Katya's World

CHAPTER 21 Everything Changes

The Vodyanoi had drifted at a depth of two hundred metres, watching, waiting and doing very little else while the Leviathan mauled the FP-1. The crew had spent ten years learning pragmatism and they practised it now, ignoring the desperate distress signals from their sister vessels as the hulking killer-ship slid unheard and unseen through their midst, seeding death among the Yagizban boats with its combat drones. They listened as the battlefield grew quieter and quieter and they wondered how long it would be before the Leviathan sighted and destroyed them. Instead, the carnage halted abruptly. The Yagizban recalled their remaining forces and the great floating station had moved slowly away, listing badly in the water.

The Vodyanoi had started to cautiously follow, assuming that the Leviathan, invisible to their sensors, would be doing the same. Instead they had detected a massive disturbance behind them; almost seven million displacement tonnes of vessel surfacing at speed and tearing itself from the ocean top. They had released a camera buoy to the surface and watched the Leviathan fly upwards, upwards until it was lost in the boiling clouds.

For lack of anything else that they could do, they waited. Thirty minutes later, the clouds glowed white above them and the communication channels filled with random noise.

For lack of anything else it could be, they knew the Leviathan was destroyed, and that their captain was dead.

They were debating what to do next when, through the slowly clearing channels, they detected the transponder signal of the Baby. Triangulation showed it was not in the sea, but in the air. A long way up in the air. The most likely explanation was it had been blown free in the blast and was falling back to Russalka like an artificial meteorite. But it fell, and it fell and it fell and it took its own sweet time doing it. The camera buoy, coming back online after the radiation wave had temporarily silenced it, showed them the truth. The Baby, lightened to the point of almost no effective weight by the combat drones strapped to it, floating slowly towards the ocean, as slow as a soap bubble.

Finally, it touched down. The Vodyanoi was waiting for it.

When the minisub Pushkin’s Baby finally reached Lemuria Station, it was ten days late. There was no fuss, no crowds at the locks when she arrived hungry for news of what had happened to her, not even anybody demanding to know where her cargo was. The official who processed her was new to the station and didn’t know the local boats and masters, so nobody even asked about Lukyan Pushkin.

Katya Kuriakova signed the cargo — newly returned from the Vodyanoi’s stores — into the warehouse to await collection and left the locks for the station’s commercial sector. With her went a passenger, a man travelling under false papers.

Now they sat in a small and almost empty coffee shop in the middle of the shopping area, watching people walk by and drinking real — and therefore expensive — coffee. Kane’s treat.

“What are you thinking, Katya Kuriakova?”

She watched a mother argue with her children for a moment before replying. “Wondering how many of these people will still be alive in a year.”

“Oh,” said Kane. He drank a little of his cup. “You’ve become a fatalist.”

“A realist.”

“No, not necessarily. Things might not come to a full war. There’s always the possibility of a cold war. Both sides bristle at each other, but nobody shoots.” He noticed Katya’s eyes upon him and shook his head in resignation. “No, they’ll shoot. The FMA have been used to getting their own way for too long, and the Yagizban have invested too much to just step back. There’ll be war.” He drank a little more. “Nice coffee.”

“Grown hydroponically. That’s what it says in the menu. What will you do, Kane?”

“Me? Oh, I don’t know. The usual. Make it up as we go along. We can start by selling off those combat drones. They can be reverse-engineered and, anyway, Terran components are always much sought after.”

“Who will you sell them to?”

“Happily, there’s two, so we can sell one to the FMA and flog the other off to the Yagizban. I know what you’re thinking,” he added quickly, “playing both sides off against the middle, but you’re… actually, no, that’s partially true. The idea is that neither side gets an advantage over the other and we get ourselves some leeway, build some bridges. We’d like to stay neutral, but that will be impossible. People get into this ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ mindset. It’s shallow and inflexible, but that’s what happens when people start thinking like a mob, and that’s what happens in war. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.”

“You won’t live long on the proceeds from two combat drones.”

“No. ‘Honest, mate, lovely combat drone, one careful owner, fell off the back of an artificially intelligent battleship.’ No, that won’t set us up for life.” He shrugged. “There’s always piracy, I suppose. But what about you, Katya? What are you going to do? Are you going to sign up for the FMA? They’ll be needing good officers.”

Katya shook her head, smiling at a private joke. “The FMA isn’t for me. I don’t respond well to military discipline. I’ve got the Baby to look after now, anyway. Operating a minisub for conveyance and maybe recovery work will probably get me listed in a reserved occupation. I’ll be more useful to them as a civilian than in uniform. I know that will cheer Sergei up; he hates the Federals.” She closed her eyes and opened them again as a sharp pang of inner misery troubled her. “I have to tell him Lukyan’s dead. They’ve been friends since they were boys.” She steeled herself and put that where it belonged, in the future. “Anyway, yes. I’ve got the sub. I’ve got a business to run.”

“You sound very grown up,” said Kane, sadness in his voice.

“Of course I’m grown up. I’ve got a card somewhere to prove it.” She patted her pocket, but it was empty. She laughed a small, bitter laugh. “I think it’s still on the Novgorod. That’s a point. I’d better tell the FMA where she’s lying. It shouldn’t take long to get her seaworthy again and, the devil knows, they’ll need every boat they can get.”

Kane checked his cup. It was down to the dregs. “There’s an alternative.”

Katya looked up at him, mildly interested.

“We could go back to the locks, take the Baby back to the Vodyanoi and keep our heads down until this is all over. There are plenty of places to hide, plenty of small settlements who won’t want any part of what’s coming. You’d be welcome to join the crew.”

“And why would I want to do that?”

“So you don’t die.”

Katya thought about it, but not for long. “No, Kane, I won’t do that. I’ll take my chances here.”

Kane was unsurprised but felt he had to ask. “May I ask why?”

Katya thought longer this time, remembering what had happened to her, what she had learned, what she hungered to forget and never would. When she had her thoughts ordered and her mind clear, she replied.

“I don’t like to be near you, Kane. People die near you. You go around wide-eyed and clueless as if you don’t understand how these things could happen and then, five minutes later, you say, ‘Oh, well, that happened for this reason that I didn’t bother telling you about until it was too late.’ All this,” she swept her hand across the tabletop, but the gesture encompassed the Leviathan, the FP-1, the Chertovka, the dead and the lost, “all this is your fault. You brought the Leviathan here. Then you abandoned it and just hoped it was a problem that would go away if you didn’t think about it. But it didn’t go away. Ten years later, it gets stirred up and you are right there when it happens. And what do you do? Nothing. You don’t say a word. You didn’t give Captain Zagadko enough information to fight it or even to realise he couldn’t. You’d lost control of the situation and you couldn’t even be bothered to tell us what that situation was. Why? You’d spent ten years hoping it would all just go away and it hadn’t. What made you think it would just fade away now?

“And then it turns out you’ve been collaborating with the Yagizba Conclaves in treason. Treason, Kane! Without access to your boat, they wouldn’t have been able to churn out copies. They’ve got a whole war effort based on technologies that you gave them! And now hundreds, thousands of people are going to die because of a war you helped start.”

Kane was looking grey. “Katya, it’s not…”

“No!” she spat at him. “Shut up! I liked Captain Zagadko. I liked Petrov. I liked Tokarov. I loved my uncle. Unless you can bring them back, then shut up. You have nothing to say to me.” She wanted to cry but she would not, not in front of him. Later, she would discover that she could not cry at all and she would hate him for that too.

Kane sat silently, looking unblinkingly at his empty cup. Then he glanced up at the chronometer on the wall and back down again. “The Vodyanoi will be standing off the auxiliary locks by now. It will take me five minutes to get there, five minutes to get aboard, ten minutes to get out of the sensor cordon.” He nodded in the direction of the corridor leading into the administrative area. “There’s an FMA office just down there, first on the left. You can go and make a report there after you’ve finished your coffee. If you nurse it, it might last twenty minutes.” He looked up but he couldn’t meet her eyes. “Would you do that much for me?”

Katya didn’t reply for a long moment. Then she said, “Go.”

She didn’t see his eyes widen as he remembered the last word of the Leviathan, and finally realised whose voice it had been spoken in.

Abruptly, like a man who’d forgotten something, he climbed to his feet and walked quickly away without looking back. Katya watched him until he turned the corner to the auxiliary facilities sector and was lost to sight. She sipped her coffee. It was cold and she couldn’t taste it anyway.

It took her twenty-five minutes to finish her cup. Then she ordered another.