His self-control and the knowledge that he’d been stringing them along all the way were almost more than she could bear. “You dirty Grubber,” she snarled.
Nothing seemed to bother him. “You know, I’ve never liked that term. It says more about some vague Russalkin sense of inadequacy than anything bad about Earth. Land-grubbers…” He snorted. “What do most Russalkin know about it? You’ve never had real ground under your feet, just blasted rock or deck sections. You’ve never lain on your back in a field and reached up,” he raised his arm towards the ceiling, “feeling you can almost touch the clouds. Fluffy white clouds against a cobalt blue sky this is, not those filthy dark clouds that Russalka gets all the time. You think I want to be on your foul little planet? If I could leave, I would have left ten years ago.”
“Get up.”
“No.” He lowered his hand, but still didn’t look at her. “I’m quite happy here, thank you.”
“Get up!”
“Or what?” He sounded bored or perhaps just tired. “You’ll shoot me?” He finally turned his head to look at her. She had the gun drawn and levelled at him. His eyebrows raised. “Oh. Perhaps that was an ill-considered thing to say.”
She stood with feet apart and both hands gripping the pistol. “I’m not joking. Get up or I will shoot you.”
He turned away from her to look at the ceiling again. “You won’t shoot. You’re too well mannered to shoot anybody, never mind an unarmed man.”
The pistol made a surprisingly loud krak!-hisss! in the small room. Katya did a better job of hiding her startled reaction to the sound than Kane. Then again, a maser bolt hadn’t just gone past the tip of Katya’s nose to fry and bubble the paint on the wall by her head.
“You don’t know anything about me,” said Katya, “and I’m not that well mannered.”
Kane swung his feet onto the floor and looked at her, trying not to appear worried. “Okay, so I’m up. Now what?”
The shooting had died down by the time Kane emerged on deck, Katya standing close behind him with the barrel of the maser pushed hard into the small of his back. Kane’s boat sat at an angle across the moon pool, her guns trained on the surviving members of the Novgorod’s crew lining up on the dock side with their hands behind their heads. There were some unmoving bodies on the stone floor and a couple floating facedown in the pool itself. Katya found she accepted this without a qualm and the ease of that acceptance nauseated her far more than the sight of death itself.
Armed pirates were moving onto their boats’ deck to back up the remaining Gatling gunner, sweeping their muzzles to cover the area. They were looking in every direction except hers and, for a crazy moment, Katya considered sneaking back below. Then one looked over at the Novgorod. Instantly, she had six or seven long arms trained on her. More specifically, they were trained on Kane, behind whom she was hiding. For a less crazy and more fearful moment, she wondered if they’d recognise him from sixty metres away and, even if they did, who was to say his captaincy hadn’t been usurped in his absence? Perhaps even the pirates wanted him dead.
But they didn’t fire, neither before or after one of them cried out, “It’s the captain!”
“Are you all right, captain?” shouted another.
“Fine, thank you,” called Kane, as casually as if they were meeting in a corridor. “Well, apart from the maser being stuck in my back by this young lady.”
The pirates’ weapons, which had been lowered when they recognised him, snapped back into aiming positions.
“I think I can get her,” Katya heard one say, the sound floating across the water with great clarity.
“You are to do no such thing,” said Kane, in a cold, hard voice that carried at least as much threat and authority as Zagadko’s roar. “I don’t want any more shooting. The time for violence has passed.”
“But you agree that violence was necessary?” said a new voice.
A figure stepped aside from the rest of the pirates, a woman somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties, with short black hair that barely reached her collar and an angular face that hinted at determination. She was wearing the distinctive body-armour of an FMA marine from the war, but without the helmet. The black ceramic armour panels had been recoloured, however, in dark reds and oranges to create a striped effect that Katya knew were called “tiger stripes” after some animal the Grubbers had driven into extinction.
“Hello, Tasya,” called Kane. He waved at the churned surface of the Novgorod’s hull. “Was the deck-sweeper really necessary?”
“Yes,” she replied brusquely. “We’ve lost Daliev doing this. I think it was necessary.”
“Well, you were the one on the spot. I’ll leave it to your discretion. I’m back now, though, and I don’t want the girl shot if it can be avoided.”
“Who is she?”
“A waif and a stray. Katya Kuriakova. She’s the surviving crew of the boat the Feds commandeered to take me to the Deeps. She’s not FMA. It’s just lousy luck that has brought her here.”
“Hey!” hissed Katya, jamming the gun more firmly into his back. “Stop it! I’ve got the gun here. You don’t talk unless I say so.”
“What was the name?” called the woman Kane had called Tasya. “Did you say Kuriakova?”
Kane raised his hands. “Sorry. She’s armed and a bit nervous. I should shut up.”
There was activity aboard the pirate vessel. Some crewmembers disappeared below. “What are they doing?” Katya demanded of Kane.
“I don’t know. How should I know?”
Her curiosity only had to wait a couple of minutes to be sated. The pirates returned and this time they had company, a huge and distinctive figure.
“Uncle Lukyan!” cried Katya as he was forced to his knees on the pirate vessel’s deck. A moment later, the equally bedraggled figure of Suhkalev joined him.
Kane laughed out loud. “You were shadowing us the whole time?”
Katya hardly heard him. She stared at Lukyan, a miracle in the flesh. Part of her wanted everyone to just vanish so she could hug her uncle so hard that he would never, ever die, that she would never have to feel grief and loss like that again. This part of her would have flung the gun down right away, filled as she was with a joyous, childish belief that everyone would smile at her happiness and would not stand in her way.
But the greater part of her could still smell the blood and the tang of air ionised by maser bolts. She could feel the deck beneath her feet, the gun in her hand, and Kane’s spine beneath the muzzle as she dug it into his back. She’d been taught from when she was old enough to reach an airlock control that curiosity could kill, that panic could kill, that impatience could kill. For the first time, she realised that even joy can kill you on Russalka.
With an effort, she forced herself to be cold and rational, to think through what had happened and what was likely to happen.
Step by step, she worked it out. Kane’s boat had been in the sonar dead zone behind them – their baffles – as soon as they’d left the locks. It had tracked them with the intention of scooping up the Baby in its great salvage maw when they were halfway through the trip and boats responding to a distress signal would have taken too long to reach their location to do any good.
“We lost you in the Weft. Then we heard all sorts of noise on the hydrophones. We got there to find that little sub going down and we grabbed it.” Tasya crossed her arms. “Typically, you’d already left. Never where you’re meant to be, are you, Captain?”
“I got bored of waiting for you,” replied Kane nonchalantly.
Tasya stood over the kneeling prisoners and drew her gun. “Drop your weapon and surrender, girl, or your uncle dies.”
“I’d do it,” said Kane quietly to Katya. “She’s more than capable of squeezing that trigger.”
Katya looked at all the forces ranged against her and suddenly the maser in her hand seemed a pathetic sort of thing to have put her hopes in. If she surrendered, what then? The pirates didn’
t need her, didn’t need Lukyan. They knew that the pirates used the old mining site as a hideout, too. Surely they’d be murdered? But if she didn’t surrender, what could she hope to accomplish? She didn’t stand a chance of hitting anything on the pirate boat at this range, all she could do was shoot Kane and then they’d shoot her anyway.
“You know who Tasya is, don’t you?” murmured Kane, interrupting her train of thought. “ She’s the Chertovka. You know that name, surely?”
The Chertovka. The She-Devil.
“She’s a war criminal,” said Katya, an awful sense of dread welling in her. A war criminal, and worse. “You sail with a… a… a monster like her?”
“She’s no angel,” admitted Kane, “but you should be a lot more suspicious about what the Feds put on criminal records. Don’t underestimate her, though. She doesn’t do threats, just warnings.”
“I’m getting bored,” called Tasya. “Maybe you don’t think I’ll do it.” She jammed the gun against the back of Suhkalev’s head. “He’s expendable. Here’s your demonstration, girl.” Katya could hear Suhkalev’s whimpers turn to panicked hyperventilating, a sob of fear on every outward breath.
She’s going to kill him, thought Katya, she really is. She thought of her experiences with the arrogant young Federal officer and how all this was his fault. If he’d just bothered somebody else with his stupid little problems, Lukyan, Sergei and she could have done the round trip and been home celebrating by now. Stupid, stupid Fed.
Just for a second, one tiny fleeting second, she thought, Go ahead. Kill him and she was ashamed.
She dropped the gun and stepped away from Kane. “You win. Leave him alone.” The Chertovka – Katya couldn’t think of her in any other way now – stood over the sobbing man for a moment longer, apparently disappointed. She stepped back and sent Suhkalev sprawling on his face with a kick in his back.
Kane picked up Katya’s gun. He looked at her grimly, but made no move to point it at her. “Very wise, Ms Kuriakova. I’m glad that’s over. Now, if you’ve finished waving guns around and otherwise demonstrating what you’re not very good at, we can concentrate on the real problem.”
“Real problem? I… I don’t understand?”
Kane sighed. “Nothing like a bit of a firefight to distract people from the big picture, is there?” He shook his head and walked towards the Novgorod’s prow and the dockside, not even making Katya go first or ensuring she was following. She stood for a moment, wondering what he meant. Realisation was cold and fearful.
The Leviathan.
Chapter 7
Scuttling Code
Katya was having trouble breathing.
Uncle Lukyan was showing no sign of releasing her from the bearhug he’d flung around her the first chance he had. “I thought you were dead, Katinka,” he kept saying, more than a suspicion of a sob in his voice, “I thought you were dead.” He rarely used the familiar form of her name, preferring Katya. It took a lot to make him use Katinka.
When he finally let her go, she said, “I thought the same of you, uncle.” She could feel the tears running down her cheeks and was aware of some of the pirates watching their reunion and not being subtle about it. She really didn’t care. “Yet here you are. Here we are. Here we are.” She couldn’t speak anymore and hugged him close, her eyes clenched shut.
“I tried to save you, Katinka. But the damned LoxPak wouldn’t go on and, by the time I had it secure, you’d vanished. I saw that the top hatch had been blown and hoped… prayed for you to have got clear. The next thing I know, that filthy pirate scow had swallowed the Baby whole. As soon as they’d drained the salvage maw, they were waving guns in our faces and demanding to know where Kane was. That Federal cur, Suhkalev, he’d have sold them his own grandmother he was so scared.”
Katya let Lukyan go, and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She looked over where Suhkalev sat on the rock floor of the dock, separate from the Novgorod’s crew. They’d treated him with contempt ever since the pirates had concentrated all their prisoners into one group under the unnerving gaze of the deck-sweeper guns aboard the pirate boat. The Fed had his knees drawn up, his chin resting on them, a look of abject misery on his face. He knew he’d disgraced himself and his uniform. Katya thought he looked like he wanted to die. She hoped he wouldn’t do anything stupid.
“We really didn’t know what had happened, though. The acting captain, Tasya something – the one they call the Chertovka – she’s a clever one. She put the boat on silent running and we just hung at neutral buoyancy for what seemed like hours while they listened for whatever had attacked us. They heard something in the distance, but couldn’t get a decent lock until it hit the surface. She went up on one third ahead to investigate but there was nothing there. The Baby’s distress beacon cut out at the same time and she guessed it had been picked up.”
“It had. Kane and I were hanging onto it when the Novgorod picked it up,” said Katya.
Lukyan nodded. “So they brought us here while they figured out what to do next. Next thing we know the pirates are running around because they thought the mining site was under attack by the Feds.” He sighed. “She played the FMA people for fools and they fell for it. What happened to bring you here in such a great hurry, Katya?” Katya noticed he’d dropped the familiar form of her name. He must be calming down.
Slowly, putting in as much detail as she could remember, she told Lukyan about how they’d been attacked again by the same thing that had attacked the Baby, the thing Kane called Leviathan. He listened quietly, asking only a few questions to clarify her story and iron out ambiguities.
“Leviathan,” he said when she’d finished. “That’s an old Earth name for a sea monster. Is...?”
“He’s from Earth,” she confirmed. “He didn’t even try to deny it when I confronted him with it. He seems proud of it.”
“He would be. He should be. A man who has no pride for his birthplace is a hollow man. I don’t begrudge him that much. Still…” his expression darkened, “…Earth.”
It was no secret that there were still Grubbers on Russalka even ten years after they’d lost the war. Stranded away from their units, trapped when the Terran ships ignited their drives and ran back to Earth with their tails between their legs. Abominated and loathed by the Russalkin, it was hardly surprising that most ended up in the world of crime. She’d seen lots in action dramas; pirates, terrorists and insane killers. They’d always seemed so ineffectual, though. Perhaps, she thought, it was time to stop watching everything that came out of the drama studios of the Department of Public Enlightenment quite so uncritically.
“What about the Chertovka?” she asked. “She seems Russalkin.”
“She is,” growled Lukyan, “to our shame. She was a collaborator during the war. She worked for the Grubbers against her own kind. If the FMA ever capture her, there’s nothing waiting for her but a maser bolt through the brain in a quiet cell.”
“And Secor?”
He looked at her suspiciously. “What about Secor?”
“The captain of the Novgorod, Captain Zagadko, he was going to hand Kane over to Secor.”
Lukyan frowned. “Well, I don’t suppose it’s any less than he deserves,” he muttered, but Katya doubted he really meant it. He looked past her and his frown deepened. “Speak of the devil…”
Kane and Tasya were approaching with a couple of pirates acting as bodyguards. Tasya looked like she could look after herself pretty well and wouldn’t need guards, but Kane looked tired and ill.
“Captain Pushkin, Ms Kuriakova,” said Tasya, nodding politely at each.
“Hello again, Katya,” said Kane. His voice sounded strained, the pleasantries forced. “We meet again, Captain Pushkin. I’m very happy you made it.”
Lukyan said nothing but glared at them both.
“The Novgorod’s captain,” said Tasya, “Zagadko. Where is he?”
“We’re telling you nothing,” spat Lukyan.
“He’s dead,” said Katya. She ca
ught her uncle’s furious glance. “So what if I tell them, uncle? None of us are ever leaving this place.”
Tasya laughed, a pleasantly throaty sound. “This sea monster Havilland has been telling me about?” It took Katya a moment to remember that was Kane’s first name. “We travelled from the North docks right around the mountain and came into the moon pool at speed, making plenty of noise. We weren’t attacked. Whatever it is, it’s long gone.”
Kane shook his head slowly like an old man. Katya couldn’t believe the change that had come over him so quickly. It was as if he was dying before her eyes. “Oh, Tasya, no. Whatever it is, it’s outside. It has cunning, you see.”
Tasya gave him an exasperated look and, Katya realised, one with some underlying affection. “So why didn’t it attack, hmmm? Tell me that.”
Kane opened his mouth, but it was Katya who answered. “Now it only has to watch one docking tunnel. It’s got both boats trapped in the same moon pool. You won’t get out as easily as you got in.”
“She’s right,” said Kane. His voice was so weak that even Tasya, who’d seemed blind to his rapid deterioration, noticed.
“You ought to go aboard,” she whispered urgently, moving closer to Kane in an attempt to make the conversation private.
“I will,” replied Kane in a croak that wouldn’t have seemed out of place coming from a man in his last minutes. “Don’t fuss so, Tasya. I’ll be fine.”
“Captain!” the shout floated across from the pirates who were securing the Novgorod.
“Damn,” said Kane. “Now what?”
Kane had insisted on coming aboard the Novgorod to see what the problem was, overriding Tasya’s increasingly forceful demands that he go back to the pirate boat. They’d been gone for a few minutes when the pirate who’d called across came back up on deck and called to Katya that Captain Kane wanted her present. With a few calming words to her uncle, she climbed up the gangway that had been placed up against the prow, walked down the tilted deck and climbed back down the hatch into the bridge.
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