Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

“You’re in third, in that case. Glazov, whichever way I go, you go the other way and clear the door so Shepitko can come in and engage ahead and above. Move fast and don’t pause in the doorway unless you like being repeatedly shot. Got it?”

Whether they got it or not, she wasn’t waiting. She reached the door, tapped its control, and led through, swinging right, Glazov was through immediately behind her sweeping left, and Shepitko came through on their tails, looking worried. They vanished out of sight. There was a pause of a few seconds before Tasya reappeared, using the doorframe as cover. “Clear,” she said with obvious disappointment. “Your turn, captain.”

Sevnik nodded, girding himself for danger. Just as he and his team were about to break cover, however, an inmate leaned out of one of the doors further down the corridor. There was a hollow “pop” sound, and something sailed through the air towards them, trailing a thin streamer of smoke.

“Gas!” shouted Sevnik, ducking back behind cover.

When things happen together, it is in the nature of humans to first assume that the events must be related, no matter how unlikely. When the gas grenade bounced off the Feds’ barricade, it landed on the floor, rolled back a metre, and then coughed gently as the fuse initiated the payload and riot gas started to flow out from it in thick, opaque waves. At the same moment, the Deeps shook with a sudden violence that was enough to knock Katya over. In a moment it had gone, but no dweller in the Russalkin depths ever feels a corridor floor vibrate and then dismisses it as nothing.

There was a horrified silence after the vibration, and they remained in tableaux, waiting for an aftershock. Then Sevnik said, “The gas grenade.” At first Katya thought he was suggesting the grenade was responsible, but then she heard the tinny rumble over the hiss of the gas. Holding her breath and squinting, she looked quickly over the barricade.

The grenade was rolling away from them, back towards the prisoners’ positions.

On the one hand, it should have made her happy. The grenade had barely started to produce gas, and although there was enough of it in the air to make her eyes sting and water a little, there wasn’t nearly enough of it to be debilitating. On the other hand, it was rolling . All floors in stations and facilities were level to several decimal places. Any slopes within them were deliberate with black and yellow danger stripes at both ends and plentiful signage. Nowhere else could you drop a ball and expect it to roll away from you.

The speakers clicked into life. “On ancient Earth, we came from the sea,” spoke the governor’s voice, “and now, we are consigned to it; to wipe away our sins, to expunge us from a universe that will do better without us.”

Sevnik turned to Katya. “I thought you said the governor was no longer a threat?”

“He isn’t. It’s a recording. He had this planned all along.” The tilt in the corridor floors was becoming obvious. “What’s he done?”

Sevnik swallowed hard. His complexion was grey. “He’s blown the ballast tanks.”

“He’s blown the tanks?” That didn’t seem so bad to Katya. To a submariner, “blowing the tanks” just meant driving out all the water with compressed air to give them maximum positive buoyancy. “So we’re rising?”

Sevnik shook his head urgently. “No, I don’t mean he’s blown the tanks empty. I mean he’s blown them clear off .”

One of the desks making up the barricade fell over.

Katya saw sweat starting to appear on Sevnik’s brow. Being shot at had not bothered him unduly, but now he was afraid. “There’s an emergency protocol in case the prisoners ever took control of the facility. It detonates charges on the tanks’ pylons. We’re sinking like a rock.”

“Tasya!” shouted Katya. “The governor’s scuttled the whole station!”

“I was beginning to work that out myself,” she shouted back. “Better to kill the prisoners and the surviving guards than allow a mass escape. Wish I could meet the genius who came up with that and bang his head off the wall a few times. Captain! No time for subtlety. We have minutes to live unless we reach that pod.”

All caution gone, the captain hurdled the barricade. “Come on!” he shouted to those still sheltering behind him. “Follow me! If it moves, shoot it!”

Tasya and her team were out of the office door in a second following him and, as soon as they could get over the barricade, so was the remainder of the captain’s team, Oksana, and Katya.

The inmate who’d thrown the grenade watched it roll back past his doorway. “Hey!” he shouted to anyone who might reply. “Hey, what’s…?” As he spoke, he leaned out of cover and was shot by Captain Sevnik.

As they ran, Katya’s mind was working quickly. Why was the Deeps tilting like this? Why didn’t it just sink?

Because it was roughly saucer shaped and one edge of it was slightly heavier, she told herself. Out of the five sectors, the administration sector contained the main boat docks. That was why it was heavier, and that was why, without the ballast tanks in place to keep the station trimmed, it was sinking a little faster.

Above them there was nothing but the corridor ceiling, some service utilities, and the inner hull. Through it, she could hear a slowly growing roar. The Deeps may once have been intended to be mobile, but that scheme had been dropped early. Now its outer skin was festooned with sensors and other equipment that rendered it well short of perfectly hydrodynamic. The roaring was the sound of the sea moving more and more quickly over the station’s skin as it sank.

Katya recalled what she could remember of the Deeps and its location; she’d once had to plot a course to it what seemed like a lifetime ago, but which wasn’t even a year. The first time she’d ever met Kane, that accursed day.

The Deeps was held in place by cables running from the ballast tanks; with the tanks gone, so had the tethers. The station was anchored over a small plateau, the shoulder of an extinct submarine volcano. The approach was from open water, heading towards the mountain. At this sort of angle, that meant…

“Wait!” Katya shouted. “We’re going to crash!”

She grabbed Oksana’s wrist and the back of Tasya’s coveralls. Tasya whirled, her natural assumption being that anything unexpected was potentially dangerous. The rest of the party slowed to a confused halt, except Captain Sevnik.

The impact was a moment later. They all fell and rolled along the corridor floor. Sevnik, however, had been running too fast. He couldn’t stop and, to his horror, felt the deck sloping even more rapidly now. With a cry of impotent anger, he was airborne.

“The offices! Quickly!” cried Katya. “The whole place is turning over!”

Tasya was on her feet in a second, bodily throwing Alina through an office doorway next to them. There was a male shout from inside, and the crack of a maser going off. It seemed that Tasya had found an armed inmate to take her wrath out on after all.

Quickly they streamed through the door, Katya and Oksana last, but as Oksana reached the doorway, an office chair from the barricade rolled by and clipped her, knocking her off balance.

The tilt of the corridor was too great for her to climb the flooring and, terrified, she started to slide away from them.

Tasya had stayed on the door. She saw Katya look back and started to say, “Leave her.”

“Grab my feet,” said Katya, and dived after Oksana.

Oksana had, naturally, been reaching out with her injured arm, and naturally, that was the one Katya grabbed at. She locked both hands around Oksana’s wrist and felt Tasya’s hands clasp around her own ankle just as the corridor became less like a corridor and started to remind Katya of the lift shaft she’d enjoyed so much in Atlantis.