Winter Storm (8 page)

“What
if those facts no longer hold here?” he asked Fedorov.

“That
is a real possibility, sir. These are details that one might think would be
lost in the wave of change that seems to have overtaken this time period.
Considering that Russia is a divided state, why should
Lexington
be
delivering planes to Midway, just as it was when the history remained intact?”

“My
point exactly,” said Karpov. “I suppose that would be a matter for a good
intelligence network to discover. Yet if the Japanese do carry out this attack,
do you believe their route would change?”

“You
mean the approach to Hawaii? No sir, they chose the most efficient route to
evade shipping lanes and achieve the surprise they wanted. Yet that, too,
contributed to their downfall. The attack so angered the Americans that the
outcome of the war was inevitable. But sir… May I ask why you are so interested
in this operation? Are you planning to intervene?”

“A fair
question, Mister Fedorov. This is not likely to be a pleasure cruise. We have
no place to hang our hat and coat in the Pacific. The Japanese have
Vladivostok. They call the place Urajio. Well, I would like to persuade them to
make a graceful withdrawal, and to do so I will need some leverage.”

“In
what way, sir?”

At that
moment there came a shudder, and the lights dimmed and fluttered. The two men
passed a moment where each tried to ascertain what was happening, looking up at
the overhead lights. Karpov quickly thumbed the intercom, punching up
engineering.

“Chief
Dobrynin, do we have a problem with the reactors?”

There
was a brief delay. Then Dobrynin’s voice could be recognized by its tone, but
there was an odd static on the line that garbled what he was saying. Fedorov
looked around, his pulse quickening. Then he remembered—Rod-25! He looked at
his watch and saw the date, realizing that it was now the twelfth day since
their initial arrival shift. How could he have forgotten this? Dobrynin was
going to schedule rod maintenance today!

All
this passed through his mind in an instant, as he chided himself for becoming
so caught up with his subterfuge and quest for allies that he could have
forgotten something so important. And yet, the ship had required the power of a
nuclear detonation to disturb the continuum when they shifted before. That had
clearly not happened, yet the static on the line made him very worried that
something was amiss. Could the ship have reacted to Dobrynin’s rod maintenance?
The chief’s voice finally cleared.

“… a
flutter in reactor two. Yet all systems are still up.”

“Then
there is no danger?”

“No
sir. The ship is safe.”

A quiet
knock on the door brought other news. It was Rodenko, stepping off the bridge
where he was Senior Watch Officer in Karpov’s absence.

“Captain
sir…” he began. “You had better come to the bridge. That airship…”

“You
mean
Tunguska?
What of it?”

“It’s
gone, sir. Damn thing just disappeared. All our bridge systems quavered at that
same moment, but the airship… Well we can’t even see it on radar now sir. It
just vanished!”

Karpov
was justifiably alarmed at the news, up on his feet
immediately and off to the bridge. “Come along, Mister Fedorov,” he said
quickly, all business now.

The
Captain knew more than anyone else in this situation. He knew that
Tunguska
was, in and of itself, capable of doing exactly what Rodenko had described.
Karpov had vanished over the English Channel in that storm, and found himself
amazingly in the early 1900s again. And he had safely used
Tunguska
to
navigate the stormy waters of Paradox Hour, the very ship that had saved his
own life. His brother self was there now, along with all the weapons that had
been recently loaded onto the sub-cloud cars for transfer to the Captain on the
airship. This thought was most troubling as he took stock of the situation on
the bridge.

“Rodenko,
was there any sign of an explosion?” He wondered if a weapon had been
mishandled, or worse, if someone got too curious and foolishly set one off
aboard
Tunguska
.

“No
sir. I’ve had no reports of that, and there is certainly no flotsam on the sea.
But that airship is gone. It was as if a grey fog just swallowed the damn
thing. Then we got that flutter in all the bridge systems, and the next thing I
know the airship had vanished.”

“What
about the other airships? What about
Riga
and
Narva?”

“They
diverted some time ago, and were not on our Fregat tracks for the last hour.”

“Mister
Nikolin,” said Karpov quickly. “Hail Captain Korenko on the
Narva
at once.
Use the channel I discussed with you earlier. Hail Commandant Bogrov on
Tunguska
while you are at it.”

“Sir,”
said Fedorov cautiously. “There’s another possibility.
We
may have
vanished. The airships might still be there, but if we moved again…” Fedorov
had to be cautious here. He could not reveal any knowledge of Rod-25, at least
not yet. “The ship, sir. Our position in time may not be stable yet. If we
moved again we would see the airship vanish, but for them, the inverse would be
true.”

“Anything
Nikolin?”

“Nothing
sir, but I’m getting some odd static on those comm-link channels.”

“Shift
to your regular station monitor. Try to ascertain date and time.” Karpov’s mind
was working very quickly now, trying to run down every possibility. “Mister
Fedorov,” he said. You are very good at analyzing sun and moon data. Get busy.
Try to find out what the moon is telling you this time. Fedorov was at the
navigation station keying in numbers to his computer at once. He soon
determined the basic information he needed.

“Sun up
all day at our present position. Moon rising at 23:00 —a waning gibbous, sir.
But Captain… The position of the sun is not correct for our last recorded time.
It’s a few minutes after 08:00, but look how high the sun is already. That’s a
late afternoon sun, but I can still taste my eggs and sausage from breakfast.
Sir, on this evidence alone, I would suggest we have moved again—in time.”

Karpov’s
eyes narrowed. “I am going to speak with Chief Dobrynin. In the meantime, use
that head of yours to analyze where we might be, given the conditions you can
observe. Rodenko, you have the bridge. Notify me if Nikolin hears anything
significant.

Fedorov
knew exactly why Karpov felt so compelled to get to engineering now—Rod-25. He
wanted to answer the same question Fedorov had in his own mind, and he was
almost certain the Chief had run his maintenance procedure. Dobrynin pulled a
control rod, and in its place he dipped in Rod-25…. But Karpov’s order was the
question now. Where in God’s name were they?

*

The
Captain was still scanning the sea, his eyes almost
desperate, but the ship was nowhere to be seen. He received the very same
startling news that his elder self had been given, only this time Fedorov’s
premise was well proved.
Tunguska
had been hovering about 3000 meters
off the starboard bow of
Kirov
, and then, the watchman ran in and said
he could no longer make out the ship. Karpov went to look himself, finding the
best pair of field glasses he could get his hands on. There was a low mist on
the sea, but visibility was fairly good from their present altitude. He considered
setting up one of the
Oko
panels they had just received from
Kirov
,
but knew it would be days before he could properly rig the power generation to
make a good match with the new equipment. They would have to rig all new wiring
to get adequate power to the unit. It was not simply a matter of plugging the
system in and turning it on.

That
said, the
Topaz
radar on the airship should have been enough to produce
a return on the battlecruiser, but it saw nothing on the sea at all, out to its
maximum range of fifteen kilometers. He gave orders to descend for a closer
inspection of the water, but nothing was found, no wreckage, no ship.
Kirov
was gone.

He had
only just come to terms with the possibility that the ship had actually moved
in time, and had no inkling that
Tunguska
also possessed that
capability. So in this instance, the younger Karpov correctly assumed that it
was the ship that had vanished. But how? He knew nothing of Rod-25, and there
had been no accident this time, no explosion.

“What
could have happened?” he said aloud.

Tyrenkov
was at his side, equally perplexed. “Bogrov says we are still at our old
coordinates, and conditions indicate all is as it was before.”

“Yes?
Well my ship is not where it was, and a battlecruiser does not simply vanish
like that! This doesn’t make any sense!”

Oh, but
it does, he thought as soon as he had said that. I was on the ship when
Kirov
did exactly that, bringing me here to this impossible time and place. And now
it’s gone again, vanished, leaving me marooned here. He could hear the words of
his other self when the Siberian had tried to explain it to him.

“The
ship must have slipped through some hole in time, and then here it was, in the
middle of WWII. It did this and it did that, and then it slipped again. I’ll
make a very long story short. Eventually that ship out there found its way to
the year 1940, a little over a year ago, and it has been here ever since, until
it slipped again, vanishing last May.”

So it
has slipped yet again, thought Karpov, reaching the only conclusion that could
explain what had happened. But where did it go? Has it slipped back to our own
time in 2021? Has it slipped further into the past? As far as he could
determine, with reports from Tyrenkov and Bogrov, they were still drifting over
the Kara Sea in August of 1941. But the ship was no longer with them…

He
passed a dark moment, wondering whether his elder brother had planned this? Did
he know how the ship eventually came to move in time? Could he even initiate
such a shift at will? Is that why he was so adamant that he should be the one
to command
Kirov
in these early days. Did he plan this, plan to shift
away and return home to 2021, leaving me here? Has that bastard stolen my life
as well as my ship? It felt strange to call his own self that, but at that
moment, with
Kirov
and the Siberian both missing, he felt very
estranged.

All
these thoughts passed through his mind on a pulse of fear, and he could feel
his anxiety rising, his heart beating faster. Tyrenkov was watching his
reaction to all of this very closely now. Studying him, but saying nothing.

“Don’t
just stand there. What do you know about all of this?”

“Only
what our eyes have already shown us. The ship was there, and now it is gone.
Yet we are where we belong. That can only tell me that the ship has moved, but
how or where I cannot say.”

Karpov
walked over to the man, leaning in and lowering his voice so Bogrov would not
hear. “Tell me this was not planned, Tyrenkov. Did my brother say anything to
you? Tell me, by God, or I’ll order your own damn security men to pluck out
your eyes!”

“Sir! I
knew nothing whatsoever of this. No. There was no plan that I was aware of.”

“Then
you are telling me this was another accident? We saw no evidence of that—no man
reported an explosion.”

“No
accident, no explosion,” said Tyrenkov. “But things happen—this I have learned
well enough.”

Karpov
gave him a frustrated look. Then he took a long breath, his mind already
spelling out the inevitable truth for him.
Kirov
was gone, it had moved
again, and he was standing here on this god forsaken Zeppelin, like a passenger
at a train station with the wrong ticket and at the wrong time. If the ship
went home again, he wasn’t going there with it. If it fled into the past, then
it had to have moved to a time before he first arrived here, or so he reasoned.

So here
I am, the new Siberian Karpov, so wet behind the ears here that I’ll have
icicles hanging from them when the cold sets in. Here I am, commander of the
Free Siberian Air Corps, and more, the visible head of state of all Siberia
now. I was left in the lurch, but at least the perks are well appointed. Yet
what in God’s name do I do here?

He
considered the possibilities, but had no immediate answers. All he could do was
stare out the observation windows at that empty sea beneath them, and think of
everything he had just lost.

*

Aboard
Kirov
, the Siberian was thinking of the very same
thing. Every time the ship moved he was taking his whole life and pushing it
out onto the roulette table, rolling the dice. It was all there, like a stack
of red and white chips, his career, his carefully husbanded fleet, the power he
had fought and scraped for these long years, all the friends, allies and
enemies along the way. He knew what Dobrynin was going to say the moment he got
there.

“Chief,
what is our status?”

“Reactors
are stable, Captain. We’re in no danger. It was just a minor flux.”

“Did
you run a control rod maintenance routine recently?”

That
struck Dobrynin as an odd question. “Now that you mention it, I did, sir. Did
Mister Fedorov tell you about it?”

“Fedorov?
He’s not an engineer, Chief. What would he know about it?”

“Well
he was in here asking me a lot of questions about the matter a few days ago.
Said he wanted to watch and asked if I would message him before the next rod
inspection. It’s a fairly simple procedure, sir. One rod goes in while the
other comes out. I used to run it every two weeks, but I always shave two days
off that cycle when we’re at sea.”

Rod-25…
The culprit had now been confirmed. Dobrynin had mindlessly gone about his
business, and Karpov kicked himself mentally for not paying closer attention to
the presence of that control rod on the ship, especially since he knew what it
was capable of. Rod-25 had moved them yet again, and with no help from me this
time, he thought. It was like a whisper of fog, just the same way we shifted
away from Saint Helena, and then found ourselves in 1942 in the Timor Sea.
Sometimes we go with a bang, and other times with a whimper… but where have we
gone?

“Chief
Dobrynin,” he said, realizing he had important business here now. “Can the
reactors function properly if you don’t run these maintenance checks?”

“Well,
yes I suppose so. It’s just standard procedure to run these inspections, but I
haven’t found anything that raised my concerns for some time.”

“Good.
Discontinue the inspections. You used Rod-25 just now, correct?”

Again,
Dobrynin was surprised to hear this. “So Fedorov told you about that too?”

“Fedorov?
Yes, tell me more about that now Chief.”

“Not
much to say sir. He just seemed interested in the reactor maintenance, and
wanted to see me run the procedure, but I was so busy this last week that I
forgot to message him.”

“ I
see… You have more than one spare control rod aboard?”

“Yes
sir, we’ve got number 26 and 27 stored.”

“And it
was number 25 that you used today?”

“Yes
sir, we took delivery on that before we left Severomorsk.”

“Remove
it from the cycle and mount one of the other rods. Can you do that safely while
we’re at sea?”

“I can,
but I’ll need some time, and a good crew of engineers.”

“Do it,
and also cancel all rod inspection maintenance until I discuss this matter with
you again. If that’s a problem, come to me, But otherwise, replace and store
Rod-25 and take no further action.”

“Aye
sir, I’ll see to it immediately.”

*

Later
that day, Nikolin had some answers that surprised everyone
on the Bridge. He had been listening closely to stations to the south, fighting
that odd flux that seemed to plague the airways. “It is still 1941,” he said, “but
I’m getting a lot of stuff on the airwaves about the fighting. The Germans are
much closer to Moscow. I heard the latest from the Kremlin a moment ago. It’s
mid-September now!”