Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

That the sea would enter.

Katya swallowed again.

Then, she heard the technician speaking to her through the still-open back of the suit. His voice was shockingly close given the sense of isolation the helmet had created, close and warm, humanly intimate. “Everybody feels a bit strange their first time in a suit,” he murmured. “Just remember, the type you’re wearing is the top of the line. Its test depth is twice what you’ll be experiencing. This will be nothing to it. You’ll be out there with three others who have all done this kind of thing before, you’ve got the best drone pilot in the water steering you, and you have two boats watching your every move.” He let that sink in for a moment. “How are you feeling, Ms Kuriakova?”

Katya closed her eyes, steadied herself, and when she re-opened them the panic had been put away somewhere inside where it could do her no harm. “Call me Katya,” she said. “And I’m fine. Thank you.”

“My pleasure. I’m Mike. I’ll close the suit now, carry out the last checks, and then you’re off on your daytrip. See you when you get back, Katya.”

Katya smiled despite herself. “See you, Mike.”

She felt the suit cover slam shut, heard the locks click, and yet she kept the sense of isolation, of abandonment away this time. There were eight other people in the maw, she told herself, three of them experiencing exactly what she was experiencing. All these people watching out for her, and with the experience and equipment to step in immediately if anything went wrong. But nothing was going to go wrong, because these experienced people knew what they were doing. She visualised her suit’s checklist again, saw the happy column of smiling, encouraging green check marks. All systems go. She nodded slightly. The trip was going to be easy.

And, typically for her, as the spectre of the short journey through the ocean abated, she began to think about what they might find at the other end.

She’d seen dead bodies before, but never bodies that had been in the water for any length of time. She heard the stories, of course; corpses floating in water cloudy with their own putrefaction, bloated, grotesque, the eyes gone. She admitted to herself that it was a frightening prospect, but it did not fill her with the irrational fear the suit had at first. Rather, it was a muted revulsion, something she knew she would hate, but that must be endured.

OK, Kane , she said to herself, I’ll face your horror show, and I will loathe you for making me face it. And afterwards, my answer will still be “No.”

The checks on the suit seals were rapid, yet thorough. One by one, the technicians rapped on the helmets of their divers to indicate that they were ready to go. Mike made a point of standing in Katya’s eye line and giving her a double thumbs up. She made the effort to bring both arms up slightly and waggled the thumbs enough to be noticeable. Mike saw them, laughed, nodded to her, and slapped her suit on the arm as he walked by to pick up the step ladder and his gear. A few moments later, she heard the bulkhead door slam, and the four of them were left alone in the salvage maw.

“Comms check,” said a voice in her headset. Katya recognised Ocello. “Captain, are you reading me?”

“Loud and clear, thank you.” Kane sounded blithe, as if he was about to do nothing more enterprising than read a book.

“Ms Kuriakova? Do you read me?”

“Very clear. Please, call me Katya. It’s quicker.”

“As you wish, Katya. Colonel?”

“Loud and clear,” said Tasya. She sounded impatient. She only seemed to have two modes, though, thought Katya. Impatient tending towards violent, and languid tending towards pleasant (with occasional outbreaks of violence). Once Katya had heard Kane refer to Tasya as having a “feline temperament,” but Katya had no idea what that meant. She’d remembered the word and looked it up later, but it had been of little help — “Belonging to the cat family or pertaining to cats, catlike.” A “cat” was some sort of Earth animal. She tried to imagine what one might look like from the description; quadruped, clawed, furred. Every animal she’d ever seen had been be-finned, be-tentacled, be-pincered or, on one memorable creature, all three. Her imagination couldn’t manage “fur,” never mind the other aspects.

While she’d been distracting herself thinking about the fauna of Earth, Giroux had also completed his communications check, and the bridge stood by to commence the EVA, as Kane had called it.

The water did not burst in upon them, but rose smoothly and rapidly as the salvage maw was flooded. She could just see the base of Kane’s MMU, a tapering angular column covered in inlets and impeller nozzles, all painted in a pale anti-fouling green paint unlike the yellow and black of the suits themselves. The Lukyan was painted in yellow and black, too, she realised, and it somehow made the suits seem a lot friendlier.

The water level climbed up to the grating on which they stood, and then further, rising up the sides of Kane’s MMU. Katya knew that it must be doing the same on hers, but she was completely unaware of it. There was no sense of pressure or coldness. Intellectually, she had appreciated that the description of the rigidly armoured suits with their wedge ring segmented joints as “personal submarines” was about right, but part of her had still feared the water being so close. That she couldn’t feel a thing through the suit made the idea concrete though, allowing her to screw down the lid on her anxiety so much tighter. She no longer just felt calm about it; now she began to feel confident.

The water rose and rose. Even when it burbled up past her helmet’s visor, she felt relaxed. She’d been in the Lukyan when it had been in a dry dock, just prior to being refloated. She’d watched the water rise past the canopy then with pleasure simply to be watching such a novelty. She felt just the same now.

“Maw’s fully flooded,” said Ocello. “Adjust for neutral buoyancy. Sahlberg will do that for you, Katya.”

The MMU’s flotation tanks had been fully filled by the technicians to prevent the suits bobbing around like so much flotsam when the maw was flooded. Now the tanks were partially emptied with compressed air until the average density of the MMUs, the suits, and the suits’ contents equalled that of the sea water.

“Neutral,” called Giroux, closely followed by the others.

“Looking good across all units,” confirmed Ocello. “Opening the jaws now.”

Katya looked up and saw the two seams running along the ceiling slowly start to widen. As they separated, she could see nothing beyond but darkness. That was the sea, the naked, angry sea of Russalka. She would not be frightened, she swore to herself. She would not let herself down. She imagined Lukyan watching her, and she determined to make him proud.

The Vodyanoi ’s jaws reached their furthest extreme, leaving the four suits floating in the void between them.

“Right,” said Kane. “Here we go. Single file. Follow me.”

The murk illuminated in her suit’s lights suddenly stirred violently as Kane triggered his manoeuvre unit’s impellers and then he was moving smoothly away from her. On her helmet’s head-up display, a small navigational caret glowed, showing her their destination.

“This is Sahlberg. Here we go, Katya.” She felt the vibration of her own MMU’s impellers coming to life and, almost instantly, she was moving steadily forward through the water. She watched the jaws taper away over her head before they vanished altogether from view. She was clear of the maw, now. In the open sea. And she felt… She barely had to examine her feelings.

She felt great. The fear had been for nothing. She felt safe, she felt protected, she felt excited for the adventure of it all. She was surrounded by the world ocean on every side, no part of her skin more than a few centimetres from the great deadly, terrifying, wonderful waters, and she felt suddenly so ecstatically good she could almost have wept for joy.