Katya's War

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.

Behind them, a rumbling was growing louder. Katya saw Oksana’s eyes look past her and widen. The barricade that so recently had sheltered them from harm was coming to kill them.

Katya risked a look over her shoulder. Tasya, always sensitive to danger was already looking into an “up” that was recently a “back.” Above them on the slope, the desk was barely in contact with the floor anymore, accelerating rapidly towards them.

It was impossible for Tasya to pull both Katya and Oksana back in time and, if she stayed where she was, she would be hit too.

Tasya looked down and her eyes met Katya’s.

“Let go,” said Katya.

Without hesitation, Tasya did.

Oksana screamed as they fell. Katya didn’t have time for such a luxury. She drew up her legs and kicked against the wall, pulling Oksana closer as she did. The desk, heavy and already travelling at speed, clipped her hard enough to hurt but not to disable. She ignored the pain and grabbed the edge of it with her left hand. As she wrestled herself and Oksana across its underside, its corners kept scraping the floor and wall, threatening to flip it.

Suddenly, they hit the bulkhead surround she’d seen from above. The impact drove the breath from her, and she felt something break inside. Through the wave of pain, she had a momentary vision of Sevnik’s body on the other side of the surround, his eyes open, the left of his skull crushed. Then the desk flipped over the edge of the support and they were falling again.

Oksana was no longer screaming. Perhaps she’s dead and all this was for nothing, thought Katya. But she’d had to try.

But now “down” wasn’t neatly along the corridor anymore. Katya kicked against the floor with her failing strength and the desk moved towards the ceiling. As it slowly became the floor, she hoped that it wasn’t just made of cosmetic tiling, or they would be falling through it in a moment. The surface of the desk touched down tentatively, then solidly, and Katya found herself sledging along the ceiling. As the angle grew less, the desk started to slow. Behind her she could hear shouting, and she looked back to see the guards and Tasya running down the ridiculously steep slope of the ceiling. She knew they had no choice; the fact that there had been no further impacts beneath their feet meant that the Deeps had rolled off the edge of the plateau and was falling. Below them was a drop of two thousand metres ending in a lake of the Soup. If the water pressure didn’t crush the prison, the massive pressures within the heavy metal cocktail of the Soup definitely would.

Katya was trying to drag Oksana to the escape pod door when the others reached them. The corridor was flat by then, but already starting to pitch over again as the Deeps toppled towards destruction. Tasya was with her in a moment, pulling Oksana’s arm over her neck and pulling her along.

“Get that hatch open!” she barked at the guards. They needed no second telling.

“Is she still alive?” asked Katya gripping her side. The pain was blossoming, blazing through her ribs every time she took a breath.

“Don’t know,” replied Tasya, and they carried the limp body to the opening hatch.

Whatever formalities about boarding an escape pod the guards may have learned during training was largely ignored in the rush to get clear of the doomed prison. Two guards took positions on either side of the entry into the circular pod, and more or less threw the others inside as they reached the doorway. The pod’s circumference was occupied by ten inset seats, albeit seats currently over the heads of the escapers, and they moved under the seat they planned to take, possibly the only bit of the escape drill that had survived the chaos.

Alina was one of the guards and helped Tasya and Katya get Oksana inside. As soon as they were all in, she hit the door closure control.

“Don’t eject until we’re more or less upright,” warned Tasya. “It was never built to work upside down.” Then to the others, “Grab hold of anything solid.”

The pod, and the Deeps around it, slowly performed another one hundred and eighty degree flip. Long before it had completed it, the seats were at an angle they could all climb into and pull on the safety harnesses. Katya stayed with Oksana to lock her into her seat. Before she ran to her own, she quickly checked Oksana’s throat for a pulse. It was there; not strong, but at least she still lived.

For a brief moment, the escape pod was perfectly the right way up. Alina needed no prompting to arm and trigger the release mechanism.

For a moment nothing happened, and despair sparked in more than one heart. Then there was a dull thud beneath their feet and a sense of movement. No longer the slow tumble of the sinking prison, but a slight rocking as the escape pod — a convex underside and a conical upper, connected by a metre and a half high cylindrical section — rose towards the surface.

“Evacuation unit Alpha-4 has successfully disengaged and is operating normally,” announced the pod’s computer in the soothing tones somebody had decided would be most beneficial to those in an emergency. “A distress signal is already being transmitted. Help is on its way.”

“Does it know that, or is it just saying it?” asked one of the guards.

Katya knew a signal wouldn’t reach anyone until they got to the surface, but she didn’t want to speak because that meant taking a breath, and breathing really hurt.

“You’ve cracked some ribs, Kuriakova,” said Tasya. She nodded at Oksana. “She probably has, too. That was quite an impact you took.” Suddenly she grinned. “I loved it when you said ‘Let go.’ I could just see the calculations going on inside your head. You’re like me. You figure out the odds and take the crazy risk, even if it’s not quite as crazy as it looks.”

“I didn’t take a risk,” said Katya and winced. Cracked ribs. Yes, that would explain a lot. “You were going to let me go anyway.”

Tasya looked like she might deny it, then shrugged. “So why did you tell me to let you go?”

“So, if it was the last thing that ever happened to me, it was because I asked for it. It was my choice.”

Tasya looked at Katya with appraising eyes. “Is that pride I hear, Kuriakova?”

Katya said nothing. It hurt too much to say.

The pod broke the surface to find fourteen others already there and, while they watched, another surfaced about a kilometre away.

Russalka’s weather system was having close to the best weather it seemed capable of — a stiff breeze and a fine rain. Above them some of the dense cloud cover was distinctly thinner than others areas, allowing moderate amounts of light in. In Russalkin terms, this was balmy weather. It was more than calm enough for them to have opened the evacuation hatches on the pod’s upper surface to look around.

“Well, that’s sixteen transmitters squawking,” said Glazov, the guard. “That should draw something.”

As if answering him, the water boiled some two hundred metres away. Rising slowly from the depths, they saw a rakish conning tower break the surface, followed by the lean and lethal form of an attack boat.

“Is that the Vengeance?” said Glazov a little nervously. It certainly wasn’t a standard Federal design. The only boat on the Federal lists that looked like that was the Vengeance, stolen from the Yagizban. “If it isn’t, then it’s Yag.”

“It’s neither,” said Tasya airily, “it’s the Vodyanoi,” and launched a flare to attract the boat’s attention.

“What are you doing?” shouted Glazov. He dropped back inside the pod to remonstrate, but found Tasya was already back inside and had her gun drawn.

“You’re not Secor,” he said. He turned on Oksana, but she was still unconscious, so he turned on Alina instead. “You lied!”

“To save your lives,” said Katya wearily. “Feds,” she pointed at Tasya, “the Chertovka. The Chertovka,” she wafted her finger around to take in the increasingly worried Federal guards, “Feds. There, now you’re properly introduced and perhaps you’re beginning to understand why Oksana and Alina lied. Put down your weapons and don’t do anything stupid, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t live through this.” The pod began to bob violently in the water as the Vodyanoi came alongside. “And here’s our ride.”

The pod was cleared with less urgency than it had been filled. None of the guards seemed very keen to throw themselves upon the mercy of a notorious pirate and his crew of cut-throats. When the notorious pirate turned out to be a mild-looking man of perhaps forty years who insisted on shaking their hands and welcoming them aboard, and when the cut-throats just looked like a regular crew, they calmed down a little.

The guards were taken below to be checked over and placed in the brig, with the exception of Oksana who was taken to the sickbay, and Alina because Katya feared the other guards might turn on her for her deception. Despite her ribs, Katya stayed topside with Kane. He was looking ruefully at the pods bobbing in the waves.

“Awful. Even if every one of those pods is full, that still means close on a thousand lives lost. Another psychotic break, you say?”

“Governor Senyavin went mad,” said Katya. Only now did she have time to think of all those who’d died. She thought of Dominika and the others. More deaths to haunt her.

“Mad. Mad is such a simple term for something so complicated. As for went mad, I have my doubts about that. He may have been driven to it.”

Abruptly the ocean erupted with a great rushing gout of air and debris some three kilometres away. Kane’s binoculars were at his eyes in a moment, and he watched it grimly. Neither needed to say what it meant; that the Deeps was crushed.

Katya turned away, unable to look. Kane lowered the binoculars and looked at her; she was crying silently, misery in her every fibre.

“It would have happened whether you were there or not, Katya,” he said gently. “This was Senyavin’s doing.”

“Can’t I just weep for the dead, Kane? There were a lot of scum in there, but there were good people, too. Political prisoners, dissidents. People whose faces just didn’t fit.” She looked at him, furious. “Tell me they died for something, Kane. Tell me they’ll be the last.”

Kane looked at her, rocked his head from side to side as if considering. “Let’s go for a cruise,” he said finally. He pulled a communicator from his pocket and said, “Ms Ocello, make for the rendezvous, would you, please?”

Katya heard the first officer reply. “Aye, captain. If you’ll come below, we’ll secure for diving.”

“No,” said Kane, drawling the word out. “It’s such a nice day. Let’s stay on the surface.”

“Captain?”

“Seriously, Genevra. We’re staying on the surface. Que será, será as they say.” To Katya he said, “On Earth. Somewhere. I forget where. Oh, and, Genevra, start transmitting a truce signal.” He put away the communicator. He smiled at Katya, but she could see the nervousness under the surface. “Que será, será. It means ‘Whatever will be, will be.’ We’ve done all we can. You, far more than most.”

“Did it work?”

“I hope so.”