Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

“I don’t know this word,” she admitted. “I haven’t seen it before. What’s ‘indenturement’?”

Kane didn’t reply immediately. He looked at Tasya first. Katya followed his glance, and saw Tasya had gone pale with anger. Abruptly, she stirred from her place in the door and walked out into the corridor.

“It’s when you contract to work for someone in return for food, clothes, somewhere to sleep.”

Katya was confused. What was a proviso like that doing in a peace negotiation? Now she knew what it meant, she could make sense of the sentences around it. Her eyes widened. They couldn’t be serious.

“ All Yagizban?” she asked Kane. “Mandatory indenturement for a period of thirty years on all Yagizban? But, if it’s mandatory, if they have to do it…”

“Slavery,” said Tasya reappearing at the door. “They want to enslave my people. This is what they call a ‘peaceful overture.’” Her anger was in danger of boiling over. She took off her Secor cap and threw it in the corner as if it were diseased.

Katya was used to bickering and haggling over terms with traders, and was very familiar with the idea of starting with an outrageous offer. But buying a load of crimson squid fillets and negotiating a ceasefire couldn’t work exactly the same, could they? You couldn’t start by threatening the other party with enslavement or extermination. That was how wars started, not how they ended.

Then she read the last clause. It said in unequivocal terms that this was the FMA’s first and only offer. The Yagizba Enclaves must accept it or suffer the consequences.

“I don’t understand,” Katya said to Kane. “This is a declaration of war for a war that’s already being fought. I just…” She looked at the document as if it was dry water or pale black or something else that had no right existing. “What’s going on, Kane? What are they doing?”

“Now that is an excellent question,” he said, looking at the other documents still on the desktop. “I know what it looks like they’re doing.” He looked her in the eye. “It looks like they’re trying to wipe out the Russalkin.”

“You mean the Yagizban.”

“I mean what I say.” He held up two of the sheets. “More documents I’m not supposed to have. I’ll give you the short version and you can read them yourself if you don’t believe me. That love letter from the FMA gives the impression that a Federal victory is inevitable. These documents,” he waved the two sheets, “are recent loss reports for both sides, and include projected losses. Katya, if the war continues with its current ferocity, in one year’s time the global population will be less than a thousand. The only people left will be the ones in the warboats, because they will have destroyed all the settlements.”

Katya shook her head. “That’s not possible. No conventional war is that destructive.”

Kane dropped the papers to the desktop and rubbed his eyes. “Oh, if only that were true. There are two problems with that idea, though. One, it only really applies in places where the planet itself isn’t trying to kill you. Russalka isn’t a nice place, Katya. We can only live here because we have the technology. We make environments to live in because the Russalkin environment would kill us in hours. Most of it wants to drown us, and the rest of it will kill us with hypothermia. We live in bubbles. All it takes is a big enough pin and any bubble can be burst. And that brings us to point number two.”

He slid another sheet towards Katya. From the heading she could see it was a Yagizban intelligence report. “It turns out that the FMA is developing a bigger pin. A fusion device, specifically intended to open underwater bases to the ocean across multiple decks, thus overwhelming compartmentalisation and bulkhead safety measures. Anybody who isn’t vaporised, blown up, or drowned in the detonation will just suffocate in the darkness as the life-support fails.” He smiled humourlessly. “Even my lot never stooped that low.”

“The Leviathan ,” said Katya with pointed emphasis.

Kane winced. “Yes. That’s true. The Leviathan . But something went wrong with it. It wasn’t supposed to kill everyone. Just destroy any military capability. What the Feds are planning is genocide. Cold-blooded mass murder. Slavery or extermination. This is your government planning this, Katya. This is happening in your name.”

Katya turned to Tasya. “What are you doing about it, your government?”

Tasya pointed at the intelligence report. “We have warning. The Feds may have the numbers, but we’ve always had the technological edge. We’ll have fusion warheads by the time they do. If they attack the Enclaves with these weapons, we will destroy their settlements. If they want total war, they can have it.”

Katya shook her head. “This is crazy. This is all crazy. Are you seriously saying this war has to end with us all killing one another? I can’t… Over a century we’ve fought the planet just to survive, we fought the Grubbers when they tried to take it away from us, and you’re saying it’s all as good as over? We were our own worst enemies the whole time? No. No, I can’t accept that. We’re not that stupid.” The others were just looking at her. “We are not that stupid!”

She was angry now. Angry with them, angry with all this secret agent rubbish, but most of all she was angry because she had an ugly feeling gnawing away inside her that the Russalkin were more than capable of cutting their own throats rather than back down over a matter of pride.

Of course, all this still left one very large question.

“Why are you telling me this?”

Kane and Tasya exchanged glances. Katya realised that this was not a courtesy visit to tell her all this, or just to say hello and chat.

“We think we have a solution.” Katya looked at him suspiciously. Considering he was claiming to have found a way to prevent humans becoming nearly extinct on the planet, he didn’t seem very happy about it. “But, you’re not going to like it.”

“Try me.”

So Kane told her.

An hour later Katya was back at the pens. Sergei was relieved to see her, but wisely decided not to say anything when he saw her face. She was clearly furious, fighting furious. Deadly pale and fists clenched, she had shot him a glance that would blister anti-fouling paint and said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Instead she entered the Lukyan , and sat down in the left hand seat, the pilot’s seat, her uncle’s seat. Sergei looked at her back, her shoulders heaving with heavy breaths. “I’ll be in the dock cafe, OK?” he said cautiously. She said nothing. With misgivings, Sergei left.

Katya sat at the helm and looked at the darkness of the Lukyan ’s pen. She was glad of the observation bubble’s anti-reflective coating; she had no great desire to see her face there, illuminated by the glow from the screens, appearing to float like a drowned phantom in the water. She especially had no desire to see how she felt — angry, depressed, and terribly, terribly confused. She felt ugly inside her head, and it would just make her day if she looked it, too.

How could this war, this stupid little war, actually be even more dangerous than that against the Terrans? How could some silly homespun conflict fuelled by self-righteousness and point scoring have turned more deadly than a bona fide invasion from space?

The war against Earth had been intense, furious, a new turning point every day, whereas this spat with the Yagizba Enclaves was only slightly more interesting than the fish prices. Specific incidents were barely reported, just the steady drumbeat of “We’re at war and we’ll win after a while” in the news reports. Either the news was deliberately skipping many stories, or the figures Kane had showed her was a lie. She frowned hard enough to close her eyes. They were all such liars. Who could tell?