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 final
ly.
“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.”
Chapter 5
Environmental Control
Katya had known it intuitively, even if consciously she had elected not to think about it. Of course the Leviathan was probably after them; it would hardly have attacked and then just swum off, giving them grace to lick their wounds. Of course it wanted to know where they would run. The only “of course” she could not supply was what it would do when it realised that they had made a bolthole of an abandoned mining base. She doubted it would just give them up as a bad job and go off to harass somebody else.
She’d watched the Baby’s distress log four times before the captain had decided that she was past the point of analytical interest and well into obsession. “There was nothing you could have done,” he’d told her, not without kindness. Of course there wasn’t. Of course he was right.
Of course.
It was difficult to take one’s ga
ze away from the main screen, which still continued to show the Novgorod’s course and maximum range. The centre of the map was still the submarine herself; the map updated thirty times a second and she got closer and closer to the abandoned mine with every minute. The red circle grew smaller each minute too, but the mine stayed within its circumference. Just, only just.
The lack of a safety margin obviously vexed Captain Zagadko so much that he was even prepared to listen to Kane.
“Have you ever flown a fixed-wing aircraft, captain?” asked Kane.
“I’ve flown CG craft, but what’s your point?” Katya noticed Petrov give Kane a very suspicious look as Zagadko answered.
“The point is, you’re going to have to treat this boat like an aircraft on the final approach. A fixed-wing aircraft doesn’t handle anything like a CG, believe me. You’ve got a source of thrust – propellers, jets, whatever – and that’s it. The aircraft develops lift through its aerodynamic lifting surfaces. You can’t slow down to think things through, you fly on gut reaction and experience.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“It is. That’s why everybody uses contra-gravity; it’s much more forgiving. Usually, a sub handles like a CG aircraft but, with this steady sinking, we’re behaving more like a fixed-wing aircraft at the moment. She’s constantly fighting going down and crashing.”
“I ask again, what’s your point?”
“We’ve got a good head of speed up at the moment. That can make us climb if we use the hydroplanes like the wings of an aircraft.”
“And that’s it?” said Petrov dismissively. “You think we don’t already know that?”
“Oh yes, you know it intellectually. But you don’t know it in here.” Kane tapped his chest over his heart. “You’re going to try to translate too late and we won’t climb far enough or too early and we’ll stall.”
“Stall?” said Zagadko.
“If you burn off too much speed, you’ll sink like a brick and it’ll be ‘next stop, crush depth.’”
Katya's World Page 6