Katya's World

CHAPTER 11 Mythical Creatures

“You did this deliberately!” roared Lukyan.

“No!” Kane looked in as much shock as the others. His eyes wavered around even as he tried to explain himself, as if he were trying to deal with the present and the future simultaneously.

“Dirty Grubber…” Lukyan wanted to say something so vicious that it exceeded even his vocabulary. Instead he reached for the sidearm he’d strapped on before they’d left the mining station.

“Hold on,” snapped Tokarov, grabbing his wrist. Lukyan glared at him as if to say he could be next if he liked, but Tokarov’s steady eye-contact gave him pause. “If you draw that gun, the Leviathan will kill you before you’ve even got the safety off. Calm down. It’s the only way we’re going to get through this.”

Lukyan slowly subsided, but the looks he gave Kane were still venomous.

“I’m sorry,” said Kane hopelessly to nobody in particular, “I’m so sorry. I forgot that I ever said such a thing. I was desperate, I had to get out. I’d have said anything. I did say anything.”

“Leviathan,” rumbled Lukyan, his fury suppressed but evident, “why was this man here, Kane, you said he was rejected. Why?”

The reply was curt, factual and unhelpful. “Interface misphasing.”

“What does that mean?”

Kane shook his head. “You’re wasting your time. It doesn’t understand language in the same way you do. It was never programmed to act like a thesaurus.”

Lukyan turned on him. “Fine. You tell me then. What the blazes is ‘interface misphasing’?”

“I don’t think this is the time or the…”

“It’s exactly the time and the place,” said Lukyan, darks threats in his voice.

“It’s not like we can walk out of here,” said Katya. “Please, Kane. If you were rejected, we need to know why. Maybe we can make it reject all of us.”

Kane heaved an exasperated sigh. “Simply put,” he said with a sideways glance at Lukyan, “it means the Leviathan couldn’t interface with my nervous system. It’s supposed to attach itself to nerve endings and the grey and white matter of the spine and brain for full interface. For some reason my nervous system rejected it, or it rejected my nervous system. I don’t know which. All I know was that the attempt was very painful.” He shuddered at the memory.

Tokarov looked cynical. “You don’t know why it happened?”

“No. I don’t know why it happened.”

“It just strikes me as strange that the Terrans should choose you to go with this extraordinary vessel…”

“I volunteered.”

“Were you the only volunteer?”

Kane’s lips narrowed. “No.”

“Well then, chose you from a pool of volunteers to be part of a vital mission and entrusted this astonishing craft, the Leviathan, to you. They did all this, gave you such a responsibility and never tested you for compatibility with it?”

“They tested me.” Kane seemed to be growing, in his own way, as angry as Lukyan under this inquisition. “I was fully compatible.”

“So what went wrong when it came time to do it for real?”

Kane’s voice was tight and Katya half expected him to refuse to answer or even to strike Tokarov. “If I could tell you,” he hissed through clenched teeth, “I would tell you.”

She was getting a little angry herself. All this bunch of so-called “adults” was doing was making enemies of one another when what they really needed to be concentrating on was how to get out alive.

“Leviathan!” Her voice sounded less impressive echoing around the chamber than she’d hoped, but it still stopped the men bickering. They looked at her in bewilderment. “When one of us is selected, what will become of the rest?”

“They will be without function. They will be stored until a function arises.”

“Clarify stored in this context.” Katya had spoken to enough artificial intelligences to know the terms it was easiest to communicate in. At the moment, the Leviathan was clever in military AI terms, but nowhere near as intelligent as it would be when it got its human… component? Victim? At the moment, it could be fooled easily enough if you were careful and clever.

“Confined to living quarters.”

“Those were designed for one person,” groaned Kane behind her. She ignored him.

“What if we had a function to fulfil for you? Would we be allowed to leave then?”

“That would be dependent on the priority of the utilisation.”

“We will attempt to recover drone six for you,” said Katya. “You cannot build new drones, each one you lose must be a serious drain on your resources. We can try and get it back.”

She heard Tokarov make a pleased little “Heh!” sound and Lukyan said, “That’s my niece.”

“That is of utility,” said the Leviathan.

“Then we can go? And try and get it for you, that is?”

The Leviathan didn’t hesitate. “No.”

“What?” She thought she heard herself echoed by at least two of the others. “Why not?”

“Recovery of drone six is of a lower priority than locating a replacement for Kane, Havilland. A human is required for maximum efficiency. This is the higher priority.”

Katya wasn’t beaten yet. “Kane, when you sat in that seat, when the interface with the Leviathan failed, were you forced into it?”

“I had no choice.”

“But that Medusa sphere up there was a surprise to you just now. It didn’t force you into the seat at gunpoint, so why did you sit down?”

“Because I had no choice. I couldn’t leave and there was nothing else to do except grow old in here. It kept demanding I took the seat, but I was never forced to. I just…” he closed his eyes and hung his head, “wanted to get it over with.”

“Fine. Thanks.” She turned to face them all. “I’ll stay.”

“Katya..?” said her uncle, appalled.

Kane’s eyes had snapped open and he stared fiercely at her. “You must not. The process is irreversible.”

Katya shook her head, they just didn’t get it. “I’m not going to sit down in that ugly great heap of a chair. I’m just going to stay here for a while — like you did, Kane.”

Tokarov was looking at her curiously. “For how long?”

They really didn’t get it. “Until you figure out a way to rescue me, of course. I’ll be fine. I’m patient.”

Nobody seemed very impressed. “That’s not a very good idea,” said Kane, “you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.”

“If you’ve got a brighter idea, let’s hear it,” she countered.

“I’ll stay,” said Lukyan.

“Uncle!”

“No, Katinka. You are young. I’ve already lived, seen a lot. Perhaps too much. I’ll stay.”

“What rank were you, Captain Pushkin?” asked Tokarov. “You’re a veteran, aren’t you?”

“I am,” replied Lukyan, but he did not swell with pride the way Katya had seen in the past. His great patriotic war was starting to look like it had only been paused, not won. If the Russalkin had won, it was only through default. “I made chief petty officer.”

“And you’re in the reserve?”

Lukyan nodded.

“Then, by the powers vested in me by the Federal Maritime Authority, I recall you to duty, Chief Petty Officer Lukyan Pushkin.”

Lukyan looked confused. “But, why?”

Tokarov smiled wearily. “Because now you’re under military discipline. And I outrank you. You’re not staying, Pushkin. You’re leaving with Kane and Katya. That’s an order.”

“I…” The desperate need to find some flaw in what Lieutenant Tokarov had done was clear in Lukyan’s expression just as the failure to find that flaw was evident a few moments later. “Yes. Yes, sir,” he said numbly.

“Oh, no,” said Katya firmly. “This was my stupid idea. I’m the one who should do it.”

“As you said yourself, Ms Kuriakova, all I have to do is sit around and wait to be rescued. As long as I don’t sit in that chair.” He smiled again as he jerked his thumb at the interface chair.

Once it had its volunteer, the Leviathan released the others to return to the Baby so they could locate, repair and return the damaged combat drone. Even succeeding in this deceit and escaping did little to lighten their mood. Even Kane whined like an old woman about the state the craft’s internal corridors were in since he had left a decade before. He had found some dirt by the door leading back into the docking bay and had carried on as if it mattered, as if the Leviathan should have spent some time spring-cleaning before deciding to kill everybody on the planet. Katya had been very glad when they’d finally managed to get him through the door and back inside the Baby.

Katya finished strapping herself in and, while she waited for the others to finish, looked over her shoulder at Tokarov’s empty seat. “He’s a brave man.”

“He’s paid to be brave,” said Lukyan gruffly. “It’s his job to be brave.” He still seemed to be smarting over the way Tokarov had outmanoeuvred him.

“I hope he realises how brave.” Kane secured his restraint buckle and leaned back in his seat with an air of infinite weariness. “I’m not sure he does.”

Lukyan snorted and started going through the checklist. “All he has to do is confine himself to the crew quarters and wait. He’ll be fed. There are amusements there?”

Kane nodded. “Texts. Dramas. Thousands of them.”

“Then he won’t get bored. This is not bravery. He is in no danger.”

Katya couldn’t believe her ears. “Uncle? Are you serious? We have no guarantee that will ever find a way to get him out of there. He could die an old man in there. Just because nobody’s shooting at him doesn’t make it any less courageous. He’s let himself be locked up in a prison that might never release him.”

Lukyan grunted dismissively, but he couldn’t meet her eyes.

The Leviathan released them from the docking bay with no ceremony, threats or reminders. It was as mundane and banal as any recorded voice in a navigational simulation. Except, Katya reminded herself as the Baby hummed quietly away from the immense bulk of the warship, simulations weren’t likely to kill you in an instant if you got anything wrong. When they were several thousand metres away and there was no indication that they were being followed (“Not that we’d stand any chance of detecting it if we were,” Kane noted with mock cheerfulness), Katya laid in a course for the moon pool entrance of the mining complex. The Baby’s inertial locator indicated that the Leviathan had been moving away from the site in a neutral direction the whole time they’d been aboard. Apparently it had lost interest in the Novgorod, the Vodyanoi and their crews.

Katya knew appearances could be deceptive and that a machine-mind like the Leviathan’s would not abandon its attack simply because it had grown bored with it. Everything was organised in priorities, complex relationships of function against requirements. If it had left, it was because there was something more pressing that it was going to apply itself to. She wondered what that might be with a sense of dread.

Unexpectedly, the communications channel crackled into life making them all jump. “Vodyanoi to minisub Pushkin’s Baby. Do you read me? Come in, please.”

Lukyan toggled open a channel. “Pushkin here. Who is this?”

Katya reached across and patched her own headset into the link. “Katya here, Lieutenant Petrov. Good to hear your voice again.”

Abruptly she had her headset pulled off. She started to protest but then saw the anger in Kane’s face as he put it on. “Kane here, Petrov. Making yourself comfortable aboard my boat, are you?”

“Quite comfortable, Captain Kane. She’s an interesting vessel.”

“Let me speak to Tasya this instant!”

There was a moment’s pause, then, “Calm down, Havilland.”

“Tasya?”

“Yes.” Her calming voice filled the cabin. “It’s all right. We have an agreement. When it looked like the Leviathan was going to leave us alone, we went back to the moon pool. It hadn't touched the Vodyanoi, so we piled in and got out while we still could.”

“But Petrov…”

“Relax. We don’t have enough people left to man the boat at battle stations, not after those damn drones cut half of them down. Between our attack on them and some of their people running into the drone in the tunnels, there’re not a lot of the Feds left either. We think there must have been more than one drone; maybe as many as three or four. The upshot is that neither we nor the Feds have got enough people left to properly crew a boat by themselves. Working together, we can do it.”

“And this agreement?”

“They don’t try and take control or try to arrest us, any nonsense like that. We don’t kill them and dump them in deep waters. When this is over, we drop them somewhere safe and sound. The enemy is the Leviathan. I think we can all agree about that.”

Kane frowned, but only as an expression of his reluctance to accept the reasonable. “Well, where are you then?”

“About a hundred metres behind you. We’ve been shadowing you for the last couple of minutes.”

“What? What for?”

“Just to make sure the Leviathan was keeping its distance before we hailed you. Are you ready to be taken aboard?”

Lukyan didn’t seem any happier than Kane about the way things had moved on in their absence, but neither could he deny the practicality of it. He spoke with a coldness verging on ill-grace. “Slowing to five knots. Level and steady.”

They waited in taut silence for almost a minute before the Baby started to be buffeted by the turbulence of the Vodyanoi’s open salvage maw. It became worse as they were slowly overtaken and engulfed by the gaping mouth and then, abruptly, it became very calm. Lukyan cut the engines without comment and sat with his arms folded as the maw closed around them.

Petrov’s first words when they reached the Vodyanoi’s bridge were, “Where’s Tokarov?” While Lukyan explained with the occasional clarification from Kane, Katya looked around the boat’s bridge with interest.

It was very alien to anything she’d ever seen before. The whole philosophy of design was different from FMA or civil boats, all of which, of course, came from the same yards. Where a federal boat like — the poor Novgorod, for example — had all the crew stations ranged around the main screen, the Vodyanoi contained niches for most of the bridge officers, each with their own small screens. Only the captain’s position — a much more imposing seat with armrests imbedded with repeater displays and communications controls — the weapons officer, and the helm faced a modestly sized but high definition main viewer. It was so unlike anything in her experience, there was only one thing it could be.

“This is a Grubber boat, isn’t it?” she asked Kane.

“Hmm?” He turned from listening to Lukyan’s conversation with Petrov. “A what?”

“This is from Earth, isn’t it? It’s a Terran vessel?”

He raised his eyebrows in mild surprise, as if he’d thought they’d been talking about kelp all along and had only just realised his mistake. “The Vodyanoi? Why, yes. She was built on Earth and transported here.” He smiled. “She’s not very big, at least by Earth standards — about equivalent to a frigate if that means anything to you — but you’ll appreciate the problems of transporting anything of any size over the best part of fifty light years. She was originally the Raleigh, but it seemed altogether too noble a name for a… well, you know.”

Katya had no idea who Raleigh was, but she guessed he wouldn’t have been happy to have a pirate ship named after him.

“So I renamed her the Vodyanoi. It seemed appropriate.”

“Did it?” said Katya. She had no idea who “Vodyanoi” was either.

“Yes.” He looked at her closely. “You don’t know what a vodyanoi is, do you?”

“Why should I?”

“Because your ancestors were Russian.”

“I’ve heard that. I don’t know what it means.” She saw the shock on Kane’s face and added spitefully, “And I don’t care either. Russians are Grubbers. We’re Russalkin now.”

Kane looked at her seriously, then walked over to an unoccupied crew position and gestured to her to sit by him. Reluctantly she complied.

“Don’t throw away your past, Katya.” He spoke with quiet emphasis. “As a race, we’re built from memories. There’s an old saying, those who don’t learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them. You’re too intelligent to do that.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“More than you know about me, I assure you. These Russians, whose memory you so lightly cast aside; they came here on a trip that took years, putting all their hopes and fears into one great gamble, that they could make a home here on this world. Things were starting to deteriorate on Earth, they could see that. You’re a product of their fondest wishes.”

“So?” She was sounding like a little girl again, Katya thought.

“So, they brought Earth with them. Don’t you know why this world is called Russalka? The Russalki were water nymphs from Russian folklore, beautiful and clever. Your ancestors didn’t miraculously become Russalkin as soon as they’d shaken the dust of Terra from their feet, you know. They saw this planet in the view screens as they approached and they saw a new home, but they could never forget their old one. Don’t you honour them enough to at least understand that?”

Katya felt awkward and confused. Two halves of her were at war: one side that knew full well that her great grandparents had come from Earth, that they had been good people and she quite literally owed them everything for their bravery in making such a long and dangerous journey; one side that could see the history files of the atrocities that the Grubbers had heaped upon Russalka when they had invaded and knew that Earth was a festering heap of evil — rapacious and violent — that took what it wanted and didn’t mind how many died to get it. She wanted to hate the Terrans. That would be easiest. Why did Kane insist on making everything so difficult?

“I renamed this boat the Vodyanoi for a couple of reasons,” he was saying. “I think both of them are good. In Russian mythology, the vodyanoi were the husbands of the Russalki. It seemed, I don’t know, poetic to me. Things are difficult here; even before the war they were difficult. I thought a little poetry wouldn’t go amiss. The other reason is because of what the vodyanoi looked like. They could change their form. A handsome young man one second, a hideous ogre the next. They travelled in the water, sometimes above it. They were neither one thing nor the other. This boat is a little like that. Once it was a legal warboat of one world. Now it’s a very illegal pirate vessel on another. Few vessels can claim to have a history like that. Quite the sea change.” He laughed a little but quickly sobered. “I don’t suppose you know any Shakespeare either?” He took her blank expression for agreement. “No poetry here. None at all.”

Tasya had walked in close to the beginning of Kane’s explanations and had been listening intently with Petrov. “You say that as if it’s a surprise to you, Kane,” she said and then, as if to prove her point, said to Petrov, “what are your thoughts about the Leviathan, lieutenant?”

“Tokarov’s in danger every minute he’s aboard that… vessel. We have to think of some way to get him out safely. How we do that, I have no idea. I’ll have to think on it.” He turned towards Kane. “One thing that interests me, though, is why that thing rejected you. You must have been hand-picked. It doesn’t make sense that you were incompatible.”

Kane shrugged and looked away, but Katya saw the same hunted expression she’d noticed in him aboard the Leviathan. He looked like a cornered animal, and she didn’t believe him when he said, “I don’t know. The selection process was governmentally organised. Stupid mistakes are virtually guaranteed.” Petrov narrowed his eyes, making her think that he didn’t believe Kane either.

Tasya didn’t seem to care. She was already mulling over rescue plans. “Sensors,” she demanded crisply. “Where is the Leviathan now?”

The Vodyanoi’s own sensor officer must have died in the mining base as the position was taken by the Novgorod’s. If he resented taking orders from a pirate, he showed no sign of it. “Whatever its stealth capability, it’s not using it. Between passive sonar and the amount of noise it’s making manoeuvring, I’m having no trouble tracking it.”

Something Kane had said suddenly came back to Katya. If it had been impractical to transport submarines much larger that the Vodyanoi or the Raleigh or whatever you wanted to call it, how could the Leviathan then be explained? It dwarfed the Vodyanoi, but it had been brought the huge distance from Earth. How large a transporter starship would that have required? It boggled the imagination. She made up her mind to ask him the next chance she got. After Petrov’s pointed comments, Kane seemed in no mood to answer any more questions for the moment.

Tasya had taken the captain’s seat with no argument from Kane. He had claimed to be captain, but Katya thought it looked more like they took turns at being captain and first officer. “What course is it on?” Tasya asked.

“Nothing you can really call a course, ma’am. It was running slow but steadily north while the Baby minisub was aboard, but now…” he quickly punched a few keys and the main display echoed his own station’s display. A blip labelled Leviathan was tracing out lazy loops and zigzags in the ocean. “Now it’s lost all direction. It just seems to be wandering about.”

There was some puzzled mutterings from the other crew positions. Tasya cut across it. “Is it searching for something?”

“That’s no search pattern I’ve ever seen. It really does seem to be dawdling about. It’s as if it doesn’t know what to do next.”

“It’s a machine,” snapped Kane, his tiredness flashing into irritation. “It doesn’t ‘dawdle.’ If it’s got nothing to do, it does nothing.” He watched the blip draw a lazy ‘S’ on the screen. “I do not like this. There’s no reason for this behaviour.” Suddenly remembering something, he reached inside his jacket and produced a grimy handkerchief. He looked at it closely for a few seconds, said, “If you’ll all excuse me, I’ll be in my cabin,” and left the bridge.

Tasya barely gave him a sideways glance as he left. “He has these little episodes,” she said to nobody in particular. Turning her attention back to the display, her eyes narrowed. “We should consider what to do next. I doubt it will wander around like this for much longer.”

“You could try attacking it,” said Lukyan.

Katya sat up, astonished he could say such a thing. “Lieutenant Tokarov’s still aboard, uncle!”

Her uncle looked at her grimly and she read something she didn’t like in his expression. Looking at Tasya and Petrov, they too had it. “You think he’s already as good as dead, don’t you?” she said, accusation in her voice.

“From what your uncle’s told me,” said Tasya, “that thing won’t release him unless he gets a better candidate and perhaps not even then. I’d love to go in there with guns blazing and get him out, but we’d all be dead before we even got close. If the opportunity to rescue him arises, that’s well and good. Otherwise, we count him among the dead.”

Petrov’s lips thinned but didn’t argue with her. Katya couldn’t believe this; after what he’d done to save them, they were just going to abandon him?

“Katya,” said Lukyan, “try to understand. He knew perfectly well he wasn’t going to be getting out. What he did, it was like fighting a rearguard action. He got us and the information we gathered out of there. If we try and rescue him, the Leviathan will kill us all and then there will nobody to stand in its way and he will still be trapped.”

Tasya was looking thoughtful. “The IFF box would get us in again,” said Tasya, reluctantly. “There’s a good chance of it, anyway. We didn’t do anything to antagonise it last time, so it won’t have learned not to trust that way of approaching it. It would be a risk, but I think we could get away with it once more. If we do try it, then, it had better be with a plan because there won’t be a third visit.”

Katya felt torn. Of course she wanted to get Tokarov out if it was at all possible, but the memory of that black featureless eye of the Medusa made her cold with dread. “Once we’re in, we’re bound to upset it, though,” she said, “and that Medusa sphere will punch us full of holes. You didn’t see it, it never stops tracking you.”

Tasya gave her a complacent look. “Then the plan had better cover that too, hadn’t it? Believe me, girl, I have no desire to enter that monstrosity without a fighting chance of getting out again. If we can’t find a plan to beat the Leviathan’s security system, we have no plan at all.”

Lukyan hushed them both by pointing at the main screen. “Look at this.”

The passive track of the Leviathan had been replaced by a slowly spinning computer model. “Is that the Leviathan?” breathed Tasya. Katya belatedly remembered that none of the Vodyanoi’s crew had actually seen the Leviathan; that dubious pleasure had belonged only to the Novgorod’s, as it had swept past them before attacking.

“Yes, ma’am,” replied the sensor operator from his position. “The amount of passive sound energy out there is just about giving us enough information to get an idea what the whole thing looks like. I’m running the data through the sonar imaging suite and making a few guesses to help it come up with something that’s fairly accurate. At least, I think it’s more accurate. What do you think?”

Submarines, by their very nature, don’t tend to look very interesting to the eye and the larger they get, the more streamlined and featureless they become. The Baby was a minisub and its hull was busy with waldo-arms and lighting mounts, all finished in a yellow and black livery. The Leviathan, by stark contrast, was so smooth it seemed organic. Long gentle curves that rolled like titanium surf across the machine-monster’s hull before being lost in tapering aft surfaces. It seemed wrong that it didn’t have a tail or fins. It reminded Katya of the tiny amorphous creatures that the manta whales fed upon, filtering them from the seas of Russalka. As if a tiny protozoan had been frozen in a single languidly elegant form and then made colossal.

“Where are its drive ports?” asked Petrov stepping closer to the display to peer at the details.

“That’s a mystery, sir. I can’t find anything that might be drive systems. No drive ports, impeller tubes or even an old fashioned sea screw. I’m not even picking up engine noise; what ambient sound it’s creating is all being caused simply by the water travelling over the hull at speed. Microcavitation effects. That’s why the image has so much guesswork in it. It’s just not making the amount of noise something that big should be.”

A possible explanation jumped into Katya’s head, but she didn’t consider voicing it until it had become plausible. By the time it had reached that point, however, it was suggesting some other possibilities about the Leviathan. These corollaries bothered her for a moment and she mentally went to swat them away. Then she stopped herself. Suddenly, she could see the explanation for some other little details that had been bothering her.

“Are you all right?” said Lukyan. “You look terrible, like you’d seen a ghost.”

She almost laughed, but she knew it would have sounded hysterical. She wished she had seen a ghost. What she had just deduced was much, much worse.

“I… I’m fine Uncle Lukyan. I… may I be excused?” She left without waiting for anybody to say yes or no. She walked aft looking for the officers’ cabins. Only Kane could tell her if she was right. But, a small voice inside her asked, if it is true, then this is something he has deliberately concealed. Why? And what will he do when he knows you know his secret?