Kirov III: Pacific Storm

on the horizon, and assumed she had been masked in the billowing black smoke of her own fires.

“We’re pulsing again,” said Fedorov. “Thank God. I wish it had happened hours ago, and then we might have avoided that.” He pointed, also noticing the fading glow on the horizon. “Let us hope we don’t regress this time and end up back in the same borscht. I don’t think we need another round with the Imperial Japanese Navy—let alone the Americans.”

The ship was moving farther and faster than they realized, moving in and out of time itself, even as she slowed below twenty knots so Byko could reduce the stress on the dislodged hull patch. But something else was now going to happen that no man among them could have possibly anticipated, or even believed.

Kirov moved, the very fabric of her being becoming gossamer thin, a wisp of shadow on the sea, a vaporous menacing mist. It seemed only seconds to the crew, and no man could really say they noticed it, but the ship was indeed “pulsing” as Fedorov had come to describe it, fading in and out of the time period she had been trapped in, slipping into infinity and the limbo of uttermost nowhere. She loitered there but a few brief moments before falling back into the turbulent waters of the Coral Sea and her private war on war itself.

What seemed like a few insubstantial seconds away in this otherworldly place and time, were actually long minutes in the realm she had come from, the wee hours of August 27, 1942. She had been sailing at twenty knots, still moving in space, yet ten minutes passed in 1942 for every second she was away, and that happened again and again as the ship pulsed in time. The enemy ship that had been chasing her now had ample time to close the range.

Tasarov heard it before anyone saw anything. The sound that had once been a faint, high whine in his headphones was now grossly magnified, and when he looked at the signal profile he was shocked to see the pattern matched that of the enemy cruiser that had been hastening to join the battle.

“Sir,” he began, “that cruiser contact… I’m reading a range of only 50,000 meters now.”

Karpov spun around. “What? That’s impossible. That ship was nearly a hundred kilometers behind us just a minute ago.”

“It was, sir… At least I thought as much, but it seems to have cut that range in half!”

Fedorov took keen notice of this. “From their perspective we moved nearly 8000 miles in a single day when we vanished on August 23rd and reappeared off the Australian coast just a day later. I guess Time loses the beat when she plays a new song for us. It could be that time slows down for us when we shift, and then re-synchs when we appear again—like an old cassette tape fast forwarded to a new point in the music. That ship is gaining on us every time we pulse.”

There came a third vibration, and Kirov shuddered, slipping away again into the nameless void, a shadow on a sea of shadows now. Karpov walked slowly to the forward viewports, seeing the enemy battleship quaver and fade in the distance—and then the ship vanished. Kirov hovered like a single breath of God in time without end, then reappeared, gaining form and substance again in the real world of rock and sea and sky, and men in steel ships on the Coral Sea of 1942. Karpov suddenly saw what looked like a vast darkness looming off the starboard beam, a brooding, menacing thunderstorm, and then it seemed to sharpen to hard angles, as if a shadow had been frozen solid, resolving to the shape and form of a ship of war!

The moonlight gleamed on her long, forward deck, the white bow wave rising high as she came at the ship, hurtling toward them on a collision course.

“My God!” He pointed, a look of utter surprise and amazement on his face. “My God! It’s coming right at us! Hard to starboard, ahead full! Brace for impact!”

He had desperately tried to maneuver the ship to prevent a direct collision, and Kirov shuddered, not only with the straining effort of her turbines, the sea still clawing at the open gash in her side, her rudders vibrating as they fought to turn the ship, but also she quavered again with the cold hand of Mother Time on her neck.

The captain and crew of the heavy cruiser Tone were equally astounded by what they saw, a formless shadow on the sea that must have been unseen behind an impenetrable cloud of smoke. It suddenly became the long threatening presence of a great warship! Then a strange light came over it, as if it had been struck by lightning, a Saint Elmo’s fire of doom crowning her tall battlements and gilded decks—and she began to fade away, just as the sharp forward prow of the Tone slammed into her hull in a massive unavoidable collision.

There came the sound of metal on metal, a grinding scream of agony, and then it faded away as quickly as it came, and to Captain Iwabuchi on the bridge, it seemed that his ship was slowly being swallowed by the enemy vessel, as if Mizuchi had opened its maw to devour the smaller cruiser.

Aboard Kirov they saw the ship plunge right into the starboard side of Kirov’s broad armored hull, and then there was absolute chaos. Tone was there, and yet not there, careening forward through the ship, her form and structure a luminescent, translucent green, a ghostly phosphorous phantom ship that cut right through the heart of the Russian battlecruiser. And they could see right through the ship, through her bulkheads and into the labyrinthine metal innards where they glimpsed ghostly figures of men standing their spectral watches.

They heard screams of men frightened beyond their capacity to understand and endure. Karpov covered his ears, his eyes bulging at what he saw—the contorted faces of the enemy crew as the tall bridge pagoda on Tone passed completely through the armored citadel. And there, in the midst of a host of leering wraiths from hell, came the stalwart and brooding face and form of Sanji Iwabuchi, his arms clutching the binnacle on the bridge of Tone, officer’s hat pulled low on his forehead above murderous eyes. And it seemed that the soul of that man passed right through Karpov himself, and he suddenly felt his mind flooded with the awareness of another being, the dour Japanese Captain in all his wrath and ire, and all his carefully controlled madness.

The vision passed, as the ship plunged on through, and Karpov was doubled over with nausea, dropping to one knee, bewildered and beset with a fear unlike any other he had known in his life. The wail of frightened and panicked men followed in the wake of the ghostly ship, and it slowly faded, a long distended screed that diminished until it was devoured by the dark.

The sound of men screaming below decks still echoed through the ship, resounding through the corridors and passages, fading to a whimper of silence. Then a thick, cottony darkness enfolded them. Karpov turned to see Fedorov literally shaking with fear and shock. The Admiral was unconscious on the deck. Rodenko had his head buried in his arms, slumped over his lifeless radar station. Tasarov was just staring, his eyes unfocused, jaw slack. He heard the sound of a junior officer weeping at his station. Only Samsonov still sat on guard, his muscled arm poised over his CIC panels, an expression of shock giving way to the light of fire and anger in his eyes.

Somehow, Karpov forced his own limbs to move, fighting off the cold shiver of infinity. They had sailed through hell—or rather it had just sailed through them! They were somewhere else now. He looked out the viewport thinking to see the Japanese cruiser, but the sea was empty and calm. There was no sign of the angry glow of fire on the horizon. Yamato was gone as well. They had moved in time!

“Fedorov!” he had hold of the younger man’s shoulders now. “Fedorov! We’ve moved! We’ve shifted somewhere else. That ship…it passed right through us. God, what a nightmare! It went right through us. But we’re safe now… I think we are safe….” He was looking fearfully over his shoulder, as if the flaming hulk of Yamato might come boring in on them next, but all was calm. There was only the long wavering shimmer of the cold moonlight on the sea.

It was over.

EPILOGUE

“There are an infinite number of universes existing side by side and through which our consciousnesses