Winter Storm by John Schettler

recorded time.
It’s a few minutes after 08:00, but look how high the sun is already. That’s a
late afternoon sun, but I can still taste my eggs and sausage from breakfast.
Sir, on this evidence alone, I would suggest we have moved again—in time.”
    Karpov’s
eyes narrowed. “I am going to speak with Chief Dobrynin. In the meantime, use
that head of yours to analyze where we might be, given the conditions you can
observe. Rodenko, you have the bridge. Notify me if Nikolin hears anything
significant.
    Fedorov
knew exactly why Karpov felt so compelled to get to engineering now—Rod-25. He
wanted to answer the same question Fedorov had in his own mind, and he was
almost certain the Chief had run his maintenance procedure. Dobrynin pulled a
control rod, and in its place he dipped in Rod-25…. But Karpov’s order was the
question now. Where in God’s name were they?
     
    *
     
    The Captain was still scanning the sea, his eyes almost
desperate, but the ship was nowhere to be seen. He received the very same
startling news that his elder self had been given, only this time Fedorov’s
premise was well proved. Tunguska had been hovering about 3000 meters
off the starboard bow of Kirov , and then, the watchman ran in and said
he could no longer make out the ship. Karpov went to look himself, finding the
best pair of field glasses he could get his hands on. There was a low mist on
the sea, but visibility was fairly good from their present altitude. He considered
setting up one of the Oko panels they had just received from Kirov ,
but knew it would be days before he could properly rig the power generation to
make a good match with the new equipment. They would have to rig all new wiring
to get adequate power to the unit. It was not simply a matter of plugging the
system in and turning it on.
    That
said, the Topaz radar on the airship should have been enough to produce
a return on the battlecruiser, but it saw nothing on the sea at all, out to its
maximum range of fifteen kilometers. He gave orders to descend for a closer
inspection of the water, but nothing was found, no wreckage, no ship. Kirov was gone.
    He had
only just come to terms with the possibility that the ship had actually moved
in time, and had no inkling that Tunguska also possessed that
capability. So in this instance, the younger Karpov correctly assumed that it
was the ship that had vanished. But how? He knew nothing of Rod-25, and there
had been no accident this time, no explosion.
    “What
could have happened?” he said aloud.
    Tyrenkov
was at his side, equally perplexed. “Bogrov says we are still at our old
coordinates, and conditions indicate all is as it was before.”
    “Yes?
Well my ship is not where it was, and a battlecruiser does not simply vanish
like that! This doesn’t make any sense!”
    Oh, but
it does, he thought as soon as he had said that. I was on the ship when Kirov did exactly that, bringing me here to this impossible time and place. And now
it’s gone again, vanished, leaving me marooned here. He could hear the words of
his other self when the Siberian had tried to explain it to him.
    “The
ship must have slipped through some hole in time, and then here it was, in the
middle of WWII. It did this and it did that, and then it slipped again. I’ll
make a very long story short. Eventually that ship out there found its way to
the year 1940, a little over a year ago, and it has been here ever since, until
it slipped again, vanishing last May.”
    So it
has slipped yet again, thought Karpov, reaching the only conclusion that could
explain what had happened. But where did it go? Has it slipped back to our own
time in 2021? Has it slipped further into the past? As far as he could
determine, with reports from Tyrenkov and Bogrov, they were still drifting over
the Kara Sea in August of 1941. But the ship was no longer with them…
    He
passed a dark moment, wondering whether his elder brother had planned this? Did
he know how the ship