Crescendo Of Doom (38 page)

“Then he was trying to deliberately change the history? This wasn’t all an accident as I was told earlier?”

“Let me be clear,” said Fedorov. “Our initial displacement in time was the accident. Decisions this man made after that were willful, and though we must take responsibility for what we have done, we did not agree with Karpov, and were trying to stop him. We found ourselves here, bewildered, and soon pulled into the fire of this war. Much of what we did was simply to defend ourselves, as Admiral Tovey and his Royal Navy proved to be quite a formidable opponent! But yes, Karpov took deliberate action, and it was aimed at bettering Russia’s future, yet it failed. We later saw the terrible consequences of our meddling here. Ever since then, it had been our effort to try and prevent those consequences, one of which is that war we were starting in 2021.”

“And this Karpov took the fight all the way to 1908?” Elena shook her head, astounded to learn all of this, and inwardly nagged by a great unanswered question about it all.

“I was not surprised to see what Karpov planned to do when he found himself in 1908,” said Fedorov. “At one point, I thought we had seen him come to his senses, and take a more reasonable view. In fact, I came to like the man very much, and admire his skill at the helm. I learned a very great deal from him, and believe me, it was not easy for me to raise my hand against him. But it was absolutely necessary.
Kazan
was our only means of doing so, a threat so powerful that Karpov could not dismiss it. We removed the control Rod from
Kirov
before the ship sortied from Vladivostok in 2021, and the reason why is another long story I will confide to you later. Yet that allowed us to use this rod on
Kazan
, and to eventually stop Karpov in 1908.”

“You went that far back? I wonder why? All your other displacements only brought you to the 1940s, or so you’ve explained.”

“Very true, and that was somewhat of a mystery at first, but I have come to some understanding about it, which I will share with you if you care to hear it. It gets at the heart of why all of this is happening, and might possibly help us untie this Gordian knot we’ve got on our hands now.”

“I see,” said Elena. “Do go on, Captain. I’m all ears.”

Part XII

Coincidence

“Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which—miraculously, it seems—merge into a significant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.”

―
Arthur Koestler

Chapter 34

“1908,”
Fedorov began. “That year, something very significant happened in Russia, in late June, at a place called Tunguska. No doubt you have heard of this?”

“Of course,” said Elena.

“I can’t say as it rings much of a bell for me,” said Tovey.

Good, thought Nikolin as he translated. Now I finally get to hear what this has all been about! He waited, eager to be Fedorov’s mouthpiece, and thanking his lucky stars that he was so accomplished as a speaker of English. I’ve been taking tea and lunch with Admirals and Generals, and privy to decisions and discussions that no other man aboard knows anything about, he thought. And all my life I’ve read those stories about Tunguska, and imagined what may have happened there. Now perhaps I will find out!

“Admiral,” he translated for Fedorov, “In June of 1908, something came out of deep space and impacted the earth, exploding in the atmosphere over the taiga of Siberia with such power that it leveled trees over an area exceeding 2000 square kilometers. No one but the locals knew of it, though this impact was seen by many, and detected as far away as your London on seismographs and other equipment. Its effects were also observed for days after, a strange lightening and discoloration of the evening sky. The region was so remote, that it was not investigated until nineteen years later, and it has been explored by curious minds ever since, with many explanations as to what may have happened there. I do not presume to know the answer to that, even though I am one of perhaps a very few people now alive who actually saw that event transpire.”

“Excuse me?” Elena Fairchild had been following closely, but that brought her to a stumble. “You saw the event? On this mission you described earlier to stop your renegade Captain?”

“No, not on that mission, but on another. If you recall, I told you we had removed that control rod from our ship’s reactors, but I did not explain why.”

Now Fedorov gave a brief account of the trouble caused by the other conspirator in that first fateful mutiny aboard
Kirov
, Gennadi Orlov. Elena listened intently, taking all this in and mating it with information she had been privy to in her position as a member of the Watch, information gained over long years of meticulous intelligence work, slowly tugging at the cords of that Gordian knot.

“Amazing,” she said. “You used it in your test reactor to go back yourself after this Orlov. That explains a few things.”

Fedorov did not quite know what to make of that statement. What did this woman know about all of this? She seemed to be very interested here, almost as if she were inwardly testing what he was telling her now, assessing it all in light of something she knew herself. He resolved to find out what that might be.

“Yes,” he said. “It was a very risky thing to do, but back then I was very worried Orlov would eventually do something, and cause irreparable harm to the history. Seeing what has happened to the world here, I suppose my fears were well justified, though I cannot lay all this on Orlov’s shoulders. Much of it was my fault.”

“Your fault? I don’t understand.”

“Yes, My fault. Why I appeared on that day, in 1908, I have never truly understood.”

“Your engineering reactor sent you there?” asked Elena. “This Rod-25 was responsible for that displacement?”

“No. Rod-25 was not the cause. It delivered me to the 1940s, just as I hoped it would and, after a very difficult mission, I found our missing officer. But that was not the only thing I found during that mission, and this discovery has perhaps had more influence on events here than anything else. I left Vladivostok, traveling east along the Trans-Siberian Rail line to a location where I hoped I might find Orlov. Along the way I stopped at a small railway station.”

Now he briefly related that story, and the strange event that occurred on the stairs of Ilanskiy. This time both Admiral Tovey and Elena sat in utter stillness, hanging on every word that Nikolin was translating. As the story unfolded, Elena could feel her pulse rising.

Another rift, she thought! A location we knew nothing about! At least one that I never learned of. I’ll be the first to admit that I may not have been told everything. Yes, I’m Watchstander G1 now, so appointed by this man sitting right across from me here—Admiral John Tovey in the flesh—our founding father, though I never dreamed I would ever meet him like this. I’m Watchstander G1, by God and his degree, and I more than that. I’m a goddamned Keyholder, a Riftkeeper as well. But we haven’t found every location then, have we? This Russian Captain is telling me about one that we never discovered. And it took him right back to the source of this entire affair—Tunguska! My god, he saw it with his own eyes!

And what she learned next was equally dumbfounding. There he met a young man in the dining hall having breakfast, Mironov, Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov, and that was the very same man who later took the name of Sergei Kirov. Fedorov went on and on, telling her of that awful moment of weakness when he had whispered that dire warning in Mironov’s ear, the words that shook the world’s foundation, and reset the meridians of the history from that day forward.

“So now you know why I have told you that I am responsible,” said Fedorov with a deep shrug. “I killed Josef Stalin, just as surely as Sergei Kirov might make that claim. It was all my doing, in an effort to spare the life of a single man that I had always admired in the history. And here I am now, Captain of that ship out there, and consorting with other men who have glowed only in the light of my imagination as I studied these events. Yes, I have studied them all my life, a strange love affair with it all, and now, as we can all so plainly see, I have destroyed the thing I so loved. Now I foolishly sail about in this monstrosity of a battlecruiser, thinking I can put all the pieces back together again—thinking I can somehow redeem myself for the great sin I committed, and the misfortune I caused here in this world.”

Nikolin finished his translation, but Elena’s eyes were always on Fedorov as he spoke. So he has been standing a watch of his own in all of this, she suddenly thought, feeling in him a kindred spirit at long last. She had tried to explain it all to Gordon and Mack Morgan, but only ended up confusing them, and raising one question after another in their minds. Her heart opened as she looked at Fedorov, seeing the torment in his eyes, and hearing it in the tone of his voice. She said the one thing that she could, in all honesty, seeing this young man with new eyes now.

“I understand,” she said softly. “Well I must tell you that I have spent a good part of my life studying these events as well, Captain Fedorov. Some of the things you have just revealed are most startling, things I never knew, and I knew a great deal. I knew about Tunguska, for one thing. Yes. The events related to us by your Director Kamenski were well known to me—the nuclear testing, the exotic effects of those detonations, and the odd connection all of this had to that event above the Stony Tunguska River.”

“You knew of this?” said Fedorov. “How?”

“Because the good Admiral Tovey here got hold of this business long ago, in 1942, and he and his associate, a Mister Alan Turing, came to some very interesting conclusions about your ship in time. Yes, in time, that is one of those little puns of destiny I suppose.”

Now it was Elena’s turn to confess her crimes, telling them of the foundation of the Watch, the discoveries they made, and how they eventually came to trace the threads of the mystery back to Tunguska.

“Well,” said Tovey. “Here I sit feeling as though another man has made off with my entire life! You all speak of things I have done, things I will do, as though they have already happened. And yet, even as you do so, I find myself strangely possessed by the clawing inner realization that it is all true. I remember it now, Mister Fedorov. Yes, and it was in 1908 that I first set eyes on that ship of yours. In fact, I believe I fought my first battle against it all those many years ago, a battle I thought we had won, though we never did come to any satisfactory conclusion about what had happened to that ship.”

He told them of Tushima, and the battle he had fought. “I was a very young man then, and young men go from one moment to the next, with scarcely any worry over what they leave behind. I left that battle behind me, I suppose. At least I tried. I moved on in the ranks, busy with one thing after another, and let it drift away, but I have been strangely haunted by it ever since, and particularly so when your ship returned here last June. I knew I had seen it before, but my mind was telling me it could not possibly have been the ship I fought back then, in 1908, the year this thing came from the sky. What does it all mean?”

“As you can see, Admiral,” said Elena, “We are as perplexed about it as you might be.”

“Yes? Well it seems we all have a piece of this puzzle in our pockets. I sit here knowing that I never laid eyes on you, Captain Fedorov, or Admiral Volsky. And yet, deep down, I feel I met you both before, in a year I have not yet even lived! It’s maddening, and I would certify it all as such if not for that unaccountable evidence presented to me by our Mister Turing. You sit there and lay out chapter and verse about my collusion with Turing, Miss Fairchild, and the foundation of this group you call the Watch. Yet I only just met the man some months ago, and damn if that wasn’t the subject of that very meeting—this Russian ship,
Geronimo
, and those file boxes Turing had discovered in the archive room at Bletchley Park. It is utterly confounding!”

“As is this whole story about that stairway at Ilanskiy,” said Elena. “Well, as you say, Admiral, I have something in my pocket as well. It’s time I pulled my piece of the puzzle out and put it on the table here. Perhaps we can all find how it connects to everything else we’ve been discussing.”

“I would be very eager to hear your story, Miss Fairchild,” said Fedorov. “May I ask you to begin by first telling me how your ship came to be here?”

“Yes. You were not at that meeting in Alexandria when I met your Director Kamenski—a most interesting man. Well, it seems we have a little magic box ourselves, one full of unexpected tricks, just like that control rod of yours.” She told Fedorov of the box, or the device she had aboard
Argos Fire
, which he found quite surprising.

“And you believe it was responsible for displacing your ship in time? How?”

“I
know
it was responsible. I was given specific orders to go and fetch the damn thing, from a very special site, right here in the Mediterranean, albeit in our time, the year 2021.”

“Orders? From who?”

Now Elena had to smile. “Forgive me if this does nothing but confuse the issue, but in point of fact, from this gentleman right here, Admiral John Tovey.”

“Yes,” said Tovey. “I’ve been presented evidence of my complicity in that crime, but I must confess I recall nothing whatsoever about it, and plead innocence.”