Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles)

by Howard, Jonathan L

  Whereas, it seemed, masering a hole through somebody’s foot for it was perfectly reasonable.

  Yet here she was, clearly angry at the delay but saying nothing about it, never mind resorting to gunplay. Kane received a unique degree of tolerance from her. Some of Katya’s old school friends would have been quick to assign thwarted romantic feelings to Tasya, but that didn’t seem quite right to Katya. It was more like the protectiveness of an older sister to a slightly stupid younger brother. Havilland was actually the elder by a little way, but his eccentricities often made him seem very immature for his years.

  “We’re here, captain,” reported the helm, “directly over the wreck of the Zarya. Continuing to descend.”

  The news seemed to sober Kane. Indeed, the atmosphere on the bridge became sombre. Katya was not surprised; the Vodyanois were Terrans, and the Zarya must have contained hundreds of their compatriots.

  “Take us down to fifty metres above the wreck, please. Mr Sahlberg, Mr Quinn, prepare a drone if you would.”

  Every few seconds, the hull creaked again under the increasing pressure, but never as sharply or, at least, never as unexpectedly as the first time. It was an impossible sound to enjoy, but at least it became bearable in the knowledge that they would not be exceeding the Vodyanoi’s design depth, never mind its more problematical crush depth.

  The drone was launched before the submarine reached its prescribed depth, travelling down ahead of its mothership. The water was relatively clear, and when the Vodyanoi activated the searchlights in its visual array, the great bulk of the stricken Terran starship immediately leapt into view.

  Despite herself, Katya gasped. The array was scanning a directional sonar search over the Zarya assisted by the drone’s pulse emitter and superimposing the results over the camera image along with range and scale information. “It’s vast,” she said out loud.

  “She’s big,” agreed Kane. “I remember being shocked when I saw her in the flesh for the first time.”

  Katya looked at the smooth, wide lines of the drowned ship, and felt some small recollection nagging at her. Something from when she was just a kid. “Have you been here many times?”

  “Yes. Once a year ever since I arrived on Russalka. But this isn’t how I remember her. The first time I saw her she was in space, in Earth’s orbit. I had gone up the orbital elevator from Libreville to the high port. She was just hanging there. In space, it can be difficult to get a sense of scale sometimes, but then I saw the shuttles going back and forth. I knew how big those were, and they were dwarfed by the Zarya.” Katya glanced sideways at him, and saw he was lost in the memory. “I watched her depart geostationary orbit, watched her until she was no bigger than the stars. Then, soon enough, she was gone. It was a hard thing, to watch her go, and to have to stay behind.”

  Katya looked at him, confused. This did not match well with what she knew. “You were supposed to be aboard her?” He nodded absently, still looking at the image. “But, you weren’t in the military, were you? I don’t understand. Why were you supposed to be aboard an invasion ship?”

  “There are invasions, and there are invasions. Look at her, Katya. Tell me what you see.”

  Katya turned back to the main screen, her confusion not at all diminished. “She’s big. I suppose that’s not a surprise; she was carrying a whole invasion force. Very wide in the beam. Long, but not as long as the Leviathan. And…” It suddenly struck her that she wasn’t seeing something that should very definitely have been there. “Kane… where are her weapons?” The old memory from her school days nagged at her again and she could almost recall where she’d seen something very like the Zarya before.

  Kane smiled a little sadly, like a teacher with a slow pupil who had finally understood a simple point. “There aren’t any.”

  That didn’t make sense, except it did, but Katya didn’t want to think about that, because that way led something awful that she shied away from. So instead she scoffed and said, “It must have weapons. It’s an invasion ship.”

  “The ships that came a year later, the ships that came in response to the Zarya’s last distress signal, that came to avenge her, they were armed. But that was a real invasion. The Zarya came to re-establish links with the lost colony of Russalka, to continue what had begun a century before.” He pointed at the screen. “Five thousand colonists. Mr Sahlberg’s sister, brother-in-law and two nephews. Ms Ocello’s sister, sister-in-law, nephew and niece. Two of Mr Lowe’s cousins.” He paused and swallowed, and said very quietly, “My wife and daughter.”

  Katya remembered the toy Kane had once given her: a “yo-yo,” all the way from Earth. “I bought it for my daughter,” he’d told her. She had never asked why he still had it. She looked at the image on the screen. Somewhere in that wreck…

  No. It couldn’t be so. It could not be so. The Grubbers started the war. Everybody knew that. The Grubbers turned up in a ship bristling with weapons and demanded obedience. They fired first. The FMA destroyed the invasion ship in a desperate and bravely fought battle. She’d seen dramas of it. She’d read about it in class. She’d heard war stories from veterans. It couldn’t all be lies.

  “You’re lying. I don’t know what that ship is, but it can’t be the Zarya.”

  Even as she said it, she knew she was wrong. The memory from school strengthened. It was a history lesson. The class was watching a recreation of the original colonisation. The broad, smooth lines of the colony ships…

  “There are invasions, and there are invasions, Katya. The Terran government are not nice people, by and large. They monitor the population, curtail freedoms. Believe me when I say that the people who volunteer to be colonists are glad to leave the place. They came to Russalka expecting to find a well-established colony here. Or, just possibly, everybody dead, in which case they’d have to start again. Earth had tried to communicate with the place, but received no reply. So they assumed the FTL communications relay satellites had failed. Or, as I say, everybody was dead and there was no one to answer. It didn’t matter. The Zarya was supposed to be the second wave of the colonisation effort. A century late, but there’d been the small matter of a world war on Earth that turned hot. You don’t get over things like that quickly.”

  “That’s not true. The FTL satellites were in place. We were using them to communicate with the other colonies. The Grubbers destroyed those satellites in orbit when they arrived.”

  “Yes, they did. There was nothing wrong with them up to that point. You’re missing the obvious – Earth received no reply from Russalka because the FMA decided not to reply. They didn’t say a thing until the Zarya was in orbit. Then they told her they’d had satellite problems, were very glad to see them, and could they set down just here.” He pointed at the screen. “It was an ambush. She never stood a chance.”

  Katya couldn’t find anything to say. Kane continued, quietly crushing almost everything she had ever believed. “What happened at that Yagizban evacuation site wasn’t an aberration, Katya. The Federal government hasn’t suffered some sort of personality change overnight. They have been doing things like this for years. Somewhere in that long century when Russalka was on its own, your ancestors gave the bureaucrats too much power. They became very comfortable with that power and very protective of it. So they sold you a lie: of things always being on a knife edge; of disaster being just around the corner. How you must all pull together or perish.

  “The Zarya represented a huge threat to them. All those new faces, new minds that hadn’t been indoctrinated with generations of the lie, that would ask questions and have direct contact with Earth to discuss matters. The government could see the good times coming to an end. So, they just made the lie a bigger one still, but in a way that would appeal to the populace. Now you were the innocent victims of a warmongering colonial power. It was a beautifully convincing lie. The Russalkin bled and died for it in their thousands. The only risk the government could see was that they might lose the war, but I’m sure they had continge
ncy plans in place for that.

  “The one thing they didn’t anticipate was the Yagizban actually believing what the Terrans told them. When the war fizzled out and Earth didn’t send reinforcements, the Feds believed it was business as usual. You can see how well that worked out. Ten years of growing Yagizban resentment and a lovely new war that the Federal government thinks is worth fighting to the last drop of somebody else’s blood.”

  Katya felt empty, exhausted, sickened. She wanted to cling to the reality she had grown up in, but now everywhere she touched it with her mind, it crumbled and rotted away.

  She kept thinking of little things that she had always simply accepted, but that now made a new and terrible sense. The existence of Secor boats, and how it was always just expected that they would be part of flotillas and wolf packs. How many times had decent people fired on innocent targets using data and “pirate” identifications provided by the Secor command boats? The Russalkin had suffered, been called “heroes,” and regarded those who complained as verging on traitors. All the time they thought they had been proud warriors, they had been nothing but patsies for the biggest confidence game in the galaxy.

  “You’re wasting your time searching a grid,” she said. “If Sergei is still at the controls, he’ll run for the nearest station where he feels safe. That will be Dunwich. Find him and the Lukyan, Kane. We can’t do this without them.” She left the bridge without another word.

  They picked up the Lukyan twenty kilometres from Dunwich’s sensor line. Kane wasn’t in the mood for subtlety – the Vodyanoi swooped quickly on the minisub, approaching in her baffles so it wasn’t detected until it was too late. The salvage maw gaped wide and swallowed the Lukyan in a perfectly performed manoeuvre that hinted at how many times the crew had practised it in the past.

  Tasya wanted to go into the maw with two others, all armed, but Katya wouldn’t hear of it. Sergei was her friend, her employee and her crew, the Lukyan her vessel, and every Russalkin knew better than to get between a captain and her boat. She climbed through the hatch into the maw as soon as it was drained, Tasya – armed of course – at her heels.

  Katya cast an eye already rendered professional by a few months of ownership over the Lukyan, noting the damage caused by its violent capture. Scuffed paintwork, punctured air tank, snapped strut on the lighting rig – four to six hours to repair if she and Sergei worked on it together.

  She walked around the front to look in through the forward observation bubble, but the internal lights were out. The light from the maw’s own illumination strips seemed to show a dark bundle on the floor next to the crate of plumbing supplies which Sergei had insisted on keeping aboard.

  Katya walked back to the minisub’s aft hatch where Tasya was waiting. “I can see something on the floor in there. It might be a body.”

  “Only one?”

  “Why guess?” said Katya, and operated the hatch control.

  A strange organic smell rolled out of the open door, and it took Katya a moment to identify the mixed scent of blood and urine. Tasya didn’t wait that moment; she stepped inside, drawing and aiming her maser at the shape as she did so. She kicked it, and it whimpered.

  “On your feet,” she ordered.

  The shape clambered painfully up, and Katya saw it was Sergei. Her joy at seeing him alive was immediately dissipated by the state he was in. He had a deep cut down the left side of his brow, and the blood had splashed all the way down his habitual green coveralls to the waist. But there was blood, too, on his sleeve cuffs.

  “We need a medic,” Katya called back to the open maw hatch where Kane and a couple of the crew stood watching. Sergei cried out, making her turn quickly back.

  Tasya had him held against the wall of the minisub by his throat with one hand while the other held her gun unwaveringly between his eyes. The last time Katya had seen a gun held to someone like that, a second later Filipp Shurygin was dead. “Tasya? What the hell are you doing?”

  “Where’s Vetsch?” demanded Tasya, her voice cold with suppressed violence.

  “Katya!” croaked Sergei through Tasya’s firm grip on his windpipe. “Help!”

  “Tasya, let him go! He can hardly breathe!”

  Tasya released his throat, but kept the maser’s muzzle aiming steadily between his eyes. “Don’t make me wait for my answer, Ilyin,” she said.

  Sergei shot her a terrified glance, although somebody unexpectedly knowing his surname was probably enough to do that. “He attacked me. Look!” He pointed at the cut.

  “Sergei,” said Katya gently in an attempt to calm him, “please, tell us what exactly happened.”

  “He was as nice as anything to start with. I thought he was OK for a pirate.” Belatedly realising what he had said, he started to stumble out some apologies, but Tasya just waved the barrel of her gun impatiently. This served to concentrate his mind wonderfully.

  “Then he said the boat was his.”

  “The Vodyanoi?” asked Kane, stepping into the maw. He noticed Tasya bristle, and added, “Never mind me. Just an interested party. Carry on. You were saying?”

  “No,” said Sergei. “The Lukyan. Katya’s boat. He said he was in the captain’s seat so that made him the captain. I’d taken the co-pilot’s seat. I’m happier there.”

  “He is,” said Katya to no one in particular.

  “So I gave him the pilot’s seat. Then he says the Lukyan belongs to him, because he’s the captain. I thought he was joking, but then he gave me a bad look, a real bad look, and I thought He’s stealing her because Kane told him to, because they’re pirates.”

  “Word of honour, for whatever that’s worth,” said Kane. “I told him to do no such thing.”

  “And I said she belongs to Captain Kuriakova, and he said, no, she belongs to him because… because he was sitting in the captain’s seat, and that meant he owned her now. He meant it, too.”

  “What happened then?” demanded Tasya.

  “I laughed. I sort of thought he might still be joking. And… he went crazy. He grabbed the extinguisher and smacked me in the side of the head with it. I unstrapped and got into the back, trying to get away from him. He came after me. He was crazy. He was shouting about how I was trespassing aboard his command and he would kill me before giving her up.” He was looking pleadingly at Katya. “I sort of danced around that crate full of plumbing gear, just trying to keep away from him. He was getting angrier and angrier. I’ve never seen anyone go like that before. His face was all scrunched up but he was dead white. Then he tried to dodge past the crate and hit me and he fell over.” He fell silent, his eyes on the maser and Tasya’s face.

  “What then?” she said.

  “I… hit him. He’d dropped the extinguisher when he fell over, and I grabbed it and I hit him.” He gulped, the sweat showing on his face. “I hit him a lot of times. I didn’t want him to get up again.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  Sergei nodded miserably. “I think so.”

  “And then what? You dumped the body out of the dorsal lock?”

  If Sergei had been reluctant to admit that he had killed Vetsch, even in self-defence, it was nothing compared to now. His gaze flickered from face to face, cornered and desperate.

  “What did you do with him, Sergei?” said Katya gently, then far less gently, “Lower your gun, Tasya, for crying out loud!”

  Tasya kept it aimed at Sergei’s forehead for another three seconds and then slowly, very slowly, lowered it, leaving them all in no doubt she could still put a maser bolt between his eyes in an instant if he tried anything.

  As the gun lowered, Sergei’s fear ebbed just a little. “I didn’t throw him out. He… climbed out himself.”

  Katya frowned; she must have misunderstood something. “So, you didn’t kill him after all. Obviously.”

  “I couldn’t find a pulse. I… I felt his skull break when I hit him the last time. That’s why I stopped. I didn’t want to kill him. Just knock him out. But I’d hit him too hard. So
I checked for a pulse, and there wasn’t one. I even used the monitor from the medical kit. It said he was dead, too. I thought the pirates would kill me. So I ran. I’m sorry, Katya. You know them, I thought you’d be OK. But they don’t know me. I’m so sorry.”

  Katya couldn’t find it in herself to be angry with him. There he was, injured, bloodied, terrified, and so scared of pain and death. Of course he had run. “It’s OK, Sergei. I understand.”

  Tasya had no interest in forgiveness. “He was either dead or he wasn’t. What did you do with the body?”

  “I was in my seat, trying to get away. I had the hydrophones turned up, listening for if you were chasing me. I didn’t hear him at all until the inner hatch closed and the controls showed the airlock was cycling. I thought he’d gone mad… more mad, or the head wound had made him confused. I tried to stop him! I swear! I tried to stop the cycle, but by the time I put in an abort command, the outer hatch was open. It was too late. Katya, tell them! Tell them how quickly the lock can fill!”

  Katya shrugged helplessly. “I’ve never had any reason to use it,” she said to the others. “I’ve never seen it filled. But it isn’t very big. You can just about get one average person in a flexible diving suit into it. It must fill pretty quickly, especially if there’s someone in there.”

  “Stow the pistol, please, Tasya,” said Kane. “Mr Ilyin’s story is easy enough to confirm or refute using the available evidence.” He waved the two Vodyanois behind him in and said, “Take Mr Ilyin to a secure cabin and keep an eye on him. Kid gloves, please; he’s a friend of a friend. I also want pictures of his injuries before the medic gets to work on him.”

  Sergei was led away, subdued and silent. As he was taken past her, Katya said, “Don’t worry. We’ll get this all sorted out. Just rest, OK?” He looked sideways at her, but his expression seemed resentful rather than hopeful or grateful. Katya had a bad feeling in her gut that their relationship would be forever changed by this incident, and not for the better.