Stormtide Rising

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After the shock and surprise of finding that Takami was not the only warship from 2021 to challenge Karpov’s reign of terror, Kirov narrowly averts disaster. Once again, Karpov resorts to the last extreme to repel the dangerous attack by stealth jets that his helicopters have been unable to see and track. The string of glide bombs unleashed by Admiral Kita’s F-35’s seemed, at first, to be much less of a threat than the fast moving missiles Kirov might fling at its enemies, yet they prove to be very accurate, capable of delivering a saturation attack that simply puts too many weapons on target for the ship to defend itself. As Karpov himself grimly admits, something always gets through.

His resort to the use of one of his three precious nuclear warheads to blast one wave of the glide bomb attack out of the sky, was still barely enough to save the ship. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that: “One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” Karpov, though sobered and wizened by his experience, still has that chaos within, which is why he does not hesitate to manifest it in the world about him. He unleashed his star, and saved the ship, and yet his final resort to speed and endurance remains unspoken testimony to the danger he now perceives, not only to the ship and crew, but to the soaring artifice of his ambitions; his lofty position as head of the Free Siberian State, and his aspirations to restore Russia’s lost territories, seized by Japan so long ago after his failed sortie to 1908. He has unfinished business there, as we shall see at the end of this volume.

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