Kirov Saga: Altered States (Kirov Series) by John Schettler Read Free Book Online Page A

the Fregat radar was recovering rapidly. “We have radar out to near maximum range sir. A very rapid recovery this time. The odd thing is that we should be getting landform returns from Kamchatka to the east, we were only about a hundred kilometers west of the peninsula when we initiated the shift. There are elevations there as high as 1900 meters and we should be seeing them clearly at this range. What we do have is landforms to our north, and I’m sending the data to navigation for a digital map match.”
    The Admiral immediately looked for Fedorov, who was already working on plotting their position in time. Now he called up the data Rodenko had sent him and the computer’s response immediately gave him a sense of foreboding.
    “This is impossible,” he said aloud, “impossible!”
    Hearing that, the Admiral knew enough to put caution at the forefront of his thinking. Yet he retained his composure, looking to the Helmsman and issuing a quiet order. “The ship will come full about and ahead two thirds.”
    “Aye, sir.”
    “Mister Nikolin, signal that ship in the same Morse code standard you received. Simply bid them farewell, please.”
    “Very well, sir.”
    “Now if you would be so kind, Mister Fedorov.” Volsky swiveled his chair and looked to the navigation station, seeing Fedorov still looking at the screen map with a shocked expression.
    “Sir,” he said haltingly. The Admiral’s last order to Nikolin rattled in his mind in an odd moment of serendipity just as he realized what he was looking at. “That is Cape Farewell! We’re sitting about 220 kilometers south of Greenland! According to that radar plot our position is 57.51 by -45.24. Our longitude is identical to what it was at the time of our shift, but our latitude…Why we’ve move half way around the earth, a full 200 degrees to the west! We’ve moved in space!”
    “Calm yourself, Mister Fedorov. I need you to think. How could this have occurred?”
    Fedorov thought for a moment, his eyes still scanning the data he had been keying on sun and moon data. Now an idea occurred to him and he put his estimated sun and moon positions into the computer again for this new position in space and asked it to display all dates where those two bodies would be in this position. He soon saw what he feared.
    “Admiral, the sun-moon configuration at this location would be valid for 1940—June 12 to be exact. We’ve shifted alright, but in space this time. It’s as if the procedure simply picked us up on the 11th in the Pacific and then dropped us here a day later…Yes…” The light of a sudden discovery flashed in his eyes. “That it! The only thing that makes any sense here is the earth’s rotation. It’s as if we moved into some null zone in time, but only for a brief moment. In that interval the earth rotated and then we manifested again, on the exact same longitude but half way around the earth!”
    “Good lord,” said Volsky. “You mean to say we disappeared, but did not move in time?”
    “No sir, it was as if we were simply suspended in time, then dropped into this present again when we just manifested. It’s a wonder we made a safe landing here. Another few degrees to the west and we would be sitting in Canada on dry land!”
    “Thankfully the surface of the earth is mostly water,” said Volsky, but now we are in the pot again, and from the looks of this radar contact and that ship out there it is starting to heat up. Any further trouble, Mister Nikolin?”
    “No sir. They just signaled farewell back.”
    “Mister Fedorov…Please open your history books and kindly find out what is going on here.”
    “Fifty ships in the Sea of Okhotsk did not make any sense in the world, sir, particularly with one of them flying a Royal Navy Ensign. But here they make perfect sense, on this day and in this year, if my calculations are accurate.”
    “Then what have we just encountered here?”
    Fedorov smiled. “I’ll have your answer in just