Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) (4 page)

Tovey could almost see all this
in his mind’s eye as Admiral Volsky described it, feel the anxiety of the
chase, the impact of a rocket against the armor of his flagship.

“Then we were enemies?”

“Sadly true,” said Volsky. “We
made our way to the Mediterranean Sea, and even fought a duel with your own
battleships there… What were their names, Mister Fedorov?”

“
Nelson
and
Rodney
,
sir”

“Yes. I was indisposed at the
time, because the photograph of one of your planes strafing this ship was real,
Admiral, and I was seriously injured during that attack. Mister Fedorov here
was in command at the time. And so you see, all the material you presented to
me ashore was very surprising for us to see, for we knew it was authentic, moments
we have fought and lived through, at great cost to both sides. Yes, men died on
this ship in action against your fleet, and I am afraid a good many more died
on your ships. I could spend hours talking about it, but in an effort to return
to our own day, we tried a procedure with our propulsion system, and were able
to move again in time. Unfortunately, the end of that journey now finds us
here, where we appeared just weeks ago very near one of your convoys south of
Iceland. Mister Fedorov?”

“Convoy HX-49, sir, just off Cape
Farewell.”

Tovey sat in stunned silence, his
mind laboring to protest this lunacy, but muted now by the awful weight of the
feeling he had carried that all this was true. Finally he spoke… “I have read
my Dickens as well, Admiral Tovey. Are you saying you now appear to me like the
Ghost of Christmas yet to come? That all these engagements you say we have
fought are fated to re-occur?”

“No. That need not be the case.
Quite frankly, the world as it now stands does not seem to be the one we left.
This will also be difficult for you to grasp, but the history we knew did not
see our homeland divided in civil war as it is. The Soviet Union was exactly
that, a strong union of all the states that now make up what was once Imperial
Russia under the Romanov dynasty. No… We now believe the actions we took in the
events documented in that box of yours are responsible for the radical changes
to the history we have learned about since our arrival here—in 1940. We tried,
many times, to clean up the mess we had made and set things right, but you have
a nursery rhyme about a fat egg man that falls off a wall, do you not?”

“Humpty Dumpty?”

“That is the one. Well, we, too,
learned that all the King’s horses, and all the King’s men could not put the
world back together again as it was. We are living in an altered reality now—a
world we helped to shape with our own damnable incompetence and short-sightedness.
So this time when we appeared here I realized it was no good trying to mend
things again, but a man my age will not easily make the same mistake twice. You
and I were adversaries in that other world. This time I decided things
differently. Yes, Admiral, we did meet once before, and we found reason and
good will could trump our enmity. We made peace, you and I. This time I wanted
to make a friend of the Royal Navy, and not have to relive the events we had
already experienced. So here we are.” He smiled, holding up his glass and
taking a long sip of much needed wine. “Here we are at dinner with the Admiral
of the British Home Fleet!”

Now Fedorov spoke, wanting to
voice a matter he had puzzled over since Tovey first handed them those
photographs. “If I may, Admiral, we find ourselves equally bemused by all of
this. As you may have seen, we were quite shocked to see the photographs in
that envelope you handed us, and I cannot think of how that material, this box
you say you have, ever came into your possession at all! It stands as a deep
mystery, for those are images from the world we came from—not this world.”

“They certainly could not have
been taken in the world I know,” Tovey agreed as Nikolin quickly translated.

“Yes, you yourself know that you
have only two ships ready in the
King George V
class now, yet that photo
you handed me clearly showed four. That photo is a remnant from another time,
and it images an event that now may never occur. The thought that photograph
could even exist now is most disturbing; completely inexplicable. So you see, while
we tell you now the seemingly impossible truth concerning our own displacement
in time, we must confess that we are no masters of that. Our control over what
happened to us is very limited, and the existence of these photographs, and
things like that report you mentioned to us regarding the meeting Admiral
Volsky had with you in 1942, well they are quite troubling, maddeningly unsettling
to us, even as this outrageous tale must prey upon your own mind. How could
images of events we lived through in 1941 and 1942 be here, a year before any
of that ever happened, in the year 1940? Unless—and this is the only
possibility we could grasp at—unless they were
brought
here, from some
future year, and by someone we have yet to identify who is also capable of
moving in time.”

“Like our Mister Wells,” said
Tovey, his eyes narrowing. “Yes, just like old H. G. Wells with his Time
Machine.”

Even as Tovey said that he
realized how stupid and foolish it sounded, but this man was suggesting it as a
real possibility. If the material Turing had dredged up in that box was
authentic, then it had to come from somewhere. These men had just told him that
was so. The next question was obvious to them all.

“Brought here, you say?” said
Tovey. “By who? For what reason? Was it meant as a warning of some kind? As you
have just confessed, we were apparently at each other’s throats the first time
around this merry-go-round.”

“We have not had time to think
this through,” said Volsky. “I am sure Mister Fedorov here will have a bit of a
sleepless night over this matter.”

“That is an understatement,” said
Tovey. “I’ve been sitting here pinching myself, gentlemen, thinking I should
wake up from a nightmare and find myself back in Scapa Flow with nothing to
worry about but the
Hindenburg
.”

Fedorov smiled. “You may be
surprised to know that ship was never built by Germany in the history we
knew—nor was your own ship anchored just a few hundred yards from us this
evening, HMS
Invincible
.”

“Never built?”

“No sir. The history we know
records that the G3 class battlecruisers were cancelled due to the limitations
imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty. That ship does displace somewhat over
35,000 tons, does it not? All four planned ships were cancelled, so imagine my
surprise when we arrived here and I laid eyes on your ship. This world has
things in it that amaze us as well.”

“Astounding…” It was all Tovey
could say. It was all simply astounding. Then something occurred to him that
struck him like a thunderclap. “Then you know,” he said. “You know
everything—the history, the war, how it all ends.” He looked at them, his eyes
open wide with the possibilities hidden within his question.

“Yes, we know how it turned out… once
upon a time. But, as the existence of your own ship testifies, this world is a
new reality. Everything is different here now, at least to us. It could all
turn out quite differently as well.”

Tovey was silent, lost in the
deep gravity of all this, yet pulled by the irresistible urge to know more.
“Did I know this in the time where we last met?”

“We were never sure what you
knew, though I had my suspicions that you were slowly realizing something was
terribly amiss in regards to our ship.”

“Geronimo….”
Tovey had a
distant look in his eye now, as if he were seeing ghostly, vaporous images of a
past life, always present in the hidden recesses of his mind, yet ever fleeing
from the powerful light of his conscious attention, like fitful shadows. “We
called your ship
Geronimo.
I don’t know how I know that, but I would
swear that is so.”

Fedorov looked at Volsky, not
knowing what to say. This was all so completely confounding that he had no way
to grasp it. Photos here before the things they imaged ever had a chance to be
lived, and from another reality. And here was a man who seemed to sense the
truth of all this, as though the imprint of those experiences remained branded
on his soul, a remnant or shadow from that other world, like a man remembering
a past life. It was an anomaly of profound importance. How could this John
Tovey have any recollection of events he had never lived in this time line?

Now Admiral Volsky said the one
thing that seemed to make some sense. “We struggled for some time over whether
or not any of this should ever be revealed, to you or anyone else from this
time. It is said that the truth eventually emerges no matter how long we
struggle to hide it.”

“Yes,” said Tovey with a smile.
“Our own Mister Churchill has said that ‘men occasionally stumble over the
truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever
happened.’ Well this is a revelation that I will have to sit with for a very
long while, more than a stumble, gentlemen.”

“Seeing those photographs was a blow
to my soul as well,” said Volsky. “In some ways I hope what we do here now will
make certain none of them can ever come into being. Yes, we know how things once
were, but something tells me the changes to the history of these momentous
events are only just beginning, even as this war is only just beginning. I
spoke to give you hope that things might turn out favorably, but I must also
tell you that this war will not be the last, Admiral Tovey, and the next great
war leads us to the edge of complete annihilation.” He let that sit there as
Nikolin translated slowly.

 “Can we avoid that future?”
Volsky continued. “This is what we wonder now, but there is no way for us to
know this for certain. The only way we will know how it all turns out is to
live it all through, one day at a time.”

Part
II

Confrontation

“Brinkmanship is the art of bringing a
situation to the edge of the abyss.”

—Adlai Stevenson

Chapter 4

After
his harrowing experience on that stairway at Ilanskiy,
Karpov had plenty of time to think things over. Now he knew he must have been
seeing events from his home world, the year 2021. It was the great war, he
thought, the last great war. We wondered how long we had until the missiles
would fly, and it seems they have. So that stairway must be some kind of
passage in time! How was that possible? Was it only because of the nearby
nuclear detonation he had witnessed? Volkov said nothing about this, so he must
have gone down those steps well before the missiles were fired. How could he
have moved in time—and all the way to 1908?

No, he
thought. He did not get that far. He came here, to the 1940s. What was all this
talk about meeting men who claimed they were NKVD? If that was so then he must
have gone down those stairs a second time if he ended up in 1908. And why would
that passage in time lead there? Rod-25 had done the same thing. It moved the
ship from 2021 to 1941, and took us on that journey forward and back again many
times. Then, for some reason, a hole in time had opened to the year 1908. He
could not yet understand why this was, or even how Fedorov had managed to move
from 1942 to find him in 1908, and on two occasions. What was so special about
that year?

He
thought about that for some time, until he revisited what had happened when
that Demon Volcano had erupted in 2021. Large explosive events… yes, something
about the shattering power of these events was affecting the integrity of time.
That volcano blasted the ship into the 1940s, and then his own use of nuclear
weapons had sent
Kirov
even farther back in time.

Why not
Orlan,
he thought?
That ship was steaming just a few thousand
meters ahead of me, even closer to the source of the detonation, did it move in
time as well? It certainly did not move to 1908. Could it have gone somewhere
else? None of the American ships or planes were affected either, as least as
far as I know. We thought it was something unique to
Kirov
—Rod-25—but
could it have been something more, something in the ship’s reactor core that
Rod-25 was only catalyzing? And what did any of that have to do with that
stairway at Ilanskiy? There were no nuclear reactors or detonations of any kind
there. He could make no sense of it, but then again his life had been one
impossibility after another since
Kirov
first disappeared in the
Norwegian Sea. He had come to accept the impossible as commonplace now. Yet
there had to be an answer to all of this, something he was not seeing. Fedorov
was trying to figure all this out long ago. I must do the same, he thought.

Why did
the ship move to 1908? It was also the year where Volkov appeared when he went
down those stairs. And Fedorov was able to get there using Rod-25 on both the
Anatoly
Alexandrov
and
Kazan
. Why that year? Was it mere coincidence? The
ship seemed to move in and out of the 1940s numerous times. First we arrive in
1941, then move to 1942 on two separate occasions. He said it was as if our
position in time was unstable, like a rock skipping on a pond, and we always
moved forward—until that last shift from 1945 to 1908. Was that a random event
or was there something significant about that year?

He
thought about that, reaching for a volume of the history of the Siberian State,
and scouring information for the year 1908 to see if he could turn up any
clues. Here I am sitting like Fedorov with my nose in the history books, he
realized. Then he saw a reference to the strange event in late June of 1908.
Yes! That must be it! Tunguska! June 30, 1908.