Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles)

by Howard, Jonathan L

  “So,” said Katya. “You girls do a lot of this sort of thing?” She’d seen how they watched the hatch close like a death sentence, and seemed disconcerted by the boat’s wallowing when they’d been on the surface. The logical deduction was that they’d been seconded from base security, and were not frequent travellers.

  One of them got up and went to the toilet unit. The other sat there, pallid as they listened to her colleague being sick very audibly because of the imperfectly closed door. Throughout, Katya smiled pleasantly at the seated trooper.

  She’d apparently broken the first Secor interrogator, after all; perhaps she could break a few more Feds before she reached the Deeps. She balled her hands into fists and felt the restraints around her wrists. Yes, she decided, it was good to have a hobby.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ADMIRAL’S LAUNCH

  For the first couple of hours, the names of her escort were “None of your business, traitor.”

  Then, for about the next five hours, they were called “Officers Volkova and Shepitko to you, prisoner.”

  And finally they were Oksana and Alina, and Katya was now just “Katya.”

  Neither of the officers seemed greatly motivated by their current mission and settled easily into scuttlebutt and scurrilous tales about their fellow officers, their watch commander, and one of their husbands, who was very dreamy by all accounts.

  Katya tried to explain to them why she’d done what she’d done, about the drowned colony ship, slaughter at the evacuation site, the lies that threaded through every part of FMA operations, but Oksana just shushed her and said they’d been specifically ordered not to discuss the details of Katya’s case so, if it was all the same to her, wouldn’t she rather hear about the brilliant practical joke Oleg played on Grigory with a length of flexible piping, a quantity of liquid laxative, and a fire extinguisher? Katya had to admit that sounded pretty interesting, so they talked about it for a while. It turned out that Grigory stills hated Oleg because of the incident, and Katya said she couldn’t blame him, because Oleg had gone too far.

  As the chronometer showed the standard “day” turning to standard “night,” Katya said, “Those pilots must have steel bladders. Do they have their own head up front or something?”

  Oksana and Alina looked blankly at her, until she remembered that they’d probably never been on any submarine journey worth the name. “Head,” she explained. “It’s just the name for a boat’s toilet.”

  “There aren’t any pilots,” said Alina. “Everything’s automatic.”

  Katya looked at her in astonishment. “No pilots? What if anything goes wrong? Can you get to the pilot positions?”

  “Nothing’s going to go wrong,” said Oksana, whose confidence in the competence of her superiors tended towards complacency.

  “Maybe it won’t,” said Katya.

  There was no point talking to her guards for anything other than information and amusement. Recruits for Base Security were not renowned for their native intelligence, just their loyalty and a modicum of common sense. Okasana and Alina were not much older than her, and she was sure they’d signed up for Security out of a sense of patriotism and a desire to help their fellow citizens. They were goodhearted, but they were not very bright. There was no possibility that they would realise what was going on, and that was exactly why they had been chosen for the job.

  “Listen to me,” said Katya, “there’s nothing we can do about it, but I’m going to tell you what your superior didn’t when he gave you this mission. We will not be rendezvousing with another boat. A piece of junk like this…”

  “It’s an admiral’s launch!” said Alina, scandalised.

  “Maybe twenty years ago it was an admiral’s launch. These seats are new to this boat. If you look under yours, you can see new mountings have been drilled for them. Same thing with the display on the forward bulkhead. You can see the outline of the original one, which was a little bit wider. You can still smell the gel filling agent they used to neaten things up a bit. Believe me, two days ago this scow was sitting in storage.”

  Alina fell quiet and Katya continued, “A piece of junk like this will not be able to carry out an automatic docking at sea. It will be going all the way to the Deeps. I guarantee I will need the head before then. Now, back that way,” she nodded towards the rear of the boat, “no closer than five thousand metres and no farther than ten, there is at least one boat following us. I’d make a guess at the Novgorod. She was preparing to leave when we boarded. She knows the exact route we’ll be taking because we’re on automatic pilot and you can bet our shadows have the exact waypoint and timings list for the whole journey.”

  Oksana looked at her suspiciously. “How do you know all this?”

  “I don’t know it. Not for a fact. But I’ve lived my whole life in submarines and there are ways of doing things, and when those ways are changed you have to ask yourself, why?”

  Oksana shrugged. “Well, even if you’re right, having a warboat like the Novgorod is a good thing. I feel safer,” she added, speaking to Alina.

  Oksana’s unquestioning belief in the nobility of her masters had irked Katya in their earlier conversations, but now it was beginning to look like wilful ignorance.

  “You shouldn’t. Think about it – if a warboat is shadowing us all the way to the Deeps for our protection, why didn’t they just ship us there in the warboat?” She let that sink in before adding, “We’re bait.”

  “Bait? What are you talking about?” demanded Alina. Katya had already come to the conclusion that Alina was less impressed by her superiors than Oksana.

  “Well, I’m the bait, obviously. You’re… bait minders, I suppose.” She could see Oksana was about to express her resentment at the term, so she quickly said, “You see, somewhere that way,” she nodded her head forward, “they’re hoping the Vodyanoi is waiting, or maybe some Yagizban boats. They try to rescue me, and our shadows jump in for the kill.”

  Oksana’s eyes had grown large. “That’s exciting!”

  Alina looked at her as if she was insane. “Oksana! It’s not exciting! It’s terrifying!”

  Oksana snorted dismissively. “They won’t shoot at us.”

  “They won’t have to,” said Katya. “Torpedoes are pretty smart, but once they’re off guidance, if they’ve lost target lock, they’ll search to re-acquire it. This scow must be as noisy as hell. We might as well have a target painted on our tail. If we could control her, the smart thing would be to kill the drives and just dive quietly trying to find an isotherm to hide under. But we can’t. Alina’s right to be worried, Oksana. If we end up with, say, the Novgorod on one side and the Vodyanoi on the other exchanging torpedo fire, we’re as good as dead.”

  “But,” Oksana was trying to find a flaw in the logic, “but you’re a high value prisoner. They wouldn’t dare!”

  “Maybe, but I’m not as big a prize as the Vodyanoi. She’s been weed in the FMA’s fans since the war. They’d sacrifice me in a second if it meant sinking the Vodyanoi. Sacrifice us.” Oksana’s face fell; this was an argument she could understand. Alina already looked sick with fear. Katya smiled sympathetically. “Not that I want to worry you or anything.”

  After that, an air of doom-laden pessimism set in with her guards and they became far less strict with Katya. First they freed her hands, the theory being that she couldn’t reach them across the aisle while her ankles were still restrained. It was a reasonable theory and she had no desire to provoke them any further by trying anything suspicious. She did consider for a while pointing out that their main threat was far more likely to be boredom rather than torpedoes, since she had neglected to point out that Kane would never be stupid enough to fall for such an obvious trap. But frightened people tend to cling together, and she preferred the comradeship the phantom threat had created aboard the little shuttle.

  Then they let her use the head unsupervised, and – without prompting – let her walk up and down the aisle for a few minutes every c
ouple of hours to keep her circulation up. One or other of them would sit with their gun in hand as a matter of form, but without enthusiasm. Katya considered ways of taking control of the shuttle, but every plan foundered on the necessity of shooting one or both of her guards once she’d taken one of the poorly protected pistols, and then the certainty that the shadowing submarine would never allow her to get away even if she somehow managed to gain entrance to the control section.

  Katya was pleased that the former reason influenced her decision not to attempt an escape more than the latter. Despite everything, she hadn’t turned into the Chertovka yet.

  At least the little boat’s supplies included changes of clothing for Katya. Oksana and Alina’s kitbags had already been loaded when they’d come aboard and, when they had realised that they would be in the small vessel for almost three days, they had changed from duty uniforms to much more comfortable fatigues.

  By halfway through the second day, they were no longer bothering to restrain Katya at all. This change in affairs had been caused when, during one of her exercise walks up and down the aisle, she noticed Oksana’s gun lying by her folded uniform on one of the seats while Oksana was in the head using the shower unit. Katya coughed and, when Alina looked up from reading a book on her memo pad, pointed at the unattended maser. “You might want to put that somewhere where I can’t get it so easily,” advised Katya.

  The knowledge that their prisoner could have killed the pair of them – yet didn’t – convinced them that Katya was not at all violent, which made her status as a traitor all the more baffling to them. After Alina had finished shouting at Oksana about the pistol, she said to Katya, “So, just what did you do?”

  “Alina!” Oksana was scandalised at the flouting of their orders like this, but Alina just fobbed her off with an impatient flap of her hand.

  So Katya told them. She told them of how she’d been involved with the beginning of the war, and of how she discovered the Yagizban treason, although she did not tell them of the Leviathan because her story was complicated enough as it was. She described how she had become a darling of the news services for a day or two, of her decoration as a Hero of Russalka and of how much she loved the medal’s wooden box. Then she told them of the axis of enemies, of Havilland “Killer” Kane (who wasn’t the monster he was made out to be) and Tasya “Chertovka” Morevna (who pretty much was). Then she told them of how her boat was hijacked by the Vodyanoi, her voyage into Red Water, and what she found there – the massacre of Yagizban civilians, the grave of the Terran colonists.

  “The war has to stop,” she finished. “FMA versus Yagizban doesn’t matter anymore. The survival of the Russalkin is all that matters. That’s why I did what I did.”

  There was a silence. Then Oksana said, “The Yagizban base. It must have been a set-up. The Yags conned you, Katya.”

  “And they built a full scale replica of a Terran colony ship and sank it in the middle of the Peklo Volume? I know what I saw. I always thought the FMA was there for all of us. It never crossed my mind to ask what was going on in the governmental corridors.”

  She thought of something Kane had once said. He’d been right, damn him.

  “People are people,” she said. “Our ancestors put power into the hands of a small council with insufficient checks and balances as to how they used that power. Corruption had set in long before the Terrans returned, but that was a perfect opportunity to declare martial law. Since then it’s been endless wars. War against the Grubbers, or war against the pirates, and now war against the Yagizban. We’re so busy trying to be patriotic heroes we never even question if the wars were ever necessary.”

  Oksana wasn’t having it. She shook her head defiantly. “The Federal government would never do any of these things you’ve said they have.”

  Alina looked sideways at her. “That’s a pretty nice thing to say considering they’ve staked us out here like kraken bait.”

  “I’m sure they thought it was necessary.” Katya saw the light of desperation in Oksana’s eye, the fear of change. She’d seen it in Sergei’s, too. “They know what they’re doing.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Alina, “they know exactly what they’re doing. What they’re not doing is caring a bucket of fish guts what happens to us. Think about it, Oks. They could have programmed this shuttle to wait in the moon pool exit tunnel while an empty one went out instead on full automatic. Then the Novgorod or whatever followed us out could have picked us up in its salvage maw. We’d be nice and safe in a big warboat, and who cares what happens to the shuttle? Let Kane and the She-Devil go after it, good riddance to it.”

  It was a good idea, Katya admitted to herself, and must surely have occurred to the people behind their current situation. It would, of course, have required substantial extra organisation. However much trouble it would have taken, apparently the three women weren’t worth it in the eyes of the Federal Government. And, of course, if Katya died out there, it would be claimed the Yagizban had murdered her to keep her silent, no matter whose torpedo actually made the kill. Alina and Oksana’s deaths would be entirely acceptable collateral damage.

  Katya didn’t think either of them really believed her about what she’d seen in the Red Water. Oksana clung to the notion that the Yagizban had somehow fooled Katya into doing their dirty work for them, while Alina somehow heard what Katya had said, accepted it, and then partially forgot about it. It was as if Katya’s experiences ran contrary to the universe Alina thought she had grown up within, the resulting cognitive dissonance weakening the newer and less established thoughts. Katya couldn’t really blame her; for all her apparent cynicism, the FMA was a godlike entity to Alina, and it would take more than some hearsay to break her faith.

  The one thing that did stick with both her guards was that they would not be intercepted by pirates or Yagizban, so they relaxed, played games, and told one another anecdotes. Here, at least, they had no problems of belief or comprehension when Katya told them about Killer Kane and the Chertovka. Oksana was disappointed and Alina unsurprised that Kane was polite and thoughtful, and was not very keen on killing people as a rule. “Where’s the return in being a mass murderer?” Alina pointed out. “Piracy is a business. Kane’s a businessman.” She nodded sagely at this wisdom.

  They were far more intrigued by Tasya Morevna. “Is it true she collects the heads of those she kills in battle?” asked Alina with an artlessness Katya expected more from Oksana.

  “No,” said Katya. “She a real warrior, but she’s not a sadist or a lunatic; not most of the time, anyway.”

  “Is it true she wears Terran armour?” asked Oksana.

  “Yes, she does. She’s painted it up a bit, and it’s not a complete suit – the torso section mainly – but, yes, it’s definitely not Russalkin.”

  “How does she look in it?”

  “I bet she looks awesome!” said Alina, and they all laughed. It seemed, Katya thought, that Tasya’s fan club extended even beyond the Yagizban, who certainly held her in awe.

  Yet, slow as the journey was, it still had to come to an end. Katya found the shadow of her uncertain future deepening around her again, and her guards were sorry too, for they had come to like one another. They spent the last six hours of the approach tidying up the inside of the shuttle, which had begun to look like a dormitory, chatting about almost anything but their destination. Alina said at least they’d been going about as fast as the shuttle could manage; the shadowing warboat or boats would only have been making a fraction of their usual cruising speed. She mimed the helmsman pushing forward an imaginary throttle control a tiny bit and then slowly tapping his fingers while wearing an expression of slack-jawed boredom. She snapped back to herself, announced “Three days later!” and instantly returned to the same expression and finger tapping. Oksana and Katya laughed and Alina joined in.

  Katya decided not to mention how glad she was that she hadn’t murdered the pair of them earlier, no matter how kindly meant the comment was.

&nbs
p; With an hour to go, the shuttle was in pristine order. Officers Volkova and Shepitko were in their duty uniforms, masers holstered. The prisoner, Katya Kuriakova, was in her yellow convict uniform sitting in restraints opposite to them. While the scene was very similar to that of three days earlier, the tone was very different. Officer Alina Shepitko had apologised when one of Prisoner Kuriakova’s wrists was nipped by its restraining strap as it was tightened. Where once they had glared at her, now they cast her sympathetic glances.

  “It’ll be OK,” Officer Oksana Volkova told the prisoner. “Just keep your head down. Don’t piss off the guards. We’ll give you a great report when we’re debriefed. Model prisoner. They’ll go easy on you.”

  Katya smiled. It was a weak, unconvincing smile, for she was touched by the kindness of her escorts, but she also knew what was waiting for her, and she was afraid. “Thanks, Oksa… Officer Volkova. I appreciate that. They’re not bringing me to the Deeps just to lock me away, though.” Her smile dissolved away altogether. “They’re taking me there because it has the main Secor interrogation facility. They’re going to torture me, and then they’re going to kill me.” She made a half sob sound in her throat and looked at them without hope. “I’m really scared.”

  “No,” said Alina. “No, they won’t do that.”

  “Two Secor agents have told me that is exactly what they’re going to do.” She tried to smile to reassure them that it was alright, none of this was their fault, but the muscles in her face twisted it into a grimace.