Winter Storm by John Schettler Page A

eventually came to move in time? Could he even initiate
such a shift at will? Is that why he was so adamant that he should be the one
to command Kirov in these early days. Did he plan this, plan to shift
away and return home to 2021, leaving me here? Has that bastard stolen my life
as well as my ship? It felt strange to call his own self that, but at that
moment, with Kirov and the Siberian both missing, he felt very
estranged.
    All
these thoughts passed through his mind on a pulse of fear, and he could feel
his anxiety rising, his heart beating faster. Tyrenkov was watching his
reaction to all of this very closely now. Studying him, but saying nothing.
    “Don’t
just stand there. What do you know about all of this?”
    “Only
what our eyes have already shown us. The ship was there, and now it is gone.
Yet we are where we belong. That can only tell me that the ship has moved, but
how or where I cannot say.”
    Karpov
walked over to the man, leaning in and lowering his voice so Bogrov would not
hear. “Tell me this was not planned, Tyrenkov. Did my brother say anything to
you? Tell me, by God, or I’ll order your own damn security men to pluck out
your eyes!”
    “Sir! I
knew nothing whatsoever of this. No. There was no plan that I was aware of.”
    “Then
you are telling me this was another accident? We saw no evidence of that—no man
reported an explosion.”
    “No
accident, no explosion,” said Tyrenkov. “But things happen—this I have learned
well enough.”
    Karpov
gave him a frustrated look. Then he took a long breath, his mind already
spelling out the inevitable truth for him. Kirov was gone, it had moved
again, and he was standing here on this god forsaken Zeppelin, like a passenger
at a train station with the wrong ticket and at the wrong time. If the ship
went home again, he wasn’t going there with it. If it fled into the past, then
it had to have moved to a time before he first arrived here, or so he reasoned.
    So here
I am, the new Siberian Karpov, so wet behind the ears here that I’ll have
icicles hanging from them when the cold sets in. Here I am, commander of the
Free Siberian Air Corps, and more, the visible head of state of all Siberia
now. I was left in the lurch, but at least the perks are well appointed. Yet
what in God’s name do I do here?
    He
considered the possibilities, but had no immediate answers. All he could do was
stare out the observation windows at that empty sea beneath them, and think of
everything he had just lost.
     
    *
     
    Aboard Kirov , the Siberian was thinking of the very same
thing. Every time the ship moved he was taking his whole life and pushing it
out onto the roulette table, rolling the dice. It was all there, like a stack
of red and white chips, his career, his carefully husbanded fleet, the power he
had fought and scraped for these long years, all the friends, allies and
enemies along the way. He knew what Dobrynin was going to say the moment he got
there.
    “Chief,
what is our status?”
    “Reactors
are stable, Captain. We’re in no danger. It was just a minor flux.”
    “Did
you run a control rod maintenance routine recently?”
    That
struck Dobrynin as an odd question. “Now that you mention it, I did, sir. Did
Mister Fedorov tell you about it?”
    “Fedorov?
He’s not an engineer, Chief. What would he know about it?”
    “Well
he was in here asking me a lot of questions about the matter a few days ago.
Said he wanted to watch and asked if I would message him before the next rod
inspection. It’s a fairly simple procedure, sir. One rod goes in while the
other comes out. I used to run it every two weeks, but I always shave two days
off that cycle when we’re at sea.”
    Rod-25…
The culprit had now been confirmed. Dobrynin had mindlessly gone about his
business, and Karpov kicked himself mentally for not paying closer attention to
the presence of that control rod on the ship, especially since he knew what it
was capable of. Rod-25 had moved them