Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles)

by Howard, Jonathan L

  It was the co-pilot’s job to run down the pre-launch checklist, and the captain’s to oversee it, so Sergei counted off the items and called “check” at each positive, and it was Katya who watched him do it. It was ridiculous, she thought. In her entire maritime career to date, she had done that job once. Once, and only once, she had been co-pilot/navigator. Then she had inherited the boat and become captain. “A battlefield promotion,” Uncle Lukyan would have called it.

  She snapped herself out of her reverie before it could become maudlin, and listened to Sergei finish the list. “All lights green, captain. All systems go.”

  Katya opened the communications channel to traffic control. “We’re clear to disengage, traffic control. No last minute reports of Yag boats in the vicinity?”

  “Nothing new, captain.” She recognised the voice of the major. “I can only recommend you stay sharp, and take care. Launch when ready, RRS 15743 Kilo Lukyan. Good luck.”

  “Thank you, major,” replied Katya. “Disengaging now. Lukyan out.”

  With a thud as the docking clamps released the boat, and the hum of the impellers taking them out into open water, the voyage was underway.

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time, renaming her uncle’s boat from Pushkin’s Baby to the Lukyan. It had seemed like a good way to honour him, to remember him. But now every time the boat’s name was used, she had to fight the urge to look at the left hand seat to see if he was there. Really, that should have been her seat as captain, but she just couldn’t bring herself to take it. She felt a big enough fraud calling herself “captain.” Claiming the captain’s seat, Lukyan’s seat… no. That was too much.

  Sergei hadn’t wanted it either, but he had seen how she looked at the seat almost superstitiously and decided that he was going to have to be the stoic, pragmatic one. He didn’t like it, though, and had spent much of the first couple of months complaining that the seat felt wrong, that no matter how he adjusted it, it just felt wrong.

  Katya steered until they were clear of Mologa Station’s approach volume and then switched on the autopilot. The inertial guidance systems took what data they could from the baseline of Mologa’s precise location on the charts and took over, taking them on a slow downward gradient into seabed clutter to try and make them a difficult contact to acquire should a Yagizban boat happen by. In peacetime, echo beacons along the way would have provided route correction, but they had all been closed down now. Anything that might help the enemy was to be denied to them, even if it inconvenienced your own people.

  “Arrival at Atlantis docking bays in nineteen hours, forty eight minutes,” said the Lukyan’s computer voice in the same calm tones that it announced everything from waypoint arrivals to incoming torpedoes.

  Katya lifted her hands from the control yoke and watched it move by itself under the autopilot’s direction. “I sometimes wonder why boats even have crews anymore.”

  Sergei was already climbing out of the left hand seat, and was glad to do so. “They used to use drones. Then we got pirates after the war. Drones aren’t so great when it comes to out-thinking people who are after your cargo.” He sat in the forward port passenger seat and pulled the table down from the ceiling on its central strut that swung down to the vertical and then telescoped out. He pulled up the screen on his side and gestured impatiently at the opposite seat. “Well?”

  Katya left the co-pilot’s position and climbed into the indicated seat. “What are we playing?” she asked. “Chess?”

  Sergei curled a lip and tapped some keys. Katya raised the screen on her side to find a virtual card table already waiting for her.

  “Poker,” he said. “A proper game, with risk and chance. Just like life.”

  They played a few hands until Sergei said he was feeling tired again and was going to take a nap. Katya noted that his energy seemed to have a direct correlation to how well he was doing in the game. After a disastrous losing streak that would have cost him his wages for a year had they been playing for real money, he was entirely exhausted and was horizontal across two passenger seats and snoring a minute later.

  “Your choice, my friend,” said Katya under her breath, logged when he fell asleep and set that as the beginning of his down shift. He would argue about it when he woke up in thirty or forty minutes’ time, but it had been one of Lukyan’s hard and fast rules. If Sergei had ever thought Katya was going to be a soft touch, he was well on his way to re-education now.

  As it was, he actually woke twenty-three minutes later when Katya threw an empty beaker at his head. He struggled upright, swearing copiously until she told him in a harsh whisper to shut up and quiet down. The realisation that the drives were off and they were drifting in the current was enough to calm him instantly. He was up front, headset on, and seat restraints locked inside ten seconds.

  “What is it?” he whispered. “Yags?”

  “Don’t know yet,” she replied. “Just caught a glimpse of something on the passive sonar. One-oh-five relative. Might be nothing. Better safe than sorry.”

  Sergei nodded. “Better safe than dead.” He noted the concentration on her face and knew she was listening through the hydrophones, the submarine’s “ears,” for the sound of engines. Without needing to be told, he pulled up the passive sonar interface on his own multi-function display and started a slow, careful scan, quadrant by quadrant.

  Five minutes passed. Ten. At fifteen Katya was about to call it off as a false alert when something showed on the passive sonar at fifty degrees high relative to their heading. She immediately brought the hydrophone array to bear and listened intently.

  “A shoal?” asked Sergei with unusual optimism.

  Katya shook her head slightly. “I hear a drive. Lock it up at my bearing and give me an analysis.”

  Sergei told the passive sonar to lock onto the hydrophone bearing and ran the sound through the database. “It’s military.”

  “Yeah. She’s no civilian.” Military boats carried engines with much higher performance than those of civil transports and carriers. Their turbines ran at greater speed and generated a very distinctive tone that every sensor operator knew. There was still a chance it was a Federal boat combing the Mologa approaches. Not even three hours out and a Yag warboat sniffing around? It seemed… all too likely. The ocean deeps were vast and even a large carrier could shuffle around out there with a whole fleet looking for it and probably stay safe. The station approaches, though… there the game went from looking for a fish in an ocean to looking for a fish in a bath. It was dangerous for the hunters if the station defences picked them up, of course, but war is all about risks.

  Another twenty seconds of tracking the unidentified contact passed before the computer decided it had enough information to offer its analysis. “Eighty seven per cent likelihood contact Alpha is a Vodyanoi/2 class hunter-killer submarine of the Yagizba Enclaves,” it told them. “It is therefore designated an enemy.” And to show them what it thought of enemies, the computer changed the contact’s symbol on the sonar display from yellow to red.

  “A Vodyanoi?” said Sergei hollowly. He had gone very pale, or at least his stubble seemed much more clearly defined. “One of their new boats? The Grubber design? It would be.” His tone was bitter. “We’ve never dealt with one of those before.”

  It wasn’t good news. The Yag’s Vodyanoi/2 class was a development of a Terran boat called the Vodyanoi, the vessel of the notorious pirate Havilland Kane, no less. She had met Kane, and she had been aboard the Vodyanoi. It was a highly sophisticated boat, but she knew the Yag copies were not its match; necessary compromises had to be made in their production to keep down costs, and some aspects of the original’s technology were beyond Russalkin manufacturing methods. Even so, the Vodyanoi/2s were dangerous predators. If it got a clear lock on them, they were as good as dead.

  So, they did the only thing a minisub could do against such a killer; they remained quiet and hoped for the best.

  “Do you think they’d hear our
ballast tanks vent?” said Katya in a whisper. When you knew people who were keen on the idea of killing you weren’t very far away and were actively listening for you, it was difficult not to whisper. “We’re about fifty metres above a thermocline. We’d be a bit safer under it.”

  Sergei shook his head. “I know it’s tempting, but it’s best not to do a thing, Katya. If they’re low on munitions, they might not bother, but if they’re flush, they might stick a fish in our direction on a search pattern, and then we’d be pretty screwed.”

  By “fish,” he meant “torpedo.” By “pretty screwed,” he meant “very thoroughly dead.”

  Katya knew good advice when she heard it, so she leaned back in her seat and crossed her arms so she wouldn’t be tempted to press any buttons just to relieve the tension.

  The only thing they could do was watch the sonar screen as the passive return grew stronger. The Yag boat was heading almost directly for them; it would pass by about three hundred metres above them and a little in front. It would be a close call whether they ended up in its baffles – the conical volume astern of a boat in which its own engines blinded its sonar.

  Katya had no idea how broad a cone that was. If they were hidden by the Yag’s engine noise, they could risk the descent to the thermocline and hide behind the layer of the water where the temperature above was lower than that below, and which could reflect sonar waves. If they weren’t, however, the Yag would hear the air venting from their ballast tanks as they gained negative buoyancy, and then the Yag would kill them. Given how nice a boat the Vodyanoi was, she reckoned its baffles were small, and that the baffles of her clones might be small too. It wasn’t worth the risk.

  Katya kept her arms very folded.

  Sergei leaned forward. “What the hell is that?” he murmured.

  Behind them, a new trace had appeared. If they had been under way the contact would have been lost in their own baffles. Only that they were running silent permitted the sonar receptors to pick up the new contact. Katya quickly brought the hydrophones to bear. Any faint hope that it might be a Federal patrol boat was quickly shattered.

  “Ninety per cent likelihood contact Beta is a Jarilo Mark 4 class heavy carrier submarine of the Federal Maritime Authority,” the computer told them. “It is therefore designated an ally.” The contact’s symbol flicked from yellow to blue.

  “A transporter,” whispered Sergei. “It’s bound to have an escort!”

  On the screen, the Alpha contact slowed and faded. The Yags were coming about for an attack pass. “They’ll fire and run,” he said. “Those poor bastards…”

  Katya’s eye fell on the database readout currently displayed on one of her secondary screens. The Jarilo was listed as having a standard crew of twenty. Twenty men and women who would probably die in a few minutes. Then its unseen escort or escorts would engage the Vodyanoi/2 and soon there would be more blood in the water.

  “No,” she murmured. “I can’t let that happen.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  FALSE FLAG

  Sergei’s eyes were unattractively wide. Fear did that to them.

  “Katya, we can’t get involved! We’re in a minisub, a tiny bug! Even a close detonation will break us open!”

  “Then we’re just going to have to make sure nothing goes off near us then, aren’t we?” Katya was already pulling up the operations screens. “Arm a noisemaker and stand by to dive.”

  Sergei did neither. “What? No! You’ll kill us!”

  “Not part of the plan, Sergei. Just do it.”

  “What plan? We’re nothing more than krill compared to the hunter-killers out there! Just stay still and silent and we should weather this out!”

  “I am not standing by and letting this happen, Sergei. Noisemaker! Arm one!” But Sergei just looked at her as if she was insane. “I am the captain here, Sergei Illyin! You will obey my orders!”

  On the screen the Alpha contact faded away entirely. The Beta contact in contrast grew steadily stronger. It would only be a matter of moments before the Yagizban boat launched torpedoes.

  “You can’t order me to commit suicide,” said Sergei. “Captain.”

  Katya glared at him, then turned her attention to the controls. In a few quick moves she had frozen Sergei’s work station out and taken full control of the Lukyan.

  “Noisemaker 1 armed,” reported the computer. Katya checked the settings she’d given it, and then flipped the cover on a “Commit” button. As a security and safety measure, some functions could not be activated through the touch screens – it was far too easy for accidents to happen that way. These functions, many of which were associated with weapons, had to be confirmed with the actual push of a physical button. Technically, noisemakers were considered weapons in terms of their interface functionality and the fact that they were expendable and expensive supplies. Nobody wanted to launch one accidentally. Katya’s fingertip hesitated for half a heartbeat, and then pushed the button with a sense of finality.

  A slight click sounded through the hull as the noisemaker’s mounting clamp released it. “Noisemaker 1 away,” said the computer.

  Katya made a point of not looking at Sergei; she knew full well what expression he would be wearing at that moment and it wouldn’t be one that bolstered her confidence.

  Without pause, she opened the tactical options sheet on a secondary screen and ordered a slow descent below the next thermocline. The computer gauged that they would reach it in about ten seconds, which was encouraging as that was the timing she’d based the noisemaker’s programming upon. Now she could only hope that the Yagizban would not open fire in those ten seconds, that her plan – such as it was – would work, and that they didn’t get killed in the next few minutes.

  Dying would be bad enough, but having Sergei spending their last moments saying “I told you so” would be more than she could bear.

  The passive sonar did not report torpedoes in the water, which didn’t surprise her at all. She’d seen enough of the military to know that they didn’t like jumping in when there was still uncertainty about the situation. In this case, the Yags had almost certainly picked up the sound of air venting from the Lukyan’s ballast tanks and were wondering what was out there that they hadn’t yet detected. That was enough to take the finger off the firing button.

  A moment later the Lukyan sank through the thermocline and immediately adjusted its tanks to neutral buoyancy in the shadowed space there, where sonar waves tended to behave unreliably. As they breached the thermal layer where the water temperature changed abruptly, a hundred metres above them, where it had been lazily rising from its release point, the noisemaker burst into life. Essentially a small torpedo with a motor that mimicked the sound of a larger boat, the Noisemaker 1 set off on its maiden and final journey, straight towards the presumed location of the Yagizban Vodyanoi/2 warboat.

  Noisemakers were clever devices, but the fact remained that their impersonation could only be reasonably convincing and no more. Inside a minute the Yag boat would have identified inconsistencies in the hydrophone data and the noisemaker would be subsequently ignored. A minute is a long time in a battle, however, and now things started to happen rapidly.

  The Jarilo, more than aware that stealth was not its strong suit, anticipated that it was probably already on an enemy’s scopes and decided to respond aggressively. A focused cone of sound energy sped out from its bow as it emitted a directional sonar “ping.” Suddenly the Yagizban’s stealthy manoeuvring was all for nothing as it lit up brilliantly on the sonar screens of the Jarilo, the Lukyan, and doubtless the one or more Federal warboats shadowing the transport.

  Instantly the situation changed from a stalking game to a straight fight. The Vodyanoi/2 launched one torpedo and changed course dramatically, diving for the thermocline itself. “Oops,” said Katya more mildly than this development really deserved; in a moment the Yagizban warboat would be on the same side of the temperature differential as them, and it would be able to see them easily.
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  Discretion would definitely be the better part of valour, she decided, and opened the throttle to one third ahead. It had turned into a game of judging the angles; she needed the Lukyan to get into the Yag’s baffles while at the same time not exciting the curiosity of the Jarilo’s escort – who, a bleep on the display informed her, had just launched a torpedo themselves – because in the confusion of a submarine battle, the Feds would be sure to fire first and run a sonic profile analysis later. They would probably be very sorrowful about sinking a Federally registered minisub, but then shrug, say “That’s war” and ask what’s for dinner.

  She made an educated guess where the rapidly fading trace of the Yagizban boat was heading and what its bearing was; drew a line that should be, more or less, its blind spot, and piloted the Lukyan into it. Beside her she could hear Sergei breathing heavily, possibly with fear, possibly with anger, most likely both. If she got them out of this alive, there was going to be a monstrous argument afterwards, of that she was sure. For the time being, however, she was entirely focused on the “getting out of this alive” aspect of their immediate situation.

  She turned the Lukyan to starboard and headed away, hoping for the best. The hydrophones were full of the sound of control surface cavitation, torpedo drives, and noisemakers being shot off in all directions, all of which boded well – the big boys were too busy with one another to worry about a little bug like theirs. There was still the possibility of a torpedo performing a search pattern picking them up, but every second they ran broadened their chances. After ten minutes Katya and Sergei were breathing more easily. After twenty they were as sure as they could be that they’d escaped the battle. Katya slowed to a crawl and “cleared the baffles” to be sure, performing a quiet three hundred and sixty degree circle that allowed the sensors to scan the entire environs. There was nothing out there but the kind of fish that doesn’t carry a warhead.