Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

“What were children… babies doing here, Kane?” she demanded. “Why?” She could feel a sob forming in her throat and choked it down. “ Why ?”

“The obvious reason,” answered Tasya. She sounded tired and depressed. “To escape the war.”

“This isn’t a spy base, Katya,” said Kane. “That’s a Federal lie. Yet another Federal lie. This was an evacuation site. There was nobody here but those too old, too young, or too injured to fight, and the staff needed to look after them. This facility is… was militarily unimportant.”

“The FMA couldn’t have known,” said Katya. “They couldn’t have known. They must have found the place and just attacked first.”

“Oh, Katya,” said Kane sadly. “Even in the middle of an atrocity, you’re still looking for some get out, some way of saying this was down to stupidity or incompetence.”

Tasya waved her over. “I found this when I came back this way.” She walked to the next spur corridor and shone her torch down it. The beam first picked out the wall. There was a ragged row of spots where the rock had melted momentarily, just enough to mark it. Half way along the row was a break and beneath the break — Tasya lowered the beam to light the corridor floor — lay a corpse. Katya recognised a medic’s insignia on the body’s sleeve.

“They came in?” said Katya. “They came in? But… they’d have seen…”

“And they did it all the same.” Kane was standing in the corridor entrance, his light globe bringing the scene of the murder into full relief. “There was no mistake here, Katya. They destroyed the main entrance and sent troops in through the auxiliary lock to clean up. There is no possible way they thought this was a military facility.”

Katya took an unsteady step towards the body. Perhaps — distant, hopeless, vain hope — perhaps they weren’t dead. Perhaps some small victory could be wrested from the clinging horror of the place. Tasya gripped her shoulder, stopping her in her tracks. “No!” she snapped. Then more gently, “The body’s booby-trapped. There’s a thermobaric grenade under it with the pin out.” She drew Katya into a crouch to show her. “If you moved the body, the arming spoon would release. I guarantee the fuse has been set to zero seconds.”

Katya straightened and backed away. The Feds couldn’t even leave the dead in peace. The Feds. Her side.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand how this happened. When did we become the bad guys?” The Grubbers, the loathed and loathsome Grubbers had fought a hard war against Russalka, but it had always been to cripple her military. The Grubbers only ever killed non-combatants by accident, as “collateral damage” in the phrase of the news reports. Her side, the great and heroic Federal Maritime Authority, protector of Russalka, champions of her independence, they were the ones who murdered infants, they were the ones who shot unarmed medics in cold blood and then planted traps on the corpses.

Her pride was gone, trampled in blood. She didn’t know what she was anymore.

“This was all more… traumatic than I expected, Katya,” said Kane. “I’m truly sorry. Even I had no idea the FMA would go so far. We should leave. I think we’re done here.”

“I’ll do what you want,” said Katya. Her voice was small, defeated.

Tasya looked away, seeing what they had done to Katya, and felt ashamed once more.

Kane clasped his hands together, and said, “You’ll be a traitor, Katya. Once they realise what you’ve done, they’ll hunt you down. They’ll probably shoot you on sight.”

“A traitor?” Katya laughed, a humourless coughing sound. “They betrayed me first. They betrayed all of us.”

“More than you know,” said Tasya. She said it as an aside, but Katya was on it in a second.

“What? What do you mean more than I know?”

Kane winced. With a reproving sideways glance at Tasya, he said, “It’s… it can wait.”

“Don’t lie to me, Kane. I am sick of lies. I want to know what she meant.”

The ping of an incoming signal from Kane’s radio provided an unexpected distraction that he gratefully leapt at. “That’ll be Giroux,” he said unnecessarily before opening the channel. “Hello, Mr Giroux. We were just wondering what had become of you.”

“My torch failed, captain. I’m using a cold light stick, but the illumination’s not so good. I’ve found the next main bulkhead.”

“Never mind. From what we’ve seen, the other side is flooded anyway. We’re heading back to the entry lock. How long do you think it will take you to get back?”

“Captain, there are signs of a fire fight up here. I can make out maser hits on the bulkhead and the walls.”

“Yes, we’ve seen them too. How long until you can get back?”

“There’s a body here, captain. Civilian clothes. It looks like…”

Kane drew breath to warn Giroux, but never had the chance to utter it. They sensed the detonation through the rock before they heard it, a wave of sensation through their boots as if the mountain itself had felt its flesh creep.

Tasya looked in the direction that Giroux had gone. “That’s no grenade…”

Then the shockwave reached them.

There was no sense of intervening time. Katya was standing near Tasya and Kane when Giroux called in. Then she was lying on the ground, Tasya leaning over her and shaking her roughly. “Get up, Kuriakova! Wake up, damn you!”

Katya blinked at her, trying to patch events together and failing. Tasya’s harness torch was playing its beam directly in her face, and she only had the vaguest impression of Tasya being behind it. The voice, tone, and the violence of the shaking was all the evidence Katya needed for a positive identification, however.

“What happened?” said Katya, trying to sit up and regretting it as nausea wracked her. “Where’s Kane? Giroux?”

“Oh, you found her!” she heard Kane say, answering the first question. Tasya turned as he arrived. Kane held up a handful of pieces of smashed plastic. “The orb didn’t ride the blast wave very well,” he said ruefully. “I don’t suppose the supplier does mail order deliveries at interstellar distances, so no chance of a replacement. Perhaps I can repair it.” So saying, he placed the fragments in a belt pouch with the guileless optimism of a young child who believes anything can be fixed.

“Where’s Giroux?”

Kane looked surprised. “Oh, you must have taken a knock, Katya. Your short term memory…”

“Giroux’s dead,” said Tasya bluntly. “He found a body and, like an idiot, searched it. It was booby trapped.”

“I remember a body with a grenade under it…” Katya’s memories were beginning to sort themselves out although she would never remember the few seconds before the explosion. She remembered the body, the maser marks, and then she remembered the flooded room. She felt cold and finally realised that there was a thin sheen of water on the floor, flowing past them in the direction of the auxiliary lock.

“The one Giroux disturbed must have been a detonator. That explosion sounded more like emplaced charges. The upper bulkhead’s been compromised. The sea’s getting in.” Tasya stood and held out her hand. Katya took it and allowed herself to be drawn to her feet. “We’re just lucky those Fed bastards aren’t as good at setting charges as they are at killing babies or we’d be sucking water now.”

A deep vibration thrummed through the structure, making them all look into the darkness in the direction of the damaged bulkhead. “It’s giving way,” said Tasya. “ Run! ”

The ingrained Russalkin fear of water was with them in that moment. They turned and ran for the auxiliary lock as they had never run before, Tasya pulling quickly ahead with long, loping strides, Katya following in a hard sprint, and Kane at the rear in an untidy kinetic mass of flailing arms and pumping legs.