“I will see the unbelief in your eyes,” he said with Popski translating. “And yes, I know that you may look upon me as your enemy, though I offer my hand in friendship now, and I speak to you with absolute fidelity and sincerity. Yet the information I must now disclose is critical, the darkest secret the world has ever known. I do not use these words lightly. Secret. Yes, My ship and crew have lived with the burden that word implies since the accident I will soon reveal to you-a mishap that changed the course of history itself. Only one man among us is entirely convinced that he has his feet firmly planted in the here and now-General O’Connor. He will tell you to a certainty that this is the year 1941, and you must believe him, as I have had to believe this same terrible truth. Yet he now struggles to believe that we now stand here like dark angels from another world, with weapons and power at our disposal unlike anything this world has ever seen.”
He looked from one officer to another now, seeing various reactions in the eyes of the men, and when his gaze fell on O’Connor he felt an upwelling of compassion for the man. The innocence of his life was now forever gone. He would never be the same man again after hearing all this.
“Yes,” Fedorov continued, “that is how many might perceive us. This world may not be able to hear what you must now hear and know. The collective arms of every soul on this earth may not be able to hold what you must now grasp. Can you imagine it? This knowledge is, in itself, a force of chaos and terrible power. My crew learned all of this the hard way, in the fire of combat. Your men, each and every one, will soon learn the same way. Yet though it was easy to contain this terrible knowledge on a single ship, hidden in the vast oceans of the world, that will not be the case here if this brigade goes north, as it certainly must in the hours ahead.”
He looked at them, an almost pleading look on his face. “But anything we can do to limit the general knowledge of what you learn here is of the greatest importance. In war there are secrets-we all know this. Weapons will be built, forces moved and gathered in secrecy, plans devised and sprung into motion. Secrecy is no stranger to the war fighter. Lives depend on it. The hope of victory over a determined and dangerous enemy requires it. But in this we face the hard task of denying even those we fight for the full knowledge of who we are, and where we have come from-a future that was again wracked in the throes of an all consuming war. Well, I have seen the end of it, as I will soon relate. I have seen the place we were all condemned to, the purgatory, the hell of our own making, and I have been struggling here to prevent that enmity and war from ever taking shape-the war that will follow this one as surely as night follows day. And yet we must struggle on in the shadows, gentlemen, even though we few will be the sole carriers of this light of truth, and we will bear a very hard burden as we do so.”
He could see that some of the officers were following him, others waiting for more clarity, still others with expressions of disbelief and suspicion, but he struggled on.
“Some men of this world must know what I will now reveal, a chosen few who find themselves entrusted with the fate of all those they now guide and command in this war. Up until this moment only two men in this world have come to learn this truth. General O’Connor here is the third, and soon we will have to welcome General Wavell to this dark circle. Yet, as I will now tell you, the force inherent in this knowledge can tear this world apart. It is fantastic, unbelievable, terrible, but nonetheless true. And we are now watchers on a crumbling wall of secrecy that hold the full fury of this knowledge from the innocence of this world. If it breaks, if we break, and this truth were to become generally known… I fear the fabric of history, perhaps even the fabric of human society itself, might be rent asunder and lost forever. And what world would it give rise to? This will be our responsibility, because Destiny now lies prostrate at our feet. Fate waits at our beck and call, and gentlemen, Time itself has lost her cold hard grip upon our souls. We are men unlike any others who have ever walked this earth, and we must measure that, stand up now, and act accordingly.”
Then he told them… he told them the whole long and bewildering journey that had brought him to this place, beginning slowly with that last moment when he still sat in the innocence of unknowing.
“It was the 28th of July, in the year 2021, and I was at my station as acting Navigator on the bridge of the Russian battlecruiser Kirov…”
