“You are telling me that you moved in time?”
“Don't be so surprised, Karpov. Your very presence here tells me you have done the same! Yes, how could you be here, I say this to myself? But the evidence of one's eyes is very convincing, is it not? You are Vladimir Karpov, Captain of the battlecruiser Kirov. Do you deny it?” Volkov could see that Karpov remained speechless, bewildered, and now somewhat ill at ease.
“No, you do not deny it. You are Karpov, the same man I spoke with. And given what happened to me, and your presence here, I now begin to understand what happened to your ship.”
Chapter 12
“This is astounding!”
“Yes, it truly is, and I have lived with it for the last thirty-two years. Tell me, Karpov, how long have you been here? As I said, you do not look like you have aged much since I remember seeing you last, except for that scar you bear on your cheek.”
Now that the awful truth was plain between them, Karpov's words spilled out, unrestrained.
“Thirty-two years? 1908 you say? There is something about that year. I don't suppose you know what happened to me after the Inspector General sent you on your way and I sailed out of Vladivostok later to face the American Navy. No, I don't suppose you have any idea at all what I have gone through. Face them we did, and we hurt them. Then that Demon volcano erupted in the Kuriles and blew what was left of my fleet into the past again. I say again because you are right, that is what happened to Kirov in July during those live fire exercises in the Norwegian Sea. All your suspicions were correct. You could clearly see that the ship had been in combat, that something was amiss, but the pieces of the puzzle did not add up. There was no way for you to see the big picture, and of course no way you could possibly believe what we might have told you if we had revealed the truth. But, as you say, the evidence of one's eyes becomes indisputable after a while, and so I, too, came to believe that the impossible was real.”
Schettler, John
Kirov Saga: Darkest Hour: Altered States — Volume II (Kirov Series)
“Demon volcano? I don't understand.”
“It's a very long story, Volkov. Perhaps one day we will have more time to discuss it, but for now it seems we share one thing that few in this world could comprehend or ever know. Yes, Kirov moved in time. It was an accident, and just as you say you found yourself somewhere else in time, our ship did the same. We found ourselves in the 1940s, fighting in this damnable war, struggling to find any way we could to get home. At times that struggle was rather fierce, and I had to resort to some extreme measures. But it seems all I did was worsen our situation. Then we found ourselves displaced deeper in time, to the year 1908, as impossible as it sounds for me to casually say such a thing. Then, unaccountably, the ship vanished, but I was left behind… Somewhere else.”
Volkov was trying as best he could to follow all of this, and only his own incredible experience gave him any reference point to understand it or accept it. But now each of the two men were coming to believe the impossibility that was before them, and Karpov’s candor was evident.
“You say the ship moved to the1940s? How was it I had no word of that? My intelligence apparatus is very good, as you might suspect.”
“Because you weren’t here, Volkov. None of this had happened. There was no Orenburg Federation or Free Siberian State. The Japanese were not in Vladivostok, and Stalin ruled a united Soviet Union with an iron hand.”
“Stalin? What about Kirov?”
“He was dead, just as he should be now. Yes. We were in the past, but the history had not yet changed. It was all our meddling while we were there-all my meddling to be fair about it. That is what gave rise to all of this.” He waved his arm, encompassing the entirety of the world beyond the confines of that meeting room.
“Your meddling? So the entire ship did move in time as I suspected. How? Have you discovered that yet?”
“Yes, we thought we knew how and why it was happening, but now I come to feel that ship was cursed, along with every man aboard. Yes, we moved even as you did, Volkov. Then, in the midst of combat, I was thrown clear of the ship when we were struck by enemy gunfire, and when I awoke I was here… That was two years ago.”
“Two years ago? You mean to say you appeared in the year 1938?”
“Correct, and I have been busy too! I see you have made the most of your situation, so do not be surprised that I made the most of mine. Cream rises to the top, does it not? You and I seem to be common fated, Volkov. We are two men cut from the same cloth.”
“This is amazing!” Volkov put his hands flat on the table now, as if he were testing the reality of this moment, needing something common and tangible to get hold of and anchor him. On one hand the presence of Karpov in the room relieved the terrible burden he had carried all these years, that he was a derelict, and outcast in time, a lost soul condemned to this wicked torture, exiled in the past. Here was another confederate, someone he could finally unburden himself to, a man and face from the old life he had come from. So he wasn’t insane, and this was not his private hell any longer. There was another fallen angel before him now, scarred, haggard in spite of his prim uniform and cap, and all those medals pinned on his chest.
“So you have been busy,” he pointed. “Old Man Kolchak seems to have taken a liking to you.”
“That is so. He knows strength when he sees it.”
“How did this happen, Karpov?”
“We don’t really know.”
“You say it was an accident?”
“At first, yes, that is what we believed. Then we discovered it may have had something to do with our reactors, with a control rod we were using in a maintenance procedure. That’s what we were doing at the Primorskiy Engineering Center that night, Volkov. We were testing that damn control rod, and the man you were sent to look for, Fedorov, he was behind it all.”
“What do you mean?”
“Once we suspected the control rod may have been the cause of these time displacements, he thought he could use it to go back and fetch that last missing man you uncovered in your inspection-Orlov.”
“Orlov… Yes, I remember now. He was listed as missing, the only officer on the ship casualty list.”
“Well he was missing-in 1942! Yes, we were there-the whole damn ship and crew-and Orlov jumped ship. Fedorov thought he would cause nothing but trouble if we left him there, and he hatched this wild scheme to go and fetch him. War was at hand, and we could not take the ship back again. Kirov was needed in the here and now, at least as we once held it in 2021. So we installed the control rod in the Primorskiy test reactor, and Fedorov went back. He was going to travel west on the Siberian Rail if he made it back safely, and apparently he did. So I suppose Kamenski and Kapustin had the right idea-just the wrong time. You were on his trail alright, Volkov, but some eighty years late. Fedorov did make it back to 1942 with that control rod. What I can’t understand is how you slipped in time.”
“Nor can I.”
“When did it happen again?”
“At that railway inn… Now I remember the name. Yes, the place was called Ilanskiy. I was searching every rail station and inn on the line.”
“And you had men with you up until then?”
“Yes. Then I went downstairs with a suspicious character I found hiding in a locked stairwell, and that is when the madness started.”