Katya's World

by Jonathan L. Howard

  “From what your uncle’s told me,” said Tasya, “that thing won’t release him unless he gets a better candidate and perhaps not even then. I’d love to go in there with guns blazing and get him out, but we’d all be dead before we even got close. If the opportunity to rescue him arises, that’s well and good. Otherwise, we count him among the dead.”

  Petrov’s lips thinned but didn’t argue with her. Katya couldn’t believe this; after what he’d done to save them, they were just going to abandon him?

  “Katya,” said Lukyan, “try to understand. He knew perfectly well he wasn’t going to be getting out. What he did, it was like fighting a rearguard action. He got us and the information we gathered out of there. If we try and rescue him, the Leviathan will kill us all and then there will nobody to stand in its way and he will still be trapped.”

  Tasya was looking thoughtful. “The IFF box would get us in again,” said Tasya, reluctantly. “There’s a good chance of it, anyway. We didn’t do anything to antagonise it last time, so it won’t have learned not to trust that way of approaching it. It would be a risk, but I think we could get away with it once more. If we do try it, then, it had better be with a plan because there won’t be a third visit.”

  Katya felt torn. Of course she wanted to get Tokarov out if it was at all possible, but the memory of that black featureless eye of the Medusa made her cold with dread. “Once we’re in, we’re bound to upset it, though,” she said, “and that Medusa sphere will punch us full of holes. You didn’t see it, it never stops tracking you.”

  Tasya gave her a complacent look. “Then the plan had better cover that too, hadn’t it? Believe me, girl, I have no desire to enter that monstrosity without a fighting chance of getting out again. If we can’t find a plan to beat the Leviathan’s security system, we have no plan at all.”

  Lukyan hushed them both by pointing at the main screen. “Look at this.”

  The passive track of the Leviathan had been replaced by a slowly spinning computer model. “Is that the Leviathan?” breathed Tasya. Katya belatedly remembered that none of the Vodyanoi’s crew had actually seen the Leviathan; that dubious pleasure had belonged only to the Novgorod’s, as it had swept past them before attacking.

  “Yes, ma’am,” replied the sensor operator from his position. “The amount of passive sound energy out there is just about giving us enough information to get an idea what the whole thing looks like. I’m running the data through the sonar imaging suite and making a few guesses to help it come up with something that’s fairly accurate. At least, I think it’s more accurate. What do you think?”

  Submarines, by their very nature, don’t tend to look very interesting to the eye and the larger they get, the more streamlined and featureless they become. The Baby was a minisub and its hull was busy with waldo-arms and lighting mounts, all finished in a yellow and black livery. The Leviathan, by stark contrast, was so smooth it seemed organic. Long gentle curves that rolled like titanium surf across the machine-monster’s hull before being lost in tapering aft surfaces. It seemed wrong that it didn’t have a tail or fins. It reminded Katya of the tiny amorphous creatures that the manta whales fed upon, filtering them from the seas of Russalka. As if a tiny protozoan had been frozen in a single languidly elegant form and then made colossal.

  “Where are its drive ports?” asked Petrov stepping closer to the display to peer at the details.

  “That’s a mystery, sir. I can’t find anything that might be drive systems. No drive ports, impeller tubes or even an old fashioned sea screw. I’m not even picking up engine noise; what ambient sound it’s creating is all being caused simply by the water travelling over the hull at speed. Microcavitation effects. That’s why the image has so much guesswork in it. It’s just not making the amount of noise something that big should be.”

  A possible explanation jumped into Katya’s head, but she didn’t consider voicing it until it had become plausible. By the time it had reached that point, however, it was suggesting some other possibilities about the Leviathan. These corollaries bothered her for a moment and she mentally went to swat them away. Then she stopped herself. Suddenly, she could see the explanation for some other little details that had been bothering her.

  “Are you all right?” said Lukyan. “You look terrible, like you’d seen a ghost.”

  She almost laughed, but she knew it would have sounded hysterical. She wished she had seen a ghost. What she had just deduced was much, much worse.

  “I… I’m fine Uncle Lukyan. I… may I be excused?” She left without waiting for anybody to say yes or no. She walked aft looking for the officers’ cabins. Only Kane could tell her if she was right. But, a small voice inside her asked, if it is true, then this is something he has deliberately concealed. Why? And what will he do when he knows you know his secret?

  Chapter 12

  Sin Bottle

  She didn’t even have to ask her way; the doors were labelled. In less time than she would have liked, she was standing in front of one of the Vodyanoi’s executive officers’ staterooms, the door simply labelled KANE. She stood indecisively for a long moment, wondering whether it would be better to suggest her idea to the others back on the bridge. It would be so much easier to put the problem into somebody else’s hands. But… she looked at the name plate again. Kane knew it all. If she came here from the bridge leading a mob, he’d shut up and claim ignorance.

  There was something going on within him, some aspect of all this that was torturing him. He’d believed the Leviathan was gone and arranged his life accordingly. Now it was back and it thought the war was still on. He wanted to stop the Leviathan, she was sure of it, but the damage was already done. People knew too much about him for his own security and comfort. Even if they stopped the Leviathan, what would he do next?

  The Leviathan, she scolded herself. It will cause untold misery and death. You need to know what Kane knows and you need to know it now. She knocked, waited a second, and entered.

  Perhaps she should have waited until he’d asked her to come in. She found him in a frenzy of concealment, throwing an awkward handful of things into an open desk drawer and slamming it shut. Something stopped the drawer closing completely and he slammed it twice more in frustration before pushing the obstruction down inside and finally getting the drawer shut. He turned to Katya and spoke with false calmness.

  “How can I help you, Ms Kuriakova?”

  Katya pointed at the closed drawer. “What was that?”

  “None of your concern. Now, what…”

  “It was a syringe, a pressure syringe.”

  He looked at the drawer and then back at her. “You’re mistaken.”

  “I had to train to use those things for the paramedic certification on my officer’s card. Don’t treat me like some idiot off the corridors, Kane. I know a pressure syringe when I see one.”

  “I don’t care what… Wait!”

  Katya, anger growing in her, had stepped the two short steps needed to take her across the small stateroom to the desk and jerked it open. It was a syringe all right, and nestling against it was a slim loading-bottle of an inky black fluid. It had no label. It didn’t need one. She snatched up the syringe. The dose chamber was empty, but there were still the faint traces of black fluid there. She turned on Kane, her anger becoming fury. “You!” She almost screamed it. They’d trusted so much to him and all the time… this. “You’re a waster!” She flung the syringe at him. It bounced off his chest and fell into his lap.

  He looked at it sadly, as if somebody had just flung a gift back in his face. He picked it up and put it back into the drawer, slowly and carefully this time. He slid the drawer shut and looked at her. “Ms Kuriakova. Katya… this isn’t what you think.”

  Not what she thought? Ever since she’d been born, a loathing of wasters had been drilled into her. It was inconceivable to her why anybody should want to corrupt their bodies with drugs just for a brief… What? A release from reality? Why? Reality was all there was
. Russalka society tolerated alcohol, but it was controlled to levels that would have appalled their ancestors. Russalka was as unforgiving as the hard vacuum of space. Being drunk could kill you. Being tired could kill you. Hell’s teeth, even being momentarily distracted could kill you. Not just you, either. With such a small overall population, everybody had a weight to carry for everybody else. Every Russalkin shouldered responsibility, and they shouldered it young. Deliberately using drugs was a dereliction of that responsibility and that could not, would not be countenanced. She’d heard tales of men from the early days of the colony, bad men, who’d tried to make themselves rich by supplying drugs, creating wasters and so creating their own little herd of criminals who needed the next little bottle of stolen or illegally synthesised narcotics more than they needed their pride. These bad men, so the stories went, ended up inside airlocks without breathing gear while grim faced citizens on the other side of the door cycled open the outer lock and let in Russalka’s implacable ocean. After a very short while, there were no bad men left.

  Kane seemed to know pathetic it would sound but he said it anyway. “It’s not what you think. It’s medicinal.”

  “In an unmarked bottle? How stupid do you think I am?” His weakness earlier, his collapse aboard the Novgorod, it all made sense to her now. He must have been unable to use his “medicine” since the FMA captured him. With the trouble in the mining site, unable to get back to this stateroom and the bottle it held, every minute must have stretched on unbearably with his addiction gnawing away at him. Finally, the withdrawal symptoms had become too much and he’d passed out, reducing him to a doddering wreck first.

  “There are different types of medicine. You think I’m a waster. Technically, I suppose you’re right, but there’s more to it than that.”

  Katya waved his explanations away. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said, moving towards the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Where do you think I’m going? I’m going to tell my uncle and Lieutenant Petrov that maybe everything you’ve told us is garbage. For all we know, it was the filth in that bottle talking.”

  “I’ve told you the truth.” He was quiet, firm, as if convincing her was the only thing that mattered.

  She laughed bitterly. “The whole truth?”

  “I’ve told you the truth,” he insisted. “You want more of it? Then listen.”

  They looked at each other in silence for a minute. Then Katya drew the chair out from under the chair and sat down, facing Kane as he sat on his bunk. “Okay,” she said, exuding cynicism. “I’m listening.”

  Kane suddenly seemed uncertain what he was going to say. Making up his mind, he opened the drawer and took out the loading-bottle. The thick black liquid sloshed lazily inside.

  “I’m going to have to fill in a few details first. You need to know exactly what this stuff is to understand. To understand why I have to use it. You don’t know much about Earth, do you? That blasted war closed the door on your roots for you and your contemporaries. If you’re anything to go by, the Russalkin don’t much care for their old world.”

  “Why should we? You invaded us! You wanted to bring your dirty, wasteful ways here and, when we wouldn’t just let you stroll in to take what you wanted, you invaded!”

  “Did we? Somebody once said that history belongs to the victor. As I think I’ve already told you, that war was never won one way or the other. Earth just decided it was too expensive. The Leviathan was their last shot. When it was lost, they just gave the whole thing up as a bad job. You didn’t win a war; you just won a battle at most. Earth hasn’t finished with Russalka yet. The failure of the Leviathan to exterminate the lot of you has given you some breathing time, which – incidentally – you can thank me for.”

  Katya looked at him with disgust. “I should thank you for being a reject? I was there, remember? I heard what the Leviathan said about you. You were as useless to the Leviathan as you are to us now. I’m not sure thanks would be enough. Maybe we should throw you a big state banquet or something for services to redundancy.”

  “Such sarcasm in one so young,” Kane said wryly. “Yes, the Leviathan rejected me. Yes, that saved your world, at least if has for the last ten years. But Petrov was right. I was extensively tested. I was compatible.” He held up the bottle again, rolling it slightly to make the viscous fluid lap against the glass walls. “This stuff is called Sin. There’s a complicated literary reason for calling it that; I won’t bore you with it. Just some biochemist with pretensions of grandeur coming up with a smart-arse name. It is a narcotic in the strict dictionary definition. It is incredibly addictive; one dose normally causes full dependency. As a way of having a good time, it rates slightly lower than having your eyes burnt out with red-hot wire loops. The first dose you have will make you a little light-headed, probably nauseous too. After that, you feel nothing at all when you take it. You might as well be giving yourself a shot of sterile saline.”

  Katya was wondering how good her understanding of the wasters’ vice was. “I thought the idea was it made you feel good?”

  “Not Sin. It’s the ultimate progression of what drug dealers want in a drug. Total dependency. Sin doesn’t make you feel good; it addicts you and then, if you don’t get regular doses, it kills you.” He looked at the bottle with a strange expression somewhere between loathing and longing. “Sin was never created to give wasters some pathetic escape from reality. It was created to enslave. The Terran government, when Earth finally got one after the collapse, commissioned this stuff. One injection and you’ve got a slave for life. It doesn’t affect the performance of their duties, but if they don’t get another dose when the last one starts to wear off, they descend into Hell, one ring at a time. It’s indescribable, foul. Nobody willingly takes this stuff, Katya.”

  She looked at him, her mouth open in shock. Her anger of only a few minutes ago had quite gone, replaced by pity and disbelief that people could do such a thing to another human being. “Before you came, they used it on you? To make you obey orders?”

  He was surprised. “Heavens, no. This stuff was banned sixty years ago.” He smiled wanly at her obvious confusion. “I managed to secure a copy of the formula and synthesised it before I left Earth. Katya, I used it on myself.” He put the bottle away before continuing. “It was my insurance policy. When I left Earth, I had visions of what Russalka would be like. A colony world fallen into barbarism, people capable of the most brutal, merciless things. That’s what I believed when I offered myself to the Leviathan programme. As the day came closer, I started having doubts. I wasn’t sure if I’d want to be a part of such a devastating attack if it turned out the situation wasn’t right. I wasn’t a soldier, you see. My motives… it wasn’t patriotism. So, I made Sin and smuggled it aboard.” He frowned as he thought back. “Russalka wasn’t anything like I’d expected. I just found a hardy race of survivors trying to hang on. This should never have come to a war. There should have been negotiations, we should have sent diplomats, tried to salvage something from the mess. Instead we sent ships and troops and certain death in the form of the Leviathan. If I let it interface with me, I had no idea what it would do to me. My personality might have been destroyed, my doubts about the war lost. I had to escape.”

  Katya nodded slowly. She was beginning to understand. “And the only way you could get away was to be rejected. So you used the Sin, knowing it would interfere with the interfacing process.”

  Kane leaned back against the bulkhead and crossed his arms. “You are clever. Everybody says so.”

  “But, the addiction..?”

  “Permanent.”

  “There must have been some other way,” she protested, “some other drug?”

  He shook his head. “No. Believe me. I researched it very thoroughly. If anything else could have done the trick reliably, I’d have used it. It had to be that stuff, though. You can imagine how I felt when I finished the database search and only that…” he nodded at the drawer, �
�…would do. I was going to be sacrificed one way or the other. The only question was would I be sacrificed to Sin or the Leviathan?” He paused. “That sounds very biblical, doesn’t it?”

  “So, you really did stop the Leviathan?”

  “Without undue modesty, yes, I did. I wish I could have done it by just pulling out a fuse or by pissing through a transformer cover but, as you saw, the Leviathan is very touchy about letting people near its vitals.” He stopped, thoughtful. Then he reached into his jacket pocket. “Which brings me onto this.”

  Before he could show Katya what he had, the communicator mounted on the wall clicked into life. “Kane?” It was Tasya’s voice, sounding distracted and puzzled. “Come to the bridge immediately.” She’d broken the connection before Kane had a chance to reply and he glared at the communicator with frustration.

  “It’s always something, isn’t it?” he said peevishly to Katya and his theatrical irritation made her smile. “Come on, you’re as much a part of all this as anyone.”

  As she followed him out of the cabin, she noticed on a bookshelf by the door the small maser pistol she’d used to hold Kane at gunpoint aboard the Novgorod. It felt strange and unexpected to see it abandoned like that and, acting on an impulse she barely understood, she picked it up and slipped it in her pocket.

  On the bridge, Tasya was in the captain’s chair. She made no effort to relinquish it when Kane entered, but neither did he make any move towards it, instead perching on the edge of an inactive console. “Well, what’s so fascinating?”

  Tasya nodded at the main screen. “Our large lumbering friend has developed a sense of direction again.”

  Katya was already looking at the screen as Tasya spoke. The Leviathan had, indeed, pulled itself out of the doldrums and was travelling with a definite sense of purpose. But, she noticed, it wasn’t heading north towards Lemuria. Instead, it was heading roughly easterly, perhaps eighty degrees. “Where’s it going?”