He drew himself up and took a long calming breath. “No Russalkin could have saved our lives in the way that he did,” he finished quietly.
Chapter 6
Deck Sweeper
Katya sat in the otherwise deserted junior officers’ ward room and wondered how so much can go so wrong in so little time. The memories kept running around her head in a jumbled mess: clinging to the distress buoy; that idiot Fed Suhkalev; getting dressed that morning, so carefully putting her navigator’s card in her pocket; the ghost return from the “ore mountain”; torpedoes in the water. Most of all, she remembered her Uncle Lukyan. He’d survived the war only to die on some stupid milk run. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair. It was not fair.
“Theoretically I’m not allowed in here without an invitation.” She looked up. Lieutenant Petrov was standing in the doorway, his hands on the top frame, looking speculatively around. “I’m the first officer,” he continued, “so I’m not really a junior officer anymore. Tradition says I don’t go any further without being asked.”
Katya looked at him for a long second. She wasn’t sure she liked him; she still remembered the look on his face when Kane had made the slip about aircraft that had condemned him. If the captain hadn’t picked it up, she was sure Petrov would have informed him of his suspicions. But, like so much else, it was duty. Duty and tradition. Traditions from old Earth, strangely enough – the world they cursed in one breath and held in grudging respect the next. “Come in,” she said.
Petrov looked too tall to be a submariner, she thought as he folded himself through the door and slid with practised ease but little grace into the seat opposite her. With his close-cropped hair and his cold grey eyes, he was almost a parody of the stereotypical Secor officer. A Russalka spider-crab made human.
He sat in silence, regarding her for a moment. Then he opened his breast pocket and reached inside. “I have something for you.” He slid her navigator’s card out and put it down on the table in front of her. As she took it, he added, “It was in your clothes. I thought you’d like it back.”
Katya was looking at her picture on the card. There she was looking so seriously back out at herself and Katya thought that was taken eighteen days ago. Why do I look like such a child? “Thank you.” She put the card away. “You searched my clothes?”
“Of course,” said Petrov, unsurprised and unembarrassed by the question. “You came aboard with a criminal. I wanted to make sure your story, at least, was true.”
She felt oddly complimented. Petrov hadn’t thought she’s just a girl; he’d thought she might be a desperate criminal. He was the first person the whole day who had treated her like an adult. No, that wasn’t quite true. “Have you heard anything from Lieutenant Tokarov yet?”
“No. Not yet. These tunnels will play havoc with communications though, so that doesn’t necessarily signify anything untoward.”
“But you’re worried?”
He raised an eyebrow. “What gives you that idea?”
Katya shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps the way you’re so keen to explain away the fact he hasn’t reported in yet.”
Petrov looked at her blankly. Then he smiled. It didn’t light up his face and looked like it rarely had many opportunities to show itself, but it was a smile nonetheless. “Your prodigious talents extend further than just navigation, I see. A student of human nature too.”
“Prodigious?”
“I read your card, remember. Your scores are excellent. With more experience you could walk onto any boat in the ocean and they’d be pleased to have you. I haven’t seen such impressive scores since, well, my own. I was something of a wunderkind too, you see.” The smile flickered briefly again.
Katya’s gaze seemed distant, and Petrov wondered what she was seeing. Then she looked him in the eye and said, “My uncle’s dead.”
She said it flatly, as if the words and their meaning had become disconnected in her mind.
Petrov’s smile instantly went. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“What I don’t understand is, why don’t I care?” She shook her head. “I loved him. He was there for us right after papa died, has always been there. Why can’t I cry for him?”
“Perhaps,” said Petrov, “because he’s always been there. You know he’s gone but, part of you, a very great part of you does not believe it. You expect him to walk through the door at any minute.”
She looked at the door, an open door aboard a boat Uncle Lukyan had never set foot aboard in his entire life. Yet somehow, she could see him in her mind’s eye, stepping around the frame, looking up and seeing her, that slightly prepossessed air that he usually carried turning to the great smile he’d reserved for her ever since she’d been born. She willed him to be there, for the whole thing to have been a dreadful mistake or a stupid joke. No Leviathan, no attack, no drowned corpse strapped into the wreck of the Baby. She couldn’t do it. She knew she could never do it. Finally she started to cry.
Petrov stood, unfolding himself easily out from the confinement of the table and chair and left her silently to her grief.
Some time later the speaker in the wardroom’s bulkhead burst into life. “Battle stations!” barked the captain’s voice, tense with anger. “All crew to battle stations! Prepare to repulse boarders!”
Katya’s head jerked up. She’d been drifting in a shallow sleep, exhaustion finally catching up with her. For a moment she had no idea where she was or how she’d come to be there. Then it all came back in a sickening flood. She might have sat there in indefinite despair if the captain’s words hadn’t finally sunk in. Her eyes widened.
Repel boarders?
The gangways were in frenzy when she stuck her head out of the door. Ratings and officers were hurrying back and forth and she realised with a shock that they were all carrying weapons. Not just the sidearms that the senior officers wore but longarms – maser rifles, close-assault guns, even a flamer pack.
She followed the flow of personnel to the bridge and found it almost empty. The top hatch was open and she could hear shouting going on outside, the voices echoing around the great cavern of the moon pool. Then the shooting started.
She had no idea how far away the firing was between the echoes and the sound coming down the hatch but it didn’t sound that close. There was the sporadic krak! Of ballistic smallarms and a couple of bursts of full automatic fire. It quickly became obvious it was coming closer.
“What’s happening?” she called up the hatch.
A face appeared above her, a female sublieutenant she didn’t recognise. “Stay there!” she was ordered. “Stay off the deck!” Then the face was gone.
More firing. She could hear the captain up top giving terse commands. Fine, she thought, I don’t have to be up there to find out what’s happening. She walked to the station where she’d seen Petrov operate the lights and exterior cameras and examined the controls briefly. Her cybernetics teacher had always said that the more sophisticated a system was and the better designed it was, the simpler it seemed to be. “All the functionality, none of the knobs and dials,” recited Katya under her breath. Whoever had designed this console had known their trade well. In a few seconds she was using the Novgorod’s cameras as easily as she once operated the Baby’s.
Captain Zagadko had deployed his marines and armed crew behind any available cover facing into the tunnels; crates, raised hatches, even the boat’s exposed hull all sheltered waiting crew as the shooting in the tunnels got closer. There was little time for tension to build further before Lieutenant Tokarov and his team came into sight, the ones at the front pausing to provide covering fire for the ones at the rear as they moved to the front and returned the favour, the tactical leapfrogging that Katya had only ever seen in screen dramas about the war and crime thrillers. As soon as the angle of the tunnel gave them enough cover from their pursuers, they just ran for the Novgorod.
They’d barely made it when their foes surged out after them. Katya thought there must have been abou
t fifteen or twenty of them, mainly men but she spotted a couple of women. There was no pattern or consistency in their clothing or armament; they looked like a mass escape from an FMA holding facility that had bolted through a weapons museum.
So this was what real pirates looked like.
Unlike the ordered retreat of Tokarov’s team, they ran headlong into the cavern and stopped in a shocked rabble when they saw the mass of the FMA boat beached there. She snorted derisively – how did that bunch of morons think the Feds had got into the mining complex in the first place? That they’d swum there? All of a sudden, the smart and wily pirates of fiction looked like a grand exaggeration of the truth.
“This is Captain Alexander Zagadko of the FMA boat, the Novgorod!” roared the captain’s voice from above. It was perfectly audible through the open hatch and Katya quickly wound down the volume on the hull sensor relays before the speakers blew. “By the authority vested in me by the Federal Maritime Authority and by the Russalkin legislature, you’re all under arrest! Drop your weapons immediately! Surrender or die!”
The pirates, to their credit, had a third alternative. As one, they ran back down the tunnel before the captain could give the order to fire.
Zagadko swore a pithy but venomous oath of the kind that comes easily to sailors. “Tokarov! Report!”
“We just ran into them in the corridors, sir. They looked more surprised to see us than we were to see them. We’d already found signs this place was occupied.”
“Any idea where their boat is?”
“We saw signage about another dock on the other side of the mountain. They must be moored there.”
“Kane’s people,” growled Zagadko. “No wonder he knew so much about it. Well, perhaps he’s done us a favour. Do you think you could reach this other dock quickly, lieutenant?”
Tokarov considered the question quickly. “Yes, sir. If that’s where they’re headed, we’ll be on their heels the whole way.”
“Take the marines. I want their boat. It’s our way out of here. What are you waiting for? Jump to it, man!”
Tokarov was off and running to the captain of the marines in a moment.
Katya didn’t like it. The crew were trained in combat, but wouldn’t have the sharp edge of the marines. She could see the captain’s reasoning, but she really didn’t like the thought of the boat’s defences being cut like this. It made her feel vulnerable and she’d heard too many ugly stories about what pirates did with prisoners to want to take risks.
There was something else she didn’t like either. Something about the pirates she’d seen on the cameras. She sat down and watched the screens as Tokarov and the marines headed off into the tunnels in pursuit and tried to put her finger on what was bothering her. There was an imbalance somewhere, an inequality. On the one hand there were those pirate clowns and on the other, there were… There was…
“Kane!” she said, her eyes widening in horror. “Oh no! Oh no, no, no, no!”
She skittered up the ladder, her feet on the rungs clattering like gunfire. Once on deck, she ran to where Zagadko was giving orders to the same sublieutenant who’d ordered her to stay below.
“Captain!” blurted Katya. “Please, I’ve got an awful feeling…”
“Not now, Ms Kuriakova,” said Zagadko. “I’m busy.” He continued telling the officer his orders to set up defensive positions along the dock.
“It can’t wait!” Katya was in a fury of indecision. Was it really worth antagonizing the captain over? It was just a gut feeling she had really. Was it enough?
“Didn’t I order you to stay below?” said the sublieutenant.
“Yes, but this is important!” Every second Tokarov and the marines were getting further from the moon pool. Every second the danger was increasing. If she was right.
Zagadko sighed. “Carry on,” he told the sublieutenant who left to carry out his orders with a backward narrow-eyed glance at Katya. He turned to Katya and looked down at her, crossing his arms. “Very well, Ms Kuriakova. What is so important?”
Now she had his attention, she didn’t know where to start. “Those pirates, didn’t they bother you?”
“I’ve encountered worse. What do you know about it, anyway? You were below decks during the attack, such as it was.”
“I was watching on the hull cameras.” She saw the captain’s eyebrows rise and pushed on before he got into a lecture about illicit use of FMA equipment. “They were a joke. I can’t imagine that bunch getting dressed without help. Can you?”
Zagadko laughed. “No, not really. Who’d have thought Kane would…” Then his slightly patronising smile abruptly faded. “Oh, gods,” he said hoarsely. Then in a full throated roar, “Petrov! Recall Tokarov! NOW!”
Petrov whirled to face his captain, saw this wasn’t a time to ask for clarification and jerked the radio from his belt. “Tokarov!” he said into the handset. “Pull back to the boat! Captain’s orders, most urgent!” For answer he only got the dead tone of a clear digital channel. Petrov shook his head. “I’m sorry, captain. These damn tunnels soak up signals like sponge.”
“Take two men. Catch up with them and get them back here immediately. Go!”
Petrov had barely taken three steps before the surface of the moon pool exploded off to the starboard of the Novgorod.
“Down!” shouted Zagadko, grabbing Katya fiercely by the arm and almost throwing her at the open hatch. She sprawled on the metal as the wave smashed into the Novgorod’s side, making the boat roll ten or fifteen degrees, her hull groaning hideously under the strain. It swept over the deck, blinding Katya for a moment as she covered her head for protection. Zagadko’s legs were swept out from beneath him and he fell heavily before being carried back and almost dumped off the port side. The huge wave hitting the docks caught the Novgorod’s crew by total surprise. Katya cleared her face of seawater in time to see the sublieutenant who’d ordered her around previously caught in the backwash as the tonnes of water rolled back into the pool. She looked like the wave had first smashed her against the wall; Katya couldn’t tell if she was dead or only unconscious. Katya jumped to her feet to run to her aid, but the captain’s voice stopped her in her tracks.
“No, Ms Kuriakova! Below! Get below!” He was crawling forward, his sidearm maser – a monster of a gun and definitely not FMA standard issue – drawn and aiming out into the moon pool. Katya stole a sideways look and almost froze. Another submarine was in the pool – leaner and smaller than the Novgorod but just as deadly. Its hydroplanes were up and Katya realised the massive wave had been deliberate. Hatches were already clanging open on her deck and atop her rakish conning tower, and people – pirates – were streaming out. She watched in horror as a forward hatch opened and a great pintle-mounted weapon rose on a cargo lift, two pirates already manning it. Katya had heard enough war stories from her Uncle Lukyan to know a “deck-sweeper” when she saw it; a great brute of a Gatling machinegun engineered so that no two bullets would travel quite the same path. Accuracy wasn’t its strength, just massive firepower delivered in broad strokes.
Behind her, she heard the distinctive half krak, half hisssss of a maser and realised the captain had opened fire. Part of her was watching all this as if it was happening to somebody else. I don’t want to see anyone die, she thought, the sick feeling of fear beginning to grow in her gut.
One of the pirates at the Gatling gun stepped back as if they’d just remembered something important and then collapsed. Katya knew he was dead. Then she saw the Gatling gun come to bear on her and its barrels started to spin with a high electrical whine. She dived headlong down the hatch as the first large calibre rounds hailed heavily against the Novgorod’s hull, stripping off matte-black anechoic tiling and blowing it into the air in a shower of lightless fragments.
She got tangled with the rungs of the gangway ladder and hit the bridge deck heavily, sprawling on her back. Hurt and stunned, she listened to the scream of the Gatling for a few seconds, realising that the captain was ver
y probably dead by now. They’d been fooled, conned by the pirates with their display of comical incompetence into underestimating them. All the while, the pirate vessel had been making its way around the mountain to attack them from behind. And now the captain was probably dead, Tokarov and the marines had probably been ambushed and were dead, Petrov had probably run into the ambushing force and was dead, even that tight-lipped sublieutenant who’d been so off-hand with Katya was probably dead. There was only one thing left to do.
She found the arms locker easily enough. It was still unlocked; after the urgent arming to repel boarders, they’d obviously been in too much of a hurry to secure it. Besides which it was empty, stripped bare.
Almost bare. In one corner there were some small drawers containing spare parts, cleaning kits and manuals. In the lowermost, she found a box that held what she needed.
Havilland Kane was lying on the bunk in the brig when Katya opened the door. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye and then went back to considering the ceiling.
“Noisy outside,” he commented. “I gather my Brethren of the Deep, to coin a phrase, are making life difficult for the good captain?”
“The captain’s dead.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Truly I am. My colleagues can be a little heavy-handed at times.”
“You planned all this.” Katya’s hand closed around the little maser pistol concealed in her pocket. Lukyan had never balked at showing her how to maintain, activate and operate weapons. The very fact that she didn’t like guns had encouraged him. If she’d been fascinated by them, he’d once told her, he would have taught her about hydroponics gardens instead.
“Planned? No, that’s a very strong term for what I’ve done. I’ve extemporised. Made it up as I went along. I certainly didn’t plan for your uncle’s craft to be attacked or this one, for that matter. I just took advantage of opportunities as they’ve presented themselves. I’m sorry about the violence, though. Without my calming influence, my crew can get… excitable.”
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