Crescendo Of Doom Read Online Free Page B

I be forced to live out my life here, live through the Revolution, the First World War, the long civil war of Red on White?
    While a part of him thought he had found himself in the perfect place to eliminate his last potential rivals, and seize the history of his nation, that outcome was not certain.
    It would be long years of murder and struggle here before I reached the time I have just come from. By then I would be much older, and I might not even live to see the conclusion of the Second World War, or know what happens to Russia when it all ends. After all, isn’t that what I must set my mind on? I must assure Russia is not marginalized, ostracized, entrenched behind an iron curtain and guarded by the prison warden that came to be called NATO. To settle those years favorably, I must live to see the end of WWII. If I stay here, that will be a long 34 years to wait, and I would not have much time to live in the post-war era. If I get back to the 1940s, I’ll still be young, vital, with long decades ahead of me to settle the affairs of the world.
    Yes, I must return.
    “Weather report, Admiral. Cloud Master is calling for increasing overcast, and a storm front building to the northeast.”
    “Very well, send to Bogrov that we are to make ready for operations. Prepare to cast off lines and make our ascent within fifteen minutes.”
    A storm brewing.
    Karpov did not get the details in that report, but the storm was emanating from a massive low to the northeast, over the Stony Tunguska River. A hard wind was blowing, the skies mushrooming up in tall thunderheads, their flanks rippled by lightning. It was as if some power was at work, stirring the airs to fitful wrath, even as Karpov’s own thoughts rose on the winds of his anger and determination. Soon the ship would rise to meet that storm, driven as much by that anger as it would be by the wind. Karpov and Tunguska would surge forward, sailing into the outermost squalls of doom itself.
    He steeled himself, knowing he could be off on a wild bear hunt, with no hope of ever achieving his objective now, but he had to try. It was a storm that sent me here, and so now I’ll look for another, he thought. A voice within him chided that it might take many days, weeks or even months to find a storm with the power he needed to move Tunguska again. And what if he did? Where would he go? At least on the stairs of Ilanskiy there seemed to be a method to the madness of Time. The dots of distant eras were connected by the line of those stairs, but this was a casting of his fate to the wind in the most literal way imaginable.
    Yet another voice, the place in his head that did the planning and scheming and reckoning, rose with his anger to still the inner warning. I have been a most unwelcome guest in the homes I’ve broken into all through this saga, he thought to himself grimly. I tortured Mother Time with my doings, and here I was about to cause her grief and torment yet again. She doesn’t want me here. I can feel it. Eliminating Volkov from here causes so many changes to the history that she’ll be long years, decades sorting out the trouble I cause. So my guess is that she will do everything possible to send me on my way.
    He stepped out of his heated stateroom, his eyes looking down the long central corridor of the airship, looking up at the lattice of her duralumin skeleton, seeing the cold steel ladders rising into small voids between the massive gas bags. Men moved there, like shadowy spiders in a metal web, spinning out wires and rigging cables.
    He turned for the bridge, the hard clump of his boots on the metal grating of the decking. Aboard Kirov he had always climbed up to reach the place of command, but here the inverse was true. He looked for the ladder down, descending through the mass of the ship to reach the lower gondola. Even as he went, he could hear the movement of other men echoing through the massive structure of the ship. That always gave him a quiet little