“How so?”
“Here a battle at sea is a lonesome affair. You never really ever see the thing you are firing at, unless the occasional missile gets inside five miles. All you see are the SAM’s firing off the deck, the SSM’s. Soon the entire ship is shrouded in a white misty cloud from the smoke of all the rockets. The only way you can ever make any sense of what might be happening would be to hover over the radar station, and there you can watch the tracks of the missiles as they come and go. The computers tell you whether a missile failed or hit its target, and if it does, you know nothing of the terror it caused on that unfortunate ship. There is a wrenching explosion, smoke, fire, but you see nothing. You just sit there in that white fog….”
The Admiral inclined his head, as if he had hold of something in his mind. “Yes… fog….”
“And this is what you dream?”
“Quite the contrary. The battle I see in my dream is one where you can actually see the ship you are attacking, off on the horizon, a dark and threatening shape, a shadow. From time to time you see the flash and wink of light, and then comes the boom of great guns.”
“Guns? You mean naval guns? We never seem to use them on this ship. They just sit there.”
“Very true, but not in my dream. Kirov is there, to be sure, but then in one dream I find myself on some other ship, and not one I even command. It is very old, one of those big battleships from the great war. The sound of the guns firing is deafening, terrible, worse even than the roar of these missiles when they fire. You can hear the woosh and fall of those massive shells, and see them plop into the sea to send up big water geysers. No, it is nothing like modern naval combat, where the missile you send will almost certainly find and kill its target—unless another missile finds and kills that Vampire first. It is almost exhilarating. The fact that the enemy shells miss you actually heightens the tension. You see them walking closer to your ship on the sea, and realize that should one ever strike…. Well, at least there is no fog. You actually see the devil stalking you, and feel the wind from his fists of steel as he flings his madness at you. Yes… no fog.”
“Better to see your end, if it’s coming?” said Zolkin. “I would not like to be sitting there is a cloud, not knowing whether an enemy missile is about to break on through and smash into the ship. So I just stay here and hope nothing bad happens, and that I will not have a line of wounded men to tend to.”
“Well, that’s the thing, Dimitri. All you have to do is go to the radar screens, and you will know if an enemy missile is close or far. But this is not the case on those old dreadnoughts.”
“Leonid, you sound as though you have actually fought such battles. I know you have been in the navy a good long time, but not that long.”
Volsky smiled. Of course there was no way he could tell his friend all that he really knew, and all he had experienced. Because yes, he had seen those mighty old battleships, and he knew the doings of the war where they once fought on the seas first hand. Yes, he had been to the last great war, aboard Kazan, until Fedorov had urged them to try and return to the world where they belonged. Go forward, he said. Go home. They had the means, one of those magic control rods Kazan had been carrying, and Time had the will. So they dipped that rod, shifted, and here they were, but not in the world they once knew as home. Instead, they found themselves in this far flung future, the years that grew directly from the great war he had seen in the past.
Yet his friend here knew nothing of that, nothing at all. Fedorov and Karpov hijacked this ship in 2021. That was the future we came from. They tell me they stopped Kirov from regressing to the past, and instead became embroiled in a war like this one. They tell me I was on that ship—another Admiral Volsky, and perhaps the man I was before all of this ever happened. So there we were. The missiles started flying, and we fought, for our lives, for our country, for that future, or so Fedorov tells me. But we failed. Way leads on to way when first we practice the deadly art of war. There we were, thumping our chest with those live fire exercises, and yes, way leads on to way….
Fedorov told me Russia was losing that war, in spite of all our efforts. Karpov fought with the same art and skill he has always shown, the same unwavering determination, but the Navy was just not strong enough to face and defeat the USN. And the land war that started so auspiciously for us in the Baltic States, and Ukraine, took a decided turn for the worse once the European Union, Britain, and the United States mobilized their latent strength.
Very strange… That was a war I should have fought—the war I trained and prepared for through all my years in the service. They tell me I did fight, defending Severomorsk and the approaches to the Barents Sea, and covering our troops in Norway, but it was not me. It was some other version of this old man, and when Karpov, Fedorov, and Tyrenkov got the notion that things were going up in smoke in that war—nuclear war being imminent—they simply stole away on this ship, leaving that old Volsky behind to his fate.
I suppose that wasn’t something they could remedy, as I was not aboard when they felt compelled to make good their escape. That said, it still stings a bit to think they left me there, but time has a way of righting all wrongs. Here I am! I came forward with Gromyko aboard Kazan, and we have had our nice little reunion. But this is not the future I once knew. No, it is the future of the war I saw with my own eyes, the war where dreadnoughts prowled the seas. Yet even as I think back on it, I am beset with these strange feelings. I fought there, yes, but in some deep place within me, I feel I died there as well. That is what I dream of now. Yes, I died in that war, as I died again in 2021…. Yet here I am, sitting with my old friend of so many years, in this and every Meridian of time where I have ever existed.
“It is very strange, Dimitri—more than strange. If you knew all the things I have really done, you would know I came to make friends with the impossible long ago. But this is what I dream… Once I was on a great battleship, in the last war, and the enemy shells found my ship I think—found me.”
Zolkin nodded. “Just a dream, Leonid. Do not fret about it.”
“You are probably right,” said Volsky. “Dimitri, do you ever have the odd feeling you have done something twice?”
“Twice? You mean feeling like I have lived through the same event more than once?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, to be quite honest, I have. I putter around in here when there’s no line at the hatch, and once I found something that puzzled me. It was an old bandage, still bloodied, but for the life of me, I could not remember ever using it, or dressing out a crewman with it. If that were the case, I would certainly have disposed of it properly.”
“A bandage? Just throw it away, Dimitri. Nothing to bother with.”
“You might think as much, but I couldn’t…. throw it away. I wouldn’t. It seemed important, though for the life of me I cannot say why. But it was important, something I kept for a reason. The strange thing is this. The instant I saw that bandage, I had the distinct feeling that I had found it once before, and had this very same reaction to it. You would think I would recall something like that, eh? Well, it seemed as if I did recall it, but then I could not remember why it would be important enough for me to keep it like that—locked up in the medicine cabinet and all. That was most unusual.”
“Something tells me we’ve both been at sea too long,” said Volsky. “Tell me, Dimitri. What do you make of all this?”