Nemesis Read Free Page A

borders.”
    “The
British did this?”
    “They
were just the devil’s adjutant. No. It was the United States that became our
real nemesis. Great Britain was just their cute little shadow puppet after the
war. They never survived as an empire after 1945. They lose India, and most
every other outpost of note, forsaking all colonies East of Suez, as they
called it. But they didn’t even hold Suez for very much longer, or any of their
hard won territories in the Middle East. Oh, their oil companies continued on,
but there was no longer any real power beyond the exchange of oil for pounds
sterling. That was what Great Britain became. In my time their vaunted Royal
Navy, unrivaled at the start of this war, was reduced to no more than twenty
active ships. But the Americans? That is a completely different story.”
    “They
become our enemy?”
    “Our
chief opponent on the world stage, until their meddling and grinding finally
wore us down. The Soviet Union, as we called it, collapsed, and formally
dissolved in December of 1991, fifty years from now. After that, the entire
state disintegrated into not three, but fifteen separate nations. We
lose all the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Belarus. We lose
all of the Ukraine, and the Crimea with it, and everything Volkov now controls
disintegrates into a patchwork of six or seven separate states. We manage to
hold a little slice of the Caucasus, for the oil, of course, and the heartland
of Russia itself, and all of Siberia, remain united. Yes, Kirov, Siberia
remains loyal. And the nation I will soon lead even had all of Primorskiy
Province under its control, and a nice deep water port at Vladivostok. It
wasn’t until another man named Vladimir decided to do something about this sad
state of affairs, that we began to get back on our feet, but that took us
nearly twenty years.
    “I… I
had no idea…”
    “Of
course not. You went up those stairs at Ilanskiy from 1908, and they took you
to this war, did they not? You saw enough of a disaster underway here—the
gulags, concentration camps that killed millions, and forced millions more into
slave labor. Hitler gets busy with that soon as well. He has a particular
dislike of the Jews, and starts rounding them up and literally gassing them, and
burning the bodies in brick ovens.”
    “This I
have seen,” said Kirov, his face drawn and hard now. “And just a little more...
Once I went up the stairs twice, and I think I may have reached your time.
Things were very different, particularly the rail yard. There were books on a
shelf near the window, and I saw it was about the history of the war, this war!
So I took them, and hastened back down those stairs. It was a very eerie
feeling, to think I had reached some far off future, and I never went back
again.”
    “Then
you know what the Nazis have planned,” said Karpov. Few knew about it in the
beginning, but by the end of the war they called it the Holocaust, Hitler’s
‘Final Solution’ gone awry. And realize that is exactly what he will do here if
he wins this war. But we can stop him, Mister General Secretary. We can stop
him. In fact, we will be the two men most directly responsible for doing that.
You have seen the history. Yes? So you know that the British and Americans will
liberate France and the Low Countries, and knock Italy out of the war as well,
but the rest is our task. Germany fields about 330 divisions in this war, and
at any given time, eighty percent of them are fighting us, here on Russian
soil, until we eventually grind them under our heel and drive all the way to
Berlin. We beat the Americans there, but just barely. After that, the ‘Iron
Curtain’ falls and divides Europe for the next 50 years… Until we fall…”
    The
silence in the room was broken only by the slow ticking of a great Grandfather
clock that stood imposingly on one wall of the stateroom. Its steady tick-tock
marked out the moments, and Kirov suddenly realized that far more