Katya's War

CHAPTER SEVEN Red Water

As a child Katya had been fascinated by a drama series in which secret Federal agents had special atmospheric diving suits that also amplified their strength, carried weapons, and — in one episode — flew just long enough to save the day. She and her friends had run up and down the corridors in the residential section, imitating the sound of sonar pings and launching “minitorps” at one another. Andrei Ivanovich always said his imaginary ADS was the one that could fly and, furthermore, it was the only one that could fly, and he defended its uniqueness with cuffs and shoves to any who would attempt flight in theirs. But then, Andrei Ivanovich was a bully and a bastard.

The reality was scarier than Andrei Ivanovich could ever have aspired to.

The best place from which they might be deployed was undeniably the Vodyanoi’s salvage maw; it was relatively spacious and when the jaws were open wide they would give plenty of clearance for the suits to reach the water. The minor problem of the maw currently being occupied by the Lukyan was easily solved — Sergei would pilot it out, the maw would be closed and emptied, and the suits taken in ready for the expedition members. Sergei was very happy at this part of the plan, at least until Kane put a Vodyanoi aboard the Lukyan “just so I have another pair of eyes on the site.” Perhaps he was telling the truth, but Sergei clearly understood the gesture to mean Kane wanted a “pair of eyes” specifically upon Sergei.

Fifteen minutes after the Lukyan had left the boat, Katya was called to the salvage maw. The floor and walls were still wet from the recent departure, but her attention was entirely focused upon the four looming forms that now stood there in a T formation, the crossbar closest to the aft bulkhead, to provide each with as much space around as possible in the maw’s tapering beak.

Each atmospheric diving suit was, as Katya had told Sergei, essentially a submarine in itself. Unlike a normal diving suit, these were rigid, machine-like forms that maintained a normal atmosphere for their operator. There would be no need for specialised breathing mixtures, compression and decompression schedules, or hyperbaric chambers with these. The foreboding robotic appearance of the suits, their arms extended as if about to clutch at anyone who walked in front of them, was intensified by the MMU units that swathed them from the waist downwards. These Manned Manoeuvring Units locked entirely around the suits’ legs, making them look like half statues of robot gods rising from metal plinths. Each suit had a small stepladder by it, and a dedicated technician who stood silently by like an acolyte to the metal divinities.

Kane, Katya, Tasya, and Giroux were met by the ship’s doctor who gave each one of them a quick check-up as they waited in coveralls.

“Nothing to worry about, Ms Kuriakova,” said the doctor as he checked her pulse. “Your heart rate is a little elevated. Would you like a mild sedative? Just something to calm your nerves?”

Katya shook her head. “Thanks, but no. I’d like to stay a bit nervous.”

As the doctor worked down the line, the technicians were up on the stepladders, opening the suits. The heavy helmets fell forward as the suit backs were unlocked and lifted, giving the impression that the suits had suddenly fallen asleep. Most of the diagnostics had been completed before the expedition members had even arrived, and the techs quickly ran through the remainder. Katya caught a glimpse of the pad the technician for her suit was carrying, and was relieved at the sight of an orderly list of green ticks down the checklist.

Finally, all was ready, and Katya and the others stepped forward.

Kane almost scampered up his suit’s ladder. “I love this part,” he said as he grabbed the handles at the top of the entry port in the suit’s back, lifted his legs and slid in. “It makes me think of knights from the olden days, armouring up before a battle.”

Katya was less enthusiastic about the experience, but nevertheless found getting into the suit far easier than she’d expected. Her suit’s technician had measured her height and the lengths of her arms and legs earlier and adjusted the suit’s internal braces so that they would receive her comfortably. He certainly seemed to know his job; the suit fitted her like a glove. She allowed her arms to slide into the suit’s arms as the small of her back rode over the lower edge of the access port and, by the time she was fully in and upright, her hands were inside the suit’s gauntlets.

A Knight of the Deep, she thought. Well, at least now I look the part.

“How’s it feel?” asked her technician as he checked her cap, a close-fitting cloth skullcap that had her communications microphone and earphones attached. Unlike a simple headset it could not accidentally fall off, an important point inside a helmet.

“Snug,” said Katya.

“Snug tight, or snug comfortable?”

“Comfortable, thanks.”

“Good to hear. OK, the next stage is the helmet. Then I’ll seal the suit and you’ll be on your own oxygen from thereon. Understand?”

Katya tried to give a thumbs up, but the gesture was barely noticeable when translated into a small twitch of the heavy articulated gauntlet. She nodded a little instead and said, “Understood.”

The technician reached forward and pulled the helmet back into its upright position, locking it against the head support. As he did, it encased Katya’s head, the sound of the locking mechanism engaging seeming very final. It was as if Katya was suddenly severed from the real world. Outside sounds became distant and muffled, and her breathing became very loud in the confines of the helmet. She swallowed and concentrated on not panicking, about just living in the moment and not thinking about what all this foreshadowed, that soon the technicians and the doctor would leave, that the hatches would seal.

That the sea would enter.

Katya swallowed again.

Then, she heard the technician speaking to her through the still-open back of the suit. His voice was shockingly close given the sense of isolation the helmet had created, close and warm, humanly intimate. “Everybody feels a bit strange their first time in a suit,” he murmured. “Just remember, the type you’re wearing is the top of the line. Its test depth is twice what you’ll be experiencing. This will be nothing to it. You’ll be out there with three others who have all done this kind of thing before, you’ve got the best drone pilot in the water steering you, and you have two boats watching your every move.” He let that sink in for a moment. “How are you feeling, Ms Kuriakova?”

Katya closed her eyes, steadied herself, and when she re-opened them the panic had been put away somewhere inside where it could do her no harm. “Call me Katya,” she said. “And I’m fine. Thank you.”

“My pleasure. I’m Mike. I’ll close the suit now, carry out the last checks, and then you’re off on your daytrip. See you when you get back, Katya.”

Katya smiled despite herself. “See you, Mike.”

She felt the suit cover slam shut, heard the locks click, and yet she kept the sense of isolation, of abandonment away this time. There were eight other people in the maw, she told herself, three of them experiencing exactly what she was experiencing. All these people watching out for her, and with the experience and equipment to step in immediately if anything went wrong. But nothing was going to go wrong, because these experienced people knew what they were doing. She visualised her suit’s checklist again, saw the happy column of smiling, encouraging green check marks. All systems go. She nodded slightly. The trip was going to be easy.

And, typically for her, as the spectre of the short journey through the ocean abated, she began to think about what they might find at the other end.

She’d seen dead bodies before, but never bodies that had been in the water for any length of time. She heard the stories, of course; corpses floating in water cloudy with their own putrefaction, bloated, grotesque, the eyes gone. She admitted to herself that it was a frightening prospect, but it did not fill her with the irrational fear the suit had at first. Rather, it was a muted revulsion, something she knew she would hate, but that must be endured.

OK, Kane, she said to herself, I’ll face your horror show, and I will loathe you for making me face it. And afterwards, my answer will still be “No.”

The checks on the suit seals were rapid, yet thorough. One by one, the technicians rapped on the helmets of their divers to indicate that they were ready to go. Mike made a point of standing in Katya’s eye line and giving her a double thumbs up. She made the effort to bring both arms up slightly and waggled the thumbs enough to be noticeable. Mike saw them, laughed, nodded to her, and slapped her suit on the arm as he walked by to pick up the step ladder and his gear. A few moments later, she heard the bulkhead door slam, and the four of them were left alone in the salvage maw.

“Comms check,” said a voice in her headset. Katya recognised Ocello. “Captain, are you reading me?”

“Loud and clear, thank you.” Kane sounded blithe, as if he was about to do nothing more enterprising than read a book.

“Ms Kuriakova? Do you read me?”

“Very clear. Please, call me Katya. It’s quicker.”

“As you wish, Katya. Colonel?”

“Loud and clear,” said Tasya. She sounded impatient. She only seemed to have two modes, though, thought Katya. Impatient tending towards violent, and languid tending towards pleasant (with occasional outbreaks of violence). Once Katya had heard Kane refer to Tasya as having a “feline temperament,” but Katya had no idea what that meant. She’d remembered the word and looked it up later, but it had been of little help — “Belonging to the cat family or pertaining to cats, catlike.” A “cat” was some sort of Earth animal. She tried to imagine what one might look like from the description; quadruped, clawed, furred. Every animal she’d ever seen had been be-finned, be-tentacled, be-pincered or, on one memorable creature, all three. Her imagination couldn’t manage “fur,” never mind the other aspects.

While she’d been distracting herself thinking about the fauna of Earth, Giroux had also completed his communications check, and the bridge stood by to commence the EVA, as Kane had called it.

The water did not burst in upon them, but rose smoothly and rapidly as the salvage maw was flooded. She could just see the base of Kane’s MMU, a tapering angular column covered in inlets and impeller nozzles, all painted in a pale anti-fouling green paint unlike the yellow and black of the suits themselves. The Lukyan was painted in yellow and black, too, she realised, and it somehow made the suits seem a lot friendlier.

The water level climbed up to the grating on which they stood, and then further, rising up the sides of Kane’s MMU. Katya knew that it must be doing the same on hers, but she was completely unaware of it. There was no sense of pressure or coldness. Intellectually, she had appreciated that the description of the rigidly armoured suits with their wedge ring segmented joints as “personal submarines” was about right, but part of her had still feared the water being so close. That she couldn’t feel a thing through the suit made the idea concrete though, allowing her to screw down the lid on her anxiety so much tighter. She no longer just felt calm about it; now she began to feel confident.

The water rose and rose. Even when it burbled up past her helmet’s visor, she felt relaxed. She’d been in the Lukyan when it had been in a dry dock, just prior to being refloated. She’d watched the water rise past the canopy then with pleasure simply to be watching such a novelty. She felt just the same now.

“Maw’s fully flooded,” said Ocello. “Adjust for neutral buoyancy. Sahlberg will do that for you, Katya.”

The MMU’s flotation tanks had been fully filled by the technicians to prevent the suits bobbing around like so much flotsam when the maw was flooded. Now the tanks were partially emptied with compressed air until the average density of the MMUs, the suits, and the suits’ contents equalled that of the sea water.

“Neutral,” called Giroux, closely followed by the others.

“Looking good across all units,” confirmed Ocello. “Opening the jaws now.”

Katya looked up and saw the two seams running along the ceiling slowly start to widen. As they separated, she could see nothing beyond but darkness. That was the sea, the naked, angry sea of Russalka. She would not be frightened, she swore to herself. She would not let herself down. She imagined Lukyan watching her, and she determined to make him proud.

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.