Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) Read online

  Troyak had his answer. He kicked a little ass here, pushed these odd legionnaires back over that causeway, and now he was considering what to do about those stairs. The problem was solved when this order came in from well above his pay grade. Plan B was just what Zykov had advised. Blow the place to hell and then pull his men out. Someone has had second thoughts, he realized. Good enough. He acknowledged the signal, reported his status, and confirmed his new orders.

  Even as he did so he heard a distant train whistle, sounding high and shrill above the mutter of small arms fire to the west. A train was approaching, and he knew it was probably carrying much needed reinforcements for the Siberians. My brothers here will have what they need to beat these Kazakh scum off now. He had heard the distant shouts of the Legionnaires and he recognized their dialect as well.

  “Alright,” he said decisively. “Get back to the railway inn, Litchko,” he said to a nearby rifleman. “Demolition team,” he called on his mike. “Stand ready.” He pinched his collar mike and then gave Zykov the news.

  “Hey Zykov! We got through to the ship! Orders are to do things your way now. We blow the place sky high and extract. Spot for the grenade launcher, then notify Narva on the radio. We’ll say goodbye and then pull out.”

  Chapter 15

  “I’m not sure why I never thought of this before,” said Fedorov. “I knew it was problematic, but then it just hit me!” He was sitting in the officer’s briefing room with Admiral Volsky and Kamenski. “So I gave the order, sir. I hope I was not out of line.”

  “Considering the situation,” said Volsky, “I believe you acted appropriately. But explain it to an old man again, if you will.”

  “Well sir, I had been wondering what might happen here if Troyak did go down that stairway and managed to find Volkov. I knew it was a long shot, but what if he did make it to 1908 as I did, and managed to find him? What if he took him back up those stairs again? Where would they appear? In my experience, I returned to the same time that I had left, only what was just a few minutes for me at the bottom of those stairs was much longer for Troyak and Zykov. But at least it was the same year. So I thought that it must be something to do with the traveler. Perhaps there was a connection between the moment he leaves and the place he ends up, as if he had some kind of tether or life line when he went down those stairs, like someone going over a cliff with a safety rope. Then I realized that Volkov was not in this year—1940—so how could he return to this time with Troyak? We can only speculate, but we have been assuming Volkov went down from the year 2021, so his connection would be to that year. How could he go with Troyak to this year if this holds water?”

  “But that isn’t the reason you gave this order,” said Kamenski, a knowing light in his eye.

  “No sir. I was also trying to understand what would happen here—to us, to this whole world we find ourselves in. If Troyak did find Volkov, and if he was able to bring him up those steps, well… would there be an Orenburg Federation? What would happen? I just couldn’t see how everything in this world could suddenly re-arrange itself right under our noses, and if it did, would we still know about it? What about Troyak? Would he know why he was even sent there when he reached the top of those steps?”

  “I see what you are getting at,” said Kamenski, calmly poking at the bowl of his pipe. “If he did find Volkov and bring him to this year, or any other year for that matter, then he would have never had a reason to go there and look for him in the first place.”

  “Paradox,” said Fedorov darkly, and the word itself carried a sinister new meaning for him now. He explained it as best he could. “Paradox is not simply some thorny problem—I think it is the force that rearranges things when time is confronted with an insoluble contradiction. It is a real and dangerous force.”

  Fedorov had hit on a great truth. Paradox was time’s black hooded executioner, the slayer of impossibility, a sharp sword that cut through the Gordian knots they had twisted with their meddling.

  Kamenski gave him a solemn nod. “This is the first time our own necks have been on the chopping block,” he said. “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.”

  “Agreed,” said Fedorov. “Yet I realized something else that might be impossible. Volkov is here—in this world, at this very moment! How could he then be brought up those stairs by Troyak?”

  “Correct,” said Kamenski with a smile. “Yes, he could not co-locate. There cannot be two Ivan Volkovs here in this moment, one the young man who disappeared in 2021, and one the old man who now rules the Orenburg Federation, or so we have learned.”

  “But we rescued Mister Orlov,” said Volsky.

  “Correct Admiral,” said Fedorov, but we brought him back to a place and time where he did not exist at that moment. We brought him back aboard to the year 2021, a year he had left long ago when Kirov vanished.”

  “I see,” Volsky nodded. “So a person cannot go to a time or place where he already exists. This makes sense.”

  “And if he tries to do so he puts time in a most uncomfortable position,” said Kamenski. “He creates work for paradox—yes, Mister Fedorov, I agree with you. Paradox is not simply a mind puzzle. It is death itself—worse than death! It is the force of utter annihilation. If Volkov tried to go up those stairs to this time, then paradox would have to get rid of one version or the other, yes?”

  “What about us?” said Volsky. “We’ve been shifting all over time and back again.”

  “But we have never shifted to a time or place where we already existed. Each time we shifted we seemed to bounce a little ahead in the 1940s… until we appeared here, in a safe time before our first arrival, but one with a short lease, or so I fear.”

  “And summer's lease hath all too short a date,” said Kamenski, quoting the famous bard himself.

  Fedorov nodded. “So you see why I have been worried what will happen to us come July 28th next year?”

  “Yes, you believe we will be asking Mother Time to make a choice. Which Kirov will she permit in that time and space, this ship, or the one arriving from the year 2021?”

  “The one that must arrive from 2021 in order for this ship to even be here,” said Fedorov.

  “Mother Time will have to choose,” said Kamenski, “and being busy with other matters, she will not want to be bothered by us again. We have certainly caused enough trouble for her as it stands. Yes?”

  “Then she will hand the matter over to Paradox,” said Fedorov. “And one ship or the other must fall beneath his axe.”

  “So you ordered Troyak to abort his sortie to 1908 for this reason? You wanted to keep this paradox from happening?”

  “Yes sir. I realized there could not be two Volkovs in the same time and place.”

  “Well,” said Kamenski. “Time can be quite the magician, Mister Fedorov. Troyak could have collared him, and the Sergeant could have returned to 1940 on his journey up those stairs, while Volkov reappeared in the year 2021, still thinking he is hot on your trail along the Trans-Siberian rail line.”

  “Perhaps, sir, but then I return to my first problem.” He swept his arm at the unseen world beyond the ship’s bulkheads. “What happens to this world? What happens to the Orenburg Federation, to all the troops facing off along the Volga. What happens to all the history this moment now rests on? I’ve been reading how Volkov slowly rose to power and established control of Denikin’s White faction after Sergei Kirov forced him out of the Bolshevik movement. Do all those books get re-written, and do I suddenly forget I ever read them this week past?”

  At this Kamenski gave him a sympathetic smile. “This is exactly what happened to me,” he said quietly. “I tried to explain it to Inspector General Kapustin once. It is very disconcerting when you reach for an old fa
vorite book, read the chapter where you left off, and find the story is coming out to be something quite unexpected! Then you go back a few pages and find out one of the characters is missing!”

  “And you have told us you remember things,” said Fedorov, “from time lines that no longer exist, at least not from our perspective here.”

  “Correct, just as you remember the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Americans reprisal at Hiroshima at the other end of that war. Yet there are those who remember the bombing of Vladivostok instead, and have no recollection of Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima.”

  “So we retain memories of past times we have lived in.”

  “Apparently so,” said Kamenski. “Strange little remnants remain stuck in our head. Are they figments of our imagination or real remembered events? Is your memory of what you did yesterday a real thing, or something you construct within your own imagination? If it is a real thing, then where does it go if you die? Where do all those memories of all the days you have lived go? They are no more substantial than the images from a dream you have in your sleep, and in fact those images are woven from the very same cloth your lived memories are made from.”

  Now Admiral Volsky reached for the small flask of Vodka he had in his jacket pocket, giving them both a grim smile.

  “The two of you will make a drunkard out of me yet. How can we possibly sort through all of this?” He took a small swig, offering the flask to the others, who both politely declined.

  Kamenski tamped down the bowl of his pipe, thinking. He lit the tobacco again with his lighter, watching the thin curl of smoke billow up. Fedorov had been warming his cold hands on a mug of coffee. Each man had their own places to find small comforts.

  “So you were worried that this world we now sit in would just go up in smoke like the tobacco in my pipe, correct Fedorov? And I suppose you were worried that you would go up in smoke with it. Yes? And if not, and we are still here when the next wave of change passes through, would we remember anything of the old life, or would our memories vanish too, like the flame from my lighter when I close it?”

  “Perhaps I thought something like that, sir.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps. But remember that Mother Time does not like to make these kind of decisions. In fact, I believe she will do everything in her power to avoid turning out the dogs.”

  “The dogs?”

  “The hounds of paradox, Mister Fedorov, the wolves of change that she holds fast with the rein of causality. When time is presented with a situation that cannot be resolved in any other way, she releases the hounds. But before it comes to that, a little sleight of hand will also serve her quite well at times. Notice how you just prevented Sergeant Troyak from going down those stairs and asking an impossible question of time that could make her very disagreeable. You see what I mean? Time finds a way.”

  “And what about plan B,” said Volsky. “Have we heard anything further on that question?”

  “I have Nikolin glued to his chair,” said Fedorov, “with orders to contact me the instant Troyak confirms the demolition was carried out.”

  “Don’t hold your breath, Mister Fedorov,” Kamenski said quietly, and 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?”

  Fedorov’s pulse quickened at that. My God, he thought. I may have set up yet another paradox by ordering Troyak to demolish that stairway! This is what he had feared. If Kamenski is correct, that would be impossible, and how might time handle such a dilemma? She would have to handle Troyak first, he thought darkly, and realized he may have just signed the Sergeant’s death warrant.

  * * *

  Troyak was back at the railway inn with his assault rifle squad. He looked to see Zykov’s men falling back through the park behind the inn with cool precision.

  “Hold here!” Troyak raised his fist. They could see that a squad of grey coated soldiers had again come up the roadway from the causeway and they would soon filter in to the town center. “Zykov! Take three men and lay a spider web across these roads.” He was referring to a special kind of anti-personnel mine used by special forces to discourage pursuit on missions like this. The mine would be set, battery activated to eject and deploy up to six stakes, trailing thin tripwires that would shoot out in all directions like the web of a spider. Should anyone trip on them, the mine itself would then pop up a center core that would explode in a hail of fragmentation shrapnel. A single web set on a road would buy them the time they needed to slip away. Zykov set three in an arc protecting their line of withdrawal.

  “Private,” said Troyak. “Set off your charges.”

  The man nodded, and produced a hand held device with a small retractable antenna. He turned a dial on the back, called out a warning, but Troyak reached down and tapped his shoulder, his palm open as he reached for the device. Then he thumbed down hard on the detonator switch. There was first one, followed by a second loud explosion, with charges set at each end of the back stairway. Troyak waited until the smoke cleared, then raised a small pair of field glasses, studying the inn carefully. The entire left side of the building, including the dining hall, the chimney from the hearth, and a large segment of the second floor above were completely destroyed.

  Troyak had just done something impossible, or so Fedorov would believe when he radioed in the report. Yet that thought never entered his mind. This was just a simple search and destroy mission, and the little engagement with the zeppelin was only icing on the cake. It was time to move his men out.

  “Alright, back the way we came, and we’ll get ourselves into that tree line north of the rail leading east. Once we get well away we’ll signal the Narva to arrange for an extraction point.”

  The men had picked up all their equipment and began moving quickly through the narrow streets until they passed the tin roofed warehouse buildings by the rail yard. From there they sprinted across a 300 meter clearing and back into the woods that would take them to the culvert and small railroad bridge. Even as they went, Troyak looked over his shoulder to see the massive shape of yet another zeppelin descending from the clouds over the small town. Its guns began to blast away at targets on the ground, but he gave it no mind. His mission was accomplished.

  The back stairway at Ilanskiy no longer existed.

  * * *

  Karpov had been up on high overwatch in the Abakan, worried about that third airship out there somewhere. He was listening to the radio traffic as Andarva continued its pursuit, and keeping one eye on his Topaz radar system, bothered that the strange interference was limiting its effectiveness now. Volkov must have rigged some kind of jammers for that frequency. I’ll need to see if I can get the engineers to figure out frequency modulation and find some ways of hardening my equipment. This damn war is only beginning, and there isn’t anything in any of Fedorov’s history books about any of it. Not here.

  The news had also come in on signals traffic that confirmed Volkov’s treachery. Six divisions had crossed the western border. The 17th, 21st and 11th Orenburg divisions were all pushing for Omsk. South of that city, the 9th, 22nd Air Mobile and 15th divisions had crossed the border in a drive towards the Ob river line positions near Barnaul. At least four more airships had crossed there on overwatch, and all he had to oppose them near Barnaul was old Krasny. The men in the Aero Corps called it Big Red, due to the dull red tarp used on its outer shell. It’s real name was the Krasnoyarsk, and he knew that he would now either have to pull that airship out of there or Big Red would likely be a flaming wreck within 48 hours.

  The third airship he had been watching for seemed very close on radar, then it withdrew north, possibly discouraged when they saw Abakan was on to them and heading their way, or so he thought. Then he got the news that there were Grey Legionnaires o
n the ground and attacking Ilanskiy, and he turned Abakan about, heading back to the town.

  He followed the action closely on radio, learning of Angara’s fate, alive but unable to maneuver and out of the fight. When the Oskemen doubled back to lend fire support to the Legionnaires on the ground, he pressed Abakan into a rapid descent, intent on getting down there to engage. When he arrived, however, the matter had already been settled. The sight of the flaming duralumin skeleton and the wreckage of the Oskemen on the ground gave him heart. We took down two of Volkov’s airships!

  Three hours later he was on the ground, his mood considerably darkened as he stared at another pile of wreckage, this time at the site of the railway inn.

  How did Volkov know, he asked himself? That was obviously why he risked those airships and all his men here today—to get a demolition team in here and take out that back stairway.

  “What happened to my guards here?” He could see no bodies.

  “Sir,” said a nearby Lieutenant. “The heavy platoon you sent relieved them and took over this position.”

  “Heavy platoon?” Karpov gave him a strange look.

  “Yes sir. They were the ones who took down that second zeppelin. Damn thing was giving us hell, and they just blasted it from the sky. When can my men get their hands on those weapons, sir?”

  What was this man talking about? Karpov questioned the Lieutenant further and soon got a description of the men from this platoon, which struck a hard chord in him.

  “These men,” he said quickly, “they all wore this black camouflage uniform? And did you see any unit designation?”

  The Lieutenant thought, then he remembered the odd shoulder patch he had seen. “Yes sir. It read ‘Maritime Infantry,’ a symbol of a ship’s anchor, gold on black.”