John Schettler - Altered States -Volume III. Hinge of Fate

Tovey was more than impressed. The interior of the silo was immaculate, the missile threatening in every line and aspect. There was clearly technology and knowhow on this ship far in excess of anything he could imagine possible. Was the admiral merely boasting to make an impression? Could this missile hit its target over a hundred miles away? How would it see it? He asked this, and got an answer.

“Those radars tell it the general location of the target, and then when it is in flight it uses its own radar, right there in the nose, to have a look for itself. It is extremely accurate.”

“My God, your advances in radar technology must be very far ahead of our own.”

“Come, now I will show you my bridge.”

They made their way up, climbing ladders and stairways, and in time came in through the aft hatch of the main citadel.

“Admiral on the bridge!” Rodenko’s voice was sharp and clear, and Tovey needed no translation to know what he had said when every officer and watchstander snapped to attention.

“As you were, gentlemen. Admiral, may I present the ship’s Executive Officer, Grigori Rodenko, a very able man. He will show you the control interfaces and systems we use to receive the data those big radar dishes send here.”

Rodenko walked them from station to station, describing the equipment as Nikolin translated, and noting its basic purpose. They toured Radar and then Sonar, where Tasarov waited quietly beneath his headset.

“We could hear the approach of a German U-Boat from over twenty kilometers away, and if we were simply listening for your ship, we would hear it coming at many times that range.”

Then came to the combat information center, aglow with lights and status panels, where the Admiral introduced Victor Samsonov. “Here is my strong right arm, Admiral Tovey. This man executes battle orders to deliver the appropriate ordnance on the target, and he is very efficient, as the German navy has already seen.”

Tovey was taking this all in, one amazing fact after another. The electronic devices that seemed to be everywhere hummed with quiet energy. There were no telescopes for sighting on distant ships, no voice pipes for the officer of the watch to bawl out orders to stations below. Instead there was an enormous flat black panel overhead that suddenly came to life with the image of his own ship, HMS Invincible, where it road at anchor behind a screen of destroyers hundreds of yards away. To his utter astonishment the image was zoomed in at Admiral Volsky’s request, and Tovey gaped when he clearly saw men he recognized standing on the weather deck at their watches. The resolution and clarity of the image was impeccable.

“Now let us retire to the officer’s dining room for dinner. I am eager to repay your hospitality in hosting us for lunch some weeks ago, and there is much we have to discuss.”

If a man could eat the finest cut of steak and not taste it, that was Tovey’s experience that night, so focused as he was on what the Russian Admiral was telling him.

“So you have seen this ship, and I can imagine you find it more than uncommon.” Volsky set down his napkin, taking a sip of wine as he finished. “Your next question is obvious. How could Soviet Russia build such a ship, develop such advanced weaponry, electronics, radar, and more? There are things hidden behind those glowing consoles and screens that I have not mentioned, Admiral. We have a machine that allows us to make precise calculations, faster than the speed of thought itself. The application of these weapons requires it, the hand of man being simply too slow to adequately manage these weapons once they are unleashed. The world I come from demands such precision, and a matter of even a few seconds could make the difference between life or death in battle there.”

“The world you come from? I will admit that the nature and capabilities of the weapons and machinery you have shown me here seems otherworldly, but what do you mean by that?”

“Consider it yourself, Admiral. You have seen the development of military science, and know it can be plodding at times, and take great leaps at others. But how long do you think it would be before you might have missiles that can do what you have seen us demonstrate?”

Tovey was a realist, and knew that Britain had very little to show by way of rocket development. “I must say it would take us a good number of years.”

“Precisely, decades in fact. By the end of this war you will see the emergence of this technology. After that it will grow and grow until it can do things you would not imagine now.”

“You speak of this as though you have already lived through this war and well beyond,” said Tovey with a smile. “Surely this is mere conjecture. Your engineers and scientists have developed this technology, and ours will as well one day. Perhaps you might hasten that day with a gesture of friendship and give us a leg up in that regard.”

“We would be happy to do so, but these weapons and the machinery that controls them are very complex, as you might imagine. They require advances in many fields, aviation, flight mechanics, ballistics, metallurgy, solid fuel development, guidance mechanisms, and so on. These things all take time…”

He leaned on that last word, clearly intending it to matter and convey something more than he had said. Nikolin caught the innuendo, and did his best to translate it in a way that Tovey would understand.

The British Admiral waited, saying nothing, arms folded as he listened. Then Admiral Volsky gave him a long, serious look, and exhaled, resigned to what he must now do.

“Admiral Tovey, nothing I have shown you here could be built by any engineering firm of this day. You could set your entire war effort to the task, the Germans as well, and that of every other nation on earth, including Soviet Russia. Together they would labor to produce just a fraction of the capability we now possess. These things take time, and that is the heart of the matter. A ship this size would take years to design and build, would it not? It would take enormous resources, but I must tell you now that this ship was not built in the last five years as you might think. There are things aboard that could not be built, even if we were to wait fifty years. This ship was not built by the Soviet Russia you now know. It was built in the distant future… There. I have finally said it.”

“The future? Are we to discuss H. G. Wells and his Time Machine now?” Tovey felt a mixture of surprise, outrage and shock, but behind it was a throbbing pulse of anxiety that warned of the truth, a dangerous and deadly truth in everything this man was now saying. It was something he had known once, discovered once, set a long and guarded watch on. Yes… the Watch! That word resonated within him now, and he could feel that awful sense that he knew something that he could simply not clarify and grasp, like the fading recollection of a dream as it fled from his waking mind. He knew…

“Time machine? That would hit very close to the bone,” said Volsky. “This ship was commissioned into the Russian Navy in the year 2020. An accident occurred while we were underway in the Norwegian Sea, something we now believe is associated with our highly advanced propulsion system, and we found ourselves strangely marooned, lost, adrift in the seas of the year 1941.”

“1941? It hasn’t happened yet!” Tovey’s rational mind voiced the obvious protest, but his inner mind knew it had happened, he had lived it through. Everything in that damnable box Turing had wrestled away from the cobwebs in the archive of BP- it was all true!

“No it hasn’t happened here yet. Not for you, Admiral, but for us, for every man aboard this ship, this war is very old history that we have studied at school and long forgotten. Now I will tell you what happened to us. We were spotted by one of your Royal Navy task forces. Appearing as we did in the Norwegian Sea, I believe they assumed we were a German raider. At that time we were struggling, even as you must be now, to come to grips with what had happened to us. It simply could not be, we thought. It was impossible for us to find ourselves displaced to another time, like the story you have mentioned. But, little by little, the evidence of our own eyes persuaded us that it was the truth, an impossible truth, and a very dangerous one. Mister Fedorov, who was the Admiral commanding the task force that first discovered us?”