These odd feelings and notions aren’t simply hunches or intuition, he thought. It’s apowerful sensation, like deja vu, a shadow of a deeply hidden memory upwelling in my mind. These must be remnants of those other lives… echoes. In fact, Turing felt them as well, though Cunningham seemed completely unaffected this way. He was properly astounded by what he learned at that briefing, and I’ll have to keep a good eye on him now, but I sense no deeper root in him like the one that seems to be growing within me-at least not yet.
It was more than memories, much more. There were tangible things from that other world in this one, the intelligence files he had just told Fairchild about, and the strange box aboard her ship-the device she mentioned. And what about Turing’s watch! There was another little mystery that was as yet unsolved. It went missing in this world, and then turned up in a box from some other telling of these events. How could all these things from other times find their way into this world? How were these memories emerging from within him?
A box from the future-a device… Fairchild said she had instructions that led her to Delphi. Someone must have a flair for the dramatic, he thought, hiding the damn thing beneath the Oracle’s shrine. Now that I think of it, that young Russian Captain intimated there were other places like this, where the rifts in time caused by all these massive detonations had become permanent. Think on it-gateways in time, portals to other worlds. Yet, from everything the Russians have told me, things done in one world seem to have an effect on all the others!
That was why the Russians remained here, and why Admiral Volsky has thrown in with Great Britain. They’re trying to prevent things that happened in their own time, things they have seen, a great doom that comes upon the world in 2021. It was a doom of our own making, or so they have led me to believe. These missiles they fire, scratching the blue sky, driven on with relentless yellow fire, like mindless sharks-that is what put an end to their world. Yet how ironic it is that we need them now, in this war, to give us any hope of seeing they never consume the world in the next one.
A bell rang, turning over the hour, and setting the new watch. He suddenly became aware of his senses in the here and now, the smell of the sea, the light on the water, the streaks of dark grey in the distant clouds that promised the threat of rain.
My life is wound about this Russian ship like a vine now, he realized. My God… I believe I saw this ship decades ago, in the Straits of Tsushima, aboard King Alfred, off Iki Island. Then boxes of reports and photographs appear, and notes from the future, bearing my name. The Russian Captain came to the same conclusion as Miss Fairchild did about all this. He could still hear Fedorov’s voice… “ How could images of events we lived through in 1941 and 1942 be here, a year before any of that ever happened, in the year 1940? Unless-and this is the only possibility we could grasp at-unless they were brought here, from some future year, and by someone we have yet to identify who is also capable of moving in time.”
He smiled now, a strange light in his eye. Someone planned it, the mission for this Argos Fire. The order went out through the Watch, the organization I supposedly founded. The note bore my name. Why feathers and fiddlesticks… I think I may know who brought these things here, and it wasn’t old H.G. Wells with his Time Machine as I told the Admiral.
“Excuse me Admiral. Message from the Russians.”
Tovey was again pulled from his reverie into the urgency of the moment. He took the decrypted message and read it quietly… Argos Fire had radar contact at long range on the Italian fleet. CONTACT ON LARGE ENEMY FLEET REPORTED, BEARING NW AT 120 KILOMETERS. The coordinate of the contact followed, and estimated composition. Many ships. Steel in the water, and an impending battle at sea rising with the weather off his bow. RECOMMEND YOU JOIN A.B.C. — HOSTILITIES IMMINENT.
That was an understatement, thought Tovey.
“Mister Towers, send to Captain Bridge on Eagle and have them reconnoiter this contact and ascertain ship type and number. I want to know what we’re looking at.”
“Right away sir.”
That was a question on Admiral Volsky’s mind as well that morning. Rodenko had reported no less than thirty separate contacts! At a range of 120 kilometers, the two forces were closing the distance between one another by at least 40 kilometers per hour. They would have the enemy on their horizon in under three hours time, and by noon the battle would be fully engaged. Yet Volsky had no intention of waiting for the enemy to get within gun range. He could have fired an hour ago, but chose to take the time to coordinate his actions with the other fleet elements.
