Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

They reached the first bulkhead at the head of the slope leading down to the auxiliary lock and stumbled through the small door in the large wall. The water level was already well over the door’s lower lintel and beginning to surge as a much greater volume of water entered the flooding section behind them. As soon as Kane was through, Tasya threw herself at the door to try and close it, but the water was on the side the builder’s had reasonably concluded was the less likely to be a threat. Now the pressure of water was forcing the door open, not shut, and that pressure was rising.

“Go, go, go!” she shouted at Katya and Kane. “I’ll hold it as closed as I can.”

Katya hesitated for a moment, but Kane grabbed her arm and pulled her away. They ran down the incline, the water sluicing past their legs. Ahead of them in the dancing beams of their torches, Katya could see the auxiliary lock’s doors open before them, fifty metres away, but she could also see the water climbing over the lintel and starting to flood the interior of the airlock. The realisation that simply reaching the lock might not be enough to save their lives chilled her for the moment it took for it to crystallise in her mind. Then she put it aside; there lay panic, and panic would kill them.

She reached the door ten strides ahead of Kane and jumped through. She was on her communicator the second her feet splashed down in the shin-deep water. “Tasya! We’re in — come on!”

“Close the doors.”

Katya frowned; she had misheard. She must have misheard. “Say again?”

“Close the airlock doors, Kuriakova.”

Katya looked uncomprehendingly at Kane. He gave her what was presumably intended as a reassuring nod, and said, “Understood. Closing doors now.” Before Katya could stop him, he had reached out and twisted the door controls. With a hum of power, they began to swing shut.

“Kane! What are you doing?”

He smiled a little nervously. “I’m trusting her. You have to remember one thing about Tasya.” He turned on the lock’s internal lights, then joined Katya where she stood. He pointed through the narrowing gap up the slope of the corridor. “She’s a survivor.”

Into the glow of the lights, the steady sheen of water abruptly became a wave, a surge that could only mean Tasya had abandoned the door and let the rising water through. And in the middle of that surge, she rode down. Almost standing, almost lying, leaning back into the wave with her legs together and her arms steering her, she shot down the corridor towards the closing doors.

At the very last, she folded her arms across her chest, straightened her legs and made an arrow of her body, an arrow that shot into the airlock, brushing both her shoulders against the steel doors. They slammed shut behind her, a single sardonic clap of applause for the latest exploit of the legendary Chertovka.

“You truly have the luck of the Devil,” said Kane casually, as if it was a dull day that only featured one death-defying escape. He set the lock controls to drain away the water that was lapping around their thighs. Katya just gawped.

“I’m soaked,” said Tasya, as she rose from the waters. “These coveralls are going to ride up in the ADS, there’s nothing more certain. Nothing’s ever comfortable in this world.”

Kane was leaning into the back of his diving suit and fiddling with the more powerful communications unit in it. “Still no signal. We’re going to have to get into the water before we can talk to the boat. Right, Katya first, I think.”

The airlock’s floor was now only wet, not flooded, and Kane helped her doff her gear and stow it away in the MMU. Then with help from Tasya, he lifted Katya up she could get into the suit once more. As they locked her in, Tasya said, “What about Giroux’s suit?”

Katya heard Kane’s bitter sigh. “Poor Bruno. Despite all we’ve seen in this world, he was probably the only Vodyanoi who wouldn’t have believed somebody could stoop so low as to booby trap a corpse. We’ll seal up his suit and Sahlberg can bring it in under drone control once he’s brought in Katya.”

“I was looking at the controls on the way in,” offered Katya. “I think I could pilot it. Well enough to get back to the Vodyanoi anyway.”

“It would save some time,” said Tasya, with a tone of approval that Katya was slightly embarrassed to realise she enjoyed. Now she cared about the opinion of war criminals, she thought. How much further could she fall? But she was only a war criminal because the Federal authorities said she was; the same people who had planned, sanctioned, and carried out the extermination of a civilian evacuation centre.

At least you knew where you were with the Chertovka. Usually in deep trouble.

They finished sealing Katya into her suit and turned their attention to other matters. While Tasya stored her and Kane’s gear — she found the pouch with the fragments of the light orb in and shook her head like a long-suffering mother emptying the pockets of her son’s clothes — Kane closed Giroux’s suit and assigned its MMU a drone control channel. Then he went to his own suit and tried gamely to clamber in, an action which, without a stepladder, proved challenging to him. Still showing a long-suffering expression, Tasya gave him a boost which he gratefully accepted. As Tasya closed his suit he asked, “How will you get into your suit, Tasya?”

“By being competent,” she answered, and Kane shut up after that.

“Pride comes before a fall” was proving to be an idiom with which Tasya had little if any experience. She got into her suit with ridiculous ease, and had it sealed and secure by herself faster than either Katya or Kane had managed with help. She had even had the foresight to “walk” her suit on the corners of the MMU’s base so she could reach the airlock controls once she was in it.

“Flooding airlock,” she called before pressing the valve controls.

As the water rose, Katya’s thoughts were very different to when she had last stood in a filling lock. Now she didn’t care about the trip, even if she was going to be piloting her suit this time. She was finding it hard to care about anything at all. Everything seemed to be becoming detached and inconsequential. She had lived her entire life as a citizen under Federal law, and Federal protection. The Federal administration was there to serve the people, to keep them safe, and to maintain services. They were the angels, the guardians, the heroes in advanced AD suits that could fly for a little while, damn them.

Damn them. Damn them.

But, no. They were just little people with too much power who did what little people always do when they have too much power. They abused it, and said it was for the greater good. Perhaps they even believed it. Perhaps when they entered the evacuation site and saw beyond any doubt that it offered no threat to them, they ordered the survivors massacred and traps placed because they honestly thought it was a necessary evil.

But, doesn’t every evil seem necessary at the time?

Katya didn’t want to think anymore. She just wanted to sleep for the rest of her life, or at least until some morning came that was like the mornings before the war, before the chaos. Before Kane.

“Opening the lock.” Tasya’s voice coming through her cap’s earpieces startled Katya momentarily. The outer doors moved ponderously aside and, as they did so, their communication units re-established contact with the Vodyanoi .

Katya looked at the channel acquisition alert projected on her helmet’s head-up display with confusion. The channel allocated to the Lukyan showed blank.

“Captain!” Ocello’s relieved voice sounded through all their suits. “I was just putting together a search party to go after you.”