John Schettler - 1943

“That sounds very much like Karpov,” said Volsky. “Yet if he cannot be convinced of the gravity of our situation, that will present us with a very difficult choice here—the same choice we had before in the Sea of Japan.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Do you think he can be reasoned with? Do you think if we press the seriousness of this matter on him, the two of us could get through to him?”

“We could try,” said Fedorov. “If he holds the line and refuses to cooperate, then I hate to think of the alternative.”

“Yes, that will be very difficult. It would certainly place you in great danger there. Would not Karpov see you as an enemy?”

“I have been at odds with him for some time, as you well know. But Admiral, things have happened since we learned you were killed. I… I thought all of this was my fault, the danger to this world and all those that follow this time. I thought I could make one last attempt at undoing my many mistakes. You remember what I discovered at Ilanskiy?”

“Yes of course, that stairway.”

“Correct. Well, I wanted to use that to go back and… reclaim that errant whisper. I wanted to try and prevent Sergei Kirov from doing what he did. Karpov and I discussed it at great length. We had a plan, but in the end, he decided against it, even while my mission was already underway. It’s a long story, but I did get to Ilanskiy—to the year 1908—though not the way I thought I would. And I found Mironov—Sergei Kirov. I had steeled myself to do the only sure thing that might absolutely prevent him from killing Josef Stalin. But in the end, I wasn’t man enough to pull that trigger…”

Volsky took a moment to digest that. “No Fedorov, you were man enough not to pull that trigger. I would not have expected anything different from you. The world turned on the mercy you showed that man. It was a world born of that single act of compassion, and it will be what it will be—but not with us here. We must leave—all of us— Kirov , Kazan , the Argos Fire, all those men you met in the desert, the little fleet of transports, everything must go. Those that will not leave of their own accord must be compelled by other means…. or be destroyed. I would speak with Karpov on this, and I am willing to do so if he will hear me. Whether he would heed any order I might give at this point is doubtful. We had every reason to believe that he would not heed my warning, and being faced with this decision, we have steeled ourselves to take a more difficult path if necessary. Yet I could not raise my hand against my old ship and crew without having this conversation first, and I clung to the hope that we might reach an accommodation. It may be our last hope, Mister Fedorov, the last hope of tomorrow. So I must ask you to take this to Karpov. If he will hear us out, perhaps we can avert the doom Kamenski fears.”

Fedorov considered all this, and was inwardly torn. He had thought his mission to Ilanskiy, returning to the source of the first major contamination at that point, would be the last hope, but that slipped from his grasp when he could not bring himself to kill Sergei Kirov. Now here was the Admiral, the man once dead living again, returning from a future that was still there, still intact, his head filled with the recollection of all his other doppelgangers from tangled time meridians.

There was grave danger ahead. The Admiral’s proposal, and his determination that no stone must be left unturned here, was fraught with peril. Fedorov had come to the same place Karpov had, albeit with great reluctance. He had thought that there was now nothing they could do to change the world they were living in. They could only do one thing—win this war. He had set down the impossible burden of thinking he could re-write all the history that had been so badly shattered by their actions, and come instead to do the one thing that remained doable in his mind—they could use the power they had, in the ship beneath his feet, to win the war and at least nudge the world closer to the course that it had taken in the post war history he knew so well.

“Sir,” he said tentatively. “This war… the things we have already done have changed it dramatically. The Allies are finally fighting back, but the issue remains in doubt. The Axis remains very strong, and there is a real possibility that they might prevail. Karpov has been trying to avert that possibility all along. It was his aim to try and reset the conditions that prevailed in our world in the Pacific, and with Kirov , there remains a chance they he might succeed.”

“That may be so,” said Volsky. “With Kazan those odds get longer. Yes, we can certainly weigh in to profoundly affect the outcome of this war, and I suppose we should discuss that. Kamenski believes that will expose us to great peril—not just us, but the future world that follows. He could not say what that peril was—something we do here, or perhaps something we fail to do—who can say? You remember the warnings Tovey’s group received. Beware a ship… Beware Kirov . Those warnings were sent from the future, from men who saw the final outcome of all we are now struggling with. They have seen something we cannot fathom from this point in time. Not even Kamenski can see it; not with all his arcane wisdom and genius for sorting all this time business through. But he can feel it, Fedorov, like a man who senses the impending edge of an event that has not yet come to pass. Call it prescience, call it a hunch, but he can feel the doom that Elena Fairchild first voiced to us, the same shadow and final darkness that professor tried to explain. What was his name again?”

“Dorland,” said Fedorov. “Professor Paul Dorland.”

PaulDorland emerged from the great doorway, seeing Maeve and Kelly there to greet him. He had just come through the successful retraction shift in the Arch, returning from the meeting with Tovey and Fairchild in the Azores.

“A welcoming committee,” he said with a grin. “Two out of three isn’t bad. Where’s Nordhausen?”

“Where else,” said Maeve. “He’s up on the history module trying to sort out all the splinter threads that we’re dealing with now. I should be there too to make sure he doesn’t jump to any conclusions we can’t live with.” Maeve Lindford was head of Outcomes and Consequences, the small group responsible for analyzing the conditions resulting from time interventions. Her honey red hair curled onto the shoulders of the white lab coat she was wearing.

At her side was Kelly Ramer, the computer genius responsible for keeping all the equipment up and running, maintaining the live RAM data bank, reviewing the Golem reports, and crunching the numbers required to shift anyone in time, the calculus of infinity, as he called it. Their missing comrade, Robert Nordhausen, was the historian, sleuthing the record of the past to identify key nexus points where the course of events shifted and turned, key push points on the continuum.

“I’ll bet the Golems are going crazy,” said Dorland. He was referring to a widely distributed computer program created by Kelly Ramer that was constantly searching the massive body of generated news on the Internet for references to historical events, and comparing it to the history of those events as permanently recorded in their RAM data bank. Golems would send reports to the Meridian Team computers, which would warn of possible variations or alterations forming in the history, the effects of possible tampering in the past.

“It isn’t just the Golems,” said Kelly. “We’ve got real fragmentation of the Meridian now. It all originated from the Nexus in 1908, but now we’ve identified at least three different threads.”