Katya's World

CHAPTER 5 Environmental Control

Katya had known it intuitively, even if consciously she had elected not to think about it. Of course the Leviathan was probably after them; it would hardly have attacked and then just swum off, giving them grace to lick their wounds. Of course it wanted to know where they would run. The only “of course” she could not supply was what it would do when it realised that they had made a bolthole of an abandoned mining base. She doubted it would just give them up as a bad job and go off to harass somebody else.

She’d watched the Baby’s distress log four times before the captain had decided that she was past the point of analytical interest and well into obsession. “There was nothing you could have done,” he’d told her, not without kindness. Of course there wasn’t. Of course he was right.

Of course.

It was difficult to take one’s gaze away from the main screen, which still continued to show the Novgorod’s course and maximum range. The centre of the map was still the submarine herself; the map updated thirty times a second and she got closer and closer to the abandoned mine with every minute. The red circle grew smaller each minute too, but the mine stayed within its circumference. Just, only just.

The lack of a safety margin obviously vexed Captain Zagadko so much that he was even prepared to listen to Kane.

“Have you ever flown a fixed-wing aircraft, captain?” asked Kane.

“I’ve flown CG craft, but what’s your point?” Katya noticed Petrov give Kane a very suspicious look as Zagadko answered.

“The point is, you’re going to have to treat this boat like an aircraft on the final approach. A fixed-wing aircraft doesn’t handle anything like a CG, believe me. You’ve got a source of thrust — propellers, jets, whatever — and that’s it. The aircraft develops lift through its aerodynamic lifting surfaces. You can’t slow down to think things through, you fly on gut reaction and experience.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“It is. That’s why everybody uses contra-gravity; it’s much more forgiving. Usually, a sub handles like a CG aircraft but, with this steady sinking, we’re behaving more like a fixed-wing aircraft at the moment. She’s constantly fighting going down and crashing.”

“I ask again, what’s your point?”

“We’ve got a good head of speed up at the moment. That can make us climb if we use the hydroplanes like the wings of an aircraft.”

“And that’s it?” said Petrov dismissively. “You think we don’t already know that?”

“Oh yes, you know it intellectually. But you don’t know it in here.” Kane tapped his chest over his heart. “You’re going to try to translate too late and we won’t climb far enough or too early and we’ll stall.”

“Stall?” said Zagadko.

“If you burn off too much speed, you’ll sink like a brick and it’ll be ‘next stop, crush depth.’”

“Let me understand you. Are you asking to be at the helm when we make our approach on the mine?”

Kane smiled. “I’ve done something similar in the past. I can do this. Trust me.”

Zagadko didn’t hesitate. “You’ll have the helm at a thousand metres off the mine.”

Petrov’s jaw drooped with incredulity for a moment. “What? Sir?”

Zagadko looked at him steadily. “I hope you’re not intending to debate your captain’s command, lieutenant?”

He clearly wanted to do just that, but discipline overrode it. “No, sir. Of course not.”

“Good.” Then to Kane, “The helm position uses a perfectly standard yoke. You might want to run a couple of simulations before the real thing to get the feel of the vessel.”

Kane, who’d apparently been expecting some argument at least, was almost as taken aback by Zagadko’s agreement as Petrov. “Yes. Yes, that would be helpful. Thank you very much, captain.”

Only Katya saw the captain’s expression when Kane turned away to set up a simulation and she didn’t like it at all.

Kane, on the other hand, was too focussed on the work at hand to pay much attention to anything else. It was the work of only a couple of minutes to set up a simulation of the Novgorod approaching the mine from a range of a thousand metres, engines at full power and the nose pulling down harder than the rest of the sub could lift back. The one unknown was the exact proportions of the mine’s moon pool. “We don’t have time to model it anyway,” Kane told Tokarov who’d assisted in setting up. “I’ll concentrate on hitting the outer entrance and then make up the rest as we go along. Going from full speed to a dead stop in perhaps a couple of hundred metres is going to be quite a party trick in itself.”

“What if the entry tunnel is shorter than a couple of hundred metres?”

“Then we’ll be making a dead stop no matter what I do. Ready?”

Tokarov checked a display and nodded. Kane pulled on a headset, braced himself in his seat and nodded. “Let’s go, then.”

Katya stood behind him as the screen flared into light and movement. Novgorod was running fast and noisy; there was no possibility that the Leviathan could not detect them. Indeed, it was probably right behind them at that very moment. With stealth no longer a concern, the captain had given Kane leave to use active sonar on the approach. A little more noise would hardly make a difference. He’d set up a tight cone of rapid pulses to give high resolution to the imaging sonar. In the same way a terrestrial bat would build up a picture of its surroundings in pitch darkness by using sound pulses, the Novgorod’s computers would be using the sonar returns to make a model of the mountain and the tunnel entrance.

On Kane’s display, the rocky finger of the underwater mountain thrust up from the seabed six kilometres below. Four hundred and fifty metres below the sea surface, high on the mountain, the tunnel entrance stood out in pulsing red. The Novgorod’s current depth was one and half thousand. Kane immediately paused the simulation. “I know we’re at flank speed, but is that flank flank, or is there a little bit held back for special occasions?”

Tokarov shook his head. Kane nodded. “Okay. This is going to be difficult.” He toggled the speed display from kilometres per hour over to knots and started the simulation again.

The mountainside flew towards them at shocking speed; Kane was like her uncle in preferring to work in knots but Katya was a kph woman herself. She did the calculation in her head quickly and grimaced. The Novgorod was doing one hundred and ten kph. They would cover the thousand metres in a little less than thirty-three seconds. Kane immediately started pulling back on the yoke, making the hydroplanes dig and the boat climb. They would have to climb over a thousand metres in a thousand metres of forward travel. Katya didn’t need to delve into sines and cosines to know that was at least a forty-five degree climb. She looked around her, looking for a bulkhead she could sit against when the deck tilted up like that.

The simulated Novgorod climbed quickly and smoothly, but its velocity was withering away with every metre faster than she would have believed possible. As her speed dropped, the intercept time drifted upwards from thirty-three seconds. At forty-six seconds, the Novgorod stalled, her forward speed no longer enough to make the hydroplanes bite. The nose went down and she ploughed into the mountainside fifty metres below the entrance.

“Only a first attempt,” said Kane, a little unsteadily. “I’ll do better next time.”

“You don’t have a next time,” said Zagadko stepping up beside him and looking at the display with disgust as the virtual Novgorod scraped down the virtual mountainside with her virtual nose crumpled and her virtual crew dying. “In one minute, you have the helm.” He went to his command chair, swivelled it forward and clamped it. As he strapped himself in, he ordered a collision warning.

“All hands secure! Brace for impact!” squawked the usually placid computer voice throughout the boat.

Tokorov found a vacant seat for Katya and put her there when he saw her making to sit on the floor. “We’re likely to hit something pretty fast and pretty hard,” he warned her. “If you’re not strapped in, you’ll smash your brains out on the far bulkhead.” She didn’t need a second warning, strapping herself in quickly and efficiently just as Sergei had shown her. She hoped she wouldn’t need Kane to get her out again in as much of a hurry as last time.

“Twelve hundred metres. You might as well have the helm now, Mr Kane. Good luck,” said Zagadko, his voice carefully toneless as if he was handing down a death sentence.

The “active” light on Kane’s console turned to green. The sonar image on his screen was now the real thing and Katya imagined how very useful it would be if the “pause” control still worked, freezing the boat in the water while they worked out something cleverer than simply flinging themselves at the side of a mountain.

Kane pulled back on the yoke, but nowhere near as violently as he had in the simulation. The deck started to tilt back as the Novgorod began to climb towards the surface. He didn’t want to kill their speed so badly this time, but now he ran the risk of not climbing far enough in the short distance they had. The hull thrummed with the water rushing rapidly over the hydroplanes, angling back further and further.

“Eight hundred metres,” read off the navigator. “Depth thirteen-fifty.”

It’s not going to work, thought Katya, not with numbers like those. We’re not going to do it.

Zagadko clearly thought the same. “Weapons,” he ordered, his voice tight, “dump all the torpedoes. Don’t bother arming anything; just get them out of the tubes.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” replied the weapons officer. A warship has to be in a tight position before it will willingly disarm itself, but nobody could argue that things weren’t desperate. Even the lightest of the weapons weighed several hundred kilos and that might make the difference.

The hiss of torpedo launches sounded again and again as the autoloaders shoved every weapon from the magazines into the tubes. Katya winced at the thought of all that live armament drifting down into the depths. Kane was already pulling the yoke back much harder. The Novgorod was climbing rapidly, but she was losing speed just as quickly.

“Four hundred. Depth six hundred.”

Katya stared. How was that possible? Then she saw the attitude indicator had drifted far past forty-five degrees. They were on course to hit the docking tunnel but at this angle they would blow into its ceiling and the journey would end abruptly and fatally.

Suddenly, Kane shoved the yoke forward. What was he doing? In her mind’s eye, Katya saw the Novgorod start to tip nose down while her depth… what? Of course, a boat as big as this would carry vast amounts of inertia — she couldn’t hope to manoeuvre as tightly as a little sub like the Baby. The boat would get an even keel even as she continued to climb for a brief second or two. And in that time…

“Zero! Depth four-fifty!” The navigator was almost shouting. On the main screen the mine entrance swept towards them and then out towards the edge of the display as it engulfed them. “We’re in!”

But they weren’t out of trouble. The very inertia that Kane had used to perform a vertical skid still existed in their headlong rush. “Full astern!” snapped Zagadko. “Forward cameras! Overlay on the sonar image!”

The main screen flickered and they were seeing through the Novgorod’s eyes as it hurtled through the tunnel. The walls shot past them as if they were falling down a well. Suddenly, they broadened and they were out in the internal lake of the mine’s moon pool. The far wall rose up ahead of them.

It would be an unfair irony, thought Katya, if they’d saved themselves from being smashed on the outside of a mountain only to be smashed on the inside of one. She’d hardly noticed that she’d dug her heels in against the floor plating as if she could bring the submarine to a halt by sheer force of will.

“Beaching ramp to port!” called Kane and wrenched the controls over. Many such pools had beaching ramps where boats could be pulled out of the water for routine maintenance. Usually, the boat rode up on a custom-built wheeled cradle, all prim and pampered.

The Novgorod hit the ramp with her bare belly and ran up screaming every centimetre of the way. A four hundred metre long vessel can build up quite a bow wave, especially with her hydroplanes in the vertical position to act as water brakes. The wave was three metres high when it hit the quayside and broke, running tonnes of water across ground where nobody had stood for five years. It hit the front of the empty traffic control offices and stove in the thick glass sheeting. Katya watched all this on the boat’s cameras. She wondered if somebody was going to have to pay for all this damage.

“Engines, all stop!” commanded Captain Zagadko. “And kill that damn sonar!” With the sonar grids out of the water, they were just making a fierce whittering tone that echoed around the pool’s cavern. On the quay, the backwash of water from the bow wave gushed back into the moon pool.

The engines died. The sonar died.

The silence was beautiful.

“Damage report,” demanded Zagadko as he unstrapped himself, standing up and testing the skewed angle of the deck with his feet.

It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Structurally, the boat was intact. There were any number of minor pieces of damage, but they were largely unimportant to the operation of the vessel or easily fixed. The greatest problem was the actual physical situation. The Novgorod’s first quarter was out of the water and there was no possible way of getting her back into the pool without heavy equipment. “She’ll swim,” the damage control officer concluded, “but she’ll need help to do it.”

Tokorov was at the environmental controls. “Captain, I’ve taken a sample of the air in the mining base.”

“Is it breathable?”

“It’s not just breathable, it’s at maintained levels. They must have left the environmental systems running when it was abandoned. Perhaps they thought somebody would be going back to finish stripping the place and it never happened.”

Zagadko nodded; there was an excellent chance that was exactly what happened. A typical failure in communications between two work crews hired through different contractors and both under the impression that the other would be the last ones out. With no personnel left there to put a strain on life-support, it could tick over quite happily on its fusion cells for ten or twenty years.

“That’s something, at least. We’re going to have to get a message out somehow. Put together a party, Lieutenant Tokarov, and see if there’s any communications gear still in place. Even the bare terminals of a transmitter array will do — we can provide the rest.” Tokarov saluted smartly and moved off to put together a landing party.

Zagadko pursed his lips and grimaced. “Which leaves me with one last unpleasant duty.” In a single smooth action, he drew his sidearm and clapped the barrel against the back of Kane’s skull as he sat at the controls. “Hands clear of the yoke, Mr Kane. I have no desire to kill you so please don’t make it a necessity.”

Kane slowly raised his hands. He didn’t look at all surprised. Katya, on the other hand, was outraged. “What are you doing, captain? He just saved all our lives!”

Zagadko shot her a sideways glance. “I don’t deny it, Ms Kuriakova. But the fact remains that I have reasonable grounds to believe Mr Kane here is an agent of a foreign power. I’d be failing in my duty if I didn’t take him into custody. Which reminds me — Mr Kane, by the authority vested in me by the Federal Maritime Authority and by the Russalkin legislature, you’re under arrest.”

“So I gather,” replied Kane. He seemed faintly amused by it all. Katya couldn’t see anything funny about having a maser pistol tight against the back of your skull. “May I ask under what charge?”

“Suspicion of insurgent activity, acting against the interests of Russalka, farting in a confined space… does it really matter, Kane? There’s something wrong about you and I intend to find out what it is. Specifically, I intend to hand you over to Secor and they can find out.”

“But…” started Katya.

“I’m fully aware of the service that Mr Kane has afforded this vessel, Ms Kuriakova,” Zagadko interrupted her. She saw he was becoming angry and shut up. “And I’m not unappreciative. I shall make that clear in my report. The fact remains that he’s said enough things that make me think he’s a Terran. That’s enough reason for me to arrest him and more than enough for you to accept it.”

“Don’t argue with the captain, Katya,” said Kane softly. “I’d do exactly the same in his place.”

Katya fumed. Why did they insist on talking down to her like this? “How can you be so calm? Do you know what Secor will do to you?”

Secor was the popular name for the FMA Security Organisation and was the only popular thing about it. Nobody liked to think about what went on in Secor establishments or what its agents did with the carte blanche they’d been given by a desperate government during the war. Now, ten years later, the government seemed too terrified to withdraw those powers.

Kane smiled. “Sensory deprivation, psychotomimetic drugs, RNA stripping, the usual. They’re quite old fashioned in their ways, bless them.”

Zagadko had Kane taken to the brig by a couple of marines. He seemed embarrassed to have Kane present on the bridge for any longer than was necessary, Kane’s calm acceptance of his arrest unnerving him somewhat.

For her part Katya watched him go with very mixed emotions. He was a ruthless pirate, a murderer who had saved her life. He was probably a Terran, a Grubber, one of the filth who had killed her father and thousands more, yet he had also saved the Novgorod and everybody aboard her. Katya didn’t know what to think. She couldn’t bring herself to hate him, but she certainly couldn’t like him either. That only left her the option of indifference, and Kane was a hard man to be indifferent about. She settled on something like grudging respect, but that just made what Secor were going to do to him feel all the worse.

Tokarov arrived back to report he’d put together his party. “Shall I have weapons issued, sir?”

The captain looked at him as if he was mad for a second, but then his brow clouded and he nodded. “Yes. Yes, that would be wise. I don’t like the way Kane knew so much about this place and the way the life-support has so conveniently been left running. We may not be alone here.”

Katya watched the party troop up the deck, restlessness growing in her. She didn’t care to be trapped in the Novgorod with the likes of Captain Zagadko. She’d known Kane was a criminal, but Secor? They’d tear his mind to pieces looking for Grubber conspiracies and leave him a hollowed-out wreck. She’d heard too many ugly stories of what Secor agents did to amuse themselves, from friends and from Sergei in his darker moments. If even half of what they said was true… Why couldn’t Zagadko just have said he’d hand Kane over to the normal law enforcement agencies?

“Captain,” she began.

“Request denied,” replied Zagadko blandly without even looking away from the damage report he’d just been handed.

“You don’t even know what…”

“You were going to ask permission to go ashore.” He finally favoured her with a look. “Weren’t you?”

She had been, but she just glared at him as her answer.

“Well,” he continued without giving her any more time to answer, “that’s impossible. I’m not convinced that this mining site is nearly as abandoned as Mr Kane tried to suggest.”

“What?” said Katya, anger making her incautious and impolite.” You think the Terran army is hiding here?”

The captain ignored the venom in her voice. “Criminals tend to associate with criminals, greater and lesser. I think our Mr Kane is the former, and that he will associate with the latter. Pirates, perhaps? People who have little to lose by working for somebody like him.”

“You’re making a lot of guesses, captain.”

The captain’s face hardened. “With all due respect, Ms Kuriakova, you know nothing.” The grimness of his voice indicated that she was due precious little respect, from him at least. “The war was only ten years ago, not even a generation, and you know nothing of it.”

“My father…”

“Died in it? Lots of fathers died in it. And mothers. And sons. And daughters. You dishonour their memory. The first strikes were against our air arm. Remember that much?”

“The Andrev Platform was destroyed. Of course I…”

“And what kind of aircraft were destroyed there? Eh?”

Katya couldn’t answer; she had no idea. Her mouth opened and closed a few times until the captain lost patience.

“Contragravitic craft, girl! CG craft just like the ones in the forward compartment! They were all we had; ideal for lifting from a submersible platform. How then,” he leaned close and she could suddenly feel the weight of that war on his shoulders, all that loss and agony expressing itself in the cold fury of his glance, “did Kane have experience flying fixed-wing aircraft? Those are Terran!” He spat the word out like diseased phlegm.

He drew himself up and took a long calming breath. “No Russalkin could have saved our lives in the way that he did,” he finished quietly.