Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

“Have you noticed any… odd behaviour?” said Katya suddenly.

“What, with Vetsch?”

“With anyone. Not just in your crew. Just, you know… generally?”

“It’s a war, Katya. It’s all about odd behaviour.”

“I mean… crazy.”

“My last comment still applies.” He frowned. “What are you thinking?”

“I saw a Federal officer shoot an innocent, unarmed man dead in cold blood for no reason at all. He’d have carried on killing everyone in sight if he hadn’t been brought down.”

“It may seem a horrible thing to say, but my last comment still applies. War puts pressures on people. Psychotic breaks happen. People go crazy.”

“I’ve heard about other times it’s happened. The FMA tries to keep it quiet, but there’s gossip. People talk.” She saw Kane seemed unconvinced. “Secor interviewed me about it.”

That made Kane sit up. “They what ?”

“They asked me a load of questions, and I really got a strong feeling they had asked those same questions before for other cases. When I asked if it had happened before, they were so keen not to say anything that they all but admitted it. It made me think. There has been that gossip, all that scuttlebutt between captains, but I didn’t give it much attention. I’m starting to wonder, now.”

“That’s strange. That’s really very strange. I’ll ask Tasya to see if the Yagizban are noticing a marked increase in psychosis amongst their people. More than is to be expected, anyway.” He leaned forward towards her. “Are you saying you think either Vetsch or Sergei may have suffered one of these… incidents?”

“Sergei would not go off station without a good reason. I can’t imagine him turning and running like that.” At least , she admitted to herself, unless he felt threatened . There had been nothing to threaten him, however, which left only one possibility. “I think Vetsch has done something to him. He cracked up and attacked Sergei.”

“Not the other way around?”

“Sergei wouldn’t.”

“That’s a coincidence, because I’ve got a lengthy personnel record here along with my personal experience of the man that says that Vetsch wouldn’t either.” He closed the file, revealing a navigation chart, showing the Vodyanoi ’s current position, speed, depth, and heading.

“We’re heading deeper into the Red Water,” Katya commented. Kane didn’t answer, but just stared at the screen. There was a subtle change in his manner, as if she was watching his mood change in degrees, right before her eyes. She watched him in silence for some seconds, then asked, “Why is this Red Water still here anyway?”

“The Peklo Volume,” said Kane, watching the symbol representing his boat slowly moving across the map.

“This is the Peklo? I didn’t know. Uncle told me a bit about it, but not much. Who was Peklo?”

“Not a who. A what . It’s a word borrowed from a neighbour of your ancestors. It’s another word for ‘Hell,’ as if humanity hadn’t made enough hells for itself already.”

“Uncle told me that there was a sunken Terran vessel there, full of unstable weapons. They were too dangerous to disarm, so they just left them down there and interdicted the volume.”

Kane closed his eyes as if thinking, or remembering. When he opened them, he was looking directly at Katya. “Is that what he said? Well, he was largely correct. There is a sunken Terran vessel down there, and its contents are very dangerous. We’re heading in that direction, anyway,” he added, talking half to himself. He opened a line to the bridge. “Number One, any sign of the Lukyan ?”

“Not yet, captain. If she was trying to get away from us, she’s bound to have changed her heading by now. I’d be running quiet and deep.”

“That’s what I thought. OK, let’s try something different. We’ll try a search grid. One thing, please make the first waypoint at the grave of the Zarya .”

There was a distinct pause.

“The Zarya , sir?”

“Yes. I’m of a mind to show Ms Kuriakova just what her world was up against when Earth first invaded.”

Another pause.

When Ocello spoke again, it was in a quiet and very serious voice. “Captain. You will appreciate why I have to ask twice. Are you sure you want us to go to the Zarya ?”

Kane looked as if he wasn’t sure at all. It seemed to take an effort of will for him to say, “Quite sure, Genevra.”

As soon as he closed the link Katya said, “But what about the weapons? We’ll be right over them!”

“The weapons aren’t what you think at all, Katya.” He got up to go. At the doorway, he said, “I’ve already apologised for what we saw in the evacuation site. I had no idea that would be the first thing we would discover. What I will show you at the grave of the Zarya , however, I make no apologies for. You said I kept too many secrets from you. If you’re not already wishing that you could unlearn some of those secrets, you soon shall.”

The hull groaned. Beyond it, Russalka was trying her very best to crush the Vodyanoi into a tattered wreck and drop her to crash beside the Zarya in the lightless deep.

“We’re two hundred metres past test depth. Continuing to descend.”

Kane was back in the captain’s chair, behaving a little too manically for Katya’s comfort. “I like the sound of a groaning hull. Don’t you, Katya?” he asked. “Makes you feel alive, when you think of all those millions of tonnes of water just out there, and how narrow a rope we walk in this life. Just one silly, inconsequential thing — seemingly ,” he corrected himself, “ seemingly inconsequential thing could kill us all in a tenth of the time it takes to think, ‘Well, gosh, that’s a lot of water.’”

Katya didn’t care for his fatalism, but she noticed that the bridge crew took no notice of him at all. She guessed that in the ten years they’d been stalking the depths, they’d seen their captain make far more outrageous little speeches than this.

Now and then Tasya would wander in, frown with impatience, and walk out again. It was easy to understand why; the plan Katya had flatly refused to help with at Atlantis and then agreed to at the evacuation site was complicated and desperate as it was without further difficulties being introduced. The plan depended on Katya being above suspicion, and that meant everything being normal. If she turned up back at Atlantis without her boat, even the slowest Fed might doubt that she’d swum there. They should have been looking for the Lukyan and yet, although this was formally the beginning of the search for the minisub, it was an odd place to start.

Odder still was that Tasya expressed her impatience with only a frown. This from a woman who had reputedly once shot someone dead for being ten minutes late. Katya had asked about that earlier, cagily approaching the subject sideways in case Tasya didn’t wish to be reminded.

“Did I kill someone for being ten minutes late to the beginning of an operation? No, that’s nonsense,” Tasya had said. “No, he was late during a mission. I just shot him in the foot at the end after exfiltration so he was taken off active duty and would never screw up anything important again.” She’d laughed at Katya’s silly little misunderstanding. “As if I’d kill somebody for being a little tardy.”

Whereas, it seemed, masering a hole through somebody’s foot for it was perfectly reasonable.

Yet here she was, clearly angry at the delay but saying nothing about it, never mind resorting to gunplay. Kane received a unique degree of tolerance from her. Some of Katya’s old school friends would have been quick to assign thwarted romantic feelings to Tasya, but that didn’t seem quite right to Katya. It was more like the protectiveness of an older sister to a slightly stupid younger brother. Havilland was actually the elder by a little way, but his eccentricities often made him seem very immature for his years.