Katya's World

CHAPTER 2 Ghost Return

Uncle Lukyan gave Katya the helm until they reached the first waypoint. She steered the little submarine cautiously, very aware of the responsibility the steering yoke gave her. The Federal officer made impatient noises from the back but they both ignored him. The prisoner, apparently seeking another beating, asked the Fed — with great concern if little sincerity — whether he was feeling ill?

When they reached the waypoint, the officer insisted that they go to automatic pilot. Katya regretfully gave up control to the wayfinder. Now that the boat’s computers were in charge, there wasn’t a great deal to do except monitor systems that were automatically monitored by other systems anyway. Every time she’d been aboard the Baby in the past, switching onto automatic pilot would have been the cue for one or other of the crew to unstrap and come back for a chat or a game of chess. With the compartment full of passengers and cargo, that would have been difficult. With the stifling presence of the Fed, who seemed to carry the full powers of the FMA around with him like a bad smell, it was impossible. Katya and her uncle were reduced to reading checklists off to one another until that got boring. Then they lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. The trip to the Deeps couldn’t be over fast enough for either of them.

The prisoner, on the other hand, kept trying to start conversations with everybody. He asked Lukyan how long he’d owned the Baby. He asked Katya what her favourite subject had been at school and why she’d liked it. He even asked the Fed what the interview for the FMA officer’s job had been like as he was considering applying himself.

“Shut up,” said the Fed.

“Just wondering. Once all this misunderstanding is sorted out, I was wondering what I might do for a job and then I thought, don’t just go for a job, go for a career. It’s a man’s life in the FMA. Since you and I have been acquainted, Officer Suhkalev, I’ve become very impressed with the FMA. Specifically its low standards. I thought to myself, well, if he can get in…”

He stopped suddenly with a cough of pain. Katya looked back to see him doubling up; Suhkalev had elbowed him hard by the look of it. “Hey!” she called back. “Cut that out!”

“Don’t tell me my business, girl,” the officer snapped.

“How about I do?” said Lukyan. The officer was silent, his expression resentful. “You’ve got your gun on your right hip. You’re sitting to the left of your prisoner. Did it ever cross your mind that he can reach your gun at least as easily as you can?”

Suhkalev glared at Lukyan, but he drew his gun and put it to his left all the same.

“Damn,” said the prisoner, “I was looking forward to getting that. Oh,” he added in a different tone, “I’m very sorry but I seem to be bleeding on your deck.”

“Hell, that head wound has opened again,” growled Lukyan. “Katya, could…”

But Katya was already out of her seat and taking down the first aid kit from its locker. She looked around for somewhere to rest it while she opened it and the prisoner indicated his lap. “Put it here, it’ll be handy.”

“I didn’t say he could be treated,” said Suhkalev.

“You don’t need to,” replied the prisoner. “It’s in FMA regs on the treatment of and conditions for prisoners. You ought to read it sometime.”

Katya rested the box on the prisoner’s lap and opened it. “How do you do?” he said, peering over the raised lip of the lid as she pulled on surgical gloves and located the necessary medications. “We haven’t been introduced. I’m Havilland Kane.”

Katya looked up sharply. Had he just said… “Havilland Kane?”

He smiled, amused. “My infamy precedes me.”

“You’re the… pirate?” It couldn’t be? This bedraggled, painfully polite man couldn’t be Kane.

His eyebrows rose. “Am I? Perhaps I am. I’ve been accused of so many nonsensical charges it becomes difficult to keep track.” His smile broadened but — and perhaps it was just Katya’s imagination — seemed to grow colder. “And your name is?”

She didn’t answer, instead busying herself with a swab. She cleaned his wound quickly but carefully. He barely winced though the cut was deep and was already showing some signs of a mild infection. “I’m going to close it up now. I’ve put in some antibiotic matrix,” she said, carefully neutral, “but it needs seeing to properly. Make sure the medics at the Deeps know about it.”

“You’re an angel,” he said, but so quietly that she doubted anyone else heard it. Then he hissed slightly with discomfort as she used the suture pen to bind the edges of the cut together.

“Have you finished?” muttered Suhkalev. Katya didn’t even look at him. She closed up the kit and stowed it in its place before returning to her seat.

As she strapped herself in, she thought she heard Kane say, “Thank you, Katya Kuriakova,” but it was hard to be sure over the hum of the Baby’s systems.

The journey continued in a strained silence apart from the quiet curses of Uncle Lukyan as they entered the Weft. As predicted, the random currents were not their friends. The boat started to go off-course almost immediately and Katya and he had to wrestle the controls around before extemporising some new intermediate waypoints to try and get them out of the cross current that had them. They succeeded in that but ran quickly into a lazily twisting vortex that turned them around again and again. Lukyan was concerned that the extreme manoeuvring might upset their inertial guidance; Katya could see the strain on his face as he watched their coordinates like a hawk, waiting for a telltale lurch in their apparent location. After the vortex, they hit a head current that the Baby forged against with agonising slowness. “One hour it would have taken us to go around,” hissed Lukyan loudly enough for the Fed to hear. “We’ll be lucky to get out of here in five at this rate.”

Finally, the going became easier as they reached the centre of the system of complex currents. It was only a respite; things would become difficult again when they tried to leave, but at least they had a few minutes’ peace.

Katya spent the time thinking about their handcuffed passenger. She couldn’t believe it; Havilland Kane sitting right behind her. She didn’t know whether to be excited or scared and settled on faintly worried. Kane had been all over the news bulletins for the last six months. Commerce raids, drone intercepts, the disappearances of any vessels in the region had all been put at his door. There had been talk of crews murdered, too. The FMA hadn’t had an image to show, given any background on him, or even a reliable description and the idea had grown in her head that Kane must be some sort of monster. She’d envisioned him as ugly and hulking, unshaven and eyes devoid of the faintest glimmer of mercy. Now it turned out that he looked just like anybody else. If she’d passed him in a corridor, she’d have thought he was a tutor or a researcher. She frowned to herself. Maybe the FMA had messed it up. Looking at Officer Suhkalev, it was difficult to believe that they were infallible.

Any further reflections were blown away by one of the Baby’s automated alarms. It wasn’t one of the danger alerts — she knew well enough the difference between a status alert and the urgency of a failing major system alarm, but it made her jump all the same. Not nearly as far as Suhkalev, though.

“What’s that?” he blurted. “What’s happening?”

Lukyan had already switched his largest multi-function display to show a sonar map of the seabed. The computer represented it as interconnecting triangles of dull blue and red light drawn against blackness.

In the centre of the display, the seabed rose up to form a hump described in triangles that dimmed to orange where they joined the ocean floor. Pushkin’s Baby was, like many other private submarines, a jack-of-all-trades. Its insect-like yellow hull contained and carried many different types of equipment allowing it to do many jobs from geological survey to cargo carrier to salvage vessel. Katya knew the display was relaying data from the geological sensor array, but she had no idea what the hump was or why it was worth an alarm. She started to ask her uncle, but she saw the expression on his face and the question died. He had a rapt, focussed expression, like a man who has seen the merest hint that all his dreams were about to come true.

“Katya,” he said slowly. “We might be very, very rich.”

“A deposit?” she said. Russalka was rich in minerals, one of the reasons the Grubbers wanted it so much. Submarine mining, however, was difficult. Finding large deposits of ore just lying on the seabed wasn’t unknown, but it was very rare, and the savings meant the discoverer of such a deposit could more or less name their price. Katya read off the scale information on the nuclear magnetic resonance display and felt her own eyes widen with disbelief. It was huge.

Lukyan brought the Baby to a halt and adjusted the active sonar, increasing the frequency of the pulses to get a better picture.

“What? What are you doing?” The Fed spluttered in his outrage. “We have a prisoner to deliver here! We don’t have time…”

“You don’t have time. I’ve got all the time in the world for a beautiful sight like that.” Lukyan tapped the screen. “I can’t run a business running errands for the FMA. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

“You’ll be recompensed for your journey,” said Suhkalev, perhaps realising that he should have mentioned payment earlier.

“Oh, yes. An FMA scrip that will take years to be honoured, if it ever is. You can hold your water for a few minutes. Look at this, look at this!” He studied the sonar returns. “The signal’s good. No, the signal’s excellent. There’s a mound of ore down there. A hill of the stuff! It must be, I don't know, a hundred and fifty thousand tonnes. If it extends beneath the bed, maybe quarter of a million. Katya, arm a probe.”

Katya turned back to her controls, trying to look efficient. Although munitions and ordnance were among the co-pilot’s jobs, she’d never even studied the systems outside a training manual. She checked the launch tube’s inventory and found they were, indeed, carrying a couple of geo-survey probes. Getting them from their magazine into the tube was another matter. Her mouth felt very dry as she tried to work out how to do it quickly. The silence in the submarine drew out, punctuated only by the wheedling survey alarm. She felt they were all watching her make a mess of it and blushed, which just made her feel even more embarrassed.

Then her Uncle Lukyan lost his patience, leaned across and hit the right keys and switches to load and arm a probe, completing her humiliation. She just sat there feeling childish and useless as he returned to his own console and fired the device off. The hiss of the compressed air driving the stubby cylindrical torpedo out of its tube resonated through the hull.

“Survey probe away,” reported the computer primly.

Lukyan settled back in his seat, very pleased with himself and insensitive to Katya’s burning face. “On its way. Man alive, even if the quality's poor, there's so much of it, it's as makes no difference. You’re crew, Katya, you get a share too. What do you…” He turned and saw her expression. He seemed surprised for a moment and then his face fell as he realised how he’d inadvertently humiliated her in front of the Fed and Kane. “Oh, Katya. I’m…”

The computer interrupted. “Probe link lost.” Lukyan’s attention was back on the sensor readouts in an instant.

“What? But it’s right on the scope.”

But it wasn’t. The probe had vanished. And, quickly, before their startled eyes, so did the ore deposit. The great mound simply seemed to flow back into the seabed, flattening out in seconds, the polygons that it had been drawn in fading from the brilliant gold they had been a moment before to dull reds and blues, indistinguishable from the rest of the submarine landscape.

“That’s…” said Lukyan, “…that’s just not possible.”

“Maybe it was methane,” said a voice from the back, Kane. “Perhaps it was methane gas from rotting plant matter caught in a mat of sunken vegetation. You punctured it with your probe and it just…” he shrugged, “deflated.”

Lukyan turned slowly in his chair, his surprise and disappointment turning to sneering anger. “The only gasbag around here is sitting in handcuffs. The NMR was lit up like a birthday cake, that thing was magnetically aglow. Methane…” He turned back to face forward, still muttering angrily. “Methane, he says.”

“Whatever it was, it’s gone now. Maybe we ought to get moving,” said Kane. Suhkalev looked at him suspiciously.

“You seem to be in a big hurry to get to a holding cell, Kane.”

“I just don’t like…” Kane shrugged and laughed lightly. “I just don’t like hanging around under three hundred metres of water in the middle of the Weft. It’s a bad place to be.”

Katya didn’t need to look back at Kane to know there was something else bothering him. A submariner of his experience must know that the Weft was a nuisance but certainly no danger. That laugh had been altogether too mannered and a little strained.

“No,” said Lukyan, his disappointment still evident in his voice. “We’re going nowhere until I’ve run a diagnostic analysis of the sensors. I’ve never seen a ghost return like that. If they’re feeding us garbage data, then we’re blind. Worse than blind. I’m not risking going through the rest of the Weft until I’m happy.”

Predictably, Suhkalev was not happy. “You’ve wasted enough time here, captain. Get us under way!”

“No. My authority over my vessel is absolute in matters of operational safety. You can’t tell me to go anywhere until I’m happy with the operation of this boat.”

“He’s right,” said Kane. Suhkalev shot him a dirty look. Kane grinned unapologetically back. “It’s no good getting shirty over it with me. It’s in the maritime regulations. The FMA maritime regs, that is. Like I say, you really ought to read them some time. Gripping stuff. I laughed, I cried.”

Katya tried to ignore them. Why did Kane keep provoking Suhkalev? All it would get him would be another beating.

Abruptly, another alarm sounded; the proximity alarm. Now it seemed the Baby thought there was danger of collision with something. She toggled the alarm off and nestled her headset on more comfortably.

Lukyan watched her silently while she — her hearing younger and more acute than his — listened carefully through the submarine’s ears. In the Baby’s hull were mounted highly sensitive microphones. When relayed to a human listener, they provided a stereophonic sound image of the marine environment. She sat in absolute silence, her eyes shut as she concentrated entirely on what was coming through the headset speakers.

“Hydrophones are picking something up,” she said finally, eyes still shut. “Can’t make it out. Very low frequency.”

“Manta-whale?” asked her uncle.

“No, nothing like a manta. There’s no song. Just a hum, slight pulse.” She dipped the hydrophones’ active frequencies so they translated sounds normally too low to be heard by the human ear up into the audible range. “Really quiet. Almost silent, but it’s there.”

Kane said, almost to himself, “We really ought to go,” but everybody ignored him.

Katya’s eyes fluttered open, her expression confused like somebody waking from a cryptic dream. “I thought I heard cavitation. Just for a moment.”

“A sub?” said Lukyan, his frown as puzzled as his niece’s. Cavitation was the sound caused by water travelling swiftly over an imperfectly streamlined surface. It developed into tiny water vapour-filled bubbles that hissed in the water and sounded clearly through audio sensors. It had long been the bane of war submarines; the faster you went, the greater the cavitation noise. In submarine warfare, silence is life. A loud boat is a dead boat.

Lukyan had fought before and he knew that golden rule. Katya seemed to be describing the barely-detectable sound of a war sub. Lukyan knew that an opening torpedo tube door, the gap in the hull flawing the otherwise perfect teardrop design, could have caused the momentary sound of cavitation.

Perhaps he was being paranoid, but he’d rather be paranoid than dead.

“Nobody make any noise,” he whispered as he switched off the impellers that were holding their position, the sound relays, even the ventilator fans. Pushkin’s Baby drifted freely, silent and — Lukyan fervently hoped — invisible to hostile hydrophones and passive sonar.

“Pirates!” hissed Suhkalev at Kane. “Your crew, no doubt?”

“I said quiet!” whispered Lukyan, only keeping his voice down with a massive effort of will.

Kane said nothing. He just sat looking at the deck, his hands clasped in front of him. Katya was meanwhile trying to get more of an idea of what they were dealing with, or at least where it was. About the only thing she could think of that might work in this situation was a complex technique called integrated coordination. This combined simple triangulation with examining the Doppler shift in any sound data. It usually needed so much data drawn over such a long period that it was of very limited use when dealing with a moving target. It could, however, at least give an idea of range.

Lukyan looked at what she had pulled up on her main screen and nodded approvingly. The seconds ticked by, turning into minutes.

Katya was lost in concentration, only faintly aware of the increasing tension in the three men who watched and waited for her to perform her mathematical magic. She needed a decent frequency shift, she thought, as target and listener moved relative to one another. Just a few millihertz, she wasn’t greedy. When the Baby drifted into a tendril of the Weft and moved smoothly away from the target for a few seconds it was all she needed.

“I have an IC resolution,” she whispered, gently tapping the numbers into the workpad. Then, her normal voice sounding like a shout after the quiet, “Oh no! 800 metres! Closing rapidly!”

Both submarines had seen each other simultaneously.

The time for stealth had gone. “Navcom!” barked Lukyan at the computer. “Evade! Evade!”

The impellers whirred into life as the navigational computer started running the evasion programs that had been standard on every Russalkin boat since the war. “Evading now,” it reported. Then, “multiple contacts in the water, closing one two zero knots.”

Katya couldn’t believe it. “How fast?” She’d never heard of a torpedo that could beat a hundred knots. To go faster meant using very loud drives and — she listened intently through the hydrophones — she could just hear some faint cavitation noise. The torpedoes were almost silent.

“We’re not at war, are we?” asked Suhkalev from the back in a shaky voice.

“Uncle?” said Katya as she pulled off her headset, “I’m not picking up any active sonar pings. What kind of torpedo doesn’t use active sonar?”

Lukyan wasn’t listening; he’d opened communications channels. “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is RRS 15743 Kilo Pushkin's Baby. We are under attack! Repeat, under attack! Requesting urgent assistance.”

Katya was horrified. The chances of anybody being within range when Suhkalev’s orders had taken them so far off the recognised lanes were minimal. Her uncle must know that. With a sense of cold sickness deep in her belly, Katya realised how desperate their situation was.

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is RRS 15743 Kilo Pushkin's Baby. We are under attack! Repeat, under attack! Requesting urgent assistance. We are…” He paused as the sensor screens suddenly filled with red emergency light. The impact-warning klaxon sounded. “Oh, no…”

Katya couldn’t believe how quickly the water came in. It was as if a spar of ice had punched through the Baby, stabbing clean through her metal and plastic hull and then instantly turning back to liquid. By the time she thought we’ve been holed the water was already up to her knees.

It all became confused then; too many stimuli, not enough time to examine each of them. She saw her uncle punch the emergency surface control and felt the Baby lurch as her trim weights were dumped and her ballast tanks were blown empty with compressed air. The depth gauge stopped falling, even rose for a couple of metres, but they’d taken on too much water and started to fall again. She heard her uncle shouting “Locks! Locks!” but that made no sense. Then she felt the water rise cold and deadly over her hands and was shocked by how high it was. She reached down and tried to release her harness but it wouldn’t unlock. She thought she really should have asked Sergei about the seat’s eccentricities and she’d make a point of asking him next time.

Then she thought, except there won’t be a next time because I’m going to die before the next time.

She tugged at the seat’s webbing until she realised the water was up to her neck and she ought to worry about breathing. Then something happened — she guessed that the Baby had lost trim and rolled — and she was completely underwater. She fought with the straps a bit more but it was no good, they simply weren’t going to let her go. She looked up and saw the Judas box. Almost all the lights were red, especially the ones across the top row. Hull integrity, motive power, life support — all her favourite green lights had gone red and that saddened her as the cold water leeched the life out of her.

She couldn’t care anymore. She couldn’t concentrate enough to care. She couldn’t even feel her fingers anymore.

She looked across at her Uncle Lukyan and found he was looking right at her. There was an expression of such horror on his face. For a moment, she thought he was afraid to die, but then she realised that he was horrified that she was going to die. She wished she could have hugged him, told him it was all right, that she couldn’t care anymore, but the straps held her firmly into her seat and she couldn’t care about that either. Then the power failed and they were in darkness. She watched the lights on the Judas box flicker out and wondered if the Judas box had a Judas box indicator on it. She guessed not, or else there would be a lone red light burning there now, to tell them that the Judas box was broken.

In the darkness, death snuggled up close to her. She realised that she was still holding her breath and wondered why she was bothering, now death had finally showed up to embrace her. She tried to hold her breath a little longer just to show she could, but death wanted her to come with him. She didn’t want to be impolite. The stale air bubbled out of her mouth and nose. Liquid flooded in.

She thought, in the brief moment before the darkness claimed her, that it was a shame she’d died just before her sixteenth birthday. There was going to be a party. It would have been fun.