Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

The view opposite was hardly fascinating, either; the male troopers had returned to the quay after making sure everything was in readiness and this left Katya with the two female officers sitting directly across the aisle from her. Katya was very hopeful that they would be meeting another boat to take her onwards; the prospect of staring at them while they stared at her for three days was a depressing one, probably for all of them.

The hatch lowered on powered hydraulics, sealing with a muffled clump and hiss, both of which Katya decided sounded unforgivably self-satisfied. There was a sound of grating metal as the gangway disengaged, and Katya felt the slight wallow of an untethered boat. A moment later, a gentle hum told her that the drives were engaged and that they were underway. The shuttle pulled away from the quay and headed for the tunnel cut through the mountain connecting the moon pool with the ocean. Almost immediately the pilot began flooding the ballast tanks; the tunnel was flooded along its full length from its mouth in the moon pool, down a shallow descent, and then exiting into open sea.

“So,” said Katya. “You girls do a lot of this sort of thing?” She’d seen how they watched the hatch close like a death sentence, and seemed disconcerted by the boat’s wallowing when they’d been on the surface. The logical deduction was that they’d been seconded from base security, and were not frequent travellers.

One of them got up and went to the toilet unit. The other sat there, pallid as they listened to her colleague being sick very audibly because of the imperfectly closed door. Throughout, Katya smiled pleasantly at the seated trooper.

She’d apparently broken the first Secor interrogator, after all; perhaps she could break a few more Feds before she reached the Deeps. She balled her hands into fists and felt the restraints around her wrists. Yes, she decided, it was good to have a hobby.

For the first couple of hours, the names of her escort were “None of your business, traitor.”

Then, for about the next five hours, they were called “Officers Volkova and Shepitko to you, prisoner.”

And finally they were Oksana and Alina, and Katya was now just “Katya.”

Neither of the officers seemed greatly motivated by their current mission and settled easily into scuttlebutt and scurrilous tales about their fellow officers, their watch commander, and one of their husbands, who was very dreamy by all accounts.

Katya tried to explain to them why she’d done what she’d done, about the drowned colony ship, slaughter at the evacuation site, the lies that threaded through every part of FMA operations, but Oksana just shushed her and said they’d been specifically ordered not to discuss the details of Katya’s case so, if it was all the same to her, wouldn’t she rather hear about the brilliant practical joke Oleg played on Grigory with a length of flexible piping, a quantity of liquid laxative, and a fire extinguisher? Katya had to admit that sounded pretty interesting, so they talked about it for a while. It turned out that Grigory stills hated Oleg because of the incident, and Katya said she couldn’t blame him, because Oleg had gone too far.

As the chronometer showed the standard “day” turning to standard “night,” Katya said, “Those pilots must have steel bladders. Do they have their own head up front or something?”

Oksana and Alina looked blankly at her, until she remembered that they’d probably never been on any submarine journey worth the name. “Head,” she explained. “It’s just the name for a boat’s toilet.”

“There aren’t any pilots,” said Alina. “Everything’s automatic.”

Katya looked at her in astonishment. “No pilots? What if anything goes wrong? Can you get to the pilot positions?”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” said Oksana, whose confidence in the competence of her superiors tended towards complacency.

“Maybe it won’t,” said Katya.

There was no point talking to her guards for anything other than information and amusement. Recruits for Base Security were not renowned for their native intelligence, just their loyalty and a modicum of common sense. Okasana and Alina were not much older than her, and she was sure they’d signed up for Security out of a sense of patriotism and a desire to help their fellow citizens. They were goodhearted, but they were not very bright. There was no possibility that they would realise what was going on, and that was exactly why they had been chosen for the job.

“Listen to me,” said Katya, “there’s nothing we can do about it, but I’m going to tell you what your superior didn’t when he gave you this mission. We will not be rendezvousing with another boat. A piece of junk like this…”

“It’s an admiral’s launch!” said Alina, scandalised.

“Maybe twenty years ago it was an admiral’s launch. These seats are new to this boat. If you look under yours, you can see new mountings have been drilled for them. Same thing with the display on the forward bulkhead. You can see the outline of the original one, which was a little bit wider. You can still smell the gel filling agent they used to neaten things up a bit. Believe me, two days ago this scow was sitting in storage.”

Alina fell quiet and Katya continued, “A piece of junk like this will not be able to carry out an automatic docking at sea. It will be going all the way to the Deeps. I guarantee I will need the head before then. Now, back that way,” she nodded towards the rear of the boat, “no closer than five thousand metres and no farther than ten, there is at least one boat following us. I’d make a guess at the Novgorod . She was preparing to leave when we boarded. She knows the exact route we’ll be taking because we’re on automatic pilot and you can bet our shadows have the exact waypoint and timings list for the whole journey.”

Oksana looked at her suspiciously. “How do you know all this?”

“I don’t know it. Not for a fact. But I’ve lived my whole life in submarines and there are ways of doing things, and when those ways are changed you have to ask yourself, why?”

Oksana shrugged. “Well, even if you’re right, having a warboat like the Novgorod is a good thing. I feel safer,” she added, speaking to Alina.

Oksana’s unquestioning belief in the nobility of her masters had irked Katya in their earlier conversations, but now it was beginning to look like wilful ignorance.

“You shouldn’t. Think about it — if a warboat is shadowing us all the way to the Deeps for our protection, why didn’t they just ship us there in the warboat?” She let that sink in before adding, “We’re bait.”

“Bait? What are you talking about?” demanded Alina. Katya had already come to the conclusion that Alina was less impressed by her superiors than Oksana.

“Well, I’m the bait, obviously. You’re… bait minders, I suppose.” She could see Oksana was about to express her resentment at the term, so she quickly said, “You see, somewhere that way,” she nodded her head forward, “they’re hoping the Vodyanoi is waiting, or maybe some Yagizban boats. They try to rescue me, and our shadows jump in for the kill.”

Oksana’s eyes had grown large. “That’s exciting!”

Alina looked at her as if she was insane. “Oksana! It’s not exciting! It’s terrifying!”

Oksana snorted dismissively. “They won’t shoot at us.”

“They won’t have to,” said Katya. “Torpedoes are pretty smart, but once they’re off guidance, if they’ve lost target lock, they’ll search to re-acquire it. This scow must be as noisy as hell. We might as well have a target painted on our tail. If we could control her, the smart thing would be to kill the drives and just dive quietly trying to find an isotherm to hide under. But we can’t. Alina’s right to be worried, Oksana. If we end up with, say, the Novgorod on one side and the Vodyanoi on the other exchanging torpedo fire, we’re as good as dead.”