Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) (28 page)

“Brought
here? By who?”

“Therein
lies the rub,” said Tovey. “The Russian Admiral hinted they knew of other men
who had traveled in time. He called them dark angels, and said there are
dangerous men at large in this world—possibly from the future. We shall have to
keep a sharp watch, and possibly put your machines to work on that little
mystery. Yes?”

Turing
nodded gravely. “Even so, Admiral, my theory still remains viable. No one could
bring an object from the future if it already existed here. That would be very
inconvenient. How could the second watch be accounted for? Something would have
to happen to one watch or another. The watch from the future would have to be
left behind, or in this case I think Time found a more elegant solution—the
watch that existed here was simply moved.”

“Most
alarming, Mister Turing. All of this gives me the shivers, and the worst of it
is this…. If these men have come from the future, then they have knowledge that
can be decisive to the outcome of this war. They must know how it all turned
out, and of course I asked this question. The answer I received was equally
disturbing. They told me that events they have observed here are out of order.
Things are happening that never occurred in the history they know—my flagship
being a perfect example. I was told it never existed in the world these men
came from, and that was the least of it. They said their homeland was not
divided in civil war as it remains today. It was one unified Soviet state.”

“Remarkable,”
said Turing.

“Sadly,
these men have come to believe that it was their earlier intervention, the
events documented in that box, that may have been responsible for these
changes.”

“Is
that why they have come here, sir? To set matters right?”

“No,
Mister Turing, they told me they tried to re-set the table, but the china is so
badly broken that it came to no avail. In fact, they told me their movement in
time was unintentional, quite by accident—something to do with a mishap in
their ship’s propulsion system.”

“Amazing,”
Turing was riveted by all of this. “Yet they seem to have bounced about a good
deal, sir. The
Geronimo
file documents their movement from 1941 through
1942, and now they are here. Did you ask about that?”

“There
were a thousand questions in my mind,” said Tovey, “Each one crowded out the
last, and there was too little time for answers. I did press gently on the
matter of the outcome of this war, and though they seemed reluctant to disclose
information on that, I was given to hope that things might take a turn for the
better.”

“Possibly,”
said Turing. “They may hope as much, even as we do. But it could be that they
now realize what I have already concluded.”

“And
what is that?”

“If
what you say is true, and events here have been altered because of this ship,
then they may not really know how things resolve.”

Tovey
nodded. “They did say something to that effect.
The Russian Admiral told
me he had already seen one possible outcome of all this, and it was rather
bleak and foreboding. He said this war would not be the last, and that was a
rather difficult thing to hear. Then he said the only way we will know how it
all turns out is to live it all through, one day at a time.”

“I see….” Turing seemed very
thoughtful now. “Well Admiral, we seem to be marked men, you and I. Our
initials and fingerprints are all over that box, and just as you say you have
been haunted by the feeling you knew all of this, I have felt the very same
way. It could be that more than my pocket watch was shuffled about when that ship
appeared here on the 12th of June. Our lives seem to have been changed as well.
How very strange it feels. One fine morning you simply wake up a different man,
with memories in your head you take to be dreams and mere imagination—but they
are
not
dreams. No. They are real, as all of this is real—that box, that
ship,
Geronimo
. Things have changed, Admiral. You feel it, I feel it and
know it to be so. It isn’t just our own fate I speak of now. The whole world is
caught up in the maelstrom, and you and I, well we are standing right in the
eye of the storm.”

Part IX

Fimbulwinter

“When clouds appear, wise men put on
their cloaks;
When great leaves fall, the winter is at hand;
When the sun sets, who doth not look for night?”

—William Shakespeare: Richard III, 2.3

Chapter 25

Kirov
was out to
sea, cruising in the Denmark Strait after setting up the Ice Watch with an
Oko
panel radar team at Hornsrandir, the northernmost cape of Iceland in the
Westfjord region. Fedorov coordinated the mission, seeing to security and the
movement of adequate supplies to the outpost. The Americans will have a similar
outpost here in the future, he thought as he finished up and returned to the
ship on the KA-40. Yet the moment he was back aboard
Kirov
his mind
returned to the impossible news he had received. Troyak had succeeded! His
Marines got through to Ilanskiy and demolished that back stairway—but how? How
was that possible given what Kamenski had told him?

He recalled his words from their
earlier conversation, the discussion that was so daunting that it had prompted
Admiral Volsky to take a sip from his vodka flask.

“Don’t hold your breath,
Mister Fedorov,”
Kamenski had said quietly, as he took another long slow
drag on his pipe.

“Sir?”

“Well… If your Sergeant Troyak
destroys that railway inn in 1940, then how in the world did you go down those
steps in 1942, to eventually end up here and get the idea for this little
mission? For that matter, how did Volkov go down those stairs in 2021?”

But he did it! Kamenski was wrong.
Troyak had reported mission accomplished. To put it more bluntly, he radioed
that he had blown that stairway to hell. That sent Fedorov off to the bridge to
check their present situation and see if there was any unusual news on the
airwaves. Were things still the same? Out here on the sea, isolated in the ice
fog of the Denmark Strait, they would have seen nothing if it changed.

The first thing he checked on
were the two British cruisers Admiral Tovey had assigned to this watch, placing
them directly under Admiral Volsky’s command. He soon learned that they were
still there,
Sheffield
and
Southampton
, on what they believed
were forward radar picket duties. Shiny Sheff, as the
Sheffield
was
called, had been one of the first British ships fitted with the Type 79Y early
warning radar, effective out to about 50 kilometers.

The two cruisers were still
there, right on station as
Kirov’s
own radar had them. So nothing must
have changed, thought Fedorov. Nikolin also confirmed that news of the Orenburg
Federation was again on the wires, with renewed fighting reported at the
Siberian city of Omsk. Apparently the “Omsk Accord” as it had been called
earlier, had fallen apart. So if Orenburg remained, and the civil war
continued, then Volkov must have taken his trip down those stairs. Sergei Kirov’s
name was also prominent in the news items that continued to follow the treaty
now being signed with England.

Fedorov now wondered if he had
been wrong about the importance of those stairs. What had happened? How could
the history here remain inviolate? Were the changes so subtle that they had not
yet been noticed? He could not help but think that Troyak’s mission had created
some great contradiction, and was again dogged by the feeling that it would be his
fault if it did. Kamenski’s voice returned again.

“Yes, the edge of paradox is a
very dangerous precipice to hike along. We must be very careful here. I cannot
say how that problem might resolve itself, Mister Fedorov, but something tells
me that time would find a way. Yes. Mother Time does not wish to have her
skirts ruffled any more than necessary. She would find a way.”

Time
must have found a way, thought Fedorov.
But how? If Sergei Kirov was still
safely alive and in power in the Soviet Union, then he must have used that stairway
as before, and in 1942. If Ivan Volkov was alive now then he must have also
used it safely in 2021.

Then the answer struck him like a
wet fish in the face, so obviously simple that he was surprised he had not
considered it earlier. Troyak may have just destroyed the stairway, but he
obviously did not destroy the time rift itself! So the only solution to his
problem was that someone must have rebuilt those stairs. Could this be done?

This had to be the answer. The
inn was restored, sometime between this moment and that date in 1942 when he
first discovered the rift. Then the darker implications of what he had
concluded struck him. Was the restoration done by someone who knew what they
were about—someone who knew that rift in time existed? If so, who might that
person be? He realized that any number of people might have inadvertently gone
up or down those stairs, and now he wondered if that inn had a history of these
events, the people who may have boarded there and unwittingly stumbled through
that rift as he did. Some may have returned to their correct time, even as
Fedorov returned when he retreated back up those stairs. Yet others may have
been trapped in some other time, like Volkov.

Then he realized that there
was
a record of everyone who had ever boarded at that inn—the guest register! Boarders
would sign in on a routine basis, and there might also be billing records. Did
the innkeepers know about the strange effects on that stairway? Could they be
the ones behind this restoration, or was it someone else?

That thought led him to one dark
name that might be on the list of possible suspects, and one of the primary
reasons he sent Troyak on that mission in the first place—Vladimir Karpov. The
threat that stairway represented may have only been temporarily forestalled by
Troyak’s mission. Yet there might be no way he would ever know who rebuilt the
inn, or when they might do this, which would make any future operation
difficult to plan.

Yes, Mother Time had found a way,
and he could at least know that he was not responsible for creating another
insoluble paradox with his mission plan. That thought gave him little solace.

“Admiral on the bridge!”

Fedorov turned to see that Volsky
had returned to take up his post after a long eight hour shift below decks.

“Good
day, sir,” he said, but Volsky took one look at his face and knew something was
wrong.

“You do
not look so happy today, Mister Fedorov. Is something troubling you?”

“No
sir… I was just thinking how we will recover the mission team.” Fedorov did not
want to burden the Admiral again with more talk of paradox and time theory that
neither of them really understood in the first place.

“Ah,”
said Volsky. “I have sent a message to Admiral Golovko on this while you were
busy setting up the Ice Watch team. The
Narva
has safely returned to
Murmansk, refueled, and is already on its way to rendezvous with us here. Along
the way they can reconnoiter to see if the Germans are up to anything.”

“A very
good idea, sir.”

“Yes, and
how was the deployment of the
Oko
panel? Any problems?”

“No
sir. We laid in a month’s supply of food, fuel and other items for the six man
team there. They are on-line now and feeding data to our main radar display.
Contacts will display on our navigation board in blue.”

“Is
there adequate security? We must not allow this technology to fall into the
wrong hands, which is why I hesitated to release it to the British unless
necessary.”

“The
Ice Watch is very isolated, sir, and the team would certainly see anything
coming by air or sea in time to warn us. I’ve also given some thought to the
risk of sharing technology. Perhaps we were too paranoid earlier with the fear
that nothing must ever fall into enemy hands.”

“Oh?
Why do you say this, Fedorov?”

“Well
sir, there is simply no way any of our technology could be reverse engineered
in this era. Think about it for a moment. Take the
Oko
panel radar set,
for example. It uses a powerful 6m² radar antenna with 360° azimuthal coverage.
The processing power in a single unit exceeds that of all computational devices
that will be made on planet earth through the 1980s! It has integrated
micro-circuitry, millions of transistors, and wafer thin digital circuits,
exotic materials and other components that no power on earth could even begin
to duplicate until the 1990s. The technology could be used by men from this era
trained to do so, but there is no conceivable way it could ever be reverse
engineered or duplicated. In many ways the same can be said of our missile
technology. Our engineers could certainly improve existing models of rocketry
here, but face it, you could gather the very best of the missile scientists of
this era into one project, and they could not reproduce a functioning
Moskit-II
if they worked round the clock for ten years! It simply requires advances in
too many technological areas. Our computer technology is quantum leaps above
anything of this era, and it is an essential integrated component in all of our
systems. Computers handle all radar and infrared detection, inertial
navigation, guidance and targeting. Without them the missile is just a very
efficient and deadly unguided bomb, and no power on earth could ever duplicate
our computers in this era. It simply could not be done.”