Crescendo Of Doom (19 page)

“Just as I assumed. It’s the air power that worries me, which is why
Argos Fire
is coming along with us. Together we have a combined total of 232 surface to air missiles, counting the 50 missiles we still have on the short range Kashtan systems. I am hoping that will be enough.”

Fedorov nodded, feeling a little better about their prospects. “We may also have an advantage of surprise, if we move quickly. They won’t expect us to move west like this. But the submarines are a matter of some concern to me.”

“Don’t worry about them, Gromyko will be right out in front of us in
Kazan
.”

“I see… Well then, I think we have a good chance, sir. It will all depend on how many planes the enemy has to throw at us, and how determined they are to stop us.”

“With any luck they will find our SAM defense a formidable deterrent,” said Volsky. “They gave up trying to mount air strikes against Alexandria and Suez weeks ago. But tell me—what did you accomplish in your maneuvers?”

“Not much, sir. We served as an advance scouting and holding unit for the British, but they could not take Palmyra. Our move to Raqqa interfered with the German withdrawal there, but little else. Frankly, our raids on the rail lines around Aleppo were probably the most significant thing we did. It slowed down the movement of German troops and supplies into Syria.”

“Yes,” said Volsky. “I am told that situation has reached a stalemate around Rayak. The British used Brigadier Kinlan’s troops there, but now they are moving them back to face Rommel. That force has been truly decisive, has it not?”

“At least here in this theatre. It can trump anything the Germans are likely to commit here, and tip the scales just enough that the British will likely gain the upper hand in time.”

“It looks like Rommel is going for Tobruk this time.”

“Of course, sir. He needs that port to secure his lines of supply, and to deny the same to the British. It is the key to all these operations.”

“It is still amazing to me that unit is even here. How did it get here, Fedorov? You tried to work this out with Director Kamenski before.”

“It’s still quite a mystery. Kinlan tells me they were on station at the Sultan Apache oil facilities, and they were targeted by an ICBM.”

“Most likely one of ours,” said Volsky sullenly. “Luckily their SAM defense was enough to save them.”

“Yes, but a warhead did detonate, and we know that can create conditions where time displacement is possible.”

“But we determined it was Rod-25 that was responsible for our own movement,” said Volsky, “not just that accident aboard
Orel
, god rest the souls of every man on that boat.”

“It may have been that the exotic effects of the nuclear detonation was catalyzing Rod-25,” said Fedorov.

“Awakening the dragon?”

“Possibly, sir. Then, once activated, the control rod was sufficient to move the ship on its own.”

“But this General Kinlan had no such control rod at his disposal, so this is what leads you to suspect that object Orlov found. Yes?”

“True sir.”

Fedorov remembered those first, harried moments when he had tried to comprehend what had happened, and the one odd thing in the mix he had eventually focused his thinking on—that strange object Orlov had found in the Tunguska River Valley—the Devil’s Teardrop.
A nuclear detonation… a Tunguska fragment… a hole in time
. It was the only possible explanation. That’s how Rod 25 must be working, he concluded. It contained exotic residual material from the Tunguska event… Was this Teardrop another such fragment?

He recalled Orlov’s haunting words, describing the moment and the place where he had found the object. “
The Sergeant calls it the Devil’s Teardrop. Good name for it. There was something very strange about that place—very bad.”
I’ve read stories like that about Siberia all my life, thought Fedorov, as every young boy in Russia eventually did. It was our “Devil’s Triangle,” one of those unexplained mysteries, wrapped up in all the myth and lore from the taiga and tundra.
Tunguska
… I was right there, on the very morning that object struck in Siberia.

He still shuddered to think of that, realizing that he had seen that second sunrise, the evil glow in the sky, with his own eyes. And he had heard the dull rumble that had haunted all those stories of his youth, echoing in the confined space of that stairwell at Ilanskiy.

“We gave that thing to Chief Dobrynin,” he said. “Has he discovered anything more?”

“Go and see him about it. Frankly, the whole matter slipped my mind. I’ve been in one conference after another with Admiral Tovey and Wavell. Then we came to this decision to head west.”

“I understand, sir….”

“But you are not quite comfortable with that, yes Fedorov? Something tells me it is not only the threat of enemy planes and submarines that is bothering you now.”

“Well I was just thinking that the war is about to take a very serious evolution soon sir—Operation Barbarossa.”

“Yes, the invasion of Kirov’s Soviet Russia. Yet how can we prevent that?”

“Impossible sir. Oh, we do have means at our disposal, but I don’t think you would wish to use our special warheads.”

“Believe me,” said Volsky, “I have given that a good deal of thought. In fact I was just discussing it with Admiral Tovey.”

“You told him about our nuclear weapons?”

“Not quite, but I hinted that I had more in my arsenal than he has seen. Then a very odd thing happened. It was as if he knew what I was talking about. He had a strange look on his face, almost as if he was seeing things that were not there, ghosts.”

“Admiral Tovey has been another little mystery in these encounters,” said Fedorov. “That file box he produced was quite a shock, and he seems to be haunted by memories from those earlier encounters we had with him, though I cannot see how that is possible.”

“Those photographs and reports he handed us were the real shock,” said Volsky. “They were hard evidence of our appearance in that other timeframe. But how could they be here, Fedorov, in this time?”

“We never did reason that out. Perhaps Director Kamenski could help us, but the only conclusion I came to is that they were brought here.”

“Brought here? By who?”

“That is the mystery, sir.”

“Well it is one that needs solving, Fedorov. And there is another wrinkle in all of this that I still do not quite understand—the
Argos Fire!
How did that ship get here. It has no Rod 25, and I do not think that Devil’s Teardrop was aboard the ship either. Yet it is there, right off our starboard quarter. For that I am grateful now, but the presence of that ship remains a stubborn mystery.”

“Miss Fairchild never really explained that during the meeting at Alexandria. I assumed it was a result of a nuclear detonation—mere happenstance.”

“Yes, but why only that one ship, Fedorov? If this is true, and
Argos Fire
was sent here by the shock of a detonation, why no other ships? There must have been missiles flying everywhere.”

“We need to discover that, sir. Perhaps we should convene a meeting here, and discuss this, as we plan the route ahead.”

“I will arrange it,” said Volsky. “In the meantime, kindly go and see if Dobrynin knows anything more about that Devil’s Teardrop.”

Fedorov saluted, eager to get to the bottom of things.

“And Fedorov,” said Volsky.

“Sir?”

“Welcome back!”

Chapter 17

Chief
Dobrynin had been a very busy man of late, but he had given the mystery of the Devil’s Teardrop as much time as he could.

“I’ve determined one thing right off,” he said. “That object must be kept well away from the ship’s reactors. Every time I got near the main engineering plant with it, we started to go into a flux event. I had the thing in my pocket when one started, and when I rushed to the engineering supply to fetch my system reports, things settled down, until I got back there, when they started all over again. On a hunch I just backed away—slipped right out through the hatch, and the moment I got well outside the armored shell, things settled down again. So I put two and two together, remembering the other times that had happened. Orlov was here on the first incident, and he tells me he had that thing in his pocket.”

“And I had it the next time it happened!” Fedorov said excitedly.

“Correct. So I took the thing down to an engineering lab and gave it a good inspection. I was looking to determine its makeup, but found a little something more.”

“You told Volsky about this?”

“Not yet. The ship has been in combat, running at high speed, and now we have this mission west to Gibraltar and the engines need to be in top condition. So I’ve been too busy with things, but now that you are here—listen to this! I used a phase-measuring acoustic microscope, and also an electron microscope. This thing is not a natural element, not simply a chunk of rock that has been melted by heat. It was engineered.”

“Engineered? You are certain of this?”

“I could go in to technical details, but you’d have a hard time following me. But yes, I’m certain. It was once an almost perfect sphere, at least this is what I believe now. I thought it might be some kind of bearing, which is why I used that equipment to have a closer look. We often inspect bearings to check for surface wear, hardness measurements, cracks and depressions, but the metal is almost flawless.”

“Well, what is it, Chief? Have you determined that?”

“I’m not quite sure, but I suspect it is loaded with exotic materials beneath that smooth exterior. I don’t have the equipment aboard ship to really do the job right, but everything about that object tells me that it was engineered. It’s an alloy. I’m convinced of that. We use similar superalloys in our own high performance engines, and even here in the ship’s reactors. They have an austenitic face-centered cubic crystal structure, and so does this thing, but its unlike any I have scanned before—very advanced metallurgy. I’d say it was engineered using equipment designed for nano-metrology.”

“I see…” Fedorov was quite surprised to hear this, but it only deepened the mystery surrounding this object. There it was, just gleaming in that open clearing of the taiga, very near that other oddity, the thing Troyak described as a cauldron. They had been shrouded in mystery on the taiga, spoken of in ancient lore, where they were thought to be the haunts of demons. Anyone who found one was befallen by strange ailments, vision problems, dizziness, fainting, loss of balance, unaccountable chills… and fear. Orlov had tried to describe it to him, how unnerved he had become…

“In fact, it scared the crap out of me, and I’m not ashamed to admit that. It was as if… well I could feel something was terrible there, a real feeling of doom. Your senses were keened up like a grizzly bear was on your trail, but it was deathly quiet. I never felt anything quite like it. All I could think of was getting the hell away from that place.”

“Would this be anything we might have made, in our time?”

“I suppose the technology is within our grasp,” said Dobrynin, “but it would take some very sophisticated work to create an alloy like this. The surface of that thing was remarkably smooth. Yet I can’t imagine what it would be doing here, in this time.”

“Thank you, Chief. Where is the object?”

“Locked away in a rad-safe container, and as far from the reactors as I could get it.”

Fedorov thought about this, though he could not come to any sure conclusions. Yet he kept that object locked away in the back of his own mind, wondering what it might do if allowed to really interact with the function of the ship’s reactors for any length of time.

A manufactured object, he thought. So my initial theory that this was a part of the comet or meteor that struck at Tunguska is somewhat shaky now…. Unless it
wasn’t
a comet… He did not know where that line of thinking could lead him, but the presence of this object here in 1941 was most disturbing. If it was machined, an alloy as Dobrynin believes, then how did it get here? Who brought it here? What was its real purpose?

He had heard all the other stories about Tunguska as well, that it wasn’t a comet, but something much more. The UFO crowd had speculated about it, filling the empty space at the heart of that mystery with their own colorful ideas. In 1946, Soviet Engineer Alexander Kazantsev wrote a story called “A Visitor From Outer Space,” where he theorized that the Tunguska event was actually the explosion of a spaceship from Mars. Many more serious expeditions had been also mounted in the wake of Kulik’s early explorations. In 2009, a Russian scientist named Yuri Lavbin claimed he had found unusual quartz crystals at the site of the event, crystals with strange markings on them. He also claimed to have found “ferrum silicate,” something he said could only be produced in space, though no evidence was forthcoming.

It was all speculation, fantasy, storytelling, just like those old legends reputed the strange metal cauldrons to be the homes of demons on the taiga. We’ve only just substituted UFOs for the demons, thought Fedorov, but this object came from somewhere, did it not?

I may not know what the damn thing is, but I know what it might be able to do—what it may have already done in bringing Kinlan’s Brigade here. That thing affects the stable flow of time, particularly if catalyzed by a nuclear environment. It may be dangerous to have it anywhere near the ship, but they had experienced no ill effects as long as it was safely away from the reactors.

A thought occurred to him now, emerging from a worry he had nursed for some time. It was May 1941. In less than 90 days they would have to face a most uncomfortable moment, the instant
Kirov
first breached time and appeared on July 28, 1941—Paradox Hour. That was what he called it in his inner thoughts now. It was that impossible moment when the ship, and everyone on it, might face utter annihilation if they still remained here.

What was going to happen? Was this the world
Kirov
first shifted to, or was it some other universe? There were no altered states when they first shifted back. The Soviet union was intact, as was the history itself, before we started changing everything. I was able to call events, chapter and verse, but I could not presume to do that now.