Jonathan Howard: Katya's War

She tried to move but it was bearing down on her now, pushing her backward into the shallow mattress. She squirmed hopelessly, her face to one side. How had this happened? Had the station been hit by some new and strange weapon of the Yagizban?

The ceiling stopped its descent. Then, with another crack of fracturing stone, it slammed down.

Katya felt her bones break and break again. She felt her skull compress and shatter as millions of tonnes of submarine mountain settled on her. She felt little pain, but only an odd sense of regret as her skeleton splintered, her tongue was crushed, her eyeballs exploded.

And she did not die.

She was smeared, an atom thick, between the rock faces.

And she did not die.

She could feel the mass of the mountain, feel the shift in the drowned continental plate on which it stood, feel the countless billions tonnes of water flow across the planet’s surface drawn by an unseen moon beyond the unending clouds.

An atom thick, no, thinner yet, as thin as thought, she enveloped the planet Russalka. Russalka — she’d always thought it a good name, but now she realised it was too small to encompass everything the world was. She could almost reach out and…

The alarm was a relief and a huge frustration. The cubicle lights came up gently along with the slowly increasing volume of the alarm tones, and Katya found herself whole and sweating in the capsule room that showed no signs of wanting to be any smaller than it already was. She reached out reflexively and muted the alarm, looked up at the silent screen where the news was always changing yet reassuringly similar. Fierce battles, broad victories, solitary and inconsequential defeats, proud Feds, subhuman Yags.

Her mind was still echoing with her dream, though. A dream of a united planet. She had felt good, powerful, and another emotion that she equated with confidence yet had been somehow different.

Not such a bad dream, then, although she could have done without the bit about being crushed into liquid. That had been… not so enjoyable.

She struggled into her old clothes, grabbed her overnight bag and left the capsule, its red light snapping over to amber as she swiped her card again and tapped the “Checking Out?” square on the status screen mounted on the outside of the hatch. Now, she decided, before she did anything else that day, she desperately needed a shower.

Twenty minutes later, clean, in fresh clothes, and the last echoes of her dream fading, Katya joined Sergei in the station cafeteria for breakfast. He stirred his scrambled eggs (in reality a 1:3 ratio of Edible Protein Reconstitutes 78 and 80b) onto his slice of toast (Carbohydrate Staple Complex Synthetic — Bread 15, although at least it had seen the inside of a real toaster), and glowered across the table at her. He looked exactly as he always looked. His disreputable coveralls never seemed to get any dirtier, his moustache was never any longer or shorter, his stubble was always one missed shave old.

“What are you so happy about?” he demanded, then shovelled some “egg” into his mouth as if he expected it to be taken from him any moment.

“Had a strange dream,” she replied. She was eating kedgeree. The egg was as synthetic as Sergei’s, the rice was reconstituted starch pellets, and the spice paste had come out of a laboratory somewhere, but at least the fish was real. “I saw the whole world. I was the whole world, sort of. Y’know, Sergei, there’s not a problem that can’t be solved. I think we’re going to be OK.”

Sergei’s shovelling stopped. “God. If you’re going to be like this all day, I’m resigning now.”

“Seriously? OK. We both know I can handle the boat alone and the navy’s desperate for hands, so just hand in your reserved occupation papers and get yourself into uniform. Oh, and you’ll have to keep it clean. They’re pretty fussy about that.” She smiled sweetly at him.

He looked at her stonily. “I bloody hate you, Kuriakova,” he said, and returned his attention to his breakfast.

“‘I bloody hate you, Captain Kuriakova,’” she corrected him. “I will have discipline within my crew.”

She carried on eating, having duly noted Sergei struggling not to smile.

“Wake her up, Sergei.”

They were aboard the boat, set to go with a small cargo of assorted parcels, mainly intended for friends and family of Mologa’s military staff at Atlantis. That and a few data sticks containing messages in written and video form, both official and personal. Lines of communication were often among the first casualties in wartime. The landlines, never very reliable, had mainly been severed by enemy action, and the surface long wave relays — tethered communication buoys floating above the settlements — were too easy to intercept and jam. That’s if some enterprising raider didn’t slap them with a couple of torpedoes, of course. With rapid communications difficult, almost everything had to be done by couriers.

Katya had noticed among the parcels some actual letters, forming their own envelopes with a tab of tape to seal them.

“Letters. Imagine that,” she’d said, waving one of them at Sergei. “Writing. On paper.” Sergei had said nothing, so she’d added, “Amazing!” to emphasise the novelty of it.

“People sent letters on paper in the war,” he’d said. It was an extruded fibre weave, but it looked and behaved in much the same fashion as real wood pulp paper, the kind they had on Earth. “Sometimes, y’know, sometimes words on a screen aren’t enough. You want something you can carry with you. Sometimes it’s all that’s left of someone.”

Now the bags were stowed, and twenty hours of submarine travel awaited. Twenty hours of brain-freezing tedium, possibly mixed with bouts of bowel-loosening terror should the major in traffic control be wrong about local Yag activity. At least, Katya reflected, the cess tank was empty.

It was the co-pilot’s job to run down the pre-launch checklist, and the captain’s to oversee it, so Sergei counted off the items and called “check” at each positive, and it was Katya who watched him do it. It was ridiculous, she thought. In her entire maritime career to date, she had done that job once. Once, and only once, she had been co-pilot/navigator. Then she had inherited the boat and become captain. “A battlefield promotion,” Uncle Lukyan would have called it.

She snapped herself out of her reverie before it could become maudlin, and listened to Sergei finish the list. “All lights green, captain. All systems go.”

Katya opened the communications channel to traffic control. “We’re clear to disengage, traffic control. No last minute reports of Yag boats in the vicinity?”

“Nothing new, captain.” She recognised the voice of the major. “I can only recommend you stay sharp, and take care. Launch when ready, RRS 15743 Kilo Lukyan . Good luck.”

“Thank you, major,” replied Katya. “Disengaging now. Lukyan out.”

With a thud as the docking clamps released the boat, and the hum of the impellers taking them out into open water, the voyage was underway.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, renaming her uncle’s boat from Pushkin’s Baby to the Lukyan . It had seemed like a good way to honour him, to remember him. But now every time the boat’s name was used, she had to fight the urge to look at the left hand seat to see if he was there. Really, that should have been her seat as captain, but she just couldn’t bring herself to take it. She felt a big enough fraud calling herself “captain.” Claiming the captain’s seat, Lukyan’s seat… no. That was too much.

Sergei hadn’t wanted it either, but he had seen how she looked at the seat almost superstitiously and decided that he was going to have to be the stoic, pragmatic one. He didn’t like it, though, and had spent much of the first couple of months complaining that the seat felt wrong, that no matter how he adjusted it, it just felt wrong .