Free Paradox Hour by John Schettler

pilots flying top cover. Those planes were now heading south to cover the Kaiser Wilhelm, where a battle was said to be underway and rumors were flying as high as the planes.
    “Have you heard, Marco? Kaiser has sunk two British cruisers, and now he’s after that carrier!”
    “Well don’t just stand there gawking at me,” said Ritter. “Is my plane refueled?”
    “Give me ten minutes. The crews are reloading your guns.”
    Just enough time to grab some hot tea, thought Ritter. Then there is still plenty of daylight for hunting. I’m supposed to fly top cover, but I think I’ll ease over to see what Kaiser is up to. Heilich and Ehrler landed earlier, and they are already top side waiting for their planes. I won’t keep them long.
    The crews were working feverishly on the three Messerschmitts, but it was all of twenty minutes before they finally got Marco’s plane on the elevator. He took the ladder up. Wanting to get the blood flowing in his legs before he strapped into the cockpit again. Already a legend over Poland and France, his term as a carrier fighter pilot had only served to further enhance his reputation. But the work crews had been a little too hasty turning his plane around, and that was going to be another of those small little things in the stream of events that would have a subtle effect on the flow.
    Marco Ritter would find that out very soon.
     

 
     
 
Part III
 
Keeper of the Keys
 
“Who goes there?”
“The Keys.” answers The Chief Warder
“Whose Keys?” the sentry demands.
“King George's Keys.”
“Pass King George's Keys. All's well.”
 
― 21:53 Hours, Bloody Tower Archway, London
     

 
     
Chapter 7
     
    Fedorov could sense the veiled animosity from Miss Fairchild in the beginning, but as the meeting ensued, she came to regard him differently. Their mutual frankness, and the revelations they shared, had done much to ease the tension, and he soon came to feel she was now regarding him as an ally after all.
    Yet that last statement had shaken him, deepening the feeling of guilt he carried within. Calamity… that was quite a word for all they had seen. Was that what they had glimpsed in the empty, cinder black world the ship had visited when they first displaced forward in time? The shock of seeing that world certainly fit the description she had first shared—Grand Finality.
    The thought that Admiral Tovey had established this group he called the Watch was damning enough. A select group of people in the know, all nested within the Royal Navy, had kept a long vigil waiting and watching for the return of Kirov at some future point in their time line. They had given the ship a special code name— Geronimo , the name of a renegade Indian Chief in the American West. It was a bit disturbing to think of his ship and crew as a renegade, something to be chased after, hunted down, destroyed. But that is what the Watch was established for, and now this odd new circumstance that saw Kirov steaming side by side with the Argos Fire , a ship of the Watch, was an unexpected twist. Was it the first step in possibly healing and mending the damage they had done to the history? He could not know, though he hoped as much.
    Fairchild had told him many things that only deepened the sense of mystery and doom he felt. The revelation of how those messages and signals had come to members of the Watch from the future was most alarming. Yet now that he thought on it, he realized it was only his own sense of self-important arrogance that made him think time went no further than the era of his own life.
    We all know and believe in the past, he thought, because it is still alive in our memories. The future was another matter, always a great unknown, never seen but always predicted, and hidden with a shroud of darkness and uncertainty. We have the feeling that we are riding the crest of time, he thought, perhaps like a man or woman surfing on the shore. Our lives are carried inexorably forward by the