“I see,” said Elena. “Yes, he certainly wasn’t the boogie man I first thought him to be.”
“Not at all. A good many men on my ship owe him their lives. Unfortunately, that round did go off, and there was no way he could have survived the resulting explosion. What remained, largely his sea jacket and blazer, were given to me… and something else.”
Now Tovey reached into his coat pocket, producing the key he had found in the hidden pocket within Volsky’s coat. Elena’s eyes widened.
“It was given to the Admiral by Mister Fedorov, or so I was told by Volsky himself. In fact, he delivered it to me. When I fell after that hit, the Admiral must have taken it again for safekeeping, unsure of what my fate might be.”
“It was sent by Fedorov? From the ship that arrived in July?”
“Presumably.”
“Well I don’t understand. How could that man have come by it? This doesn’t make sense.”
Yes, thought Tovey, that was quite the question. If Fedorov knew of the importance of this key, then he had to be the same young, enterprising man he had already met, the man who sailed with them in the Med, the man who met Churchill after rescuing O’Connor in the desert. Yet that man vanished when Kirov disappeared, did he not? How was it that he now appears on this new ship arriving July 28th? Volsky was clearly different, unknowing, a man made new…. But not Fedorov. How was this possible? He shared all this with Miss Fairchild.
“This business is all twisted about like a good pretzel,” said Elena. “Could there be two Fedorovs? We already know we have one Doppelganger in the two Karpovs.”
“Madame, I am the last man who could come up with an answer to that. Drill me on gun laying for a good 16-inch battery in sea state 4 and I’ll do a good deal better.”
“I understand.”
“Well… here it is. I’ve had a good look at it. This one doesn’t seem to have any of those numbers engraved on the shaft.”
That got Elena’s attention. “You’re certain?”
“Have a look yourself.” He handed her the key, and she leaned under the nearby lamp to squint at it.
“Nothing I can see. Well… How very interesting. Mine has a serial number, and it is associated with specific geographic coordinates. Professor Dorland claimed he had a good look at the key we lost on Rodney, and it had coordinates for Saint Michael’s Cave, Gibraltar. So we know there are time rifts at those locations… But this one…”
“Seems to lead nowhere,” said Tovey.
“May I keep this?”
“Be my guest. I have no idea what I would do with it, only that Mister Fedorov was very keen to have it delivered here. Now, after a good long delay and a great deal of mischief and misery, that has been done. Have you any idea what this is all about?”
“The rifts,” said Elena, “physical deformities in the spacetime continuum. You heard Dorland trying to explain it. Well, he was correct. Something did happen, many years ago, and it had a very severe impact on time. Think of it like a ball batted against a pane of glass, or a mirror. The damage causes a web of cracks, but the mirror itself doesn’t shatter. We believe these keys are all associated with the end points of one of those cracks, and now I know how many we have to worry about.”
“How many? You mean there are more of these keys beyond those we discussed?”
“Indeed. We now possess two, but there are at least seven. Another went down with the Rodney, and this Professor Dorland is keen to find it again. He has some scheme, but we’ve heard nothing from the man since that last meeting in the Azores when he scared me half to death.”
“You mean all that talk of a grand finality.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Well that makes three… then there are four more missing keys?”
“We know about one of those—the Watch knew. It was supposedly assigned to an agent for a special mission. Often times the right hand knows not what the left hand is doing in this secret little group. I knew it existed, but that’s all I can say about it. As for the other three… We received information as to the location of yet another key—don’t ask me how. Thinking we had it safely in hand, we were soon very disappointed. It was supposedly in the British museum as well.”
“The British Museum?”
“Quite so. Just as the key on Rodney was embedded in the Selene Horse, so this one was supposed to be hidden with another artifact there in the museum.”
“Pray tell…”
“I suppose you ought to know… It was the Rosetta Stone.”
“Interesting… And might it be associated with a location?”
“Possibly, but we’ve never laid eyes on it.”
“I don’t understand. You mean you’ve left it there in the stone?”
“Something a little more complicated. As you may know, that stone was recovered damaged. A good chunk of the top was missing. That still left enough of the engraved text for it to be deciphered, but we now believe the key may be hidden within the piece that is missing.”
Tovey tapped his fingers on the table, thinking. “My dear woman… I’m rather fond of that museum. In fact I last visited just before the war and saw the Rosetta Stone at that time. It was in very good condition, perfectly intact—oh a little chip here or there, but no major damage to speak of.”
Now it was Elena’s turn to be taken by unexpected news. “Undamaged? The top third was intact?”
Tovey nodded. Watching her eyes move back and forth as though following her wild inner thoughts. He could see that this was a complete revelation to her, something entirely unexpected.
“Of course!” she said, her breath coming quickly. “This is an altered reality—a different Meridian as Dorland would put it. The Rosetta Stone we had access to after learning about this was in our time.”
“I’m not quite sure I follow you.”
“Well then,” she said. “In the history I know, your favorite battleship, HMS Invincible, was never built. The Germans never took Gibraltar, there was no battle for the Canary Islands, Russia was never fragmented as it is here, Moscow never fell to the Germans, and there was no Orenburg Federation. Furthermore, Krakatoa never erupted in 1942, that occurred several decades earlier. Don’t you see? From my perspective, this world is an alternate time line.” The realization was a glow on her face now. “Why, it never occurred to me that the Rosetta Stone would be in any way different from the one I could look at in my time. But here you say it’s complete and whole? That means we might have yet another key, safe and sound, right there in the museum!”
“My,” said Tovey. “This is getting darker and more mysterious every time we discuss it, and more frightening every time I contemplate what doors these keys might open, and where they might lead. There’s a real darkness there, real uncertainty. Don’t you feel it?”
“Of course. Though I don’t fear them because the keys might open them. No. I think these keys were men to keep them sealed shut, locked and well hidden. Because once we do open one, there’s no guarantee that we can close it again.”