Katya's War

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Desperate Times

The Vodyanoi moved away from the group of escape pods at surface cruise speed, which was only two thirds of the maximum. Slowly the pods dwindled into the distance. With Katya on the conning tower, Kane watched them go through his binoculars, impatience making him fractious.

“Oh, come on. Where are you? There’s a whole high security facility been destroyed and you can’t…”

Sudden rapid boot falls on the ladder made him pause. A moment later, Tasya emerged from the hatch. She’d changed into her trademark Terran trooper’s partial armour, Yagizban combat fatigues visible beneath it. “It’s the Feds.”

“Oh, super,” said Kane with unfeigned pleasure. “I was getting worried.”

“It’s the Novgorod. They’re in our baffles, communicating through the hydrophones.”

Kane produced his communicator again. “Hello, Number One,” he said into it. “Could you relay comms through my handset, please? Thanks. Thanks ever so.”

There was a pause and then, loud enough for them to all hear, “…ovgorod to hostile vessel. You are to surrender immediately. Failure to comply will result in…”

“Hello!” said Kane brightly. “Hello, is Petrov there? Captain Petrov, that is? This is Havilland Kane. Hello?” He waited, but there was near silence, only moderated by the artefacts of normal oceanic sounds that were being filtered out by the communications system. The two submarines were talking using the sea itself as the connecting medium, transmitting sound through their sonar grids and receiving it through their hydrophones.

“You’ve gone all quiet,” persisted Kane. “Hello? Anyone there?”

“This is Petrov. Surrender the Vodyanoi immediately, Kane, and prepare for boarding.”

“Yes, and lovely to hear from you, too. How are things?”

“I’m not playing games, Kane. Heave to, or we will launch torpedoes.”

“That would be rude of you. I’m transmitting a truce signal and everything.”

“You’re asking for a truce?”

“Mmhm. As is every Yagizban vessel and floating facility. In fact…” Kane looked ahead through his binoculars, “in fact, I can see FP-1 ahead. I know you didn’t have a very good experience there last time, but if you listen, you’ll find they’re transmitting for a truce, too.”

“What are you playing at, Kane?”

“Captain, I have a great deal of respect for you. You are an honourable and intelligent man. I will not lie to you. We have done a very desperate thing. If it comes off, the war will be over and there will still be Russalkin alive at the end of it. If it doesn’t, the two sides will just keep on hitting one another until there’s no one left. The truce is entirely sincere. Our tubes are closed and loaded only with noisemakers. You are in our baffles. We are at your mercy. Please, surface. We will not engage. You can keep your tubes open and blow us out of the water if we try anything.”

“Your reputation for cunning makes me distrust you.”

Katya gestured to Kane to hand her the communicator. He nodded and gave it to her without hesitation. “Petrov? Captain Petrov?”

“Who is this?”

“Katya, sir. Katya Kuriakova. Please, Kane’s telling the truth. If you don’t trust him, maybe you can trust me.”

“Ms Kuriakova.” Petrov seemed unsettled. “I thought you must have died in the Deeps.”

“I nearly did. But even if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered, not to Russalka. Please, this is bigger than the war. This is about everything.” She tried to think of something to convince him, something she would never offer up under duress. When she thought of it, she had to take a second to steel herself to say it in an even voice. “I swear it on my love for my uncle, Lukyan Pushkin.”

“I see.” Petrov was silent for a moment, then said, “Kane? Are you there?”

“Yes, captain.”

“If I get even the ghost of a bad feeling about this, I will engage you without a second thought. Do you understand?”

“The truce is genuine, captain.”

“If you’ve made a liar of Ms Kuriakova,” said Petrov evenly, “I will kill you myself. Petrov out.”

Kane pulled a face. “He sounded quite impassioned there, didn’t he? By his standards, anyway.” He lifted the communicator to his mouth. “Ms Ocello. The Novgorod will be surfacing off our stern in a moment. Please don’t do anything to make them more excited than they already are. They’re on a bit of a hair-trigger.”

“Aye, captain.”

Two minutes later, the waters three hundred metres aft of the Vodyanoi heaved and split, cascading from the Novgorod’s conning tower as she rose, huge and ominous. Almost twice the length of the Vodyanoi, she was as capable and as deadly as she looked. Formerly she’d been called a “shipping protection vessel,” but that had just been a polite name for a warboat built in peacetime. Her bow torpedo tubes were open, their threat explicit.

Kane gave them enough time for the water to clear her hull cameras, and for the forward facing lenses to find him. Then he smiled and waved.

“Provocative as always,” said Tasya.

“Just being friendly,” said Kane. “You can’t launch torpedoes at someone who’s waving at you. It’d be inhuman.” He noticed Katya wince. “Just trying to lighten the mood,” he apologised. “I… oh. It’s your ribs, isn’t it?”

The Vodyanoi’s medic had checked Katya over and told her that she’d cracked three ribs and would be in “some discomfort” for the month or so it would take for the bones to set. She’d been given some pain medication and told to come back the next day. Oksana’s breaks were far more severe, one rib threatening to puncture a lung. The medic assured Katya that he’d dealt with much worse, and shooed her out of the sickbay so that he could get on with his job.

“Yes, it’s my ribs.” She felt very tired, and the thought of having trouble lying on her left side whilst trying to sleep didn’t appeal to her at all. Yes, she had sedatives to help with that, but she didn’t enjoy the prospect of swallowing so many drugs. The Russalkin distrust of drugs ran deep, even medicinal ones. “There’s somebody over there!”

Indeed there was. Petrov had appeared on the Novgorod’s conning tower along with another officer and two marines. Both the latter took firing positions on the rail, and levelled maser carbines at Kane, Tasya, and Katya.

“You know, I don’t think he trusts us,” said Kane.

“No,” corrected Katya. “He doesn’t trust you.”

“Hurtful,” said Kane philosophically.

A shortwave signal came in and the captains spoke. “Very well, Kane. What is the purpose of this truce?”

“Well, probably easier to show than tell, Captain Petrov. Let me just check my chronometer.” He looked up, lips pursed. “Does anyone know why we don’t just call chronometers watches? Sorry. Random thought. Can you see FP-1, captain?”

It was a somewhat patronising comment; Petrov would have had to have his eyes shut or be facing the other way not to see the massive floating military airfield. It was close enough now to be filling a good section of the visible horizon. Vast, grey, and imposing.

“Of course I can see it.”

“Then I think this is as good a place as any to stop. Warn your helm we’re going to go all engines stop in a minute.”

They saw Petrov speak to his officer and the Novgorod immediately started to slow. With its great inertia, it couldn’t hope to come to a full halt quite as quickly as Vodyanoi, it began the manoeuvre early.

By the time both boats were no longer cutting bow waves, they had finished less than a hundred metres apart. The Novgorod had turned slightly to starboard while slowing to avoid any possibility of collision.

Kane’s communicator blipped and he changed to another channel, listened for a moment, and closed the call. “Captain Petrov,” he said after re-establishing the link to the Novgorod, “the war is over. Don’t get yourself and your crew killed at the last minute by doing something silly.”

“What are you talking about, Kane? The Yagizban have surrendered?”

Thunder rolled, a ripping, tearing peal of thunder that seemed to stun the waves. Petrov scanned the horizon looking for lightning, but there was none.

Kane passed the communicator to Katya. “He’ll take this better from you.”

Katya looked at him and tilted her head. “You think so?” she said, a little sardonically.

“Fractionally. Just tell him.”

Reluctantly Katya lifted the communicator and spoke.

“Hello? Anatoly? It’s Katya again.”

“Ms Kuriakova,” said Petrov cautiously. “Just what is Kane talking about?”

It was hard to sum it all up. To take all the reasons and the need and the desperation of it, and put it into words, especially when she’d spent her time in the Deeps doing her best to force it from her mind.

“The Terrans didn’t start the war, Anatoly. We did. The FMA high command might have given the orders, but we all just stood around like idiots and believed them. The last eleven, twelve years have been a big lie, but the Alpha Pluses were lying to us long before then.”

“That’s dissident talk, Ms Kuriak…”

“No! You haven’t seen the bodies. You haven’t seen just what’s lying in the middle of the Peklo Volume. I’m not guessing at the truth — I’ve seen it. The FMA is as good as dead. You should start thinking about what’s coming next.”

“And what precisely is coming next?” He sounded impatient, a man talking to a fanatic. Katya realised that he’d put her into a nicely stereotyped category in his mind so that he didn’t have to think very hard about what she said. She couldn’t blame him. How many times had she heard similarly dark muttering from others, usually put down by a friend’s concerned whisper of, “Careful. Don’t let Secor hear you talking like that.”

“I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t tell Secor. I’ll tell you what I did in Atlantis, what made me a traitor. I placed a transmitter box in a disused relay station.”

“A microwave relay. I know. I saw the report. To communicate with all the surface Yagizban elements. To what end?”

“Is that what the report said? It’s wrong. Atlantis is the oldest settlement, with equipment not found at any other station. Equipment we’ve lost the ability to replicate elsewhere. The microwave relay I plugged that box into was the old satellite communications link.”

“There are no satellites left. The Terrans destroyed them.”

Petrov was sounding angrier than she’d ever heard him. Was he beginning to suspect? If so, it didn’t surprise her. He was a clever man.

“The Terrans destroyed all of our satellites, that’s true. Then they deployed their own.”

Across the water between the two boats, Katya saw Petrov lower his communicator as he understood exactly what Katya had done. She continued to speak. Perhaps he could still hear her.

“The Yagizban collaborated with the Terrans and were given the satellite network’s access codes. Anatoly… one of them is a long range faster-than-light communications array.”

In the clouds above FP-1, the lightning flashed long after the thunder had died away. Blue, unnatural lightning. As they watched the flickering blue grew stronger and brighter, illuminating the whole cloud bank above the waiting platform. Then the clouds rolled aside.

It was beautiful. It was terrifying. Katya thought of how the Novgorod had looked as she broke the surface. This seemed so similar, as if the clouds were the surface of an angry sea and they were looking down upon it.

Petrov’s voice came through the communicator, taut, angry, fearful. “Katya. What have you done?”

She turned it off. There was no point talking now. She had either helped save a world on the edge of destruction, or pushed it over the precipice. She had called across the stars, and her call had been heard.

The Terrans were here.