That thought gave Fedorov no comfort, and Nikolin regretted it the moment he said it, but they pressed on with the plan. It was a tense five minutes, but then Nikolin saw his secure signal line go green and he knew they had managed to make contact.
“Got them!” he said with a smile, and Fedorov sighed with relief. But a sudden pulse of anxiety swept over him now. If I give this order, he thought, then my own fate is directly involved this time. I could create another insoluble problem for time, and this time she just might go after the offender-me! Yet he knew he had to do something. That stairway was simply too dangerous.
He closed his eyes. Even if it meant he might now be casting his soul to the wolves, he had to act. Then he reached for the handset and pushed the send button.
Troyak’s men gave the onrushing Legionnaires a nasty surprise. The enemy had crossed the causeway and were working their way past an old abandoned garage and vehicle park. Troyak let them come, then gave the hand signal for his men to open up. They cut down the two lead squads in seconds, the staccato of their assault rifles sharp in the air. The third enemy squad retreated quickly. They brought up two machine guns to try and answer the heavy automatic weapons fire from the Marines, but the RPG-30 made short work of them.
“Sergeant Troyak! I have comm-sig from Kirov! It’s Nikolin!”
The Sergeant had just reloaded his assault rifle when the radio man he left with the two demolitions experts sounded off in his earbud. “Here it is sir, I’ll patch him through to you.” The man toggled his speaker switch but it was not Nikolin. Troyak immediately recognized the voice of Fedorov.
“Fedorov here. It is imperative that no one utilizes the back stairway. I repeat. Sergeant Troyak-your mission down those stairs is cancelled. Implement plan B, and then move to extract your team. I repeat. Plan A is aborted. There must be no sortie on the stairwell. Implement plan B and extract. Over.”
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.”