Katya's World

CHAPTER 6 Deck Sweeper

Katya sat in the otherwise deserted junior officers’ ward room and wondered how so much can go so wrong in so little time. The memories kept running around her head in a jumbled mess: clinging to the distress buoy; that idiot Fed Suhkalev; getting dressed that morning, so carefully putting her navigator’s card in her pocket; the ghost return from the “ore mountain”; torpedoes in the water. Most of all, she remembered her Uncle Lukyan. He’d survived the war only to die on some stupid milk run. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair. It was not fair.

“Theoretically I’m not allowed in here without an invitation.” She looked up. Lieutenant Petrov was standing in the doorway, his hands on the top frame, looking speculatively around. “I’m the first officer,” he continued, “so I’m not really a junior officer anymore. Tradition says I don’t go any further without being asked.”

Katya looked at him for a long second. She wasn’t sure she liked him; she still remembered the look on his face when Kane had made the slip about aircraft that had condemned him. If the captain hadn’t picked it up, she was sure Petrov would have informed him of his suspicions. But, like so much else, it was duty. Duty and tradition. Traditions from old Earth, strangely enough — the world they cursed in one breath and held in grudging respect the next. “Come in,” she said.

Petrov looked too tall to be a submariner, she thought as he folded himself through the door and slid with practised ease but little grace into the seat opposite her. With his close-cropped hair and his cold grey eyes, he was almost a parody of the stereotypical Secor officer. A Russalka spider-crab made human.

He sat in silence, regarding her for a moment. Then he opened his breast pocket and reached inside. “I have something for you.” He slid her navigator’s card out and put it down on the table in front of her. As she took it, he added, “It was in your clothes. I thought you’d like it back.”

Katya was looking at her picture on the card. There she was looking so seriously back out at herself and Katya thought that was taken eighteen days ago. Why do I look like such a child? “Thank you.” She put the card away. “You searched my clothes?”

“Of course,” said Petrov, unsurprised and unembarrassed by the question. “You came aboard with a criminal. I wanted to make sure your story, at least, was true.”

She felt oddly complimented. Petrov hadn’t thought she’s just a girl; he’d thought she might be a desperate criminal. He was the first person the whole day who had treated her like an adult. No, that wasn’t quite true. “Have you heard anything from Lieutenant Tokarov yet?”

“No. Not yet. These tunnels will play havoc with communications though, so that doesn’t necessarily signify anything untoward.”

“But you’re worried?”

He raised an eyebrow. “What gives you that idea?”

Katya shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps the way you’re so keen to explain away the fact he hasn’t reported in yet.”

Petrov looked at her blankly. Then he smiled. It didn’t light up his face and looked like it rarely had many opportunities to show itself, but it was a smile nonetheless. “Your prodigious talents extend further than just navigation, I see. A student of human nature too.”

“Prodigious?”

“I read your card, remember. Your scores are excellent. With more experience you could walk onto any boat in the ocean and they’d be pleased to have you. I haven’t seen such impressive scores since, well, my own. I was something of a wunderkind too, you see.” The smile flickered briefly again.

Katya’s gaze seemed distant, and Petrov wondered what she was seeing. Then she looked him in the eye and said, “My uncle’s dead.”

She said it flatly, as if the words and their meaning had become disconnected in her mind.

Petrov’s smile instantly went. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

“What I don’t understand is, why don’t I care?” She shook her head. “I loved him. He was there for us right after papa died, has always been there. Why can’t I cry for him?”

“Perhaps,” said Petrov, “because he’s always been there. You know he’s gone but, part of you, a very great part of you does not believe it. You expect him to walk through the door at any minute.”

She looked at the door, an open door aboard a boat Uncle Lukyan had never set foot aboard in his entire life. Yet somehow, she could see him in her mind’s eye, stepping around the frame, looking up and seeing her, that slightly prepossessed air that he usually carried turning to the great smile he’d reserved for her ever since she’d been born. She willed him to be there, for the whole thing to have been a dreadful mistake or a stupid joke. No Leviathan, no attack, no drowned corpse strapped into the wreck of the Baby. She couldn’t do it. She knew she could never do it. Finally she started to cry.

Petrov stood, unfolding himself easily out from the confinement of the table and chair and left her silently to her grief.

Some time later the speaker in the wardroom’s bulkhead burst into life. “Battle stations!” barked the captain’s voice, tense with anger. “All crew to battle stations! Prepare to repulse boarders!”

Katya’s head jerked up. She’d been drifting in a shallow sleep, exhaustion finally catching up with her. For a moment she had no idea where she was or how she’d come to be there. Then it all came back in a sickening flood. She might have sat there in indefinite despair if the captain’s words hadn’t finally sunk in. Her eyes widened.

Repel boarders?

The gangways were in frenzy when she stuck her head out of the door. Ratings and officers were hurrying back and forth and she realised with a shock that they were all carrying weapons. Not just the sidearms that the senior officers wore but longarms — maser rifles, close-assault guns, even a flamer pack.

She followed the flow of personnel to the bridge and found it almost empty. The top hatch was open and she could hear shouting going on outside, the voices echoing around the great cavern of the moon pool. Then the shooting started.

She had no idea how far away the firing was between the echoes and the sound coming down the hatch but it didn’t sound that close. There was the sporadic krak! Of ballistic smallarms and a couple of bursts of full automatic fire. It quickly became obvious it was coming closer.

“What’s happening?” she called up the hatch.

A face appeared above her, a female sublieutenant she didn’t recognise. “Stay there!” she was ordered. “Stay off the deck!” Then the face was gone.

More firing. She could hear the captain up top giving terse commands. Fine, she thought, I don’t have to be up there to find out what’s happening. She walked to the station where she’d seen Petrov operate the lights and exterior cameras and examined the controls briefly. Her cybernetics teacher had always said that the more sophisticated a system was and the better designed it was, the simpler it seemed to be. “All the functionality, none of the knobs and dials,” recited Katya under her breath. Whoever had designed this console had known their trade well. In a few seconds she was using the Novgorod’s cameras as easily as she once operated the Baby’s.

Captain Zagadko had deployed his marines and armed crew behind any available cover facing into the tunnels; crates, raised hatches, even the boat’s exposed hull all sheltered waiting crew as the shooting in the tunnels got closer. There was little time for tension to build further before Lieutenant Tokarov and his team came into sight, the ones at the front pausing to provide covering fire for the ones at the rear as they moved to the front and returned the favour, the tactical leapfrogging that Katya had only ever seen in screen dramas about the war and crime thrillers. As soon as the angle of the tunnel gave them enough cover from their pursuers, they just ran for the Novgorod.

They’d barely made it when their foes surged out after them. Katya thought there must have been about fifteen or twenty of them, mainly men but she spotted a couple of women. There was no pattern or consistency in their clothing or armament; they looked like a mass escape from an FMA holding facility that had bolted through a weapons museum.

So this was what real pirates looked like.

Unlike the ordered retreat of Tokarov’s team, they ran headlong into the cavern and stopped in a shocked rabble when they saw the mass of the FMA boat beached there. She snorted derisively — how did that bunch of morons think the Feds had got into the mining complex in the first place? That they’d swum there? All of a sudden, the smart and wily pirates of fiction looked like a grand exaggeration of the truth.

“This is Captain Alexander Zagadko of the FMA boat, the Novgorod!” roared the captain’s voice from above. It was perfectly audible through the open hatch and Katya quickly wound down the volume on the hull sensor relays before the speakers blew. “By the authority vested in me by the Federal Maritime Authority and by the Russalkin legislature, you’re all under arrest! Drop your weapons immediately! Surrender or die!”

The pirates, to their credit, had a third alternative. As one, they ran back down the tunnel before the captain could give the order to fire.

Zagadko swore a pithy but venomous oath of the kind that comes easily to sailors. “Tokarov! Report!”

“We just ran into them in the corridors, sir. They looked more surprised to see us than we were to see them. We’d already found signs this place was occupied.”

“Any idea where their boat is?”

“We saw signage about another dock on the other side of the mountain. They must be moored there.”

“Kane’s people,” growled Zagadko. “No wonder he knew so much about it. Well, perhaps he’s done us a favour. Do you think you could reach this other dock quickly, lieutenant?”

Tokarov considered the question quickly. “Yes, sir. If that’s where they’re headed, we’ll be on their heels the whole way.”

“Take the marines. I want their boat. It’s our way out of here. What are you waiting for? Jump to it, man!”

Tokarov was off and running to the captain of the marines in a moment.

Katya didn’t like it. The crew were trained in combat, but wouldn’t have the sharp edge of the marines. She could see the captain’s reasoning, but she really didn’t like the thought of the boat’s defences being cut like this. It made her feel vulnerable and she’d heard too many ugly stories about what pirates did with prisoners to want to take risks.

There was something else she didn’t like either. Something about the pirates she’d seen on the cameras. She sat down and watched the screens as Tokarov and the marines headed off into the tunnels in pursuit and tried to put her finger on what was bothering her. There was an imbalance somewhere, an inequality. On the one hand there were those pirate clowns and on the other, there were… There was…

“Kane!” she said, her eyes widening in horror. “Oh no! Oh no, no, no, no!”

She skittered up the ladder, her feet on the rungs clattering like gunfire. Once on deck, she ran to where Zagadko was giving orders to the same sublieutenant who’d ordered her to stay below.

“Captain!” blurted Katya. “Please, I’ve got an awful feeling…”

“Not now, Ms Kuriakova,” said Zagadko. “I’m busy.” He continued telling the officer his orders to set up defensive positions along the dock.

“It can’t wait!” Katya was in a fury of indecision. Was it really worth antagonizing the captain over? It was just a gut feeling she had really. Was it enough?

“Didn’t I order you to stay below?” said the sublieutenant.

“Yes, but this is important!” Every second Tokarov and the marines were getting further from the moon pool. Every second the danger was increasing. If she was right.

Zagadko sighed. “Carry on,” he told the sublieutenant who left to carry out his orders with a backward narrow-eyed glance at Katya. He turned to Katya and looked down at her, crossing his arms. “Very well, Ms Kuriakova. What is so important?”

Now she had his attention, she didn’t know where to start. “Those pirates, didn’t they bother you?”

“I’ve encountered worse. What do you know about it, anyway? You were below decks during the attack, such as it was.”

“I was watching on the hull cameras.” She saw the captain’s eyebrows rise and pushed on before he got into a lecture about illicit use of FMA equipment. “They were a joke. I can’t imagine that bunch getting dressed without help. Can you?”

Zagadko laughed. “No, not really. Who’d have thought Kane would…” Then his slightly patronising smile abruptly faded. “Oh, gods,” he said hoarsely. Then in a full throated roar, “Petrov! Recall Tokarov! NOW!”

Petrov whirled to face his captain, saw this wasn’t a time to ask for clarification and jerked the radio from his belt. “Tokarov!” he said into the handset. “Pull back to the boat! Captain’s orders, most urgent!” For answer he only got the dead tone of a clear digital channel. Petrov shook his head. “I’m sorry, captain. These damn tunnels soak up signals like sponge.”

“Take two men. Catch up with them and get them back here immediately. Go!”

Petrov had barely taken three steps before the surface of the moon pool exploded off to the starboard of the Novgorod.

“Down!” shouted Zagadko, grabbing Katya fiercely by the arm and almost throwing her at the open hatch. She sprawled on the metal as the wave smashed into the Novgorod’s side, making the boat roll ten or fifteen degrees, her hull groaning hideously under the strain. It swept over the deck, blinding Katya for a moment as she covered her head for protection. Zagadko’s legs were swept out from beneath him and he fell heavily before being carried back and almost dumped off the port side. The huge wave hitting the docks caught the Novgorod’s crew by total surprise. Katya cleared her face of seawater in time to see the sublieutenant who’d ordered her around previously caught in the backwash as the tonnes of water rolled back into the pool. She looked like the wave had first smashed her against the wall; Katya couldn’t tell if she was dead or only unconscious. Katya jumped to her feet to run to her aid, but the captain’s voice stopped her in her tracks.

“No, Ms Kuriakova! Below! Get below!” He was crawling forward, his sidearm maser — a monster of a gun and definitely not FMA standard issue — drawn and aiming out into the moon pool. Katya stole a sideways look and almost froze. Another submarine was in the pool — leaner and smaller than the Novgorod but just as deadly. Its hydroplanes were up and Katya realised the massive wave had been deliberate. Hatches were already clanging open on her deck and atop her rakish conning tower, and people — pirates — were streaming out. She watched in horror as a forward hatch opened and a great pintle-mounted weapon rose on a cargo lift, two pirates already manning it. Katya had heard enough war stories from her Uncle Lukyan to know a “deck-sweeper” when she saw it; a great brute of a Gatling machinegun engineered so that no two bullets would travel quite the same path. Accuracy wasn’t its strength, just massive firepower delivered in broad strokes.

Behind her, she heard the distinctive half krak, half hisssss of a maser and realised the captain had opened fire. Part of her was watching all this as if it was happening to somebody else. I don’t want to see anyone die, she thought, the sick feeling of fear beginning to grow in her gut.

One of the pirates at the Gatling gun stepped back as if they’d just remembered something important and then collapsed. Katya knew he was dead. Then she saw the Gatling gun come to bear on her and its barrels started to spin with a high electrical whine. She dived headlong down the hatch as the first large calibre rounds hailed heavily against the Novgorod’s hull, stripping off matte-black anechoic tiling and blowing it into the air in a shower of lightless fragments.

She got tangled with the rungs of the gangway ladder and hit the bridge deck heavily, sprawling on her back. Hurt and stunned, she listened to the scream of the Gatling for a few seconds, realising that the captain was very probably dead by now. They’d been fooled, conned by the pirates with their display of comical incompetence into underestimating them. All the while, the pirate vessel had been making its way around the mountain to attack them from behind. And now the captain was probably dead, Tokarov and the marines had probably been ambushed and were dead, Petrov had probably run into the ambushing force and was dead, even that tight-lipped sublieutenant who’d been so off-hand with Katya was probably dead. There was only one thing left to do.

She found the arms locker easily enough. It was still unlocked; after the urgent arming to repel boarders, they’d obviously been in too much of a hurry to secure it. Besides which it was empty, stripped bare.

Almost bare. In one corner there were some small drawers containing spare parts, cleaning kits and manuals. In the lowermost, she found a box that held what she needed.

Havilland Kane was lying on the bunk in the brig when Katya opened the door. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye and then went back to considering the ceiling.

“Noisy outside,” he commented. “I gather my Brethren of the Deep, to coin a phrase, are making life difficult for the good captain?”

“The captain’s dead.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Truly I am. My colleagues can be a little heavy-handed at times.”

“You planned all this.” Katya’s hand closed around the little maser pistol concealed in her pocket. Lukyan had never balked at showing her how to maintain, activate and operate weapons. The very fact that she didn’t like guns had encouraged him. If she’d been fascinated by them, he’d once told her, he would have taught her about hydroponics gardens instead.

“Planned? No, that’s a very strong term for what I’ve done. I’ve extemporised. Made it up as I went along. I certainly didn’t plan for your uncle’s craft to be attacked or this one, for that matter. I just took advantage of opportunities as they’ve presented themselves. I’m sorry about the violence, though. Without my calming influence, my crew can get… excitable.”

His self-control and the knowledge that he’d been stringing them along all the way were almost more than she could bear. “You dirty Grubber,” she snarled.

Nothing seemed to bother him. “You know, I’ve never liked that term. It says more about some vague Russalkin sense of inadequacy than anything bad about Earth. Land-grubbers…” He snorted. “What do most Russalkin know about it? You’ve never had real ground under your feet, just blasted rock or deck sections. You’ve never lain on your back in a field and reached up,” he raised his arm towards the ceiling, “feeling you can almost touch the clouds. Fluffy white clouds against a cobalt blue sky this is, not those filthy dark clouds that Russalka gets all the time. You think I want to be on your foul little planet? If I could leave, I would have left ten years ago.”

“Get up.”

“No.” He lowered his hand, but still didn’t look at her. “I’m quite happy here, thank you.”

“Get up!”

“Or what?” He sounded bored or perhaps just tired. “You’ll shoot me?” He finally turned his head to look at her. She had the gun drawn and levelled at him. His eyebrows raised. “Oh. Perhaps that was an ill-considered thing to say.”

She stood with feet apart and both hands gripping the pistol. “I’m not joking. Get up or I will shoot you.”

He turned away from her to look at the ceiling again. “You won’t shoot. You’re too well mannered to shoot anybody, never mind an unarmed man.”

The pistol made a surprisingly loud krak!-hisss! in the small room. Katya did a better job of hiding her startled reaction to the sound than Kane. Then again, a maser bolt hadn’t just gone past the tip of Katya’s nose to fry and bubble the paint on the wall by her head.

“You don’t know anything about me,” said Katya, “and I’m not that well mannered.”

Kane swung his feet onto the floor and looked at her, trying not to appear worried. “Okay, so I’m up. Now what?”

The shooting had died down by the time Kane emerged on deck, Katya standing close behind him with the barrel of the maser pushed hard into the small of his back. Kane’s boat sat at an angle across the moon pool, her guns trained on the surviving members of the Novgorod’s crew lining up on the dock side with their hands behind their heads. There were some unmoving bodies on the stone floor and a couple floating facedown in the pool itself. Katya found she accepted this without a qualm and the ease of that acceptance nauseated her far more than the sight of death itself.

Armed pirates were moving onto their boats’ deck to back up the remaining Gatling gunner, sweeping their muzzles to cover the area. They were looking in every direction except hers and, for a crazy moment, Katya considered sneaking back below. Then one looked over at the Novgorod. Instantly, she had six or seven long arms trained on her. More specifically, they were trained on Kane, behind whom she was hiding. For a less crazy and more fearful moment, she wondered if they’d recognise him from sixty metres away and, even if they did, who was to say his captaincy hadn’t been usurped in his absence? Perhaps even the pirates wanted him dead.

But they didn’t fire, neither before or after one of them cried out, “It’s the captain!”

“Are you all right, captain?” shouted another.

“Fine, thank you,” called Kane, as casually as if they were meeting in a corridor. “Well, apart from the maser being stuck in my back by this young lady.”

The pirates’ weapons, which had been lowered when they recognised him, snapped back into aiming positions.

“I think I can get her,” Katya heard one say, the sound floating across the water with great clarity.

“You are to do no such thing,” said Kane, in a cold, hard voice that carried at least as much threat and authority as Zagadko’s roar. “I don’t want any more shooting. The time for violence has passed.”

“But you agree that violence was necessary?” said a new voice.

A figure stepped aside from the rest of the pirates, a woman somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties, with short black hair that barely reached her collar and an angular face that hinted at determination. She was wearing the distinctive body-armour of an FMA marine from the war, but without the helmet. The black ceramic armour panels had been recoloured, however, in dark reds and oranges to create a striped effect that Katya knew were called “tiger stripes” after some animal the Grubbers had driven into extinction.

“Hello, Tasya,” called Kane. He waved at the churned surface of the Novgorod’s hull. “Was the deck-sweeper really necessary?”

“Yes,” she replied brusquely. “We’ve lost Daliev doing this. I think it was necessary.”

“Well, you were the one on the spot. I’ll leave it to your discretion. I’m back now, though, and I don’t want the girl shot if it can be avoided.”

“Who is she?”

“A waif and a stray. Katya Kuriakova. She’s the surviving crew of the boat the Feds commandeered to take me to the Deeps. She’s not FMA. It’s just lousy luck that has brought her here.”

“Hey!” hissed Katya, jamming the gun more firmly into his back. “Stop it! I’ve got the gun here. You don’t talk unless I say so.”

“What was the name?” called the woman Kane had called Tasya. “Did you say Kuriakova?”

Kane raised his hands. “Sorry. She’s armed and a bit nervous. I should shut up.”

There was activity aboard the pirate vessel. Some crewmembers disappeared below. “What are they doing?” Katya demanded of Kane.

“I don’t know. How should I know?”

Her curiosity only had to wait a couple of minutes to be sated. The pirates returned and this time they had company, a huge and distinctive figure.

“Uncle Lukyan!” cried Katya as he was forced to his knees on the pirate vessel’s deck. A moment later, the equally bedraggled figure of Suhkalev joined him.

Kane laughed out loud. “You were shadowing us the whole time?”

Katya hardly heard him. She stared at Lukyan, a miracle in the flesh. Part of her wanted everyone to just vanish so she could hug her uncle so hard that he would never, ever die, that she would never have to feel grief and loss like that again. This part of her would have flung the gun down right away, filled as she was with a joyous, childish belief that everyone would smile at her happiness and would not stand in her way.

But the greater part of her could still smell the blood and the tang of air ionised by maser bolts. She could feel the deck beneath her feet, the gun in her hand, and Kane’s spine beneath the muzzle as she dug it into his back. She’d been taught from when she was old enough to reach an airlock control that curiosity could kill, that panic could kill, that impatience could kill. For the first time, she realised that even joy can kill you on Russalka.

With an effort, she forced herself to be cold and rational, to think through what had happened and what was likely to happen.

Step by step, she worked it out. Kane’s boat had been in the sonar dead zone behind them — their baffles — as soon as they’d left the locks. It had tracked them with the intention of scooping up the Baby in its great salvage maw when they were halfway through the trip and boats responding to a distress signal would have taken too long to reach their location to do any good.

“We lost you in the Weft. Then we heard all sorts of noise on the hydrophones. We got there to find that little sub going down and we grabbed it.” Tasya crossed her arms. “Typically, you’d already left. Never where you’re meant to be, are you, Captain?”

“I got bored of waiting for you,” replied Kane nonchalantly.

Tasya stood over the kneeling prisoners and drew her gun. “Drop your weapon and surrender, girl, or your uncle dies.”

“I’d do it,” said Kane quietly to Katya. “She’s more than capable of squeezing that trigger.”

Katya looked at all the forces ranged against her and suddenly the maser in her hand seemed a pathetic sort of thing to have put her hopes in. If she surrendered, what then? The pirates didn’t need her, didn’t need Lukyan. They knew that the pirates used the old mining site as a hideout, too. Surely they’d be murdered? But if she didn’t surrender, what could she hope to accomplish? She didn’t stand a chance of hitting anything on the pirate boat at this range, all she could do was shoot Kane and then they’d shoot her anyway.

“You know who Tasya is, don’t you?” murmured Kane, interrupting her train of thought. “ She’s the Chertovka. You know that name, surely?”

The Chertovka. The She-Devil.

“She’s a war criminal,” said Katya, an awful sense of dread welling in her. A war criminal, and worse. “You sail with a… a… a monster like her?”

“She’s no angel,” admitted Kane, “but you should be a lot more suspicious about what the Feds put on criminal records. Don’t underestimate her, though. She doesn’t do threats, just warnings.”

“I’m getting bored,” called Tasya. “Maybe you don’t think I’ll do it.” She jammed the gun against the back of Suhkalev’s head. “He’s expendable. Here’s your demonstration, girl.” Katya could hear Suhkalev’s whimpers turn to panicked hyperventilating, a sob of fear on every outward breath.

She’s going to kill him, thought Katya, she really is. She thought of her experiences with the arrogant young Federal officer and how all this was his fault. If he’d just bothered somebody else with his stupid little problems, Lukyan, Sergei and she could have done the round trip and been home celebrating by now. Stupid, stupid Fed.

Just for a second, one tiny fleeting second, she thought, Go ahead. Kill him and she was ashamed.

She dropped the gun and stepped away from Kane. “You win. Leave him alone.” The Chertovka — Katya couldn’t think of her in any other way now — stood over the sobbing man for a moment longer, apparently disappointed. She stepped back and sent Suhkalev sprawling on his face with a kick in his back.

Kane picked up Katya’s gun. He looked at her grimly, but made no move to point it at her. “Very wise, Ms Kuriakova. I’m glad that’s over. Now, if you’ve finished waving guns around and otherwise demonstrating what you’re not very good at, we can concentrate on the real problem.”

“Real problem? I… I don’t understand?”

Kane sighed. “Nothing like a bit of a firefight to distract people from the big picture, is there?” He shook his head and walked towards the Novgorod’s prow and the dockside, not even making Katya go first or ensuring she was following. She stood for a moment, wondering what he meant. Realisation was cold and fearful.

The Leviathan.