A man of just 54 years, Kirov seemed in the fullness of his life, with just a touch of grey starting to appear in his thick head of hair, combed back above his broad forehead. A handsome man, he exuded an energy of confidence and authority.
“Admiral Volsky,” he said smiling. “I must admit that we have no Admiral by that name here in Soviet Russia, and so imagine my surprise when I was invited to this meeting. And you… He turned to Fedorov, his eyes strangely distant, as though he were seeing back through the years to that moment when he had first laid eyes on this man outside the dining hall of the inn at Ilanskiy. “You are Fedorov, and if you can assure me that you are not working for the Okhrana, I would be happy to share my breakfast with you!”
Fedorov smiled. “Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov,” he said warmly. “I am honored to make your acquaintance again, after so many long years.”
“Not for you, Fedorov! You appear exactly as I have remembered you all these many years, even as I remembered every word you whispered to me on that stairway before I went down. Imagine my surprise when I received your message—a message only I could understand, and so I hastened here to this meeting, unwilling to believe it might be the same man I spoke to back then… in 1908. Ah, but it wasn’t 1908 when we parted, was it Fedorov? It was 1942! Yes, I found that out as well. Yet every step I took down those stairs gobbled up two years! I counted them—seventeen steps, a nice prime number. When I got to the bottom all was as I expected, but I must tell you that the room where we spoke that day on the upper floor was not in the same world I left. Yes, I know that now.”
He gestured to the table and they all took seats, with Kirov sitting opposite his visitors. Now he looked at Admiral Volsky. “I did not see your ship in the harbor, Admiral, though they tell me you have given it a familiar name.”
“We have, sir,” said Volsky.
“Well, when I first heard of this ship I came to believe you had come here from the Black Sea, sent by Volkov in a warship built by the Orenburg Federation, though that seemed surprising to me. We saw no sign of this at Sevastopol or any other port on the Black Sea, and we still control Odessa and the shipyards there.”
“No, General Secretary.”
“You need not be so formal. Just call me Mironov, for old time’s sake. That is who I was when I first met this man. Then he told me he was just a sailor being transferred, but I had my own suspicions about him.”
“Very well, Mironov, I must be forthright and tell you we have not come from the Black Sea, nor are we in any way affiliated with Orenburg.”
“Oh? Then where have you come from? Surely not from the far east, unless you’ve managed to Shanghai a Japanese warship and sail it all this way as a prize.”
Volsky smiled. “In fact, we have come from there, but not in a Japanese ship.”
“I see…” Kirov thought for a moment, then leaned forward, lowering his voice to an almost conspiratorial tone. “I can see you hesitate to say more, Admiral. You must think that to do so would be too much for me to comprehend. Perhaps it would be so, but…” now he looked at Fedorov. “I am a very curious man, you see. So curious that I must tell you I took more than one trip up that stairway at Ilanskiy. Some of the things I saw and learned were quite shocking, and I think you know of what I am speaking.”
“You went back up those stairs?” Fedorov’s eyes registered surprise and just a touch of fear.
“I know you told me to get as far away from that place as I could, and never come up those stairs again, Fedorov, but that is one bit of advice that I’m afraid I did not take. It wasn’t until I did go back up that stairway that I finally realized what you meant with that other bit of advice you gave me, that whisper in my ear as we parted. Yes, I learned more than any man should ever have to know—the very day, time and moment of my death! But as you see, I have avoided that fate. You wanted that, did you not? Yes, you did. Well then let me shake your hand one more time, Fedorov, and give you my thanks. Because of you the man that would arrange that unfortunate business scheduled for December of 1934 was not in the world to do so.”
“Because of me?” Fedorov had a guilty look.
“Only in part,” said Mironov. “The rest was my hand writing in the ledger of fate. It was I who made an end of Josef Stalin. Having seen the world that resulted from his reign of terror, no sane man could do anything else. Yes, I went to Bayil when I found out the Okhrana had him there. It was risky, the most dangerous thing I ever did in my life. I gave myself even odds of living out that night, but I gave Stalin worse.”
Fedorov was shocked to hear this. “You killed Stalin?”
“I did. And thank god for that. Unfortunately I have not been as willing to cut off heads as he might have been, and so the effort to unify the country became mired in this endless civil war. I suppose I saved millions of lives by taking Stalin’s, but now we have this damnable war. On the one side we sit watching the Polish border for any sign of the German buildup there that is almost certain to come. On the other we remain locked in this perpetual civil war with the Whites—with Volkov’s Orenburg Federation as he has come to call it these days.”
“It appears Time and Fate have a way of balancing their books,” said Volsky.
“Very true, Admiral. I must ask you one thing now, though I believe I may already know the answer. When I met you in 1908, Fedorov, you were not born to that world. Am I correct?”
“Yes sir.”
“You came from the world at the top of those stairs? From the world we live in now?”
“No, sir.”
Mironov folded his arms, his brow registering some confusion. “No? Here I thought you waited all this time to arrange this meeting. You see, you look exactly as I remember you.”
Fedorov looked at the Admiral, and Volsky nodded, giving him quiet permission to explain himself. He cleared his throat, thinking what he might say and how he could elucidate that they were from another time altogether. Then the image of the stairway itself gave him some graspable way of explaining things.
“You lived on the first floor back then, sir, in the dining room of 1908. That was a very memorable day. I suppose you now may know what we were looking at to the northeast when the sky seemed to be on fire there. Well… when you came up that stairway after me, you know where you ended up. Suppose that inn had a third floor. That is the world I came from. How I came to be there in the year you met me is a very long story, but we—the Admiral and I—we live on the third floor sir, if that makes any sense.”
Sergie Kirov was quiet for a time, his eyes alive, thinking. “A third floor? Yes, I get what you are saying, Fedorov. Why not? Then you are telling me you came from years beyond that time?”
“We did, sir.”
“But why?” The question was obvious, burning, unanswered in the whole impossible saga they had lived through thus far.
“At that moment I was looking for a man, a member of our crew in fact. I was sent to find him by the Admiral here.”
“And how did you get to the place on that second floor where we spoke, Fedorov? How did you get back? Are there other stairways out there that wend their way through madness and time? Yes, I thought I was mad for a while, truly insane. But I got over it when I learned what was really going on at the top of those stairs.”
Fedorov was not quite sure what to say now. Kirov would have no comprehension of nuclear reactors, and control rods. How could he explain what happened when he barely understood it himself?
“Sir… We are not exactly certain. There was an accident—in our time—and we found ourselves adrift on the oceans of your world.”
“Just the two of you?”
“No, said Admiral Volsky. Now you have the explanation as to why you cannot seem to recall the construction of my ship.”
Kirov leaned back, quite shocked now. “You mean to say your entire ship moved in time? My god, how many are you?”
“Our crew? About seven hundred men. Our ship was christened Sergie Kirov, yes, in your hono
r.”
“When?” Kirov’s eyes held intense anticipation as he waited for the answer.
Volsky looked at Fedorov, then folded his arms. “Well I don’t suppose there is any harm in saying it now. The ship was originally laid down in the year 1974, launched three years later, and finally commissioned in 1980. It was later extensively re-designed, and re-commissioned again… in the year 2020. Since you, yourself, have been up and down those stairs, sir, you are aware that the stairway may continue on and on. We never know what lies beyond the floor we are born to, unless something very strange happens to us, but I think that stairway does go on into the future, and we are a small clique of men, fortunate or not, who have moved from one floor to the next.”
“2020? This is amazing! Unbelievable. Yet you are correct in what you say. If anyone might hear what you have just said and not think it wild vranyo, it is I, someone who has walked that back stairway, more times than I should have. But what are you doing here now?”
“Fedorov here is saying hello to an old acquaintance,” said Volsky. “Beyond that, it was our hope to make a new friend or two here. You see, General Secretary, as Fedorov said, we are not quite sure why we find ourselves here—but here we are and, at the moment, we seem to be marooned in this day and year. Believe me, I am as bewildered as you seem to be now about it all. I have spent hours wondering just who I really am now, in this world. You see, I am a little older than you are, Mironov, but I was born in the year 1957, and young Fedorov here… why, when were you born, Captain?”
“1994, sir.”
“Remarkable,” said Kirov. “This ship of yours… Why it must be very powerful.”
“That it is, the most powerful ship in the world, and we have been tested against many others who might like to make that claim. It was our hope to minimize any contact with the world we found ourselves in after we first went down the rabbit hole. Now we have come to realize that we have already made a very grave difference in the world. Our presence in the past has had a shattering effect. Your presence here, at this very moment, is one result. You see… you did die on that cold December night in Leningrad, in 1934, but here you are. Everything is different now, in more ways that we can possibly have time to explain. Fedorov here calls it a broken mirror, and when we look into it now we wonder who we are at times. We thought we could reverse the damage, preserve it, put things back the way they were. Finally we gave up trying, as it seems it is an impossible task. So here we are, Sergei Kirov, beggars at your doorstep—a place we once called home. We left this very harbor in the year 2021, and sailed out on a bright sunny day. The weather has been very stormy for us ever since, but now we are finally back… not quite home yet, but we are here at long last.”
Kirov had a grave expression on his face. These men have been through the same madness I suffered through, he thought. Yes, I can see it in their eyes. We are brothers, the three of us.
“Admiral Volsky, in one sense we are all in the same boat, the three of us here, and I, too, am a member of your crew.”
They smiled.
Chapter 15
“I had hoped I could recruit your support,” said Volsky. “Every moment we have been at sea these last months has been a hardship. The men have lost everything they had, everyone they ever knew, and while I have promised them we would find a way to get them home again, that may never happen for us. Once we thought we had come home, but here we are again, and I am no longer sure the world we came from even exists any longer.”
Kirov had a very serious expression on his face, clearly empathizing with everything the Admiral was saying. “Well,” he said, “I owe this man my life, and so in return I will do everything possible to secure yours, and those of every man on your ship. You are welcome to anything we have, food, fuel, quarters ashore. Anything you need can be provided.”
“Thank you, Mironov, it was my hope that we could find a safe harbor here. Yet there is one more thing I must tell you. Our route here took us through the Atlantic and the Denmark Strait, and there has been a major battle there between the British and Germans.”
“Yes, our intelligence has informed me of this, but the British seem to have prevailed. Their navy is the one force the Germans cannot break.”
“It was much more serious than you may realize,” Volsky said with a certain urgency. “Mister Fedorov here is somewhat of a student of military history, and he believes the Germans would have won this engagement if not for our intervention.”
“Your intervention?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. It is a long story, sir, and I cannot give you all the details now, but at one time we made an enemy of the Royal Navy. Finding ourselves in these waters again, and needing support, this time I thought to make them a friend. The Germans sortied with a very powerful fleet, and the situation did not look good for the British. I therefore elected to use the power of my ship to… discourage the Germans, and we were able to see them off home again.”
“I see…” Kirov was very thoughtful now. “I must tell you, Admiral Volsky, that we will not be able to stand neutral in this war for very much longer. When I went up those stairs at Ilanskiy, into Stalin’s world, I learned that Russia and Germany were at war by 1942, and that the Germans had pushed all the way to the Volga! If they were to do the same again, then we are facing annihilation. So in some sense I look upon your coming here as a harbinger of good fate.”
“We are a powerful ship, sir, but I do not think we can sail to the front line if the Germans push for Moscow.”
“And they will,” said Fedorov. “It is almost certain that they will. They called it Operation Barbarossa.”
Kirov nodded gravely. “Even now we begin to see a slow and steady buildup on the Polish frontier, and yes, our intelligence had wind of that very name—Barbarossa. You may or may not know that the Orenburg Federation has declared open war on us and allied itself with Germany. At the moment they are also squabbling with the Free Siberian State. Last winter they crossed the border and took Omsk from the Siberians, which was good news for us. We made overtures to Kolchak, but he seemed indecisive. He, too, has a war on two fronts now, with the Japanese at his back and Volkov on the other flank.”
“I must tell you something now,” said Volsky. “This man Volkov, the man they call the Prophet, we believe that he was not born to this world.”
“What do you mean? He has come from… from another floor in the inn?”
“That may have been exactly what happened,” said Fedorov. “We have thought a great deal about that stairway and the strange effects we have both experienced there. When we learned of this man, Volkov, we began to suspect that he was a man by the same name that had also come from our world—that he has gone down those stairs as well.”
“I see…” A light of realization was evident in Kirov’s eyes. “That would explain much. Volkov was able to outmaneuver Denikin and everyone else—except me. I had the support of the Reds, so he settled into the White movement and consolidated power there. But he had been here for years, decades in fact. I met him twenty years ago, and could see that he was going to be trouble during the revolution.”
“If what we believe has actually happened, he may have gone down that stairway, just as I did,” said Fedorov. “If he ended up in 1908, then that would explain his presence here all these years. We know that he vanished in our day, and at that very place, Ilanskiy. This leads me to suspect that stairway can also make a connection to our world—to the third floor, Mironov.”
“That would be very significant if it did. Do you think Volkov knows about this?”
“We do not know, but I am inclined to believe that he does not. If he did, why would he have remained marooned in the past? It would seem any sane man would try to return the way he came.”
“Something may have prevented him,” said Kirov, “the madness, the shock of what he experienced. I found it very difficult to bear myself.”
“Yet he had years to try and return, but never did. If he does remain i
n the dark, that is good news, and we hope as much. Because if that stairway still exists in this world, and the effects continue, then it could be a way for us to return to our own time—a way for any man to do so.”
Kirov immediately perceived the peril there. “That would be very dangerous.”
“Yes,” said Volsky. “Men who knew what they were about could use that stairway to cause a great deal of mischief.”
“At the moment that inn may not see many travelers,” said Kirov. “This civil war has been very hard. The railway east has degraded. Much of it has fallen into disrepair. The route from Chebalyinsk to Novosibirsk is impassible now with Cossacks and Tartars at each other’s throats. One or two trains still operate further east all the way to Irkutsk, but there are very few who dare to travel that route. We have men there from our intelligence arm. Things are starting to wake up now that Karpov has come on the scene.”
The name fell like a hot coal in a bucket of ice water, and Kirov could see the immediate reaction in both the other men. Volsky leaned forward, giving Fedorov a worried glance. “Karpov? Tell me more of this man.”
“I wish I could. He seemed to come from nowhere just a few years ago. Old Man Kolchak and his Lieutenant Kozolnikov were running things in the east. Then the name of this man Karpov began to appear in dispatches and signals traffic. We thought he was just another minor official, or perhaps a newly appointed military officer. Then we learned he was given command of the Siberian Air Corps. Now it appears that he exercises considerable influence over Kolchak. They call him the old man for a good reason. Kolchak is getting slow, and he has been unable to unite the disparate warlords ranging throughout Siberia—until recently. Karpov is whipping things into shape there. Yet you both seem very surprised to hear this name. What is your concern?”
“It may be nothing,” said Volsky. “It is just that Karpov was an officer aboard my ship—one we believed was killed in action, though we never recovered his body.”
Kirov Saga: Darkest Hour: Altered States - Volume II (Kirov Series) Page 12