John Schettler - Fallen Angels - 9 Days Falling, Volume II

“Yes, they tried to cut these supply lines by any means, and sunk a number of ships. This ship here, the Amerika , will be sunk in a few weeks time off Astrakhan by a German air strike—that is if the history I studied before we departed still holds true. After what I experienced back at Ilanskiy I have no idea what to really expect now.”

The more Fedorov thought of those narrow back stairs at the inn, the more he worried. It was strange how he was affected, literally walking down those steps to another time, and then having his experience confirmed so dramatically by the sudden reappearance of Mironov. That was more than coincidence, he thought. Here we are, officers and crew off the battlecruiser Kirov , now Argonauts in time, and I meet the very man that ship was named for! It was still astounding to consider, or even believe, yet the memory of Mironov’s eyes, the face of young Sergei Kirov, was burned in his memory. He recalled the overwhelming temptation to say something to the man concerning his fate, years hence, on that dark day in December when he would die at the hands of an assassin. Did he say too much?

Here he was on an impossible mission in time to try and find Gennadi Orlov because he suspected the man may have fatally changed the course of events, and then this happens! The thought came to him again, even as it had in that single pulse pounding moment when Mironov was brought in by Zykov—what if this was the key moment in time? What if Orlov was nothing more than a big red herring meant only to bring him here to this place, to that darkened stairwell, and face to face with Sergei Kirov?

Before he knew what he was saying the words blurted out, an urgent whisper in the young man’s ear. ‘Do not go to St. Petersburg in 1934! Beware Stalin! Beware the 30th of December! Go with God. Go and live, Mironov. Live!’

What have I done? Fedorov turned that question over and over again in his mind now. I meet one of the most important figures in modern Russian history, a man of the Great Revolution, and I say something that could change everything if Mironov were to ever remember it and act on my stupid advice. What was I thinking? Here I am trying to find a way to prevent that terrible future we saw, but we have been fumbling in the dark all this time. We really don’t know what we must do, or change. Could this be the key?

What if Kirov remembers me; remembers what I whispered to him at the top of those stairs? What if he does not go to St. Petersburg? Would Josef Stalin still find a way to remove him? Would time find a way, just like all those crewmen on the ship who ended up never being born? A man like Stalin was such an overweening shadow on the face of history that it seemed impossible to think his fate might be changed. But what if Kirov survived…What if?

He thought about that for a good long while as they settled into a damp crew compartment on the Amerika . If Kirov survived how might his life and influence have changed things? He was very close to Stalin, almost like a brother. Yet Stalin resented his popularity, and his influence. It was clear that Stalin used Kirov’s assassination to launch his great purge and remove thousands of potential rivals and opponents. As many as a million may have died, and surely he would not leave Kirov alive under similar circumstances. Yet if Kirov did live….If he managed to remain a powerful and influential figure, what might Soviet Russia look like once freed from the blight of Stalin’s influence? Could Russia survive the rigors of WWII and still prevail without the ‘Man of Steel,’ Stalin, at the helm of that ship of state?

It was all too much for him to grasp at the moment, and Fedorov soon found that the mystery of that back stairwell was more than enough to challenge him. He had tried to describe the event as a rift in time, a tear in the fabric of spacetime that seemed to connect two points on the continuum, two years—1908 and 1942. The fact that his regression to 1908 brought him to the very moment of the impact at Tunguska was very telling, and he still suspected that that strange occurrence on June 30, 1908 could have caused the rift to form. The stairwell at the inn must have just been perfectly positioned to allow one to pass through that rift! That was mere happenstance. If the inn had never been built then the rift in time would just be hovering in space at that location, a few meters above the ground. The position and angle of the stairs provided the perfect means of entering the rift, and traveling in time!

Now he wondered if there were other places like that, other rifts in time possibly caused by the violence and mystery of the Tunguska event. Even more so, he wondered how long the rift persisted. Clearly it did not always work, for Troyak claimed he went down those stairs and yet remained stable in the year 1942. He did not encounter the phenomenon that sent Fedorov farther back in time.

How long did the effect last? Was it intermittent, coming and going like that strange pulsing the battlecruiser experienced when it moved in time? If it first occurred in 1908, it was obviously still present 34 years later in 1942. The pulsing effect could explain why Troyak did not move in time. Perhaps one had to transit the stairway at just the right moment.

What if the rift persisted into modern times, thought Fedorov? Was it there in the year 2021? And if it persisted all those years, who might have come up those back stairs in all that time, and who might have passed down them to find themselves in the distant past, stalking through the lost days of history as he was even now? That thought was truly staggering. What if other men had discovered what he had just experienced, and vanished into time? If they could not get back by taking the stairs again, then what? They would be marooned in the past and forced to live out their entire lives there. My God! He realized that every time someone went down those stairs they could have a profound effect on all history.

They could change everything, just as Fedorov and his team were striving to change the history at this moment, and save humanity from a terrible future fate. He was suddenly filled with the urge to go back and test his theory again. At the very least he wondered if he could somehow get another message to the future, to Admiral Volsky. We must find out if the stairway still exists in our time, he thought darkly. We must!

Even as he thought this another man was answering some of the very same questions Fedorov was asking himself, for he has also come down those same stairs and was about to make a most interesting discovery of his own.

“I ama Captain in the Internal Affairs Division of the Russian Naval Intelligence! How dare you treat me in this manner!” Volkov’s anger was apparent in the heat, which now colored his otherwise pallid cheeks.

“Is that so? Well I am a Colonel in the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—Rail Security Division, Captain, if that is who you really are. Your identification card is most unusual. I have never seen anything like it. Your uniform, weapon, also very unusual. We see a great deal on this line; roust out every sort of thief and scoundrel imaginable, and we hear many wild stories. But this one I have never heard before. At the moment the irregularities I have already mentioned are enough to suspect you are not who you claim to be. This identification card for example…very strange.”

“That is standard navy issue. Or perhaps you have never seen proper credentials for a naval officer before? There is nothing irregular about it at all!”

Colonel Lysenko, cocked his head to one side, taking another long drag on his cigarette. “And you say you have never seen this man before?” He pointed to the other officer, the one who had fingered Volkov, the one who regarded him even now with narrow eyed suspicion behind his round wire framed glasses, Mikhael Surinov.