Katya's World

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Some images are destined to stay in the mind’s eye for the rest of one’s life. Katya knew that, if she lived through this, what she saw in that room would haunt her in the moments before sleep and in the dreams that followed. She had braced herself for the worst thing she could imagine; Tokarov’s mummified corpse caught in a paroxysm of agony forever perhaps, the moment of interface caught forever in tableau. What she actually found was far, far worse.

  Tokarov was alive, but what a diseased impersonation of life it was. The interface chair had grown into him, the matter of the throne having grown hundreds, thousands of wiry cables like the grappling tentacles in the docking bay. The cables were thinner here, black and glistening in a foul oily fashion. The tips of the tentacles were all imbedded in Tokarov’s flesh, latching onto nerve endings and muscle ganglion, hijacking his motor functions and devouring his reason. His pale skin seemed dark with the mass of tentacles, some as thin as threads, some as broad as fingers, that cut and penetrated and usurped and writhed his whole body. A hemisphere in the ceiling directly above the throne dangled yet more, vanishing into his ears, his nose and his eyes. Only his mouth had been left alone and they could all hear his ragged breathing even from the door.

  Lukyan swore. Katya fought down the urge to vomit. Kane only watched. He lifted his own hand to inspect it and Katya noticed several small crescent-shaped scars on him, the marks of the Leviathan’s failed attempt to interface with him. She wanted to hate him for shirking this fate and leaving it to befall somebody else, but she couldn’t. She didn’t like to think what she might have done herself to avoid this hideous devouring.

  Kane lowered his hand and, with infinite reluctance, took a step forwards. Instantly, a section of the chamber’s ceiling dilated and the Medusa sphere descended on its stalk. Kane froze in mid-step as several purple targeting dots appeared on his face and chest. He took a slow breath and said quietly to himself, “I’m not dead, am I? No? That’s good. Stepping back now.” He reversed his stride, but the sphere continued to target him.

  “Kane, you’re the only one who’s been targeted. Katya and I are clear,” said Lukyan in a measured, conversational tone, “that’s different from last time.”

  “It seems personal,” whispered Katya.

  “I was thinking that myself.” Kane looked down at the half dozen targeting spots that moved slowly across his chest like confused insects.

  “You knew,” said the Leviathan, but it was not the even tones of their last visit. The intonation was human. “You knew!”

  “Of course I knew, Tokarov,” said Kane directly to the human wreckage in the chair. “I warned you to stay away from that thing. I wish I’d known about your ulterior motive for staying behind. I’d never have agreed if I had.”

  “I can feel it. It’s eating my mind.” The Leviathan’s voice –Tokarov’s voice – was full of horror and, worse still, defeat. Katya knew he’d given up and accepted this terrible fate.

  “Every time you express your personality, the Leviathan will monitor it as a malfunction, hunt down the section of your brain that generated it and… I don’t know what to call what it does. Reconfigures it, I suppose.” There was no catch in Kane’s voice, but Katya was surprised to see a silent tear roll down his cheek. “I’m so sorry, Tokarov. If there was anything I could do, I would do it.”

  “I… No! Not me! The Leviathan doesn’t trust you anymore.” The machine voice modulated and cracked with emotions it had never been created to express. “The Yagizba Conclaves attacked. You are their ally. You are an enemy. You warned me. You are the only one who knows. You are a friend.” The targeting dots shuddered around Kane as man and machine warred. “Kane is a real and present threat. Kane can help me. Kane is a category one threat. Kane has to… It fears you, Kane. It fears you!”

  Kane looked up at the Medusa sphere. “Learnt about fear, have you?” He took another step back. “That’s not necessarily a good thing.”

  “I know what you did, Kane. It’s all in the Leviathan’s memory. I know how you poisoned yourself to prevent interface.”

  Lukyan shot a hard glance at Kane, who was at pains not to return it. “Yes, well. Desperate times make for…”

  “That was clever,” interrupted Tokarov in the Leviathan’s voice. “I wish I’d been as clever.”

  “Not your fault. Maybe I should have been more specific in my warnings. Anyway, you didn’t have the resources handy.” Kane slid his hand nonchalantly into his jacket pocket. When it came out again, Katya saw it cradled a pressure syringe. In its transparent barrel, a black liquid. She kept her face expressionless with a massive effort of will and returned to looking straight ahead.

  “The Leviathan wanted to kill you. As soon as I… we detected the drone #6 signal, it knew you were coming back and it wanted to kill you. Kane is a category… I confused it… supposed to make allowances during interface… follow my instincts even if it doesn’t understand them… I didn’t want you to die.”

  Where there’s life, there’s hope, thought Katya. She stepped forward. “Does it trust me?”

  “You are unrecognised,” said the Leviathan, before immediately adding, “You’re a clever girl, you saved the Novgorod. Category one… category blue…”

  As Katya walked slowly forward, she took the syringe from Kane’s hand. He wasn’t expecting the action and almost dropped it before she had it from him and concealed along the line of her forearm. He glared intensely at her as she walked past. “It could kill you in a second.”

  “Tokarov’s doing everything he can to keep it off balance and sacrificing himself to do it. In a minute, everything he ever was will be gone. We can’t waste that minute.” She said it quietly as she continued to walk and wasn’t even sure if Kane caught all of it. Perhaps, she wondered, she was just saying it to herself to root herself in the moment and the minute to follow.

  She walked steadily, neither so slow that time was frittered away or so quickly that it might antagonise the Leviathan despite its scattered priorities. She wondered how many targeting dots the Medusa sphere had painted on her; none or ten? She wondered if the sphere killed painlessly, or only silently. And, before she had time to wonder anything else, she was standing before Tokarov.

  The interface threads, cables and tentacles flexed slowly as if connected to some great, ponderous heart, beating a thin ichor of machine hatred into Tokarov to replace his red, human blood. The tentacles running into his eye sockets must surely have destroyed the eyes and Katya remembered they had been a hazel brown once. She looked upon him unflinchingly, saw where his eyelids were rubbed raw from being unable to close but trying all the same, smelled the surgical scent of antiseptics and antibiotics the machine must be using to keep his body functioning until it had no further use for it, and felt the fear of an ebbing mind.

  “Tokarov,” she said gently. “It’s me, Katya.”

  “I know,” he half whispered, half sobbed through his own mouth rather than through the Leviathan. “I know. It can see you. Watching you.”

  A thought occurred to her and it seemed a ridiculous thought at first, but then she immediately realised that it wasn’t ridiculous at all. For Tokarov at that moment, it might be the most important question anybody had ever asked him, so she asked it. “What’s your name? I can’t just call you Tokarov. What’s your whole name?”

  He sat silently. The tentacles imbedded in him shuddered slightly as if discomforted and suspicious. He opened his mouth and spoke, one word on each exhalation. “Pyotr… Grigorevich… Tokarov.”

  Katya nodded, as quiet and comforting as any nurse at the deathbed. “Pyotr Grigorevich Tokarov. I shall remember you.”

  Then she stabbed him in the neck with the syringe. Her aim was good; the blunt end of the pressure syringe slammed up hard against his carotid artery and she kept her thumb on the dosage release until the whole chamber was empty.

  She felt none of the sickness or self-loathing that she had felt so quickly when she’d shot the Yagizban troop
er. That had been an impulse and the thought that violence lived so close to the surface in her was a terror to her. This though, this was an act of humanity.

  Perhaps the large dose of Sin would kill him immediately, perhaps the rejection process would, perhaps the Leviathan would kill all of them in retaliation, Tokarov included. It didn’t matter – there had been no choice.

  The effect was instantaneous. Katya had seen deep ocean worms that shied from the touch of searchlight beams as if they were fire. The Leviathan’s tentacles slid out of Tokarov as if his touch was poison. To the Leviathan, perhaps he was. In a great thrashing mass, the cables and tentacles and hair-thin threads withdrew and hung back, their tendrils waving in an unfelt breeze.

  “Interface prematurely halted,” said the Leviathan, any trace of Tokarov gone from its voice.

  Tokarov slumped back into the throne, gasping violently. His flesh was a wreck, his eyelids had mercifully been able to close and Katya was spared the sight of the ruined sockets. But she’d seen that frantic clawing for breath once before; back in the mines when a crewman injured during the Vodyanoi’s attack had died. Katya knew he was going to die just as surely as that crewman and that, just as surely, there was nothing she could do.

  “I’m sorry, Pyotr,” she whispered.

  But there was to be no dignity in death here. A cable, thicker than the others, separated from the mass and snaked around Tokarov’s neck. Before Katya could react, he was jerked into the air and thrown aside, nothing more than a failed component.

  Katya saw him hit the wall with a horrible crack of breaking bone and took a step forward. Thus, she never saw the tentacle that hit her.

  “New replacement selected,” said the Leviathan. “Interface process initiating.”

  Katya felt the tip of the tentacle break the skin at the back of her neck, directly where it joined the skull. She felt it separate into roots and then into threads, penetrating muscle and bone. Even though she knew it was impossible, she felt it penetrate her brain.

  Somewhere distant, she thought she head screams and shouts; her uncle, Kane, perhaps even herself. Before she could wonder why everybody seemed to be so upset, the Leviathan was in her mind and, worse yet, she was inside its.

  She saw it greedily access her memories, looking for intelligence, experience, tactics and strategies, human cunning and human guile. She felt it ransack her mind like a thief looking for valuables amongst family heirlooms valuable to no one but the owner. Each memory accessed flared into colours and smells and sounds as if it were yesterday. No, as if it were now.

  …her mother came in to comfort her and she ended comforting her mother, her mother saying “This stupid, stupid war” until Katya said “Stupid war” and her mother laughed or was it a sob and papa never came home again…

  … she never liked her Uncle Lukyan, he was so big and he laughed too loud and here he was all quiet, his huge hands holding hers and saying, “My poor Katinka” and telling her something about an accident and how she would be living with him now…

  … Sergei looking at the plot she had made on the practise table and scratching his head and asking, “Did you do this by yourself?” and showing Lukyan who smiled and said, “She’s a prodigy, that one” and looking up “prodigy” and being proud…

  “Let her go! Let her go, machine!”

  “Pushkin! Careful, man! Look out!”

  … feeling sick, stomach cramps and no one to talk to, Uncle Lukyan asking if she were well as if she just has a cold and no one to talk to and her mama dead these five years…

  … being expelled from the Federal Cadet League for gross insubordination, in front of all the others, the shame and humiliation turning to hysterical laughter, the commander snarling “You’re a disgrace, you’ll never wear a Federal uniform!” and telling Lukyan and him just saying, “You’ve got all the training out of that programme that’s worth having, plenty of civilian boats would be glad to have you”…

  Something deeper, something in the shadows. An invasion? She thinks of the tendrils in Tokarov’s flesh and the antiseptic and the thought gratefully takes up the theme. Not an invasion, a wound. Antibodies rallying against it. Burning out the infection. Whose memory is this? she wonders. Not mine. Tokarov’s? Is that what another person’s memories are like? Disconnected images without context, ideas floating in vacuum. No, not that. The Leviathan? It must be, but why does it want to talk to me? What is wounded?

  Motion, a pressure at the back of her head. “You might kill her!” “It’s not having her!” Not a pressure, a pulling, like when she used to wear a ponytail and Andrei Ivanovitch pulled it so hard she fell over backwards…

  The agony was so exquisite, so far beyond anything she has ever experienced before, her only reaction was to open her eyes very, very wide. She had a momentary impression of Lukyan standing by her, a tentacle held in his fist, the end a tangle of fibres dripping… blood?

  Then she collapsed and he grabbed her under one arm like he used to when she was young and they played monsters while her mother, Lukyan’s sister, looked on and shook her head ruefully.

  “Go, Pushkin! GO!” She heard Kane bellow as if every devil from every hell was pursuing them.

  “Category one. Confirmed.”

  Katya heard a crack and Lukyan staggered. Then he straightened up and lumbered towards the exit, Kane running ahead of them. Another crack and then another, and another. Lukyan moaned miserably under his breath but kept running. Kane had reached the doorway and was unfolding something he’d had concealed under his jacket. As they neared, he raised it to his shoulder and it started making a very similar cracking noise. The agony was ebbing and Katya was now in a dull place of pain and distance. It took her a moment to realise that Kane’s weapon must be Terran and that made her wonder if it was one of the laser smallarms Earth was supposed to have. Then the similarity of the sound of the weapon to the sounds behind her sank in.

  The Medusa sphere was firing. She wondered if she was being hit and the pain from being forcibly disconnected from the Leviathan was overshadowing the pain of laser wounds. Then Lukyan staggered again and she knew the truth of it. He was almost sobbing, not in pain but in desperation to reach the hatch before his strength failed and she finally understood how important his promise to look after her he had made to the memory of her mother was to him.

  Lukyan collapsed just a metre from the hatch, falling to his knees. Kane looked down at him and saw there was little life in him, but still there was hope. Kane flicked a control on the laser carbine and fired. From a stubby barrel beneath the laser emitter, a rocket propelled shell flew out, hissing past them and towards the interface chair. Kane threw the weapon down behind him and grabbed Katya, dragging her through the hatch. She looked back then and saw her uncle for the last time; all but dead, his eyes tired and glazing, his face pallid. She could see the smoke rising from his back where the Medusa sphere had rained laser bolts into him, and she could only guess at what kind of man could have carried on this long.

  But she knew.

  “Uncle.”

  He tried to speak but no sounds came. His lips moved and she thought he said, “Katinka.” Then he reached forward, toppling as he did so. His hand slammed into the door control and the hatch slid shut.

  Kane grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her to the floor at the same moment the fuse on the rocket he’d launched ran out. From the other side of the door, there was a ferocious concussion, a dull whump like a giant punching the wall. Instantly, alert sirens sounded.

  Kane staggered back to his feet, collecting the laser carbine and stowing it away. “Rocket grenade. Nasty weapons, not really suitable for submarine actions. Blow down a bulkhead as soon as look at it.” He listened to the klaxons. “I think it may have hurt the Leviathan quite badly. We should go.”

  She looked at him, dazed, then she shook her head. “My uncle,” she said and walked unsteadily back towards the hatch.

  “Lukyan’s dead.”

  She
stopped, staring at the hatch, willing it to slide open and Lukyan to jump through, safe and sound.

  “He gave his life to save you, Katya. You know that. The sphere was firing on him right from the moment he released you. I’ve never seen anything like it.” The hatch wasn’t opening. Katya thought it would probably never open again. Behind her, Kane was still talking, his voice low and intense. “I’m going to honour him by telling anybody who’ll listen about the bravest thing I ever saw, that I have ever even heard of. How are you going to honour him?”

  She lowered her head. Then she turned and walked down the corridor towards the docking bay. “By living,” she said quietly as she passed him.

  They reached the docking bay a minute later. Kane went in first, his gun drawn in case the docking cables were set to attack. The hemisphere in the ceiling was quiet, though; it seemed the Leviathan had other more pressing concerns.

  “How do we get out of here without the Leviathan’s cooperation?”

  “We override. This place has maintenance hatches and access panels very deliberately kept out of the areas that I had access to.” He examined the apparently smooth wall, found a couple of shallow indentations and dug his thumbs into them. With agonising slowness, he unscrewed a small circular hatch.

  Katya was pacing up and down. It wasn’t fair that she should lose her last relative, and have him restored to her only to see him die. It wasn’t fair that her father had died in the war. It wasn’t fair that her mother had died in a stupid avoidable accident that wasn’t even her own fault. “It’s not fair.”

  Kane looked over his shoulder at her. “No,” he answered. He turned back to his work. “It isn’t. It never is.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like.” She was getting angry with him, and she didn’t want to. She needed to hurt him, but she didn’t want to.

  “What you’re going through this minute? No, I don’t. I don’t know at all.” He twisted a release control inside the hatch fiercely and, around them, the whole chamber started to reconfigure itself. The smooth wall panels slid back to expose pipes and girders and…