Final impact

Kicji nodded, and left to inform the Chukchi. They were so well hidden in crevices, under hanging rocks, and inside the caves that riddled these mountains, Ivanov could not keep track of them. Good. It meant the NKVD would have the same problem.

His own team, Vennie, Sergo, and Ahmed Khan, had huddled down to share some food and drink before the day’s march.

Ivanov quickly unpacked his comm gear, setting up the pulse unit and its dish on a small collapsible tripod. He jacked in the flexipad and set the program to transmit an encrypted signal on wide-area datacast. The burst would travel outward in an arc for five thousand kilometers. He had no idea whether it would pass over a Fleetnet node, but he had to assume that Kolhammer had moved some assets into the area to take the feed.

To be certain, he would repeat the process whenever possible until he received verification that the signal had been intercepted. It was a ham-fisted, inefficient method of communicating such important intelligence, but without satellite cover they had no choice.

D-DAY + 40. 13 JUNE 1944. 0629 HOURS.

THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW.

So pleased was the Vozhd that he ordered breakfast served in the conference room. Even Admiral Kuznetsov looked more relaxed. It seemed that, today at least, he would benefit from Stalin’s capricious moods.

The main table was littered with official papers and dossiers, with plates of half-eaten food, pots of coffee, and bottles of champagne. Beria used a glass spoon to scoop dollops of Beluga caviar onto hot buttered black bread. Stalin threw grapes and hunks of cheese down the table.

“It is a great day, Comrades. A great day,” he declared. “Today we change history. Today the correlation of forces shifts back into alignment. I knew. I knew-did I not tell you? — that there was a mechanical inevitability about all of this. We may not understand the physics yet, but the laws of dialectical materialism would not allow the revolution to fail. And so, as antihistorical pressures built up, they ruptured history itself, delivering us the means to…”

Beria tuned him out. The old fool was talking nonsense again.

The NKVD boss well remembered the shock and fear that lived on Stalin’s face in the first days after the Emergence. They all expected Nazi storm troopers to burst through the gates of the Kremlin in some sort of invincible supertank, firing death rays and wonder rockets. Stalin had claimed that the Emergence was a product of an unstable history on the other side of the event, but it was all so much eyewash.

As information had trickled in, Beria had been briefed by his best scientists about the experiment that had been conducted by the madman called Pope. About what he had been attempting to do, and the theory behind it. He had tried to explain it to the Vozhd and the rest of the war cabinet, but had backpedaled when it became obvious that Stalin needed an explanation for why all of his statues would have been pulled down.

For Stalin it was simple. History was wrong.

And since history was subject to determinist laws, just like an apple falling from a tree, it had corrected itself. Now the workers’ revolution would proceed as nature intended.

A couple of Red Army guards appeared pushing one of the electronic boards retrieved from the Vanguard. A nervous technician followed them.

“Excellent. Excellent. Bring it in,” Stalin roared. “Turn it on, man. Quickly,” he continued. “We have the business of state to carry out.”

Beria chased the last of his caviar around the bottom of the bowl while the shaking apparatchik attempted to do as he’d been ordered. When the dull white screen winked into life, you would have thought he’d just given birth. The technician handed Stalin a small black, handheld device and attempted to instruct him on its use. The general secretary tossed it back at him.

“You do it,” he instructed.

How fortunate for the poor bastard, Beria thought. Stalin has enough trouble making an old gramophone play. It wouldn’t be worth one’s life to embarrass him with a complicated piece of equipment like this.

After a few seconds’ fiddling with the remote control, a map of the world appeared.

“Marvelous,” Stalin said. “Can you-what is the correct word-define Berlin and Tokyo? Make them flash or something?”

He could.

“Good. Very good,” Stalin said. He was positively beaming. “Marshal Timoshenko, can you see those two cities?”

The defense minister nodded, unsure what this was about.

“And if necessary, do you have a bomber that could reach them?”

Timoshenko appeared to think it over. “The Tu-Sixteen could easily make it to Berlin and back, if we staged the flight out of a Polish base,” he conceded. “Tokyo would be more difficult. It could certainly be reached from Vladivostok. But the return trip is too far.”

“But the pilots could reach the Japanese capital?”

“Oh yes.”