The baby cried.
It wasn't a soft cry. It was a siren.
Jake walked the length of the bedroom, bouncing Yuri in his arms. The floorboards creaked rhythmically.
"Shh," Jake whispered. "The Americans are sleeping. You'll wake them up."
Yuri didn't care about geopolitics. He was hungry. He was wet. He was furious at the universe for existing.
Nadya was asleep in the bed. She hadn't moved in four hours. The birth had drained her. She looked like a porcelain doll that had been dropped and glued back together.
Jake looked at his son's face.
It was a small, red potato. But the eyes—when they opened—were dark. Intelligent.
"You have my nose," Jake murmured. "Poor kid."
A knock on the door. Quiet. respectful.
Jake opened it a crack.
Menzhinsky stood there. He held a telegram.
"It is 3 AM, Vyacheslav," Jake hissed.
"History doesn't sleep," Menzhinsky said. He looked at the baby. "And neither does the heir, apparently."
"What is it?"
"The British," Menzhinsky said. "They have moved the Mediterranean Fleet to the Dardanelles. They are threatening to close the straits to Soviet shipping."
Jake shifted Yuri to his other shoulder. The baby burped.
"Let them," Jake said. "We don't need the straits. We have the rail lines to Berlin."
"There is more," Menzhinsky said. "A message from our agent in Los Alamos."
Jake froze.
"Los Alamos doesn't exist yet," Jake whispered. "It's a boys' school in the desert."
"It exists now," Menzhinsky said. "Oppenheimer has been recruited. By Hoover. They are breaking ground on a laboratory."
Jake felt the blood drain from his face.
He had started the Manhattan Project fifteen years early.
"How?" Jake asked. "How did they know to look there?"
"Because you looked there," Menzhinsky said softly. "You looked at the map. You made inquiries about heavy water in 1924. They are following your footprints, Koba."
The baby started crying again.
Jake rocked him, harder this time.
"They are chasing a ghost," Jake said. "They don't have the centrifuges. They don't have the math."
"They have Einstein," Menzhinsky countered. "And they have fear. Fear is a powerful calculator."
Jake looked at his son.
He had wanted to build a shield for Yuri. instead, he had started an arms race that would consume the century.
"Accelerate the test," Jake ordered.
"The core isn't stable," Menzhinsky warned. "Kurchatov says—"
"I don't care what Kurchatov says!" Jake hissed, trying not to wake Nadya. "I want that mushroom cloud. I want the world to see it. Before the Americans figure out how to make their own."
"When?"
"One week," Jake said. "On May Day. We will light a candle for the workers."
Menzhinsky bowed his head. "A very bright candle."
He left.
Jake looked down at Yuri. The baby had stopped crying. He was staring up at Jake with wide, unblinking eyes.
"I'm sorry," Jake whispered to the infant. "I'm going to make a lot of noise."
The test site was in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.
It was a flat, empty steppe. The wind howled through the dry grass.
A steel tower stood in the center of nothing. It was a hundred feet tall. At the top, a small shed housed the Gadget.
Jake stood in the observation bunker, ten miles away. He wore dark welding goggles.
Kurchatov was pacing. He was sweating through his lab coat.
"The wind is shifting," Kurchatov muttered. "If the fallout cloud blows north, it will hit Omsk."
"Evacuate Omsk," Jake said.
"We can't evacuate a city in three hours!"
"Then tell them to stay indoors," Jake said coldly. "And close the windows."
He looked at the clock. 05:59:00.
One minute to dawn. One minute to the new world.
"Arm the trigger," Jake ordered.
A technician flipped a switch. A red light turned green.
"Capacitors charging," von Braun said. The German boy was there too, watching his rocket's payload come to life. He looked thrilled.
"Thirty seconds," the announcer's voice echoed in the bunker.
Jake put his hand on the concrete wall. It was cold.
In his timeline, he had read about Trinity. About Hiroshima. He knew the descriptions. "Brighter than a thousand suns."
But reading history was different from pulling the trigger.
"Ten... nine... eight..."
Jake thought of Nadya. Of Yuri.
I am doing this for you, he told himself. I am burning the sky so you don't have to.
"Three... two... one..."
Silence.
Then, light.
It wasn't white. It wasn't yellow. It was a color that didn't have a name. It bleached the world. It erased the shadows. It turned the steppe into a photograph overexposed by God.
Jake didn't blink. He watched the fireball rise. It was purple, then orange, then black.
It churned and boiled, sucking the dust of the earth into itself.
A minute later, the sound hit them.
CRACK.
The ground jumped. Dust fell from the ceiling. The heavy blast door rattled like a tin can.
"Yield?" Jake asked, his voice steady.
"Twenty kilotons," Kurchatov whispered, staring at his instruments. "Maybe twenty-five."
Jake took off his goggles.
He looked at the mushroom cloud rising into the stratosphere. It looked like a brain. A tumor.
"It works," Jake said.
He turned to the stunned room.
"Send the telegram to Washington," Jake ordered. "Two words."
Menzhinsky had his pen ready.
"What words?"
"Check Mate," Jake said.
Washington D.C. The Oval Office.
President Coolidge stared at the telegram.
CHECK MATE.
"What does it mean?" Hoover asked.
"It means they have it," Coolidge said. His voice was flat. "The seismographs in Turkey picked it up. A massive earth tremor in Kazakhstan."
"An earthquake?" Hoover hoped.
"Earthquakes don't produce radiation spikes in the upper atmosphere," Coolidge said.
He walked to the window. He looked at the Washington Monument.
"They have the Bomb, Edgar. And they have the rockets to deliver it."
"We have to strike," Hoover said. "Now. Before they build more."
"With what?" Coolidge asked. "Our battleships? They can sink them from space. Our army? They have ten thousand tanks on the Polish border."
He sat down heavily.
"We lost," Coolidge whispered. "We lost the war before it started."
"No," Hoover said. His eyes were hard. "We didn't lose. We just fell behind."
He grabbed the telegram.
"Triple the budget for Los Alamos," Hoover ordered. "Draft every physicist in the Ivy League. I don't care if they are communists. I don't care if they are Martians. Build me that bomb."
"And the Russians?"
"Contain them," Hoover said. "Starve them. Surround them. If they want to be a superpower, we will make them pay for every inch of ground."
The Kremlin. May Day Parade.
The Red Square was packed. Soldiers marched in perfect unison. The new T-34 tanks rolled over the cobblestones, their diesel engines roaring.
Above, a flight of silver fighters screamed past. German designs, built in Russian factories.
Jake stood on the mausoleum. He waved to the crowd.
They cheered. They screamed his name. "Stalin! Stalin! Stalin!"
They didn't know about the bomb. They didn't know about the radiation cloud drifting toward Omsk.
They only knew they were strong.
Nadya stood beside him. She held Yuri. The baby was wrapped in a red blanket.
"They love you," Nadya shouted over the noise.
"They fear me," Jake corrected. "It is safer."
He looked down at his son. Yuri was asleep, oblivious to the tanks and the cheering.
Jake felt a sudden, sharp pain in his chest.
Not a heart attack. A realization.
He had won. He had secured the borders. He had the ultimate weapon.
But he had changed the timeline so much, he was now flying blind.
Hitler was rising faster. America was mobilizing earlier. The Great Depression had started four years too soon.
He was the captain of a ship in a hurricane he had created.
"Koba," Nadya touched his arm. "Smile. The cameras are watching."
Jake forced a smile. He raised his hand in a salute.
Menzhinsky stood in the shadows behind them. He wasn't watching the parade. He was watching Jake.
He opened his notebook.
The Bomb is tested.
The West is awake.
The Game has changed.
He closed the book.
End of Act One.
Two Years Later. 1928.
The office was different now. More modern. Electric lights that didn't flicker. A map of the world that covered an entire wall.
Jake sat at his desk. He looked older. There was grey in his mustache.
Yuri was a toddler now, running around the office with a wooden toy rocket.
"Papa, zoom!" Yuri shouted, crashing the rocket into the leg of the desk.
"Zoom," Jake agreed absently.
The door opened.
Taranov walked in. He looked grim.
"It happened," Taranov said.
"Where?"
"Germany," Taranov said. "The elections."
He placed a newspaper on the desk. Der Stürmer.
The headline was in bold Gothic script.
VICTORY! NATIONAL SOCIALISTS WIN MAJORITY!
CHANCELLOR HITLER PROMISES TO TEAR UP VERSAILLES!
Jake stared at the photo. Hitler, looking triumphant, surrounded by brownshirts.
It was 1928. In real history, Hitler didn't take power until 1933.
He was five years early.
"He is moving fast," Jake whispered.
"He is demanding the return of the Sudetenland," Taranov said. "And the Polish Corridor."
Jake looked at the map.
He had the Bomb. But Hitler knew he wouldn't use it over a strip of land. It was a bluffing game.
"And the Americans?"
"Silent," Taranov said. "They are too busy dealing with the bread riots in Chicago."
Jake stood up. He walked to the window.
The peace was over. The Cold War was heating up.
"Get the car," Jake said.
"Where are we going?"
"To the airport," Jake said. "I need to go to Berlin."
Taranov blinked. "Berlin? It is enemy territory."
"Not yet," Jake said. "We have a non-aggression pact. Remember?"
He picked up Yuri. He kissed the boy's forehead.
"Papa go away?" Yuri asked.
"Papa go to stop the bad man," Jake said.
He handed the boy to the nanny.
"I am going to meet him," Jake said to Taranov. "Face to face. Dictator to dictator."
"He will try to kill you," Taranov warned.
"Let him try," Jake touched the pistol under his tunic. "I know how he dies. He shoots himself in a bunker."
"That was the old script," Taranov reminded him.
"Then I will write a new ending," Jake said.
He walked out.
The chess board was set. The pieces were moving.
And the Red Tsar was going to meet the Wolf.