Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) Read Online Free

take, or he could reveal the impossible truth
that he had lived with and would continue to live with here—a truth that could
simply not be hidden any longer as he saw things. Then he thought of Ivan
Volkov, Vladimir Karpov, and even Sergei Kirov, all men who had also taken that
same impossible journey through time, all key players now in the shattered
reality of this world. The truth, as impossible as it seemed, was his only
recourse.
    “Admiral Tovey, I could spend
hours trying to explain what I am now about to tell you, but I think there is a
better way. You were kind enough to invite me aboard your ship. May I suggest
now that you take a moment to visit me aboard Kirov? There you will have
the answer to all your questions, and if the evidence of your own eyes is not
something you can believe, then I will join you in happy retirement to your
Bethlem Royal Hospital, and the two of us can sit out the remainder of this war
as a pair of crazy old fools.”
     
    * * *
     
    ‘Let us go then, you and I, When
the evening is spread out against the sky,          Like a patient etherized
upon a table…’ Tovey ran the words of T. S. Eliot through his mind now as
they made their way through the small settlement towards the Admiral’s launch
by the quay. ‘There will be time, there will be time… time to murder and
create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a
question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a
hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking
of a toast and tea…’
     The ship loomed in the lee of
the tall stony sail of Tinholmur rock, thrust up from the hidden depths below
in some upwelling of chaos in the earth itself, its sharp, jagged edge still
unweathered by wind and rain over the centuries. As he looked at the ship he
felt that its sharp metallic lines were also the product of chaos, something
wholly unaccountable, out of place, a misfit in time. It was as if this strange
ship had haunted his nightmares all his life.
    He thought once that his
recollection of that harrowing moment aboard King Alfred in the Pacific
had been the source of this long steeped anxiety. One moment he was charging
ahead into battle, leading in the British China Squadron, his forward cannon
blasting away at the ominous shadow on the sea. The next moment the distant
ship seemed to be enveloped in haze, a green mist, luminescent, like the artful
and eerie dance of Saint Elmo’s Fire in the high mast at the edge of a storm.
    The ship just seemed to vanish,
presumed sunk, but with no wreckage ever found in the shallow waters near Iki
Island in the Tsushima Strait. So the official report would state that it was
obliterated, though Tovey could recall no explosion big enough to destroy a
ship of that size. It was a deep mystery, and the report was since lost to the
weathering of time and events. Yet he always thought about it, the ship that
took the Captain’s life and thrust him into his first daring moment of command.
    Now as he drew near to the broad
hull of the battlecruiser Kirov , he felt a strange magnetism, a
connection, linking his life and fate to the cold metal hull and decks and
battlements of this vessel. The closer he came, the more he felt that
compelling sense of discovery, as if he was finally to have the answer to a
stubborn question that had lingered in his mind all his life. It was here… It
was this ship… It was Geronimo .
    He could stop now, just here
beneath the lowering curve of the ship’s hull, the edge of uncertainty. ‘Do
I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and
revisions which a minute will reverse.’
    The growl of the small boat’s
engine stilled and they came along side. Seamen at the bow of the boat tossed
up the rope to tie it off. Tovey felt his arms and legs moving almost
mechanically as he climbed up from the Admiral’s launch, onto the metal
stairwell that had been