“Rather astounding,” said Tovey. “Well… Not to dispute your theory, Turing, but the Russians suggested something else.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. The Russian Admiral seemed to rely a great deal on his young Captain to try and sort things out. The man seemed very sharp. The two of you should meet one day. That aside, this man Fedorov suggested that the only possible explanation as to how those photographs could exist would be if they were brought here by someone.”
“Brought here? By who?”
“Therein lies the rub,” said Tovey. “The Russian Admiral hinted they knew of other men who had traveled in time. He called them dark angels, and said there are dangerous men at large in this world-possibly from the future. We shall have to keep a sharp watch, and possibly put your machines to work on that little mystery. Yes?”
Turing nodded gravely. “Even so, Admiral, my theory still remains viable. No one could bring an object from the future if it already existed here. That would be very inconvenient. How could the second watch be accounted for? Something would have to happen to one watch or another. The watch from the future would have to be left behind, or in this case I think Time found a more elegant solution-the watch that existed here was simply moved.”
“Most alarming, Mister Turing. All of this gives me the shivers, and the worst of it is this… If these men have come from the future, then they have knowledge that can be decisive to the outcome of this war. They must know how it all turned out, and of course I asked this question. The answer I received was equally disturbing. They told me that events they have observed here are out of order. Things are happening that never occurred in the history they know-my flagship being a perfect example. I was told it never existed in the world these men came from, and that was the least of it. They said their homeland was not divided in civil war as it remains today. It was one unified Soviet state.”
“Remarkable,” said Turing.
“Sadly, these men have come to believe that it was their earlier intervention, the events documented in that box, that may have been responsible for these changes.”
“Is that why they have come here, sir? To set matters right?”
“No, Mister Turing, they told me they tried to re-set the table, but the china is so badly broken that it came to no avail. In fact, they told me their movement in time was unintentional, quite by accident-something to do with a mishap in their ship’s propulsion system.”
“Amazing,” Turing was riveted by all of this. “Yet they seem to have bounced about a good deal, sir. The Geronimo file documents their movement from 1941 through 1942, and now they are here. Did you ask about that?”
“There were a thousand questions in my mind,” said Tovey, “Each one crowded out the last, and there was too little time for answers. I did press gently on the matter of the outcome of this war, and though they seemed reluctant to disclose information on that, I was given to hope that things might take a turn for the better.”
“Possibly,” said Turing. “They may hope as much, even as we do. But it could be that they now realize what I have already concluded.”
“And what is that?”
“If what you say is true, and events here have been altered because of this ship, then they may not really know how things resolve.”
Tovey nodded. “They did say something to that effect. The Russian Admiral told me he had already seen one possible outcome of all this, and it was rather bleak and foreboding. He said this war would not be the last, and that was a rather difficult thing to hear. Then he said the only way we will know how it all turns out is to live it all through, one day at a time.”
“I see…” Turing seemed very thoughtful now. “Well Admiral, we seem to be marked men, you and I. Our initials and fingerprints are all over that box, and just as you say you have been haunted by the feeling you knew all of this, I have felt the very same way. It could be that more than my pocket watch was shuffled about when that ship appeared here on the 12th of June. Our lives seem to have been changed as well. How very strange it feels. One fine morning you simply wake up a different man, with memories in your head you take to be dreams and mere imagination-but they are not dreams. No. They are real, as all of this is real-that box, that ship, Geronimo. Things have changed, Admiral. You feel it, I feel it and know it to be so. It isn’t just our own fate I speak of now. The whole world is caught up in the maelstrom, and you and I, well we are standing right in the eye of the storm.”
Schettler, John
Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series)
Part IX
“When clouds appear, wise men put on their cloaks;
When great leaves fall, the winter is at hand;
When the sun sets, who doth not look for night?”
Chapter 25
Kirov was out to sea, cruising in the Denmark Strait after setting up the Ice Watch with an Oko panel radar team at Hornsrandir, the northernmost cape of Iceland in the Westfjord region. Fedorov coordinated the mission, seeing to security and the movement of adequate supplies to the outpost. The Americans will have a similar outpost here in the future, he thought as he finished up and returned to the ship on the KA-40. Yet the moment he was back aboard Kirov his mind returned to the impossible news he had received. Troyak had succeeded! His Marines got through to Ilanskiy and demolished that back stairway-but how? How was that possible given what Kamenski had told him?
He recalled his words from their earlier conversation, the discussion that was so daunting that it had prompted Admiral Volsky to take a sip from his vodka flask.
“Don’t hold your breath, Mister Fedorov,” Kamenski had said quietly, as 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?”
But he did it! Kamenski was wrong. Troyak had reported mission accomplished. To put it more bluntly, he radioed that he had blown that stairway to hell. That sent Fedorov off to the bridge to check their present situation and see if there was any unusual news on the airwaves. Were things still the same? Out here on the sea, isolated in the ice fog of the Denmark Strait, they would have seen nothing if it changed.
The first thing he checked on were the two British cruisers Admiral Tovey had assigned to this watch, placing them directly under Admiral Volsky’s command. He soon learned that they were still there, Sheffield and Southampton, on what they believed were forward radar picket duties. Shiny Sheff, as the Sheffield was called, had been one of the first British ships fitted with the Type 79Y early warning radar, effective out to about 50 kilometers.
The two cruisers were still there, right on station as Kirov’s own radar had them. So nothing must have changed, thought Fedorov. Nikolin also confirmed that news of the Orenburg Federation was again on the wires, with renewed fighting reported at the Siberian city of Omsk. Apparently the “Omsk Accord” as it had been called earlier, had fallen apart. So if Orenburg remained, and the civil war continued, then Volkov must have taken his trip down those stairs. Sergei Kirov’s name was also prominent in the news items that continued to follow the treaty now being signed with England.