Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

“Sergei fell ill when we were at Dunwich.”

“Anything serious?”

“Not really, but not the kind of thing you’d enjoy sharing a minisub with. Put it this way — we were transporting plumbing supplies there. Sergei must be pretty pleased their bathroom facilities are up to spec at the moment.”

The officer winced sympathetically. “Will he be coming here when he’s better, or are you going back?”

“The plan is to find a cargo for Dunwich and I’ll go back and pick him up. Things are so tight, every trip has to pay its way.”

Katya felt she was standing outside herself, watching as she chatted with the officer, so calm and normal . If he asked to check her shoulder bag as he was perfectly entitled to do, he would find a strangely bland piece of equipment, an aluminium box twenty centimetres by thirty centimetres by four centimetres, with a couple of metre lengths of cable, tightly coiled and tied, plugged into one end, and a covered switch at the other.

It clearly wasn’t a standard piece of equipment. If asked, she was to say it was a custom unit she had designed to filter hydrophone data to help in the war effort, but disappointingly the device didn’t work as well as she’d hoped. Any technician who opened the box would see this was a lie. Katya knew the cover story was thin, and that her best chance of succeeding in her mission was for no Federal officer, agent, or technician to even see the box until after it had done its job.

“Well, good luck finding a cargo for Dunwich,” said the officer, signing off her papers. “We don’t get much traffic heading for there. It’s pretty much self-sufficient.”

Katya nodded as she accepted her papers and crew card back. “I sometimes get lucky with personal mail and packages.”

The officer cast a cautious look around. “Secor’s tightening up on that sort of cargo,” he said quietly. “It’s getting so they have to read every letter and open every parcel.”

“Yes. True. That packing directive was Secor, then?”

The customs officer wrinkled his nose as if even the word “Secor” smelled bad. “Yes, but don’t tell anyone that. They ran it through our channels, so now we have to pretend it was our idea.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” said Katya, smiling. She waved the officer goodbye, and went off into the halls of Atlantis to commit high treason.

Katya liked coffee, real coffee, but it was an expensive and rare treat. She went into the most elegant drinks salon she could find, and ordered a pot. It was a terrible extravagance, but as she was going to be dead soon, she wanted to have at least one thing happen in her last hours that she could wholeheartedly enjoy.

“Elegant” did not say a great deal on Russalka, but the place was clean and quiet and convivial, and the staff took justifiable pride in how they prepared the coffee. Her coveralls did not earn her cold looks as they might on other worlds; here almost everyone wore them at some time of the day. The salon staff wore white shirts and dark red trousers, which alone made it the fanciest place she had ever been. Everyone wore uniforms, she knew, but the novel thought of a world where it was not expected occurred to her now as she drank the first cup from the pot.

There was so much that she had never really considered. So many things about her life that she had always accepted because that’s the way things were. Everybody had this view of the Federal government as an amorphous brain constructed from pure bureaucracy. It did what it did, and there was no point in arguing because nobody was really responsible for policy. It just happened.

The way Kane explained it, it was very different. There was a political class physically concentrated in the higher security areas of the major settlements, Atlantis being the largest. Everything went through them. They were essentially born into the job and, as they didn’t put much effort into it, there were no dissenters from the lifetime of ease it offered. Thus, the amorphous bureaucracy brain that ruled the planet was not frighteningly intelligent. It was, however, very jealous.

The military and security arms of the FMA were charged to hunt, locate, and eliminate dissent, even if the navy in particular never quite understood that was the nature of their work. Dissent was dressed up in all manner of exciting terms like “terrorism,” “piracy,” “anarchism,” and “rogue Terran sabotage,” but often the people who ended up being quietly dumped out of airlocks or sent on one way trips to the Deeps high security facility had just made the mistake of wondering if the governance of Russalka might just possibly be done in a better way.

“The government’s riding for a fall, of course,” Kane had said. “They’ve tried to keep Secor violent but stupid, so it never becomes a threat to them. They’ve put so much trust into Secor now, though, they’ve had to step back a little, and clever people have ended up being recruited. Well, I say clever , but I really mean not entirely stupid . If they knew their Earth history, they’d know how much trouble they’re heading for. Give it a year or two and, in the normal run of things, there’ll be a coup d’etat .”

“Meaning what?” Katya had asked.

“Meaning Russalka would end up being run by the military. That always works terrifically well. People just love being ordered around by soldiers. But, not to worry. The way things are, Russalka doesn’t have a year or two. No pressure, Katya, but the fate of the world rests on your shoulders.”

Or to be exact , Katya thought as she poured her second cup, in the electronic box of tricks that I have in my bag .

At least there wasn’t a gun in the bag with it. Tasya had offered her a small maser, but Katya had declined. She’d used one once and never wanted to do so again. Besides, if things ended up in a fire fight, the mission was a failure anyway. Kane had run off to his cabin and returned with another piece of Terran technology that she might accept instead. It was a small black cylinder about twenty five centimetres long and two and a half in diameter, a press-and-hold button on the shaft, and a smooth metal plate at the end.

“Taser stunner,” he’d explained. “Good for about four shocks. Small chance of killing your target, but it really is small. Otherwise, they’re stunned or unconscious for about five minutes. Oh, and make sure there’s no contact between you and them apart from the plate when you press the button, or you’ll be dancing together into the arms of Morpheus.” Katya and Tasya had both stared at him until he had added, “I mean, it will electrocute you too. Nobody appreciates classical allusions anymore, do they?”

The coffee was good, even now that she was getting down to the grounds. It was as good to smell as it was to drink, and as often as not she inhaled its rich, heavy scent before actually letting the liquid flow across her tongue. She’d long since realised that coffee was the only luxury she truly craved, and it was right and proper that she indulge herself in it now. But, quickly enough, the coffee in her cup was gone, the pot was empty and that was that.

She called for the bill, but when it arrived she was bemused to discover that it came to a grand total of nothing at all. “We decided to waive it,” said the waiter. “We recognised you from the news when the war started. Helping the crew of the Novgorod escape from the Yagizban, and everything.”

“Thanks,” said Katya, a pit filled with concentrated embarrassment opening beneath her feet, “I appreciate the thought, but, really, I can’t accept.”

“Your money’s no good here, Ms.” The waiter smiled, aware of how awkward the situation was becoming but staying his course.