The mud at the Kubinka Proving Ground was knee-deep. It was freezing, grey sludge that sucked at boots and swallowed wheels.
Jake stood on a wooden platform, shivering in his greatcoat. Beside him, General Brusilov leaned on a cane, watching the field through brass binoculars.
"They are ready," Brusilov rasped.
A whistle blew.
From the tree line, a roar erupted. It wasn't the sound of men. It was the sound of twelve-cylinder diesel engines.
Three tanks burst from the forest.
They weren't the tiny, rattling T-26s of the old Red Army. These were monsters. Sloped armor. Wide tracks. Long 76mm guns.
The T-34 prototypes. Built in three months by starving workers in unheated factories.
They hit the mud at thirty miles per hour. They didn't sink. They skated over the sludge, their tracks throwing up geysers of dirt.
"Beautiful," Jake whispered.
He felt a surge of pride that had nothing to do with ideology. This was the weapon that would kill Fascism. And he had birthed it five years early.
"Fire!" Brusilov barked.
The lead tank spun its turret. Boom.
A target shed—a wooden replica of a German bunker—vaporized in a cloud of splinters and smoke.
The generals on the platform gasped. The Old Bolsheviks looked terrified.
"They are fast," Voroshilov muttered, clutching his fur hat. "Too fast. The infantry cannot keep up."
"Then put the infantry in trucks," Jake said. "We aren't walking to Berlin, Kliment. We are driving."
He turned to Brusilov.
"How many?"
"Fifty by next month," the old general said. "Five hundred by summer. If the Americans deliver the tooling."
"They will," Jake said. "Ford is greedy."
He looked back at the tanks. They were doing donuts in the mud, tearing up the earth.
He had the sword. Now he needed the arm to swing it.
The drive back to Moscow was quiet.
Menzhinsky sat in the jump seat, reading a decoded intercept. The paper was stamped with the red wax seal of the Foreign Intelligence Service.
"We found him," Menzhinsky said.
Jake looked away from the window. "Who?"
"The man running the German rocket program. The 'prophet' you worried about."
Menzhinsky handed over the paper.
Name: Wernher von Braun.
Age: 18.
Status: Student at Berlin Institute of Technology.
Jake frowned. "He's a teenager."
"A teenager who just filed a patent for a liquid-fuel combustion chamber that is ten years ahead of current science," Menzhinsky noted. "And he is being funded directly by the Reichswehr."
Jake stared at the name.
In his timeline, von Braun was the genius who built the V-2 and later took America to the moon. But in 1925, he should have been building model airplanes, not ballistic missiles.
"I pushed too hard," Jake realized aloud. "I scared the Germans, so they went looking for miracles. And they found a boy genius."
"He is young," Menzhinsky said. "Young men are impressionable. Perhaps we can... recruit him?"
"No," Jake said. "He's an aristocrat. He hates us. He will build those rockets to hit Moscow."
Jake tapped the paper.
"Kill him."
Menzhinsky didn't blink. "It will be difficult. He is guarded by the Black Reichswehr."
"I don't care," Jake said. "Send Taranov. Send the Finn. Burn down his laboratory. If that boy lives to be twenty, we are all dead."
He crumpled the intercept.
He was ordering the assassination of an eighteen-year-old. A kid who, in another life, would be a hero of space exploration.
The Trolley Problem, Jake thought bitterly. Kill the boy to save the city.
But the tracks were getting slippery with blood.
The Kremlin was buzzing with news of the tank trials. The mood was shifting. Fear was being replaced by a dangerous arrogance.
Jake walked into his office. Nadya was there.
She was standing by his desk, holding a book. It wasn't poetry this time. It was a medical textbook.
"You look flush," she said.
"The fresh air," Jake lied. "We tested the new tractors."
"Tractors with cannons?" she asked.
Jake sighed. He took off his coat. "They are necessary, Nadya. The wolves are at the door."
"The wolves are always at the door, Koba," she said. She put the book down. "But I came to tell you something else."
She took a breath. Her hands were trembling slightly.
"I am pregnant."
The room stopped spinning. The roar of the tank engines faded.
Jake stared at her.
"What?"
"I saw the doctor today," she said. "Three months."
Jake fell into his chair.
A child. In this timeline, Vasily Stalin was born in 1921. He already existed—a toddler running around the nursery.
But this... this was a new child. A child that didn't exist in the history books.
A child born of a time traveler and a ghost.
"Koba?" Nadya stepped closer. "Are you angry?"
Jake looked at her stomach. It was flat. But inside, a new variable was growing.
He felt a surge of terrifying, overwhelming love. And then, immediate, crushing fear.
He was bringing a child into a world on the brink of nuclear war. A world where rockets were aimed at this very room.
"No," Jake whispered. "No, I am not angry."
He stood up and pulled her into a hug. He buried his face in her neck.
"I am happy," he lied. "I am so happy."
But over her shoulder, he looked at the map of Berlin.
He had to kill von Braun. He had to stop the rockets. Not for the Soviet Union anymore. But for the baby.
"This child will be different," Nadya whispered against his chest. "This child will see the peace you are building."
"Yes," Jake said. His eyes were cold, focused on the map. "Peace."
Late that night. The basement of the Lubyanka.
Taranov was cleaning his Nagant revolver. He did it with the tenderness of a mother bathing a child.
Jake stood in the doorway. The shadows stretched long across the concrete floor.
"You leave for Berlin in the hour," Jake said.
Taranov nodded. He didn't look up. "The boy?"
"The boy," Jake confirmed. "And the blueprints. Burn it all."
Taranov slotted the cylinder back into the gun. Click.
"It is done."
"Wait," Jake said.
He walked over. He pulled a heavy gold ring from his pocket. It had the Romanov crest on it—loot from the Tsar's execution.
"Use this to bribe the border guards," Jake said. "Do not get caught. If they catch you, you are a madman acting alone. You do not know me."
"I have never known you," Taranov said simply.
He stood up. He was a mountain of loyalty and violence.
"Comrade," Taranov paused. "Does the boy... does he matter to the future?"
Jake looked at the giant. Taranov knew nothing of time travel, but he had instincts like a dog.
"He matters," Jake said. "If he lives, he touches the stars."
Taranov shrugged. "The stars are cold. Moscow is warm."
He holstered the gun and walked out.
Jake watched him go.
He had just sent a hitman to kill the Space Age in the cradle.
Menzhinsky found Jake in the map room an hour later.
"The message is sent," Menzhinsky said. "Taranov has crossed the perimeter."
"Good."
"There is more," Menzhinsky said. He looked troubled. A rare expression for the spy chief.
"What?"
"The graphite pile in the Urals," Menzhinsky said. "Kurchatov signaled. It has reached critical mass."
Jake's heart skipped a beat.
"Is it stable?"
"It is... hot," Menzhinsky said. "Running at 110% capacity. They are producing Plutonium-239."
"How much?"
"Enough for a core in six months," Menzhinsky said. "If the pile doesn't melt through the earth first."
Jake leaned against the table.
Six months.
T-34s in production. A child on the way. An assassin in Berlin. And a nuclear bomb baking in the oven.
The pieces were moving faster than he could track.
"Keep the pile running," Jake ordered. "Pour river water on it if you have to. I want that bomb."
"The Americans have noticed the power drain," Menzhinsky warned. "Their ambassador is asking why the Urals are glowing on the thermal scans."
"Let them ask," Jake said. "By the time they figure it out, we will have the deterrent."
He looked at the date on the calendar. December 1925.
Christmas was coming.
"Vyacheslav," Jake said softly. "Do you believe in God?"
Menzhinsky blinked. "I am a Bolshevik. I believe in the Party."
"I used to believe in history," Jake said. "But I think we killed it."
He turned off the lamp.
"Let's go. I have a pregnant wife to feed."
As they walked out, the red pins on the map seemed to glow in the dark.
Berlin. Moscow. The Urals.
A triangle of death. And somewhere in the middle, a baby was waiting to be born.
The race wasn't just for survival anymore. It was personal.