Three Kings

Chapter 28

The waters of the Strait of Artemisium were high that day, a sudden storm brewing up in the narrow channel that heralded another warrior arriving from a doomed world. It blew down from the craggy heights of Mount Paranassus, stirring the waters to a fitful state until the waves were capped with frothing white spray, and the tides crashed hard against the tiny Isle of Argyronison at the outlet of the strait.

There sat a fisherman, who had seen the rising clouds and pulled hard to reach the safety of the island, knowing he could never get back to his mainland village of Katadika in time. He would be the only human eyes to witness the coming, and when he saw it he first believed the Italians had come to add naval gunfire to the torment already underway in his homeland. Germans and Italian troops had invaded a month earlier, and were now relentlessly driving the stalwart Greek Army back towards Athens.

If Regia Marina is here, he thought, then they mean to cross the Strait of Artemisium, and my home town is right where they will land. He knew he had to get there as soon as possible to warn his friends and family, but now he stood, transfixed when he saw the ship in the grey rain, its tall white mainmast crowned by a spherical dome the like of which he had never seen. It shimmered with a strange glow, Saint Elmo’s Fire crackling from the lines and masts, outlining the sharp fighting edges of the warship in stark relief with an eerie green light. He did not really know what he saw that day, and he would never know that it had come from the fire of one great battle to this one, arriving like the hard steel of the Spartans of old, as if hearing the drumbeat of war and marching in this grave hour.

The high pass of Thermopylae was very close, but it was not Leonidas and his 300 Spartans, marching to the doom foretold by the Oracle of Delphi so long ago:

Another warrior had lately visited that shrine, and found their a talisman that would describe the lines of fate that would set a new doom in motion. But the fisherman knew nothing of this, for it had not yet come to pass, nor would it happen for another eighty years when a young woman would find the weight of the world on her shoulders, and the doom of the Oracle in a strange metal box.

Elena Fairchild had been truly puzzled when she found no further doorway in the hidden passage beneath Delphi. There was nothing but that strange black box. She had inserted her key, but it would not turn or open. Could other members of the Watch help her solve the riddle? Protocol now required her to report the incident. That was mandatory, but there was so little time and only one place she could do that — back on Argos Fire, the corporate HQ and security ship cruising out beyond the Strait of Artemisia. Its sleek lines and soft white paint scheme belied its true purpose, for the ship was a Daring class British destroyer, purchased by the Fairchild company and refit for the role it now served, and it was every bit as deadly as any of the other warships in its class.

It was well past the eleventh hour, on a hard night in 2021. The missiles were about to fire in the war that had been building to a terrible climax for the last nine days. Her only thought now was how they could possibly survive it, and where they could go. This place was not likely to be on any immediate target list, but on one hour or another, a warhead might come that would end all their days on this earth. The answer she desperately needed had to be inside this box, but how to open it?

“Get the men to the helicopters,” she said firmly. She was obviously meant to find what she now had in hand. Why else would she have been sent here? The box may not open with her key, but it might be opened with another. She had to report this! She had to get back to the ship, re-enable her secure command line to the Watch and report. They had precious little time, but enough to get there and back again if need be on the fast X-3 helos.

The Sergeants whistled, calling back the Argonauts from their security perimeter and shouting to fire up the helicopter. They would leave the famous Oracle scarred by the spade work that had uncovered the hidden entry. It won’t matter anyway in a few hours time., she thought. It won’t matter…

But it did matter. It was going to make all the difference, at least to them and the lives they would lead in the world they returned to. The helos landed on the after deck of Argos Fire, and the Argonauts dismounted, laden with arms and equipment and feeling like passengers at an airport whose flight had been cancelled. Yet they were glad to be back aboard the ship and soon settled in below decks, thinking nothing more of the strange mission.

The Captain went forward with Elena Fairchild, carrying that small box they had retrieved from the dig site at Delphi. They reached the executive suite, tired, and somewhat confused. Morgan came in last after having stopped on the bridge to confer briefly with Commander Dean.

“What’s happening out there, Mack?” said Elena as she cast a worried glance at the clock on the wall.

Her intelligence officer, Mack Morgan, scratched his dark beard, a puzzled expression on his face. “Well, Mum, there’s been nothing on the black line while we were gone, so I’ve no hard intelligence over that channel. Funny thing now is that Mister Dean says we’ve got some strange interference on all the normal communications channels.”

“Interference? Anything wrong with the equipment?”

“No, Mum, they’ve checked it top to bottom. It’s very odd. We can’t even pick up anything on either AM or FM bands, not a word, not a whisper. It’s as if there’s just no one out there.”

At this Elena’s eyes clouded over with a squall of fear. It has started. It’s already underway. Captain Gordon MacRae was watching her closely as she stood up, slowly walking to her desk to depress a hidden button that would open the rear bulkhead to secret room harboring the red phone.

“Come with me, gentlemen. There’s one more line we can try.”

Morgan looked at MacRae, and the two men passed a knowing glance with one another. This was the hidden inner sanctum of Argos Fire, and messages coming across that line had been the seed of many missions in the past. Neither man had ever been permitted to enter the room before this, and so it was with some surprise and an equal measure of curiosity that they both stood now, quietly following Elena into the small room.

There was a single chair sitting before a small pedestal crowned by a Plexiglas dome over the red phone. It had a keypad for code entry and Elena quickly used it to re-enable her phone. MacRae set the box heavily down on the pedestal desk, waiting while Elena seated herself on the chair.

“Well,” she said, “protocol has it that I should report any red mission irregularity at once. I never thought I would find myself sitting here in front of this damn phone again. This is all quite unexpected.”

“What was the failure?” MacRae folded his arms.

“You saw yourself. The key would not operate, and there was no other passage or door.”

“But there was that box,” he pointed.

“Yes, and now I’ve got to report that and see if I can find out why my key won’t open it.”

“Try it again,” MacRae suggested. “No sense making your call unless you’re sure it won’t work.”

That sounded reasonable, and so she nodded, drawing out the key again on its chain and slowly inserting it into the hole. It turned! There was an audible click and a quiet tone from some mechanism inside the box, and now the front side tilted open, revealing a small drawer that held a rolled scroll. She glanced at MacRae, perplexed, and then slowly reached for the scroll to open it.

There was a brief message, addressed to her, and she read it aloud. “Should you read this your mission will have concluded as planned. Keep this device within a secure room aboard Argos Fire at all times and it will serve to hold you in a safe nexus. As of this moment, you are now Watchstander G1. Godspeed.”

“Watchstander G1?” MacRae did not understand.

“There were nine of us left,” said Elena. “It seems I’ve been promoted.”

“What does it mean, Mum?” said Morgan. “A safe nexus?”

She turned, looking at him with a new light in her eyes, and then smiled. “It means I know why you can’t raise anything on the radio now, Mack. It’s begun. It’s happening right now, and we’re right in the eye of the maelstrom.”

“What’s begun?”

“The bloody war you’ve been feeding me information on these last nine days. The missiles are in the air.”

“Athens would surely be on the target list. It’s fairly thick out there with this sudden squall, but we’d see a nuclear warhead if one went off.”

“Perhaps,” said Elena. “Unless we’ve moved.”

“Moved? Where?” Morgan didn’t understand. They were still in the strait northeast of Delphi.

Elena just looked at him, then back to the message on the scroll. She hadn’t read it all to them, not the string of numbers there, nor the name of the man who had signed off on the note.

A tone sounded on the ship’s intercom, and Elena tapped the button to take the message. It was the ship’s executive officer, Mister Dean.

“Bridge reporting. We’ve got radar returns now, but can’t seem to get signal returns on the tankers. Radio is clearing up, but nothing on the Black Line.”

“Forget the Black Line,” she said. “Listen to AM bands. See if you can pick up any local news. And you can forget the tankers as well.”

At this Dean seemed to stumble, a brief silence indicating his confusion before he spoke again. “Excuse me, Mum… Forget the tankers? I thought we were to escort them to Heraklion.”

Both Captain MacRae and Mack Morgan were giving her the same look that had to be on Dean’s face at that moment, a bemused look of worry and concern.

“Yes, proceed to Heraklion, but I’m afraid the tankers won’t be coming. I’ll explain everything later Mister Dean. Just get us underway.”

“Very good, Mum. We’ll get moving immediately.”

They had shepherded the company’s tanker fleet through every hazard, all in the service of securing the deal that could save Fairchild Inc. from certain bankruptcy after the loss of Princess Royal in the Persian Gulf, and secure vital oil supplies for Britain in the bargain. They had braved the transit of the Bosphorus and dueled with the Russian Black Sea Fleet, losing one of their three remaining tankers there, Princess Irene. Yet they had managed to get safely through the Bosphorus with the last two tankers and two million barrels of precious oil. Then, like a dog that had tussled for hours with a rope and then suddenly lost interest, the Company CEO had told them the oil no longer mattered.

MacRae pursed his lips, wondering what was up here, and how they could have lost radar signals on the tankers. “We’d best check that radar dome on the mainmast,” he said. “It may ‘ha been damaged in the storm.” His Scottish brogue rolled like honey at times, and his reserve of calm was most welcome in the tension of the moment.

Elena Fairchild took a long breath. “Don’t worry about that, Gordon,” said Elena. “The tankers don’t matter now. They’re no longer with us…”

MacRae scratched his head at that. “Well they were five miles off our stern ten minutes ago,” he said, an edge of frustration creeping into his tone.”

“Yes,” she returned, “they were, and they’re probably still sitting there, god help them now that we’ve moved.”

“Moved? You’re not making sense, Elena.” He used her first name, he realized, and in front of Mack Morgan, but then he threw that aside. They were talking about the two million barrels of crude oil he’d been shepherding the last nine days, and it was no time to worry about the niceties of protocol. Mack wasn’t stupid. He could read the book that MacRae and Ms. Fairchild had been writing together, and knew they had cross that thin professional line between them and become something more than a company CEO and her dutiful ship’s Captain.

“Sorry Gordon, but there’s no other way to put it. We’ve moved. Argos Fire is no longer in the soup the world was serving up in 2021. They key finally worked and it did its job — only not the way I expected. We’ve moved in time, gentlemen. We haven’t lost our tankers, but they’ve lost us, and god speed them both to safety now. We’re somewhere else. Their fate is no longer our concern.”

“Somewhere else?” MacRae looked at Morgan now to see how he was taking this, and he was just standing there, stupefied, and looking to MacRae to sort things out. The Captain had at least one anchor on the situation. Elena had made some startling revelations the previous night, about the Russians, their experiments with an odd effect of nuclear detonations that cause aberrations in the flow of time. Yet the real stunner had been the business about the shadowy group that had been established within the Royal Navy called the Watch.

Yes, the Russians were playing with time travel, or so she had explained, and it all had something to do now with that big warship that went missing last July in the Norwegian Sea, the battlecruiser Kirov. The ship went missing alright, to another century! It had apparently displaced in time to the 1940s, and became embroiled in the Second World War! That was what she had told him, the goddamned Russians were tampering with history, but the real revelation was how she had managed to find that out. He remember the moment when her words had struck him like a thunderbolt…

“Something truly profound is about to happen,” she had told him, “something terrible.”

Chapter 29

“What?” he had asked. “Is it somehow related to this Russian ship?”

“Yes. Kirov has everything to do with it, but we aren’t exactly sure what to expect. One thing we were told is this: it could be catastrophic — life ending — at least life as we know it now. And the worst of it is that no one that survives will know about it. This thing will happen and then it will all change — that is if the missiles don’t finish off the world first.”

“What do you mean with talk like that? What will happen that could be worse than a full on nuclear exchange? Is another volcano about to pop off? And how can you know something like this? Is this all speculation? I can understand that the world’s at the edge of oblivion now with this news from Morgan on the Russian ICBMs, but you sound a whole lot more terrified than that.”

“I am… And to answer your question, we know because we were warned about this very moment — told what to expect.”

“Warned? By who? Has some pointy headed scientist come up with this prediction or was it a politician this time?”

“No, Gordon. The warning didn’t come from anyone here…”

MacRae remembered the look he had given her, cocking his head to one side, his eyes narrowing. “See here now. If you expect me to believe in little green men from Mars…”

“No, it has nothing to do with extraterrestrials either. I’m afraid our doom will be kept all in the family this time around. The warning came from the one and only place that could possibly know what would happen. It came from the future.”

From the future… Yes, as impossible as that sounded it held a kernel of sense that he could finally grasp. If it was ever possible to perfect the science of travel in time, it would be in the future. If it was true that the Russians had been conducting strange experiments on the fringes of their nuclear weapons tests all through the decades, then future generations would know that and certainly do the same. If these experiments carried on through the decades yet to come…

“You’re saying they revealed this event, this thing about to happen?”

“More or less. Look, Gordon, I need you to think now. I’ve told you a good deal, but not everything. Yet consider what I’ve said. The Russians have been playing with time. They’ve sent a bloody battlecruiser back through time, and it’s been less than kind about minding its own business. Things have changed, quite a few things. I’m not sure about it all myself, but think about it. The world can take a poke now and then and still hold together. We’ve learned that much. The history has a kind of cohesive quality. It wants to hold true, but there are some events that are too profound. The changes they introduce in the line of causality cannot be smoothed over.”

MacRae and Morgan were trying to follow her, but this was all fairly amazing and they could not quite grasp what she was saying. Elena could see the looks on their faces, so she tried again.

“Let me see if I can make this a little more concrete,” she began. “Yes… a man is laying concrete for a new walk. He gets it all laid out, mixes everything with just the right amount of water and all. Now he has only so long to trowel and smooth it all out before it begins to dry and harden. Once it does, it can’t be changed easily, and any blemish or misstep in the process sets in as it hardens. History is like that. Events get sifted and mixed into the slurry of time, and it all gets laid out nice and neat, hardening to the facts we take for granted as unchangeable. Well that isn’t true. Find a way to go back in time and do things differently, and you can change things quite easily. In this case that’s what the Russians have done, and messed that nice fresh laid concrete up rather badly. That change ripples forward. Break something there in the past, and things get broken here too, in our time. Back then it might be just a seemingly insignificant change, like a soft motion of the mason’s trowel, but here it could manifest like a sledgehammer on the hardened concrete of the history we know, and it can be rather terrifying. It’s called a finality — an event so important that it must change the history of everything that follows it. When that happens, things do change all throughout the continuum, suddenly and painfully. That’s what we were warned of, and it’s about to happen — it may be happening even as we speak. The only way to avoid the maelstrom of change is to be in the center of a safe spot on the flux of time — a nexus point.”

“And how do we do that?”

“I think we’ve already done it.”

The Captain shook his head, like a boxer shaking off a hard punch, and then he turned and stared at the box on the desk by the red phone.

“That?” he pointed at the box, saying nothing more.

“Yes,” said Elena, “That box is from the future too. At least that is what I now believe. Apparently we received more than messages from that distant time — sorry Mack, you haven’t heard any of this, but you may as well know now.”

She told him the same impossible story that she had revealed to Gordon the previous evening, all about the secret group that had been established by the Royal Navy, secret even from the British government itself. She told him how they had begun to receive strange signal transmissions, video feeds of events that seemed to make no sense — until they happened four days later. They had seen the horrific attack on the World Trade Center, in pixel perfect video that replicated the entire event, but four days before it happened! They had been send a list of the closing price of every stock on the Dow three days before the big crash, and it was accurate to the decimal point. That got their attention. Someone was trying to communicate with them from the future, trying to warn them of a great, impending doom, and it all had something to do with that Russian ship, the battlecruiser Kirov.

Morgan stood there, a stunned look on his face, and Captain MacRae clasped his shoulder. “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” he said. “Just as I did when I was told this last evening. At least I had a good stiff gin at hand when I got the news.”

“You mean to say…”

“Yes, it’s all true,” said Elena. “It sounds impossible but it’s been known for some time, really, since 1942 when British intelligence finally figured out that a strange ship they had been calling Geronimo was actually not from their own time, but the future. That’s when the Watch was set, a group of highly placed men in the Royal Navy who set a watch on history itself. You see, that Russian battlecruiser appeared, raised hell for a time, and then simply vanished. The Watch was established to wait for its next appearance, a dozen sheep dogs waiting for the wolf to return. It was started by a very famous British Admiral, the man commanding Home Fleet at the time, John Tovey. It also had a man inside Bletchley Park, Mack, someone you’ve long admired, Alan Turing.”

“Turing? He knew about all of this?”

“He was the one who figured out the Russian ship had to be from the future.”

“But you’re saying tha’ box there is from the future as well?” Gordon pointed again.

“I believe so. It must contain a fragment from the Tunguska event — sorry, that’s a part of the story I haven’t told you about, but we eventually sorted it out. You all know of that event.”

“The big explosion in 1908?” Morgan had heard of it.

“Exactly. Well it wasn’t just nuclear detonations that seemed to fragment time, but any massive explosion could do the same now that the china has been cracked. This is what we’ve learned.”

“But there have been massive explosions all through history. Are you telling me they’ve all affected time?”

“No, just the one’s after 1908. The Tunguska incident was different from any other similar event in the earth’s history. We don’t know why yet, or even what actually happened that day, but whatever it was had a profound effect on time, and like the first crack in a piece of pottery, the whole thing is unstable now. Time has a crack in it, and now any big explosive event seems to be compounding the damage. Beyond that, the event left remnants of a strange element that seems to cut time like a diamond. We’ve found a very few samples, and learned that they can be activated or catalyzed by any nuclear detonation, or other means. Something about the proximity of this element to nuclear fission creates some most alarming effects. We aren’t really sure, but we think the Russians were using it in the control rods of the nuclear reactors aboard that battlecruiser—Kirov. It took a good long time for us to discover that, but we put the clues together with skills you would be privy too Mack, good intelligence work.”

“Then there’s a piece of that thing from Tunguska right here,” said Gordon, “in that bloody box?”

“Correct. It was sent to us… from the future. Tunguska had more profound effects than anyone realizes. Whatever it was that exploded over Siberia that day fragmented spacetime itself, created cracks, fissures, like a stone breaking glass. Stumble upon one of those cracks and you can move right through time. We’ve found quite a few over the last eighty years, and taken great pains to conceal and secure them. In fact, those we have found are behind lock and key.” She reached for her own key now, dangling it to make the point.

“I thought our little foray to Delphi was going to be a farewell journey through one of those fissures in time, but finding that box was the real surprise for me.”

“Well how did you come by that damn key?” Morgan wondered, somewhat pointedly.

“Because I’m a Keyholder,” said Elena. “I was a member of that secret organization — the Watch started by Admiral John Tovey.” She smiled, telling him how she had been recruited seven years earlier. Then she revealed those final lines in the scroll that had been hidden within the box.

“See those numbers?” she pointed them out. “That’s a date line for our intended destination. If our systems recover as they should, we will soon pick up transmissions indicating we are in the year 1941.”

“Date line?”

“Tunguska fragments have a propensity to cut time and fall through to a specific date. In this case that would be January 30, in the year 1941.”

“1941?” Mack Morgan was shaken by the news. Then we’ve slipped through one of these cracks as well? The whole bloody ship? Because of something in that box there?”

“That’s about the size of it,” said Elena.

“Well, what in God’s name are we suppose to do here?” Morgan folded his arms. MacRae was also waiting.

“Live, gentlemen,” Elena said with finality. “Live… Because if we had stayed where we were it would have been the end for us, as the whole damn world goes to hell in 2021. Our friends from the future told us that too

“The war?”

“That and more, this radical change I’ve been talking about. No time to explain it all now, but the simple fact is this. If we had stayed this ship would probably be destroyed by now, and we’d all be dead. But we’ve moved — in the nick of time — and we’re here. This is our watch now, my watch, and this may shock you, but we’re here to stay.”

“What? You mean we can’t get back?”

“No, I’m afraid we have a one way ticket this time, Mack.”

“We’re stuck in 1941, just like that bloody Russian ship? Is that why we’ve been sent? Are we supposed to find the Russians and deal with them?”

“Possibly. We’re here for good now. This is our life, but this ship still remains true to its service as a proud member of the Royal Navy.”

“Royal Navy? I thought Argos Fire sailed for Fairchild Incorporated.”

“So you did, and that was a convenient thing for other people to think as well. Do you think the British government would so easily sign off on a Daring class destroyer just because I asked them nicely and had the money to pay for one?”

Now Morgan gave her a wry smile. “Clever girl,” he said slowly. “You say you are a member of this Watch, started by Tovey during the war, and the Argos Fire has been registered in the Royal Navy Fleet all this time. Well some intelligence master I am. You’ve kept that secret well.”

“That we have. Now that we’re here we’ve got to have our wits about us. This is World War Two. There’s fighting in Greece and the British are at it in North Africa. So we sail for Heraklion as planned, and get to safe waters under British control. We may have to be discreet in the short run, and we’ll need time to break this news to the ship’s crew. Their lives are all replanted here as well, and we owe them the same explanation I have just given you. Once we get the ship’s systems sorted out, which should be a matter of hours, we’ll try to make contact with Admiral Tovey as soon as possible.”

“Tovey? What? And just announce ourselves as fresh off the tube from 2021?”

“Something like that. You see, I neglected to mention the man who signed off on that farewell note I read you from the box.” She showed them the paper now, and there was the name in large, bold letters: ADM JOHN TOVEY.

Elena smiled. “A box from the future, a voice from the past, and here we are in the present moment, with a new lease on life, and a new mission, gentlemen. But I certainly hope Admiral Tovey and Alan Turing have sorted through this Geronimo business by now, because we’re about to deliver a new warship to the service of the Royal Navy, and it may come as quite a surprise.”

Chapter 30

Everything Elena told him was confirmed within the hour. Mack Morgan huddled in his secure comm-link room, where data feeds from all his intelligence sources would come in, including the “Black Line,” which was no longer operational. In fact, most of his feeds, taps on satellite transmissions, were now gone. He had some intermittent Morse code in the local area, and some other transmissions that would not resolve through the normal Morse decoder, so he put his decryption team on them with the considerable resources of the ship’s computers. Beyond this, there was traffic on normal radio bands, AM, FM, and shortwave, but nothing in the HF or ultra low frequencies that would be used by modern military or government sources. All that traffic was as dead as his Black Line. The world he had once been so connected to was gone.

What he did hear was all typical AM broadcast news at the outset, and he thought he was listening in on a documentary. The Germans were in the Balkans, and Greece was under attack. He checked on some facts and found it easy to isolate the probable year of this news to early 1941. Nailing down the exact month and day was not as easy, until he caught a BBC transmission that confirmed everything Ms. Fairchild had told them.

It was true, impossibly true, and here they were in January of 1941! There were some odd stories in the stream that he could not quite get a handle on. From what he could gather there was fighting in the Caucasus, but a quick fact check told him that should not be happening until July of 1942. The startling thing was that it seemed to be a battle between two Russian factions, and he caught news of the Orenburg Federation and the siege of Novorossiysk that made no sense to him. There was also fighting on Malta, and he knew enough about the old war to realize there should not be fighting there at all, except the air duel that made the place one of the most heavily bombed pieces of real estate in the war.

Confused and frustrated, he took the information to the Captain first, and the two men were discussing it in the ready room off the Bridge.

“It doesn’t make any sense. What’s this Orenburg Federation?”

“Beats me, Mack. And you’re correct about that report of fighting on Malta. That never happened.”

“Yeah? Well I looked a few things up. The Germans are in Greece, but that wasn’t supposed to happen until April of ’41. In North Africa the British were supposed to have taken Derna in Libya on their first offensive of the war against the Italians, but it’s the other way around! They just retreated from the place, and guess who’s nipping at their heels — Rommel. He wasn’t suppose to set foot in Libya for another two weeks, arriving with his 5th Light Division and a Valentine on the 14th of February, but he’s already closing in on Tobruk. Things are all out of whack, Gordon. If this is 1941 then someone has shuffled the deck here, and we’re not being dealt a fair hand.”

It was then that there came a knock on the door, and Executive Officer Dean was there, a look of concern on his face. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said still using the more relaxed protocols of civility, as the ship had always been a corporate HQ. “It seems we have an AEW warning light.”

“Air alert?” That got Captain MacRae’s attention immediately.

“Yes sir, Mister Haley says it looks to be a flight of five aircraft, relatively slow, and coming from the vicinity of Athens to our northwest.” They had been cruising for Heraklion on Crete, and were now passing the second in a string of five Greek Islands off their starboard side, Kythnos. Athens was a little over 100 kilometers to the northwest.”

“Well stand to, Mister Dean! The next time you get such a warning the ship is to come to full alert, with all battle stations manned. Understood?”

“Aye sir. Sorry sir.”

“Consider this ship to be on a wartime footing from this moment forward,” MacRae reinforced his order. “Come on, Mack. Let’s see what we have.”

They were soon out with the bridge crew, who had the news of what happened but were understandably confused by it all. They had been facing the difficult prospect of surviving a war in 2021, now they were right in a new kettle, and having difficulty getting their minds around the news they had been given.

“Listen up!” MacRae thought he had better get the crew focused again. “Enough chit chat over what’s happened to us. We’re here, and it’s bloody well 1941. That’s the fact of it, and one we’re going to be living with for some time. And if any of you still remember your history books, there’s a war on here as well, and a damn nasty one. So buck up! This is a war zone, and from this moment forward this is a ship of war, and in the service of the Royal Navy. We may still be wearing our dress whites, but the gloves are comin’ off, ladies and gentlemen. Now… What do we have, Mister Haley?”

“Air contact, 80 kilometers out at 15,000 feet. Flight of five aircraft, speed 300KPH. They look to be vectored right in on our heading sir.”

“Air alert one!” MacRae gave his voice the amplitude the moment required. He had to get the crew’s instincts and reflexes sharpened for war, and shake them from the dazed stupor that had seemed to settle over the entire ship when Ms. Fairchild made the announcement on the P.A. system explaining what had happened. Now she was walking the ship, talking with the crew, answering the thousand questions that were sure to be asked by her 300 Spartans.

Haley punched the audible alarm, and the warning claxon sounded. The deck panels opened and the sleek lines of the ship were now studded with the emerging close in defense guns, a pair of Phalanx CIWS systems, two Oerlikon 30mm batteries, augmented by two miniguns and six more general purpose MGs. But the ship’s real air defense was in her missiles, a cell of speedy Sea Vipers under the forward deck. They were so accurate they could hit a cricket ball in flight. They had fired 12 of 48 in the Black Sea against the Russians, and were now ready to deal with this new threat, whatever it might be. Crews in battle dress were already preparing the close in defense systems, removing the protective gun tarps as the batteries emerged from their hidden underdeck compartments.

The ship may have had a facelift and makeover to look more civil in her role as a corporate HQ, but it was every bit as deadly as the military version of the Type 45 Destroyer, a vessel that had five times the capability of the older British Type 42 which it replaced.

The bridge of the ship was a bit roomier than that of the British destroyer. It spanned the entire beam of the ship, where seven large windows took in the expansive view forward, and the bridge crew sat right along these, serving a line of glowing digital displays and consoles to manage all the ship’s systems in a series of EMEs, Electrical Modular Enclosures. Behind these there were two comfortable blue chairs, one for the Captain and the other for his XO. Other Watchstanders would do exactly that, and take up standing posts to the left and right on the carpeted deck.

Now MacRae was considering what to do. “Missile count on the ready Viper system,” he said sharply, all business.

“Sir,” a crewman responded, Ensign Temple, Angela Temple, coordinating air defense that day. “I have 36 missiles ready in the VLS module.”

“Reloads?”

Temple tapped her screen for magazine inventory. “Two cell reloads of 48 missiles each.”

“Very good.” MacRae knew his ship was like a shark, with a row of sharp outer teeth at the ready, but with plenty more in reserve. The Daring class had been built primarily as a fleet air defense ship, perhaps the best ever designed, with its Sampson radar able to track hundreds of targets at any given moment out to 400 kilometers, and the longer range air surveillance radar, designated S1850M, could track a thousand more. The missiles were actually Aster 15, an ancient Greek word meaning “star,” but aboard the Argos Fire the crew preferred the overall system name, “Sea Vipers.”

“Now what might be coming from that direction,” MacRae said aloud to no one in particular. “I doubt if this is the Greek air force.”

“My money is on the Germans,” said Morgan. “A flight of five would make it strike planes or fighters. You don’t bunch up that many for simple reconnaissance.”

“Aye,” MacRae scratched his chin. Yet he had the inclination to wait and see what was coming. Might it be a flight of British planes heading for Crete? They did not have long to wait. The planes were in visual range in under fifteen minutes, and the ship’s long range optical cameras had an image that was chilling. The dark fuselage and characteristic bent gull wings of the German Stuka were quite evident, and easily recognizable — and they were just starting to tip over to begin their diving attack.

“Miss Temple,” said MacRae coolly. “Shoot down those planes.”

“Sir?”

“Sea Vipers. Right now.”

“Aye, Aye Captain.” Temple minded her business as air defense officer that day, and keyed the firing commands. Seconds later the forward deck of Argos Fire seemed to belch angry flame and smoke, and, one after another, the Aster-15 “Vipers” launched and hurtled up to find their targets. They watched as the first four missiles swatted the planes unerringly from the sky. The last had come in close enough that the system held the final missile in the salvo and elected to utilize the CIWS Phalanx system. It rotated, the barrels elevating and then blasting out its lethal shower of 20mm rounds that shattered the Stuka in mid flight, ending the attack with a shuddering roar as the plane exploded.

The incident got the attention of everyone aboard, and as he expected, the bridge intercom soon carried the voice of their CEO asking what was going on. MacRae tapped the switch. “No worries, mum,” he said calmly. “But we’ve just made it official and taken up sides here. That was a flight of five German Stuka dive bombers thinking to say hello. I saw to the matter.”

“Very well,” came the familiar voice. “How much longer to the gate?”

She was referring to the Sikinos/Ios gate, named after the two islands that flanked the narrow passage. Beyond it lay the caldera island of Santorini, the volcano also known as Thera, that some believed was the site of the ancient Atlantean civilization before it exploded in what was called the “Minoan eruption,” a massive event with a V.E.I. of up to 7 by many estimates, equal to that of the Demon volcano that had been in the news just before these events occurred in 2021. Yet now the Argos Fire was far from that news cycle, lost in another era, and she had just fired her first shots in anger.

MacRae checked quickly with his navigator. “We should be through the gate and off Santorini within the hour, mum.”

“Good enough. Meet me in the executive cabin, please. I’m heading there now. And if you can find Mack Morgan, have him come along.”

“He’s right here on the bridge, and we’ll be there directly.”

Mack Morgan leaned in, catching the Captain’s ear. “That was easy enough with those planes,” he said. “We outclass anything they can throw at us.”

“Aye,” said MacRae in a low voice. “At the moment.”

Morgan thought about that, then realized what MacRae might be thinking. Ensign Temple had just reported 36 ready Vipers with two cell reloads of 48 missiles each in the ship’s magazines. Four had just been fired, and the count ticked down to 32 ready, which MacRae immediately corrected.

“Miss Temple,” he said calmly. “Kindly send down an order to have the ship’s Vipers reloaded. I want that VLS system topped off to a full battery.”

“Aye sir.”

MacRae looked at Morgan now. “What day have you figured it is, Mack?”

“30th of January, 1941.”

The Captain folded his arms, saying nothing more in front of the crew. There was a tense silence on the bridge now. The men and women there were tending to their business, watching system panels and radar screens, but their thoughts were searching the world around them now with equal intensity. It was 1941! None of them really understood what had happened to the ship, or how it could possibly be here. The incident just concluded had also made them keenly aware that they were in dangerous waters. The island of Santorini up ahead was a hotbed for European tourist traffic, with nightclubs and bars generating most of the heat on the island in 2021. Yet they would never see that time again, or so Miss Fairchild had told them all. She had not really explained how they came to be here, but did make one thing very clear — they could not go back, she had said. They were here to stay.

Ensign Temple had caught the low discourse between Morgan and MacRae as the two men started away. As she keyed the system maintenance order, she suddenly realized what the Captain meant. Her system board told the tale well enough. Their Viper inventory had just rotated from a total of 132 missiles to 128. That count was also stuck on a one way journey, she realized. If all this was true, if this was really what it looked to be, and they had landed right in the middle of the Second World War, then that missile count might tick away over time… And then what? The meaning of the Captain’s statement to his intelligence master was now quite apparent.

When the two senior officers had gone, Mister Dean seated himself in the blue Captain’s chair, his face still troubled by all that had happened. Dean was a young and handsome man, and Angela Temple had always enjoyed taking her watch while he had the bridge.

“Funny, sir,” she said quietly.

“What’s funny, Miss Temple?” Dean gave her those dark eyes.

“It’s just that it looks odd now in color.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This, sir.” She waved her hand expansively. “World War Two. All I ever knew about it was in black and white.”

Dean sat with that a moment. “Well,” he said at length. “There’s one color they used with a liberal brush in this damn war, red — blood red, Miss Temple. It’s not black and white any longer. This is living color, and that wasn’t an old newsreel we were just watching as we took down those planes.”

“Aye, sir.”

“My Great Grandfather fought here. Died here in fact, right in the Mediterranean.”

Temple raised a blonde eyebrow at that. “Then he’s out there somewhere? Right now?”

“Not quite,” said Dean. “He was aboard HMS Regulus, a British submarine. Damn thing struck a mine off Taranto and went down with all hands.. December 6, 1940. So he’s gone, I suppose.”

“Lucky he got his business done with your Grandmother before that,” said Carl Hampton, the Helmsman on that watch. “He smiled with the remark, then thought twice about it. “Sorry,” he apologized.

“Never mind it,” said Dean. “I expect we all have ancestors out there somewhere, right this very moment.”

“I suppose that’s true,” said the Helmsman.

“Let’s just hope time keeps a very tight ledger on them. Gramps went down with the Regulus, but what if something slips?”

“What do you mean?” Temple didn’t follow him.

“Well,” said Dean. “I think we just made a new entry in the record books with that missile fire. Who knows how those five fellows out there were supposed to finish out this war? Well, we’ve seen to that, haven’t we? They were Great Grandfathers to somebody out there, eh? Let’s hope they got their business done too before our Vipers took them down.”

No one said anything.