Katya couldn’t believe how quickly the water came in. It was as if a spar of ice had punched through the Baby, stabbing clean through her metal and plastic hull and then instantly turning back to liquid. By the time she thought we’ve been holed the water was already up to her knees.
It all became confused then; too many stimuli, not enough time to examine each of them. She saw her uncle punch the emergency surface control and felt the Baby lurch as her trim weights were dumped and her ballast tanks were blown empty with compressed air. The depth gauge stopped falling, even rose for a couple of metres, but they’d taken on too much water and started to fall again. She heard her uncle shouting “Locks! Locks!” but that made no sense. Then she felt the water rise cold and deadly over her hands and was shocked by how high it was. She reached down and tried to release her harness but it wouldn’t unlock. She thought she really should have asked Sergei about the seat’s eccentricities and she’d make a point of asking him next time.
Then she thought, except there won’t be a next time because I’m going to die before the next time.
She tugged at the seat’s webbing until she realised the water was up to her neck and she ought to worry about breathing. Then something happened – she guessed that the Baby had lost trim and rolled – and she was completely underwater. She fought with the straps a bit more but it was no good, they simply weren’t going to let her go. She looked up and saw the Judas box. Almost all the lights were red, especially the ones across the top row. Hull integrity, motive power, life support – all her favourite green lights had gone red and that saddened her as the cold water leeched the life out of her.
She couldn’t care anymore. She couldn’t concentrate enough to care. She couldn’t even feel her fingers anymore.
She looked across at her Uncle Lukyan and found he was looking right at her. There was an expression of such horror on his face. For a moment, she thought he was afraid to die, but then she realised that he was horrified that she was going to die. She wished she could have hugged him, told him it was all right, that she couldn’t care anymore, but the straps held her firmly into her seat and she couldn’t care about that either. Then the power failed and they were in darkness. She watched the lights on the Judas box flicker out and wondered if the Judas box had a Judas box indicator on it. She guessed not, or else there would be a lone red light burning there now, to tell them that the Judas box was broken.
In the darkness, death snuggled up close to her. She realised that she was still holding her breath and wondered why she was bothering, now death had finally showed up to embrace her. She tried to hold her breath a little longer just to show she could, but death wanted her to come with him. She didn’t want to be impolite. The stale air bubbled out of her mouth and nose. Liquid flooded in.
She thought, in the brief moment before the darkness claimed her, that it was a shame she’d died just before her sixteenth birthday. There was going to be a party. It would have been fun.
Chapter 3
Novgorod
If Russalka had a global religion, it was atheism.
Colonising a new planet had given the settlers a long-range perspective on the workings of religion and it all seemed so distant to them here; so irrelevant, so faintly childish. Religions were still studied, though, if only as mythologies, and as a way of understanding some aspects of Terran politics and history.
But nobody was very interested in knowing much about the past of that distant world now, anyway. People had much more important things to worry about.
Katya was raised as an atheist from birth, but she knew about angels. When she died, she was slightly surprised to find herself taken to Heaven by one.
The angel carried her upwards through the darkness of space, leaving Russalka behind. Higher and higher they rose, until she saw the distant lights of the Celestial City.
She wondered how she was going to apologise to God for being wrong all the time about Him. Still, she wouldn’t be being taken up in rapture from her worldly existence unless He was a forgiving God; the vengeful version suggested in other comparative religion files would have left her in Limbo or worse. No, she was sure He’d be able to accept an apology in the spirit in which it was meant and they could start afresh. She wondered if He played chess.
Then the light grew bright and she flew strongly and happily towards it, borne by her angel. They struck it and the light shattered into a thousand million fragments, scattering around her, droplets of Heaven falling back into the sea.
The sea.
The sea?
Where she had been in rapturous certainty a moment ago, now she felt panic and confusion. She wasn’t in Heaven at all. There was no God waiting for her with the chess pieces already set out. There was only the sea and the lightning flashing spasmodically across an angry sky. Was this Hell? Was she still on Russalka? Were they – the thought flittered momentarily and vanished before she could settle upon its intimations – the same thing?
More lightning, distorted through water drops on plastic. She realised she was wearing goggles, but how..?
She was wearing an emergency respirator pack, but she could not remember putting it on, nor could she remember escaping the Baby. She couldn’t even remember managing to undo her seatbelt. Her tongue felt strange in her mouth, impeded somehow and she suddenly realised her mouth was full of liquid. She moved to tear away the respirator pack’s mask but a hand restrained her. She spun around in the water and found herself face to face with Kane.
His emergency respirator mask made him look insect-like and sinister. Part of the breathing mechanism itself was clear and she could see a green fluid inside. She cursed herself for her stupidity. The whole near-death experience suddenly made perfect, if humiliating, sense.
He gestured to her to follow and swam towards a beacon-buoy floating a few metres away. With a sick feeling, she knew it was the Baby’s beacon, automatically released when all else had failed, and she knew what it meant. The Baby was gone, and Uncle Lukyan was dead.
They clung to the side of the small buoy as the waves slapped half-heartedly at them. The weather report had been right; the sea wouldn’t go out of its way to drown them. It didn’t have to; Russalka’s electrical storms were notoriously disruptive to communications. They’d be lucky if anybody detected the distress signal the buoy was transmitting for hours. They’d be dead from exposure long before then.
Kane hooked his arm around a stanchion on the buoy, closed the respirator’s valves and took it off. The green fluid ran from his nostrils as he vomited up the fluid that was in his lungs. It wasn’t really vomiting – lungs simply aren’t equipped for dumping liquid contents like stomachs – but it allowed him to breathe the thick Russalka atmosphere.
When he’d got about as much out as he was likely to under the circumstances, he helped Katya to do the same. It was an ugly sensation; she’d grown used to the feel of the liquid in her throat and lungs since she’d come around. Feeling cold air flooding her mouth and trachea right down inside her chest was uniquely unpleasant.
“Are… are you all right?” asked Kane, coughing up more of the fluid.
“My uncle, what happened?”
Kane looked away from her, out across the choppy sea. “I’m sorry. I could only try and save whoever was closest to me. That was either going to be you or that worthless FMA bletherskite. I couldn’t have got to your uncle in time.”
“He tried to save me,” said Katya. She wanted to cry, but something seemed broken inside. She could only talk, she didn’t seem able to feel anymore. “He was shouting about the Lox packs.” She touched the emergency respirator. Its trademark name was a LoxPak, Lox supposedly meaning liquid oxygen. It was a misnomer and unpopular among mechanics who dealt in the real thing; real liquid oxygen would kill anybody who tried to fill their lungs with it, an agonising death as their throat and chest froze solid. In contrast, the green fluid in LoxPaks was merely saturated in oxygen, releasing it directly into the lung tissue.
&
nbsp; The fluid also scrubbed nitrogen rapidly from the blood, vital if a victim of a submarine disaster was to stand any chance of surviving a rapid ascent from a few hundred metres down to the surface. She wasn’t in agony, blind or dead, so at least she knew her LoxPak had saved her from the worst symptoms of decompression sickness. The worst symptoms, but Katya now realised, not all the symptoms.
One of the lesser symptoms was the “rapture of the deep.” Hallucinations. Katya knew she’d suffered from them now. Her guardian angel bearing her to a better place had been a notorious pirate taking her to the surface, where she could die more slowly. She laughed out loud, surprising Kane, but the laugh finished with her bringing up more Lox liquid and by the time she’d stopped coughing, the opportunity to ask her what she thought was so funny had passed.
They floated in silence for some time. Then Katya said, “What happened to your handcuffs?”
“They were an inconvenience,” said Kane. “I got rid of them.” He caught Katya’s expression. “I’m sorry, that sounded fatuous, but they were a nuisance. While you were tending to the cut on my head, I borrowed a probe from the medical kit. FMA ‘cuffs really are primitive. I could teach you how to pick them in ten minutes.”
“You’ve practised?”
“Of course I’ve practised. The Feds might not be the brightest intellects in the universe but even the stupid get lucky sometimes. I like to be prepared.”
Another minute passed. “How did they catch you anyway?” asked Katya.
“You ask a lot of questions,” replied Kane.
“I can’t feel my feet.”
Kane looked at her seriously. Hypothermia would be setting in soon. The sea was freezing and slowly leaching the heat from them. They needed to concentrate and talking might be the thing to give them a few more minutes.
“How did they catch me,” repeated Kane. “It wasn’t brilliant detective work, put it that way. It was the reward money that did it. I was informed on.” He noted Katya’s blank expression. “I was grassed on. Done up like a kipper.” None of this seemed to be getting through. He tried again. “Sold out?”
Katya finally seemed to understand what he meant, so he continued. “Did a bit of business with a man who I’d have thought would know better, walked out straight into three officers waiting for me with masers drawn. That’s the trouble with this planet; all the criminals are such amateurs. How is Russalka ever going to get a real criminal underworld going if anybody will grass up anybody for a fistful of small change? It’s divisive.”
“You’re not from Russalka?” She’d thought not. Not with that name and that accent. She’d met people from other colonies before. Now they were all trapped on Russalka since the Grubbers had attacked and destroyed their few starships.
“No, I’m not from Russalka. If I could leave tomorrow, I would, too. This place is a dump. Why did anybody ever decide it was a good idea to colonise a planet with no dry land at all?”
“Minerals.”
“I know. I was talking rhetorically.”
“So if you hate it so much, why did you come?” She knew Russalka was considered a freak world to colonise. No land to speak of, just one great global rolling ocean with a couple of icecaps. Nothing had ever evolved to grow on them though. The ocean teemed with life, but the icecaps and the sky were dead. Everybody else from the Grubbers – the Terrans – through to the other colonies had land to stand on. Out of all the colony worlds, Russalka was unique and difficult, and the Russalkins were proud of that.
“I didn’t want to. Circumstances dictated it.”
Katya wondered what he meant by that, but something in his tone warned her off, and she didn’t press him for an explanation. “Well, you’re stuck here for a while then,” she said.
During the war, all Russalka’s space assets had been destroyed; her communication, navigation and meteorological satellites, the launch platforms and the handful of starships held in the great floating hangars had all been wrecked by the Grubbers to deny Russalka any line of defence from orbit out to the transition shelf where starships entered the star system.
In the end it had all been for nothing – the war had just stopped. The Grubbers never sent any diplomats or anybody to explain why they weren’t going to fight anymore, they’d just stopped coming. One morning Russalka woke up and there were no new incursions, no more targeted asteroid hits, no more robot hunter/killers splashing down. The war just stopped. The wise money was that the Grubbers had trouble at home or another colony closer to them had agitated for independence and they’d redirected their war budget at them instead. Whatever the reason, after eighteen months of fierce combat the Grubbers went home and took their war with them, leaving Russalka badly wounded and gasping on the ropes.
As far as it went, Kane was right about organised crime on Russalka being a bad joke, but that was true of everything. They’d lost a lot of people and a lot of technology. Thankfully Russalka was a mineral rich planet with a lot of energy to be had; they would rebuild, but it would take time.
There was a lot to do before Kane could leave Russalka for somewhere more suitable for a career criminal. New launch platforms would have to be built, new starships built to be launched from them, new satellites put up to feed the ships the accurate astronomical data they needed before hitting the transition shelf and initiating quantum drive. It would take a lot of effort, a lot of will, a lot of money and, the worst thing for Kane, a lot of time.
“I heard Lyonesse was building a platform,” said Kane conversationally. A wave rolled over him and Katya waited until he’d finished coughing before answering.
“I heard it was just for sub-orbital transports. Nobody’s interested in space, Kane. We’ve got enough problems on planet without worrying about what’s overhead.”
“What if it’s the Grubbers who are overhead?”
“Then…” Katya paused. She was glad her uncle wasn’t here to hear her say this, but she believed it all the same. “We should surrender.”
Kane made a point of getting eye contact before he replied. “Do you really think so?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “If they attack again, they’ll kill us all. Let them bring their stormtroopers. They can’t be any worse than the FMA.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that. The FMA are light entertainment compared to stormtroopers.”
“It doesn’t matter. The travel time is what will do the trick. It takes a year to get to Russalka; it’s not a cheap trip to take. Anybody they send will end up going native, just like we did. They won’t be sending occupiers, they’ll be sending new colonists.”
“Interesting thought. I think you underestimate the Terrans, but you’re right about surrendering. If they can scrape together the budget for another invasion taskforce, this world’s in no shape to resist.” He looked up at the tip of the buoy’s spire, a metre above them. Upon it, a brilliant white light flashed rhythmically.
They watched it in silence for a minute or so. Katya was beginning to feel very tired. It was so cold in that sea, and she knew it was killing them slowly. She tried to wedge her arm into the spire’s frame so if she fell unconscious, she wouldn’t simply slip under the waves. The spire’s supports were too close together, though, and she couldn’t manage it. She looked at the dark sea beneath the sullen sky, and death felt all too close. “Do you think somebody will save us?” asked Katya.
Kane thought for a moment as if working out an exact answer, but then only said, “Maybe. At least whoever put that hole in the sub didn’t come after us to finish the job.”
“Who do you think that was?”
“I don’t know,” replied Kane, a little too quickly.
Katya had no intention of dying with questions unanswered. She was about to ask him again when her mouth stopped in mid-syllable, and she was left with a foolish expression. Kane looked at her oddly and then followed her line of sight.
Perhaps five hundred metres away, the sea had begun to boil. As they watched, the com
motion grew more focussed, more kinetic and Katya realised it was coming closer. She also realised what it was.
“It’s a bow wave! There’s something headed right for us!”
“I’m glad you worked that out for yourself; it saves me having to explain it,” said Kane. “Survival tip, Katya. Take a deep breath just before it hits us. That should be enough, but keep your LoxPak handy in case.”
The mound of angry sea was almost upon them. “In case of what?” she screamed as the roaring of the waters grew deafening.
“Oh, you know,” said Kane, looking straight at the mound, which was quickly turning into a mountain, “stuff.”
The front of the great pile of sea charging towards them seemed to tear and sheer away as the great muzzle of the object was finally exposed. With a hideous, shuddering whine, the muzzle split into three equal jaws – one below and two opening up and away to the left and right. The waters, thrashed until they were milky, sluiced violently over them and back into the sea. The jaws devoured Katya, Kane and the distress buoy all, slowly closing again as the monstrous thing sank back into the ocean. In a few seconds, there was no sign that they had ever been there.
The petty officer who opened the airlock into the salvage maw was only expecting to find a distress buoy. The furious fifteen-year-old girl and the bedraggled man were definitely a surprise.
“What was that?” spat Katya in a fury, waving her arms around to take in the maw and, by implication, the whole process of being swallowed by a submarine. It wasn’t very pleasant in there. It was cold and wet – if not as wet as it had been before the bilge pumps drained it – and dark but for the flashing light on top of the buoy and a dim maintenance light over the door. The maw was like being in a tall conical room that had fallen on its side. Its use was simple; it opened wide, swallowed anything the boat’s captain wanted to look at and then clamped shut. They were also never used in rescues as there was too great a chance of a survivor slipping between the edges of the jaws as the maw shut and, regrettably, being snipped in half. “What did you think you were playing at? You could have killed us!”
Katya's World Page 4