No we don’t, do we, thought MacRae, and that’s what bothers me. But he said nothing of this, turning the bridge over to Dean to go below. He wanted to check on the situation below the forward deck, and see how the crew was settling in to this full wartime status. Yet the question still nagged at him like an itch he could not reach, so he caught hold of Mack Morgan in a corridor and voiced it again.
“We know this ship tangled with the Americans in the Pacific, right? Well at the briefing we heard they mixed it up pretty well here before they came to their senses and sided with us. Why would we not know about those engagements? Wouldn’t they be history to us from where we were back in 2021?”
Morgan did not quite know what to say. He had never considered the question and had no immediate answer for MacRae.
“Good point there, Gordie, if you don’t mind my using the handle.”
“Not here, between the two of us, but in front of the crew you’ll stick to Captain.”
“Aye, sir,” Morgan gave him his toothy white smile. “Well what about that Nexus talk Miss Fairchild laid on us.”
“What’s that?”
“Well the lady said we were in some kind of Nexus point as I recall it. And to be honest, who had their nose in the history books with all that was going on these last few weeks.”
“True,” said MacRae, “but you haven’t forgotten who led the assault at D-Day, did you?”
“Good old Monty.”
“Yes, but the Yanks will say it was Eisenhower.”
“Let them. Monty was the de facto commander on the ground.”
“That’s the point I’m making, Mack. If this damn Russian ship raised hell with the Royal Navy in 1941, then why don’t I remember ever hearing about it in school?”
“You’d best ask her ladyship,” said Morgan.
“I’ve missiles to look after for the moment.”
But MacRae made it a point to ask when he could, and was never quite happy with the answer he got from Elena.
Tovey was on the bridge of HMS Invincible, watching the missiles score the blue sky with their white tails. The spectacle seemed to stir a memory within him, and not of the missiles he had seen in the recent North Atlantic engagement, or above Suez. No. It was something deeper, that odd feeling again, just as he felt it welling up when he heard the word Geronimo. Miss Fairchild’s mention of the Watch also had the same effect on him, and he was thinking deeply about that note she had handed him.
The woman seemed convinced that this device, as she called it, had come from the future-not her own future, but years even more lost and distant beyond her time. The conclusion they had come to, that the fractures in time might extend in both directions, was most disturbing. Yet that was not what bothered him, it was his name affixed to that note.
“ Should you read this your mission will have concluded as planned…” As planned? That suddenly had a rather ominous tinge, for he realized that his name there implied he was most likely aware of that plan, if not its author. Yet how could that be possible? How would I get hold of something like that, a box from the future with something in it capable of moving that ship in time. Why, the whole matter seems like it was designed to bring that ship here, to this moment, to serve in this hour of need.
A sudden thought occurred to him, and brought a smile to his lips. This whole business with none of these people knowing about the Orenburg Federation is rather telling, isn’t it? Why, it’s as if they all came from a completely different world, a copy of this world, yet different. In fact, the Russians fairly well confirmed this. The words of Admiral Volsky came to mind now, from that fateful meeting aboard the Russian ship off the Faeroes… “ Quite frankly, the world as it now stands does not seem to be the one we left. This will also be difficult for you to grasp, but the history we knew did not see our homeland divided in civil war as it is…”
They claim they met with me off Gibraltar in 1942, to parley, and the evidence of that meeting was plain to see in the archive. Why, I even knew the name of the place-Las Palomas. It just popped into my mind like I had lived all that through in this life, a memory emerging from some hidden depth, like a fish leaping from the unfathomable sea, and then it was gone…
Who’s memory was that? Mine? It couldn’t be. The thought of another John Tovey out there, interacting with the Russians, establishing the shadowy group that came to be called the Watch… well it gave him a bit of a shiver. The more he thought about things, the deeper the feeling became seated in him.
