Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) (3 page)

Suhkalev! From spotty little thug to a “Knight of the Deep” as the caption proclaimed him, and all in only six months. They’d given him a medal and everything, just like they’d given to her.

Look at us now, Suhkalev
,
she thought.
Look at us with our medals, heroes all. Knights of the Deep
.
 

She finally passed out soon after that, the screen still flickering images of resistance to the enemy and glorious victory above her face. Her mouth moved, and she may have been saying “Knights of the Deep” as she sank into unconsciousness, then she half laughed, and then she was asleep.

CHAPTER TWO

JARILO

Katya awoke in total darkness. Her first thought was a power failure, but then she realised it couldn’t be – every station had back-up generators and slow-bleed capacitors to ensure a total power failure could not happen. After all, a facility without power would be a facility without life before very long. It was more likely to be a local failure, she thought, probably a power bus to the hotel had simply overloaded and was waiting to be reset. Well, if the power had failed, so had her wake up alarm. Sergei was probably down in the pens right now, tutting and muttering as they lost their departure slot.

She checked her chronometer and was nonplussed to discover its face dark. Fumbling with its buttons didn’t produce even a flicker of illumination. Now she was becoming worried; a local power failure was one thing, but even personal electronics dying? Probably just a coincidence. Probably. The possibility that the Yagizban had triggered some sort of electro-magnetic pulse weapon and scrambled Mologa’s electronics entered her mind and was just as quickly dispatched. Every station’s electronics were gauss-hardened against EMP weapons and had been since the war. No, something else was going on here. Well, lying in the dark wasn’t going to give her any answers.

She started to reach back to get her clothes when a sudden sharp sound made her freeze – a single loud crack, shockingly close. She froze, her heart suddenly pounding very fast and hard which only served to dull her hearing as the beats sounded through her head. She stayed still for ten, twenty, thirty seconds, but the noise was not repeated.

The silence was less reassuring than she had hoped. Then she realised how absolute the silence was. The tiny yet infinitely comforting sound of the ventilation fan was absent. While she doubted it was possible to suffocate in a capsule room, she didn’t care to find out. Besides, the air was growing cloying and hot. She reached for her clothes again, and as she did there was the same awful cracking noise, but this time it continued, and grew. A heavy splintering, a grinding of stone upon stone. The realisation that the stone around her was suffering some sort of structural failure filled her with urgent terror.

She decided she would rather face the humiliation of being on the corridors in her underwear than stay in the capsule a second longer and abandoned her clothes in favour of getting out. As she sat up, however, her forehead banged forcefully into the screen mounted on the capsule ceiling. The screen was probably undamaged, being a flexible polymer laminate sheet, but directly behind it was a single insulation layer and then solid stone. Katya fell back, her head landing on the pillow pad. She blinked away the pain and tried to understand how she could possibly have hit her head on a ceiling that had given her comfortable space to sit up the previous night. Now the ceiling seemed to be lower. How was that possible?

There was another loud crack, the grating of stone against stone, and she finally understood.
The capsule’s collapsing,
she realised.
Move! Move! Move!
 

She tried to sit up as far as the ceiling would allow, but now it was barely above her face. She started shuffling towards the hatch as fast as she could manage. The hatch’s locking handle would be a problem, but perhaps she might be able to disengage it with a kick. She had hardly managed to get five centimetres before the smooth plastic of the screen brushed her face. The ceiling didn’t seem to be lurching down at all, but smoothly descending like a hydraulic press.

She tried to move but it was bearing down on her now, pushing her backward into the shallow mattress. She squirmed hopelessly, her face to one side. How had this happened? Had the station been hit by some new and strange weapon of the Yagizban?

The ceiling stopped its descent. Then, with another crack of fracturing stone, it slammed down.

Katya felt her bones break and break again. She felt her skull compress and shatter as millions of tonnes of submarine mountain settled on her. She felt little pain, but only an odd sense of regret as her skeleton splintered, her tongue was crushed, her eyeballs exploded.

And she did not die.

She was smeared, an atom thick, between the rock faces.

And she did not die.

She could feel the mass of the mountain, feel the shift in the drowned continental plate on which it stood, feel the countless billions tonnes of water flow across the planet’s surface drawn by an unseen moon beyond the unending clouds.

An atom thick, no, thinner yet, as thin as thought, she enveloped the planet Russalka. Russalka – she’d always thought it a good name, but now she realised it was too small to encompass everything the world was. She could almost reach out and…

The alarm was a relief and a huge frustration. The cubicle lights came up gently along with the slowly increasing volume of the alarm tones, and Katya found herself whole and sweating in the capsule room that showed no signs of wanting to be any smaller than it already was. She reached out reflexively and muted the alarm, looked up at the silent screen where the news was always changing yet reassuringly similar. Fierce battles, broad victories, solitary and inconsequential defeats, proud Feds, subhuman Yags.

Her mind was still echoing with her dream, though. A dream of a united planet. She had felt good, powerful, and another emotion that she equated with confidence yet had been somehow different.

Not such a bad dream, then, although she could have done without the bit about being crushed into liquid. That had been… not so enjoyable.

She struggled into her old clothes, grabbed her overnight bag and left the capsule, its red light snapping over to amber as she swiped her card again and tapped the “Checking Out?” square on the status screen mounted on the outside of the hatch. Now, she decided, before she did anything else that day, she desperately needed a shower.

Twenty minutes later, clean, in fresh clothes, and the last echoes of her dream fading, Katya joined Sergei in the station cafeteria for breakfast. He stirred his scrambled eggs (in reality a 1:3 ratio of Edible Protein Reconstitutes 78 and 80b) onto his slice of toast (Carbohydrate Staple Complex Synthetic – Bread 15, although at least it had seen the inside of a real toaster), and glowered across the table at her. He looked exactly as he always looked. His disreputable coveralls never seemed to get any dirtier, his moustache was never any longer or shorter, his stubble was always one missed shave old.

“What are you so happy about?” he demanded, then shovelled some “egg” into his mouth as if he expected it to be taken from him any moment.

“Had a strange dream,” she replied. She was eating kedgeree. The egg was as synthetic as Sergei’s, the rice was reconstituted starch pellets, and the spice paste had come out of a laboratory somewhere, but at least the fish was real. “I saw the whole world. I
was
the whole world, sort of. Y’know, Sergei, there’s not a problem that can’t be solved. I think we’re going to be OK.”

Sergei’s shovelling stopped. “God. If you’re going to be like this all day, I’m resigning now.”

“Seriously? OK. We both know I can handle the boat alone and the navy’s desperate for hands, so just hand in your reserved occupation papers and get yourself into uniform. Oh, and you’ll have to keep it clean. They’re pretty fussy about that.” She smiled sweetly at him.

He looked at her stonily. “I bloody hate you, Kuriakova,” he said, and returned his attention to his breakfast.

“‘I bloody hate you,
Captain
Kuriakova,’” she corrected him. “I will have discipline within my crew.”

She carried on eating, having duly noted Sergei struggling not to smile.

“Wake her up, Sergei.”

They were aboard the boat, set to go with a small cargo of assorted parcels, mainly intended for friends and family of Mologa’s military staff at Atlantis. That and a few data sticks containing messages in written and video form, both official and personal. Lines of communication were often among the first casualties in wartime. The landlines, never very reliable, had mainly been severed by enemy action, and the surface long wave relays – tethered communication buoys floating above the settlements – were too easy to intercept and jam. That’s if some enterprising raider didn’t slap them with a couple of torpedoes, of course. With rapid communications difficult, almost everything had to be done by couriers.

Katya had noticed among the parcels some actual letters, forming their own envelopes with a tab of tape to seal them.

“Letters. Imagine that,” she’d said, waving one of them at Sergei. “Writing. On paper.” Sergei had said nothing, so she’d added, “Amazing!” to emphasise the novelty of it.

“People sent letters on paper in the war,” he’d said. It was an extruded fibre weave, but it looked and behaved in much the same fashion as real wood pulp paper, the kind they had on Earth. “Sometimes, y’know, sometimes words on a screen aren’t enough. You want something you can carry with you. Sometimes it’s all that’s left of someone.”

Now the bags were stowed, and twenty hours of submarine travel awaited. Twenty hours of brain-freezing tedium, possibly mixed with bouts of bowel-loosening terror should the major in traffic control be wrong about local Yag activity. At least, Katya reflected, the cess tank was empty.

It was the co-pilot’s job to run down the pre-launch checklist, and the captain’s to oversee it, so Sergei counted off the items and called “check” at each positive, and it was Katya who watched him do it. It was ridiculous, she thought. In her entire maritime career to date, she had done that job once. Once, and only once, she had been co-pilot/navigator. Then she had inherited the boat and become captain. “A battlefield promotion,” Uncle Lukyan would have called it.

She snapped herself out of her reverie before it could become maudlin, and listened to Sergei finish the list. “All lights green, captain. All systems go.”

Katya opened the communications channel to traffic control. “We’re clear to disengage, traffic control. No last minute reports of Yag boats in the vicinity?”

“Nothing new, captain.” She recognised the voice of the major. “I can only recommend you stay sharp, and take care. Launch when ready, RRS 15743 Kilo
Lukyan
. Good luck.”

“Thank you, major,” replied Katya. “Disengaging now.
Lukyan
out.”

With a thud as the docking clamps released the boat, and the hum of the impellers taking them out into open water, the voyage was underway.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, renaming her uncle’s boat from
Pushkin’s Baby
to the
Lukyan
. It had seemed like a good way to honour him, to remember him. But now every time the boat’s name was used, she had to fight the urge to look at the left hand seat to see if he was there. Really, that should have been her seat as captain, but she just couldn’t bring herself to take it. She felt a big enough fraud calling herself “captain.” Claiming the captain’s seat, Lukyan’s seat… no. That was too much.

Sergei hadn’t wanted it either, but he had seen how she looked at the seat almost superstitiously and decided that he was going to have to be the stoic, pragmatic one. He didn’t like it, though, and had spent much of the first couple of months complaining that the seat felt wrong, that no matter how he adjusted it, it just felt
wrong
.

Katya steered until they were clear of Mologa Station’s approach volume and then switched on the autopilot. The inertial guidance systems took what data they could from the baseline of Mologa’s precise location on the charts and took over, taking them on a slow downward gradient into seabed clutter to try and make them a difficult contact to acquire should a Yagizban boat happen by. In peacetime, echo beacons along the way would have provided route correction, but they had all been closed down now. Anything that might help the enemy was to be denied to them, even if it inconvenienced your own people.

“Arrival at Atlantis docking bays in nineteen hours, forty eight minutes,” said the
Lukyan
’s computer voice in the same calm tones that it announced everything from waypoint arrivals to incoming torpedoes.

Katya lifted her hands from the control yoke and watched it move by itself under the autopilot’s direction. “I sometimes wonder why boats even have crews anymore.”

Sergei was already climbing out of the left hand seat, and was glad to do so. “They used to use drones. Then we got pirates after the war. Drones aren’t so great when it comes to out-thinking people who are after your cargo.” He sat in the forward port passenger seat and pulled the table down from the ceiling on its central strut that swung down to the vertical and then telescoped out. He pulled up the screen on his side and gestured impatiently at the opposite seat. “Well?”

Katya left the co-pilot’s position and climbed into the indicated seat. “What are we playing?” she asked. “Chess?”

Sergei curled a lip and tapped some keys. Katya raised the screen on her side to find a virtual card table already waiting for her.

“Poker,” he said. “A proper game, with risk and chance. Just like life.”

They played a few hands until Sergei said he was feeling tired again and was going to take a nap. Katya noted that his energy seemed to have a direct correlation to how well he was doing in the game. After a disastrous losing streak that would have cost him his wages for a year had they been playing for real money, he was entirely exhausted and was horizontal across two passenger seats and snoring a minute later.