Kirov III-Pacific Storm (Kirov Series) (44 page)

“We’re pulsing again,” said Fedorov.
“Thank God. I wish it had happened hours ago, and then we might have avoided
that.” He pointed, also noticing the fading glow on the horizon. “Let us hope
we don’t regress this time and end up back in the same borscht. I don’t think
we need another round with the Imperial Japanese Navy—let alone the Americans.”

The ship was moving farther and faster
than they realized, moving in and out of time itself, even as she slowed below
twenty knots so Byko could reduce the stress on the dislodged hull patch. But
something else was now going to happen that no man among them could have
possibly anticipated, or even believed.

Kirov
moved, the very fabric of her being
becoming gossamer thin, a wisp of shadow on the sea, a vaporous menacing mist.
It seemed only seconds to the crew, and no man could really say they noticed
it, but the ship was indeed “pulsing” as Fedorov had come to describe it,
fading in and out of the time period she had been trapped in, slipping into
infinity and the limbo of uttermost nowhere. She loitered there but a few brief
moments before falling back into the turbulent waters of the Coral Sea and her
private war on war itself.

What seemed like a few insubstantial
seconds away in this otherworldly place and time, were actually long minutes in
the realm she had come from, the wee hours of August 27, 1942. She had been
sailing at twenty knots, still moving in space, yet ten minutes passed in 1942
for every second she was away, and that happened again and again as the ship
pulsed in time. The enemy ship that had been chasing her now had ample time to
close the range.

Tasarov heard it before anyone saw
anything. The sound that had once been a faint, high whine in his headphones
was now grossly magnified, and when he looked at the signal profile he was
shocked to see the pattern matched that of the enemy cruiser that had been
hastening to join the battle.

“Sir,” he began, “that cruiser
contact…I’m reading a range of only 50,000 meters now.”

Karpov spun around. “What? That’s
impossible. That ship was nearly a hundred kilometers behind us just a minute
ago.”

“It was, sir…At least I thought as
much, but it seems to have cut that range in half!”

Fedorov took keen notice of this.
“From their perspective we moved nearly 8000 miles in a single day when we
vanished on August 23rd and reappeared off the Australian coast just a day
later. I guess Time loses the beat when she plays a new song for us. It could
be that time slows down for us when we shift, and then re-synchs when we appear
again—like an old cassette tape fast forwarded to a new point in the music.
That ship is gaining on us every time we pulse.”

There came a third vibration, and
Kirov
shuddered, slipping away again into the nameless void, a shadow on a sea of
shadows now. Karpov walked slowly to the forward viewports, seeing the enemy battleship
quaver and fade in the distance—and then the ship vanished.
Kirov
hovered like a single breath of God in time without end, then reappeared,
gaining form and substance again in the real world of rock and sea and sky, and
men in steel ships on the Coral Sea of 1942. Karpov suddenly saw what looked
like a vast darkness looming off the starboard beam, a brooding, menacing
thunderstorm, and then it seemed to sharpen to hard angles, as if a shadow had
been frozen solid, resolving to the shape and form of a ship of war!

The moonlight gleamed on her long,
forward deck, the white bow wave rising high as she came at the ship, hurtling
toward them on a collision course.

“My God!” He pointed, a look of utter
surprise and amazement on his face. “My
God!
It’s coming right at us!
Hard to starboard, ahead full! Brace for impact!”

He had desperately tried to maneuver
the ship to prevent a direct collision, and
Kirov
shuddered, not only
with the straining effort of her turbines, the sea still clawing at the open gash
in her side, her rudders vibrating as they fought to turn the ship, but also
she quavered again with the cold hand of Mother Time on her neck.

The captain and crew of the heavy
cruiser
Tone
were equally astounded by what they saw, a formless shadow
on the sea that must have been unseen behind an impenetrable cloud of smoke. It
suddenly became the long threatening presence of a great warship! Then a
strange light came over it, as if it had been struck by lightning, a Saint
Elmo’s fire of doom crowning her tall battlements and gilded decks—and she
began to fade away, just as the sharp forward prow of the
Tone
slammed
into her hull in a massive unavoidable collision.

There came the sound of metal on
metal, a grinding scream of agony, and then it faded away as quickly as it
came, and to Captain Iwabuchi on the bridge, it seemed that his ship was slowly
being swallowed by the enemy vessel, as if
Mizuchi
had opened its maw to
devour the smaller cruiser.

Aboard
Kirov
they saw the ship
plunge right into the starboard side of
Kirov’s
broad armored hull, and
then there was absolute chaos.
Tone
was there, and yet
not
there,
careening forward through the ship, her form and structure a luminescent,
translucent green, a ghostly phosphorous phantom ship that cut right through
the heart of the Russian battlecruiser. And they could see right
through
the ship, through her bulkheads and into the labyrinthine metal innards where
they glimpsed ghostly figures of men standing their spectral watches.

They heard screams of men frightened
beyond their capacity to understand and endure. Karpov covered his ears, his
eyes bulging at what he saw—the contorted faces of the enemy crew as the tall
bridge pagoda on
Tone
passed completely through the armored citadel. And
there, in the midst of a host of leering wraiths from hell, came the stalwart
and brooding face and form of Sanji Iwabuchi, his arms clutching the binnacle
on the bridge of
Tone
, officer’s hat pulled low on his forehead above
murderous eyes. And it seemed that the soul of that man passed right through
Karpov himself, and he suddenly felt his mind flooded with the awareness of
another being, the dour Japanese Captain in all his wrath and ire, and all his
carefully controlled madness.

The vision passed, as the ship plunged
on through, and Karpov was doubled over with nausea, dropping to one knee,
bewildered and beset with a fear unlike any other he had known in his life. The
wail of frightened and panicked men followed in the wake of the ghostly ship,
and it slowly faded, a long distended screed that diminished until it was
devoured by the dark.

The sound of men screaming below decks
still echoed through the ship, resounding through the corridors and passages,
fading to a whimper of silence. Then a thick, cottony darkness enfolded them.
Karpov turned to see Fedorov literally shaking with fear and shock. The Admiral
was unconscious on the deck. Rodenko had his head buried in his arms, slumped
over his lifeless radar station. Tasarov was just staring, his eyes unfocused,
jaw slack. He heard the sound of a junior officer weeping at his station. Only
Samsonov still sat on guard, his muscled arm poised over his CIC panels, an
expression of shock giving way to the light of fire and anger in his eyes.

Somehow, Karpov forced his own limbs
to move, fighting off the cold shiver of infinity. They had sailed through
hell—or rather it had just sailed through them! They were somewhere else now.
He looked out the viewport thinking to see the Japanese cruiser, but the sea
was empty and calm. There was no sign of the angry glow of fire on the horizon.
Yamato
was gone as well. They had moved in time!

“Fedorov!” he had hold of the younger
man’s shoulders now. “Fedorov! We’ve moved! We’ve shifted somewhere else. That
ship…it passed right through us. God, what a nightmare! It went right
through
us. But we’re safe now… I think we are safe….” He was looking fearfully over
his shoulder, as if the flaming hulk of
Yamato
might come boring in on
them next, but all was calm. There was only the long wavering shimmer of the
cold moonlight on the sea.

It was over.

Epilogue

“There are an infinite number of
universes existing side by side and through which our consciousnesses
constantly pass. In these universes, all possibilities exist. You are alive in
some, long dead in others, and never existed in still others. Many of our
"ghosts" could indeed be visions of people going about their business
in a parallel universe or another time
—
or
both.”

—Paul F.
Eno
,
Faces at the Window

It took
a long time before the crew was able
to shake off the terror of that night. It was not simply the heat and stress of
battle, the long hours tensely at action stations, the lack of sleep, the meals
snatched between endless shifts. All that they could have taken in stride,
holding to their discipline and training in spite of severe trial. They had
been a ship of raw and untested men, and now they were as seasoned as any crew
who ever fought at sea, veterans all.

No. It was that last insane and
unbelievable moment, as terrifying as it was astonishing to them all, when
heavy cruiser
Tone
and all her crew of 824 sailors and officers finally
caught up with the ship they had been chasing, and drove right through its
heart. In doing so they passed right through the minds and souls of an equal
compliment of men aboard
Kirov
, and each crew knew something of the
other, in a dark, macabre nightmare meeting at sea that no man among them ever
wanted to recall, or speak of again. Ships pass in the  night, wrote
Longfellow, and speak to one another in passing.

Kirov
had sailed east, slipping past Milne
Bay at the southern tip of Papua New Guinea, a silent ship on an empty sea.
They wanted to know that they would not regress, waiting breathlessly in those first
hours and fearing that the ship would again be plunged into the cauldron of
battle, scalded further by those turbulent and heated waters, the controlled
insanity men now called the Second World War. But the ship seemed stable, the
reactors showing no odd neutron flux, even though Dobrynin was now using manual
backup controls to keep it running. It slowly dawned on them that the ship had
reached some stable time, though they did not have any idea where they were.

The hideous collision with that
phantom cruiser had a strange effect on all the equipment on board. The
electronics were fitful and  computers off line, with systems failing all
over the ship. It was all Dobrynin could do to keep the power stable, finally
isolating the source of the damage that had caused his cooling problem and
fixing it before events turned critical.

Nikolin could not even raise anything
on his radio, which did not surprise any man among them. All they had seen,
each and every time they shifted away from the horrors of the 1940s, had been
an empty world, a blackened world, a world of shadows, destruction and shame.
It was all that was left of the world they had left, and each man still carried
some hidden doubt that
Kirov
was somehow responsible.

Admiral Volsky recovered, as they all
eventually did, and they decided what to do next. East lay the islands he had
yearned to find for so long, scattered peaks of paradise at the top of undersea
mountains, surrounded by the pristine blue-green waters of the Pacific. They
had sailed that way, slipping past San Cristobal at the tip of the Solomons,
past Vanuatu and north of Fiji Island, hoping to ease past Samoa and find
Tahiti.

All the while the ship’s systems
slowly began to wink back on, basic circuits operating again, lights and power
stabilizing. It was as if
Kirov
was slowly rousing from some long and
fitful slumber, a bad dream that had haunted them all these many weeks. Their
chronometer read August 28th now, but it was any man’s guess as to what year or
day it really was. Then Nikolin tinkered with his radio sets and suddenly
reported that he was getting a distant, faded signal!

“What is it, Nikolin?” It was the
first stirring of the ship’s higher level electronics. The mechanical things
had kept on working. They had reverted to manual controls on many systems while
the weary engineers tried in vain to isolate faults and reboot the main
computers.

Samsonov turned, leaning on a brawny
arm and called out to Karpov. “Captain, I have CIC control once again. My board
is rebooting. Missiles green, torpedoes nominal, all systems checking in with
good diagnostics, sir. We have teeth again.”

“That’s good to know, but all too
few,” said Karpov. It had been most unsettling to be sailing in these waters
without computers, sensors or adequate control of their weapons.

With that first remote wash of sound
in Nikolin’s radio speaker, they suddenly realized that systems were slowly
winking on again all over the ship. Dobrynin called to say he had computerized
control of the reactor again and could now give them normal speeds. Rodenko saw
his short range radars snap to life again, and the longer range panels of the
Phased Array were suddenly active. Tasarov’s passive sonar was suddenly singing
to him again, a smile on his face as he listened, indicating thumbs up.