Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles)

by Howard, Jonathan L

  “Open your eyes right now, you worthless bucket of vomit, or I will cut out your eyelids,” she hissed in his ear.

  The threat apparently did little to frighten him, despite its undoubted sincerity. Instead, he smiled slowly and, just as slowly, opened his eyes. The red beam found his right eye, locked onto it and in a moment the screen displayed the Deeps’ top level system administration protocols.

  Tasya shoved the governor to one side, sending him sprawling on the floor. He lay there watching her as she started to sort through the operations menus, seeking out the one that she wanted. The whole time, his smile did not waver.

  Katya spared the display a sideways look, but she found she couldn’t look away from Senyavin. She had a feeling something was coming, something that was burning inside his head, that flooded him with a religious ecstasy, something she could almost perceive.

  “Tasya…” she said. The sense of menace growing by the moment made her voice waver.

  “In a moment,” said Tasya. “There! That’s what we want.” She tapped on the board display and was rewarded by a perky little upbeat bleep. “Escape pods are enabled. Now let’s get the hell out of here before the guards steal them all.”

  “I embrace my destiny,” said Senyavin.

  The console’s screen suddenly changed to a display of a complex waveform. “What the hell...?” said Tasya under her breath.

  “By my sacrifice, I absolve us all,” said Governor Senyavin, and closed his eyes. His smile grew rapturous.

  Too late, Tasya recognised a speech analysis program accepting a verbal trigger. She reached for the board, but the display had already changed to read, “Project: REVELATION active,” and then went blank. Tasya snatched up the governor’s identity card from where it lay on the desk and swiped it through. The console remained inactive, with not even a tone to indicate a failed card reading.

  Furious, Tasya turned to Senyavin. “What did you do?” she demanded. He said nothing, but only smiled. It was not a wilful smile, nor was it one of triumph. It was a smile of pure joy. Tasya drew her pistol from her belt and placed the muzzle against his forehead. “What did you do?” she snarled.

  “Tasya, leave him,” said Katya. “We have to get out of here, right now!”

  “What? Why?”

  “He’s committing suicide, and he wants to take us all with him.”

  Tasya looked at the governor, sitting on the floor, Durova’s corpse behind him. Then she looked suspiciously at Katya. “How do you know?”

  Katya couldn’t say. She couldn’t explain how she could see the glow of an unearthly fire within Senyavin’s mind, how she could smell his sanity ablaze. So instead she said, “I saw it in his eyes.”

  Tasya looked straight into Katya’s eyes and, remarkably, broke her gaze first. She seemed slightly rattled. She reached down, flicked away the stubs of the governor’s fingers, and recovered his dropped gun. “Come on,” she said, re-establishing control. As she reached the door, she gave the governor’s gun to Oksana. “The grip’s a little melted at the front, but it’s still serviceable,” she said, and walked out into the corridor. Oksana and Alina followed her, Oksana complaining that there appeared to be some skin still sticking to the melted polymer.

  Katya tarried a moment in the doorway. The governor had made no move. He just sat there, smiling as if he had just seen the most beautiful thing in all creation or beyond it. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He looked at Katya, and he spoke, but too quietly for her to hear him. She wasn’t sure if she read his lips, or if she heard his voice in her mind, but she knew what he said.

  “You understand.”

  Tasya’s shout of “Come on, Kuriakova!” brought her back to the moment, but the half realisation fluttered at the edge of her consciousness, and scared her so badly she pushed it away to where she didn’t have to think about it.

  She did. She did understand.

  She ran after the others.

  As they approached the straight length of corridor that would take them to the observation blister and its attached pod, Katya said, “What happened to the guards?”

  In the corridor was a barricade of desks, chairs, and even a daybed that had all apparently been pulled out of nearby offices. Behind it crouched the sector leader and three of his men. Further down the corridor there was a flash of yellow coveralls visible in one of the doorways.

  “Down!” barked Tasya, grabbing Katya and Alina by the sleeves and dragging them down. There was a sharp crack and Oksana cried out.

  Katya grabbed her belt and pulled her down with them. “I’m hit!” said Oksana, looking in disbelief at the burn hole in her upper sleeve.

  “Maybe next time I tell you to get down, you’ll do it.”

  “But I’m hit!”

  “And still talking, so it can’t be that bad.” Tasya turned her back on the aggrieved woman and said to the sector leader, “What’s the situation?”

  “They must have found an unsecured arms locker. There’s a bunch of six or seven with carbines and pistols. The only good news is that they’re not good shots, and they didn’t take any of the riot gas grenades or they’d have used them by now. What happened with Governor Senyavin, ma’am?”

  “His mind’s gone. I disarmed him and left him there.”

  “The computers…?”

  “He’s locked everyone out, even himself. We’re stuck here until the next boat arrives.”

  “That’s not the procedure. If security is totally compromised, we’re to lock down the computers, grab as many weapons as we can, and take the escape pods. There’s one at the end of here, past these scum. The plan is to kill them, take their weapons, and abandon the base.”

  “How many people can a pod take?”

  “Ten.”

  Katya saw the real reason behind Tasya’s question – whether she would have to kill the guards or not once the inmates had been dealt with. Ten places meant they might live yet. Tasya might have been on Katya’s side – at least for the moment – but there was barely a thing Tasya did or a thought she expressed that didn’t frighten or sicken her.

  An inmate ducked out of a side door about twenty metres away and fired a burst from his carbine. All the bolts went high, burning away the corridor’s already utilitarian wall covering and melting long score marks in the plastic laminate beneath. Tasya watched him with evident disdain over the top of the overturned day bed, lifted her pistol, and shot him dead.

  “Did you see that? Out of cover and he fired from the hip. They’ve got their training from watching dramas. No professionalism at all.”

  Another convict stepped out from a doorway on the other side of the corridor, shouting something incoherent about how he was going to get the Feds because they shot his friend. He held his pistol on its side with the back of his hand uppermost and fired indiscriminately, bolts hissing down the corridor over their heads or splashing ineffectually against the metal of the office furniture barricade.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Tasya peevishly, and killed him too.

  She either didn’t notice or didn’t deign to notice how perturbed she had made the Federal guards. “Yes,” Katya said to them. “She scares me, too.”

  “The only way those idiots are going to represent a threat is if you get careless and do something stupid,” said Tasya, adding insult to Oksana’s injury. “Are any of these offices connected?”

  “No. They’re all discrete rooms.”

  “So much for flanking. We’ll just have to do this the hard way. Clear and secure. Volkova’s hit in her main arm, so she’s out of this. That leaves you, your team, Shepitko, and myself. We’ll split into two teams of three, I’ll take…” she cast an eye over the sector leader’s men, “Glazov,” she read from one of the guard’s name patches. “The teams alternate, cover/clear, all the way down to the pod.”

  She noticed the leader, Sevnik, looking at her oddly. “What’s wrong?” she said. Shielded by her body from Sevnik, but visible to Katya, Tasya’s hand tight
ened on her pistol. Was it possible that he’d recognised her?

  “I’ve… I’m sorry, ma’am, it’s just all the Secor I’ve ever met have been… well…”

  “Useless in a fight, expecting others to go at the front and they tidy up afterwards? No offence taken. But I was recruited from anti-piracy operations. I’m used to combat.”

  The explanation seemed to convince and, indeed, impress him. “Anti-piracy? I envy you. I put in for that, and ended up here. Glazov, you’re with… I don’t even know your rank.”

  “Colonel, but you have command here, captain.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. Glazov, you’re with Colonel Litvyak.” He nodded at Katya. “What about you, ma’am?” he asked Katya.

  She was momentarily at a loss what to say, but Tasya had an almost-lie ready and waiting. “Ms Kuriakova is a civilian volunteer for this mission. She’s not a combatant.”

  Captain Sevnik grinned. “I knew all that stuff about you being a traitor had to be rubbish,” he said to Katya. “You won the Hero of Russalka. They don’t just hand those out to anybody.”

  “I’ve always tried to do what was right,” Katya replied, and managed a wan smile. She shrugged the carbine’s strap over her head, feeling like a fraud.

  “Could we get on, please?” said Tasya, taking the weapon. “These inmates aren’t going to just shoot themselves, you know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  FALLING FORWARD

  Naturally, Tasya insisted on clearing the first room, much to the consternation of Glazov and Shepitko. While Sevnik’s team provided covering fire, she moved up, Glazov and Shepitko stacking up on her position as she reached the door. Katya heard Tasya say to her team, “You have done this before, haven’t you?” and Shepitko say, “Uh…”

  “You’re in third, in that case. Glazov, whichever way I go, you go the other way and clear the door so Shepitko can come in and engage ahead and above. Move fast and don’t pause in the doorway unless you like being repeatedly shot. Got it?”

  Whether they got it or not, she wasn’t waiting. She reached the door, tapped its control, and led through, swinging right, Glazov was through immediately behind her sweeping left, and Shepitko came through on their tails, looking worried. They vanished out of sight. There was a pause of a few seconds before Tasya reappeared, using the doorframe as cover. “Clear,” she said with obvious disappointment. “Your turn, captain.”

  Sevnik nodded, girding himself for danger. Just as he and his team were about to break cover, however, an inmate leaned out of one of the doors further down the corridor. There was a hollow “pop” sound, and something sailed through the air towards them, trailing a thin streamer of smoke.

  “Gas!” shouted Sevnik, ducking back behind cover.

  When things happen together, it is in the nature of humans to first assume that the events must be related, no matter how unlikely. When the gas grenade bounced off the Feds’ barricade, it landed on the floor, rolled back a metre, and then coughed gently as the fuse initiated the payload and riot gas started to flow out from it in thick, opaque waves. At the same moment, the Deeps shook with a sudden violence that was enough to knock Katya over. In a moment it had gone, but no dweller in the Russalkin depths ever feels a corridor floor vibrate and then dismisses it as nothing.

  There was a horrified silence after the vibration, and they remained in tableaux, waiting for an aftershock. Then Sevnik said, “The gas grenade.” At first Katya thought he was suggesting the grenade was responsible, but then she heard the tinny rumble over the hiss of the gas. Holding her breath and squinting, she looked quickly over the barricade.

  The grenade was rolling away from them, back towards the prisoners’ positions.

  On the one hand, it should have made her happy. The grenade had barely started to produce gas, and although there was enough of it in the air to make her eyes sting and water a little, there wasn’t nearly enough of it to be debilitating. On the other hand, it was rolling. All floors in stations and facilities were level to several decimal places. Any slopes within them were deliberate with black and yellow danger stripes at both ends and plentiful signage. Nowhere else could you drop a ball and expect it to roll away from you.

  The speakers clicked into life. “On ancient Earth, we came from the sea,” spoke the governor’s voice, “and now, we are consigned to it; to wipe away our sins, to expunge us from a universe that will do better without us.”

  Sevnik turned to Katya. “I thought you said the governor was no longer a threat?”

  “He isn’t. It’s a recording. He had this planned all along.” The tilt in the corridor floors was becoming obvious. “What’s he done?”

  Sevnik swallowed hard. His complexion was grey. “He’s blown the ballast tanks.”

  “He’s blown the tanks?” That didn’t seem so bad to Katya. To a submariner, “blowing the tanks” just meant driving out all the water with compressed air to give them maximum positive buoyancy. “So we’re rising?”

  Sevnik shook his head urgently. “No, I don’t mean he’s blown the tanks empty. I mean he’s blown them clear off.”

  One of the desks making up the barricade fell over.

  Katya saw sweat starting to appear on Sevnik’s brow. Being shot at had not bothered him unduly, but now he was afraid. “There’s an emergency protocol in case the prisoners ever took control of the facility. It detonates charges on the tanks’ pylons. We’re sinking like a rock.”

  “Tasya!” shouted Katya. “The governor’s scuttled the whole station!”

  “I was beginning to work that out myself,” she shouted back. “Better to kill the prisoners and the surviving guards than allow a mass escape. Wish I could meet the genius who came up with that and bang his head off the wall a few times. Captain! No time for subtlety. We have minutes to live unless we reach that pod.”

  All caution gone, the captain hurdled the barricade. “Come on!” he shouted to those still sheltering behind him. “Follow me! If it moves, shoot it!”

  Tasya and her team were out of the office door in a second following him and, as soon as they could get over the barricade, so was the remainder of the captain’s team, Oksana, and Katya.

  The inmate who’d thrown the grenade watched it roll back past his doorway. “Hey!” he shouted to anyone who might reply. “Hey, what’s…?” As he spoke, he leaned out of cover and was shot by Captain Sevnik.

  As they ran, Katya’s mind was working quickly. Why was the Deeps tilting like this? Why didn’t it just sink?

  Because it was roughly saucer shaped and one edge of it was slightly heavier, she told herself. Out of the five sectors, the administration sector contained the main boat docks. That was why it was heavier, and that was why, without the ballast tanks in place to keep the station trimmed, it was sinking a little faster.

  Above them there was nothing but the corridor ceiling, some service utilities, and the inner hull. Through it, she could hear a slowly growing roar. The Deeps may once have been intended to be mobile, but that scheme had been dropped early. Now its outer skin was festooned with sensors and other equipment that rendered it well short of perfectly hydrodynamic. The roaring was the sound of the sea moving more and more quickly over the station’s skin as it sank.

  Katya recalled what she could remember of the Deeps and its location; she’d once had to plot a course to it what seemed like a lifetime ago, but which wasn’t even a year. The first time she’d ever met Kane, that accursed day.

  The Deeps was held in place by cables running from the ballast tanks; with the tanks gone, so had the tethers. The station was anchored over a small plateau, the shoulder of an extinct submarine volcano. The approach was from open water, heading towards the mountain. At this sort of angle, that meant…

  “Wait!” Katya shouted. “We’re going to crash!”

  She grabbed Oksana’s wrist and the back of Tasya’s coveralls. Tasya whirled, her natural assumption being that anything unexpected was potentially dangerous. The rest of the
party slowed to a confused halt, except Captain Sevnik.

  The impact was a moment later. They all fell and rolled along the corridor floor. Sevnik, however, had been running too fast. He couldn’t stop and, to his horror, felt the deck sloping even more rapidly now. With a cry of impotent anger, he was airborne.

  “The offices! Quickly!” cried Katya. “The whole place is turning over!”

  Tasya was on her feet in a second, bodily throwing Alina through an office doorway next to them. There was a male shout from inside, and the crack of a maser going off. It seemed that Tasya had found an armed inmate to take her wrath out on after all.

  Quickly they streamed through the door, Katya and Oksana last, but as Oksana reached the doorway, an office chair from the barricade rolled by and clipped her, knocking her off balance.

  The tilt of the corridor was too great for her to climb the flooring and, terrified, she started to slide away from them.

  Tasya had stayed on the door. She saw Katya look back and started to say, “Leave her.”

  “Grab my feet,” said Katya, and dived after Oksana.

  Oksana had, naturally, been reaching out with her injured arm, and naturally, that was the one Katya grabbed at. She locked both hands around Oksana’s wrist and felt Tasya’s hands clasp around her own ankle just as the corridor became less like a corridor and started to remind Katya of the lift shaft she’d enjoyed so much in Atlantis.

  “Oh, gods, Katya! Please! Don’t let go!” Oksana begged as gravity swung her off the floor.

  Beyond her, Katya had an impression of a body spread-eagled a hundred metres away against a bulkhead surround. She tried to ignore it, although she knew it must be Captain Sevnik.

  Everything was in chaos, the crash of the furniture as it left the office floors and fell against the walls, cries from all around, and Tasya swearing in grunts as she held onto Katya’s ankle, bearing the weight of both her and Oksana.