Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) (3 page)

He could stop now, just here
beneath the lowering curve of the ship’s hull, the edge of uncertainty.
‘Do
I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and
revisions which a minute will reverse.’

The growl of the small boat’s
engine stilled and they came along side. Seamen at the bow of the boat tossed
up the rope to tie it off. Tovey felt his arms and legs moving almost
mechanically as he climbed up from the Admiral’s launch, onto the metal
stairwell that had been lowered from above. It was as if he was crossing some
barrier now, between the real world he had known and lived in all his life, and
a world of twilight and mystery where everything he had ever learned was to be
called into question.

He could feel the old and
familiar slipping from his grasp with every step he took, as if he was
forfeiting the safety and comfort of his old life, and the innocence of
unknowing that had been his before this moment, the propriety and civility of
an English gentleman’s life, the calm, rational framework that was the core of
his personality.
‘For I have known them all already, known them all: Have
known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with
coffee spoons…’

Who was he, really? What was he?
How did he come to be here? These were questions that one asked of the night
and stars above, in quiet moments alone, in the solitude of inner thought. Now
it would all be called into question and profound doubt. Step beyond that
gunwale and onto the deck of chaos and uncertainty, he thought, but he pressed
on nonetheless.

He heard the familiar high strain
of the boatswain’s pipe. Not one, but two Admirals would now walk the decks of
the mighty
Kirov
. An honor guard in dress whites awaited him, and the
Marines snapped to attention, bayonets gleaming at the end of their rifles.

Admiral Volsky had gone first, so
as to welcome him again with another hearty handshake when he came up. “Please
walk with me, Admiral Tovey,” he said. “I will now give you a tour of the most
marvelous ship in the world—in this world or any other. You will see much here
that is familiar to your eye, the men below decks in their dungarees and
striped naval shirts, the sweat and toil of the
matros
, that we call our
able seamen, the
mishman
, or midshipman, the
starshini
, or petty
officers all falling to their evolutions to keep this ship running smoothly. The
bulkheads and hatches and ladders up and down will all feel like any ship to
you, but the places they lead you to will be quite different, quite astonishing.”

They walked the ship, touring the
outer decks first as Volsky pointed out the broad domes covering radars and
communications equipment, and the ceaseless rotation of the Fregat system high
above them.

“With that we can see out to a
range of 300 kilometers. You may not believe this but it is quite true.”

“But that would be well over the
horizon, Admiral. How is this possible?”

“I wish I could tell you that.
All I know is what I hear when my radar man, who is now the
Starpom
of
this ship, tells me when he reports a new contact.”

“Starpom?”

“Ah, that would be the name we give
to our Executive Officer, “Mister Rodenko. You will meet him when we visit the
bridge. But first, let us have a little stroll on the forward deck.”

Fedorov could hear the pride in
the Admiral’s voice as he led Tovey on, and he felt it as well. This was,
indeed, the finest ship in the world. While he had passed moments of real
trepidation when Volsky proposed he would reveal their true nature and origin
to the British Admiral, now he had come to realize that this was inevitable
from the first moment they decided to remain here and intervene instead of
taking their chances again with the control rods.

Admiral Volsky had the men attending
their party summon a missile deck engineer, and open one of the many hatches
there. The sharp, dangerous nose of a
Moskit-II
was seen waiting
silently in its vertical silo, like a sleeping monster waiting to be called to
life.

“That is one of the missiles you
witnessed—actually not this particular model. This one is much bigger than the
rockets we used against the Germans. And now you will hear what I say next with
disbelief, but I will tell you the truth. This rocket can hit a fly on a wall,
and at a range of 222 kilometers, that is 120 of your English miles. The
warhead is 450 kilograms, nearly a thousand English pounds.”

Tovey was more than impressed.
The interior of the silo was immaculate, the missile threatening in every line
and aspect. There was clearly technology and knowhow on this ship far in excess
of anything he could imagine possible. Was the admiral merely boasting to make
an impression? Could this missile hit its target over a hundred miles away? How
would it see it? He asked this, and got an answer.

“Those radars tell it the general
location of the target, and then when it is in flight it uses its own radar,
right there in the nose, to have a look for itself. It is extremely accurate.”

“My God, your advances in radar
technology must be very far ahead of our own.”

“Come, now I will show you my
bridge.”

They made their way up, climbing
ladders and stairways, and in time came in through the aft hatch of the main
citadel.

“Admiral on the bridge!”
Rodenko’s voice was sharp and clear, and Tovey needed no translation to know
what he had said when every officer and watchstander snapped to attention.

“As you were, gentlemen. Admiral,
may I present the ship’s Executive Officer, Grigori Rodenko, a very able man.
He will show you the control interfaces and systems we use to receive the data
those big radar dishes send here.”

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.”