Kane was unsurprised but felt he had to ask. “May I ask why?”
Katya thought longer this time, remembering what had happened to her, what she had learned, what she hungered to forget and never would. When she had her thoughts ordered and her mind clear, she replied.
“I don’t like to be near you, Kane. People die near you. You go around wide-eyed and clueless as if you don’t understand how these things could happen and then, five minutes later, you say, ‘Oh, well, that happened for this reason that I didn’t bother telling you about until it was too late.’ All this,” she swept her hand across the tabletop, but the gesture encompassed the Leviathan, the FP-1, the Chertovka, the dead and the lost, “all this is your fault. You brought the Leviathan here. Then you abandoned it and just hoped it was a problem that would go away if you didn’t think about it. But it didn’t go away. Ten years later, it gets stirred up and you are right there when it happens. And what do you do? Nothing. You don’t say a word. You didn’t give Captain Zagadko enough information to fight it or even to realise he couldn’t. You’d lost control of the situation and you couldn’t even be bothered to tell us what that situation was. Why? You’d spent ten years hoping it would all just go away and it hadn’t. What made you think it would just fade away now?
“And then it turns out you’ve been collaborating with the Yagizba Conclaves in treason. Treason, Kane! Without access to your boat, they wouldn’t have been able to churn out copies. They’ve got a whole war effort based on technologies that you gave them! And now hundreds, thousands of people are going to die because of a war you helped start.”
Kane was looking grey. “Katya, it’s not…”
“No!” she spat at him. “Shut up! I liked Captain Zagadko. I liked Petrov. I liked Tokarov. I loved my uncle. Unless you can bring them back, then shut up. You have nothing to say to me.” She wanted to cry but she would not, not in front of him. Later, she would discover that she could not cry at all and she would hate him for that too.
Kane sat silently, looking unblinkingly at his empty cup. Then he glanced up at the chronometer on the wall and back down again. “The Vodyanoi will be standing off the auxiliary locks by now. It will take me five minutes to get there, five minutes to get aboard, ten minutes to get out of the sensor cordon.” He nodded in the direction of the corridor leading into the administrative area. “There’s an FMA office just down there, first on the left. You can go and make a report there after you’ve finished your coffee. If you nurse it, it might last twenty minutes.” He looked up but he couldn’t meet her eyes. “Would you do that much for me?”
Katya didn’t reply for a long moment. Then she said, “Go.”
She didn’t see his eyes widen as he remembered the last word of the Leviathan, and finally realised whose voice it had been spoken in.
Abruptly, like a man who’d forgotten something, he climbed to his feet and walked quickly away without looking back. Katya watched him until he turned the corner to the auxiliary facilities sector and was lost to sight. She sipped her coffee. It was cold and she couldn’t taste it anyway.
It took her twenty-five minutes to finish her cup. Then she ordered another.
Table of Contents
Katya’s World
Jonathan L. Howard
Contents
Prologue Russalka
Chapter 1 Judas Box
Chapter 2 Ghost Return
Chapter 3 Novgorod
Chapter 4 Leviathan
Chapter 5 Environmental Control
Chapter 6 Deck Sweeper
Chapter 7 Scuttling Code
Chapter 8 Devil Driven
Chapter 9 Friendly Foe
Chapter 10 Medusa Sphere
Chapter 11 Mythical Creatures
Chapter 12 Sin Bottle
Chapter 13 Vodyanoi
Chapter 14 Cutting Edge
Chapter 15 Little Gun
Chapter 16 Deep Black
Chapter 17 Stormy Weather
Chapter 18 Getting Up
Chapter 19 Falling Down
Chapter 20 Vengeance
Chapter 21 Everything Changes
Katya's World Page 28