Katya's World

CHAPTER 12 Sin Bottle

She didn’t even have to ask her way; the doors were labelled. In less time than she would have liked, she was standing in front of one of the Vodyanoi’s executive officers’ staterooms, the door simply labelled KANE. She stood indecisively for a long moment, wondering whether it would be better to suggest her idea to the others back on the bridge. It would be so much easier to put the problem into somebody else’s hands. But… she looked at the name plate again. Kane knew it all. If she came here from the bridge leading a mob, he’d shut up and claim ignorance.

There was something going on within him, some aspect of all this that was torturing him. He’d believed the Leviathan was gone and arranged his life accordingly. Now it was back and it thought the war was still on. He wanted to stop the Leviathan, she was sure of it, but the damage was already done. People knew too much about him for his own security and comfort. Even if they stopped the Leviathan, what would he do next?

The Leviathan, she scolded herself. It will cause untold misery and death. You need to know what Kane knows and you need to know it now. She knocked, waited a second, and entered.

Perhaps she should have waited until he’d asked her to come in. She found him in a frenzy of concealment, throwing an awkward handful of things into an open desk drawer and slamming it shut. Something stopped the drawer closing completely and he slammed it twice more in frustration before pushing the obstruction down inside and finally getting the drawer shut. He turned to Katya and spoke with false calmness.

“How can I help you, Ms Kuriakova?”

Katya pointed at the closed drawer. “What was that?”

“None of your concern. Now, what…”

“It was a syringe, a pressure syringe.”

He looked at the drawer and then back at her. “You’re mistaken.”

“I had to train to use those things for the paramedic certification on my officer’s card. Don’t treat me like some idiot off the corridors, Kane. I know a pressure syringe when I see one.”

“I don’t care what… Wait!”

Katya, anger growing in her, had stepped the two short steps needed to take her across the small stateroom to the desk and jerked it open. It was a syringe all right, and nestling against it was a slim loading-bottle of an inky black fluid. It had no label. It didn’t need one. She snatched up the syringe. The dose chamber was empty, but there were still the faint traces of black fluid there. She turned on Kane, her anger becoming fury. “You!” She almost screamed it. They’d trusted so much to him and all the time… this. “You’re a waster!” She flung the syringe at him. It bounced off his chest and fell into his lap.

He looked at it sadly, as if somebody had just flung a gift back in his face. He picked it up and put it back into the drawer, slowly and carefully this time. He slid the drawer shut and looked at her. “Ms Kuriakova. Katya… this isn’t what you think.”

Not what she thought? Ever since she’d been born, a loathing of wasters had been drilled into her. It was inconceivable to her why anybody should want to corrupt their bodies with drugs just for a brief… What? A release from reality? Why? Reality was all there was. Russalka society tolerated alcohol, but it was controlled to levels that would have appalled their ancestors. Russalka was as unforgiving as the hard vacuum of space. Being drunk could kill you. Being tired could kill you. Hell’s teeth, even being momentarily distracted could kill you. Not just you, either. With such a small overall population, everybody had a weight to carry for everybody else. Every Russalkin shouldered responsibility, and they shouldered it young. Deliberately using drugs was a dereliction of that responsibility and that could not, would not be countenanced. She’d heard tales of men from the early days of the colony, bad men, who’d tried to make themselves rich by supplying drugs, creating wasters and so creating their own little herd of criminals who needed the next little bottle of stolen or illegally synthesised narcotics more than they needed their pride. These bad men, so the stories went, ended up inside airlocks without breathing gear while grim faced citizens on the other side of the door cycled open the outer lock and let in Russalka’s implacable ocean. After a very short while, there were no bad men left.

Kane seemed to know pathetic it would sound but he said it anyway. “It’s not what you think. It’s medicinal.”

“In an unmarked bottle? How stupid do you think I am?” His weakness earlier, his collapse aboard the Novgorod, it all made sense to her now. He must have been unable to use his “medicine” since the FMA captured him. With the trouble in the mining site, unable to get back to this stateroom and the bottle it held, every minute must have stretched on unbearably with his addiction gnawing away at him. Finally, the withdrawal symptoms had become too much and he’d passed out, reducing him to a doddering wreck first.

“There are different types of medicine. You think I’m a waster. Technically, I suppose you’re right, but there’s more to it than that.”

Katya waved his explanations away. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said, moving towards the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Where do you think I’m going? I’m going to tell my uncle and Lieutenant Petrov that maybe everything you’ve told us is garbage. For all we know, it was the filth in that bottle talking.”

“I’ve told you the truth.” He was quiet, firm, as if convincing her was the only thing that mattered.

She laughed bitterly. “The whole truth?”

“I’ve told you the truth,” he insisted. “You want more of it? Then listen.”

They looked at each other in silence for a minute. Then Katya drew the chair out from under the chair and sat down, facing Kane as he sat on his bunk. “Okay,” she said, exuding cynicism. “I’m listening.”

Kane suddenly seemed uncertain what he was going to say. Making up his mind, he opened the drawer and took out the loading-bottle. The thick black liquid sloshed lazily inside.

“I’m going to have to fill in a few details first. You need to know exactly what this stuff is to understand. To understand why I have to use it. You don’t know much about Earth, do you? That blasted war closed the door on your roots for you and your contemporaries. If you’re anything to go by, the Russalkin don’t much care for their old world.”

“Why should we? You invaded us! You wanted to bring your dirty, wasteful ways here and, when we wouldn’t just let you stroll in to take what you wanted, you invaded!”

“Did we? Somebody once said that history belongs to the victor. As I think I’ve already told you, that war was never won one way or the other. Earth just decided it was too expensive. The Leviathan was their last shot. When it was lost, they just gave the whole thing up as a bad job. You didn’t win a war; you just won a battle at most. Earth hasn’t finished with Russalka yet. The failure of the Leviathan to exterminate the lot of you has given you some breathing time, which — incidentally — you can thank me for.”

Katya looked at him with disgust. “I should thank you for being a reject? I was there, remember? I heard what the Leviathan said about you. You were as useless to the Leviathan as you are to us now. I’m not sure thanks would be enough. Maybe we should throw you a big state banquet or something for services to redundancy.”

“Such sarcasm in one so young,” Kane said wryly. “Yes, the Leviathan rejected me. Yes, that saved your world, at least if has for the last ten years. But Petrov was right. I was extensively tested. I was compatible.” He held up the bottle again, rolling it slightly to make the viscous fluid lap against the glass walls. “This stuff is called Sin. There’s a complicated literary reason for calling it that; I won’t bore you with it. Just some biochemist with pretensions of grandeur coming up with a smart-arse name. It is a narcotic in the strict dictionary definition. It is incredibly addictive; one dose normally causes full dependency. As a way of having a good time, it rates slightly lower than having your eyes burnt out with red-hot wire loops. The first dose you have will make you a little light-headed, probably nauseous too. After that, you feel nothing at all when you take it. You might as well be giving yourself a shot of sterile saline.”

Katya was wondering how good her understanding of the wasters’ vice was. “I thought the idea was it made you feel good?”

“Not Sin. It’s the ultimate progression of what drug dealers want in a drug. Total dependency. Sin doesn’t make you feel good; it addicts you and then, if you don’t get regular doses, it kills you.” He looked at the bottle with a strange expression somewhere between loathing and longing. “Sin was never created to give wasters some pathetic escape from reality. It was created to enslave. The Terran government, when Earth finally got one after the collapse, commissioned this stuff. One injection and you’ve got a slave for life. It doesn’t affect the performance of their duties, but if they don’t get another dose when the last one starts to wear off, they descend into Hell, one ring at a time. It’s indescribable, foul. Nobody willingly takes this stuff, Katya.”

She looked at him, her mouth open in shock. Her anger of only a few minutes ago had quite gone, replaced by pity and disbelief that people could do such a thing to another human being. “Before you came, they used it on you? To make you obey orders?”

He was surprised. “Heavens, no. This stuff was banned sixty years ago.” He smiled wanly at her obvious confusion. “I managed to secure a copy of the formula and synthesised it before I left Earth. Katya, I used it on myself.” He put the bottle away before continuing. “It was my insurance policy. When I left Earth, I had visions of what Russalka would be like. A colony world fallen into barbarism, people capable of the most brutal, merciless things. That’s what I believed when I offered myself to the Leviathan programme. As the day came closer, I started having doubts. I wasn’t sure if I’d want to be a part of such a devastating attack if it turned out the situation wasn’t right. I wasn’t a soldier, you see. My motives… it wasn’t patriotism. So, I made Sin and smuggled it aboard.” He frowned as he thought back. “Russalka wasn’t anything like I’d expected. I just found a hardy race of survivors trying to hang on. This should never have come to a war. There should have been negotiations, we should have sent diplomats, tried to salvage something from the mess. Instead we sent ships and troops and certain death in the form of the Leviathan. If I let it interface with me, I had no idea what it would do to me. My personality might have been destroyed, my doubts about the war lost. I had to escape.”

Katya nodded slowly. She was beginning to understand. “And the only way you could get away was to be rejected. So you used the Sin, knowing it would interfere with the interfacing process.”

Kane leaned back against the bulkhead and crossed his arms. “You are clever. Everybody says so.”

“But, the addiction..?”

“Permanent.”

“There must have been some other way,” she protested, “some other drug?”

He shook his head. “No. Believe me. I researched it very thoroughly. If anything else could have done the trick reliably, I’d have used it. It had to be that stuff, though. You can imagine how I felt when I finished the database search and only that…” he nodded at the drawer, “…would do. I was going to be sacrificed one way or the other. The only question was would I be sacrificed to Sin or the Leviathan?” He paused. “That sounds very biblical, doesn’t it?”

“So, you really did stop the Leviathan?”

“Without undue modesty, yes, I did. I wish I could have done it by just pulling out a fuse or by pissing through a transformer cover but, as you saw, the Leviathan is very touchy about letting people near its vitals.” He stopped, thoughtful. Then he reached into his jacket pocket. “Which brings me onto this.”

Before he could show Katya what he had, the communicator mounted on the wall clicked into life. “Kane?” It was Tasya’s voice, sounding distracted and puzzled. “Come to the bridge immediately.” She’d broken the connection before Kane had a chance to reply and he glared at the communicator with frustration.

“It’s always something, isn’t it?” he said peevishly to Katya and his theatrical irritation made her smile. “Come on, you’re as much a part of all this as anyone.”

As she followed him out of the cabin, she noticed on a bookshelf by the door the small maser pistol she’d used to hold Kane at gunpoint aboard the Novgorod. It felt strange and unexpected to see it abandoned like that and, acting on an impulse she barely understood, she picked it up and slipped it in her pocket.

On the bridge, Tasya was in the captain’s chair. She made no effort to relinquish it when Kane entered, but neither did he make any move towards it, instead perching on the edge of an inactive console. “Well, what’s so fascinating?”

Tasya nodded at the main screen. “Our large lumbering friend has developed a sense of direction again.”

Katya was already looking at the screen as Tasya spoke. The Leviathan had, indeed, pulled itself out of the doldrums and was travelling with a definite sense of purpose. But, she noticed, it wasn’t heading north towards Lemuria. Instead, it was heading roughly easterly, perhaps eighty degrees. “Where’s it going?”

“Not sure yet, Ms,” said the sensors operator. “Working on it.”

Katya looked around and saw the navigator’s position was empty. She knew the Novgorod’s navigator had died in the pirate attack. It seemed that the pirates had lost their own to the combat drone. Without asking permission, she sat at the post and pulled on the headset. Behind her Tasya shot a glance at Kane, who just smiled slightly and shrugged.

Katya took a few moments to familiarise herself with the layout of the position’s interface and a few moments more to reorganise it to her liking. The Terran-designed interface wasn’t hugely different from its Russalkin counterpart, but that was hardly surprising. There had to be a point where the interface couldn’t be improved much further and all versions would tend towards that. The only thing she could think of that might move it on would be interfacing directly with the computer. An image of the Leviathan’s interface throne loomed in her mind and she pushed it away, nauseated. No, she’d stick with the sort of interface you could walk away from afterwards.

She requested the sensor data via her console and fed it to the navigational systems. It was simple stuff; she’d done far more complicated plots to get her card. When she was satisfied she’d got it right, she issued the data to the main screen. A relief map of Russalka sprang up upon the screen. Marked in exaggerated size was the Vodyanoi and, not nearly so exaggerated, the Leviathan, the pair hanging between the submerged mountain ranges like airships traversing a valley. Katya tapped in a command and a red line sprang out of the Leviathan’s prow, streaking away until it was lost off the edge of the screen. Katya pulled back the viewpoint, further and further until some objects appeared, the red line of the Leviathan’s projected path running neatly through the tight cluster. Katya selected them and zoomed rapidly in.

Kane slowly stood, his face grim. “That would make a lot of sense.”

Tasya stood too, but her expression was in stark contrast to Kane’s. Where he seemed sanguine, she was horrified. “The Yagizba Conclaves!”

Katya could see Kane’s point, but she couldn’t move herself to feel empathy with Tasya. The Yagizba Conclaves were a confederation of floating towns. The fact they spent most of their time on Russalka’s angry surface was strange enough when they could withdraw easily to the serene depths, but the Yagizban also bore reputations of arrogance and vile eccentricities. They were, however, also the production powerhouses for the whole planet. In their robot factories were built almost all the machines that the submarine communities depended upon. Yes, there were other production facilities elsewhere, but Yagizban technology was of a consistently high quality and reasonably priced. When the war against Earth had opened, their floating cities had been obvious targets, especially since the Conclaves were the only serious users of aircraft and had floating airstrips dotted around the seas. The first Terran attacks had sunk every one of the airstrips and two of the smaller towns before the others had managed to flood their ballast tanks and sink to a safe depth of their own volition and choosing.

The Yagizban had been the backbone of the resistance, supplying boats and war materiel wherever it was needed. Towards the end, however, even their resources had drawn thin. It was just as well, Katya reflected, that the Terrans’ had drawn even thinner.

The Conclaves had remained aloof from the victory celebrations when the embattled Russalkin finally realised that the Terrans had given up. They had pulled together what floating towns they had left and moved off to rebuild. Now they held their distance from the rest of the planet’s settlements, supplying technology as they had always done and being paid in resources but never going any further towards integrating themselves. Uncle Lukyan called them a strange people. Katya had heard others call them much worse.

She zoomed in still further until the mapping image resolved into a cluster of five main domes and perhaps eight smaller ones. The red line ran unerringly right through the middle of the group. “It means to destroy our main means of production.”

“It would seem so.” Despite his words, Kane seemed unconvinced. “Lemuria can breathe easy, at least for the moment.” He rubbed his chin and stared at the screen, deep in thought.

“If it attacks them, we’ve lost before we start,” said Tasya. Her face was taut with some emotion. Concern? Indecision? Fear? Katya couldn’t identify it, but she would never have expected it on the Chertovka’s face, whatever it was. Even from their brief acquaintance, Tasya had only ever seemed to run from grim determination to grim humour. “We have to warn them.”

“We can’t, Tasya,” said Kane gently. “You know we can’t.”

“Why not?” said Katya.

Kane turned and spoke abruptly, angered at her breaking into his conversation. “Because we don’t carry a long wave array. Who would we want to talk to? And if we use a narrow-beam submarine transmission, it will go straight past the Leviathan who will certainly intercept it and probably jam it. If we’re lucky, that’s all it would do.”

Katya decided not to ask what might happen if they were unlucky. Instead, she turned back to her console, trying to hide the fact that her cheeks had turned red. Kane had been right to bark at her, she knew; butting in like that had just made her look like a big-mouthed kid.

She busied herself with the navigational data, trying to take her mind off what an idiot she was. She concentrated on plotting and replotting the Leviathan’s course, on the small chance that she had made some sort of childish mistake in her earlier plots, but no. Every time she went through the stages, the red line still struck neatly through the middle of the Conclaves. It was a sharp piece of navigating on the part of the Leviathan, she thought. Considering that the Yagizba Conclaves weren’t even permanently anchored…

A horrible thought occurred to her. The Yagizba Conclaves weren’t permanently anchored. Ten years ago, they’d been in an entirely different part of the Russalkin ocean.

“Hail the Leviathan.” Kane’s sudden order cut across her train of thought and she looked up at him in confusion.

“What?” Lukyan roused himself from where he’d been leaning against the wall looking over the sensor officer’s shoulder. “Are you mad? You’ve said yourself that monstrosity is trigger-happy. If an active sonar ping is enough to put it on the warpath, what will it make of a tight-beam transmission right up its baffles?”

Kane looked seriously at him. “I am very much afraid, very much afraid that the situation has changed, and not for the better. Communications, hail the Leviathan.”

The communications officer looked at him uncertainly and looked back at Tasya for confirmation. She seemed worried herself, not the confident and commanding personality Katya was used to at all. Finally she nodded quickly, as if wanting the act over and done with.

With obvious misgivings, the communications officer opened a channel. “Leviathan from Vodyanoi, Leviathan from Vodyanoi. Come in, please.”

“Put it on the speakers,” ordered Kane. Immediately the bridge was filled with the gentle hiss of an empty communications channel, rising and falling slowly. They listened in silence for almost a minute before Kane ordered another hail.

No happier than last time, the communications officer complied. “Leviathan from Vodyanoi, Leviathan from Vodyanoi. Are you receiving, please?”

Silence was the only reply. Kane waited impatiently. After a minute there was still no response. “Sensors, any change in the Leviathan’s speed and heading?” The sensors officer shook his head without looking away from his instruments. On Katya’s console, the red line never wavered. Kane grunted with frustration. “Hail it again.”

The communications officer looked beseechingly at Tasya, but she only nodded curtly. For the third time, he sent a hail.

This time, Leviathan spoke.

“This is… is Leviath…” The rest of the sentence seemed to fade away. They waited for a moment, but nothing more came.

“Hail it again,” said Kane slowly, brooking no argument.

“Leviathan from Vodyanoi, Leviathan from…”

“This… is… Lev… i… a…” Every syllable seemed to be a gargantuan effort. Katya listened to it with a mixture of trepidation and hope. Perhaps Tokarov had somehow managed to sabotage it. Even its voice, so controlled and sterile before, seemed shot through now with uncertainty and, what was that? Fear? Fear; now she realised it had been fear on Tasya’s face. How odd. But not as odd as a machine showing fear. That was so…

“Oh no,” she said out loud. “Oh no!”

The voice of the Leviathan continued, still halting, but becoming stronger now. “This is… Leviath… This… This… is… I… I am…”

Katya couldn’t speak anymore. Her hands were over her mouth in revulsion and terror and in pity. Kane’s eyes were shut as he awaited the inevitable.

“I…” the machine’s voice was strong now, certain, “…am…” and it contained tones and undertones that had never been programmed into it.

“Tokarov,” said Kane. “You fool.”

And the machine that was now more than a machine and the man who was now less than a human spoke as one, filling the bridge with their unified voice.

“I AM LEVIATHAN!”