Katya's War

CHAPTER ONE Lukyan

The piece of paper looked cheap and disposable and in no way commensurate with the hard work and trouble it was intended to reward.

Katya Kuriakova held up the paper between her index and middle finger and said, “What the hell is this?”

The Federal officer was too busy writing on his pad for several seconds before he could be bothered to answer her. “It’s your payment, captain.” He glanced up and deigned to look her in the face. “It’s a standard Federal compensation form, properly authorised. Payment in full for services rendered.”

Even a few years before, the officer might have found it strange to be calling a girl of sixteen “captain,” but that was what she was and protocol on such matters was inflexible. That her boat was some battered little utility bug was irrelevant. She stood there in a set of dark red overalls that bore her name and a “Master & Commander” stripe over the left breast pocket, her short blonde hair tousled unattractively by the same lack of sleep that was doubtless responsible for the dark rings under her eyes, glaring at him with aggressive disbelief, and holding up the Federal scrip as if it were a declaration of war or, at least, a grave personal insult.

Still, conceded the officer inwardly, she had a nice nose.

“A scrip? A scrip? Two days navigating the Vexations, dodging Yagizban patrols the whole way, pushing test depth for twelve hours at a stretch, and have you any idea what the sanitary arrangements on a minisub are like?”

The officer sighed. “Three things, captain. First, the scrip’s as good as money. Second…” he had to raise his voice slightly to override Katya’s furious denial that scrips were damn well nowhere near as good as money, “…I have no leeway on the matter. My orders are to pay captains with compensation forms. I have no money to give you even if my orders permitted it. And third, there is a war on.” He hefted his pad under his arm as if it were some marker of rank and walked further down the docking corridor towards another weary-looking captain and probably an identical argument.

Katya watched him go with the muted anger of somebody who knows from bitter experience that you can’t fight the system, especially when the system is running in a crisis and has its heels dug in against anything less important than its own survival.

There is a war on.

A single humourless laugh escaped her. Yes, officer, she thought, there is a war on. I helped start it.

She was glad she had kept that to herself; it really wouldn’t have helped matters.

She walked back to the minisub pens, to where her boat sat snugly held in its stall, aft door secure against the stable’s open access hatch. Sergei was just finishing draining the cess tank and looking as happy about it as could be expected. His mood was not improved when he saw the scrip in Katya’s hand.

“God’s teeth!” he muttered with the easy blasphemy of a born atheist. He picked up the toilet paper refill from the deck and held it out to her. “You might as well stick that thing in here. At least we’ll have a use for it then.”

Katya ignored the proffered box and stepped through the hatch, neatly avoiding catching her foot on the cess drainage tube. Four months previously she had not been so agile and the result had been impressively unpleasant. It was the sort of lesson that only needed learning once.

She sank into the fore starboard passenger’s seat and opened the locker beneath it. Inside was a waterproof documents box — “Guaranteed to resist pressures to five hundred metres!” according to the vendor — which she pulled out and unlocked with a four digit key. Inside, amongst all the other hardcopy documentation a properly registered submarine was supposed to carry and keep maintained, was a plastic folder labelled Magic Money Markers! Collect the set and see the wizerd! Labelled by Sergei, obviously. Certainly from its tone but not least because he had misspelled “wizard.” Within it was a wad of Federal Maritime Authority compensation forms, generically identical to the one that she now added to it. She quickly counted them, summing their worth as she went.

“Fancy going to Atlantis?” she called back to Sergei.

Sergei was just finishing with the cess tank. “Why is it not OK to vent the tank to the sea when it’s full, but it’s fine to vent it for cleaning after it’s been drained?” he asked and, like many of his questions, it was rhetorical. “I mean, like a bit of shit is going to break the ecosystem.” He locked down the tank’s hatch and cycled water through it from outside the hull. “Fish like shit, anyway. It’s got nutrients.”

“And deep thoughts like that are why you must never be put into any position of authority, Sergei. Now, pay attention. This is your captain speaking.” She waited until he had deactivated the cess tank’s cleaning procedure, replaced the deck plate over it, and then slowly swung his hand to his brow to make his usual lackadaisical and mocking salute to her. She took no offence at it; Sergei used to make the same salute to her uncle Lukyan when he had been captain. Lukyan could have punched Sergei clean through a bulkhead if he’d had a mind to, but what was the point? To deny Sergei his minor insubordinations would have been like denying him air.

Things were different now, of course. Lukyan was dead, and Katya was captain and owner of the little submarine, and it wasn’t called Pushkin’s Baby anymore. Also there was a war on. So many changes in so little time. It was good that some things could still be relied upon. Sergei being miserable, for example.

“Aye aye, Captain Kuriakova,” he said, his salute a thing of refined slovenliness that hung upon his brow like a dead eel. Belatedly, he realised what she had said and he dropped his arm to his side. “Atlantis? Do we have to?”

She waved the wad of scrips at him before returning them to the folder and stowing it away again. “Only way we’ll ever get these things turned into real money.”

“I know a man,” said Sergei. He had lowered his voice a little and was cautiously looking up and down the corridor alley connecting the pens. “And this fellow, he will buy the scrips off us, no questions asked.”

“Oh?” said Katya. “And how much ‘commission’ will he want?”

Sergei looked at her with astonishment. He still thinks I’m a little girl, she thought.

He mumbled something, mumbled it a little louder when she raised her eyebrows, and finally, provoked by her crossing her arms and leaning back in the seat, grudgingly admitted, “Fifty per cent.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Are you serious? Is he serious? Six months of hard, dangerous work, and half of it goes to some criminal who–”

“He’s not a criminal,” muttered Sergei.

“He’s buying scrips at half price and then somehow cashing them in for full. That’s not legal. So, yes, some criminal who profits from half our work while he sits nice and safe.” She spat a descriptive term for the unnamed criminal that hadn’t been heard in the boat since Lukyan was alive, and which went a long way to assuring Sergei that, no, Katya was no longer a little girl.

Sergei walked forward and took the seat opposite her. When he spoke, it was in a quieter and more reasonable tone. She began to understand that this wasn’t just his habitual pessimism; he was truly concerned.

“Atlantis is dangerous, Katya. I’ve heard some real horror stories about the Yags attacking anything in the water near there.”

“I haven’t.”

“It’s not the kind of thing the Feds are going to advertise, is it? That they can’t even defend the volume around the capital?” He leaned forward, almost speaking in a whisper. “Things are going really badly for the Feds. Really badly.”

Katya looked at Sergei’s worried expression, but it did not soften her resolve. The truth, as far as the truth can ever really be defined in wartime, seemed very even-handed. Yes, the Feds were having a bad time of it, but the Yagizban were hardly swimming around without a care in the world. They may have had the technological edge, but they lacked numbers, and — since the FMA had captured one of their advanced war boats at the eve of the war — even that edge had been somewhat blunted. Several of its systems had been reverse-engineered, reproduced and incorporated into serving FMA vessels already. As for the captured boat, it was out there right now, fighting for the Federal cause under its new name, the Vengeance.

“The Feds located and destroyed a Yag spy base,” she countered. “It was all over the news just before we left.”

“Yes, but they would say that,” countered Sergei, much more inclined to believe the worst in any given situation.

“There were pictures…”

“You only have the Feds’ word for it that they were new. Could have been taken months ago.”

Katya closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Sergei recognised the gesture and became subdued. It meant she was finding a quiet place in her mind where she could make a decision, a decision that was not long in coming.

“We have to believe in something,” she said, tired and morose. “Right now, I have a strong belief that I need a shower and a night where I can sleep in an actual bed. Be ready to leave at oh-nine-hundred tomorrow morning.” She climbed to her feet and walked aft to the open hatch. Sergei sighed melodramatically, but did not argue. Like her uncle, there was little point in debating with Katya once her mind was made up. “I’ll book the departure with traffic control now,” she said as she climbed out. “Good night, Sergei.”

“‘Night, Katya,” he replied, but the hatchway was already empty.

She was in the traffic control office for fifteen minutes, five of which were spent waiting, four logging the departure, and six creating the course. The desk officer was irritated at first when she told him she didn’t have a course already plotted and would it be alright to use his console? His uniform denoted him as a major of the Federal Marines, and his prosthetic right arm was the likely reason he was now piloting a desk and for his generally spiky demeanour. While his comrades were off engaging the hated foe in battle, he was left ratifying civilian travel arrangements and issuing dockets. His irritation was rapidly soothed, however, by the speed and assurance with which she made the necessary calculations and by the time she had finished, he found it within himself to compliment her.

“My uncle used to say I was a prodigy,” she said with a wan smile.

“Your uncle? Well, he’s…” The officer, a lean man in his early fifties paused, his eyes upon the name of the submarine. “Ah. You’re Lukyan’s girl…?”

She could only nod. It still hurt even to hear his name.

The officer looked at her with a respect she did not feel she had earned. “He was a fine man, captain. Yes, he mentioned you, more than once.” He smiled a little bleakly. “The word prodigy was bandied around. Not just family pride as it turns out.” The console bleeped and showed a green light by the plotted course, indicating that it was acceptable by marine law and sensible within the complex flows of the Russalkin seas. The officer immediately authorised the plot and entered it into the log.

“My co-pilot is concerned about Yag activity near Atlantis,” said Katya. “Anything that we should know about?”

The officer shook his head. “A week ago I would have told you to wait or join a convoy. Nothing’s happened out there for days, though. It’s likely the patrols have driven the Yag out of the volume, but… be careful all the same.”

Katya picked up her identity card and her boat’s clock card and stowed them in her coveralls. “I always am. Good evening, major.”

Something happened on the way to the hotel. The route she used was a supply corridor that would have been off-limits to foot traffic during the day shift while electric tractors pulled cargo to storage areas and industrial sections. Once the lights dimmed, however, the corridors opened to pedestrians on the understanding that the occasional tractor would still be whirring by, so they should get out of the way when they heard one coming. The submariners were the only people to feel comfortable doing that; most stuck to the main corridors no matter what time it was.

Katya was making her way along the side of the long curved tunnel, when she heard footfalls approaching from the other direction. A moment later, two FMA base security officers — police officers in all but title — walked by her. One ignored her entirely, too busy adjusting the baton in his belt, the other stared straight at Katya as they passed, as if daring her to return the look. Katya did not; she had no desire to get into a battle of wills with them. At the very least they’d demand to see her identity card, and she was too tired for those kinds of status games.

They passed her without slowing and she kept walking, grateful that there was nothing between her, the hotel, and sleep. Nothing, that is, until she turned the corner and found the sobbing man.

He was crouched by the wall, his back to her, crying like a child in a pool of his own blood. Katya stopped sharply enough to make her boots squeal on the concrete. The man gasped with terror and looked furtively over his shoulder at her. She saw his nose was broken, and the white of one eye was bloodshot, the pupil blown.

“Oh, gods,” she managed. “What happened? Are you alright?”

The second question was almost as stupid as the first, but she’d had to say something. It was as plain that he’d been badly beaten as it was that, no, he wasn’t alright at all.

The bloodied eye looked past her, and she realised what he was looking for. “No, it’s alright,” she said in a quiet, reassuring tone. “They’ve gone. Why did they do this to you?”

He didn’t answer, but she saw the fear grow in him, and the tears mix with the blood and snot from his ruined nose. She saw the defence injures on the back of his hands as he cowered from her, at least two fingers on his right hand seeming broken; she saw his belt lying by his feet on the concrete floor; she saw the smashed teeth and the straight bruises, as wide as a baton’s contact area, across his brow.

They remained in tableau for long moments, the only sound the man’s miserable soul-deep weeping.

“I’ll take you to the medical centre, OK?” she said finally. She crouched by him. “I’ll take you to the medical centre. You’ll be OK.”

She didn’t ask again why the FMA officers had done this. It could have been something or nothing. She’d heard it didn’t take much to earn a beating these days — a word in the wrong place about rationing, how the war was being handled, how the Feds had their noses into everything — but she’d believed it had been exaggerated in the telling. It seemed she had been the one deluding herself.

The man shook his head, said something like, “I’m fine,” rose and walked painfully away from her, back in the direction of the docks. He leaned against the wall as he went, leaving a trail of bloody handprints, each dimmer than the last.

“That’s the direction they were going in!” she called after him, but he did not respond.

She called it in. She found a communications point a little further up the corridor and asked specifically for the major in traffic control. When she was put through, she explained what had happened, and that there was a man heading in his direction who desperately needed medical attention.

“I’ll alert a response team. Don’t worry, captain. He’ll be attended to.”

“What about the officers?”

The line was silent for a moment. “Did you actually see the assault?”

“No,” said Katya, “but there was no one else in the corridor. It had to have been…”

“That’s supposition. You’re not a witness. It will be dealt with, don’t worry.”

“But I am a witness, aren’t I? After the fact, but I’m still a witness. Don’t you want a statement or anything?”

Another silence. Katya suddenly wondered if the major was consulting with somebody else.

“That won’t be necessary. Base security can take it from here.”

Katya wanted to say, “But they won’t investigate their own people properly,” when she caught herself.

It really didn’t take much to earn a beating these days.

“I understand,” she said. “I’ll leave it with you, major.”

“Thank you for calling it in, Captain Kuriakova. Good night.”

The line closed before she could reply.

Katya looked back along the corridor. The man’s belt was still lying there. She turned and walked away, feeling she’d failed a test.

It wasn’t what you’d call a hotel. Many of the larger settlements contained hotels or hostels or similar establishments, but Mologa Station was too small for that. Originally a mining site, its tunnels cut by fusion torches in strange organic curves and meanders to follow mineral seams, Mologa was now primarily a heavy engineering plant producing boats and mobile facilities for the war effort, hence the tight security and strong Federal presence.

Katya’s security grade was Beta Plus, a full three grades higher than most civilians and the product of being in the FMA’s good books after the events of six months earlier, the very events that had begun the war. In the same waterproof container that held the boat’s papers and her personal documents was a small box made of wood.

Real wood. Real, actual wood, grown as a luxury in one of the larger hydroponics farms. Inside the box was a medal on a little red ribbon, upon which was her name, and the legend, Hero of Russalka. There was also a slip of paper, the citation for the medal, which explained why it had been awarded. It used a lot of words like “heroic” and “selfless” when talking about her, and “villainy” and “traitorous” when talking about the Yagizban. It also gave the date on which the honour had been presented to her. That was a little lie, though; the medal had never been presented to her at all. Instead it had been delivered by courier, who’d just had her submit to a retinal scan, handed over a package, and left. The box had been in the package, and the medal had been in the box.

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 uniform 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.