The Kremlin Phoenix (32 page)

The fighters side slipped in
behind the A320, bringing their guns to bear.

“Here we go!” Colonel Balard said,
bracing.

General Sorokin pulled back on
the stick and pushed it to the right. The nose lifted as the big white jet banked
sharply right and tracer streamed beneath the A320’s port wing, narrowly
missing its engine. The general pushed the nose down, diving towards the sea to
pick up speed, then leveled off a few hundred meters above the water. The two
fighters followed the maneuver effortlessly, sliding in behind the jet for
another shot.

“This is General Sorokin,” he
yelled into the microphone. “I order you to break off immediately! We’re acting
under orders of the commander of the Air Force and the Prime Minister of the
Federation. You have no authority to engage us!”

Again, no response.

He hung up the microphone
angrily, then pushed the throttle to maximum. The General rocked the stick,
dipping and weaving the A320, trying vainly to make the clumsy airbus harder to
hit.

Colonel Balard pressed his face
to the side window as the two fighters swept up on them again. “Now!”

Sorokin banked the old airbus to
the left sharply as a stream of tracer cut through the starboard engine. Flames
erupted from the engine as the aircraft shuddered, and pieces of metal peeled away
from the housing like tinfoil. Black oily smoke billowed from the engine,
forming a snaking trail behind the airbus.

Sorokin cursed silently as he jabbed
the engine fire button, cutting fuel to the engine and triggering the fire
extinguisher countdown. Flames licked the engine for ten seconds as the fuel
burned away, then the fire suppressant discharged. Only one of two extinguisher
bottles was still working, but it managed to suffocate the fire, thinning the
black smoke streaming in the aircraft’s wake.

“Now we’re in for it!” Colonel
Balard said. “We can’t maneuver on one engine!”

“We could barely maneuver on two
engines!” Sorokin said, grabbing the microphone one last time. “Mayday, mayday,
Aeroflot heavy going down! Our position is . . .” General Sorokin glanced at
the navigation system, and broadcast their latitude and longitude.

The fast interceptors edged
around the smoke trail, closing on the port wing for a final shot as they toyed
with their helpless prey. In the effort to evade the fighters, no one in the
flight deck had been watching the radar. Neither had the MiG pilots who,
certain of victory, had focused on avoiding pieces of metal flying off the wrecked
engine.

The radio speaker crackled with a
crisp new voice. “Break off your attack immediately or you will be destroyed!”

For a moment there was stunned silence
on the flight deck.

“Who was that?” Craig asked.

Colonel Balard glanced at the
radar, now glowing with four new unknown contacts approaching at supersonic
velocity. He leaned against the side window, looking for the source of the
voice.

General Sorokin nosed the A320
down, sending it lurching to port as a blast of tracer tore into the fuselage. Red
warning lights began flashing throughout the flight deck as multiple systems
failed. The airbus picked up a little speed in the shallow dive, then the
General pulled up as the passenger jet came perilously close to the sea. The
change of angle brought the two MiG-29K’s into view, and further back and higher,
were four large silver-grey fighters sweeping toward them with afterburners on
full.

Two of the Super Hornets fired
Sidewinders simultaneously, then the third and fourth fighters each released missiles
in turn. The four air-to-air missiles streaked above the sea, as the MiG-29K’s suddenly
understood the danger and broke away – too late. Two brilliant fireballs
exploded almost together, and burned furiously as they fell out of the sky. The
super hornets killed their afterburners and took up position alongside the
stricken A320, two fighters off each wing.

General Sorokin watched the MiGs
crash into the sea, quickly losing sight of them as they were left behind. They’d
tried to kill him, but he nevertheless mourned their loss. He doubted the
pilots would have known why they’d been killed, but he silently promised
himself to punish those who’d ordered them to attack. When he saw Colonel
Balard watching him he said, “I know, there was no choice, but that doesn’t
make it any easier.”

The speaker crackled again with
the same crisp voice. “Aeroflot airbus, this is the US Navy. What is your
condition?”

General Sorokin passed the
microphone to Colonel Balard, who said, “We’re low on fuel, one engine is out,
and we have multiple system failures.”

“Can you make Memanbetsu?”

General Sorokin shrugged.

“Maybe,” Colonel Balard replied.

The speaker fell silent for a few
moments. “We have orders to escort you to Memanbetsu Airport. Set a direct
course. They’re expecting you.”

“Will do.” Colonel Balard said. “What
are you doing out here?”

“Looking for you, sir. Apparently
the Prime Minister of Russia wants you alive at any cost. Half the George
Washington’s air group is up searching for you.”

“We’re sure glad to see you!”
Colonel Balard said.

General Sorokin eased the
crippled A320 onto a heading direct to Memanbetsu Airport on the north coast of
Hokkaido, Japan. Alongside him, Colonel Balard couldn’t take his eyes off the
sleek super hornets now riding shotgun alongside the A320.

“I never thought I’d ever see
anything as sweet as them again!”

August 21, 2283

“Damn!” Zikky said. “That’s
where you’ve been hiding!”

“Found him?” Captain Wilkins
asked.

“Talk about a needle in a temporal
haystack! I’ve got a reference in an ancient Macau data archive. It took
translations through four languages to find! No wonder we missed it!”

“At least he survived,” Mariena
said. “After that big reset, I thought we’d failed.”

Their tachyon sensors had spiked after
Mariena’s temporal shotgun message to Craig three years ago, signaling a far
bigger reset than they’d seen before. Perhaps it was because they’d saved the
lives of dozens of people, or perhaps they were getting close to breaking the
timeline. There was no way to know. The only thing they were sure of was the
air crash investigator’s report of the A320’s destruction never existed – in
their latest timeline.

Zikky winced as he skimmed a
single Japanese media report and several archaic television broadcasts. “He was
alive, but not for long.”

Mariena turned to the display
Zikky was watching, showing Craig being filmed from a circling air vehicle. She
had to look away when Craig was suddenly shot dead, and lay motionless in a
pool of his own blood. “Switch that off.”

“You’re still using the original
upload, from all seven data exchanges?” Captain Wilkins asked, ignoring the
gruesome television broadcast.

“Yes,” Zikky replied. “Each reset
definitely changes what’s in the station’s memory core, even though we have no
way of knowing how it’s changing us. So no matter what we do, our data is
always current in every timeline.”

Wilkins frowned. “I’m still not
sure I understand how that’s possible.”

“It’s another paradox,” Mariena said.
“That’s what happens when you monkey with time. No matter what we do, the
universe always remains rational. The arrow of time always keeps pointing one
way – into the future – and we remember just enough of the previous timelines
so we can still think straight.”

“Recognizing the station’s memory
core is changing,” Zikky added, “means our memories are crossing timelines.”

“Maybe we’re remembering blended
timelines,” Mariena said. “Or maybe we’re forgetting some things we did, and
remembering other things we never actually did. Whatever’s happening, it’s
occurring in a logically coherent way.”

“Logical to you maybe,” Wilkins
said.

“Logical to the laws of the
universe,” Mariena said.

“I don’t care if it’s logical or
not,” Wilkins said, “just so long as it works.”

“Yeah, but what happens when we
paint the arrow of time into a corner?” Zikky asked.

Mariena shrugged, “We roll the
dice and hope for the best.”

Zikky gave her a dubious look. “That’s
very scientific.”

“It’s a great unknown,” Mariena
said, “If we tie causality in knots, will the arrow of time find a reset position
where it can resume pointing in one direction, in a way that keeps the universe
rational? Is that even possible?”

“It depends on whether our
memories are changing for the little resets,” Zikky said.

“And that’s something we really
don’t know,” she said, “because we can never remember, what we forgot.”

Wilkins blinked. Out of
necessity, he’d been studying causality for nearly a decade, and it still gave
him a headache. “OK, so why did it take us three years since the shotgun
message to find Craig Balard?”

“We searched the composite
data-set a dozen times and found nothing,” Zikky explained. “So I automated the
station’s search techniques, its translation programs and its data integration
methodologies, just to speed everything up.”

“You mean the station found him
by itself?” Wilkins asked.

“I wrote the code,” Zikky said.
“The original data was in Japanese, but the Macau exchange archived it in Portuguese.
When we originally integrated the Macau data, we took everything in Cantonese,
thinking all other language sources had already been translated. It turns out, some
of the really old data was stored in Portuguese only! Old habits die hard, I
guess. So this time around, the station decided to convert all the data – even
the old Portuguese records – to Cantonese, to ensure it had everything. It then
eliminated any duplicates and converted the cleansed data to English.”

“Japanese to Portuguese to
Cantonese to English,” Mariena added.

 “So we had it all along?”
Wilkins asked.

“The Macau dataset was the only
Asian source we had, and the one we spent the least time on,” Zikky said. “How
were we to know Balard would end up in Japan?”

 “Now that we know where he is, we
have to figure out what our next step is.” Mariena gave Commander Zikky a
knowing look. “Which means more detective work.”

Zikky pressed his palms to his
eyes. He was weary. “Yeah, I know. I’ve been doing this for nearly ten years,
and I’ve got to tell you, I’m losing focus.”

 “If I’m right,” Mariena said,
“you may never have done this at all.”

* * * *

Present Day

Halting English crackled over the
radio. “This is Memanbetsu Control, you are cleared for landing.”

General Sorokin ran his eye over
the flashing warning lights across the flight controls. “We are declaring an
emergency. Fuel is critically low, and we have multiple system failures. Over.”

“Understood Aeroflot heavy. All
incoming aircraft have been placed in a holding pattern. The runway is clear. Change
course to one nine zero.”

Sliding toward them out of the
night was the north coast of Hokkaido. Its shoreline was starkly defined by the
glittering lights of towns and cities wedged against a dark sea, while in the
distance, a ribbon of light marked the airport’s location.

“We’re going to land on vapor,” Colonel
Balard observed as they started a slow turn towards the runway, the maneuver perfectly
matched by the super hornets floating off each wing.

When they were twenty kilometers
out, Sorokin tried to lower the gear, but flashing warning lights indicated
multiple hydraulic failures. He cranked the manual release, trying to drop the landing
gear using gravity alone, but there was no shudder of the wheels dropping into
place, and the central display continued to show three red indicators.

“I guess we do this the hard
way,” General Sorokin said, then quickly went through the landing checklists.

Colonel Balard picked up the
intercom. “This is the flight deck. We’re belly landing. Brace for impact.”

“Reducing to one twenty six
knots,” Sorokin said, dialing in the landing speed. “Glide slope is alive.”

Presently, they could see fire
trucks and ambulances gathered on the concrete apron in front of the mustard
colored terminal ahead. Two passenger jets were parked alongside aerobridges
and several army trucks and police vehicles were gathering close to the
taxiway.

Colonel Balard activated the
flaps, wondering if the mechanical failures had extended to the wings. He was
greeted with the comforting whine of the flaps extending as the aircraft lined
up on the runway. “Flaps four, down and green.”