Altered States

Chapter 5

Fedorov stared at his data, clearly perplexed. They were not where they had hoped to be, in 2021. Chief Dobrynin had called up to the bridge, but in the business of all that was then underway, a Mishman was holding the line.

“Look there, Fedorov, what do you make of that?” The Admiral was pointing to the Tin Man Display, and when Fedorov looked up for the first time his eyes widened with surprise.

“My god, sir. Look! That ship is flying British colors!”

“That did not escape my notice,” said Volsky.

“And it’s a White Ensign, sir, which was used exclusively by the Royal Navy.”

“So the next question is obvious. What is a Royal Navy ship doing here in the Sea of Okhotsk? And that certainly does not look like a modern warship. Could it be that our shift failed and we remain in the 1940s?”

Now Rodenko spoke to say the Fregat radar was recovering rapidly. “We have radar out to near maximum range sir. A very rapid recovery this time. The odd thing is that we should be getting landform returns from Kamchatka to the east, we were only about a hundred kilometers west of the peninsula when we initiated the shift. There are elevations there as high as 1900 meters and we should be seeing them clearly at this range. What we do have is landforms to our north, and I’m sending the data to navigation for a digital map match.”

The Admiral immediately looked for Fedorov, who was already working on plotting their position in time. Now he called up the data Rodenko had sent him and the computer’s response immediately gave him a sense of foreboding.

“This is impossible,” he said aloud, “impossible!”

Hearing that, the Admiral knew enough to put caution at the forefront of his thinking. Yet he retained his composure, looking to the Helmsman and issuing a quiet order. “The ship will come full about and ahead two thirds.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Mister Nikolin, signal that ship in the same Morse code standard you received. Simply bid them farewell, please.”

“Very well, sir.”

“Now if you would be so kind, Mister Fedorov.” Volsky swiveled his chair and looked to the navigation station, seeing Fedorov still looking at the screen map with a shocked expression.

“Sir,” he said haltingly. The Admiral’s last order to Nikolin rattled in his mind in an odd moment of serendipity just as he realized what he was looking at. “That is Cape Farewell! We’re sitting about 220 kilometers south of Greenland! According to that radar plot our position is 57.51 by -45.24. Our longitude is identical to what it was at the time of our shift, but our latitude…Why we’ve move half way around the earth, a full 200 degrees to the west! We’ve moved in space!”

“Calm yourself, Mister Fedorov. I need you to think. How could this have occurred?”

Fedorov thought for a moment, his eyes still scanning the data he had been keying on sun and moon data. Now an idea occurred to him and he put his estimated sun and moon positions into the computer again for this new position in space and asked it to display all dates where those two bodies would be in this position. He soon saw what he feared.

“Admiral, the sun-moon configuration at this location would be valid for 1940-June 12 to be exact. We’ve shifted alright, but in space this time. It’s as if the procedure simply picked us up on the 11th in the Pacific and then dropped us here a day later…Yes…” The light of a sudden discovery flashed in his eyes. “That it! The only thing that makes any sense here is the earth’s rotation. It’s as if we moved into some null zone in time, but only for a brief moment. In that interval the earth rotated and then we manifested again, on the exact same longitude but half way around the earth!”

“Good lord,” said Volsky. “You mean to say we disappeared, but did not move in time?”

“No sir, it was as if we were simply suspended in time, then dropped into this present again when we just manifested. It’s a wonder we made a safe landing here. Another few degrees to the west and we would be sitting in Canada on dry land!”

“Thankfully the surface of the earth is mostly water,” said Volsky, but now we are in the pot again, and from the looks of this radar contact and that ship out there it is starting to heat up. Any further trouble, Mister Nikolin?”

“No sir. They just signaled farewell back.”

“Mister Fedorov…Please open your history books and kindly find out what is going on here.”

“Fifty ships in the Sea of Okhotsk did not make any sense in the world, sir, particularly with one of them flying a Royal Navy Ensign. But here they make perfect sense, on this day and in this year, if my calculations are accurate.”

“Then what have we just encountered here?”

Fedorov smiled. “I’ll have your answer in just one moment, sir.” He pulled out a pad device and opened an application, poking at the screen briefly as he set up a search. Then he spoke into the pad’s microphone. “Display convoy data for June of 1940.” He waited, his eyes afire as he scanned the screen. “Let’s see what we have… HG-33, Gibraltar to Liverpool…There! It has to be this one, HX-49 out of Halifax. I can even get the convoy route data from U-boat dot net. I’ve got their entire database here.” He had that information soon after and smiled, looking at the Admiral with satisfaction.

“The route crosses our present position, sir. We’ve just shifted half way around the world and almost landed right in the middle of HX-49, Halifax to Liverpool. And that-” he pointed at the Tin Man where it was still tracking the ship that had been signaling them. “That is the auxiliary cruiser Ausonia. It was the only escort assigned to the convoy on this day according to my data.” He put the pad down, folding his arms with a smile.

“Well our resident historian does not fail us,” said Admiral Volsky, amazed at how Fedorov had quickly ascertained their position in time. “And it appears that your history has not failed to skip a beat either, at least not this segment. But apparently our new control rod needs a little remedial work. Did we hear from Dobrynin yet?”

“Sir,” offered the Mishman, “I have him standing by.”

“Put it on the overhead speaker please.”

“Admiral?”

“Go ahead Chief.”

“We have a bit of a problem, sir…”

* * *

“They’re turning away, Captain,” said Bates as he watched the distant contact through his field glasses. The odd lights at the edge of the sea had glimmered for a time, then faded away. Now the day looked much as it did before, with no sign of threatening weather and relatively calm seas. The only danger on their horizon was the shadow of that distant ship, which Captain Norman was fully prepared to challenge by putting Ausonia in harm’s way. That was why he was there, the sole sheep dog guarding the flock should the wolves appear-and this one looked dangerous.

So it was with some relief that the W/T room sent up a message that the ship had sent them a single word: Farewell, as it turned away. He could have pressed the matter or even fired a warning shot to insist on a proper identification, but why tempt the devil, he thought? The ship obviously had a very good look at us, and I don’t think they were at all fooled by our mass or intimidated by our challenge. Ausonia has but one single stack aft, and she doesn’t present a silhouette anything like that of a real heavy cruiser. They will soon realize we are a sheep in wolves clothing, to switch things around. But why would they break off if this was an enemy ship? Could they be simply opening the range before engaging us?

Might they be biding their time to vector in a nearby wolfpack? It seemed unlikely that any German subs would be this far out, but it was not impossible. What was really going on here? Why didn’t they send their call sign and ship ID if they were friendly? Could it be a Royal Navy ship on a special mission? If so they might not want their position or identity known. Farewell… Well here we are just south of that cape and ready to make our turn east. He looked at his Executive Officer.

“They appear to be moving off.”

“Yes, sir, that they are. Shall we pursue?”

“What, at fifteen knots? No, mister Bates, I think we’ll leave well enough alone for the moment. We’ve sent our sighting report, now I think it best if we make our turn east. If that is a German ship it may be passing the convoy heading and speed along as well. Signal the Commodore-twenty points to starboard and we’ll come round to zero-six-zero. And tell them to be especially vigilant for the next several hours in case we get more unexpected visitors.”

“Very good, sir. Right away.”

If anything happens, thought Captain Norman, it will happen after sunset in the dark. That’s when we’ll have to keep a sharp eye. It’s going to be a long and sleepless night.

* * *

Either there was nothing left of that world they were trying to reach in their own time, or else time had sullenly refused to let them leave without seeing the consequences of their misdeeds, but the ship had not moved but a few minutes in time. They were still marooned in the past, trapped in the web of the war where they had sailed and fought so many times. Yet the odd thing in Fedorov’s mind was the ominous fact that they had come here at a time before that of their first arrival in the Norwegian sea so long ago. Then it had been late July of 1941, and now they were here a full year earlier in mid June of 1940. The realization that they had also obviously moved in space was most unsettling. In a meeting of the senior officers with Dobrynin they discussed the situation to determine what they might do.

“I do not know what happened, Admiral,” said the Chief, “but this shift sounded nothing like any of the others. Clearly the rod does something, but the sound was all wrong. No matter what I did to try and control the shift, it held steady.”

“It did move us in time,” said Fedorov, “yet only for a brief moment. Then it returned us, and in that moment the earth had rotated 200 degrees. So it is that we find ourselves in the Atlantic, still a year before the time when we first moved here.”

“Very odd,” said Kamenski. “These control rods were even more enriched with the substances that we suspect as being responsible for these time displacements, yet the result is obviously quite different.”

“And quite dangerous,” said Volsky. “Fedorov says we might have landed on dry land! It appears only by chance that we were dropped into the sea again. What about Kazan?” They had been so busy with that initial contact that they completely forgot about the submarine.

“Our automated signal activated as planned, Admiral,” said Nikolin. “We have not yet received a response.”

“Kazan was using Rod-25,” said Fedorov. “Old faithful.”

“So where might it be? Could Tasarov hear them if they were close by?”

“Possibly, sir, but they would certainly hear us…Unless they are in the Sea of Okhotsk, which is where I fear they remain now. Rod-25 has never exhibited this behavior. It always shifted in time, but there was never a spatial variance.”

“So I do not think we can expect to see Gromyko and Kazan any time soon,” Volsky shrugged.

“No sir,” Fedorov put it bluntly. “They could be half a world and decades away by now. Only a long range short wave transmission could possibly reach them now, just as we called the ship all the way from the Caspian before.”

“I could try this, Admiral,” Nikolin volunteered.

“Try, but I don’t hold much hope for any result,” said Volsky. “The question now is what do we do here? Should we try this procedure a third time?”

“Third time is a charm,” said Kamenski.

“Indeed, we might just charm ourselves right into the middle of Siberia and come careening down on some mountain like Noah’s ark after the flood. No, I think we must learn more about how this happened before we attempt to run the procedure again. See what you can determine from the data recording, Chief Dobrynin. In the meantime, gentlemen, we are here in June of 1940. What should we expect to find, Mister Fedorov, aside from another of these convoys?”

“It is likely that they reported a ship sighted, and we do look rather intimidating. That said, it was wise to simply break off as we did and signal them farewell. Perhaps they will conclude we were another Royal Navy or Canadian ship.”

“The last time we were assumed to be a German raider. Their Admiralty will soon receive this sighting report, yes? What if they run down their list of ships and realize they had nothing out here?”

“Then they may get curious as before, sir. When we showed up last time we introduced our first variation in the history by diverting Wake-Walker’s carrier force from the planned raid on Petsamo.”

“Well we have just diverted that convoy,” said Rodenko. “They made a twenty point turn to the east just as we broke off.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Fedorov. “The Germans had auxiliaries at sea that would often make sighting reports and vector in other raiders, be they surface ships or wolfpacks.”

“What is the danger of encountering submarines here? Our Horse Jaw sonar is down and is not likely to be repairable, at least according to Byko. Tasarov says he can use the side hull sensors and the Horse Tail, but submarines are much less detectable now.”

“We still have one KA-40, sir.”

“Indeed. Well what is happening in your history books at this time, Fedorov?”

“As before, sir. It is a fairly momentous period. The Germans have already broken through to the coast and the British have evacuated at Dunkirk. That will continue at Le Havre, Cherbourg and other French ports for some days. The Royal Navy has also just concluded the evacuation of Norway, and they are about to lose one of their principle aircraft carriers in that withdrawal-HMS Glorious. She was found and sunk by the Twins, sir.”

“The Twins?”

“The battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. That’s what the British called them. They also called them Salmon and Gluckstein after a tobacconist firm in the UK, but those two battlecruisers were operating to interdict the British operation, and got very lucky.”

“A hard time for Admiral Tovey,” said Volsky.

“Oh, he should still be in the Med, sir. But yes, the Anglo French resistance on the continent was fairly well beaten. Italy has just entered the war. Marshall Petain sues for terms of Armistice in a week on the 17th and France formally capitulates on the 22nd, at least in the history I have on file-but that could have changed.”

“It was remarkably consistent up until now,” said Kamenski. “The Admiral tells me you were able to identify that convoy and its escort in a just a few minutes.”

“It comes round to my cracked mirror theory,” Fedorov explained. “Throw a stone at a mirror and it will not crack everywhere. There will be large segments that remain just as they were before, then a web of fissures and cracks where the damage occurred. This part of the history may not have cracked.”

“But the damage may be elsewhere,” said Kamenski. “Russia, for example, was fairly well fractured.”

“I suppose that the closer you get to the source of the real damage the more broken things will seem. Something big obviously happened in Russia to produce all these separate states.” Even as he said that Fedorov experienced a roll of misgiving and quiet inner guilt. Something big? Perhaps not. Maybe it was only that little errant whisper that cracked the mirror this time….Me and my big mouth.

“I suggest that you get those ears of yours to your station now, Mister Nikolin,” said Volsky. “See what you can hear of the history. Try all the BBC channels and record anything of interest.”

“Alright, sir. I’ll get to work at once.” Nikolin was up and to his station, back under his headset where he lived each day in the world of dots, dashes and radio waves.

“It’s a pity Admiral Tovey is in the Med,” said Volsky. “ I think that before we are discovered again it might be good to arrange another little meeting.”

“With Tovey, sir?”

“I think he is a man I can reason with.”

“Well, yes sir, but he will have no knowledge or recollection of us at all. You met him in 1942, years from now.”

“Yes, and that is a pity. We will have to begin all over here.”

“And there’s one other thing, Admiral. If we cannot use these control rods to shift again soon, I’m still worried about what happens to us a year from now when Kirov is supposed to arrive here for the first time.”

Kamenski raised his heavy grey brows at that. “Well, Mister Fedorov. This is now the first time, isn’t it? Something tells me this is not the same world you shifted into in July of 1941-certianly not with Russia divided as you believe. Something tells me that the mirror is already badly cracked, and the world we see reflected in it may be very different now, in spite of the near picture perfect replaying of the events concerning that convoy we stumbled upon.”

“Well, gentlemen, the world took a spin and here we are.” Volsky put his finger on the heart of the matter. “Now any suggestions on what we should do?”