Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles)

by Howard, Jonathan L

  “No,” said Tasya, leaning against the doorjamb. “What you saw was the prosecution of a war. That’s not the same as trying to win it. That’s just not lying down and giving up.”

  Katya was having problems with the conversation that extended beyond its location and the other speakers. They were talking as if the Yagizban were at least thinking of giving up. It certainly didn’t sound as if they had much belly for the fight. Kane was ahead of her.

  “Don’t think the Yagizba Enclaves are thinking of surrendering. Because they’re not.”

  “We can’t,” added Tasya with quiet emphasis.

  Katya was still near the door with a strong impulse to leave, but she wasn’t leaving. She would in a moment, she was sure. Any minute now, she’d be gone. Any moment.

  Just as soon as she’d found out what the hell they were talking about.

  “What does that mean, ‘we can’t’?” she said. “It’s very easy. You say to the Feds, ‘We surrender.’ There’s no big trick to it.”

  Kane shook his head. “This war is more complicated than you realise, Katya.”

  He reached inside the long coat he always insisted on wearing, even in the temperature and humidity controlled submarine environments, the freak. Mind you, he liked the surface, liked standing around on surfaced submarine decks and on the Yagizban floating platforms, even in the howling cold and rain. She’d seen him do it herself, and it still mystified her even if it explained his attachment to his coat.

  She decided she needed a stronger word than “freak” to really sum Kane up. Then she remembered that he was Terran by birth; he was already the most extreme form of freak imaginable.

  Meanwhile, the freak in question had found what he was looking for. He pulled a waterproof envelope from his inside pocket, unsealed it and produced several sheets of hard copy. “These documents are all top secret,” he said offhandedly, as if everybody carried secret papers around with them. “The Yagizba Enclaves have already made diplomatic overtures towards equitable terms for a cessation of hostilities.” He looked at Katya. “That means they’re trying to end the war, by the way.”

  “I know what it means,” said Katya, although she hadn’t been completely sure.

  Unabashed, Kane held up one of the sheets. “This is what they suggested. Immediate ceasefire, normalisation of relations, independence for the Enclaves from Federal authority, and a claim of about an eighth of the planet’s surface.”

  “An eighth?” Katya was astounded and disgusted. That sounded like a lot.

  “Yes, an eighth. Bear in mind that the Yagizban represent about a quarter of the planet’s human population. An eighth is actually pretty modest. The eighth they want contains no Federal facilities, stations, developed mining sites, or anything else that would need to change hands. It’s untouched apart from what the Yagizban already have there.”

  “What has this got to do with me?”

  “As a Federal citizen, it has everything to do with you. Did you know the Yagizban had tried to negotiate? No. Their terms sound better than a war, don’t they?”

  Katya said nothing. She could see the other sheets Kane had taken from the envelope and scattered on the desk. One of them had the FMA seal in the corner. Kane picked it up.

  “This is the Federal response to that olive branch.” He saw her frown and added, “Sorry, that’s an Earth term that apparently didn’t make the trip here. It just means a peaceful overture. Here, read it yourself.” He passed her the FMA document.

  She took it and skim read it. Unfortunately, it was couched oddly, full of strange legal terms and skimming it did her no good. With the full knowledge that she had four people watching her as she read, she went back to the beginning and went through it more carefully. The first and obvious thing was that the FMA had dismissed the Yagizban peace plan. Most of the rest of the document was a counter-proposal, but even here some of the terms weren’t very clear to her. There was something about the Yagizban surrendering unconditionally, something about territories and…

  “I don’t know this word,” she admitted. “I haven’t seen it before. What’s ‘indenturement’?”

  Kane didn’t reply immediately. He looked at Tasya first. Katya followed his glance, and saw Tasya had gone pale with anger. Abruptly, she stirred from her place in the door and walked out into the corridor.

  “It’s when you contract to work for someone in return for food, clothes, somewhere to sleep.”

  Katya was confused. What was a proviso like that doing in a peace negotiation? Now she knew what it meant, she could make sense of the sentences around it. Her eyes widened. They couldn’t be serious.

  “All Yagizban?” she asked Kane. “Mandatory indenturement for a period of thirty years on all Yagizban? But, if it’s mandatory, if they have to do it…”

  “Slavery,” said Tasya reappearing at the door. “They want to enslave my people. This is what they call a ‘peaceful overture.’” Her anger was in danger of boiling over. She took off her Secor cap and threw it in the corner as if it were diseased.

  Katya was used to bickering and haggling over terms with traders, and was very familiar with the idea of starting with an outrageous offer. But buying a load of crimson squid fillets and negotiating a ceasefire couldn’t work exactly the same, could they? You couldn’t start by threatening the other party with enslavement or extermination. That was how wars started, not how they ended.

  Then she read the last clause. It said in unequivocal terms that this was the FMA’s first and only offer. The Yagizba Enclaves must accept it or suffer the consequences.

  “I don’t understand,” Katya said to Kane. “This is a declaration of war for a war that’s already being fought. I just…” She looked at the document as if it was dry water or pale black or something else that had no right existing. “What’s going on, Kane? What are they doing?”

  “Now that is an excellent question,” he said, looking at the other documents still on the desktop. “I know what it looks like they’re doing.” He looked her in the eye. “It looks like they’re trying to wipe out the Russalkin.”

  “You mean the Yagizban.”

  “I mean what I say.” He held up two of the sheets. “More documents I’m not supposed to have. I’ll give you the short version and you can read them yourself if you don’t believe me. That love letter from the FMA gives the impression that a Federal victory is inevitable. These documents,” he waved the two sheets, “are recent loss reports for both sides, and include projected losses. Katya, if the war continues with its current ferocity, in one year’s time the global population will be less than a thousand. The only people left will be the ones in the warboats, because they will have destroyed all the settlements.”

  Katya shook her head. “That’s not possible. No conventional war is that destructive.”

  Kane dropped the papers to the desktop and rubbed his eyes. “Oh, if only that were true. There are two problems with that idea, though. One, it only really applies in places where the planet itself isn’t trying to kill you. Russalka isn’t a nice place, Katya. We can only live here because we have the technology. We make environments to live in because the Russalkin environment would kill us in hours. Most of it wants to drown us, and the rest of it will kill us with hypothermia. We live in bubbles. All it takes is a big enough pin and any bubble can be burst. And that brings us to point number two.”

  He slid another sheet towards Katya. From the heading she could see it was a Yagizban intelligence report. “It turns out that the FMA is developing a bigger pin. A fusion device, specifically intended to open underwater bases to the ocean across multiple decks, thus overwhelming compartmentalisation and bulkhead safety measures. Anybody who isn’t vaporised, blown up, or drowned in the detonation will just suffocate in the darkness as the life-support fails.” He smiled humourlessly. “Even my lot never stooped that low.”

  “The Leviathan,” said Katya with pointed emphasis.

  Kane winced. “Yes. That’s true. The Le
viathan. But something went wrong with it. It wasn’t supposed to kill everyone. Just destroy any military capability. What the Feds are planning is genocide. Cold-blooded mass murder. Slavery or extermination. This is your government planning this, Katya. This is happening in your name.”

  Katya turned to Tasya. “What are you doing about it, your government?”

  Tasya pointed at the intelligence report. “We have warning. The Feds may have the numbers, but we’ve always had the technological edge. We’ll have fusion warheads by the time they do. If they attack the Enclaves with these weapons, we will destroy their settlements. If they want total war, they can have it.”

  Katya shook her head. “This is crazy. This is all crazy. Are you seriously saying this war has to end with us all killing one another? I can’t… Over a century we’ve fought the planet just to survive, we fought the Grubbers when they tried to take it away from us, and you’re saying it’s all as good as over? We were our own worst enemies the whole time? No. No, I can’t accept that. We’re not that stupid.” The others were just looking at her. “We are not that stupid!”

  She was angry now. Angry with them, angry with all this secret agent rubbish, but most of all she was angry because she had an ugly feeling gnawing away inside her that the Russalkin were more than capable of cutting their own throats rather than back down over a matter of pride.

  Of course, all this still left one very large question.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Kane and Tasya exchanged glances. Katya realised that this was not a courtesy visit to tell her all this, or just to say hello and chat.

  “We think we have a solution.” Katya looked at him suspiciously. Considering he was claiming to have found a way to prevent humans becoming nearly extinct on the planet, he didn’t seem very happy about it. “But, you’re not going to like it.”

  “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.
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br />   “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.