“Alright,” said Volsky. “Suppose Stalin prevails. That unites the Soviet Union, and since you will not do anything to bother Admiral Togo, the situation here in the Pacific should be back to something we all would recognize from our old Meridian. But isn’t this all speculation? Frankly, I don’t see how we could possibly know what would result from the actions we now contemplate.”
“Correct,” said Karpov. “In fact, we don’t even know if we can get out of there again, and move forward in time. Will power and absolute certainty may get us there, but Time might have no other use for us after that. Hell, she might just get rid of us if we try to shift again. That would be a nice solution.”
“Shift again?” said Fedorov. “We haven’t even discussed how we intend to go back to 1908. Are we going to use this ship? Are we going to use that back stairway at Ilanskiy?”
“Or a good Zeppelin,” said Karpov, smiling. “Yes, there are lots of ways to go. Frankly, I’d prefer to take the ship along. We’d have a good deal more clout that way, if we ever needed it.”
“True, but using that clout is another matter,” said Volsky. “That is what got the world into all this trouble in the first place. Our missiles have a way of …. Unsettling things in the past. They don’t belong there, and taking the ship along could be risky. We’d be taking the whole crew back with us. And what about Gromyko’s boat? If Kirov shifts, doe she come along as well with Kazan ?”
“Good point,” said Gromyko.
“Yes, and in my mind, the more mass we try to move, the more complex and dangerous the operation becomes. You saw what happened last time we tried to move both vessels at the same time.”
“That’s because Rod-25 could not handle all that mass on its own,” said Fedorov. “It moved us, but we could not get all the way home.”
That brought back uncomfortable memories, so they moved on. “Besides,” said Fedorov, “Kazan has its own control rod now.”
“But how can we be certain they will work in harmony with one another. Ideally, we would all want to arrive in the past at the same time, but, as we have seen, when two vessels move, they can reach very different times.”
“Yes,” said Fedorov. “It could also be dangerous. We could experience… anomalies.”
“Anomalies?” Karpov gave him a sour face.
“That’s a real possibility,” said Volsky. “This old head of mine still has memories of that last shift we made. We emerged in a region of eerie fog. The helo could not climb high enough to penetrate it, and the sea was deathly calm, a kind of dead zone, the doldrums of infinity. Then people started to go missing—including you, Mister Fedorov. I could feel my number was up, and I had a chat with Mister Rodenko, by way of warning him that he was to take over as acting commander in my absence. The next thing I know that was all a fanciful memory. My point is this—if we do try to use the ship to run this mission, we could just end up in that same borscht.”
“Then Fedorov’s Absolute Certainty proposition would be wrong,” said Karpov.
“Well it might not happen on the initial shift,” Volsky equivocated. “But it’s a real possibility that this would become a one-way trip—for us all, and for this ship and crew as well.”
“We’ll get somewhere,” said Karpov. “This isn’t magic. We’ve determined that Rod-25’s effects are physical, and in 1908, it should be at the height of its powers, because we’ll be very close to the Tunguska event. So we’ll get somewhere, mark my words, but I can also guarantee one more thing: if we do make a return shift, we’ll land in a completely new meridian of time, not this one. This world will be dead, over, kaput. Understand? So forget any notion that we’ll be fixing this meridian, or restoring it to what it once was. We’ll simply be destroying it, annihilating it completely, and then we will be building an entirely new meridian that logically arises from the action we take. If we do shift again, that’s where we will appear, and from there, the rest is done with mirrors.”
There was silence all around.
Where would they end up if they went to 1908, did all that they planned, and then initiated a shift again? That question had many possible answers, and they all seemed to rest on the choice of how they would attempt to go there.
“I still say the ship gives us power if we should ever need it. On the other hand, the back stairway at Ilanskiy has been quite reliable—old faithful. It always seems to reach that moment of the Tunguska event when we go down the steps from this time.”
“Yet coming back could incur the same risk the Admiral pointed out,” said Fedorov. “Don’t forget Orlov. He was right in front of me on those stairs, and then he simply vanished.”
“Ah, yes, Mister Orlov. He’s the man who jumped ship in the first looping of these events, and that set everything in motion. And now it seems he’s found a way to jump ship again! I wonder where he ended up? Was it in the future? Might he have shifted months or years ahead of the rest of your team? Or did he slip back further in time?”
“My guess is that he went forward,” said Fedorov. “No shift of any kind has ever reached a point earlier than July of 1908.”
That wasn’t entirely true, but Fedorov is to be forgiven for not knowing anything at all about the Duke of Elvington, or his rival Fortier.
“He’ll probably just appear on the upper landing one day down the road. Who knows, maybe he’ll appear in 1944.”
“Not if we do what we’re planning,” said Karpov. “Remember, this meridian gets destroyed if we tamper with things in 1908, so our good Mister Orlov will have no place to come home to. Perhaps he’ll be in that borscht that the Admiral mentioned. Frankly, he might be better off there than he would be blundering about on the new Meridian we create in any case. Orlov is a bit of a bull in a china closet.”
That he was….
Chapter 36
Orlov sneezed, his nose getting too much of a whiff of all that dust and soot in the darkness of that back stairway. Orlov sneezed, a reflex, an impulse, and his hand moved to his nose, as anyone’s might. In that fleeting instant, he lost contact with the man ahead of him on the stairs, and then it became very cold.
In that same awful moment, Orlov suddenly realized that he could no longer feel Fedorov’s hand on his own shoulder. He passed a moment of sickly uncertainty, as if he was suspended in mid-air. It immediately produced a feeling of great anxiety, and a sensation that he was falling. For some reason, he suddenly felt feather light, completely free, his being unfettered from the grip of gravity itself. He had not felt this way since that terrible moment when he had leapt from the helicopter over the Mediterranean, off the coast of Spain. Yes, he still had that memory in the back of his head, and he could follow the path it led him down, through the bars and brothels, onto the backs of old rusty ships, into the stony tunnels beneath the Rock of Gibraltar.
He had been interrogated, then put on a steamer heading for the Black Sea. There he was transferred to a trawler, operated by the NKVD, and he found that his knowledge of future events, all stored neatly in his computer jacket, gave him a most interesting peek at the events he was living out at that moment.
Eventually, he found the way to his Grandmother’s home in the Caucasus, but found that she, as a much younger woman, had already been hauled away by Beria’s men. A name came to him, that of a certain Commissar—Molla. He was the man responsible for his grandmother’s fate, and Orlov was determined to deal with him. He would still grin, inwardly, as he recalled the look on Molla’s face as he choked the breath and life out of the man. After that, in the midst of the battle on the Caspian coast, there was Zykov.
They had come back for him.
Fedorov had hatched the plan, always scheming, even as he always worried over everything they were doing in the past. But that world was long gone. It was as if it had never happened, for there were other memories in Orlov’s head, of Zeppelins and wild rides in sub-cloud cars—or bone numbing sound so deep that it reached inside you and pulled at every instinct in your body, with throbbi
ng fear. There were raids, on this very place, Ilanskiy, and Orlov was a part of one. Then Fedorov had tapped him for this mission as well, another Zeppelin ride that ended up in a time none of them ever expected to reach aboard the Irkutsk .
When that happened, Orlov thought a long time about the great devastation he had seen from the Irkutsk. He sat there, in awe, staring at the Tunguska Event. Fedorov had wanted to go to 1908, and they he suddenly was. They found the man he went there to look for, just as Orlov finally found Commissar Molla, and there had been some ruckus in the dining hall between the two of them—Fedorov and Mironov. Then, they were simply ordered to gather up all their gear and get in a line to file up that back stairway. What in the world was that all about?
They filed in, one my one, and each man with his hand firmly on the shoulder of the man in front of him. Fedorov was right behind him, so close that he could hear him breathing. The sound of the heavy booted Marines was loud in the dark and narrow passage.
Then Orlov sneezed.
The dizzy sensation of falling subsided, and he could feel weight and substance returning to his heavy frame; feel his feet solidly planted on the wooden step. He had been in a strange fog, but it was dark again, the murky, dusty stillness now so thick that he felt he could not breathe. He groped forward for the man in front of him, feeling nothing.
Sookin Sim! Where’s that Marine gone? Then he realized there was no one behind him either. Fedorov was gone as well. He stood there, looking over his shoulder for a moment. Then he spoke.
“Fedorov? Son of a bitch…. Fedorov? Skatina , where have you run off to?” The other men must have gone on up the stairs, but where was Fedorov? He turned, peering into the inky darkness, and then went back the way he had come.
* * *
“If we do this,” said Volsky. “If we go back, by any means, then when will we arrive there?” He looked at Fedorov, as he had always been the one to sort these things out.
Fedorov cast a glance at Karpov, then spoke. “I’m going to assume that 1908 puts us back on the old Prime Meridian, because we think Tunguska was the source of all this time fracturing. That happened the morning of June 30, 1908. I was there that morning, via the back stairway at Ilanskiy. So I can’t get to that time because co-location is impossible.”
“So we once thought,” said Karpov, thinking of his brother self.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Fedorov. “But weren’t you…. elsewhere on Paradox Hour?”
“On my Zeppelin, again named Tunguska . How’s that for irony.”
“Alright… So I don’t think we could reach June 30th, but I was only there for a brief time. It might be possible, but it would also be extremely dangerous, because I was also there the following morning, July 1st. That was when I arrived using the Irkutsk on the mission to get Mironov.”
“Yes, and that was very strange that you could go there simply by overflying the site of the event in 1942.”
“The rift was obviously in play,” said Fedorov. “I might never be able to replicate that shift if I tried it again, but it happened. Call it fate, call it Absolute Certainty because of my earnest desire to get there—but there I was.”
“And I was blown back to 1908 aboard the ship after one of my little indiscretions,” said Karpov.
“Yes,” said Volsky. “Blowing the Americans to hell with a nuke.”
“I’ll have to admit, it did feel good.” Karpov was only half jesting with his smile. “In any case, I was there from the 10th of July through the 26th, having a good deal of success until you spoiled the party. I realize now that is what set Japan loose early, and why we lost all of Primorskiy Province, but that is…. History, at least from where we stand now. Those dates are out for me.”
“Then that leaves the period of July 2 through the 10th when you first arrived there,” said Fedorov. “That’s a very narrow window for you, and for me it would extend to July 17 when I went back on the Anatoly Alexandrov. I was there through the 19th trying to persuade you to come home peacefully.” He looked at Karpov.
“That’s not much time for me if we get to July 2nd. We could try, but as we approached the 10th, I’d have to make an exit.”
“But the earlier we get there, the better,” said Fedorov. “Mironov will be long gone if we wait until after July 26th to avoid these paradoxes.”
“This may sound stupid,” said Gromyko, “but do we get to pick the time we might appear there?”
“A very good point,” said Volsky. “In fact, isn’t this all up to Mother Time? We can’t assume we’ll get to any specific date.”
“To avoid Paradox, Time would have to make the same deliberations we are now engaged in,” said Fedorov. “So considering our combined intention as Prime Movers, we might just get the best seats in the theater available, and arrive on July 2nd. Time would know that our chances of success would be very low if we had to arrive after the 26th. Mironov could be hundreds of miles away from Ilanskiy if we take that route.”
“Which is, I think, the way we must go,” said Volsky. “Taking the ship gives us power, but it also becomes very complicated. We would then have to fly by helicopter to Ilanskiy to find this Mironov, and so we would have to take the ship north of Sakhalin Island to get as close as possible. Even then, it is 2500 kilometers to Ilanskiy from there.”
“But those helos at least give us mobility,” said Karpov.
“Until the aviation fuel runs out, which it will on a flight of that length,” said Volsky. No, Mister Karpov, I think the back stairway is our only choice here.”
“Agreed,” said Fedorov. “That puts us right where we need to be, and with the best chance of finding Mironov, or even Volkov. If we take the ship, our chances diminish considerably. We’d lose too much time trying to get to Ilanskiy, and then we’d have to get back before the 10th and get the ship out of there before Karpov’s arrival on that date.”
“Alright,” said Karpov, relenting, though he was inwardly disappointed. He had inner visions of taking the helm again in 1908, and settling affairs, but this mission was going to need cloak and dagger, not the muscle of the battlecruiser.
“Let’s assume you are correct, Fedorov. We go there, and I’ll take care of Mironov this time. Then we do everything possible to find Volkov before he slips away. He can’t get far. Where would he go?”
“East or west,” said Fedorov. There was a train heading east to Irkutsk—Train 94. It was approaching Kansk on June 30th, and they saw the event. That caused quite a stir, and they stopped at some debris on the line, sending men ahead on horseback to see if the rest of the line was clear. With all the commotion the event caused, the Engineer decided to re-coal at Kansk on the 30th and then proceed east, with a brief stop at Ilanskiy at the outset on July 1st. They had to sop there to pick up tourists and passengers that went by carriage to the inn there while the train was re-coaling. I think Mironov gets on that train. Zykov found him 10 klicks east of Ilanskiy on the morning of July 1st, so he was already heading that direction.”
“July 1st?” said Volsky. “Does the train leave that day?”
“This is where it gets complicated,” said Fedorov. “Yes, I think Train 94 probably left Kansk on the 1st of July, though we didn’t see it while we were there. It may have come later that morning, or even in the afternoon, but it had a schedule to keep, so I doubt if they lingered at Kansk long. They were heading for Irkutsk, a journey of 500 miles.”
“They might get there in one day,” said Karpov.”
“I doubt it. They probably stopped many times along the route, but they would certainly get there in 48 hours, unless something happened we don’t know about.”
“Then why not go to Irkutsk and wait for this Mironov at the rail station there?” Karpov was angling for something again. “We obviously can’t catch the train leaving Ilanskiy, because the earliest we can get there is July 2nd. We’ll be a day late, and Mironov will be hundreds of miles to the east if he gets on that train July 1st. The only way we cou
ld get to Irkutsk ahead of him would be to take the ship to the Yellow Sea, use Rod-25, and then go by helo to Irkutsk. That should cut down the range and fuel burden too.”
“You really want that ship back there,” said Gromyko.
“I’m just being practical,” said Karpov.
“Practical?” Fedorov gave him a wide-eyed look. “The Yellow Sea is a Japanese lake right now. We’d certainly be spotted if we tried to take Kirov there.”
“Well, I’d get you there safely aboard Kazan ,” said Gromyko. “But my boat carries no helicopters.”
“Damn complicated,” said Volsky. “We may be determined to go back there, and perhaps time will send us right to July 2nd as you suggest, Mister Fedorov. However, there we will be, with a good chance Sergei Kirov has already gone east on that train. Can you imagine us all trying to find horses and then off we go, chasing a train through Siberia? Me? On a horse?”
The Admiral had made his point.
They all sat there, the Vodka setting in to soften their minds, glum expressions all around. “This Sergei Kirov is one slippery fish,” said Volsky again, using a term Kamenski was fond of. “And he’s carrying all this history we’re trying to reset on his back.”
“What about Volkov?” said Karpov. “That bastard will be on foot when he arrives. He couldn’t get far. We may not be able to get Sergei Kirov, but we would certainly have a good chance of collaring Volkov. He’ll have a service jacket on. We could rig out a device to find and track its signals.”
“What if he has it turned off?” said Gromyko.
“No,” said Karpov. “He’ll be confused. He’ll be wondering where his men are, and using the jacket to try and contact them. We could pick up that signal, home in on it, and get him. That at least solves part of the big problem here. It stops the Orenburg Federation from ever arising. As for Sergei Kirov, Fedorov has grown rather fond of him, and frankly, he’s much better for Russia. If we could at least solve the Volkov problem, that alone would introduce dramatic changes to this altered meridian.”
Ironfall (Kirov Series Book 30) Page 31