Doppelganger (5 page)

“We’re too damn late,” she breathed.

“Aye,” said MacRae. “We’ve had them on the radio. They took a couple hits low near their forward torpedoes, and the whole magazine went off there. Word is that cargo hold was completely flooded. There was no way in hell we were ever going to get in there. All we can do now is get as many men out of the water as possible.”

“That could be a problem. Too many eyes, Gordon.”

“We can’t bloody well leave them out there? I’ve gone and launched all out boats to lend a hand.”

“Yes, do what you can to pull them onto the boats, but there’s a big troop ship off east. Let’s see if we can quarter the survivors there.”

“That’ll take time, Elena. What if that battle out there comes our way while we’re at it?”

“How many missiles left?”

“Seven.”

Elena folded her arms, determined. “If anything so much as sticks its nose over that horizon again, you damn well hit it with everything we have.”

Gordon nodded, one eyebrow raised. “Well enough,” he said. “Aye, we can hold the field here a while if we have to, but what’s the plan now, Elena? What about those other ships out there?”

“I’ve got Mack on it,” she said. “He’s talking with the Captain of the squadron now—a chap named Dowding. He’s on that auxiliary you mentioned, the
Diligence
. There are four fleet transports, an oiler, and then the
Ulysses
.”

“Quite a flock,” said MacRae. “Useful ships.”

“Yes, and with
Rodney
going down, I’m afraid they’re all our watch now. If we can finish up here, I plan to head to Madalena or Ponta Delgada in the Azores.”

“Makes sense,” said Gordon. “We can’t very well sail into Portsmouth with that lot, can we?’

“Not bloody likely,” said Elena. “Any further word on the Russians?”

“Quiet as mice,” said MacRae. “I’ve been thinking what may have happened. Do you suppose they were on the wrong end of that mushroom out there in the garden?”

“That ship was reported missing long before that, wasn’t it?”

“Aye,” MacRae nodded, “and then the whole plan went bonkers on us. That other British Admiral must be having fits out there.”

“Tovey? Probably so. Let’s get a message off to him and let him know
Rodney
’s status. How long do you figure we have?”

“She’s listing at well over ten degrees from the look of it,” said MacRae. “And that is likely after they’ve already counter-flooded to try and correct it. She’ll most likely go down within the hour.”

Elena nodded, her eyes vacant, searching. “Get as many men on those boats as you can,” she said. “I don’t care if we have to use every raft on the ship—even the helicopters if necessary. Two of the destroyers with
Britannic
are on the way as well. At the moment, I’m going to have to arrange a meeting with this Captain on
Diligence
.”

“He’s going to have one hell of a story for breakfast,” said MacRae with a knowing smile.

“Elena shrugged. “I’ll be in my cabin,” she said, her hand touching his elbow for the barest moment, their eyes meeting, with much said there without words.

Part II

The Final Shift

“The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.”

―
Joyce Carol Oates

Chapter 4

Fedorov
was also facing down the cruel whims of time that night. The dilemma they now found themselves in was confounding, and he could not determine what was happening to the ship and crew. Were these strange effects the result of impending Paradox? The fate of Lenkov, the threatening sounds reported, and now the disappearance of key members of the crew, all convinced him that this was so. Yet what was really happening?

Have we so altered the course of history with our actions here that it has had fatal effects on the life lines of the missing men? We searched the ship’s records, both digital and analog, and found no evidence that these men had ever existed. There would have been hundreds of data points to prove the existence of a man like Orlov on this ship, he thought. He would have signed off on all the section chief crew assignments, but we find nothing, not a single trace that he was ever here. Orlov exists only in our memories now, and that can only be said of a select group on the ship.

He remembered Orlov clearly enough, and all the other missing men as well. Yet the Admiral and other senior officers seemed foggy when he first asserted Tasarov was missing. Indeed, he realized that he had also been oblivious of Tasarov until Nikolin came to him and insisted his friend had gone missing. Once the looking glass of his memory was dusted off, however, he could suddenly recall everything. And he had been able to jog the memory of Admiral Volsky and the other senior officers on the bridge at that critical moment. Now they were among the knowing few on the ship, but as he made his rounds, he soon discovered that most other crewmen knew nothing of Orlov, while others remembered him clearly enough.

Sergeant Troyak was a perfect example. He clearly recalled Orlov being assigned to his Marine detail after he was busted, and the details of his mission to Ilanskiy on the
Narva
were also clear in his mind. In fact, most of the Marines remembered him with no problem, but other crewmen, even those who might have had daily interaction with the Chief, seemed oblivious.

His first thought was that this was an effect that resulted from their sudden shift. Every other time displacement they had made, left the ship and crew remarkably intact, but not this one. The more he thought about this, the more he came to believe his worst fears were now slowly being realized.

Paradox… It wasn’t just a seeming contradiction, or a thorny puzzle to challenge the logic of one’s thinking. No. It was a real force, and one capable of reordering the physical reality of the universe, changing and altering everything. It was the force of annihilation, the cruel imperative in any equation that demanded a zero sum—and it was killing them. The missing men, the missing data, were all evidence of the deadly hand of Paradox.

Now that the ship had phased, shifted again in time, he still had no real idea what their position was on the continuum. Was it still May of 1941, or had they moved to some other time? Did they shift forward, or slip deeper into the past? If the disappearance of these men was the result of Paradox, then he was inclined to think the ship might have moved forward again, to a point in time where they were now suffering the consequences of their many interventions. They had changed the course of events to a point where the life lines of Tasarov and the others were fatally compromised. This was all he could deduce at that moment.

The only thing he was relatively certain of was that Paradox was somehow involved. As the ship had sailed closer and closer to a moment in time where it already existed, these effects became more pronounced. The hand of fate was on them now, and he could see no way they could avoid it. His fear now was that the process was still underway, and other things could change—go missing, just like Kamenski and the others.

Yet just a moment, he thought. The ship doesn’t simply exist in time. It also occupies space, and the combination of its spatial position and its temporal position would define it as an event in
spacetime
… Then something struck him with thunderclap surprise. Two discrete objects could easily exist at the same time, but they could not exist in the same space. Therefore they could also not exist together in the same spacetime, which was a unified expression of both space and time.

Physicists and theoreticians were always trying to nail things down on a chart, just as he plotted the position of the ship for navigation. He was often asked to set an intercept course that depended on many variables, and this was always a chancy prediction. He could know an enemy ship’s last reported position, course, and speed, and then compare that with similar information on his own ship. This enabled him to set a course and speed that would potentially bring the two ships together in the same future moment of spacetime. And when this was happening with two opposing warships, battle would result, with one ship ruling the moment and prevailing, and the other either driven off or destroyed.

Just like two chess pieces trying to occupy the same space on a board, one or the other had to prevail. But we are not on an intercept course in
spacetime
, only in time. Our last reported position was just a few hundred nautical miles west of Lisbon, but that other ship, the one we arrived on, will appear in the Norwegian Sea. Two discrete objects can easily co-exist in the same time, but not the same spacetime. If this were so, then it suddenly occurred to him that it was not simply a collision in time that he should fear, but a collision in
spacetime
.

Was this the source of my confusion? I believed we were on an intercept course with that other ship, with our own selves as we appeared on July 28th of 1941. They are approaching that event in spacetime from the future, while we are approaching it from the past. I have been obsessed with the timing of the event, and I was ignoring the spatial element. We’ll reach July 28th, 1941 if we continue to move forward here,
but that will be a separate event, from that defined by the other ship.
We won’t be in the same spatial location, and therefore we won’t be in the same spacetime as the ship arriving from the future!

Now he remembered that terrifying moment when
Kirov
was in the Pacific. The ship had begun to pulse, its position in spacetime wavering and undefined. They had used Rod-25 to try and remove themselves from danger, then there came that strange event, where the cruiser
Tone
had appeared and seemed to plow right through the ship. He could still see it in his mind’s eye, and feel the terror of that experience. It was as if a ship of ghosts had sailed right through them on a collision course, spectral phantoms from another reality.

At that moment we were fortunately not in the same spacetime as the
Tone
. Otherwise the two ships would have had a fatal collision. He had been thinking about this all wrong, believing he had to be in a different temporal location when
Kirov
was slated to arrive from the future. Yet could they avoid the Paradox he feared by simply being at a different spatial location? That could be easily arranged. Was the solution to this dilemma that simple?

Then one troubling note sounded an objection in his mind—Alan Turing’s watch. Why did it vanish, only to be found later in that file box that must surely have also come from a future time? Why did time find it necessary to move that watch? What complication was it trying to avoid? Was something else happening with that watch, something unrelated to the possibility of Paradox?

Two ships… one arriving from the future, another arriving from the past, and both wanting domain over a single moment in time, but not in the same location in space…

Now he found his thinking falling through to yet another level. Were there really two ships? Wasn’t
this
the ship that arrived from the future? It’s already here… and if we haven’t moved elsewhere, it will still be here come July 28, 1941. It isn’t arriving at that moment from the future this time. Now it is arriving from the past.

All these thoughts swirled through his mind, like a great spiraling whirlpool of possibility, and he felt like a swimmer adrift in that maelstrom, and desperately struggling to keep his head above water. Quite literally, only time would tell which of these conflicting theories would hold true. There were only three possible outcomes. The first was that the ship he was now standing on would vanish, as it seemingly had, and its place in 1941 would be claimed by the ship arriving from the future. This was the chilling reality he feared they were now facing. They had vanished, and pieces of the puzzle that had once been
Kirov
in 1941 were now obviously missing.

The second possibility was that the other ship would be prevented from arriving from the future, and for a number of reasons. The most obvious was that the long chain of causality could never replicate itself to produce the circumstances that sent
Kirov
back through time.

Now his thinking about that stack of plates and teacups returned. All the events from 1941 to 2021 extended out like a stack of fragile china, eighty years high. Wouldn’t these changes they were making to the history cause catastrophic changes in the future? This was what the butterfly effect argued. It held that something as simple and insignificant as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings could cause just enough of a perturbation in the air to prevent the formation of a hurricane in the future. Small things now have big effects much later, and the changes they had caused in the history were not small things—they were huge.

In their first displacement they had altered the entry date of the US in the war, and by so doing, changed the entire course of the war in the Pacific. There was no way he could see the design and building of
Kirov
after what they had done, let alone the assignment of all the exact same crew members, and the same exact decisions and events being taken to eventually result in the ship being displaced in time as it happened. How could that future moment repeat? How could it arise now from this terribly convoluted past?

That was logic enough, he thought, and there is one more reason the future
Kirov
cannot arrive here—
because the ship was already here.
If this were so, there was no real threat, even though they were now suffering all these ill effects. Something else could have caused the oddities that were occurring—our instability in time—the pulsing I have observed many times before. Perhaps Orlov and the others
were
still here with them, but strangely out of phase? Yet if that were so, why did so many seem oblivious to the fact they ever existed? Why was there no physical evidence they were ever here, their possessions, ship’s records?