Kirov Saga: Armageddon (Kirov Series) (44 page)

“Amazing, sir. Though I still can’t get my mind around this. How
does it work?”

“It’s not a machine, Thomas. It’s a physical rift in time. Think
of it this way. You may now believe time is fluid, that it flows or moves like
water in a river, and you are on a raft simply being carried along. Well these
little passages are like whirlpools in the stream. Happen across one and your
little raft might be swept under and pop up somewhere else entirely. That’s one
way of grasping it.”

“I think I follow you, sir.”

“If you want to know the truth, however, time is more like a solid
thing, but it has cracks, fissures, little tears that can take a man from one
moment to another. You live your life in one, day by day, like the grooves
scratched into an old vinyl record. The music as you go along is your life, and
you never think the song can be stopped in mid stream, reversed, or ever played
again, just like Omar Khayyam’s poem, even if you do know it will come to an
end one day. But it
can
be played again. Scratch that record and the
needle skips! Sometimes it may get stuck and simply repeat a segment over and
over, like a time loop. You’ve had brief skips like that in your own life,
coming upon a person or place and knowing you have been there before.”

“You mean like déjà vu, sir?”

“Yes, exactly. Now, we believe we are stuck here in our song—track
number five on the album if you will, and it never occurs to us that we might
skip back to track number three. But that needle can run across a scratch in
the record and skip a whole segment of the tune, or even skip backwards again
to play a part over, or go to an entirely different song! That’s what these
passages are like. They are physical scratches in time. They were discovered by
chance, I suppose. Someone stumbled through one and then found a way to stumble
back. When one is found, it is well hidden, and well secured, as you have seen.
And it is my belief that men from a future time are behind all this. Only a
very few are known to exist. Scratches, tears, grooves, fissures, whirlpools. I
mix all these metaphors to make it understandable, but the simple fact of the
matter is that if you find one, you can move the needle of your life somewhere
else—and that can be quite thrilling.”

“And quite daunting, sir. Yes, I did think this was all theater,
until we finally made port and the sheer magnitude of it all finally struck
me.”

“I thought it might work better that way,” said Sir Roger. “Wade
in gently before you take the plunge, eh? Well, now here we are, on the eve of
great events. We’ll have a long carriage ride to Brussels today, and then rest
up at a hotel near the ball room at that address I gave the driver. A room may
be difficult to come by, with the British army garrisoning the town, but I’ve
enough coin to loosen things, and more diamonds if coinage fails. Then we get
down to business. I will explain it all to you in good time. Lord knows we have
enough of that now that we’re here.”

“That passage we took,” said Thomas, his mind still wrapped about
the mystery the Duke had related. “We can go back?”

Ames raised his eyebrows. “I suppose we could try, though I have
no intention of doing so any time soon. This is a very exciting world here,
Mister Thomas. Men were real men in this day and age. They fought with swords,
pistols, and rifled muskets with a good bayonet, and not missiles and machine
guns. They still rode horses into battle, and this one here is going to be
rather grand.”

“Waterloo?”

“What else?”

“And this…business. This business you speak of, Sir Roger. You
said we were going to kill—”

Ames held up a hand, stilling him. “No need to discuss that here,”
the Duke said quickly. “But yes, we have some urgent tasks at hand, and then
I’ve a mind to get back to England after the battle.”

“To Lindisfarne, sir?”

“To London—Piccadilly in fact. I need to see the 7th Earl of Elgin
there.”

“The 7th Earl?”

“It’s a special matter. We’ll discuss it all later. For now, my
man, get your mind and thoughts around the business at hand! We’re here, just a
few days before the battle, and we get to see sights and breath air that no man
of our day could ever imagine. Smell that air, Thomas. Not a hint of pollution
on the breeze. There’s nothing in the sky but the clouds and wind by day, and
the stars by night. This is a world still unspoiled by modernity—no radio
waves, cell phone traffic, or microwaves flitting about carrying a blather of
nonsense and text messages, eh? I think we’ll have the time of our lives here,
and then, after we’ve done what I came here to do, we’ll see about a matter
that I have recently stumbled across myself—a very interesting matter indeed.”

“Yet you do plan to return when this is concluded?”

The Duke sighed heavily. “Well I suppose I should be forthright
about this as well, Mister Thomas. We could reverse our footsteps, even rejoin
Captain Cameron again on his ship if we choose. He would be more than happy to
deposit us on Lindisfarne Island again. And we could make our way back through
that passage, though I shudder to think of what we might find if we do so.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“What I mean is that the world we have come from is going to hell,
my man, and it’s not going to be a place where you and I might wish to be at
all. We were warned of this some time ago, and those in the know have made arrangements,
if they could. There are some that will simply try to go underground—you’ve
heard all the stories and rumors about the deep underground shelters and bases…
the Denver Airport and such. In fact, they even modeled some of it by way of
disinformation in those Hollywood movies about the end of the world. Well it
was all true. Anyone in their right mind back home is going underground by now,
but only the key holders have any real chance for a life in another time.”

“The key holders?”

Sir Roger held up the odd key he had used to open the hidden
passageways at Lindisfarne, smiling. “Yes, the key holders. This little
adventure is the arrangement I have made. It is my chance, and by extension
your
chance at life as well. I have no intention of returning to discover what might
be left of the world in 2021. I mean to stay here, Mister Thomas. There’s real
adventure here, and that passageway at Lindisfarne is not the only fissure in
time I am privy to. There are others, and we can do a good deal of exploring if
you have the stomach for it. For us, tomorrow is yesterday. The only way to
traverse the years between this date and the world we came from will be the old
fashioned way now—one day at a time—but we will make a grand adventure of that.”

He looked at Thomas now, a smile on his lips and a challenge in
his eye. “Come along with me, Mister Thomas, and I’ll show you worlds you could
only dream of. Are you with me?”

Afterword

Dear Readers,

“We started this, and now we must finish it,” said Fedorov at the outset
of this story.
If your eyes now scan these lines then you have been with
me since that first moment on the bridge of
Kirov
as Admiral Leonid
Volsky shifted uncomfortably in his chair, staring out at the slate grey sea.
It has been a long journey and I thank you for coming along. In truth, I meant
to move on to some other tale after I first wrote
Kirov
, but your
enthusiasm for the story, and your loyalty as members of a very elite crew,
kept the ship sailing.

Many of you have written to me expressing your enthusiasm and
enjoyment of this long saga. Some have even told me that their escape into the
world of Volsky, Fedorov, Karpov and Orlov was a balm that comforted them when
faced with the pain and challenge of their normal life, be it illness, work, or
other issues. I was delighted to hear that, and to know that you were out there
literally entering my stream of consciousness as it was when I wrote the lines of
these stories.

Writing always was, and remains, my first love in life. (If only
my typing skill equaled my knack for spinning out prose, I would be a contented
man indeed!) As many of you have told me, I have also grown very attached to
this story, the characters and their fate. They have become brothers in my mind
as I labor to give them life on these pages, and ending the story here will
leave a strange emptiness in me for some time after these two long years
writing the series.

In this volume, I wanted to keep the story strongly centered on the
characters who sailed with that incredible ship, even if they were set at odds
with one another. I thought long and hard as to how this story might end. Would
it be at the hands of Togo and his dogged fleet? Would young John Tovey rise to
the occasion and do on
King Alfred
what he could not accomplish aboard
King
George V?
Would it be the final duel between
Kirov
and
Kazan
that
would end everything? That was a real possibility, and the story came within
seconds of one side or another opening that engagement. In the end, however, I
realized that to come full circle the central conflict had to be given back to
the principle characters, and that they would decide the outcome. No external
force would end it. Just as the struggle aboard the ship was central to the
action of book I in the series, so it would be central here at the end in book
VIII. I did not want it to be a torpedo or missile that decided the issue, but
the men who sailed together on
Kirov
in that first novel.

I know that, as the story branched out in the middle volumes,
particularly in
9 Days Falling
, I challenged many of you to stay at your
post and not jump ship like Orlov. That fifth book was perhaps the  most
difficult to write, as I was expanding the story far beyond the  gunwales of
Kirov
,
introducing new plot lines and characters, and building up the mystery of
Rod-25 and the secrets surrounding time travel as they were slowly discovered
by the characters. The many sub-plots all had their part in contributing to the
story, though I knew I was writing those volumes in a much different mode than
the tight plot lines of the first three books in the series.

I have read all your comments and reviews and, like any author,
you love the good ones, cringe at the bad ones, and carry on with your vision
for the story at hand. As the hunt for Orlov came to a climax the plot lines
all re-united and brought us to the action in
Fallen Angels
, and 
finally to this two volume attempt to bring this all to some satisfying end.
Devil’s
Garden
opened with a bang with six fairly tense chapters involving the fate
of Orlov and the Destroyer Orlan. It ended with Fedorov’s determination to do
everything possible to rescue
Kirov
and its crew. I could not finish
everything, as both the Fairchild and Duke of Elvington plot lines both now
form the roots of new trees that could grow into full novels in the days ahead.

In
Armageddon,
I therefore decided to keep the focus, and
the ending, on
Kirov
and the main characters involved in the dangerous
mission to find the ship instead of trying to further develop these other strong
sub-plots that were born in the middle volumes. Those story arcs each got one
last chapter here to tie them off until I can return to them in the future, and
I deliberately placed them at the very end here so they would not interrupt the
flow of the main story.

They were important to the
Kirov Saga
for many reasons,
presenting back story on the war in 2021, showing how vulnerable the energy
centers of the world are to the fires of war, and then slowly dove-tailing with
the strange mystery of time travel that began with
Kirov’s
disappearance
and was developed in the discovery of Rod-25 with its connection to Tunguska.
Eventually I used Elena Fairchild to reveal the more profound implications of
those messages sent to the Watch from an unseen future, and the Duke of
Elvington to reveal a bit of the mystery of the Key Holders and the hidden
fissures in time at places like Lindisfarne, Delphi, and the back stairway at
Ilanskiy that Fedorov stumbled upon.

In my mind, any good time travel yarn must eventually deal with
the consequences of actions taken by the time travelers in the past and their
effect on future history. It was Fedorov’s driving desire to remove the
contagion Orlov represented that started that long hunt spanning two
continents. Karpov’s stunning betrayal in
Devil’s Garden
was predictable,
as was Fedorov’s urgent effort to bring
Kirov
home. Those plot lines
were driven by the characters themselves. The question of whether the ship
should be saved or utterly destroyed was a thorny one. I chose salvation,
though my gut feeling tells me that Karpov was correct in the end. I voice
these reservations through Admiral Volsky as he contemplates having to give the
order to unleash
Kazan’s
nuclear tipped arsenal against
Kirov
to
be certain nothing is left behind.

The cracks in the mirror of history are now wide and deep, and
Fedorov’s dream of preserving the time line or happily returning to the world
of 2021 with the shadows of war dissipated and all made well are perhaps naive.
Every round from
Kirov’s
deck guns, and the  shattering impact of each
missile fired have introduced variations and set up consequences that no member
of the ship or crew can fully envision or control.