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

  Rodenko walked them from station to station, describing the equipment as Nikolin translated, and noting its basic purpose. They toured Radar and then Sonar, where Tasarov waited quietly beneath his headset.

  “We could hear the approach of a German U-Boat from over twenty kilometers away, and if we were simply listening for your ship, we would hear it coming at many times that range.”

  Then came to the combat information center, aglow with lights and status panels, where the Admiral introduced Victor Samsonov. “Here is my strong right arm, Admiral Tovey. This man executes battle orders to deliver the appropriate ordnance on the target, and he is very efficient, as the German navy has already seen.”

  Tovey was taking this all in, one amazing fact after another. The electronic devices that seemed to be everywhere hummed with quiet energy. There were no telescopes for sighting on distant ships, no voice pipes for the officer of the watch to bawl out orders to stations below. Instead there was an enormous flat black panel overhead that suddenly came to life with the image of his own ship, HMS Invincible, where it road at anchor behind a screen of destroyers hundreds of yards away. To his utter astonishment the image was zoomed in at Admiral Volsky’s request, and Tovey gaped when he clearly saw men he recognized standing on the weather deck at their watches. The resolution and clarity of the image was impeccable.

  “Now let us retire to the officer’s dining room for dinner. I am eager to repay your hospitality in hosting us for lunch some weeks ago, and there is much we have to discuss.”

  Chapter 3

  If a man could eat the finest cut of steak and not taste it, that was Tovey’s experience that night, so focused as he was on what the Russian Admiral was telling him.

  “So you have seen this ship, and I can imagine you find it more than uncommon.” Volsky set down his napkin, taking a sip of wine as he finished. “Your next question is obvious. How could Soviet Russia build such a ship, develop such advanced weaponry, electronics, radar, and more? There are things hidden behind those glowing consoles and screens that I have not mentioned, Admiral. We have a machine that allows us to make precise calculations, faster than the speed of thought itself. The application of these weapons requires it, the hand of man being simply too slow to adequately manage these weapons once they are unleashed. The world I come from demands such precision, and a matter of even a few seconds could make the difference between life or death in battle there.”

  “The world you come from? I will admit that the nature and capabilities of the weapons and machinery you have shown me here seems otherworldly, but what do you mean by that?”

  “Consider it yourself, Admiral. You have seen the development of military science, and know it can be plodding at times, and take great leaps at others. But how long do you think it would be before you might have missiles that can do what you have seen us demonstrate?”

  Tovey was a realist, and knew that Britain had very little to show by way of rocket development. “I must say it would take us a good number of years.”

  “Precisely, decades in fact. By the end of this war you will see the emergence of this technology. After that it will grow and grow until it can do things you would not imagine now.”

  “You speak of this as though you have already lived through this war and well beyond,” said Tovey with a smile. “Surely this is mere conjecture. Your engineers and scientists have developed this technology, and ours will as well one day. Perhaps you might hasten that day with a gesture of friendship and give us a leg up in that regard.”

  “We would be happy to do so, but these weapons and the machinery that controls them are very complex, as you might imagine. They require advances in many fields, aviation, flight mechanics, ballistics, metallurgy, solid fuel development, guidance mechanisms, and so on. These things all take time…”

  He leaned on that last word, clearly intending it to matter and convey something more than he had said. Nikolin caught the innuendo, and did his best to translate it in a way that Tovey would understand.

  The British Admiral waited, saying nothing, arms folded as he listened. Then Admiral Volsky gave him a long, serious look, and exhaled, resigned to what he must now do.

  “Admiral Tovey, nothing I have shown you here could be built by any engineering firm of this day. You could set your entire war effort to the task, the Germans as well, and that of every other nation on earth, including Soviet Russia. Together they would labor to produce just a fraction of the capability we now possess. These things take time, and that is the heart of the matter. A ship this size would take years to design and build, would it not? It would take enormous resources, but I must tell you now that this ship was not built in the last five years as you might think. There are things aboard that could not be built, even if we were to wait fifty years. This ship was not built by the Soviet Russia you now know. It was built in the distant future… There. I have finally said it.”

  “The future? Are we to discuss H. G. Wells and his Time Machine now?” Tovey felt a mixture of surprise, outrage and shock, but behind it was a throbbing pulse of anxiety that warned of the truth, a dangerous and deadly truth in everything this man was now saying. It was something he had known once, discovered once, set a long and guarded watch on. Yes… the Watch! That word resonated within him now, and he could feel that awful sense that he knew something that he could simply not clarify and grasp, like the fading recollection of a dream as it fled from his waking mind. He knew…

  “Time machine? That would hit very close to the bone,” said Volsky. “This ship was commissioned into the Russian Navy in the year 2020. An accident occurred while we were underway in the Norwegian Sea, something we now believe is associated with our highly advanced propulsion system, and we found ourselves strangely marooned, lost, adrift in the seas of the year 1941.”

  “1941? It hasn’t happened yet!” Tovey’s rational mind voiced the obvious protest, but his inner mind knew it had happened, he had lived it through. Everything in that damnable box Turing had wrestled away from the cobwebs in the archive of BP—it was all true!

  “No it hasn’t happened here yet. Not for you, Admiral, but for us, for every man aboard this ship, this war is very old history that we have studied at school and long forgotten. Now I will tell you what happened to us. We were spotted by one of your Royal Navy task forces. Appearing as we did in the Norwegian Sea, I believe they assumed we were a German raider. At that time we were struggling, even as you must be now, to come to grips with what had happened to us. It simply could not be, we thought. It was impossible for us to find ourselves displaced to another time, like the story you have mentioned. But, little by little, the evidence of our own eyes persuaded us that it was the truth, an impossible truth, and a very dangerous one. Mister Fedorov, who was the Admiral commanding the task force that first discovered us?”

  “Admiral Wake-Walker, sir.”

  “There—a man you may know personally, Admiral Tovey. Well, I am sad to report that the misunderstanding and confusion of mind on both sides led to a situation where we were forced to defend ourselves. It was a small disagreement in the beginning. This Wake-Walker wanted to see if we were, indeed, a new German ship, and we could not allow him to make a close approach to our vessel. I was forced to fire on one of your destroyers, and the rest, as happens all too often in war, was a sad repetition of that mistake. Your Royal Navy is quite efficient, and in fact, you were in command at that time, even as you are now. Your pursuit of my ship was dogged and determined, and it resulted in some rather difficult moments for us both.”

  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”

&nb
sp; “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 occas
ionally 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?