Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles)

by Howard, Jonathan L

  The Vodyanoi’s jaws reached their furthest extreme, leaving the four suits floating in the void between them.

  “Right,” said Kane. “Here we go. Single file. Follow me.”

  The murk illuminated in her suit’s lights suddenly stirred violently as Kane triggered his manoeuvre unit’s impellers and then he was moving smoothly away from her. On her helmet’s head-up display, a small navigational caret glowed, showing her their destination.

  “This is Sahlberg. Here we go, Katya.” She felt the vibration of her own MMU’s impellers coming to life and, almost instantly, she was moving steadily forward through the water. She watched the jaws taper away over her head before they vanished altogether from view. She was clear of the maw, now. In the open sea. And she felt… She barely had to examine her feelings.

  She felt great. The fear had been for nothing. She felt safe, she felt protected, she felt excited for the adventure of it all. She was surrounded by the world ocean on every side, no part of her skin more than a few centimetres from the great deadly, terrifying, wonderful waters, and she felt suddenly so ecstatically good she could almost have wept for joy.

  She had always loved her world, but it had been a love for the Russalkin civilisation, its spirit, and its courage, even its more human flaws. Now, though… now she felt love for the world itself, the great glorious grey orb floating in space, the majesty of the waters, the elemental fury of its skies somewhere far above them.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said under her breath.

  “It is,” replied Kane, startling her. The microphone pick-ups were much more acute than she’d expected.

  “What are you talking about?” said Tasya, somewhere behind them. “You can’t see anything but plankton.”

  “Even plankton has its charms,” said Kane mildly. It was a comment designed to shut Tasya up, which it did. Katya smiled and said nothing more. She knew what she had meant, and she knew Kane did too.

  The column travelled onwards in silence for a few minutes. When Katya and her friends had been playing at being ADS-equipped super agents, they’d run around with their heads down, mimicking the torpedo-like movement of the agents’ suits in the drama. This was very different. They travelled almost upright, but for a very slight forward lean. They were presenting a lot of surface area, and the drag was terrific, but if they had been travelling head first, they wouldn’t have been able to see a thing through the opaque helmet tops. As in so many things, fiction was more exciting that the sensible reality.

  “I can see the lock,” said Kane suddenly. He slowed and, a moment later, Katya felt Sahlberg gently slacking off her own manoeuvre unit’s motors too. She had considered asking for a minute of two of manual operation, just to see what steering the suit was like. The time didn’t seem right, however. Perhaps she’d ask on the way back.

  Out of the gloom, detail started to build around the navigation lights on Kane’s suit as Katya grew closer. “Sahlberg, use Katya’s suit as a drone and relay pictures of the lock. Let’s see what we’re dealing with here. Sorry, Katya. Needs must.”

  “That’s OK,” she replied. “I want to see the lock anyway.” Sahlberg took her in past where Kane hung almost motionless, and switched up her lights to full intensity. Out of the darkness, she could make out an artificially exact and level overhang, the top edge of the airlock’s surround. She descended slightly as she advanced, slowly gliding beneath it.

  “I see it,” she said. “Looks untouched.”

  “Good,” said Kane. “Anything you can add to that, sensors?”

  “I’m looking at an enhanced image here, captain,” reported Sahlberg. “And it seems fine here too. You should be able to get in once the lock’s powered up.”

  “Understood. Move Katya out to the side, please, but keep her lights on the access panel. Giroux, you’re on.”

  The impellers hummed and Katya was carried gracefully backwards to halt a couple of metres away from the lock, her lights focused exactly on the panel beside the auxiliary airlock. She had to admit, Sahlberg had an extraordinarily sure touch on the controls. Every move he made with the suit felt as natural as walking.

  Giroux was just as competent at his job. He swept by her, decelerating as he approached the panel and coming to a full stop by grabbing the panel cover. The cover, intended to prevent marine life taking up residence in the power sockets and manual crank mechanism rather than keeping water out, opened easily. Giroux unclipped the power unit from the side of his MMU and mounted it on the hook provided by the socket for exactly that reason. He unrolled half a metre of cable, pushed the plug home and twisted it. In that one simple move, the water was expelled from within the hermetic seal between plug and socket, and the power unit was activated. They all saw the panel’s lights glow, but Giroux reported “Power unit placed and active” all the same. “Cycling the airlock now.”

  As they watched the lock’s outer doors slide open, Katya found her mind wandering onto what was on the other side of the airlock. She knew it wouldn’t be pretty, but that was war. Precious little glory, but plenty of hardship, and fear, and horror. The Yags had placed a spy base close by Federal shipping lanes, hidden in Red Water. The Feds had detected it and wrecked the place, probably killing everybody inside. She couldn’t blame the Yags for building the place, she couldn’t blame the Feds for destroying it. It was an ugly incident, but wartime is made up of ugly incidents. Once again, she wondered what Kane hoped to gain by bringing her here.

  “The lock was already flooded,” said Kane. “Interesting.”

  Katya understood him to mean that whoever had last used the lock had been exiting the base. Had somebody escaped?

  The interior of the lock was large enough to accept a minisub, so they had no trouble manoeuvring in and setting down on the concrete floor, Giroux starting the pump cycle before joining them. As Katya watched the water level drop past the front of her visor, she realised that she was feeling tense again. She didn’t want to leave her suit in this strange, forbidding place, but she had no choice; out of the water and even with the MMUs detached, the suits were too heavy to walk around in for long. From a symbol of a potentially dangerous journey through the waters, her suit had become one of security. She was very sorry to see the water level reach floor level, and to hear Kane order them to emerge from their armour.

  In her case, she had no idea how to open the ADS from within and had to wait for Giroux to help her. With the back panel open and the helmet forward, she was just wondering how to climb out when she felt his hands under her armpits and she was effortlessly lifted out. As he put her down, she could see Tasya managing it for herself, drawing her arms from the sleeves, gripping the shoulders and pulling herself up to sit on the lower edge of the open back of the suit. It was just as well that the MMUs were so heavy, anchoring the suit upright while their occupants wriggled out.

  The lock stank of sea water, and the pump gullies were still awash with it as the last few dozen litres were drained. Katya’s feet came down with a splash in a puddle left on the concrete. She looked at the closed outer doors and noticed a small trickle of water running down between them. “That seal’s not perfect.”

  “It’s an auxiliary lock. Was probably only checked once a month at best,” said Tasya. “Or maybe a pressure wave from the Federal attack damaged it. We can expect much worse inside.” She had recovered her watertight equipment bag from its stowage within the MMU and was clipping on a webbing harness. Katya noticed it came with a holstered maser.

  “Is that necessary?” she asked as she shrugged into her own harness, switching on the shoulder mounted light.

  Tasya drew the maser, checked it and returned it to its holster. “I don’t know. Let’s find out.” She went to the inner door controls and pressed the “open” button.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DEAD WATER

  The inner doors opened inwards into the body of the airlock, a common trait in locks that were expected to be used with less frequency. If the outer doo
r were to leak water in, the mounting pressure would just close the inner doors all the more firmly. The logic for them was plain enough, but watching the two heavy steel doors swing inwards towards them made a small shudder travel across her shoulders. Katya didn’t believe in ghosts, a stupid Earth superstition if ever she’d heard one.

  At least, she didn’t usually believe in ghosts.

  But this was a place of the dead, and the doors gliding open like those of a crypt from a Grubber story did not help her nerves.

  Katya drew a slow breath through her nose, half expecting to smell rotting flesh, but there was nothing, nothing but the scent of the sea and damp concrete. Irrationally, she started to wish she was armed, too. She had noticed that, like Tasya, Giroux was carrying a sidearm. Predictably, Kane was not.

  Kane fished in his equipment bag and produced a translucent ball perhaps fifteen centimetres in diameter. “Here’s a pretty gadget from Earth,” he said, held the ball out in one hand and clicked a small device he had mounted on his harness with the other. Instantly the ball started to glow fiercely, rose from his hand and travelled forward three or four metres just above head height. It flew through the open doorway and hovered there, as if waiting for them to catch up.

  “Not even military issue on Earth,” he said. “I picked it up from a camping supplies vendor.” Without pausing to explain what “camping” was, he walked forward, and the orb flew ahead, always maintaining the same distance from him and lighting the way. The others fell in behind him. Tasya was right behind Kane; she looked as cool and calm as she always did, but Katya noticed her unconsciously slip her holster’s retention band off the maser’s frame, freeing it for a fast draw. That a killer like Tasya found the facility unnerving did little for Katya’s state of mind.

  They made their way slowly up a slight slope in the broad, dark corridor. The construction was of the lowest practical finish, and the speed with which the place had been built was evident in every economy. The corridor was wide and the walls were concave, caused by two overlapping fusion bores being used to cut it through the rock of the mountain. The floor had been levelled, filled with some black synthetic, but the walls and ceiling were bare stone. Over their heads cables ran in bundles, crudely stapled to the rock at frequent intervals by large steel “U” pins. Equally crude was the corridor lighting, consisting of utility lamps not even attached to the rock but simply hung from the underside of each staple and wired into a power cable in the bundle. With the base’s power off, the lamps hung dark and useless.

  Ahead of them the corridor was blocked by a bulkhead that filled the six metre wide corridor, secured around its edge by more of the black synthetic used for the floor. In the middle of the bulkhead was a metre wide manual door, looking strange and out of proportion in the middle of the large bulkhead. It stood open, swung towards them on its hinges.

  Katya coughed and everybody looked at her, startled. Kane noticed Tasya’s hand had fallen onto her pistol, and said. “I think we all need to take a moment. This facility is dead. We have no reason to think anyone but us is alive here. Not a nice thought, but nor is it a threatening one in the most realistic sense. Let us not have any… accidents, hmm?” Out of the corner of her eye, Katya saw Tasya thumb the retention band back into position and drop her hand away from the weapon. Katya thought this was probably the closest that the Chertovka would ever come to expressing shame.

  Kane played around with the light globe’s control until he induced it to fly through the open hatch. It was fascinating to watch the device, which flew easily and quickly yet never let itself get closer than twenty or thirty centimetres to any surface. It clearly contained a contragravitic drive, but anything so small was unknown on Russalka. That it wasn’t even new technology to the Terrans was unsettling.

  They followed Kane through the hatch and found themselves on a level section of corridor. It seemed likely that the previous section had been intended as a safety buffer between the auxiliary lock and the main body of the base, as subsidiary corridors were now visible branching off the main one.

  “Mr Giroux,” said Kane. “Scout on ahead, will you, please? Find the next main bulkhead, but don’t go beyond it. Call in when you get there, yes?”

  “Yes, captain,” said Giroux and went ahead in a dogtrot.

  Katya had glanced at her own communications unit when Kane had mentioned Giroux calling in and noticed the display had changed. “Kane. I’ve got a problem with my gear. I’m not picking up the Vodyanoi’s channel anymore.”

  “Really? Let me see.”

  “None of us are,” said Tasya. “Not this side of the airlock, I’d say. This facility must be EM secure. It was supposed to be hidden, after all.”

  “Ah,” said Kane. “That is a nuisance.”

  “EM?” said Katya. “Electromagnetic?”

  “The whole base is effectively inside a giant Faraday cage,” explained Kane. “No electromagnetic radiation gets in or out. It’s to hide the place from sensors. There’ll be a comms relay outside the cage that’s hardwired to the command centre by cable. We don’t have that luxury.”

  “So… there’s no way we can talk to the Vodyanoi or the Lukyan?”

  “None.” He brightened. “Still, we shouldn’t need to. We’ll just see what we need to see, and then leave.”

  “And what exactly is that? Why can’t you just tell me?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me.” Katya started to say something snide, but he stopped her. “And… even if you did, it’s not enough that you believe me. It’s not enough. You have to know. Know it first-hand. Know it for yourself so there’s no denial.” He looked around, searching. “No denial,” he repeated to himself. Then, “This way.”

  “Why?” asked Katya, curious despite her desire to stay cold to Kane and his plans. “What’s this way?”

  “I don’t know. But, whatever it is, it will probably be as good as anywhere else.” He walked on, unaware of the look Katya was giving him.

  “That doesn’t work,” said Tasya, amused. “Believe me, if looks could kill, Kane would have been fish bait years ago.”

  They followed him down one of the spur corridors, the glow of the light orb turning him into a walking shadow ahead of them. Katya kept looking around, trying to glimpse just what was so astounding that she had to see it with her own eyes. It was hard to believe it was the spy base itself; it was competently built for all the obvious haste, but otherwise entirely unremarkable. She had once been in an abandoned mining site and it had looked a little like this. The one thing that seemed odd was that it was so large. The phrase “spy base” had put images in her mind of some small stealthy facility tucked into a cleft in a mountainside, just large enough to serve a small sub crew in their work of sneaking around and monitoring Federal transmissions, and watching traffic from the edge of the Red Water. This place was an altogether larger proposition. They hadn’t even seen the living quarters yet, just a medical section and… She looked up at a sign stencilled onto the rock and stopped.

  “Hold on,” she said. “We’re walking in a circle. This is the way to the medical section, but that was on the other side of the main corridor.”

  Kane came to a halt. “Perhaps there is more than one medical section.” His voice was neutral and the flying globe kept him limned with light, reducing him to a silhouette, yet Katya caught something hidden in the comment.

  “Why would a spy base have more than one medical section?” she demanded. “Hell, why does it even have one? All they’d need would be a sick bay. What were they doing here, Kane?”

  But Kane wasn’t listening. He had moved to the wall and was examining it. Even in the oblique light cast by the orb, Katya could see there were windows set into the wall and, a little beyond, a door. For the first time she realised that every doorframe she’d seen had been sealed into its surround, every door had been waterproof.

  Usually doors within the areas between bulkheads were conventional, both for reasons of economy and convenience. If s
omething terrible happened and a section flooded, the bulkheads would contain the water within that section, but the doors of the rooms in the section would not stop the water for a second.

  Yet this place was heavily compartmentalised. Why the paranoia?

  Kane had unclipped his personal torch from his harness and was angling it, trying to look through the window. As Katya and Tasya approached, he suddenly stepped back from the glass as if startled.

  “This is a mistake,” he said quickly, the words tumbling over one another. “I made a mistake bringing you here. I… I… There’ll be somewhere else here. Somewhere else for you to see. Not here, though. I never anticipated… We must go back.”

  “What have you found?” said Tasya.

  “It’s flooded in there. You can’t see anything. We’ll go back to the main corridor.”

  “You’re a miserable liar, Havilland,” said Tasya. She sounded like somebody getting ready to lose her temper. “What’s in there?”

  “Please, Tasya, I’m begging you. Don’t look.”

  And he was begging her. Not on his knees, but plucking miserably at her arm as she strode past him to squint at the thick armour glass. There was condensation on it and she rubbed angrily at it with her sleeve, before putting her face close to the glass. After a moment, she copied Kane’s action in unclipping her torch and shining it close to the surface away from her face to cut down reflection.

  Katya looked at Kane, but he barely acknowledged her, backing away from the windows in distress and horror.

  “Oh, gods,” said Tasya, quietly. She stood, rooted to the spot by what she could see. Then she extinguished her torch and walked to one side. “They knew,” she said to Kane. “How could they not know?” She was calm now, an icy calm that scared Katya in ways that a towering rage could never have done. “The operation’s cancelled, Kane. Forget it.”