Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

“Oh, gods, Katya! Please! Don’t let go!” Oksana begged as gravity swung her off the floor.

Beyond her, Katya had an impression of a body spread-eagled a hundred metres away against a bulkhead surround. She tried to ignore it, although she knew it must be Captain Sevnik.

Everything was in chaos, the crash of the furniture as it left the office floors and fell against the walls, cries from all around, and Tasya swearing in grunts as she held onto Katya’s ankle, bearing the weight of both her and Oksana.

Behind them, a rumbling was growing louder. Katya saw Oksana’s eyes look past her and widen. The barricade that so recently had sheltered them from harm was coming to kill them.

Katya risked a look over her shoulder. Tasya, always sensitive to danger was already looking into an “up” that was recently a “back.” Above them on the slope, the desk was barely in contact with the floor anymore, accelerating rapidly towards them.

It was impossible for Tasya to pull both Katya and Oksana back in time and, if she stayed where she was, she would be hit too.

Tasya looked down and her eyes met Katya’s.

“Let go,” said Katya.

Without hesitation, Tasya did.

Oksana screamed as they fell. Katya didn’t have time for such a luxury. She drew up her legs and kicked against the wall, pulling Oksana closer as she did. The desk, heavy and already travelling at speed, clipped her hard enough to hurt but not to disable. She ignored the pain and grabbed the edge of it with her left hand. As she wrestled herself and Oksana across its underside, its corners kept scraping the floor and wall, threatening to flip it.

Suddenly, they hit the bulkhead surround she’d seen from above. The impact drove the breath from her, and she felt something break inside. Through the wave of pain, she had a momentary vision of Sevnik’s body on the other side of the surround, his eyes open, the left of his skull crushed. Then the desk flipped over the edge of the support and they were falling again.

Oksana was no longer screaming. Perhaps she’s dead and all this was for nothing , thought Katya. But she’d had to try.

But now “down” wasn’t neatly along the corridor anymore. Katya kicked against the floor with her failing strength and the desk moved towards the ceiling. As it slowly became the floor, she hoped that it wasn’t just made of cosmetic tiling, or they would be falling through it in a moment. The surface of the desk touched down tentatively, then solidly, and Katya found herself sledging along the ceiling. As the angle grew less, the desk started to slow. Behind her she could hear shouting, and she looked back to see the guards and Tasya running down the ridiculously steep slope of the ceiling. She knew they had no choice; the fact that there had been no further impacts beneath their feet meant that the Deeps had rolled off the edge of the plateau and was falling. Below them was a drop of two thousand metres ending in a lake of the Soup. If the water pressure didn’t crush the prison, the massive pressures within the heavy metal cocktail of the Soup definitely would.

Katya was trying to drag Oksana to the escape pod door when the others reached them. The corridor was flat by then, but already starting to pitch over again as the Deeps toppled towards destruction. Tasya was with her in a moment, pulling Oksana’s arm over her neck and pulling her along.

“Get that hatch open!” she barked at the guards. They needed no second telling.

“Is she still alive?” asked Katya gripping her side. The pain was blossoming, blazing through her ribs every time she took a breath.

“Don’t know,” replied Tasya, and they carried the limp body to the opening hatch.

Whatever formalities about boarding an escape pod the guards may have learned during training was largely ignored in the rush to get clear of the doomed prison. Two guards took positions on either side of the entry into the circular pod, and more or less threw the others inside as they reached the doorway. The pod’s circumference was occupied by ten inset seats, albeit seats currently over the heads of the escapers, and they moved under the seat they planned to take, possibly the only bit of the escape drill that had survived the chaos.

Alina was one of the guards and helped Tasya and Katya get Oksana inside. As soon as they were all in, she hit the door closure control.

“Don’t eject until we’re more or less upright,” warned Tasya. “It was never built to work upside down.” Then to the others, “Grab hold of anything solid.”

The pod, and the Deeps around it, slowly performed another one hundred and eighty degree flip. Long before it had completed it, the seats were at an angle they could all climb into and pull on the safety harnesses. Katya stayed with Oksana to lock her into her seat. Before she ran to her own, she quickly checked Oksana’s throat for a pulse. It was there; not strong, but at least she still lived.

For a brief moment, the escape pod was perfectly the right way up. Alina needed no prompting to arm and trigger the release mechanism.

For a moment nothing happened, and despair sparked in more than one heart. Then there was a dull thud beneath their feet and a sense of movement. No longer the slow tumble of the sinking prison, but a slight rocking as the escape pod — a convex underside and a conical upper, connected by a metre and a half high cylindrical section — rose towards the surface.

“Evacuation unit Alpha-4 has successfully disengaged and is operating normally,” announced the pod’s computer in the soothing tones somebody had decided would be most beneficial to those in an emergency. “A distress signal is already being transmitted. Help is on its way.”

“Does it know that, or is it just saying it?” asked one of the guards.

Katya knew a signal wouldn’t reach anyone until they got to the surface, but she didn’t want to speak because that meant taking a breath, and breathing really hurt.

“You’ve cracked some ribs, Kuriakova,” said Tasya. She nodded at Oksana. “She probably has, too. That was quite an impact you took.” Suddenly she grinned. “I loved it when you said ‘Let go.’ I could just see the calculations going on inside your head. You’re like me. You figure out the odds and take the crazy risk, even if it’s not quite as crazy as it looks.”

“I didn’t take a risk,” said Katya and winced. Cracked ribs. Yes, that would explain a lot. “You were going to let me go anyway.”

Tasya looked like she might deny it, then shrugged. “So why did you tell me to let you go?”

“So, if it was the last thing that ever happened to me, it was because I asked for it. It was my choice.”

Tasya looked at Katya with appraising eyes. “Is that pride I hear, Kuriakova?”

Katya said nothing. It hurt too much to say.

The pod broke the surface to find fourteen others already there and, while they watched, another surfaced about a kilometre away.

Russalka’s weather system was having close to the best weather it seemed capable of — a stiff breeze and a fine rain. Above them some of the dense cloud cover was distinctly thinner than others areas, allowing moderate amounts of light in. In Russalkin terms, this was balmy weather. It was more than calm enough for them to have opened the evacuation hatches on the pod’s upper surface to look around.

“Well, that’s sixteen transmitters squawking,” said Glazov, the guard. “That should draw something.”

As if answering him, the water boiled some two hundred metres away. Rising slowly from the depths, they saw a rakish conning tower break the surface, followed by the lean and lethal form of an attack boat.

“Is that the Vengeance ?” said Glazov a little nervously. It certainly wasn’t a standard Federal design. The only boat on the Federal lists that looked like that was the Vengeance , stolen from the Yagizban. “If it isn’t, then it’s Yag.”