Until then, enjoy Able Fire, and stay safe. My best to you all, with continued thanks for keeping me fed. If you don’t read, I don’t eat. Let’s all hope that when I present the next volume in the series, Far Horizon, our world looks much better. Help make it so.
Part I
Three Blind Mice
Chapter 1
Tell me everything that happened.
That was a tall order, thought Fedorov. It had been the most harrowing time of his life, through all the many dangers and travails of Kirov these many years. He remembered how alone he felt, in command of the ship, lost in that sickening, impenetrable sea fog for seemingly endless days. How to begin? How could he explain that time to Karpov, and get him to understand.
“After what happened to Lenkov,” he started, you can imagine how the rest of the crew must have felt.”
“Certainly,” said Karpov.
“Well, I did my best to calm things, and then Dobrynin came to me again.”
“Trouble with the reactors?”
“Not exactly. He thought that at first, but it was something else—a sound, a deep abiding thrum that he really couldn’t explain. I remember he told me that it wasn’t something mechanical. He said he walked the ship to try and localize it, but could not attribute it as coming from any particular place. Then he said it seemed to be coming from all directions—everywhere. He asked me if he could take a boat out and get away from Kirov to see if he could still hear it, but there was no time for that.”
“Spooky,” said Karpov. “Dobrynin’s ears are very sharp, or so I’ve been told. He’s as good as Tasarov.”
“Yes, and Tasarov heard this sound as well. Then I remembered that Troyak had heard something like this, and Orlov—on that mission to Siberia. So I sought out the Sergeant, and that was when we found Lenkov’s legs.”
“Eerie,” said Karpov. “Was Troyak hearing it right then?”
“No… but he tried to describe what he heard when we were in Siberia. He called it glubokiy zvuk—deep sound—bone deep. It’s something you feel more than hear, unless you have ears like Tasarov and Dobrynin. He heard this when Orlov found the Devil’s Teardrop, so I began to suspect that was the source of the problem. Well, I went to Volsky, and we decided that the only thing to do was throw the damn thing overboard.”
“Yes, you told me about that—Peake’s Deep.”
“Correct… But something happened to me when I did that—to my hand. It was cold, and I rubbed my hands together a moment, and then I saw… well I saw one of my hands emit that strange green glow, and then it vanished!”
“Good lord,” said Karpov, friendly with the man upstairs when he needed to be.
“It was just a moment, but it phased, just a part of me like that, which was most unsettling. After that, I was alright, but that isn’t something you forget.”
“Of course. Did it ever happen again?”
“Thankfully not, but to be honest, I began to feel like a marked man. We got into a battle shortly after that, with the Germans, and I… well, I sunk the Graf Zeppelin.”
“The German aircraft carrier… Well, it seems I’m not alone as a man who hunts those beasts.”
“It didn’t feel quite so good to me,” said Fedorov. “I don’t get the rush you do with a victory at sea. All I remember doing was looking up the specs on that ship and learning I had just put 1700 men into the sea. It wasn’t a good feeling, Karpov. As much as I have changed, I’m just not the warrior soul you are. With all that distraction, I thought we had put the other stuff behind us, but I was wrong. That was when Tasarov collapsed. He looked worn out, haggard, saying he could just not shake off that sound. You know how he gets when he hears something at his station. He’s intense, unrelenting. Well, this was a sound he took with him to his cabin the previous night. He could hear it, just like Dobrynin. It was just the first of many more problems to come, and remember, this was while we were sailing in the impending shadow of Paradox Hour.”
“Ah, yes,” said Karpov. “The Second Coming, as we came to call it. That was what brought my brother-self to that time in the past, and I was spared annihilation because I was safe aboard Tunguska. That’s what permitted us both to survive in the same milieu, the first man in human history to have a real Doppelganger. Fedorov… We still have Rod-25 aboard. What if the rad-safe container isn’t enough? Perhaps we should throw the damn thing overboard too.”
“Perhaps,” said Fedorov. “I had a talk with Volsky about our situation, and I remember telling him I suspected the ship itself may have acquired some kind of strange property from all our time shifts. You know—the same way metals can take on magnetic properties. You know how we have to degauss the ship’s hull every so often. We were right in the middle of that discussion when it happened.”
“When what happened?”
“We vanished….” He remembered that moment as clear as yesterday.
Kalinichev interrupted with a sudden report.
“System malfunction,” he said, and Rodenko was soon at his side at the radar station.
“What is the problem?”
“I get no returns on the Fregat system, sir. All contact tracks are void. I can’t even read Invincible in our wake, yet I have no red light. My system still reads green.”
“Switch to phased array and reboot the Fregat system.”
“Aye sir. Initializing phased array now.”
There was no difference. Both systems now reported no contacts around them at all, which immediately drew Volsky and Fedorov to the radar station to see what was happening.
“Is this a local ship’s problem?” said Volsky. “Is it confined to the electronics?”
“Mister Nikolin,” said Fedorov. “Activate the aft Tin Man and feed the camera optics to the main viewing screen.”
“Aye sir. Tin Man active.”
They all looked up at the screen, expecting to see the tall mainmast and superstructure of Invincible in their wake, half a kilometer behind them. The weather was good, and there was nothing that should have been able to fool the optics of that hi-res camera system.
But the sea was clear and calm. They had been quietly planning the destruction of the entire German fleet, a feat they might have easily accomplished, until this….
Fedorov looked at Volsky, and then moved immediately to the weather bridge hatch, intending to have a look with his own eyes. He knew it was a foolish thing to do, as the Tin Man signal was clearly showing the empty sea, but something in him just wanted the confirmation of his own senses, with no digital interface.