Kirov Saga: Armageddon (Kirov Series) (40 page)

A desperate feeling came over him, as if he could sense the fate
of the Empire hanging by the barest thread here, the line of ships remaining
behind him. If I lose this fleet today, then Japan has nothing, he thought
darkly. It will be years before we can build more ships, and there to the east
is the smoke of the American Great White Fleet, a force I know we must one day
face as an enemy. All history will turn on this battle, yet if I do not
prevail, if I turn now and leave these waters to the enemy, the dishonor would
surely break our nation as well, even as it crushes me with shame. That was
something he could not bear.

So we will charge next, he thought grimly. I still have ten ships
behind me, but if Russia has ships like this demon before me now, how will
Japan ever survive?

*
* *

Kirov
was still firing its guns, a mindless thing in the sea, a steel Leviathan,
flagship of the Red Banner Fleet. The ship had written a legacy of death and
destruction on the decades from this moment to the distant future of 2021. It
had fought, and prevailed over every foe, but now it was a headless horseman,
wallowing at the edge of a minefield in a merciless sea, moving only by its own
ponderous momentum, and a reflex guided by the cold logic of its computers. It
was hemmed in on every side by lines of enemy ships, and now their guns began
to fire, led by the brave charge of a young Lieutenant aboard the armored
cruiser
King Alfred.

The sea around it was awash with the white vengeful geysers of
seawater where the hostile rounds fell. Most were short or wide, yet others
struck home. The tall parapets of her superstructure endured the impact of the
first shells, like a gladiator shrugging off the sharp edge of cold iron when
an enemy’s sword drew blood. Crewmen bled and died where those shells hit home,
lives to be extinguished in the cracked mirror of the history yet to come. Like
the men found missing, faceless, unborn on the list Inspector Kapustin and
Captain Volkov ferreted out during their inspection tour, they would never
exist in the years ahead, so they died here and now as Time mercilessly
balanced her books.

Yet ships bleed only smoke and fire when they die, and now the mighty
Kirov
began to burn with two fires amidships. There men still fated to
live rushed to fight the flames in their orange life preservers and yellow
helmets. And high above them, at the edge of the weather deck stood their Captain,
watching the scene in utter shock and disbelief. A 9.2-inch shell from
King
Alfred
straddled the ship with a great eruption of seawater. Karpov looked
aft to see smoke rolling from the fires amidships like black blood, thick and
impenetrable.

The Captain had a haggard, haunted look on his face, gaunt with
fatigue, his cheeks sallow and drawn, eyes shadowed with pain and remorse, and
now the barest glimmer of fear. There he stood, Vladimir Karpov, Captain of the
battlecruiser
Kirov
, acting commander of the Red Banner Pacific Fleet, Viceroy
of the Far East, yet with no one and nothing to command but his own forsaken
soul. In his hand he held a pistol, and now in one last act of frustrated
defiance he raised it at the far-off silhouette of HMS
King Alfred
and
fired three shots…And the last he saved for himself….

*
* *

Hidden
beneath the turbulent sea Dobrynin sat huddled in the belly of
another behemoth, and he was listening…listening… The rumble of battle sounded
faint and far away, a muted background to the song that was playing in his
head.
Sing, choirs of angels
, he thought,
sing in exultation…

Rod-25 was home now, in the year it had reached for all along. Yet
it was tasked again to rend the fabric of time and open the yawning, endless
night of infinity. Dobrynin heard the rising chorus and knew it was happening. How
far they would go, to what distant year, he could not say. Would time find a
place for them, for
Kirov
and
Kazan
where they sailed at the edge
of the maelstrom of Armageddon? Would time have a life waiting there for them,
the Admiral, Fedorov, Orlov and all the rest?

He did not know any of this, but he could feel them moving now,
slipping over the event horizon of the maelstrom and being sucked away into the
void.
Kazan
was close enough to the turmoil and strife above, close
enough to
Kirov
, and when the submarine fell into the empty hole in time
it reached out and dragged the embattled ship along with it.

To those that saw it, rising on the heavy seas as they aimed and fired
their guns, or puckered their eyes behind field glasses, telescopes and range
finders, it seemed that a vast mist enfolded the ship, a shadow deepening at
its center. Iridescent light played in the mist, like the strange glowing
ripple of luminescent sea fire. Others thought they saw the discharge of St.
Elmo’s Fire from the tall spinning mast atop the ship, coronal jets of plasma
that crowned the shadowy sea fortress in a halo of gossamer green light. It had
always been regarded as an omen of bad luck when it afflicted a ship at sea, or
the ominous portent of stormy weather to come.

The ship glimmered in the wreath of mist and shadow, there and
gone again, seen and unseen. It quavered at the edge of eternity…

And then it was gone.

The smoke and fire was gone with it, and it was over.

Part XII

Tomorrow
is Yesterday

“You
cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

―
Abraham Lincoln

Chapter 34

The
wan light of a grey day gleamed on the wet surface of the boat
when it broke the surface of the sea.
Kazan
rose from the shallow hiding
place where it had crept so close to the imminent possibility of annihilation.
Yet no one on the bridge of the burning ship in the distance was listening for
it, or seeking its death in the sharp explosive tip of a rocket torpedo or
missile.

There sat
Kirov
, the smoke and fire of war charring her
hull and superstructure, but yet sound and seaworthy, and still a dangerous
shadow on the sea. All about the two vessels the sea was calm, rippling gently
away from an unseen center point of stillness.
Kirov’s
guns were silent
as well, the computers that aimed and fired them bludgeoned into a stupor by
the effects of the displacement. There were no other ships anywhere to be seen,
not the dogged battle line of the British squadron, not the remnant of Vice
Admiral Kataoka’s embattled division, not Admiral Togo on
Mikasa
charging boldly forward to join in battle, nor the Great White Fleet that had
sailed so far and fast to reach this place, only to find the enemy it sought
had vanished.

They were all gone, far away and lost in another time. Only one
man alive on any of those ships would ever live to see that dark shadow again, John
Tovey, and he would shiver with the memory of that first sighting, and strange
disappearance, the remainder of his life. It was said the Russian ship was
sunk, yet no vestige of the vessel was ever found in the shallow waters off Iki
Island. Rumors of the ghostly encounter would be passed from sailor to
boatswain and back again over the long years ahead, but the incident was never
explained. It remained one of the great mysteries of the sea, a place where so
many other ships had vanished at the edge of a storm, never to be seen again.

The ship was there, they said. It was real, and the holed hulls,
sheered funnels, burning weather decks, and ravaged superstructures of many who
fought against it that day stood as undeniable testimony to that fact. The list
of ships sent to the bottom in the brief time the rogue vessel blighted the
seas off the Imperial homeland of Japan was a long one. Kamimura’s entire
division was all but destroyed in the Oki Island engagement, and the
battleships
Tango
and
Mishima
obliterated. Dewa’s cruisers paid a
high price for his impetuous desire for battle, with
Kasagi
and
Chitose
sunk,
Otawa
and
Nitaka
set afire, and the destroyer
Asagiri
broken in two. Kataoka’s flagship
Chinyen
and the cruiser
Matsushima
were also sunk that day, with
Hashidate
burning and falling off the line
of battle, never to fight again.

Karpov and
Kirov
exacted a very high price for the
privilege of closing the range, until one man finally stood up, refusing to
fire any longer, and said no to the horror the ship had visited upon that
unsuspecting world. The blow against the Japanese fleet was a hard one, but not
fatal. The recent commissioning of HMS
Dreadnought
had rendered most
ships afloat that day obsolete, and they would all soon be scrapped for new
construction. Without the ceaseless patrol of
Kirov
in the Sea of Japan,
that nation’s imperial ambitions, and the navy that would one day conquer half
the Pacific, were still on track.

Russia was severely censured politically for a time, but was too
possessed with its own internal strife and rebellion to notice or care. Great
Britain was now living beneath the looming shadow of the First World War, and
the Tsar was soon courted again as an ally against Germany. And so Karpov’s
dream of a Russian Pacific power would never come to pass. It was not on the
restless swells of the sea that history would turn in the gyre of the
maelstrom, but in the tempestuous storm of revolution on land.

There, the iron will of another man rose like a demon from the ashes
of the Romanov dynasty and slowly took hold of the growing revolution in his
cold hand—Ivan Volkov. With an uncanny insight for things to come, his close
confederates soon came to call him “The Prophet,” and he soon found himself at
the center of the Bolshevik party, its new master, and a shadow that would fall
over Europe and the world in days ahead.

Only one man stood in his way, resolute, unyielding, and with
enough of a power base to contest him—Sergie Kirov. He had seen the world that
Stalin would build, and learned of the fate that awaited him. Now he saw that
same iron and evil in Volkov, and he stalwartly opposed him. It would be Sergie
Kirov who stood like Rodenko, and Zolkin, and Samsonov and the others and said
no to Volkov’s meteoric rise to power, and the fate of Russia would hinge on
the outcome of that struggle.

*
* *

Rodenko
stood up now, looking at the empty seas around the ship, and he
knew it was over, the terrible ordeal finally ended. We have moved again, he
thought. There sits that island, there is the bay the Captain was steering for,
yet we are somewhere else now, in some other time. But when?

He could not answer that while Doctor Zolkin lay bleeding beside
him, and so he ordered the men to open the citadel hatch and called for a
medical team to get the Doctor below. One by one the men sat back down at their
posts, still silent, as if unable to speak in the face of the heavy stillness
around the ship. Then Rodenko walked over to Samsonov and placed his hand on
his broad shoulder, nodding with a half smile to Tasarov where he stood in the
big man’s shadow.

“Well done, Samsonov, and you Tasarov. You have done the right
thing, and you will never regret it.”

“Sir,” said Tasarov. “Where is the Captain?”

Now Rodenko looked over his shoulder at the still open hatch to
the weather bridge, his eyes darkening with misgiving. He walked slowly to the
hatch, stepping out and expecting to see Karpov huddled against the outer
bulkhead of the bridge, but there was no one there, only a stain of blood on
cold grey metal, where a bloodied hand may have gripped the gunwale. The
Captain was missing in action.

He heard the thumping of a helicopter emerge from the silence, and
looked to see the KA-40 coming in slowly off the port bow. It had been unable
to raise the ship, and so it circled back towards
Kirov
as the action
began to heat up and became another fly caught on the web woven by Rod-25. The
bulbous round nose of
Kazan
broke the sea as the big submarine leapt up
from its silent patrol. He ran back into the citadel, and was quickly at the
communications station, eying the dials to open a channel. A shadow fell on the
console and he turned to see both Chekov and Nikolin had come back to the
bridge, so he stood up, arm extended to the chairs as he invited them to take
their posts.

“Mister Nikolin, please signal
Kazan
that all is well
aboard
Kirov
, and that I have assumed command as per the Admiral’s
orders.”

The voice of Admiral Volsky was soon on the overhead intercom
speakers.
“Well done, Rodenko. And to all of you there I express my deepest
regrets for what you have just endured. You have all done your duty. Mister
Fedorov and I will be coming over in a few minutes.”