Kirov III: Pacific Storm

constantly pass. In these universes, all possibilities exist. You are alive in some, long dead in others, and never existed in still others. Many of our ‘ghosts’ could indeed be visions of people going about their business in a parallel universe or another time—or both.”

—Paul F. Eno, Faces at the Window

It took a long time before the crew was able to shake off the terror of that night. It was not simply the heat and stress of battle, the long hours tensely at action stations, the lack of sleep, the meals snatched between endless shifts. All that they could have taken in stride, holding to their discipline and training in spite of severe trial. They had been a ship of raw and untested men, and now they were as seasoned as any crew who ever fought at sea, veterans all.

No. It was that last insane and unbelievable moment, as terrifying as it was astonishing to them all, when heavy cruiser Tone and all her crew of 824 sailors and officers finally caught up with the ship they had been chasing, and drove right through its heart. In doing so they passed right through the minds and souls of an equal compliment of men aboard Kirov, and each crew knew something of the other, in a dark, macabre nightmare meeting at sea that no man among them ever wanted to recall, or speak of again. Ships pass in the night, wrote Longfellow, and speak to one another in passing.

Kirov had sailed east, slipping past Milne Bay at the southern tip of Papua New Guinea, a silent ship on an empty sea. They wanted to know that they would not regress, waiting breathlessly in those first hours and fearing that the ship would again be plunged into the cauldron of battle, scalded further by those turbulent and heated waters, the controlled insanity men now called the Second World War. But the ship seemed stable, the reactors showing no odd neutron flux, even though Dobrynin was now using manual backup controls to keep it running. It slowly dawned on them that the ship had reached some stable time, though they did not have any idea where they were.

The hideous collision with that phantom cruiser had a strange effect on all the equipment on board. The electronics were fitful and computers off line, with systems failing all over the ship. It was all Dobrynin could do to keep the power stable, finally isolating the source of the damage that had caused his cooling problem and fixing it before events turned critical.

Nikolin could not even raise anything on his radio, which did not surprise any man among them. All they had seen, each and every time they shifted away from the horrors of the 1940s, had been an empty world, a blackened world, a world of shadows, destruction and shame. It was all that was left of the world they had left, and each man still carried some hidden doubt that Kirov was somehow responsible.

Admiral Volsky recovered, as they all eventually did, and they decided what to do next. East lay the islands he had yearned to find for so long, scattered peaks of paradise at the top of undersea mountains, surrounded by the pristine blue-green waters of the Pacific. They had sailed that way, slipping past San Cristobal at the tip of the Solomons, past Vanuatu and north of Fiji Island, hoping to ease past Samoa and find Tahiti.

All the while the ship’s systems slowly began to wink back on, basic circuits operating again, lights and power stabilizing. It was as if Kirov was slowly rousing from some long and fitful slumber, a bad dream that had haunted them all these many weeks. Their chronometer read August 28th now, but it was any man’s guess as to what year or day it really was. Then Nikolin tinkered with his radio sets and suddenly reported that he was getting a distant, faded signal!

“What is it, Nikolin?” It was the first stirring of the ship’s higher level electronics. The mechanical things had kept on working. They had reverted to manual controls on many systems while the weary engineers tried in vain to isolate faults and reboot the main computers.

Samsonov turned, leaning on a brawny arm and called out to Karpov. “Captain, I have CIC control once again. My board is rebooting. Missiles green, torpedoes nominal, all systems checking in with good diagnostics, sir. We have teeth again.”

“That’s good to know, but all too few,” said Karpov. It had been most unsettling to be sailing in these waters without computers, sensors or adequate control of their weapons.

With that first remote wash of sound in Nikolin’s radio speaker, they suddenly realized that systems were slowly winking on again all over the ship. Dobrynin called to say he had computerized control of the reactor again and could now give them normal speeds. Rodenko saw his short range radars snap to life again, and the longer range panels of the Phased Array were suddenly active. Tasarov’s passive sonar was suddenly singing to him again, a smile on his face as he listened, indicating thumbs up.

All the officers gathered round Nikolin’s radio station as he struggled to tune in the distant signal. Would they hear the heartless stream of coded signals flashed between men at war? He was hearing words now… English…. And with sinking hearts they first thought they were they back in it once again, in the merciless waters of the South Pacific of 1942, fated to meet the American fleet this time, their arsenals badly depleted and their luck surely running low as well.

Then Tasarov’s elation suddenly became shock and surprise. He had his beloved sonar back again, and he immediately had closed his eyes, listening to the song of the sea, letting its sounds and rhythms and distant tempos enfold him again. He had been like a fish out of water as the ship sailed east, hearing nothing, knowing nothing of the sea around him, alone and struggling with the memories of that awful phantom ship and the reality of his own immediate uselessness. Now he could hear again, even as Rodenko could see again, but what he heard sent a rising pulse of fear through his system, and he was tensely alert, sitting up straight as he always did when he had hold of something, one hand on his headset, the other on his newly awakened sonar controls.

Karpov caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, turning his head quickly, watching the sonar man closely.

“Conn… Sonar contact… Possible submarine… No! Definitely a submarine, sir. Confidence high! He’s very close. Two thousand meters off our stern and deep. Sir, I think this is an American boat —”

“Alert one! Rig for ASW defense!” Karpov reacted like a coiled spring, suddenly snapping and releasing all the pent up energy and tension that had been stored in the trial of their recent battles. A submarine! Another damn submarine! They were back in the thick of it again, and this time it was the Americans, even as they had feared.

The claxon sounded its shrill warning, and weary men rushed to battle stations, their brief reprieve in the silence and emptiness of the open sea now over.

“We will not give this bastard a single moment to breath,” said Karpov tersely. “Can you see it yet, Samsonov? Shkval! Put it right up his ass the minute you have a firing solution!” The Captain rushed to the CIC, Volsky in his wake, leaving Nikolin suddenly abandoned with his radio again.

Then Tasarov spoke up in a loud voice. “I have acoustic profile readings! A hull number resolution!”

Karpov was a single minded fist of anger now. “Feed that data to the CIC. Let’s get him before they have a chance to fire. Ready on my command, Samsonov.” He was all business, a deadly serious look on his face now, and his God of War was moving quickly, with clock like precision, opening toggle guards, enabling warheads, keying the lethal super-cavitating torpedoes for battle.

As Karpov watched he was suddenly shaken by the memory of that awful face, the ghostly visage of Sanji Iwabuchi as the dour commander had passed right through him, the dreadful sense of doom he had felt when the man’s mind touched his, and the hopelessness of living in a world where such men were at large and at war with one another. Something broke through his fear, tugging at his mind with a certain desperation, a voice of warning and caution and alarm. My God! He thought, seeing how he had reached his own hand towards the firing switch even as Samsonov was fingering the kill button. His hand shook, his eyes widened, and then in a sharp instant he grabbed Samsonov’s hand and yanked it away from the controls.

“Wait!” he said. “Belay that order!”

Three words had penetrated the blind surge of anger and thrum of fear in his chest, stopping the reflexive urge to fight and kill. They leapt in his brain past that reptilian root of his mind and up to a higher place where beast became man, and man became reason and choice. Hull number resolution! That meant they had the ship in their database!

Fedorov suddenly realized what was happening as well. A hull number resolution! Tasarov had listened to this ship before, and its unique signal return patterns and acoustic characteristics were already stored in his computers. It could not be an American submarine from 1942. It had to be from another time. But when?