1943 (Kirov Series Book 27)

by John Schettler

  “Mister Karenin, fire up the secure command link set and raise Kirov.” That surprised the Lieutenant, but with the Captain and Fleet Admiral standing there he was all business. He sent the coded signal that Nikolin would receive moments later.

  * * *

  There it was again.

  Nikolin’s heart jumped when the signal came in. It was two cyphers off the normal EAM command link channel, a special frequency variation that had been pre-arranged by Fedorov long ago. It was the code, and the first time he saw it an avalanche of memories had come tumbling into his head. It seemed to him afterwards, that he had been living in a strange fog, but now everything was clear again. Now he remembered it all, how they had arrived here so long ago on that first ship, and all that had happened to them. But he had not said a single word about it to anyone… except Doctor Zolkin.

  His heart racing as before, he looked to find the Captain, glad that it was Fedorov’s shift. “Sir,” he said. “I have a secure authenticated message on the HF Comm-link system.”

  Fedorov raised an eyebrow. “It was properly coded?”

  “Aye sir. The ID designator has it as Kazan.” He gave Fedorov a wide-eyed look.

  Now it was Fedorov who felt his pulse rise. He knew Kazan was out there somewhere, but Gromyko had been last reported in the Barents Sea. The rendezvous he had arranged on his mission to Ilanskiy months ago had never taken place, but there had been no communication with the submarine since that time.

  “Thank you, Mister Nikolin. I will take your post for the time being. That will be all.”

  “Aye sir.”

  “And Nikolin… Say nothing of this communication. Just go have a nice late breakfast. You can return in one hour.”

  “Understood sir.” Nikolin saluted and was on his way, a thousand questions in his mind. Then Fedorov settled into his warm chair, placing the headset over his ears, and speaking in a low voice.

  “Kazan, Kazan, this is Captain Fedorov aboard Kirov. We receive and authenticate your code. Come back. Over.”

  “We read you, Kirov. This is Captain Ivan Gromyko. Something tells me you are still a long way from the Dolphin’s Head. Shall we try this rendezvous somewhere else? Over.”

  The two men would have a brief conversation where Fedorov would learn why Kazan had gone silent. “You phased,” he explained. “That happened to us more than once after a shift. It can sometimes take a while for things to settle into the new timeframe.”

  “Yes,” said Gromyko. “We also skipped forward a few more months in time. It was September when we made that tryst to meet off the Dolphin’s Head. Then we skipped forward and the year was damn near gone.”

  “It happens,” said Fedorov. “Perhaps like a plane taking a hop on landing.”

  “Something more occurred,” said Gromyko. “It’s difficult to describe, but perhaps the best way is to let you hear from him. Standby, Kirov.”

  Gromyko looked over at Volsky, who was sitting at his side now with another headset. He toggled a switch, but as he did so, he noticed that the Admiral’s eyes were watered over, as if he were overcome with emotion.

  “Mister Fedorov,” he said softly. “I cannot tell you how good it is to hear your voice again.”

  At the other end of that transmission Fedorov sat there in complete shock. How often do the dead call home to the living? Yet the voice he heard now was unmistakable. It was Volsky.

  “Admiral?” his voice quavered a bit.

  “One and the same,” Volsky came back.

  “But… Sir….”

  “Yes, I know you must have received some very hard news of my fate. How I come to be here now is a bit of a mystery, even to me, and particularly since I’m really not sure who I am these days. I was sitting quietly in my office at Fleet Headquarters, when in walked a most remarkable man.”

  He told him of the visit from Kamenski, and of the Director’s plan. “So you see, there is still a world out there that is safe and sound from all the changes you worry so much about. I was living in it. Yet now, after this little journey here, that man sits quietly beneath two others in my mind. It is all very strange. I have memories of those last days on the ship, the first ship. Do you know you went missing there, Fedorov? I mourned that a good long while, before fate came calling for me. Then again, I have memories of leaving Murmansk on that British sub after Karpov took the ship. Until the darkness fell on me in the Atlantic when we fought with the Hindenburg.”

  “Yes sir… I went through this myself when Kirov returned—memories on top of memories, two lives mingled together in one head. There I was on the bridge, knowing men like Orlov and Karpov should not be there, but unable to realize why I could remember all that had happened before, when no one else could.”

  “We’ve been remade,” said Volsky. “The both of us, or so it seems, and I am a most fortunate man. I suppose only one other man has ever made the claim that he has risen from the dead, and I do not presume to be his equal. Yet here I am. Time has put me here, and for a very grave reason. If the Director were here, he could explain it all to you, but I think you have heard some of it before—the dire dilemma we face because of the presence of Kirov in these waters. You recall how we discussed it before?”

  “I do sir…” Fedorov was finally getting himself under control, thrilled to have Volsky back, a man that had been like a father to him, his stalwart ally through the travail of all these trials and adventures.

  “Well, we have work to do here, Mister Fedorov. Kamenski is convinced that the ship cannot remain here. We must all get home. We tried this before, with Kazan attempting to do the heavy lifting, but it could not carry itself far enough forward with Kirov on its back. Yet we have a new control rod now—a new Rod-25 if you will. It’s a long story, but all Kamenski’s doing, and hear now what he has placed upon our shoulders.”

  The Admiral spoke quietly, telling him that the same urgent mission was at hand again. They had to get the ship home, remove its contagion from the time line here, assure that no further paradox might occur, and allow this history to move forward on its own. Yet even as he explained that, they both knew that there was one great stumbling block before them—Vladimir Karpov.

  “He won’t want to hear this,” said Fedorov. “He’s an Admiral now—self-appointed, and so much more. He’s taken a liking to his position here, and the power he has gathered to himself. And he’s also quite fond of the little war he’s fighting with the Japanese. We just attacked their naval base at Truk! Now he wants to look for bigger fish at Rabaul.”

  “I see…” Volsky considered. “How do you think he would take the news of my return?”

  “It would certainly be shocking,” said Fedorov. “Yet remember, he sees himself as evolved beyond any obligation to the authority you represent. In fact, he has flatly stated that he has no intention whatsoever of trying to return to our own time. Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.”

  “That sounds very much like Karpov,” said Volsky. “Yet if he cannot be convinced of the gravity of our situation, that will present us with a very difficult choice here—the same choice we had before in the Sea of Japan.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “Do you think he can be reasoned with? Do you think if we press the seriousness of this matter on him, the two of us could get through to him?”

  “We could try,” said Fedorov. “If he holds the line and refuses to cooperate, then I hate to think of the alternative.”

  “Yes, that will be very difficult. It would certainly place you in great danger there. Would not Karpov see you as an enemy?”

  “I have been at odds with him for some time, as you well know. But Admiral, things have happened since we learned you were killed. I… I thought all of this was my fault, the danger to this world and all those that follow this time. I thought I could make one last attempt at undoing my many mistakes. You remember what I discovered at Ilanskiy?”

  “Yes of course, that stairway.”

  “Correct.
Well, I wanted to use that to go back and… reclaim that errant whisper. I wanted to try and prevent Sergei Kirov from doing what he did. Karpov and I discussed it at great length. We had a plan, but in the end, he decided against it, even while my mission was already underway. It’s a long story, but I did get to Ilanskiy—to the year 1908—though not the way I thought I would. And I found Mironov—Sergei Kirov. I had steeled myself to do the only sure thing that might absolutely prevent him from killing Josef Stalin. But in the end, I wasn’t man enough to pull that trigger…”

  Volsky took a moment to digest that. “No Fedorov, you were man enough not to pull that trigger. I would not have expected anything different from you. The world turned on the mercy you showed that man. It was a world born of that single act of compassion, and it will be what it will be—but not with us here. We must leave—all of us—Kirov, Kazan, the Argos Fire, all those men you met in the desert, the little fleet of transports, everything must go. Those that will not leave of their own accord must be compelled by other means…. or be destroyed. I would speak with Karpov on this, and I am willing to do so if he will hear me. Whether he would heed any order I might give at this point is doubtful. We had every reason to believe that he would not heed my warning, and being faced with this decision, we have steeled ourselves to take a more difficult path if necessary. Yet I could not raise my hand against my old ship and crew without having this conversation first, and I clung to the hope that we might reach an accommodation. It may be our last hope, Mister Fedorov, the last hope of tomorrow. So I must ask you to take this to Karpov. If he will hear us out, perhaps we can avert the doom Kamenski fears.”

  Fedorov considered all this, and was inwardly torn. He had thought his mission to Ilanskiy, returning to the source of the first major contamination at that point, would be the last hope, but that slipped from his grasp when he could not bring himself to kill Sergei Kirov. Now here was the Admiral, the man once dead living again, returning from a future that was still there, still intact, his head filled with the recollection of all his other doppelgangers from tangled time meridians.

  There was grave danger ahead. The Admiral’s proposal, and his determination that no stone must be left unturned here, was fraught with peril. Fedorov had come to the same place Karpov had, albeit with great reluctance. He had thought that there was now nothing they could do to change the world they were living in. They could only do one thing—win this war. He had set down the impossible burden of thinking he could re-write all the history that had been so badly shattered by their actions, and come instead to do the one thing that remained doable in his mind—they could use the power they had, in the ship beneath his feet, to win the war and at least nudge the world closer to the course that it had taken in the post war history he knew so well.

  “Sir,” he said tentatively. “This war… the things we have already done have changed it dramatically. The Allies are finally fighting back, but the issue remains in doubt. The Axis remains very strong, and there is a real possibility that they might prevail. Karpov has been trying to avert that possibility all along. It was his aim to try and reset the conditions that prevailed in our world in the Pacific, and with Kirov, there remains a chance they he might succeed.”

  “That may be so,” said Volsky. “With Kazan those odds get longer. Yes, we can certainly weigh in to profoundly affect the outcome of this war, and I suppose we should discuss that. Kamenski believes that will expose us to great peril—not just us, but the future world that follows. He could not say what that peril was—something we do here, or perhaps something we fail to do—who can say? You remember the warnings Tovey’s group received. Beware a ship… Beware Kirov. Those warnings were sent from the future, from men who saw the final outcome of all we are now struggling with. They have seen something we cannot fathom from this point in time. Not even Kamenski can see it; not with all his arcane wisdom and genius for sorting all this time business through. But he can feel it, Fedorov, like a man who senses the impending edge of an event that has not yet come to pass. Call it prescience, call it a hunch, but he can feel the doom that Elena Fairchild first voiced to us, the same shadow and final darkness that professor tried to explain. What was his name again?”

  “Dorland,” said Fedorov. “Professor Paul Dorland.”

  Chapter 32

  Arch Facility, Berkeley, California, 2021

  Paul Dorland emerged from the great doorway, seeing Maeve and Kelly there to greet him. He had just come through the successful retraction shift in the Arch, returning from the meeting with Tovey and Fairchild in the Azores.

  “A welcoming committee,” he said with a grin. “Two out of three isn’t bad. Where’s Nordhausen?”

  “Where else,” said Maeve. “He’s up on the history module trying to sort out all the splinter threads that we’re dealing with now. I should be there too to make sure he doesn’t jump to any conclusions we can’t live with.” Maeve Lindford was head of Outcomes and Consequences, the small group responsible for analyzing the conditions resulting from time interventions. Her honey red hair curled onto the shoulders of the white lab coat she was wearing.

  At her side was Kelly Ramer, the computer genius responsible for keeping all the equipment up and running, maintaining the live RAM data bank, reviewing the Golem reports, and crunching the numbers required to shift anyone in time, the calculus of infinity, as he called it. Their missing comrade, Robert Nordhausen, was the historian, sleuthing the record of the past to identify key nexus points where the course of events shifted and turned, key push points on the continuum.

  “I’ll bet the Golems are going crazy,” said Dorland. He was referring to a widely distributed computer program created by Kelly Ramer that was constantly searching the massive body of generated news on the Internet for references to historical events, and comparing it to the history of those events as permanently recorded in their RAM data bank. Golems would send reports to the Meridian Team computers, which would warn of possible variations or alterations forming in the history, the effects of possible tampering in the past.

  “It isn’t just the Golems,” said Kelly. “We’ve got real fragmentation of the Meridian now. It all originated from the Nexus in 1908, but now we’ve identified at least three different threads.”

  “Threads?”

  “It’s a new term he’s using now,” Maeve explained. “I wanted to call them splinters.”

  “Well I can generate new material for the lexicon as well,” said Kelly, raising his chin in mock defense of his creation.

  “You certainly can,” said Paul. “Threads… Like threads of a conversation in an online forum?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And you say we’ve got three? Explain.”

  “It’ll be a doozy,” said Maeve. “What it boils down to is that the Prime Meridian has now fragmented, or split apart.”

  “More like how the branches split off from the trunk of a tree,” put in Kelly.

  “Right,” said Maeve. “We normally monitor variations in recorded history for the Prime Meridian—now we’ve got three.”

  “I was afraid of this,” said Paul. “And you say it originated in 1908?”

  “June 30, to be precise.”

  “The Tunguska Event,” said Paul. “That even caused damage to the integrity of Time itself.”

  “Then why didn’t we detect it sooner?” asked Kelly.

  “Who knows,” said Paul. “Perhaps it was like a hairline fracture. That happened to me once. I was pushing a massive table in my home years ago, when my feet slipped and my jaw came right down on the table top. It split my chin open on the surface of the skin, though that healed in a week or two. I later found that it did more unseen damage—only I didn’t learn about it for decades after, when I was chewing on a piece of hard pizza crust and broke a molar. That tooth had been bothering me for years, then it finally broke, and the dentist confirmed that it was apparently from a very old hairline fracture in the tooth. So whatever hit the earth
at Tunguska may have caused damage at various points in the continuum. We’re only now discovering the extent of the fissures it may have opened, and it also left fragments of some exotic material that can have alarming properties where time is concerned.”

  “Yes,” said Maeve. “It’s a mess, and now we’ve got three branches or threads breaking off from what we thought was the Prime Meridian, and they all generate slightly different Outcomes and Consequences. The question is, how do we know which thread to work on?”

  “A good point,” said Paul. “Let’s go have a look.”

  “I assume you had a satisfactory meeting?”

  “You might say so. I’ve learned a good deal in talking with this Admiral Tovey and the woman on that other ship, the Argos Fire. The two are related. When Kirov first arrived, Tovey created a group inside the Royal Navy called the Watch.”

  “Right,” said Maeve. “We’ve got that in the Alpha thread.”

  “Well this Elena Fairchild and company was a member of that group. In fact, she was promoted to their senior Watchstander, and the ship she was on was ordered to a location where they found a device that was capable of moving the Argos Fire in time.”

  “A device?”

  “A box, or that’s the way it was described to me. They said it contained a fragment from the Tunguska Event.”

  “This is beginning to add up,” said Maeve…. “The Argos Fire…. “We’ve searched all over for older references to that ship, yet we didn’t think it could be the ship we identified here in 2021.”

  “Until it was lost the other day off the coast of Greece,” said Kelly. “The Brits thought the Russians were behind that, so they hit a Russian Destroyer with one of their subs in reprisal, then all hell broke loose. The Russians retaliated, it went tit for tat for a while, then the whole thing went tits up yesterday—sorry, Maeve.”

  “Tits up?”

  “The Russians threw an ICBM at a British Petroleum facility in Southern Egypt—the oil drilling installation at Sultan Apache. I think they were trying to kill two birds with one stone. There’s been a lot of tension around the energy centers, Nigeria, the Caspian Basin, the Gulf of Mexico with that big rig disaster. Well, they smashed that BP facility, and also took out a British Army brigade there. That attack went part and parcel with another in the Atlantic. They targeted a relief convoy the British were sending to Mersa Matruh.”