Kirov Saga: Armageddon (Kirov Series), page 34
“The key holders?”
Sir Roger held up the odd key he had used to open the hidden passageways at Lindisfarne, smiling. “Yes, the key holders. This little adventure is the arrangement I have made. It is my chance, and by extension your chance at life as well. I have no intention of returning to discover what might be left of the world in 2021. I mean to stay here, Mister Thomas. There’s real adventure here, and that passageway at Lindisfarne is not the only fissure in time I am privy to. There are others, and we can do a good deal of exploring if you have the stomach for it. For us, tomorrow is yesterday. The only way to traverse the years between this date and the world we came from will be the old fashioned way now—one day at a time—but we will make a grand adventure of that.”
He looked at Thomas now, a smile on his lips and a challenge in his eye. “Come along with me, Mister Thomas, and I’ll show you worlds you could only dream of. Are you with me?”
Afterword
Dear Readers,
“We started this, and now we must finish it,” said Fedorov at the outset of this story. If your eyes now scan these lines then you have been with me since that first moment on the bridge of Kirov as Admiral Leonid Volsky shifted uncomfortably in his chair, staring out at the slate grey sea. It has been a long journey and I thank you for coming along. In truth, I meant to move on to some other tale after I first wrote Kirov, but your enthusiasm for the story, and your loyalty as members of a very elite crew, kept the ship sailing.
Many of you have written to me expressing your enthusiasm and enjoyment of this long saga. Some have even told me that their escape into the world of Volsky, Fedorov, Karpov and Orlov was a balm that comforted them when faced with the pain and challenge of their normal life, be it illness, work, or other issues. I was delighted to hear that, and to know that you were out there literally entering my stream of consciousness as it was when I wrote the lines of these stories.
Writing always was, and remains, my first love in life. (If only my typing skill equaled my knack for spinning out prose, I would be a contented man indeed!) As many of you have told me, I have also grown very attached to this story, the characters and their fate. They have become brothers in my mind as I labor to give them life on these pages, and ending the story here will leave a strange emptiness in me for some time after these two long years writing the series.
In this volume, I wanted to keep the story strongly centered on the characters who sailed with that incredible ship, even if they were set at odds with one another. I thought long and hard as to how this story might end. Would it be at the hands of Togo and his dogged fleet? Would young John Tovey rise to the occasion and do on King Alfred what he could not accomplish aboard King George V? Would it be the final duel between Kirov and Kazan that would end everything? That was a real possibility, and the story came within seconds of one side or another opening that engagement. In the end, however, I realized that to come full circle the central conflict had to be given back to the principle characters, and that they would decide the outcome. No external force would end it. Just as the struggle aboard the ship was central to the action of book I in the series, so it would be central here at the end in book VIII. I did not want it to be a torpedo or missile that decided the issue, but the men who sailed together on Kirov in that first novel.
I know that, as the story branched out in the middle volumes, particularly in 9 Days Falling, I challenged many of you to stay at your post and not jump ship like Orlov. That fifth book was perhaps the most difficult to write, as I was expanding the story far beyond the gunwales of Kirov, introducing new plot lines and characters, and building up the mystery of Rod-25 and the secrets surrounding time travel as they were slowly discovered by the characters. The many sub-plots all had their part in contributing to the story, though I knew I was writing those volumes in a much different mode than the tight plot lines of the first three books in the series.
I have read all your comments and reviews and, like any author, you love the good ones, cringe at the bad ones, and carry on with your vision for the story at hand. As the hunt for Orlov came to a climax the plot lines all re-united and brought us to the action in Fallen Angels, and finally to this two volume attempt to bring this all to some satisfying end. Devil’s Garden opened with a bang with six fairly tense chapters involving the fate of Orlov and the Destroyer Orlan. It ended with Fedorov’s determination to do everything possible to rescue Kirov and its crew. I could not finish everything, as both the Fairchild and Duke of Elvington plot lines both now form the roots of new trees that could grow into full novels in the days ahead.
In Armageddon, I therefore decided to keep the focus, and the ending, on Kirov and the main characters involved in the dangerous mission to find the ship instead of trying to further develop these other strong sub-plots that were born in the middle volumes. Those story arcs each got one last chapter here to tie them off until I can return to them in the future, and I deliberately placed them at the very end here so they would not interrupt the flow of the main story.
They were important to the Kirov Saga for many reasons, presenting back story on the war in 2021, showing how vulnerable the energy centers of the world are to the fires of war, and then slowly dove-tailing with the strange mystery of time travel that began with Kirov’s disappearance and was developed in the discovery of Rod-25 with its connection to Tunguska. Eventually I used Elena Fairchild to reveal the more profound implications of those messages sent to the Watch from an unseen future, and the Duke of Elvington to reveal a bit of the mystery of the Key Holders and the hidden fissures in time at places like Lindisfarne, Delphi, and the back stairway at Ilanskiy that Fedorov stumbled upon.
In my mind, any good time travel yarn must eventually deal with the consequences of actions taken by the time travelers in the past and their effect on future history. It was Fedorov’s driving desire to remove the contagion Orlov represented that started that long hunt spanning two continents. Karpov’s stunning betrayal in Devil’s Garden was predictable, as was Fedorov’s urgent effort to bring Kirov home. Those plot lines were driven by the characters themselves. The question of whether the ship should be saved or utterly destroyed was a thorny one. I chose salvation, though my gut feeling tells me that Karpov was correct in the end. I voice these reservations through Admiral Volsky as he contemplates having to give the order to unleash Kazan’s nuclear tipped arsenal against Kirov to be certain nothing is left behind.
The cracks in the mirror of history are now wide and deep, and Fedorov’s dream of preserving the time line or happily returning to the world of 2021 with the shadows of war dissipated and all made well are perhaps naive. Every round from Kirov’s deck guns, and the shattering impact of each missile fired have introduced variations and set up consequences that no member of the ship or crew can fully envision or control.
How would you have voted, to stay in the past and shape the future with the power you had, or to do everything possible to preserve the history as it was? Would you stand with Karpov or Fedorov? The revelations made at the end of the Fairchild and Duke of Elvington plot lines are deeply disturbing. If Fedorov had been completely aware of them I wonder what he would have decided?
The conversations between Volsky, Kamenski, Fedorov and Gromyko over how WWII ended are all very revealing. Each man knows a different ending! Thus the history is not the fixed and certain thing Fedorov would have it be, but something that is constantly shifting, cracking, ever in doubt. Kirov was not the first to take a hammer to fate, and this is a fairly shattering revelation that Fedorov struggles with at the end.
We learn that the Watch as established by John Tovey in 1942 has received cryptic messages from the future, and given vital information to guide their operations. Then the Duke reveals the astounding fact that there are more fissures in time, more cracks in the mirror than any of the characters in Kirov series know—all except one, the enigmatic figure of Pavel Kamenski.
First introduced as an amiable and curious old grandfather in Men of War, Kamenski is slowly revealed to be someone far more important. When Inspector General Kapustin and Volkov obtain Fedorov’s note at the Naval Logistics Building they lead you directly to Kamenski, and his advice to simply “let the matter go” is aimed at covering it up. We later learn that he knows far more about time travel than Volsky and Fedorov realized, and he is really like a groundskeeper in the Devil’s Garden, finding the Admiral and his young ex-navigator have climbed the fence and are sneaking about in the tulips!
You may have been perceptive enough to realize that Kamenski, like Elena Fairchild and the Duke of Elvington, is also a Key Holder, and this is a bit of the mystery that I leave you with at the end—that suspicion and the uncertain ending where Karpov is missing, presumed dead, yet with no body found, and the ship itself is now in unknown waters.
If any of you have ventured to read my five Meridian Series alternate history time travel novels, you already know that long story also ends with this same mystery in the hand of the main character, Physicist Paul Dorland. Fedorov would love Dorland and his intrepid group of time travelers, particularly the head of “Outcomes and Consequences” in that story, a woman named Maeve Lindford who acts as a guardian of the history.
The Meridian team is all about the discovery of time travel by means other than a massive explosion as in this series, so it is much more refined and controlled in that regard. Yet the same tension behind the Kirov Series, that taut rope with Karpov on one side trying to change the history, and Fedorov on the other side trying to preserve it, is at the heart of the Meridian Series.
The project team in Meridian first tries to change the history that has led to a devastating terrorist attack in modern times, but then stumbles upon the ominous fact that others are also walking the shadowy meridians of time, and in fact a “time war” is being fought by two opposing sides from the future. They then pledge their efforts to the protection and preservation of what they call the “Prime Meridian,” or the history as they know it stored in an enormous touchstone database and guarded by the ceaseless patrol of ingenious computer programs installed all over the world called “Golems.”
As that tale ended in the last book, Golem 7, the main character also discovers a strange key in the hold of HMS Rodney during the desperate battle with the German raider Bismarck. This was, in fact, the very same key that the Duke of Elvington finds missing in the damaged section of the Selene Horse sculpture at the British Museum, one of the centerpieces of the famous Elgin Marbles plundered from ancient Greece. That was the novel that inspired me to write Kirov in the first place, and so by ending this way, with the mystery of the Key Holders, I have finally come full circle.
Yet you, like Rodenko and other members of the crew may now ask: where have Kirov and Kazan ended up? My thought was to possibly answer that one day in a ninth book (Altered States) that will find the Russians in a strangely altered world—the world they built with their own meddling in time. Karpov was proved correct. The Humpty Dumpty history has fallen and cracked, and not all the King’s horses nor all the King’s men can put it back together again. As you have already seen in the prologue to Armageddon, Fedorov’s impulsive whisper in Mironov’s ear had some rather alarming consequences! In fact, Fedorov’s own muse that his hunt for Orlov was significant only because it brings him to that fissure in time on the back stairs of Ilanskiy is perhaps proved true. Mironov’s curiosity shows him what is to come in Stalin’s world, and so he takes matters into his own hands.
Altered States will show that fractured world when Russia does not survive the revolution as one unified nation. One side is ruled by the iron hand of Ivan Volkov, the shadow that rose in Stalin’s place as Doctor Zolkin warned, and the other is controlled by Sergei Kirov and his supporting power base. The borders of other nations are re-drawn as well. It is a WWII era timeframe and the world teeters on the brink of a new war. Germany has colonies in the Pacific. There are new and different ship designs based on knowledge gained in the many battles against Kirov. The science of rocketry has been advanced as nations try to build the terrible missile weapons that posed such a grave challenge. Aircraft carriers are shown to be vulnerable to ranged missile fire, etc.
The question at hand is where to go now? As Kamenski said to Volsky and Fedorov in chapter one of this volume: “We need not decide our final course at the moment, but I agree, this will be a major fork in the road, and in some respects it influences a choice we must make before we get underway.”
As to that choice, I invite you all to weigh in and cast your vote to let me know where you might like to see me take my restless pen in another story. I have several projects now underway…
Want something entirely new? Here are two all new alternate history series that will rewrite either the American Civil War or WWII:
Hindenburg
Another naval thriller, this will be the first in a series of alternate history WWII novels that begin with the early adoption of Plan Z by Germany and a dramatically strengthened Kriegsmarine. The battleships Hindenburg and Friedrich der Grosse join Bismarck and Tirpitz at the heart of the fleet, along with Graf Zeppelin class carriers and designs for new “Panzerschiffe” armored battlecruisers. The resulting fleet poses a much greater threat to the Royal Navy which struggles to forestall a German invasion in Operation Seelowe while guarding the vital Atlantic sea lanes England depends upon for her survival. This will be a fast paced alternate history WWII naval action that will re-write the entire history of WWII in the West with an emphasis on the naval campaign.
The Old War Horse
In mid-August of 1863 Lee’s “Old War Horse” of the Eastern theater, General James Longstreet, made a remarkable three week march by road and rail with the divisions of Hood, McLaws and Pickett, and a battalion of artillery under Alexander Porter. The veteran troops arrived on the eve of the Battle of Chickamauga, where Longstreet made a bold and skillful attack to crush the Union army. It was only the stubborn defense of Union General George H. Thomas that earned him the nickname “The Rock of Chickamauga,” and the sluggish incompetence of the irascible Confederate army commander Braxton Bragg that prevented the complete destruction of the Union army under Rosecrans. But what if Bragg had fallen to a sniper’s bullet and Longstreet assumed command of the entire Confederate army of the Tennessee on the eve of the battle? An exciting alternate history retelling of the Civil war in the West that begins at Battle of Chickamauga and sees Longstreet elevated to command the entire Western Theater. His daring and skill can be opposed by only one man, perhaps the finest commander the Union Army ever put in the field, Ulysses S. Grant. First in a series focused on an alternate history of the Civil War.
And then there are these two books that could arise from story threads presented in the Kirov Saga. You have already met the principle characters…Care to Join the Argonauts or take up the challenge the Duke posed to Ian Thomas?
Argonautica: The Odyssey of Argos Fire – Lost Empire
The mysterious box taken aboard Argos Fire does more than anyone expects. The nexus fades and the ship appears in an ancient world before the great catastrophe and flood that destroyed a highly advanced civilization in the Mediterranean. There they encounter strange craft in the air and on the seas of the Aegean, and soon learn the answer to the mystery posed by Plato so long ago—the fabled lost empire of Atlantis was real, though it is not found to be the marvel of civility the legends speak of, but a cruel and oppressive empire crushing the fledgling cultures in Egypt, Greece and Rome under its iron foot…Until the heat of Argos Fire arrives to give challenge!
Keyholders Saga: Roll of Thunder - Waterloo
Continue the journey of Sir Roger Ames, Duke of Elvington, and Ian Thomas as they arrive on the eve of one of the most significant and important battles of all time, Waterloo. Pursuing a personal vendetta, the Duke has a mind to end the life of a key player on that field of glory, which results in a markedly different outcome in this alternate history retelling of the battle of Waterloo. Yet the mystery of another key is also followed, to London where the Duke hopes to find the missing key that was hidden in the base of the Selene Horse, a centerpiece of the Elgin Marbles then being stored at Harrington House. What door it might open to another past?
Gotta have more Volsky? Can't live without Fedorov? Missing Orlov? Here is a possible 9th Kirov Series novel that I mentioned above.
Kirov Saga 9: Altered States
Kirov and Kazan move forward and find themselves stuck in the midst of WWII once again, only the world is not the same! The consequences of all their interventions in history have now calcified to a new reality. The political borders of nations have been re-drawn, Colonial powers vie for control of the undeveloped world, and Russia itself is a divided nation. Discovering they still possess a decisive edge in weapons technology they must now decide which side to take and struggle to end a long and terrible war that threatens millions more lives.
Stay In Touch!
Amazon doesn’t tell any of us poor authors who you are out there, so I have no way to contact you with advanced notice of new releases. Want to be informed directly by email when any of the above stories are ready for release? Register at my web site and receive advanced notice.
If you would care to cast your vote on which title you would most like to see you can do so at the link below or vote by simply dropping me an email here: mailto:john@writingshop.ws
