Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

Then after she had been dismissed and was getting up to leave, she had paused. The slightly routine way the men from Secor had demanded her silence had rankled at first, but now it made her suspicious “Have there been other incidents like this?” she asked.

“The interview is over, citizen,” said the senior agent, and that had been that.

There was one small piece of good news awaiting her return to the Lukyan , however: Sergei had secured a cargo.

“Plumbing parts?” said Katya, reading the manifest.

Like most Russalkin, Katya didn’t actually like water very much. She had the mandatory basic swimming standard that all Russalkin were required to attain, but hadn’t been near a swimming pool since. She would drink water happily enough, and shower in it, but quantities much larger than a sinkful of the stuff made her nervous. It felt like an enemy within, a little brother of its vast sibling waiting just beyond the next airlock or on the other side of the submarine hull. Waiting to rush in and crush, drown, drain the life heat from your very body. The Russalkin respected the sea, because the Russalkin feared it.

Plumbing just seemed like a good way to aggravate it.

Sergei shrugged. He tolerated drinking water, but regarded showers as agents of the great elemental enemy and usually made do with a wet sponge and no shame. Why anybody would want to shift a consignment of pipes, heaters, and shower heads around was one of the intractable mysteries of the universe as far as he was concerned. That they would get paid for it, however, was something he could understand. The plumbing supplies themselves he would leave to the dangerous intellectuals who had uses for such things.

The supplies were delivered sharply on schedule the following morning and loaded carefully. On an impulse, Katya made sure the boxes were unlocked. The directive was still days away from becoming mandatory, but it couldn’t do any harm to get into the habit ahead of time.

When she was returning from picking up some fresh food for the journey, she walked past a law enforcement agent talking to one of the pen managers by the hatch to Shurygin’s boat, the Lastochka . From what she overheard, they were discussing what they were going to do with it.

“Well, the family can’t get anyone here, and it’s not as if we can spare anyone,” said the manager.

She stepped through the Lukyan ’s hatch and sealed it. She sidled forward past the pallet loaded with plumbing supplies, saying, “They don’t know what to do with Shurygin’s boat.”

“It’ll just end up being used in the war effort,” said Sergei, running through the pre-launch checks. “Everything gets used in the war effort, one way or another.”

“Sergei,” said Katya. She waited until he looked back at her before continuing. “Mind if I take that seat?”

He raised an eyebrow, surprised. “She’s your boat, Katya. You sit where you like, but…”

“I just thought, you know… Just… Well, I don’t think Lukyan would be very happy with me being pilot and not…” She shook her head. “And not behaving like it. Responsibilities. He was always very keen on people accepting responsibilities.”

“He was.” Sergei nodded, and smiled. “I’ll be glad to be out of this seat, to tell the truth.” He unlocked his harness and climbed into the co-pilot’s seat with a blissful sigh. “I’m a right-hand seat kind of feller. Never felt comfortable over there. Too much responsibility.”

Katya took the pilot’s seat, adjusted it, locked her harness and put on her headset. “Sergei. That business on the way here…”

Sergei interrupted her. “Nobody died.”

“What? How can you know that?”

“While you were in here doing all that mad brooding after Secor had finished with you, I went to the cafe, remember? Next table, the weapons officers of the two — count ‘em — two warboats that were shadowing the Jarilo, arguing over what happened. They can’t have heard about your report, yet. Anyway, gist of the discussion, lots of torpedoes, lots of confusion, no hits. Not even the Jarilo got tabbed.”

Katya sighed deeply. “I was lucky.”

Sergei made a dismissive sound. “We make our luck.”

Atlantis Traffic Control ran them quickly through the departure protocols and bid them the traditional wish for a safe journey as the Lukyan slipped out of her lock and into the open sea. Within her, the atmosphere was a great deal more relaxed than when she’d docked. Sergei was a pragmatist at the core, even if he hid it beneath a deep crust of cynical pessimism. Rationally, he was satisfied that Katya’s actions had been reasonable after all, even if they hadn’t seemed that way at the time. Emotionally, he had no desire to stay angry at her for long. Katya might not have been blood family, but he felt like an honorary uncle to her, always had done, and now Lukyan was gone he took that role all the more seriously. An hour out of Atlantis he expressed his desire to put the past behind them in the manner time-honoured within the little submarine.

“Would you like a game of chess?” he said with an unconvincing attempt at casualness.

Katya looked over at him and grinned. Only an hour , she thought. He’s mellowing.

“I’d love a game, sure. Let me just get us to the first deep waypoint and I’ll hand over to the autopilot.” She had plotted a tortuous route to Dunwich Down, a small fish farming, protein processing, and hydroponics food facility built into a former mining site. The facility was in a cleft in the ocean bed, and there were few submarine mountains or even hills near it. This meant there was little cover on the approaches and unwary submarines could potentially be detected from kilometres away. In peacetime that was unimportant; Dunwich was not the sort of high value target that attracted pirates, and so civilian boats had travelled there and back without fear of attack. All the rules changed in war, however. Food was vital to the Federal war effort. A single Vodyanoi class warboat could target every transporter in the volume around Dunwich from a safe distance, and be away before the first torpedoes were even detected. This was hunters’ territory now, and the transport captains were justifiably fearful to go there.

Stretched tight, the FMA could only afford to have a single obsolete Sadko class patrol boat circle the site, its drives adjusted to give the impression to listening enemies that it was something larger and more dangerous. If the Yagizban had any sort of intelligence network in place, this was a wasted effort, as everybody knew about the hapless Sadko and its fake acoustic signature. Indeed, it was joked about in every base in Federal waters.

Given the high likelihood that the Yagizban knew all about Dunwich’s paper tiger, this meant that civilian pilots remained very cautious approaching and leaving the facility. In Katya’s case, she had plotted a complex route that took advantage of every rockfall, mound, and isotherm she could find in the newest navigational charts. The Lukyan was programmed to creep, dash, and scuttle its way from cover to cover like a nervous parack, a form of five-legged crustacean native to Russalka that would never be a byword for bravery. To have steered the route manually would have been painfully wearing on anyone’s nerves. Katya, grown as pragmatic as Sergei in her experiences, was content to leave it to the computer. She still had her pride, however; she would steer to the first waypoint on the evasive pattern close to the sea bed before handing over.

As they descended in a long gentle arc into the depths, Katya experimentally waggled the control yoke, listening to the whine of the manoeuvre impellers through the hull as she did. Frowning, she took her hands from the controls and looked at the yoke, which did nothing at all in response.