Katya's World

by Jonathan L. Howard

  The two groups did not have to wait long standing sullenly looking at each other while dripping on the deck plates, before they were joined by a red-headed woman in Yagizban yellow clothing that clearly was not military uniform. “Bureaucrat,” murmured Petrov to Katya. “Almost every job has a recognisable uniform. The Conclaves are run like machines and every citizen had better fit.”

  “Your attention,” said the women in a clear, penetrating voice. The chatter died down. “Welcome to station FP-1. I only wish you were here under happier circumstances.” Katya could have been wrong, but the comment seemed to be levelled more at the Vodyanois than the FMA people. “Quarters have been prepared for you and you will be taken to them now.” She gestured to another two Yagizban who had appeared by the access lifts and stepped smartly back herself.

  After a moment’s indecision, the crews made their way to the lifts and started to percolate down into the depths of the platform. Katya was heading towards the lifts when the woman stepped out and took her by the arm. “Katya Kuriakova?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “You are to come with me.” Katya found herself taken at a brisk walk around the corner from the staging area and into a smaller personnel lift. As she was led away, she looked back for Lukyan, but only caught a glimpse of the back of his head as he turned this way and that, apparently trying to find her. Then the lift’s door closed and he was gone. She tried to protest, explain that she didn’t want to be separated from her uncle, but she might as well have been talking to a robot.

  The woman refused to talk beyond polite generalities and Katya spent a frustrating couple of minutes boiling with curiosity as to why she had been separated out as the lift descended deep through the levels. The lift arrived at a floor that surely must have been deep below sea level and Katya was ushered out into a comfortably appointed area of the station. The woman, who finally identified herself as Mila Vetskya, led Katya to a storeroom, tapped out an entrance code on the door’s numerical pad and led her in. Inside were racks and stacks of clothing, uniforms as well as more casual wear. Mila cast an apprising eye over Katya and took down a selection of clothes and a pair of boots for her.

  “Blues,” she said, “they should match your colouring better than those black FMA rags.”

  Katya bit back a comment about even sea-stained black being a substantial improvement over the unpleasant dull yellow of Yagizban uniforms and took the clothes with polite thanks. Mila took her to a stateroom and left her with a warning about wandering the corridors, telling her to wait until she was called for. Katya agreed without complaint and smiled pleasantly as Mila left, closing the door behind her.

  The instant the door clicked, the smile left Katya’s face.

  She’d had enough of this, the lies and deceptions. That the Yagizban were apparently working with the pirates was very bad news. If the planet was going to defend itself against a foe like the Leviathan, everyone needed to be on the same side. Somehow, the government needed to know what was happening here and, as she was the only one not under constant supervision, the responsibility fell to her. The Russalkin were bred to shoulder responsibilities from an early age, but the urgency and importance of this one weighed upon Katya almost more than she could bear. It spoke much of her character and upbringing that she did not think of denying that responsibility for more than the briefest moment.

  It was her or nobody; she had no choice.

  She took a few moments to breathe deeply, to calm herself, and to focus on what needed to be done. She had no clear idea how she could communicate with the FMA, but that was the second thing on her list, anyway. She would worry about it once she had completed the first task – discovering what exactly the Yagizban were up to, and why they were conspiring with the likes of Captain Kane and his Vodyanois.

  She quickly changed – the FMA uniform would draw attention like iron filings to a magnet – but she had no intention of staying in her quarters. As she shrugged off the distinctive black coverall, she felt something small but heavy in her pocket. She slowly took it out and sat on the edge of the bed looking at it but not seeing it, thinking fast. The small maser she’d recovered from Kane’s cabin. What to do with it? If she was found sneaking around the corridors carrying a gun, she could forget about them treating her like a civilian. Then again, if they found her sneaking around the corridors, they’d think that anyway. In the small bathroom attached to the room, she found a medical kit and took the stitch-tape dispenser. She turned it down to the bandage level of adhesion – she had no desire to use it at suture level and have to wait for it to metabolise away – and taped the gun to the back of her left calf. She could forget about making rapid draws with it, but at least it wouldn’t show up on a casual frisk.

  She cast a quick eye over her surroundings as she pulled on the boots and snapped shut the fastenings; the stateroom was large, the sort of place rich prospectors lived in on the dramas. There, the similarities finished. Like everything else she had seen here, there was little embellishment. Space, comfort and functionalism, and that was enough for the Yagizbans. Katya couldn’t bring herself to dislike them for that; they had similar tastes to herself.

  The corridor was empty. She’d seen so few people about she assumed that the station was not fully manned yet. Even if they hadn’t gone out their way to tell the FMA that they had such a facility, they couldn’t have kept it secret for very long. It was likely that it had only gone into operation recently and did not yet have its full complement. In which case, her quarters were probably earmarked for some senior officer or functionary at some point. She grinned to herself; she felt like a rat in a palace’s cellar.

  She walked as quickly as she dared to the clothes store while still trying to appear casual to anybody who might happen upon her. Checking up and down the corridor, she tapped in the code she’d seen Mila use and ducked inside. For the second time in less than five minutes, she quickly changed, this time from the clothes that had been picked out for her into the same sort of bureaucrat’s clothes that Mila wore. The Yagizban seemed reliant on administrators and she hoped that by dressing as one, she would be invisible in many of station FP-1’s areas. She found a serviceable and efficient-looking carrying-case in the corner that might reasonably be expected to contain record discs, transcriptors, and the other adjuncts she imagined a serious young low-level bureaucrat would carry around. She carefully folded the civilian clothes as tightly as she could and crammed them inside. She might have to dump the disguise at some point and she would prefer to have something to change into rather running around the corridors in her underwear.

  She paused in front of the door, straightened her short, blond hair for the third time, tried to think administrative thoughts and went out. She walked to the lift as if she had every right to do so and called it. It arrived after a very long minute and she stepped inside.

  This was where her plan became a little vague. The overall scheme was to find out what the Yagizban were up to with their unreported transports and, even this, the first replacement for the aircraft platforms destroyed in the war of independence, and how the pirates were involved. Where might be a good place to find secrets was not something she had considered in any great detail.

  She stood for a moment wracked with indecision. Then, as she had seen Mila do, she pressed a key on the lift’s control panel and said in a clear voice, “Command centre.” She hoped the system didn’t carry out voice identifications as a matter of routine or her little adventure would be stopping very abruptly.

  The lift didn’t electrocute her, gas her or hold her until security arrived. Instead it just said in a bored mechanical voice, “Destination unrecognised. Please restate.”

  She tried again and it rejected it again. Perhaps, she wondered, it was a naming issue. In her experience, settlements almost always called their command centres command centres, but would the Yagizban? Most of the Conclaves were submersible habitats, capable of moving around the globe if they so desired. In that case, “Bridge.”

&nb
sp; “Complying,” replied the lift and moved off.

  The lift rose smoothly for a few seconds and Katya belatedly realised that what she had taken for some sort of ceramic finish to the compartment’s wall was actually transparent, the lift shaft beyond being so close and so featureless that she had not noticed until now. She was just wondering why the lift would have a transparent wall when it suddenly stopped, paused for a few moments as if ruminating, and then abruptly headed sideways.

  Technologically, it was probably no major feat, but it was unexpected enough to catch her off balance and she leaned against the wall bracing herself for another change in direction. The surprise she got, however, had nothing to do with her vector.

  The lift compartment suddenly emerged into a transparent tube running high above the floor of a massive internal section. Katya stepped forward cautiously at first to see what the floor was used for. Then she was up against the wall, eager not to miss a detail.

  The area was a large manufacturing facility. Workers moved steadily around the place as robot arms struck and welded, gripped and lifted. As she had come to expect from the Conclaves, the air was of almost inhuman efficiency, but she had no reason to expect what they were actually building, and the realisation made her gasp out loud. Across the shop floor were four cradles in which vessels were being built, submarines. Two were little more than keels, another’s hull was forming, but the forth was nearing completion and its form was very familiar to Katya, from the sleekness of its lines to the rakish slant of the low conning tower. The Yagizban were building a fleet of Vodyanoi-class boats. Fast, effective hunter-killers, these new hybrids presumably combined Terran design with Russalka technology. She saw now that the flying transport that had picked them up had not been built specifically to carry the Vodyanoi, but any of its sisters too. Being able to deliver a wolfpack of such boats anywhere in the world, over the waves, uninterceptable, undetectable.

  The Yagizban were tooling for war, there was no other possibility. And who could the war be against if not the FMA and all the rest of the world’s people it represented and protected?

  Then the lift compartment finished its travel across the work area and moved back into the bland tunnels. Katya’s mind was racing. Who could she tell? Uncle Lukyan? He was a great man in his own way, but what could he do? If she told Petrov, she’d put his life in peril, along with the rest of his crew. She clenched her fists with frustration. This was crazy. The planet was on the brink of civil war and then into the mix comes the Leviathan. Perhaps the Yagizban fleet would be enough to defeat it. But then what? Uncle Lukyan said they’d left Earth in the first place to leave the politics behind. Now it seemed they had brought it with them on their boots.

  Her train of thought was brought to an abrupt end as the car stopped and opened its doors. Beyond lay the FP-1’s bridge. Katya had imagined something like the bridge of the Vodyanoi or the Novgorod and was unprepared for what she found.

  It made sense that the bridge was going to be a little larger, but the scale of it amazed and awed her. It was a great sprawling room, full of military and bureaucratic uniforms striding around with such a sense of purpose that she felt immediately that she was making herself obvious by the very act of standing still. Putting her head down and trying to look as if she had as much right to be there as anybody she walked out of the lift.

  It was difficult not to stare: the scale of the place was impressive as was the number of people working there. She’d never seen a free-standing holographic display before but this extraordinary place had three of them, the largest and most central being a colossal representation of Russalka herself in harsh display colours, a sphere ten metres across. She could see all the settlements marked, the current locations of the Conclaves, smaller icons that she assumed to be Yagizban ships and several markers in the less explored parts of the world. She had an ugly feeling that these were more aircraft stations, undeclared and unknown to the Federal forces. How could they know? The Federal forces were drawn as tight as a falling hawser just watching the standard shipping lanes between the main settlements. There was no possibility that they could just search millions of square kilometres of open sea on the off chance that they might find a secret Yagizban platform, even one as large as the FP-1, a small town by itself.

  FP-1, she thought bitterly. How many more FP-somethings are out there?

  She kept walking, imagining herself to be a minor administrative assistant carrying documents for somebody or other in her case. If you can fool yourself that you’re who you’re pretending to be, she told herself, it makes it easier to fool others. She was just walking past a console near one of the great curving walls at the edge of the chamber when she saw something that stopped her in her tracks. Two men were standing with headsets on watching a scene on a bank of flat monitors. On each screen was a slightly different view of Kane being debriefed by Yagizban military personnel, military intelligence by the looks of them. Kane was relaxed, almost bored, as he answered their questions. Now and then he would look up at one or other of the cameras and gaze at it steadily for a moment before his attention wandered again. Whatever sound was being relayed she couldn’t hear, but the two observers with their headsets could.

  “This complicates matters,” said one of the men. “This was not covered in any of the contingency plans.”

  “How could it?” replied his colleague. “Nobody expected anything of the sort. This is… outside our experience.”

  The first man nodded at the screen. “Do we trust him? He’s… in theory at least… he should be reliable. But sometimes…”

  “Lack of motivation. We understand his limitations and can allow for them. Anyway, he’s only confirming what we’ve already been told. Now we need to formulate a response.”

  “This complicates matters,” repeated the first man. “We’re not ready…”

  “Oh, we’re ready.” The second man laughed humourlessly. “If this is all true, we’re ready right now.”

  The first man was about to reply when he half turned and saw Katya hovering around. “What do you want?” he demanded.

  Katya’s eyes widened. She’d had her lie all prepared, that she was carrying a message from Mila Vetskya for the attention of Major Moltsyn and had been told to find him here. In the heat of the moment, the lie melted.

  “I, uh… a message. I have a message for the atten… from Vetskya… Mila Vetskya for… for the attention of…” The major’s name vanished entirely from her mind. She could see his face, hear his voice, even remember how his disdain for her borrowed FMA uniform had made her flush with anger, but she could not, could not, remember his name. She looked at the men, both of who had turned towards her now, their frowns deepening.

  “For the attention of whom?” snapped the second man.

  “For… the attention of…” She flailed for the name as it flickered around her memory, grabbed something and blurted it out. “The Chertovka!”

  For a horrible moment, they both just looked at her as if she’d opened her mouth and a spline squid had fallen out. Then the first man roared at her, “How dare you refer to a superior using that word, girl? Colonel Tasya Morevna is a valued officer and a model of loyalty to the Conclaves. She’s worth a hundred worms like you, you insubordinate wretch!”

  “I’m… I’m sorry…” Katya stumbled. Her mind was racing. Colonel? Tasya’s a Yagizban colonel? “I meant no disrespect. I just…” A new lie presented itself and, sensing saying something weak now was a better strategy than something strong later, she went with it. “It’s just… she’s a legend among… among the lower grades, sirs… that name… she scares them.” She didn’t explain who “they” were, but she didn’t think she’d need to. She was right.

  “Developing a little personality cult, is she?” said the second man. He smiled wryly. “We’ve only ourselves to blame,” he said to the first man. “We’ve made the Federals fear her so much with all this ‘she-devil’ business, it’s hardly surprising that she’s becoming som
ething of a heroine to our own people.” Then to Katya, “You’ll find the colonel in or around the holding facilities on Beta where the FMA people are being held. Go on, deliver you message, but don’t call her Chertovka to her face!” Both men were laughing as she turned and headed back towards the lifts.

  “Don’t ask her for her autograph either!” the first man called as she stepped into the car and the doors closed behind her.

  Katya stood mute for a moment, then told the lift car to go back to the level her room was on. As it moved off, she leaned her shoulder blades against the wall and tried to think it through.

  Tasya wasn’t really a pirate. Instead she was some sort of, what? An agent provocateur? “She’s something of a heroine to our side,” the man had said. Our side? Katya had been hoping there would an innocent explanation for the new warboats she’d seen. Now she accepted with a sinking heart that there was not. Was it Tasya’s job to keep the FMA busy so they couldn’t use their limited resources to accidentally stumble upon what the Yagizba Conclaves were up to? That was part of it, she was sure, but was that all? And all the time, the Yagizbans had been building secret platforms, new aircraft – she couldn’t believe that their airfleet only contained a single submarine transporter – and those new submarines using the Vodyanoi as a template. The resources they had used to build all this must have been enormous and yet they were always starving the other settlements of supplies, citing manufacturing inefficiencies and mining difficulties.