Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) (7 page)

“Try me.”

So Kane told her.

An hour later Katya was back at the pens. Sergei was relieved to see her, but wisely decided not to say anything when he saw her face. She was clearly furious, fighting furious. Deadly pale and fists clenched, she had shot him a glance that would blister anti-fouling paint and said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Instead she entered the
Lukyan
, and sat down in the left hand seat, the pilot’s seat, her uncle’s seat. Sergei looked at her back, her shoulders heaving with heavy breaths. “I’ll be in the dock cafe, OK?” he said cautiously. She said nothing. With misgivings, Sergei left.

Katya sat at the helm and looked at the darkness of the
Lukyan
’s pen. She was glad of the observation bubble’s anti-reflective coating; she had no great desire to see her face there, illuminated by the glow from the screens, appearing to float like a drowned phantom in the water. She especially had no desire to see how she felt – angry, depressed, and terribly, terribly confused. She felt ugly inside her head, and it would just make her day if she looked it, too.

How could this war, this stupid little war, actually be even more dangerous than that against the Terrans? How could some silly homespun conflict fuelled by self-righteousness and point scoring have turned more deadly than a bona fide invasion from space?

The war against Earth had been intense, furious, a new turning point every day, whereas this spat with the Yagizba Enclaves was only slightly more interesting than the fish prices. Specific incidents were barely reported, just the steady drumbeat of “We’re at war and we’ll win after a while” in the news reports. Either the news was deliberately skipping many stories, or the figures Kane had showed her was a lie. She frowned hard enough to close her eyes. They were all such liars. Who could tell?

The yoke felt reassuring under her hand. Uncle Lukyan had sailed thousands upon thousands of kilometres in that very seat. She wished he was here so badly she could feel her heart clench, her eyes moisten. He’d know what to do. He’d trusted Kane, at least a little, but then he’d died. Was that Kane’s fault? Yes, but not directly. Kane hadn’t planned it, but then Kane hadn’t planned anything. Yes, he had, just a few things, and those had worked. Mostly. But people had died.

Katya wished the smooth, non-reflective bubble was just a little bit closer to the pilot’s position. Then she would be able to lean forward, and bang her head repeatedly against it.

So mired in internal debate and self-loathing was she, that it took a minute or two before the shouting filtered through to her consciousness. Glad to be offered some distraction from her troubles, she climbed out of her seat and walked back to the open hatch.

Out on the alley that joined the minisub pens, an argument was going on. No, Katya realised, not an argument. It was far too one-sided for that.

Two pen hatches down from her, a federal officer, a lieutenant, was shouting in the face of a small, plump man, bearded and bald. Katya recognised Filipp Shurygin, a trader who used the same model of boat as hers. Her uncle had known him for years, counted him as a friend, but then Shurygin had shifted his base of operations to take advantage of the trade in high tech items from the Enclaves and they hadn’t seen him very often after that. Still, he was a nice man from what she could recall, and Lukyan had often said Shurygin was the most methodical of the sole traders, envious of the little man’s reputation for never running awry in the dark waters of the Federal bureaucracy. It seemed odd that the officer was so furious with him over what seemed to be a problem with his papers.

“How could you not know about the packaging directive?” demanded the lieutenant, bellowing in Shurygin’s face. “It’s been nothing
but
the packaging directive all damn morning! How could you not know?
How could you not know?
”

Packaging directive? Katya had no idea what he was talking about. Behind the lieutenant stood a corporal. Katya could see that he was possibly more confused than she was.

“I’m sorry, lieutenant,” said Shurygin in a small voice. “I hadn’t been told. I’ll comply immediately, of course.”

“All morning!” shouted the lieutenant. Spittle flew from his lips and onto Shurygin. He flinched, which just seemed to make the officer angrier still. “Five times this morning I’ve been told to enforce this blasted directive and the very first, the
very first
piece of scum I check, hasn’t even heard of it. How is that possible?”

The corporal risked speaking. “Sir, I…”

His superior spun on his heel and roared “SHUT UP!” in his face.

“This morning, sir?” said Shurygin. “I’ve… I’ve been at sea for the last forty hours. I wouldn’t have heard…”

“Been at sea?” The lieutenant said it as if this was very suspicious behaviour for a submarine pilot. He checked his pad. “You’re based out of Tartessos, it says here.”

Shurygin nodded.

There was something about the officer’s stance that bothered Katya. He was leaning forward a little, his shoulders bowed, breathing heavily through his partially open mouth. He looked ill.

“I understand,” said the lieutenant. “I understand how you don’t know about the packaging directive. I understand now.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Shurygin. “I’m sorry about the misunderstanding. I’ll comply as soon…”

“Tartessos is close to Yagizban waters,” the lieutenant said. Then he added as if it were the most reasonable conclusion in the world, “You’re a Yag spy.”

Shurygin’s jaw dropped. It took an effort for Katya to keep her own mouth shut. Even the corporal looked at the lieutenant with unfeigned astonishment.

The lieutenant straightened up and bared his teeth in an expression of pure animalistic hatred and rage. “You’re a stinking SPY!” he screamed, drew his sidearm, placed the muzzle between poor Shurygin’s eyes, and fired.

Shurygin died much as he had lived; quietly and without fuss.

Katya cried out involuntarily and the lieutenant looked wildly at her, ignoring the body of the man he had just murdered. He seemed to become aware that, apart from Katya, there were other submariners standing there in shock, staring at him.

“Spy,” he said in a high cracked voice. “He was a spy. A Yag. A spy. Spies and saboteurs. Can’t you see them?” His voice rose to a scream. “CAN’T YOU SEE THEM?”

He raised his maser pistol again, the barrel twitching as he trembled. He fired a second time, and Katya heard a cry behind her, further down the alley. Then his gaze settled upon her. “I can see them,” he said in a dry whisper, and he levelled his maser at her.

Katya heard the “crack” very distinctly, even five metres away, and watched as the lieutenant fell headlong to lie prone on the deck. The corporal stood over him, his baton raised for a second blow if the first hadn’t done the job properly, but the lieutenant lay motionless. Quickly putting his baton back in his belt, the corporal drew his handcuffs, and placing one knee in the small of the downed man’s back, quickly cuffed his superior officer. Only then did he check for a pulse.

The corporal looked up at Katya. “He’d gone insane! You saw that, didn’t you? I had no choice!” His expression was one of profound horror, perhaps even a kind of grief. He’d overridden a lot of training and service discipline to strike a superior, and Katya could see the panic in his eyes.

“You had no choice,” she assured him. “You saved my life. Maybe his, too.” She looked back down the corridor. A submariner was sitting on the floor, cradling his forearm while his shipmates fussed over him. “You’d better call in a medical emergency,” she said to the corporal.

As he went to a wall communicator and called for help, Katya knelt by Filipp Shurygin. He was lying on his back, looking at the ceiling with an expression of wide-eyed optimism. The deep, dark burn between his eyes that penetrated skin, skull, and brain indicated that such optimism had been uncalled for.

Knowing full well that in a few minutes she would be a trembling wreck herself as the realisation of how close she’d been to death set in, she made the most of the calmness of denial, those precious few moments before you have to accept that something awful and terrifying just happened. She put out her hand to his face and gently closed his eyes.

Poor Shurygin
, she thought.
What will they put on his post mortem report? Killed while being helpful?
 

CHAPTER FIVE

PLUMBING SUPPLIES

Katya had her second encounter with Secor in one day, although this time they were the real thing. She thought it odd that they should have taken an interest in what seemed to be simply somebody cracking under the stress of war. It was tragic, of course, but it happened.

Katya was expecting the station police to deal with it, but they just took her statement while Secor sat in on the interview, occasionally throwing in questions of their own. Katya had heard that the “packaging directive” that the lieutenant – it transpired his name was “Loktev” – had been so obsessed by had indeed been announced that morning, but was only coming into effect in ten days’ time. All that the directive demanded was that cargo packaging be kept unlocked to speed up security checks. That was all, and for this a man had died.

Secor seemed very uninterested in that. They just wanted to correlate her story against that of the other witnesses, confirm that it was highly unlikely that Shurygin was actually an enemy spy – Katya undiplomatically snorted in derision at such an assertion – and only seemed to grow interested in their jobs when they got around to threatening her with dire consequences should she speak to
anyone
about the event. She’d agreed, neglecting to mention that she fully intended to tell Shurygin’s family what had happened the very next time she got over to Tartessos, if only to assure them that he hadn’t suffered.

Then after she had been dismissed and was getting up to leave, she had paused. The slightly routine way the men from Secor had demanded her silence had rankled at first, but now it made her suspicious “Have there been other incidents like this?” she asked.

“The interview is over, citizen,” said the senior agent, and that had been that.

There was one small piece of good news awaiting her return to the
Lukyan
, however: Sergei had secured a cargo.

“Plumbing parts?” said Katya, reading the manifest.

Like most Russalkin, Katya didn’t actually like water very much. She had the mandatory basic swimming standard that all Russalkin were required to attain, but hadn’t been near a swimming pool since. She would drink water happily enough, and shower in it, but quantities much larger than a sinkful of the stuff made her nervous. It felt like an enemy within, a little brother of its vast sibling waiting just beyond the next airlock or on the other side of the submarine hull. Waiting to rush in and crush, drown, drain the life heat from your very body. The Russalkin respected the sea, because the Russalkin feared it.

Plumbing just seemed like a good way to aggravate it.

Sergei shrugged. He tolerated drinking water, but regarded showers as agents of the great elemental enemy and usually made do with a wet sponge and no shame. Why anybody would want to shift a consignment of pipes, heaters, and shower heads around was one of the intractable mysteries of the universe as far as he was concerned. That they would get paid for it, however, was something he could understand. The plumbing supplies themselves he would leave to the dangerous intellectuals who had uses for such things.

The supplies were delivered sharply on schedule the following morning and loaded carefully. On an impulse, Katya made sure the boxes were unlocked. The directive was still days away from becoming mandatory, but it couldn’t do any harm to get into the habit ahead of time.

When she was returning from picking up some fresh food for the journey, she walked past a law enforcement agent talking to one of the pen managers by the hatch to Shurygin’s boat, the
Lastochka
. From what she overheard, they were discussing what they were going to do with it.

“Well, the family can’t get anyone here, and it’s not as if we can spare anyone,” said the manager.

She stepped through the
Lukyan
’s hatch and
sealed it. She sidled forward past the pallet loaded with plumbing supplies, saying, “They don’t know what to do with Shurygin’s boat.”

“It’ll just end up being used in the war effort,” said Sergei, running through the pre-launch checks. “Everything gets used in the war effort, one way or another.”

“Sergei,” said Katya. She waited until he looked back at her before continuing. “Mind if I take that seat?”

He raised an eyebrow, surprised. “She’s your boat, Katya. You sit where you like, but…”

“I just thought, you know… Just… Well, I don’t think Lukyan would be very happy with me being pilot and not…” She shook her head. “And not behaving like it. Responsibilities. He was always very keen on people accepting responsibilities.”

“He was.” Sergei nodded, and smiled. “I’ll be glad to be out of this seat, to tell the truth.” He unlocked his harness and climbed into the co-pilot’s seat with a blissful sigh. “I’m a right-hand seat kind of feller. Never felt comfortable over there. Too
much
responsibility.”

Katya took the pilot’s seat, adjusted it, locked her harness and put on her headset. “Sergei. That business on the way here…”

Sergei interrupted her. “Nobody died.”

“What? How can you know that?”

“While you were in here doing all that mad brooding after Secor had finished with you, I went to the cafe, remember? Next table, the weapons officers of the two – count ‘em –
two
warboats that were shadowing the Jarilo, arguing over what happened. They can’t have heard about your report, yet. Anyway, gist of the discussion, lots of torpedoes, lots of confusion, no hits. Not even the Jarilo got tabbed.”

Katya sighed deeply. “I was lucky.”

Sergei made a dismissive sound. “We make our luck.”