Kirov Saga: Darkest Hour: Altered States - Volume II (Kirov Series) (16 page)

“Yes
sir.”

“You
came from the world at the top of those stairs? From the world we live in now?”

“No,
sir.”

Mironov
folded his arms, his brow registering some confusion. “No? Here I thought you
waited all this time to arrange this meeting. You see, you look exactly as I
remember you.”

Fedorov
looked at the Admiral, and Volsky nodded, giving him quiet permission to
explain himself. He cleared his throat, thinking what he might say and how he
could elucidate that they were from another time altogether. Then the image of
the stairway itself gave him some graspable way of explaining things.

“You
lived on the first floor back then, sir, in the dining room of 1908. That was a
very memorable day. I suppose you now may know what we were looking at to the
northeast when the sky seemed to be on fire there. Well… when you came up that
stairway after me, you know where you ended up. Suppose that inn had a third
floor. That is the world I came from. How I came to be there in the year you
met me is a very long story, but we—the Admiral and I—we live on the third
floor sir, if that makes any sense.”

Sergie
Kirov was quiet for a time, his eyes alive, thinking. “A third floor? Yes, I
get what you are saying, Fedorov. Why not? Then you are telling me you came
from years beyond that time?”

“We
did, sir.”

“But
why?” The question was obvious, burning, unanswered in the whole impossible
saga they had lived through thus far.

“At
that moment I was looking for a man, a member of our crew in fact. I was sent
to find him by the Admiral here.”

“And
how did you get to the place on that second floor where we spoke, Fedorov? How
did you get back? Are there other stairways out there that wend their way
through madness and time? Yes, I thought I was mad for a while, truly insane.
But I got over it when I learned what was really going on at the top of those
stairs.”

Fedorov
was not quite sure what to say now. Kirov would have no comprehension of
nuclear reactors, and control rods. How could he explain what happened when he
barely understood it himself?

“Sir… We
are not exactly certain. There was an accident—in our time—and we found
ourselves adrift on the oceans of your world.”

“Just
the two of you?”

“No,
said Admiral Volsky. Now you have the explanation as to why you cannot seem to
recall the construction of my ship.”

Kirov
leaned back, quite shocked now. “You mean to say your entire ship moved in time?
My god, how many are you?”

“Our
crew? About seven hundred men. Our ship was christened
Sergie Kirov
,
yes, in your honor.”

“When?”
Kirov’s eyes held intense anticipation as he waited for the answer.

Volsky
looked at Fedorov, then folded his arms. “Well I don’t suppose there is any harm
in saying it now. The ship was originally laid down in the year 1974, launched
three years later, and finally commissioned in 1980. It was later extensively
re-designed, and re-commissioned again… in the year 2020. Since you, yourself,
have been up and down those stairs, sir, you are aware that the stairway may
continue on and on. We never know what lies beyond the floor we are born to,
unless something very strange happens to us, but I think that stairway does go
on into the future, and we are a small clique of men, fortunate or not, who
have moved from one floor to the next.”

“2020?
This is amazing! Unbelievable. Yet you are correct in what you say. If anyone
might hear what you have just said and not think it wild
vranyo
, it is
I, someone who has walked that back stairway, more times than I should have.
But what are you doing here now?”

“Fedorov
here is saying hello to an old acquaintance,” said Volsky. “Beyond that, it was
our hope to make a new friend or two here. You see, General Secretary, as Fedorov
said, we are not quite sure why we find ourselves here—but here we are and, at
the moment, we seem to be marooned in this day and year. Believe me, I am as
bewildered as you seem to be now about it all. I have spent hours wondering
just who I really am now, in this world. You see, I am a little older than you
are, Mironov, but I was born in the year 1957, and young Fedorov here… why,
when were you born, Captain?”

“1994,
sir.”

“Remarkable,”
said Kirov. “This ship of yours… Why it must be very powerful.”

“That
it is, the most powerful ship in the world, and we have been tested against
many others who might like to make that claim. It was our hope to minimize any
contact with the world we found ourselves in after we first went down the
rabbit hole. Now we have come to realize that we have already made a very grave
difference in the world. Our presence in the past has had a shattering effect.
Your presence here, at this very moment, is one result. You see… you
did
die on that cold December night in Leningrad, in 1934, but here you are.
Everything is different now, in more ways that we can possibly have time to
explain. Fedorov here calls it a broken mirror, and when we look into it now we
wonder who we are at times. We thought we could reverse the damage, preserve
it, put things back the way they were. Finally we gave up trying, as it seems
it is an impossible task. So here we are, Sergei Kirov, beggars at your
doorstep—a place we once called home. We left this very harbor in the year
2021, and sailed out on a bright sunny day. The weather has been very stormy
for us ever since, but now we are finally back… not quite home yet, but we are
here at long last.”

Kirov
had a grave expression on his face. These men have been through the same
madness I suffered through, he thought. Yes, I can see it in their eyes. We are
brothers, the three of us.

“Admiral
Volsky, in one sense we are all in the same boat, the three of us here, and I,
too, am a member of your crew.”

They
smiled.

Chapter 15

“I
had hoped I could recruit your support,” said Volsky.
“Every moment we have been at sea these last months has been a hardship. The
men have lost everything they had, everyone they ever knew, and while I have
promised them we would find a way to get them home again, that may never happen
for us. Once we thought we had come home, but here we are again, and I am no
longer sure the world we came from even exists any longer.”

Kirov
had a very serious expression on his face, clearly empathizing with everything
the Admiral was saying. “Well,” he said, “I owe this man my life, and so in
return I will do everything possible to secure yours, and those of every man on
your ship. You are welcome to anything we have, food, fuel, quarters ashore. Anything
you need can be provided.”

“Thank
you, Mironov, it was my hope that we could find a safe harbor here. Yet there
is one more thing I must tell you. Our route here took us through the Atlantic
and the Denmark Strait, and there has been a major battle there between the
British and Germans.”

“Yes,
our intelligence has informed me of this, but the British seem to have
prevailed. Their navy is the one force the Germans cannot break.”

“It was
much more serious than you may realize,” Volsky said with a certain urgency.
“Mister Fedorov here is somewhat of a student of military history, and he
believes the Germans would have won this engagement if not for our
intervention.”

“Your
intervention?”

“Yes,
I’m afraid so. It is a long story, sir, and I cannot give you all the details
now, but at one time we made an enemy of the Royal Navy. Finding ourselves in
these waters again, and needing support, this time I thought to make them a
friend. The Germans sortied with a very powerful fleet, and the situation did
not look good for the British. I therefore elected to use the power of my ship
to… discourage the Germans, and we were able to see them off home again.”

“I
see…” Kirov was very thoughtful now. “I must tell you, Admiral Volsky, that we
will not be able to stand neutral in this war for very much longer. When I went
up those stairs at Ilanskiy, into Stalin’s world, I learned that Russia and
Germany were at war by 1942, and that the Germans had pushed all the way to the
Volga! If they were to do the same again, then we are facing annihilation. So
in some sense I look upon your coming here as a harbinger of good fate.”

“We are
a powerful ship, sir, but I do not think we can sail to the front line if the
Germans push for Moscow.”

“And
they will,” said Fedorov. “It is almost certain that they will. They called it
Operation Barbarossa.”

Kirov
nodded gravely. “Even now we begin to see a slow and steady buildup on the
Polish frontier, and yes, our intelligence had wind of that very
name—Barbarossa. You may or may not know that the Orenburg Federation has
declared open war on us and allied itself with Germany. At the moment they are
also squabbling with the Free Siberian State. Last winter they crossed the
border and took Omsk from the Siberians, which was good news for us. We made
overtures to Kolchak, but he seemed indecisive. He, too, has a war on two
fronts now, with the Japanese at his back and Volkov on the other flank.”

“I must
tell you something now,” said Volsky. “This man Volkov, the man they call the
Prophet, we believe that he was not born to this world.”

“What
do you mean? He has come from… from another floor in the inn?”

“That
may have been exactly what happened,” said Fedorov. “We have thought a great
deal about that stairway and the strange effects we have both experienced
there. When we learned of this man, Volkov, we began to suspect that he was a
man by the same name that had also come from our world—that he has gone down
those stairs as well.”

“I
see…” A light of realization was evident in Kirov’s eyes. “That would explain
much. Volkov was able to outmaneuver Denikin and everyone else—except me. I had
the support of the Reds, so he settled into the White movement and consolidated
power there. But he had been here for years, decades in fact. I met him twenty
years ago, and could see that he was going to be trouble during the
revolution.”

“If
what we believe has actually happened, he may have gone down that stairway,
just as I did,” said Fedorov. “If he ended up in 1908, then that would explain
his presence here all these years. We know that he vanished in our day, and at
that very place, Ilanskiy. This leads me to suspect that stairway can also make
a connection to our world—to the third floor, Mironov.”

“That
would be very significant if it did. Do you think Volkov knows about this?”

“We do
not know, but I am inclined to believe that he does not. If he did, why would
he have remained marooned in the past? It would seem any sane man would try to
return the way he came.”

“Something
may have prevented him,” said Kirov, “the madness, the shock of what he
experienced. I found it very difficult to bear myself.”

“Yet he
had years to try and return, but never did. If he does remain in the dark, that
is good news, and we hope as much. Because if that stairway still exists in
this world, and the effects continue, then it could be a way for us to return
to our own time—a way for any man to do so.”

Kirov
immediately perceived the peril there. “That would be very dangerous.”

“Yes,”
said Volsky. “Men who knew what they were about could use that stairway to
cause a great deal of mischief.”

“At the
moment that inn may not see many travelers,” said Kirov. “This civil war has
been very hard. The railway east has degraded. Much of it has fallen into
disrepair. The route from Chebalyinsk to Novosibirsk is impassible now with
Cossacks and Tartars at each other’s throats. One or two trains still operate
further east all the way to Irkutsk, but there are very few who dare to travel
that route. We have men there from our intelligence arm. Things are starting to
wake up now that Karpov has come on the scene.”

The
name fell like a hot coal in a bucket of ice water, and Kirov could see the
immediate reaction in both the other men. Volsky leaned forward, giving Fedorov
a worried glance. “Karpov? Tell me more of this man.”

“I wish
I could. He seemed to come from nowhere just a few years ago. Old Man Kolchak
and his Lieutenant
Kozolnikov were
running things in the east. Then the name of this man Karpov began to appear in
dispatches and signals traffic. We thought he was just another minor official,
or perhaps a newly appointed military officer. Then we learned he was given
command of the Siberian Air Corps. Now it appears that he exercises
considerable influence over Kolchak. They call him the old man for a good
reason. Kolchak is getting slow, and he has been unable to unite the disparate
warlords ranging throughout Siberia—until recently. Karpov is whipping things
into shape there. Yet you both seem very surprised to hear this name. What is
your concern?”

“It
may be nothing,” said Volsky. “It is just that Karpov was an officer aboard my
ship—one we believed was killed in action, though we never recovered his body.”