“It’s dangerous,” Petrov said directly to her. “The chances are that this plan won’t work. I’d give it a 40% chance of success at most. Nobody would think any less of you if you don’t go.”
“I’m going. I’m crew.”
Petrov heaved a sigh of exasperation. “Breed them awkward in your family, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” smiled Lukyan.
The waiting was by far the worst part. Between the excellent training of the Novgorods and the ingenious jury-rigging of the Vodyanois, the last of the repairs proceeded far more quickly than would have seemed reasonable, but time still crawled by for Katya. She passed back and forth itching either to be seaborne or to back out of her insistence that she go. She knew Petrov was right; nobody, not even her uncle, would blame her if she dropped out. It wasn’t as if the short trip around the mountainside even needed a navigator. “The pride of the Kuriakovs” her grandmother had called it, speaking of it half as if it were something glorious and half as if it were a curse. Right then, it felt very much like a curse; Katya had the uneasy feeling her pride was about to get her killed.
And then, with the abruptness of a shot, the work was done and the Baby was being rolled into one of the smaller locks.
Kane had come back with Tasya. He looked drawn and upset still, and wouldn’t look at Katya. That was fine by her; she felt she should be apologising for something but she wasn’t sure what it was. Whatever the problem, she couldn’t quite bring herself to look him in the eye.
She took her position, Lukyan his, Tokarov sat behind him and Kane behind her, just as he had – it was hard to believe – only just over twelve hours before. The main lock door closed behind them and the chamber started to flood. “Here’s where we find out if the welds will hold,” said Tokarov with an attempt at gallows humour. He found no response and settled into the same silence as the others.
The water boiled and frothed on the other side of the main port as the level rose, the crew and passengers watching it without comment, past the level of their eyes and over the top of the plasteel port. Kane looked up and watched the small dorsal port grow dark as the water rolled over it.
“Sonar to passive,” said Lukyan. After a moment he repeated it.
“Eh? Oh!” Katya reached for her control board. “Check.”
“Wayfinder… offline, I think.”
“Check.”
They went through the same sequence they had a few hours before, when life was a great deal simpler. They worked down the list until Lukyan came to, “IFF transponder.”
“Ah,” said Katya uncertainly. “It’s powered up and that’s about all I can say for it. I don’t know if it’s actually working.”
“Good enough, I suppose,” said Lukyan.
“Yes? In that case, check.”
“Check list complete.” He toggled open the radio link to the FMA ensign who was at the dock controls. “We’re set, I think. Open the lock doors, please, son.”
“Opening external lock doors,” replied the ensign in the crisp tones they taught at the academy for making voice transmissions clear. It always sounded a bit theatrical to Katya, as if the speaker was on stage declaiming Chekov or something. “You’re clear to depart, Pushkin’s Baby.” A moment later he broke protocol by adding, “Good luck.”
Lukyan smiled wanly. “Thanks, control. Going to radio silence. RRS 15743 Kilo over and out.” He closed the link as the Baby lifted from its landing skis and nosed her way out into the open sea. They were on their own now.
Chapter 10
Medusa Sphere
The Baby travelled around the mass of the mountain keeping the vertiginous slopes to the right. It was very quiet aboard; after a couple of attempts at humour, even Tokarov had shut up. Now there was just the hum of the boat’s impellers running through the hull and the quiet whirr of the ventilators.
“Uncle?” said Katya, suddenly spotting a flaw in the plan.
“Hmm?”
“How are we supposed to find the Leviathan? It’s virtually invisible when it wants to be. We could swim backwards and forwards all day two hundred metres from it in this murk and never see it.”
“Ah, well,” said Lukyan in a voice that indicated that he hadn’t considered this either, but wasn’t about to admit it.
Kane saved him by saying, “It will find us. It will interrogate the IFF unit with a coded signal, detect the correct reply – if we’ve made a mess putting in the IFF then that will be about the point where this pleasure cruise finishes – and try to bring us in on remote control or command the drone’s artificial intelligence to bring itself in. Neither will work, it will assume there’s been damage, and recover us for repairs.”
“How violent is this recovery likely to be?” asked Tokarov.
“Not violent at all. You’ll see.”
“You said the drone had artificial intelligence?” said Katya.
“Yes. They have to have some autonomy. Those tunnels block communications so the drone was given its orders and left to complete them.”
“But the Leviathan itself has a synthetic intelligence?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s the difference?”
“Is this relevant?” Tokarov interrupted.
“No,” said Kane, “but it’s better than listening to your weak puns. An artificial intelligence, Ms Kuriakova,” Katya noticed the formal use of her name, “only looks like intelligence. A machine is taught a lot of responses to assorted situations and uses them if such a situation arises. The more contingencies are covered, the more intelligent the AI seems. The best have heuristic routines programmed in; that means they observe how well what they’ve been taught works and how other approaches work. If something else is better, then they’ll start using that in future instead. They’re ‘learning,’ for want of a better word. Artificial intelligences can get very good, even passing the Turing test.”
“What’s...?”
“It’s a rule of thumb test for intelligence. If you can talk to an AI for a few hours and never realise that you were talking to a machine all along, then it’s passed the Turing test. That’s artificial intelligences; they’re artificial because they’re not real minds, just good impersonations. A synthetic intelligence is something else again. The Leviathan carries a massive silicon analogue of a brain. At the moment nothing much more sophisticated than a good artificial intelligence programme is in it. The idea was for it to interface with a human…”
“You,” said Tokarov, fascinated.
“…me, and the human intelligence would act as a catalyst to spark the same sort of cascading sapient effect in the synthetic brain. The result would be a single intellect, the will and experiences of the human combined with the massive knowledge resources and capabilities of the Leviathan.
“It’s not just a theory either. They’ve done it on Earth. Nothing quite like the Leviathan, though.”
“What’s different?”
“The interface had to be more… I’m not sure how to describe it. Thorough, perhaps. Intimate.”
Tokarov laughed. “You make it sound like a marriage.”
Kane didn’t laugh along with the joke. He only said, “’Til death do us part.”
Katya’s right-hand multi-function display started showing a flashing box and bleeped urgently. “The IFF unit has been hailed,” she said quietly. A faint sense of fear was growing in her. She’d secretly hoped the Leviathan had moved on, but the indicator on the MFD showed that to be a vain hope. How many times did she think she could encounter that monstrosity and live? She was starting to hate the stupid pride that had made her volunteer for the mission.
“I’d cut the engines, if I were you,” suggested Kane to Lukyan. “There’s less chance of an accident if we’re not moving when it takes us.”
Katya didn’t like the sound of being taken at all. It made them sound like prey. But Lukyan cut the engines and now they had only the sound of the life-support fans and their breathing as they waited and lis
tened for the Leviathan to make its move.
The seconds turned into a minute and then minutes. Katya was wondering whether to suggest sending an active sonar pulse to try and provoke the Leviathan into doing something (she wasn’t wondering it very hard, though, since it didn’t seem to respond well to having sound waves blasted at it) when something touched the hull. A whispering light scraping as something travelled cautiously across the Baby’s skin.
“Here we go,” whispered Kane.
Suddenly the boat lurched and then started to move swiftly and smoothly upwards.
“What’s happening?” growled Lukyan. “Have we been grappled?” He looked to Kane for a reply, and the pirate nodded.
Grappled. Somehow the Leviathan had managed to attach lines to the Baby with barely any warning at all. Katya had read and seen stories of historical grappling actions and having harpoons banged through your hull was usually a very obvious process. This was something else again. The hiss of water travelling quickly over the hull modulated into a gruff roar for a moment and then, suddenly, they were bathed in harsh, white light.
Out of the ports, they could see the Baby was being dragged through a great hatch in the floor of a white circular chamber, perhaps twenty metres in diameter. Through the top porthole, they could see cables as thick as a man’s wrist running from a cluster in the roof and down to where they encircled the minisub. They flexed and moved like the arms of a russquid, Katya thought, even though they were obviously made from metal. She’d never seen anything like them before. Beneath the Baby, a great iris valve slid shut, sealing them off from the sea. They were trapped in the belly of the beast now.
The tentacle-cables – or cable-tentacles, Katya didn’t know which – gently lowered the Baby to the floor of the chamber and then slid back into the ceiling above. As they watched the metallic hemisphere in the ceiling into which the cables had retracted, they saw its image distort with ripples and realised the chamber was being pumped out. The water level dropped rapidly, much faster than the dock had flooded back in the mining site. Within a very few minutes, the minisub was sitting on its landing skids in the middle of the white chamber, dripping dry as the last dregs of water were efficiently sucked away from the floor.
They sat in silence for a few seconds, everybody waiting for somebody else to make the first move.
Tokarov was the first to find his voice. “Now what?”
Kane unbuckled his seat restraints. “The aft hatch, please.” Uncle Lukyan flicked a switch, and the aft hatch unsealed and swung open. Kane walked back and stopped just before stepping out. “You might as well follow,” he said. “There’s no getting the sub back out of this chamber without the Leviathan permitting it, so there’s not much point in staying behind.” The others released their restraint buckles and climbed out after him.
Katya stood by the Baby and looked around in wonderment at the chamber. It was so harshly white in here, with no obvious source of light as though the walls themselves were glowing. Everything was white except for the unpainted and untarnished dome in the ceiling, pocked with the large regular holes in its surface that were home to the tentacles, and the iris valve they were standing on. She couldn’t see any way of getting into the rest of the Leviathan from here.
Lukyan obviously thought the same thing.
“Kane, is this place connected to the rest of the boat?”
“Anything’s possible,” replied Kane vaguely. He crossed his arms and said “Open internal access.” Nothing happened. He cleared his throat and tried again. Still nothing happened.
“Great. Now what do we do?” asked Katya.
Kane looked uncomfortable. “It’s been years since it’s heard my voice. Maybe it’s changed more than I thought.” He tried again. “Open internal access.” Nothing. As an afterthought, he tried adding “Please.”
One side of the circular chamber started to draw back, the flat white plates sliding to expose a broad armoured door five metres across by three high. “Manners maketh the man,” Katya heard Kane say to himself. Tokarov made a step towards the door but Kane stopped him. “Me first, lieutenant. It might be nervous around strangers.”
“It’s nervous?” said Tokarov.
“It’s alive in a way,” said Kane. “It has its foibles, a little like a small child.”
“Oh? It might throw a tantrum?”
“Yes, it might. And its tantrums come with a body count. Follow me.”
The layout of the Leviathan was nothing like any vessel Katya had ever seen or been taught about at school. There was no sense of space being at a premium, of every cubic centimetre of ship being functional. Instead, it felt like being inside an iceberg. Everything was white and there was no feeling that, beyond the bland walls and ceilings, there was anything she could have looked at and recognised as part of a boat. Even the word “boat” – traditionally applied to even the largest submarines – failed to express the alien nature of the Leviathan.
“How big is this thing?” she asked.
Kane looked back at her and she was relieved that he no longer seemed as angry and distant as he had been back at the mining site. “Big enough. Just short of seven million cubic metres, I believe.”
Lukyan stopped so abruptly that Tokarov walked into him. “Seven million?” he echoed in disbelief.
“Not quite. I was rounding up.” Kane said, not even slowing his walk.
“Strangest boat I’ve ever been on,” said Tokarov. “Strangest one I’ve even heard of. Where are the stations? The berths?”
Kane stopped by a hatch set into the wall. “This is the only berth aboard. It used to be mine. You have to get it into your head, lieutenant, it isn’t a ship or a boat or any kind of vessel of any type that you’re familiar with. It’s a weapon. A really big, intelligent weapon that happens to have a small living space aboard for a pet human.”
“A pet?” said Lukyan. “That’s not a good comparison, is it? It wouldn’t have let a pet go.”
“Maybe it had no use for me,” said Kane.
“I thought the whole point of it having you along was…”
But Kane was walking away and the question was never asked.
The corridor ended abruptly with another hatch much like the one that had led to Kane’s old quarters. He stopped and stood before it as if steeling his nerve. His nervousness communicated itself to Katya.
“Is that the bridge?” she asked.
“No,” he answered in a strange, distracted voice. “There’s no bridge.” He reached out and touched the door very gently, barely brushing it with his fingertips. Immediately, they heard the hiss of seals being released, the door swung smoothly inwards and to one side. Kane took a deep breath and stepped through the opened portal. After a moment, they followed him.
The chamber they had entered was similar in form and proportions to the bay where they’d left the Baby. If anything, however, it was almost more spartan. Here there was no iris valve taking up much of the floor and metal dome on the ceiling housing cable tentacles. There was only one thing of note here, but a thing so extraordinary, it drew their gaze irresistibly.
Mounted exactly in the middle of the room was a chair. No, chair is too small a word. Mounted exactly in the middle of the room was a throne. An ugly, brutal thing made from dark metals and dark imaginations. It sat… it crouched in front of them, grey metal spires rising from its back and its feet merging into a circle of the same materials that seemed almost like a plug thrust into the floor.
Katya allowed a gaping expression of utter disbelief onto her face. The chair was as out of place as it was possible to imagine. “What,” she said, “is that?”
“It’s a chair,” said Kane, accurately but unhelpfully. Lukyan made a step towards it but Kane grabbed his arm. “No!” he said, both fretful and fearful. “Don’t go near that. It’s the single most dangerous thing the Leviathan possesses.”
Lukyan looked at him as if he were mad; they were aboard a synthetically intelligent killing machine arm
ed with attack drones that were so far ahead of anything Russalka had that they were bordering on magical. It seemed absurd to suggest that these were somehow less dangerous than furniture.
“It’s the interface. It’s where the Leviathan and a human…” he looked for a term they might understand, something that explain the horror he felt inside towards the throne. He could think of nothing. “…interface,” he finished, weakly.
“And what’s that?” asked Katya, pointing upwards.
In the centre of the gently vaulted ceiling, a circular aperture had appeared so silently and so neatly that none of them had even noticed it open. From the deep darkness within the aperture, a sphere was slowly descending. A metre in diameter, utterly black, the sphere came down upon a thin supporting rod as elegantly as a drop of oil rolling down a metal surface. When it had descended perhaps three metres, it stopped abruptly and without a tremor.
“What is it?” demanded Tokarov, but he demanded quietly. The sphere was so perfect and so utterly inscrutable, it was easy to imagine terrifying levels of violence lurking within.
“It’s a Medusa sphere,” said Kane. “Nobody make any sudden moves.”
“A Medusa sphere?”
“You asked whether the Leviathan had any internal security measures,” replied Kane, “I can now assure you that it has. The sphere will…” He stopped as a ghostly violet dot appeared on his chest. Slowly it moved upwards until it was lying between his eyes.
Katya looked back to Lukyan to point it out but found him rooted to the spot by an identical dot. Tokarov was the same. Katya’s hackles raised and her stomach tightened. “Uncle,” she asked, sounding far more in control of her emotions than she felt, “Have I got a purple dot of light on my forehead?” Lukyan looked at her sideways without turning his face from the sphere and nodded slightly.
“I don’t want to be overly dramatic at this point,” said Kane, “but we have all been targeted by the sphere with lasers. If the Leviathan decides it doesn’t like us being here, these beams will intensify inside perhaps a thousandth of a second and the results will be painless, but terminal. Therefore, please don’t do anything to antagonise the Leviathan.”
Katya's World Page 13