Katya's World

CHAPTER 4 Leviathan

The bridge was busy when they arrived. Deliav was just saluting the Captain. “I’ve recovered the data card from the distress buoy, captain.”

“Hold onto it for the moment, Deliav. We have more pressing business at present.”

“Permission to enter the bridge, captain,” said Katya crisply. She knew enough about the military not to go barging around on their boats like they were on a pleasure trip.

Zagadko shot them a look. “I’m afraid not, Ms Kuriakova. We’re in a state of battle readiness. There’s no place for you here. Go to the ready room, please.”

Kane cleared his throat. “With respect, captain, Katya was at the controls when her boat was attacked. If you may be engaging the same foe..?”

Zagadko was not the sort of man to dither. “Point taken. If you could stand just over there, Ms Kuriakova, and endeavour to stay out of the way.” They made a move towards the bulkhead the captain had pointed at, but he stopped them. “Not you, Mr Kane.”

Kane blinked with surprise. “But, captain…”

“You weren’t at the controls, were you? Unless there’s something you’re not telling me?”

The two men looked at each other for a moment. It was Kane who broke eye contact first. “I’ll be in the ready room if you need me,” he said and walked out with what dignity he could.

Zagadko watched him go. When the hatch had closed behind Kane, he said to Katya, “You and I are going to have a conversation when Mr Kane isn’t present. Count on it.” He turned away from her, leaving her feeling guilty and worried.

“Range to the wreck?”

“Three thousand metres.”

Katya started. They’d been hunting the wreck of the Baby? The captain noticed her surprise when he turned back. “I wasn’t about to leave her lying there for pirates to pick over, Ms Kuriakova.”

“Captain!” Zagadko turned to one of the sensor technicians. “I have something on hydrophones. Low, really low.”

Katya remembered the ghostly sound she’d picked up herself over the Baby’s hydrophones. She watched as the operator dropped the frequency translation range, just as she had done. This was a military vessel; she wondered how much better the Novgorod’s sensors were in comparison.

“Sonar?” demanded Zagadko.

The sonar operator sat hunched over his screen, looking carefully over every square millimetre of it. “Nothing, sir. Nothing on passive.”

Zagadko humphed. “Pulse.”

“Sir?” It was the first officer, a thin, dark man with heavy-lidded eyes. “We’ll give away our position.”

Katya thought that was a redundant thing to say. Zagadko was a veteran; of course he knew sending an active sonar pulse would be like lighting a match in a dark room. They would be able to see better, but everything else would be able to see them all the more easily.

“They already know full well where we are, Petrov. Active pulse, sensors.”

The sonar pulse rang through the hull as it emanated out from the Novgorod. The Baby’s sonar had made a chirpy little “ping!” It had sounded somehow friendly to Katya. The Novgorod’s pulse, however, was a dull, mournful beat of sound that seemed to buzz inside her bones long after her ears had ceased to hear it.

The sonar officer checked his screen again. “I don’t understand it, sir. We’re picking up some sound; we should be able to get a passive lock on it.” He waited for the sonar echoes to return. He seemed to wait a long time. “No bounce from the pulse, sir. I’m trying for an IC resolution — it’s giving me a range of a thousand metres but won’t give me a full solution. It’s like hunting a ghost.”

Katya remembered her own encounter. She realised that she was sweating. The Novgorod was a hundred times bigger than the Pushkin’s Baby but she still had a horrible feeling, squirming in her gut, that history was about to repeat itself.

The hydrophones operator looked up. “I’m getting something… Cavitation noise, captain!”

Katya blanched. “Oh no,” she said in a desperate little voice. Captain Zagadko looked around at the sound and was surprised to see her almost hugging herself in fear. “Cavitation,” she said in a whisper. “Then it attacks.”

Captain Zagadko was becoming quite sick of this mysterious foe. He didn’t like the way it was avoiding detection, he didn’t like the way it had moved into an attack with none of the usual preamble of submarine combat, and — very especially — he didn’t like the way it kept being referred to as “it” all the time.

He was sure it was a submarine, and a submarine is a “she,” just like any ocean-going vessel. There was an atmosphere on the bridge as if they were facing some mythical sea monster and he wasn’t having it.

“Petrov!” he barked, “sweep the external cameras, floodlights on!”

“Aye-aye, captain.” The first officer moved to the salvage controls. “The water’s not too bad,” he reported as the cameras flicked into instant life. “With enhancement running we should be able to see anything within a thousand. Nothing in the forward quarter, searching…”

“Incoming!” called out the sensors operator. “Single contact. Eight o’clock high. Fast, very fast.”

“Eight o’clock high!” snapped Zagadko at Petrov. Petrov started swinging the lights and cameras to look that way. Zagadko was already standing over another crewmember at her position. “Weapons! Two torpedoes on a reciprocal, forty-five degree search cones, three minute dry. Helm! Hard to port, dive for the isotherm, flank speed.”

“Torpedoes away, launched and running. Noisemakers, Captain.?”

“Yes, and wait for my signal. Petrov, have you..?”

But Petrov was looking at the main viewing screen on the forward bulkhead with sheer astonishment. Zagadko looked too and was struck dumb himself for several long seconds. All across the bridge, the crew paused to look up from their stations. Katya didn’t want to look, but she really couldn’t help herself.

“What,” said one of the crew in blank disbelief, “is that?”

On the screen, a shape, a massive shape loomed out of the dark, the smallest part of it illuminated by the Novgorod’s searchlights. It was unbelievably, shockingly huge, dwarfing the Novgorod. Smooth and almost featureless, it was impossible to say whether it was a machine or a creature. It swept gracefully by them, almost silent and invisible to sonar, and it never seemed to end.

Kaya heard a voice in the silence speak, so quietly that she was sure she was the only one to hear it. “Leviathan.” She looked sharply at the speaker.

It was Kane, standing by the hatch. Before she had a chance to speak, an alarm klaxon suddenly started bleating raucously, shattering the awful moment.

“We’re taking on water forward!” called an officer.

“What?” Zagadko was bemused. “With no detonation?”

“No explosion, sir,” reported the hydrophones operator, “but there was a lot of hiss, a little cavitation. It reminded me of the steam bubbles rising from a volcanic vent, very similar sound.”

“Sonar? Are you getting anything?”

The sonar operator shook his head. “I don’t know what’s going on, captain. That contact I took to be a torpedo of some sort made a close pass and then pulled away. It’s returning to… that thing — whatever it is — now. And,” he looked embarrassed and confused, “I’ve lost our torpedoes. They just… disappeared.”

“Damage control, what’s the flooding situation?”

“Much faster than the pumps can deal with, captain. We’re taking about four tonnes a minute. We’re losing trim.”

“Can we surface?”

“No, sir. We’re already too far gone.”

Zagadko stood a moment in deep thought, rubbing his earlobe. Every captain loves his vessel almost more than life itself, but every captain has to be ready to abandon that vessel at a moment’s notice if there is no alternative. “Where’s the hostile now?” he asked.

Neither the hydrophones nor the sonar operator could find any trace of the huge shape that had attacked them. “It’s gone, captain. It’s just vanished.”

“This is very calculated,” said Captain Zagadko. “It hurts us just enough to sink us and then withdraws. What’s it up to?”

Katya was wondering about that too. “Captain? He turned to her with a mild expression of surprise and she realised he’d forgotten she was there. “Captain, when it attacked us, we had multiple contacts. The Baby never stood a chance..”

“She’s right,” said Kane from the hatchway. “I was conscious throughout. It really laid into us.”

“I thought I told you to go to the ready room, Mr Kane.”

“Yes, you did. It was rather dull so I came back again.”

“You are not helping,” said Zagadko, his irritation starting to show. “Leave my bridge and…”

“What’s the point, captain? We’re sinking and you can’t stop that. There’s nothing out here but the Soup. We really don’t stand much of a chance.”

Just when she thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. “We’re over the Soup here?” she said, pleasing herself by keeping a waver out of her voice.

The Soup was one of the great mysteries and attractions of Russalka. In the deepest parts of the world ocean, beneath the crush depths of all but the strongest hulls, a thick mineral solution formed lakes and submarine seas. It was far denser than water but still liquid and it existed in standing bodies all over the planet. Little was known of it. A few small experimental samples had been taken and these showed the Soup, as it quickly became known, was rich in metallic salts including some of rare elements. Simply put, the Soup was worth a fortune to whoever worked out a way of extracting it. Many rich men had tried and left poorer. Many poor men had tried and their bodies had not been recovered. The sheer density of the Soup was one of the things that made it so difficult to manipulate and the depth at which it existed made for a very dangerous working environment. Even a vessel capable of diving to great depths like the Novgorod could not hope to enter the Soup and survive. Every litre of Soup weighed — depending where in the world it had been gathered — as much as twenty kilograms, twenty times denser than water. Diving five metres into the Soup was like diving a hundred metres of water. The few boats that could dive that deep were already past their test depth if they reached the surface of the Soup. A few metres down would send the pressure rocketing past the crush depth equivalent and the submarine would be crumpled like a paper boat in a giant’s hand.

Unless they abandoned ship immediately, they would soon be too deep for LoxPaks to save them. Then they would have no choice but to ride the stricken vessel down into the Soup, where they would be crushed in a moment.

Kane coughed. “If anybody’s got any bright ideas, now would be a good moment to share them.”

Katya had an idea, but it was so stupid, she debated sharing it for a moment.

“Blow tanks!” ordered Zagadko.

The hull thrummed as water was driven out of the ballast tanks. “That’s helping, sir,” reported the steerswoman “We’re still sinking but nowhere near as fast. The nose is heavy but we can pull it up a little on the hydroplanes.”

“Not enough,” murmured the captain, watching the depth gauge. “Navigator!” Katya looked up, but he was talking to his own navigator. Of course, thought Katya, don’t be stupid. “Can we make Lemuria?”

The navigator stabbed at some controls — Katya was once again impressed by how much better the Novgorod’s technology was than anything she was familiar with. On the main screen, a map of the area appeared with the stricken sub in the middle. “At our current rate of descent, we will make it,” a red circle appeared on the map, “this far.” The red circle was nowhere near large enough to encompass Lemuria Station.

The captain stepped up closer to the display. “All right, so we can’t hope to reach Lemuria. Anything else in the area? Research bases or mining encampments? Anything?”

The navigator checked his files and shook his head. Captain Zagadko swore under his breath.

So, that was that. They were all going to die and, it struck Katya, that even if she did make a complete idiot of herself, there would be no witnesses soon enough.

“Captain? Does the Novgorod carry any ship’s vessels?”

“A couple of EVA pods and that’s about it. I’m afraid we don’t have enough to evacuate the whole crew.”

Great, thought Katya, now he thinks I’m a coward and just want to grab a pod. “I was thinking of reconnaissance vehicles. Flying reconnaissance vehicles.”

The captain was confused now. “Two CG craft, but we have to be surfaced to launch them. I don’t…” His eyes lit up. “Great gods! Yes, I do! Tokarov!”

Lieutenant Tokarov had already seen what Katya was getting at. “On my way, captain!”

As he left the bridge at a dogtrot, Zagadko said to Katya, “Go with him, please, Ms Kuriakova. Take a flyer each.” Katya didn’t need a second bidding.

She caught up with Tokarov raiding a storeroom. “Here,” he said, tossing her a spool of metal tape. “You’ll need a crimping gun too. Ever used this stuff before?” She shook her head. “It’s very easy. The trick is to keep the stuff taut. Loaded up? Let’s go!”

He led the way through bulkhead door after bulkhead door until they found themselves in the section directly behind the salvage maw. She’d remembered the dark shapes up in their cradles when Kane and she had been taken from the maw to the sickbay. She was glad she’d been right about what they were.

Tokarov climbed up onto the hull of the starboard contra-gravity craft. It looked like a long surface boat with heavy outriders, which she guessed contained the forward drives. They wouldn’t be needing those; only the powerful lift units. Tokarov fed a length of tape around the craft and its cradle and crimped it shut. Katya climbed onto the port craft and started doing the same.

“These cradles have clamps on them. Won’t those be enough?”

The lieutenant shook his head as he laid a second length of tape further down his craft’s hull. “They’re just to stop the flyer falling out of the cradle in harsh conditions or during extreme manoeuvres. What we’re doing is something else again. How are you doing?”

Katya had just managed her first binding and didn’t think the crimp sealing the tape into a continuous loop looked very secure. “I’m doing okay,” she replied, promising herself that the next one would be better.

Tokarov had the benefit of experience and longer arms and had his craft almost cocooned in the silvery tape before Katya was even a quarter done. He came over and helped and soon both craft were fastened to their cradles as thoroughly as was possible without getting out welding gear. Tokarov went to the intercom had hailed the bridge. “We’re ready when you are, captain.”

“Do it now, lieutenant,” snapped Zagadko’s voice in reply. “Time is wasting.”

The lieutenant clambered quickly up into the cockpit of the starboard craft, Katya doing likewise for the port flyer. “Ever flown one of these, Ms? It’s simple. Power is just like a minisub’s.” Katya sought and found a bank of switches like those she’d used to fire up the Baby just a few hours before. It seemed impossible that things could have changed so dramatically and so awfully in so little time. “That’s good. Lift controls are the ones under your left hand, the slide control. On my mark, move it forward slowly. Ready? Three, two, one, mark!”

Katya gently slid the control forward. As it moved, the status screen showed the amount of mass the contra-gravity units were now ignoring. “Approaching parity,” she reported. It was a phase she’d heard some pilot use in a drama about the war once. She guessed it meant that the craft now effectively weighed nothing. It sounded calm and professional and, if she’d got it wrong, at least Tokarov had the decency not to laugh at her.

“Check,” he replied. “Keep going. Watch the tolerance meter. You want that to go through yellow into a deep orange. Not red or this has all been for nothing.”

Katya pushed the control slowly further still. Now her craft weighed less than nothing. She noticed the tapes running across the flyer’s predatory nose growing taut as it tried to lift from the cradle. The tolerance meter was changing colour so achingly slowly that she wasn’t sure what it was from moment to moment. What if it changed so subtly that what she thought was a very deep orange was actually red? What if she fried the flyer’s CG units because she couldn’t tell?

“I’m pulling four gravities and that’s as far as I dare take it. What are you up to?” asked Tokarov.

Ah, blessed numbers, Katya sighed with relief. Numbers were nice and reliable and unambiguous. “Three point seven, eight, nine… four gees!” She locked off the controls without being told to and climbed out. Tokarov jumped from his craft’s cockpit and landed in front of her. “Will it be enough?” she asked him.

“Only one way to find out,” he said. “Come on.”

The bridge was still quiet and Zagadko was grim. “Good work,” he said. “Good idea, Ms Kuriakova. Effectively cancelling out the reconnaissance flyer’s weight and giving us more buoyancy to boot has reduced the rate of descent significantly.”

“But we’re still sinking, sir?” asked Tokarov, his disappointment evident.

“We’re still sinking. You’ve bought us some more time, though, and that’s bought us more range.” He pointed to the screen and the new larger red circle showing how far the Novgorod could go before hitting the bottom. “At least we’ll clear that Soup lake. No chance of making Lemuria, still.”

“Captain, if I might make a suggestion?” said Kane. He was still standing at the hatchway. He wouldn’t enter the bridge without being invited and the captain seemed adamant that he wouldn’t get such an invitation. Katya fumed inwardly; grown men behaving like children. She wished Uncle Lukyan were here. He’d have banged their heads and made them work together.

The captain clearly didn’t want to hear it, but under the circumstances had little choice. “What is it, Mr Kane?” he asked in a tone of deep disinterest.

“Over there on that mountain,” he pointed vaguely.

Zagadko glared at him. “Get on the bridge, man, and point it out properly.”

“Thank you so much,” said Kane with politeness so perfect, it was deeply insulting. He walked over to the screen. “This mountain, there’s a mining base in it.”

Zagadko shot a glance at his navigator who was already checking his files again. “There’s no base listed, sir,” he said finally.

“You won’t find it on the active base lists,” explained Kane. “It was decommissioned five years ago. The miners have long since gone.”

“With no crew there, how are we supposed to negotiate the locks? Blast our way in?”

“You can if it makes you happy, captain, but it really isn’t necessary. It has a moon pool.”

Katya could see the captain considering. A moon pool was a harbour inside a base, the water kept at bay by air pressure. A boat need only swim along a short submerged tunnel and surface at the quayside. No locks needed to keep the ocean out, no crew needed to man the locks.

“How big?” asked Zagadko.

“Big enough. It used to handle ore carriers at least as large as this boat.”

“Good enough. Navigation, set a course for the abandoned mining station.” He turned back to Kane. “Thank you, Mr Kane,” he said with evident distaste.

“Always pleased to help the FMA in its little troubles,” said Kane, and smiled back with at least as much feeling.

With her course set, her engines running at full power and the contra-gravity units of the two reconnaissance craft holding up well, there was little to do but wait and think.

Petty Officer Deliav had finally got to hand over the data he’d removed from the Baby’s distress buoy; the little boat’s last half an hour of instrumentation readings and control settings. Captain Zagadko and lieutenants Petrov and Tokarov watched the recreation of the events on the Novgorod’s computer while Katya talked them through it.

“There seems little doubt that this huge ore deposit that so mysteriously vanished was actually the vessel that then went on to attack you,” said Petrov. “Its stealth capabilities are astonishing. I wonder why it had them all deactivated when you first detected it lying on the seabed?”

“We don’t know it is a vessel,” said Tokarov. “It doesn’t behave like any submarine I’ve ever encountered or heard of.”

“Of course it’s a vessel,” scoffed Petrov, “what else could it be? Or are you suggesting it’s some sort of sea monster?”

“Leviathan,” said Katya to herself.

“What was that, Ms Kuriakova?” Zagadko’s hearing was apparently as sharp as his intellect.

“Oh, uh… nothing,” she replied, flustered. “Just a name I heard. My father once told me that Russalka has no myths or legends yet, but it would grow them because people needed them. He told me that Earth’s history had been full of monster legends and we’d follow suit.”

“Fond of Earth, is he?” asked Petrov tartly.

“He died in the Battle of Lyonesse, fighting the Terran marines.” Tokarov shot Petrov a dirty look. Petrov bit his lip. “I hardly remember him. Just little things. He taught me the names of the Terran monsters and I remembered them at first because they were fun to say. Then I remembered them because they reminded me of that day.” She spoke the names softly like a prayer. “Kraken. Scylla. Leviathan.”

Zagadko broke the uneasy silence that followed. “Ms Kuriakova, what do you think we’re facing?”

She realised with a small shock that the captain of one of the most powerful warboats on the planet was asking her opinion. Petrov still seemed embarrassed by his gaff, but Tokarov also seemed interested in her views. She thought carefully and said, “I think it’s a machine. But I don’t think it’s a submarine, at least no sort of boat that has ever come out of our shipyards, and I don’t know how it got here. Maybe it was here all along.”

“Aliens?” said Petrov, but he wasn’t scoffing now. Humanity had always half hoped and half feared to discover other intelligent life out among the stars. Up to now it had been half disappointed and half relieved to find none.

“Maybe,” she conceded, “but then, wouldn’t we be the aliens?”

“No, that’s not possible,” said Petrov. “No signs of intelligent life having been here before us has ever been found.”

“But the whole planet hasn’t been fully mapped,” pointed out Zagadko. “We have no idea what lies beneath the Soup. Sonar just bounces off it.”

Katya remembered how close to a Soup lake they’d detected the “ore” deposit. In her mind’s eye, she could see that great bulk now crawling from the lake, slowly, painfully, until it had collapsed exhausted in the middle of the Weft. Then along they’d come and…

“It was defending itself!” she said suddenly. “Of course, I’ve been so stupid.” She looked at the officers. “We shot a probe at it. How was it to know we weren’t attacking? It cloaked itself somehow and fell off our sensors, killed the probe and retaliated.” The realisation only served to depress her. Uncle Lukyan was dead because of a misunderstanding.

“That may be so,” said the captain slowly as he weighed up the implications, “but it doesn’t account for its attack on the Novgorod. We didn’t attack it. We didn’t even see it.”

“Besides,” said Tokarov, studying the Baby’s frantic last seconds on the computer log, “its tactics are completely different. Look at this. There are four or five small contacts out there and the hull damage report issued to the distress buoy’s memory in the last moment before it was launched show multiple breaches. Hmmm, still no explosions on the hydrophones. Against us, there was one contact and damage control reports one, possibly two holes in the salvage maw and that’s it, the limit of the attack on us. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes perfect sense.”

Zagadko whirled in irritation towards Kane, who had spoken. “If you’re going to join the conversation then kindly do so, Mr Kane. I, for one, find your habit of hanging around at the edges deeply annoying.”

“Very well.” Kane got up from the seat he’d taken without permission and stepped closer to them. “I said it makes perfect sense.” When he was sure he had their attention, he continued, “The Baby was destroyed quickly because it was perceived to be a threat. This vessel, entity, whatever you want to call it, Leviathan is as good a name as any, thought it was being attacked and defended itself. Now, it punches a couple of holes in a much larger boat and then runs away. Why? Any ideas?”

“It didn’t intend to sink us,” said Tokarov.

“You’re quick. That’s right. Why didn’t it want to sink the Novgorod?”

Katya thought Kane sounded like a maniac teacher. Who knew why the Leviathan — the more she used the name, the more fitting it seemed — had only damaged them? They’d just limp off to drydock, get fixed up and come straight back out, looking for a fight. What could it possibly gain? Then Katya thought through that sequence again and suddenly knew.

“It wanted to see where we’d run. It wanted to know where the Novgorod called home.”

“Lemuria.” Zagadko was grim. “It wanted us to lead it right to Lemuria so it could… God’s teeth, if it hadn’t hurt us more than it had intended, we’d have led it right there. What would it have done?”

“I think we can make a pretty good guess,” said Kane. “That thing against an almost undefended base… They wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

“But that means,” said Petrov, “it’s out there, right now, tracking us.”