Damn… this ship had combat damage, missiles expended from our magazines, men missing, and all the souls here forever changed by what we have experienced, what we have endured. But that ship would be fresh from the docks at Severomorsk, its magazine full, undamaged in any way, and with a full crew of innocent souls who had no idea of what they were about to face.
They aren’t the same…. It may appear so, but on a quantum level the two ships would be distinctly different, two whirlpools in the stream, two expressions the world might simply call Kirov, but they would be completely different, like identical twins—doppelgangers. And considering they would not even be occupying the same spacetime event, being in two completely different locations… Was it possible that both could exist at the same time? And if this is true…
There is no Paradox!
That thought struck like the bell of hope ringing in his weary mind, yet one question still remained unanswered. If this were true, then what was happening to us now? Something told him his hope might be standing on shaky ground, and in this instance, his deep unconscious objection to his tortured logic was quite correct. For all of his assumptions and suppositions were simply wrong…
Chapter 5
The time for speculation and pondering the physics was over. The grey fog that still surrounded the ship persisted like a funeral shroud, and Fedorov knew they had to do something.
“I have never seen sea conditions like this,” said Volsky. “The ocean is still and calm, and this sea fog is impenetrable.”
“For the cloud deck to extend up so high is most unusual,” Fedorov agreed. “Every compass on the ship is spinning like a top, which is probably an effect from that uncontrolled shift. But the weather?”
“How long before it will break?”
“Hard to say, Admiral. Advection fog like this usually forms when a warmer air mass migrates above the colder sea surface air. Yet for this to extend up so high that the KA-40 could not find clear air is unheard of. It’s usually confined to the boundary layer of the warmer air mass, and just manifests as surface fog.”
“And we have no wind,” said Volsky. “So here we sit, stuck in the doldrums.”
“True sir, but I am beginning to suspect that this is not advection fog. It seems… almost unnatural.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well it’s clear we shifted, as we’ve lost all contact with the British and Gromyko. So something happened to disturb the ship’s position in time. Who knows why? The ship was beginning to exhibit signs of instability, just like that time in the Pacific after the last air strike we faced. Remember? We turned north, well ahead of the cruiser Tone, but then it just appeared because I think we were pulsing, phasing, moving in and out of the time we were in. That allowed Tone to close the distance, because it was moving in space when we phased.”
“Then no time passed for us when that happened?”
“The evidence seems to support that. Tone should not have been able to catch up with us that quickly, so when we phased, we must have been in a kind of suspended time. And yet, I never lost the sensation that we were in the sea the whole time. We don’t know where we go when this happens, but we are clearly somewhere, because the ship remains stable and afloat on the sea, just as it is now.”
“You mean you believe we are in one of these phasing states now?”
“I can think of no other explanation for this heavy fog. It simply cannot manifest all of a sudden like it did, nor could it expend up beyond the ceiling of the KA-40. You are correct Admiral, these sea conditions are nigh on to impossible. It is unnatural.”
That gave Volsky a chill as he looked about them, the grey fog so close on the ship that the bow was barely visible through the forward view screens.
“So we are somewhere,” he said. “Elsewhere, a kind of purgatory where we sit in judgment at time’s court. Is that what has happened?”
“That is a colorful way of thinking about it sir, but you may be correct. Then again, all these effects we’ve been experiencing may simply be the result of our approach to Paradox. To be equally colorful, it looms like a vast hidden ice berg out there in that fog somewhere, and there we were, sailing blindly along as