Katya's World

CHAPTER 16 Deep Black

“The lift opens directly onto the command deck. It’s big so don’t let that surprise you. There are guards posted on either side of the door as you go in and there must be at least another four or five scattered around the place.”

“Thank you, Ms Kuriakova,” said Petrov. They were already in the lift and on their way to the bridge. The cars, although large, could only hold ten people fairly close together and Petrov had said it would be better to take in ten people who had enough room to get out quickly than sixteen and be packed in there like krill on a manta whale’s baleen. Lukyan had argued against Katya going in, but she had insisted on going as the only one amongst them who had been to the command deck and knew how it was set out. Petrov had agreed and taken the furious Lukyan aside, talking quietly to him for a few minutes until Lukyan’s rage subsided. “You can’t protect her forever,” she’d overheard. “It’s what she wants to do.” Lukyan had come back and stared at her for the longest time before saying she could go. Then he added that he was coming too and he’d tear the head off anybody who said otherwise.

“The plan is simple,” Petrov told the present crew. “We go in, deal with the guards, take their weapons and then it will probably turn into a fire fight with the remaining troopers. An alert will almost certainly be called. When that happens, the other half of our number will make their way to the docks and secure a boat. We target the Leviathan, launch everything we can and then destroy the command stations so they cannot issue destruct orders to the torpedoes after we leave. We head straight for the decks in time to board the boat that has been commandeered for us. Any questions?”

There were none. Even to Katya, the plan seemed childishly simple. The best plans were always the simple ones, she’d heard. This was her chance to find out.

“Ready?” Petrov asked Olya. She nodded and hefted the carbine. “Good. You go right, I’ll go left.” The lift door opened.

The size of the FP-1’s bridge awed Katya a little even now, but her attention was drawn to something else. Or rather the lack of something else. The bridge was deserted. The idea slithered through her mind like mercury on steel and came out of her mouth before the doors had even finished opening. “It’s a trap!”

Petrov slapped the door close control but it didn’t respond, overridden by the main computer. “Down!” he shouted. Olya wasn’t listening; she was still following Plan B, unaware that they were being forced to come up with a Plan C. She stepped out of the lift and headed right. There was no guard there and she stood uncertainly for a moment, looking for a target. Somewhere over by the starboard hologram projector, there was a crack of a maser, and she sprawled onto the deck.

“Novgorods!” Lukyan roared the battlecry, and surged out of the lift like a torpedo from its tube.

“Pushkin!” shouted Petrov after him. “Don’t be a fool, man!” Then he looked around at his huddled crew and realised that the only choice left to them might be whether to die fighting or trapped in that lift. “Novgorods!” he bellowed, running forward, the tiny maser pistol in his hand cracking repeatedly.

It seemed that the Yagizban had been expecting the escaped prisoners to behave rationally and surrender. There was a stunned silence that lasted the few seconds before a lucky shot from Petrov’s maser caught a poorly concealed trooper in the arm and he fell screaming. Then the shooting really started.

Lukyan snatched up Olya’s carbine and swung himself up against a wall behind a support stanchion. Using the small rifle as a large pistol he started laying down suppressing fire, giving the rest of the Novgorods a chance to scuttle out of the lift and to the cover of the nearest console stations.

Katya slid frantically across the floor until she reached cover. Petrov ducked down beside her, checking the charge left in the pistol.

“Not going quite to plan, lieutenant,” said Katya as maser bolts cracked overhead. She wondered at her own apparent unconcern, as if they were playing a game. Maybe she couldn’t take this seriously because she still wasn’t quite used to the idea of people trying to kill her. It was a good state of mind, she decided. If she really accepted the danger she was in, she might never move again.

“No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, Ms Kuriakova,” he replied, ejecting the pistol’s depleted cell and replacing it with a new one, fresh from the manufacturer’s wrapper. Katya was going to ask him where he’d got it and the decided that she didn’t care very much under the circumstances.

She looked over at Lukyan who was pushing himself as small as he could go behind the stanchion as a hail of maser bolts cracked and hissed off the metal. He saw her and shrugged, out of ideas himself. Katya smiled as bravely as she could manage and looked around. This was crazy, she concluded. There were nine of them altogether with only two guns between them. They should have had a contingency plan, but who could have guessed that they were heading into a trap? They weren’t going to be able to shoot their way out of this. Either they surrendered or… what?

Katya wished that Kane was there with them; they could definitely have done with his infuriating habit of thinking off at tangents, seeing possibilities beyond the obvious. She made a mental effort and imagined him there, pinned down with the rest of them, and then she imagined what he might do, what ideas he might have.

He’d say that not only their plan, but their plan’s objectives were no longer possible. Specifically the secondary objective of taking the bridge. That simply was not going to happen with them pinned down by any number of troopers…

“Give it up, Petrov!” shouted a familiar voice. “Don’t get anybody else killed for no reason!”

…and the Chertovka. They were caught between the She-Devil and the deep black sea. But the primary aim had always been launching the attack on the Leviathan and perhaps that, at least, was still possible. Whatever they did, they had better do it quickly; the alarms had been blaring for the last minute and the rest of the Novgorods would already be on the way to capture a boat. They’d fight to the last ensign to hold it in the hope that Petrov’s party would be joining them. For their sakes as much as their own, they had to get out of there.

“How do you think they knew we were coming here, Petrov?” Katya asked.

He took a moment to fire a couple of blind shots over the edge of the console they were cowering behind before replying. “Monitoring the lift system, they must have been. Looks like they did find we’d gone after all, but just played it quiet.”

“So when they realised the lift was coming here, they just grabbed what troopers they could? That’s what I thought, too.”

Petrov nodded. “If they’d had more warning they’d have set up a crossfire across the lift door. We’d all be dead or recaptured by now.” He looked at her seriously. “What’s your point?”

“My point,” she swivelled onto her knees and slowly poked her head up as far as she dared. The rake of the console’s controls and the bulk of its monitor bank hid her from the trooper’s guns but allowed her to examine what was there. Typical Conclave interface and, as the Conclave’s supplied everybody else, that meant she was very familiar with the console’s operation. “My point is that we don’t need to take the bridge to open fire on the Leviathan.”

She accessed the console and reconfigured it to the targeting protocols. The fire controls were locked, but only at a low level to prevent accidental launch. It took her less than a minute to bypass them.

The firing had trickled to a halt for lack of targets. “Petrov!” called Tasya again. “You’re just delaying the inevitable. Your situation is hopeless. Surrender now and we’ll go easy on you and your people.”

Petrov was watching Katya with open admiration, not so much for her ability with the controls as thinking of doing this in the middle of a fire fight in the first place. “Yes, okay,” he called back vaguely, “I’ll think about it. Give us a minute.”

On the main holographic display, the Leviathan still surged through the waves towards FP-1. Suddenly a large red targeting reticle appeared framing the Leviathan. “Target acquired,” a computer announced.

Immediately there was pandemonium amongst the Yagizban. “What is going on?” demanded a voice Katya recognised as Major Moltsyn. “What the thunder is going on?”

“They’ve accessed the weapons systems, you idiot!” That was Tasya. “You! Lock them out!”

I don’t think so, thought Katya. She’d already prioritised her console and forced a system lockdown across the weapons multi-user protocols.

“I… I can’t, colonel,” she heard. “They’ve locked us out!”

Tasya again. Cold and very sincere. “If they fire, I will kill you.” Suddenly Katya understood why they called her the She-Devil. On her console, a series of options she didn’t understand came up. “What are lanterns?” she hissed at Petrov. “It says ‘Lanterns — 10%’ here.”

“Torpedoes set to constant active sonar. They don’t tend to last long but they light the target up like a phosphor worm for the rest of the torpedo spread. Set it to 20% of the spread — we want the Leviathan to know it’s being attacked.”

Katya quickly upped the ratio to twenty, clicked through the next couple of screens and was met with ‘Ready to fire — enter authorisation code.’

“Uh-oh.”

“What do you mean, ‘uh-oh’?” asked Petrov. He raised his head far enough to look at the screen. “Ah. Uh-oh.” He ducked back down again. “Listen to me, we’re not sunk yet. That’s not a security measure, it’s just another failsafe to make sure weapons aren’t fired accidentally. Go around it, through the system maintenance screens. Do you know how to get to those?”

“Are you kidding me?” said Katya, putting the request on hold and accessing the system maintenance screens. “Front end interfaces are for corridor rats. I can get around it.”

I think I can get around it, she added to herself. It didn’t appear that the Yagizban wanted to give her the chance. She was half aware of Petrov going flat on his belly and slithering off between the consoles before more of her attention was claimed by a new wave of maser bolts sizzling past her, cracking off bulkheads and supports. The attack came a moment later, troopers threading their way through the maze of consoles and abandoned seats at a run. Lukyan fired a scatter of shots into the middle of the Yagizban line causing a few troopers to dive for cover, but the ones close to the walls kept coming on. Then one right at the limit of the flank fell with a cry. Hardly had he vanished from sight behind a work station, than Petrov reared up, the fallen trooper’s assault maser blazing off shots in a wild suppression pattern. Caught unawares from the side, a couple of troopers were hit and fell wounded. The others took cover and returned fire, but Petrov had already vanished.

“Damn you snivelling cowards!” It was Tasya, her fury almost incandescent as she swept through the clutter of stations and consoles, indomitable and unstoppable. Lukyan fired on her but her return fire was so accurate that he was forced to break the partial cover of the stanchion and seek more complete protection behind a processor bank.

“Weapons free,” intoned the computer. “Launch in progress. Stand by.”

The room seemed to freeze but for every face turning to the main display. On the holographic image, green crosses trailing short green dotted tails were squirming away from the circle labelled FP-1 towards the arrowhead called LEV. Tasya looked at it for a long moment, anger and dismay working her features.

Then she saw movement and levelled her gun as Petrov rose, his rifle already aimed directly at her. Tasya was faster but Petrov was cooler, taking his time while her maser bolts fanned harmlessly around him. He returned fire, a three pulse burst, and she crumpled without a sound.

Then every console and all three displays in the place went dark. A moment later, they flickered back into subdued life, diagnostic data sliding across them.

Petrov was suddenly by Katya. “What did you do?” he demanded.

“Re-initialised their system. By the time it’s up and running again, it will be too late to stop the torpedoes.” She looked around at the dim flickering lights. “Can we go now?”

“Good time for it,” agreed Petrov. He stood up and laid down a withering fire on the Yagizbans, already in disarray from the reversal of the ambush and the loss of the Chertovka. Lukyan, a second lieutenant who’d taken Katya’s pistol, and another who’d grabbed a carbine dropped by one of the injured troopers all joined in. The Yagizban weren’t in flat retreat, but the FMA crew were able to force a pass to a secondary exit and went through in a run.

“Now what?” asked Lukyan from one side of the doorway as he laid down covering fire for the FMA withdrawal.

Petrov scattered some shots from his position on the other side of the door. “The docks. Let’s hope and pray the other party were able to secure a ride out of here.” As the last of their number ran crouching past them, Lukyan dragged the door shut and melted the lock with a welter of closely placed bolts.

They didn’t trust the lifts to get them where they wanted to go and used the emergency stairs instead. They’d hardly got through the doors into the stair well with its horizontal bulkheads separating each level when they found everybody just standing there. Petrov forced himself through the mass. “What’s going on? They’re going to be after us in a minute and they’re not going to be taking prisoners!”

“Sir!” An ensign, pale and sweating stepped forward. Katya recognised him from the other group, the ones who’d gone to steal a boat.

Petrov regarded him with foreboding. “What’s the news, ensign?”

“We couldn’t get to the boat bays, sir! They were waiting for us. We lost Tobin and Keretsky.”

Petrov nodded; it was only to be expected after the ambush in the bridge that the Yagizban would throw a perimeter around their boats. “So where are the rest of you?”

“Sir, we went the other way, towards the aircraft decks.” The ensign smiled wanly. “I don’t think they expected us to think about flying.”

Petrov grinned wolfishly. “Tell me you’ve grabbed an aircraft.”

The ensign nodded emphatically. “We’ve got a transporter, but they were hard pressed to hold it when I left to fetch you, sir. Mr Lubarin requests your company as quickly as possible.”

Petrov looked up the well. “I’d be delighted to give him my reply in person.” The Novgorods surged up the stairs, bristling stolen guns front and rear.

“They depend on their technology too much,” Lukyan told Katya as they ran upwards. “They fight like children, terrified of being hurt.”

The stairs seemed to go on forever, and Katya was too breathless to reply although she was impressed that her uncle hardly seemed to be breaking a sweat. He was right, though. The Yagizban were badly coordinated and their response to the threat posed to them by a partially armed mob of Federal Marines had been piecemeal and ineffectual. A couple of troopers had stuck their heads out of a door on the stairs and fired a brace of wild shots before ducking back and locking it, duty done. Katya could see that the idea of having the Leviathan fight and win a war for them more or less by itself would appeal greatly to them. They’d had some structure and competence while Tasya had been in command, but without her they were a joke.

She felt ambivalent about Tasya’s death. She was clearly very dangerous and would have been a significant part of the Conclave’s war effort, with or without the Leviathan. With her gone, she wondered if officers like Major Moltsyn represented their best. She hoped so; Moltsyn behaved like a middle-ranking bureaucrat, not a military man. Putting him into a uniform just looked like a good way to lose wars without the enemy even having to get out of bed.

On the other hand, she’d respected Tasya even if she hadn’t actually liked her much. She would remember for the rest of her life the sight of Tasya — no, she hadn’t been Tasya at that exact moment — she would remember the Chertovka, the She-Devil, leaping upon the deadly form of the Leviathan’s drone. She’d never seen such an act of reckless bravery before, and doubted she would ever see its like again. Petrov had shown great courage in the bridge, but Tasya…. She was simply breathtaking. And now she was dead. Dead like Olya and those troopers and Tobin and Keretsky and who knew who else in this war that was stumbling into existence without anybody troubling to declare it. If they didn’t stop this before it went any further, Olya’s and the others only distinction would be that they were at the head of a very long list of the dead.

The stairs opened out into a staging area on the aircraft deck. A group of Yagizban troopers had taken cover behind packing crates and were firing steadily at a transporter like the one that had brought the Vodyanoi to the FP-1 platform. From the transport’s open flight deck hatch and from behind its forward landing pylon, some little fire was being returned. It looked like the FMA team had only been able to steal a couple of guns.

A couple of the troopers saw Petrov’s team heading for them and smiled, seeing only friendly uniforms and guns. “Glad you lot finally got here,” said one of them cheerfully, “if we set up a cross fire with you firing across from…” His voice trailed away as he realised that his “reinforcements” had their guns levelled at him and his comrades.

A nearby first aid box yielded a medical tape dispenser and Petrov didn’t hesitate to dial it up to maximum adhesiveness before taping the captured troopers hands behind their backs. Taking their weapons, the FMA team, Katya and Lukyan ran across the open deck to where they were enthusiastically greeted by the rest of their number.

“Does anybody actually know how to fly this thing?” asked Petrov when he’d got some hush.

“I do,” said Suhkalev, stepping forward with an air of slight embarrassment.

“You do?” Katya couldn’t keep the disbelief out of her voice but, then, she didn’t try very hard.

“I logged fifteen hours flying time.” He didn’t sound defensive, just embarrassed still.

“Real flight or simulator?”

His voiced dipped. “Simulator. You need twenty hours before they’ll trust you with a real AG flyer.”

“This isn’t a little reconnaissance craft, Suhkalev,” said Petrov, “just remember that and don’t try any fancy flying.” Katya looked at him with surprise. He surely wasn’t going to trust Suhkalev with all their lives? Petrov caught her look. “Submarines don’t carry more than two air pilots for their flyers, Ms Kuriakova. Of ours, one died in the mines and the other is, was Tokarov. Fifteen hours in the simulator will have to do.”

“We still have a problem,” growled Lukyan. “How do we get this thing from here up onto the platform itself?”

Suhkalev had strapped himself into the pilot’s position and was quickly examining the controls. “On the elevator stage,” he said without looking up. “But we don’t need to use that if we can just get the platform hatch open. It’s big — I think I can fly us straight from here and out without using the elevator at all.”

“Can we do that from here?” said Petrov.

“No. That will be controlled from the deck flight control room. Over there.” They followed the line of his pointing hand to a control room built into the wall some ten metres from the ground reached via an enclosed spiral staircase.

Petrov sighed. “Nothing’s ever easy, is it? I’ll get it.”

“No,” said Lukyan. “I’ll do it.”

Katya looked at him as if he were mad. “Uncle?”

Lukyan wasn’t listening. He was trading the maser carbine for one of the more powerful assault versions and making sure it was carrying a full cell. “I won’t be long,” he said and climbed through the hatch. Katya looked to Petrov for support but he was busy going through the flight deck’s controls with Suhkalev.

Lukyan was halfway to the base of the metal cylinder housing the control room’s spiral staircase when he whirled at the sound of footsteps, his rifle ready. “Katya! Get back to the aircraft right now! That’s an order!”

She skittered to a halt in front of him. “I’m coming with you.”

“I gave you an order!”

“I’m not in the military and neither are you anymore!”

“Tokarov…”

“I don’t think we can count anything Tokarov’s done as being in the interests of the FMA, can we?”

Lukyan blustered for a moment while he thought of another argument. “I’m your captain and you’re my navigator. You take orders for me and I’m telling you to get back there!”

She glared fiercely back. “I quit! I resign my post!”

Lukyan paused, stuck for a reply. “I’ll… I’ll give you a really bad job reference.”

They managed to continue glaring at one another for almost three seconds before Lukyan’s face cracked into an embarrassed grin and he started laughing. Katya couldn’t stay angry either and joined him. “That’s the most pathetic threat I think I’ve ever heard, uncle.”

“What else could I say? You’re too old to have your allowance cut off.” His laughter became subdued and he looked at her tenderly. “Sometimes, I really see my sister in you, Katinka. She could be mule headed too.”

“It’s a family trait. Come on, we could have been there and halfway back by now.”

They entered the cylinder and climbed quickly and quietly up, Lukyan leading with his rifle at the ready. After two and a half revolutions around the central newel column, they emerged into the control room. Lukyan immediately snapped the rifle to his shoulder and took aim. “You.”

“Me,” agreed Kane, affable as always. He sat in one of the room’s wheeled chairs at the far end of a long console that ran the length of the side overlooking the aircraft staging areas beneath a long window. He had his feet up on the console edge and seemed to have been waiting some time.

Katya stepped around from behind her uncle. “Are you going to make a hobby of turning up unexpectedly in places I’m heading for?”

“Ah,” said Kane, “last time I was just somewhere you were supposed to be, so it doesn’t count.”

“And this time?”

“This time I was waiting for you, admittedly. When you pulled that stunt on the bridge it was obvious you’d be looking for a way out. The Yagizban seemed very sure you’d try for the locks and threw most of their people down there. I selflessly said I’d take my trusty crew and guard the aircraft.”

“We didn’t see any of your lot, just a Conclave patrol.”

“Yes, that was unfortunate. They wandered in when we were doing such a sterling job of guarding the place. What with me up here drinking horrible coffee and my crew in the Vodyanoi over at the emergency deployment locks just over there.” He waved vaguely at the far side of the hangar.

“Hold on,” said Lukyan slowly, “are you saying you were going to let us go? Us and the FMA crew?”

“No past tense about it, Lukyan Pushkin. I am going to let you and the Federals go. That,” he pointed at the console, “is the control you’re looking for, to open the flight deck. Goodbye and good luck.”

“Why are you betraying the Yagizban?”

“I owe them no fealty. They’ve used me and my boat and my crew for the last few years. I used to think they were sincere in taking and holding the planet for Earth until such time as a new expedition from the home world could be organised. This whole Leviathan episode has put the lie to that — they just think they could do a better job of running the planet.”

“And you don’t think they could?” Katya asked as she walked to the console and casually snapped the control over. Outside, the massive hatch in the hangar’s ceiling cracked open and the two halves slid ponderously apart, the whine of the motors driving them obscured by the thunder and gales outside.

“Oh, I’m sure they could. It’s not a question of politics, Katya. It’s about loyalties. Mine still lie a good few light years away. My crew are all Terran. We’ve talked it over and… we’ll wait rather than put up with being lackeys to the Conclaves anymore.”

Lukyan frowned. His gun hadn’t drifted from Kane so much as a centimetre. “Wait for what?”

Kane looked steadily at him. “You don’t think Earth has finished with Russalka yet, do you?”

The sliding hatch halves were now almost fully retracted and the storm lashed through. Curtains of rain poured in a column down onto the hangar deck to swirl through gratings and into the bilges. Kane stood up slowly to avoid antagonising Lukyan’s trigger finger and looked out of the observation window. “You had better go. As had I.” He started to step away but something caught his eye and he moved back again. “Oh dear. That complicates things.”

Katya looked down and saw troopers streaming onto the hangar deck, deploying to cover and securing as they went. Impossibly, they were led by…

“Tasya!” Katya went pale. “She’s dead! We saw…”

Lukyan joined her. “So,” he growled, “that fancy armour’s not just for show.” He took Katya’s arm and headed for the steps.

“No! Wait!” Katya shook herself free and ran back to the console. On the communications board were the fin numbers for all the craft she assumed the Yagizban currently had available. She looked out of the window and then down the list until she found the channel for the transporter Petrov and his crew had taken. She selected it and spoke. “Lieutenant Petrov! This is Katya Kuriakova. Come in, please.”

Almost immediately, the hail was returned. “Ms Kuriakova, what is your situation?”

“We can’t get to you, we’re cut off.”

“We can…”

“No, don’t try to rescue us. They want to kill you. The Chertovka’s leading them.”

There was a pause while this intelligence sank in. “Resilient, isn’t she?” Petrov said finally.

“Get out of here. Right now! Get to FMA waters and tell them what’s happening. Just go!”

“We can’t leave you.”

“Don’t be stupid. Of course you can. You must. Don’t worry, we have an alternative escape route.” She looked at Kane, pleading. He smiled slightly at her and Lukyan and nodded. “Just go.”

“What alter…”

The troopers opened fire on the transport. Maser bolts cracked off her hull.

“I’m not debating it, Petrov! Just go!” She snapped the communications link off. She turned to Kane, the confidence she’d had in the radio conversation evaporating. “Okay, Kane. How do we get to the Vodyanoi without being cut into pieces?”

“First, we wait. Let Petrov stay centre stage for a while longer.” The three of them watched the transporter. It didn’t move. “They have got a pilot, haven’t they?”

“That boy, Suhkalev,” replied Lukyan, watching the transport closely.

“Really? Oh.” Kane seemed to be looking for something optimistic to add. “Oh.”