She’d barely looked at the medal. Had read the citation once and experienced trouble finishing it, racked by embarrassment and a faint sense of disgust. It hadn’t been like that. It just hadn’t. But it was the official version now, and who was she to argue with the Federal Maritime Authority’s telling of events? After all, she had only been there, had only lived through it all.
The wooden box, though… the box she liked. Sometimes she would just hold the box, stroking its cover gently with the pad of her thumb, sensing the fine grain against her skin. What must it be like to see trees just… there? Growing where they liked, randomly dotted about?
Still, this was nature, too. Stone was natural, even if the torches had melted it smooth. She hadn’t needed to follow the signs to the Mologa Hotel – she’d been there often enough – but lost in her reverie, listening to her own tired thoughts and the sound of her boots on the decking grates, it was a surprise when she turned a corner and there it was. Mologa Hotel, a long, dimly lit tunnel with staggered rows of hatches set into each wall. Admittedly, it looked more like a mass morgue, but it was better than nothing.
She walked along, looking for a green vacancy light. Unsurprisingly, the ones nearest the tunnel entrance all showed red “Occupied” flashes with a few amber lights to show freshly vacated units that still had to be cleaned before being designated available again. She had little idea of how often the units were cleaned out. Perhaps twice a day, she guessed. It didn’t matter; she would do what she always did and walk most of the way along, and pass most of the two hundred capsule “rooms.” That far along, she was already walking past plentiful numbers of greens and some ambers. She deduced that whoever was supposed to clean the capsules perhaps only bothered with the far end of the tunnel once a day, maybe less. Once she might have been outraged at such a dereliction of duty. Right now, however, she just wanted to sleep.
She found a capsule that was identical to all its neighbours, but that she took a shine to on a whim. Her boat’s docking fee included two capsule rentals, one for her and one for Sergei, although she suspected he’d sleep aboard again. Over fifty hours in that confined space apparently wasn’t too much for Sergei Ilyin. Well, good luck to him. She swiped her ID card, waited for the click, and swung the door open.
In the same way that you couldn’t really call it a hotel, you couldn’t really call it a room. It was no more than a burrow a metre and a half square at the entrance and two and a half metres deep. The walls were covered with a smooth epoxy coating in a “restful” shade of pale blue that was apparently what the sky looked like on Earth, and which the primitive parts of their minds found comforting, or so she was told. The floor of the capsule was covered by a mattress that could be removed and hosed down for cleaning if need be, and there was a clean blanket rolled up to one side. Set into the ceiling above where the occupant would lay their head was a screen on which could be watched a selection of dull programming, available on demand. Beneath the capsule floor was a cubby for putting boots, and Katya sat in the hatchway while she removed them and her thin socks before storing them in there. When she crawled in and closed the hatch behind her, the cubby was covered and kept secure, too.
She struggled out of her clothes, made more of an attempt at folding them than she felt was really necessary, and ended up tossing them into the alcove at the capsule end along with her overnight bag. She pulled the thin blanket over herself, more from habit than necessity as the temperature was maintained at a comfortable level, set the alarm for oh-seven-thirty, and turned off the light.
She couldn’t sleep. Tired and listless, she was desperate to, yet her disloyal head kept buzzing and denied her the ease she needed to drift off. She wished she hadn’t mentioned her uncle to the major in traffic control, wished he hadn’t known Lukyan, hadn’t said he was a good man. Yes, her uncle had been a good man, and she missed him so much that it hurt. She felt the tears and did nothing to stop them. It was natural to grieve, even months later. She knew it would be months more before the pain stopped being quite so sharp, when it didn’t make her wish she had died along with him.
Each capsule had half a metre of stone between itself and its neighbours, and the doors were designed to be soundproof, but even so this was why she always chose a capsule as far from others as possible, so nobody might hear her cry.
Sergei had cried. In the pause between the threat of the Leviathan killing everyone on the planet being lifted, and the beginning of the civil war that threatened to result in everybody killing one another instead, she had got back home and sought him out immediately. She had to be the one to tell him, it was what Lukyan would have wanted.
She had stood there, willing herself to stay ramrod straight, and told Sergei that his captain, her uncle, his best friend since childhood was dead. Death wasn’t so strange on Russalka, after all. The dangerous world killed people all the time for the silliest mistakes and the most fleeting of inattentions. Sergei was made of tough stuff, she had told herself. He’d take it stoically.
But he didn’t. He sat down heavily on the floor – on the floor! – and cried like a child. There was no denial, not a single “Are you sure?” She said she’d been there, told him how Lukyan had died, and that was enough. He’d sobbed and looked ridiculous, his face red and snot running out of his nose, and he hadn’t cared. Finally she’d sat by him, put her arm around him and cried too. Her tears had been silent, though.
Perhaps Sergei had been wise after all. He had come to terms with his grief quickly and accepted Lukyan was gone forever, his lifelong friend lost for good. She still saw him grow quiet and reflective sometimes, and he might touch the corner of his eye as if dust had got into it, but that was all.
He didn’t spend his nights crying himself to sleep in a soundproof cell.
Quarter of an hour later she felt exhausted, puffy-eyed, and again empty of grief and the guilt of the survivor for a while, at least. But, she did not feel sleepy. This seemed very unfair.
Finally she gave up trying to will herself into unconsciousness. Instead she found the gently illuminated controls for the screen and switched it on – perhaps she could bore herself to sleep.
The first feed was an old action drama she was sure she’d seen years before and which hadn’t been new even then, made during or just after the war against Earth. It was about an isolated station where a Fed boat has to stop to make repairs and finds itself stuck there with some refugees. Somebody amongst them is a traitor working for the Grubbers and there was a lot of stuff with people accusing one another and then something else happens that means the accused person must be innocent, and so they accuse somebody else.
That the villain turned out to be a Yag – even though he’s really a Grubber infiltrator – was probably why they were rerunning such a steaming piece of melodrama about the war in the first place.
The war. Katya realised that nobody had yet got around to coming up with a name for the new conflict. When people said “the war,” they always meant the war against Earth, the war that was eleven, almost twelve years ago now. It was a civil war they were currently fighting, but nobody called it that. Nobody called it anything at all.
Katya changed the feed and found herself watching a news channel. There was little new here; the Feds were doughty and honourable warriors while the Yag were dirty, sneaky scum who it turned out had been colluding with the Terrans during the war.
Being caught out as traitors hadn’t really been the declaration of independence the Yags had been planning on, but you can’t always get what you want, can you?
Katya turned down the sound and dimmed the screen brightness. She lay in the flickering darkness watching earnest newsreaders, pictures of smiling Federal sailors and marines coming back from successful sorties, a few bedraggled and wretched Yagizban prisoners being paraded for the cameras, public information proclamations, some newly decorated hero going back to his old school to give a speech about duty and honour. It was just another man in a dark blue FMA naval unifor
m until he took his cap off for the cameras and she laughed with delighted surprise.
Suhkalev! From spotty little thug to a “Knight of the Deep” as the caption proclaimed him, and all in only six months. They’d given him a medal and everything, just like they’d given to her.
Look at us now, Suhkalev, she thought. Look at us with our medals, heroes all. Knights of the Deep.
She finally passed out soon after that, the screen still flickering images of resistance to the enemy and glorious victory above her face. Her mouth moved, and she may have been saying “Knights of the Deep” as she sank into unconsciousness, then she half laughed, and then she was asleep.
CHAPTER TWO
JARILO
Katya awoke in total darkness. Her first thought was a power failure, but then she realised it couldn’t be – every station had back-up generators and slow-bleed capacitors to ensure a total power failure could not happen. After all, a facility without power would be a facility without life before very long. It was more likely to be a local failure, she thought, probably a power bus to the hotel had simply overloaded and was waiting to be reset. Well, if the power had failed, so had her wake up alarm. Sergei was probably down in the pens right now, tutting and muttering as they lost their departure slot.
She checked her chronometer and was nonplussed to discover its face dark. Fumbling with its buttons didn’t produce even a flicker of illumination. Now she was becoming worried; a local power failure was one thing, but even personal electronics dying? Probably just a coincidence. Probably. The possibility that the Yagizban had triggered some sort of electro-magnetic pulse weapon and scrambled Mologa’s electronics entered her mind and was just as quickly dispatched. Every station’s electronics were gauss-hardened against EMP weapons and had been since the war. No, something else was going on here. Well, lying in the dark wasn’t going to give her any answers.
She started to reach back to get her clothes when a sudden sharp sound made her freeze – a single loud crack, shockingly close. She froze, her heart suddenly pounding very fast and hard which only served to dull her hearing as the beats sounded through her head. She stayed still for ten, twenty, thirty seconds, but the noise was not repeated.
The silence was less reassuring than she had hoped. Then she realised how absolute the silence was. The tiny yet infinitely comforting sound of the ventilation fan was absent. While she doubted it was possible to suffocate in a capsule room, she didn’t care to find out. Besides, the air was growing cloying and hot. She reached for her clothes again, and as she did there was the same awful cracking noise, but this time it continued, and grew. A heavy splintering, a grinding of stone upon stone. The realisation that the stone around her was suffering some sort of structural failure filled her with urgent terror.
She decided she would rather face the humiliation of being on the corridors in her underwear than stay in the capsule a second longer and abandoned her clothes in favour of getting out. As she sat up, however, her forehead banged forcefully into the screen mounted on the capsule ceiling. The screen was probably undamaged, being a flexible polymer laminate sheet, but directly behind it was a single insulation layer and then solid stone. Katya fell back, her head landing on the pillow pad. She blinked away the pain and tried to understand how she could possibly have hit her head on a ceiling that had given her comfortable space to sit up the previous night. Now the ceiling seemed to be lower. How was that possible?
There was another loud crack, the grating of stone against stone, and she finally understood. The capsule’s collapsing, she realised. Move! Move! Move!
She tried to sit up as far as the ceiling would allow, but now it was barely above her face. She started shuffling towards the hatch as fast as she could manage. The hatch’s locking handle would be a problem, but perhaps she might be able to disengage it with a kick. She had hardly managed to get five centimetres before the smooth plastic of the screen brushed her face. The ceiling didn’t seem to be lurching down at all, but smoothly descending like a hydraulic press.
She tried to move but it was bearing down on her now, pushing her backward into the shallow mattress. She squirmed hopelessly, her face to one side. How had this happened? Had the station been hit by some new and strange weapon of the Yagizban?
The ceiling stopped its descent. Then, with another crack of fracturing stone, it slammed down.
Katya felt her bones break and break again. She felt her skull compress and shatter as millions of tonnes of submarine mountain settled on her. She felt little pain, but only an odd sense of regret as her skeleton splintered, her tongue was crushed, her eyeballs exploded.
And she did not die.
She was smeared, an atom thick, between the rock faces.
And she did not die.
She could feel the mass of the mountain, feel the shift in the drowned continental plate on which it stood, feel the countless billions tonnes of water flow across the planet’s surface drawn by an unseen moon beyond the unending clouds.
An atom thick, no, thinner yet, as thin as thought, she enveloped the planet Russalka. Russalka – she’d always thought it a good name, but now she realised it was too small to encompass everything the world was. She could almost reach out and…
The alarm was a relief and a huge frustration. The cubicle lights came up gently along with the slowly increasing volume of the alarm tones, and Katya found herself whole and sweating in the capsule room that showed no signs of wanting to be any smaller than it already was. She reached out reflexively and muted the alarm, looked up at the silent screen where the news was always changing yet reassuringly similar. Fierce battles, broad victories, solitary and inconsequential defeats, proud Feds, subhuman Yags.
Her mind was still echoing with her dream, though. A dream of a united planet. She had felt good, powerful, and another emotion that she equated with confidence yet had been somehow different.
Not such a bad dream, then, although she could have done without the bit about being crushed into liquid. That had been… not so enjoyable.
She struggled into her old clothes, grabbed her overnight bag and left the capsule, its red light snapping over to amber as she swiped her card again and tapped the “Checking Out?” square on the status screen mounted on the outside of the hatch. Now, she decided, before she did anything else that day, she desperately needed a shower.
Twenty minutes later, clean, in fresh clothes, and the last echoes of her dream fading, Katya joined Sergei in the station cafeteria for breakfast. He stirred his scrambled eggs (in reality a 1:3 ratio of Edible Protein Reconstitutes 78 and 80b) onto his slice of toast (Carbohydrate Staple Complex Synthetic – Bread 15, although at least it had seen the inside of a real toaster), and glowered across the table at her. He looked exactly as he always looked. His disreputable coveralls never seemed to get any dirtier, his moustache was never any longer or shorter, his stubble was always one missed shave old.
“What are you so happy about?” he demanded, then shovelled some “egg” into his mouth as if he expected it to be taken from him any moment.
“Had a strange dream,” she replied. She was eating kedgeree. The egg was as synthetic as Sergei’s, the rice was reconstituted starch pellets, and the spice paste had come out of a laboratory somewhere, but at least the fish was real. “I saw the whole world. I was the whole world, sort of. Y’know, Sergei, there’s not a problem that can’t be solved. I think we’re going to be OK.”
Sergei’s shovelling stopped. “God. If you’re going to be like this all day, I’m resigning now.”
“Seriously? OK. We both know I can handle the boat alone and the navy’s desperate for hands, so just hand in your reserved occupation papers and get yourself into uniform. Oh, and you’ll have to keep it clean. They’re pretty fussy about that.” She smiled sweetly at him.
He looked at her stonily. “I bloody hate you, Kuriakova,” he said, and returned his attention to his breakfast.
“‘I bloody hate you, Captain Kuriakova,’” she c
orrected him. “I will have discipline within my crew.”
She carried on eating, having duly noted Sergei struggling not to smile.
“Wake her up, Sergei.”
They were aboard the boat, set to go with a small cargo of assorted parcels, mainly intended for friends and family of Mologa’s military staff at Atlantis. That and a few data sticks containing messages in written and video form, both official and personal. Lines of communication were often among the first casualties in wartime. The landlines, never very reliable, had mainly been severed by enemy action, and the surface long wave relays – tethered communication buoys floating above the settlements – were too easy to intercept and jam. That’s if some enterprising raider didn’t slap them with a couple of torpedoes, of course. With rapid communications difficult, almost everything had to be done by couriers.
Katya had noticed among the parcels some actual letters, forming their own envelopes with a tab of tape to seal them.
“Letters. Imagine that,” she’d said, waving one of them at Sergei. “Writing. On paper.” Sergei had said nothing, so she’d added, “Amazing!” to emphasise the novelty of it.
“People sent letters on paper in the war,” he’d said. It was an extruded fibre weave, but it looked and behaved in much the same fashion as real wood pulp paper, the kind they had on Earth. “Sometimes, y’know, sometimes words on a screen aren’t enough. You want something you can carry with you. Sometimes it’s all that’s left of someone.”
Now the bags were stowed, and twenty hours of submarine travel awaited. Twenty hours of brain-freezing tedium, possibly mixed with bouts of bowel-loosening terror should the major in traffic control be wrong about local Yag activity. At least, Katya reflected, the cess tank was empty.
Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) Page 2