Jonathan Howard: Katya's War

The piece of paper looked cheap and disposable and in no way commensurate with the hard work and trouble it was intended to reward.

Katya Kuriakova held up the paper between her index and middle finger and said, “What the hell is this?”

The Federal officer was too busy writing on his pad for several seconds before he could be bothered to answer her. “It’s your payment, captain.” He glanced up and deigned to look her in the face. “It’s a standard Federal compensation form, properly authorised. Payment in full for services rendered.”

Even a few years before, the officer might have found it strange to be calling a girl of sixteen “captain,” but that was what she was and protocol on such matters was inflexible. That her boat was some battered little utility bug was irrelevant. She stood there in a set of dark red overalls that bore her name and a “Master & Commander” stripe over the left breast pocket, her short blonde hair tousled unattractively by the same lack of sleep that was doubtless responsible for the dark rings under her eyes, glaring at him with aggressive disbelief, and holding up the Federal scrip as if it were a declaration of war or, at least, a grave personal insult.

Still, conceded the officer inwardly, she had a nice nose.

“A scrip? A scrip ? Two days navigating the Vexations, dodging Yagizban patrols the whole way, pushing test depth for twelve hours at a stretch, and have you any idea what the sanitary arrangements on a minisub are like?”

The officer sighed. “Three things, captain. First, the scrip’s as good as money. Second …” he had to raise his voice slightly to override Katya’s furious denial that scrips were damn well nowhere near as good as money, “…I have no leeway on the matter. My orders are to pay captains with compensation forms. I have no money to give you even if my orders permitted it. And third, there is a war on .” He hefted his pad under his arm as if it were some marker of rank and walked further down the docking corridor towards another weary-looking captain and probably an identical argument.

Katya watched him go with the muted anger of somebody who knows from bitter experience that you can’t fight the system, especially when the system is running in a crisis and has its heels dug in against anything less important than its own survival.

There is a war on .

A single humourless laugh escaped her. Yes, officer , she thought, there is a war on. I helped start it.

She was glad she had kept that to herself; it really wouldn’t have helped matters.

She walked back to the minisub pens, to where her boat sat snugly held in its stall, aft door secure against the stable’s open access hatch. Sergei was just finishing draining the cess tank and looking as happy about it as could be expected. His mood was not improved when he saw the scrip in Katya’s hand.

“God’s teeth!” he muttered with the easy blasphemy of a born atheist. He picked up the toilet paper refill from the deck and held it out to her. “You might as well stick that thing in here. At least we’ll have a use for it then.”

Katya ignored the proffered box and stepped through the hatch, neatly avoiding catching her foot on the cess drainage tube. Four months previously she had not been so agile and the result had been impressively unpleasant. It was the sort of lesson that only needed learning once.

She sank into the fore starboard passenger’s seat and opened the locker beneath it. Inside was a waterproof documents box — “Guaranteed to resist pressures to five hundred metres!” according to the vendor — which she pulled out and unlocked with a four digit key. Inside, amongst all the other hardcopy documentation a properly registered submarine was supposed to carry and keep maintained, was a plastic folder labelled Magic Money Markers! Collect the set and see the wizerd! Labelled by Sergei, obviously. Certainly from its tone but not least because he had misspelled “wizard.” Within it was a wad of Federal Maritime Authority compensation forms, generically identical to the one that she now added to it. She quickly counted them, summing their worth as she went.

“Fancy going to Atlantis?” she called back to Sergei.

Sergei was just finishing with the cess tank. “Why is it not OK to vent the tank to the sea when it’s full, but it’s fine to vent it for cleaning after it’s been drained?” he asked and, like many of his questions, it was rhetorical. “I mean, like a bit of shit is going to break the ecosystem.” He locked down the tank’s hatch and cycled water through it from outside the hull. “Fish like shit, anyway. It’s got nutrients.”

“And deep thoughts like that are why you must never be put into any position of authority, Sergei. Now, pay attention. This is your captain speaking.” She waited until he had deactivated the cess tank’s cleaning procedure, replaced the deck plate over it, and then slowly swung his hand to his brow to make his usual lackadaisical and mocking salute to her. She took no offence at it; Sergei used to make the same salute to her uncle Lukyan when he had been captain. Lukyan could have punched Sergei clean through a bulkhead if he’d had a mind to, but what was the point? To deny Sergei his minor insubordinations would have been like denying him air.

Things were different now, of course. Lukyan was dead, and Katya was captain and owner of the little submarine, and it wasn’t called Pushkin’s Baby anymore. Also there was a war on. So many changes in so little time. It was good that some things could still be relied upon. Sergei being miserable, for example.

“Aye aye, Captain Kuriakova,” he said, his salute a thing of refined slovenliness that hung upon his brow like a dead eel. Belatedly, he realised what she had said and he dropped his arm to his side. “Atlantis? Do we have to?”

She waved the wad of scrips at him before returning them to the folder and stowing it away again. “Only way we’ll ever get these things turned into real money.”

“I know a man,” said Sergei. He had lowered his voice a little and was cautiously looking up and down the corridor alley connecting the pens. “And this fellow, he will buy the scrips off us, no questions asked.”

“Oh?” said Katya. “And how much ‘commission’ will he want?”

Sergei looked at her with astonishment. He still thinks I’m a little girl , she thought.

He mumbled something, mumbled it a little louder when she raised her eyebrows, and finally, provoked by her crossing her arms and leaning back in the seat, grudgingly admitted, “Fifty per cent.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Are you serious? Is he serious? Six months of hard, dangerous work, and half of it goes to some criminal who–”

“He’s not a criminal,” muttered Sergei.

“He’s buying scrips at half price and then somehow cashing them in for full. That’s not legal. So, yes, some criminal who profits from half our work while he sits nice and safe.” She spat a descriptive term for the unnamed criminal that hadn’t been heard in the boat since Lukyan was alive, and which went a long way to assuring Sergei that, no, Katya was no longer a little girl.

Sergei walked forward and took the seat opposite her. When he spoke, it was in a quieter and more reasonable tone. She began to understand that this wasn’t just his habitual pessimism; he was truly concerned.

“Atlantis is dangerous, Katya. I’ve heard some real horror stories about the Yags attacking anything in the water near there.”