had a mind to consider stopping there to take on fresh food for the crew, but he needed to resolve a political problem first. He remembered very well the mission he had been given by Kamenski. When the Director first proposed it, they thought he would have to try and find Admiral Volsky after shifting back to the 1940s. He had disappeared well before Kirov’s final shift, and had no direct experience of the events that led Karpov to seize the ship in Murmansk after its second coming. There was a good deal this version of Kamenski did not know at that time, but as they continued the discussion, an idea came to him.

  “A pity we can’t just send the man we have at hand here,” he said to Gromyko.

  “Excuse me?” said Gromyko, not understanding.

  “Volsky,” said the Director. “There’s a perfectly good version of the man right here, but he’s from this sequence of events, this meridian in time, and has no knowledge of anything that happened.”

  That was one thing Gromyko could not quite fathom yet.

  “Are you not from this same meridian of time, as you call it?”

  “Yes, and I know what you are asking me with that. If I am from this timeline, then how is it I know all the things I’ve been talking about?”

  Kamenski had given him a long and confusing explanation, and he had sorted through it in his mind for some time, remembering the Director’s words.

  “Time is rather fastidious,” he had told him. “She doesn’t like wasting things, and is very fussy about that. I was almost certain that my lease on life had run its course. Heaven knows, I’ve been given more than enough time in this world. But it seems there are more worlds than we think, and this is just another one. Fedorov wanted to know where the missing men were going. Where was Orlov and all the rest? Then he became one of those missing men himself. Yet time takes away, and time gives back as well. She found a place for him, as she just found a place for me when I vanished aboard Kirov. You can feel it coming, you know. You tend to feel a bit… insubstantial. For the longest time I thought it was that little treasure I had in my pocket, the key. You know nothing of that, but let’s just say it was a kind of lucky charm. I thought it kept me safe and sound, but now I think it’s just something that helps time go about her business.”

  “Director… I’m just not sure I’m following you here.”

  “Ah, forgive me if I tend to ramble on. The older you get, the more things you have tucked away up here, and time keeps pouring more tea in my cup. One day it will run over, but for now, I still hold it well enough. Let me put it to you this way. Suppose you were writing a story. You think you have it just the way you want, then you get an idea that simply must be given form and shape in the narrative. So you do a little editing here and there, and write a new chapter. At the end of the day, you save it, overwriting the old file with the new. That’s what time is doing. Well now, you would think your characters would have the good manners to forget the old file—the way things were before you made all those changes and additions to the story—but it seems they don’t, at least in my case. I’m a file that has been saved and replaced a good many times, but I remember each version of the story I lived in before. Yes, each and every one.”

  And that was the genesis of Kamenski’s plan. Gromyko had been told to put out to sea, run his control rod procedure, and leave things to time. Once he got back to the 1940s—if he did get back at all—he was to try and find either Fedorov or Volsky. The first thing he did was call on the secure channel Fedorov had given him, and lo and behold, there was Fedorov. He said he was in an airship, and arranged to meet with him, but he never made that rendezvous, and that seems to have changed everything—yet again.

  Now Gromyko finally understood what Kamensk
i had been trying to tell him with his metaphors about teacups and editing books. He knew it in the most direct way possible, because it had happened to him. The Captain had clear memories of leaving Severomorsk, running his procedure, shifting safely back and having that nice little chat with Fedorov. Then he turned in, eager for the bunk after a long day’s operations, and when he woke up to assume his shift in the command sail, everything was different.

  The boat was in a different position, the crew a bit confused, and they soon learned that the time had shifted on them as well. It was as if they had slipped again, some strange after effect from the magic worked by that control rod.

  Even his head was different, for in it now was a completely different version of his transit to this place! As he thought about it, he realized it must have been spawned by that errant remark made by Kamenski about having a perfectly good Admiral Volsky at hand. Now he recalled that plan in clear detail. Kamenski had put Volsky aboard in Severomorsk, confident at last that if he did send that version of the Admiral along, Time would sort all the rest out.

  “He’ll either get there, or he won’t,” Kamenski had told him. “If he turns up missing after you shift, it will most likely be because there is already another version of him there where you have arrived. Time won’t permit the two of them to cohabit that same milieu like that, and so the Admiral you take on board will simply not arrive with you when you shift.”

  “You mean he’ll just vanish?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Where will he go?”

  “Elsewhere. Never mind about that now Captain. Just worry about your mission. If he remains with you, all the better. Use the good Admiral to get close to Fedorov and that ship. If he vanishes, then look to find him at large somewhere in the world. Find him, or get to Fedorov. That’s the key.”

  But there was Volsky that morning, right on his boat, and in Gromyko’s head he could now remember two versions of this mission, one where he left Severomorsk on his own, and a second where Kamenski put Admiral Volsky aboard. Apparently, something had happened, like a train being switched to a new track, and now he was sailing on the meridian where Volsky had boarded Kazan at the very beginning, and all the new memories of that were now in his head. But how? It must have been that little bump we took on landing here, he thought. The shift was not complete. We appeared, then vanished again, only to reappear with Volsky aboard. Very strange.

  Gromyko didn’t know it yet, but something had indeed happened. Fedorov was behind it all. Instead of making his planned rendezvous with Gromyko, Fedorov’s airship overflew a hole in time, and he found himself back in 1908, right where he had intended to go in the first place. There he had the fate of all these meridians in his hand. The choice he made in that fateful encounter with Mironov, would cement the meridian that went forward from that moment. Time would allow many threads in her loom, but one day she must weave them all into one strand again and create the new Prime Meridian. Fedorov’s choice to spare Mironov, to spare Sergei Kirov, had decided the matter, and at that moment, a Heisenberg wave was generated that migrated forward, all the way to its real point of origin in the year 2021.

  This tiny outlier of change was very small, just the first ripple in a series of waves that would eventually sweep forward like a tsunami. Only one man was even aware of the change—more tea in his cup, or perhaps just one more chapter in his inner book—Pavel Kamenski. It was like a song that had begun on one of those old record players the Director was still fond of, and then the needle skipped, encountering a flaw, and was bumped back. That brief segment of the song played again, and only Kamenski knew why. So he realized that his plan to send Admiral Volsky might actually work now, because things had changed again. Fedorov’s mercy had changed them, though he did not know that at the time.

  So he sent the Admiral along, though it seemed that it would take some time for Volsky to wake up and have his own tired head filled with past lives—other versions of himself that had also taken this journey. To make sure that would happen, Kamenski slipped something into his pocket before he boarded Kazan—a small key. “Keep that safe for me, will you?” he had said with a smile.

  And Volsky woke up as well, and he remembered—remembered everything, all the events that had been lived and experienced by any version of his own self that was entangled with the meridian in which he now found himself after Kazan shifted—the new Prime Meridian, the line of fate and causality that Fedorov had assured by failing to kill Sergei Kirov.

  Now Gromyko had the whole thing tossed into his lap—the decision concerning the fate of another Kirov—not the man, but the ship. Kamenski had riveted that home….

  “For now,” he told him, “we’ll start with the things we have control over—the men, the ship. We start with Kirov.”

  “Well, what are we going to do?”

  “Go back and get them out,” said Kamenski with a smile.

  “Director, haven’t we tried that once already? Look what happened!”

  “Yes, that’s a point well taken. We still have to try, because if we don’t…” Kamenski stopped, set his pipe down, and rubbed his eyes. “If we don’t, Mister Gromyko, then this is all going to unravel, this entire present moment I’ve called home for so long. It all depends on things that happened in the 1940s. Don’t you see? Well, they aren’t happening—at least not as they were supposed to. Things are changing, and we’re responsible. Never mind about trying to stop the war that is still on our doorstep here. Now it’s about something much more. If we don’t get back there and put a stop to all this, then everything, and I mean everything, is going to come flying apart. How did that poet put it? Yes… Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming!”

  He looked at Gromyko now, and in his eyes there was a profound sadness, and a vast silence of finality. “That’s what caused it, the second coming of that ship to 1941. It created a loop, and if that doesn’t resolve properly there, if anything should happen to displace that ship to a moment prior to the time of its first arrival, then we face down Paradox yet again. Do this once, and you court a good deal of trouble, just as we experienced it. Do it twice… Desolation, Mister Gromyko, that is what we are facing now, complete and utter annihilation. The cold frost of infinity is out there, and it’s a savage end, a futile end to the whole damn world. And do you know why? The second coming, that’s why. Kirov went back, and now it’s gone back a second time. Understand? If that happens again, and again, and again… See what I mean? The changes are already starting to ripple forward in time. We don’t notice them yet, but I can tell. They may seem insignificant—different missiles for your submarine and all. That doesn’t seem all that earth shaking, but I assure you, it is only the beginning.”

  “You mean if we don’t get them back here safely…”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. The whole damn loop will spin out again, and each time it does, the changes become more and more catastrophic. Try getting a future like this one sorted out under those circumstances. Don’t you see? Normally it takes… time for the variations to ripple forward to the future. But soon the changes will become so pronounced that they will reach this time, even before events have concluded in the past. That’s Mother Time’s problem now, and it’s also our problem. We started it, and so we’ll simply have to finish it.”

  “But wait a moment… Didn’t you say this was, well, a different world, a different meridian of time here. Is Kirov’s intervention in your history recorded here? Could I read about it in a history book in your library?”

  “Very astute,” said Kamenski. “The answer to your last question is no—there is no mention of any of those events in the history of this timeline. But that hardly matters. You see, this isn’t the Prime Meridian. It’s just one of many possible alternative Meridians that could
arise from events happening in the Prime Meridian. That’s where Kirov is now, but the Prime is badly warped, bent out of shape, contaminated by all those missiles, and yes, nuclear bombs as well. It will change things, Mister Gromyko, and rather dramatically. It will change the fate of each and every possible meridian arising from those events—including this one. Understand? Kirov sits on the trunk of the tree, this is just one of the branches. But if you cut through that trunk, they all go down together. That’s what Kirov is doing—cutting through the Prime Meridian like a buzz saw. So we have to go back, get them out, and that failing….”

  He gave Gromyko those sad empty eyes again.

  “We have to kill them,” said the Captain, understanding the darker side of the mission Kamenski was handing him now. “Kill Kirov, the ship—there won’t be any magic tricks with a control rod this time. That’s the only way we can really be certain this loop you speak of could not repeat—kill the ship and crew. That’s why you want to load all those nice new missiles onto my boat.”

  “Captain, as I said, you are a very astute man.”

  A very astute man…. Gromyko smiled to himself. Yes, this was the trunk of the tree now. This was the new Prime Meridian, not the world he first came from, and not the world he returned to, finding Kamenski waiting for him there with this mission. This was the Prime, and it was now his mission to decide whether it would stand, or whether it would fall, and that all depended on the life or death of that ship, Kirov.

  At least I don’t bear the burden alone, he thought. Time shuffled the deck on me somehow, and I have an Ace in my hand this time—Admiral Volsky. It will be his choice, won’t it…. But what if he decides that Kirov must live? Then what?

  Something told him this mission had many dark corners to get around before it would ever end. Here he was, and with Admiral Volsky at his side, and now they had to decide what to do.