Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

“We’re here, captain,” reported the helm, “directly over the wreck of the Zarya . Continuing to descend.”

The news seemed to sober Kane. Indeed, the atmosphere on the bridge became sombre. Katya was not surprised; the Vodyanois were Terrans, and the Zarya must have contained hundreds of their compatriots.

“Take us down to fifty metres above the wreck, please. Mr Sahlberg, Mr Quinn, prepare a drone if you would.”

Every few seconds, the hull creaked again under the increasing pressure, but never as sharply or, at least, never as unexpectedly as the first time. It was an impossible sound to enjoy, but at least it became bearable in the knowledge that they would not be exceeding the Vodyanoi ’s design depth, never mind its more problematical crush depth.

The drone was launched before the submarine reached its prescribed depth, travelling down ahead of its mothership. The water was relatively clear, and when the Vodyanoi activated the searchlights in its visual array, the great bulk of the stricken Terran starship immediately leapt into view.

Despite herself, Katya gasped. The array was scanning a directional sonar search over the Zarya assisted by the drone’s pulse emitter and superimposing the results over the camera image along with range and scale information. “It’s vast,” she said out loud.

“She’s big,” agreed Kane. “I remember being shocked when I saw her in the flesh for the first time.”

Katya looked at the smooth, wide lines of the drowned ship, and felt some small recollection nagging at her. Something from when she was just a kid. “Have you been here many times?”

“Yes. Once a year ever since I arrived on Russalka. But this isn’t how I remember her. The first time I saw her she was in space, in Earth’s orbit. I had gone up the orbital elevator from Libreville to the high port. She was just hanging there. In space, it can be difficult to get a sense of scale sometimes, but then I saw the shuttles going back and forth. I knew how big those were, and they were dwarfed by the Zarya .” Katya glanced sideways at him, and saw he was lost in the memory. “I watched her depart geostationary orbit, watched her until she was no bigger than the stars. Then, soon enough, she was gone. It was a hard thing, to watch her go, and to have to stay behind.”

Katya looked at him, confused. This did not match well with what she knew. “You were supposed to be aboard her?” He nodded absently, still looking at the image. “But, you weren’t in the military, were you? I don’t understand. Why were you supposed to be aboard an invasion ship?”

“There are invasions, and there are invasions. Look at her, Katya. Tell me what you see.”

Katya turned back to the main screen, her confusion not at all diminished. “She’s big. I suppose that’s not a surprise; she was carrying a whole invasion force. Very wide in the beam. Long, but not as long as the Leviathan . And…” It suddenly struck her that she wasn’t seeing something that should very definitely have been there. “Kane… where are her weapons?” The old memory from her school days nagged at her again and she could almost recall where she’d seen something very like the Zarya before.

Kane smiled a little sadly, like a teacher with a slow pupil who had finally understood a simple point. “There aren’t any.”

That didn’t make sense, except it did, but Katya didn’t want to think about that, because that way led something awful that she shied away from. So instead she scoffed and said, “It must have weapons. It’s an invasion ship.”

“The ships that came a year later, the ships that came in response to the Zarya ’s last distress signal, that came to avenge her, they were armed. But that was a real invasion. The Zarya came to re-establish links with the lost colony of Russalka, to continue what had begun a century before.” He pointed at the screen. “Five thousand colonists. Mr Sahlberg’s sister, brother-in-law and two nephews. Ms Ocello’s sister, sister-in-law, nephew and niece. Two of Mr Lowe’s cousins.” He paused and swallowed, and said very quietly, “My wife and daughter.”

Katya remembered the toy Kane had once given her: a “yo-yo,” all the way from Earth. “I bought it for my daughter,” he’d told her. She had never asked why he still had it. She looked at the image on the screen. Somewhere in that wreck…

No. It couldn’t be so. It could not be so . The Grubbers started the war. Everybody knew that. The Grubbers turned up in a ship bristling with weapons and demanded obedience. They fired first. The FMA destroyed the invasion ship in a desperate and bravely fought battle. She’d seen dramas of it. She’d read about it in class. She’d heard war stories from veterans. It couldn’t all be lies.

“You’re lying. I don’t know what that ship is, but it can’t be the Zarya .”

Even as she said it, she knew she was wrong. The memory from school strengthened. It was a history lesson. The class was watching a recreation of the original colonisation. The broad, smooth lines of the colony ships…

“There are invasions, and there are invasions, Katya. The Terran government are not nice people, by and large. They monitor the population, curtail freedoms. Believe me when I say that the people who volunteer to be colonists are glad to leave the place. They came to Russalka expecting to find a well-established colony here. Or, just possibly, everybody dead, in which case they’d have to start again. Earth had tried to communicate with the place, but received no reply. So they assumed the FTL communications relay satellites had failed. Or, as I say, everybody was dead and there was no one to answer. It didn’t matter. The Zarya was supposed to be the second wave of the colonisation effort. A century late, but there’d been the small matter of a world war on Earth that turned hot. You don’t get over things like that quickly.”

“That’s not true. The FTL satellites were in place. We were using them to communicate with the other colonies. The Grubbers destroyed those satellites in orbit when they arrived.”

“Yes, they did. There was nothing wrong with them up to that point. You’re missing the obvious — Earth received no reply from Russalka because the FMA decided not to reply. They didn’t say a thing until the Zarya was in orbit. Then they told her they’d had satellite problems, were very glad to see them, and could they set down just here .” He pointed at the screen. “It was an ambush. She never stood a chance.”

Katya couldn’t find anything to say. Kane continued, quietly crushing almost everything she had ever believed. “What happened at that Yagizban evacuation site wasn’t an aberration, Katya. The Federal government hasn’t suffered some sort of personality change overnight. They have been doing things like this for years. Somewhere in that long century when Russalka was on its own, your ancestors gave the bureaucrats too much power. They became very comfortable with that power and very protective of it. So they sold you a lie: of things always being on a knife edge; of disaster being just around the corner. How you must all pull together or perish.

“The Zarya represented a huge threat to them. All those new faces, new minds that hadn’t been indoctrinated with generations of the lie, that would ask questions and have direct contact with Earth to discuss matters. The government could see the good times coming to an end. So, they just made the lie a bigger one still, but in a way that would appeal to the populace. Now you were the innocent victims of a warmongering colonial power. It was a beautifully convincing lie. The Russalkin bled and died for it in their thousands. The only risk the government could see was that they might lose the war, but I’m sure they had contingency plans in place for that.