Jonathan Howard - Katya's World

He sat silently. The tentacles imbedded in him shuddered slightly as if discomforted and suspicious. He opened his mouth and spoke, one word on each exhalation. “Pyotr… Grigorevich… Tokarov.”

Katya nodded, as quiet and comforting as any nurse at the deathbed. “Pyotr Grigorevich Tokarov. I shall remember you.”

Then she stabbed him in the neck with the syringe. Her aim was good; the blunt end of the pressure syringe slammed up hard against his carotid artery and she kept her thumb on the dosage release until the whole chamber was empty.

She felt none of the sickness or self-loathing that she had felt so quickly when she’d shot the Yagizban trooper. That had been an impulse and the thought that violence lived so close to the surface in her was a terror to her. This though, this was an act of humanity.

Perhaps the large dose of Sin would kill him immediately, perhaps the rejection process would, perhaps the Leviathan would kill all of them in retaliation, Tokarov included. It didn’t matter — there had been no choice.

The effect was instantaneous. Katya had seen deep ocean worms that shied from the touch of searchlight beams as if they were fire. The Leviathan ’s tentacles slid out of Tokarov as if his touch was poison. To the Leviathan , perhaps he was. In a great thrashing mass, the cables and tentacles and hair-thin threads withdrew and hung back, their tendrils waving in an unfelt breeze.

“Interface prematurely halted,” said the Leviathan , any trace of Tokarov gone from its voice.

Tokarov slumped back into the throne, gasping violently. His flesh was a wreck, his eyelids had mercifully been able to close and Katya was spared the sight of the ruined sockets. But she’d seen that frantic clawing for breath once before; back in the mines when a crewman injured during the Vodyanoi ’s attack had died. Katya knew he was going to die just as surely as that crewman and that, just as surely, there was nothing she could do.

“I’m sorry, Pyotr,” she whispered.

But there was to be no dignity in death here. A cable, thicker than the others, separated from the mass and snaked around Tokarov’s neck. Before Katya could react, he was jerked into the air and thrown aside, nothing more than a failed component.

Katya saw him hit the wall with a horrible crack of breaking bone and took a step forward. Thus, she never saw the tentacle that hit her.

“New replacement selected,” said the Leviathan . “Interface process initiating.”

Katya felt the tip of the tentacle break the skin at the back of her neck, directly where it joined the skull. She felt it separate into roots and then into threads, penetrating muscle and bone. Even though she knew it was impossible, she felt it penetrate her brain.

Somewhere distant, she thought she head screams and shouts; her uncle, Kane, perhaps even herself. Before she could wonder why everybody seemed to be so upset, the Leviathan was in her mind and, worse yet, she was inside its.

She saw it greedily access her memories, looking for intelligence, experience, tactics and strategies, human cunning and human guile. She felt it ransack her mind like a thief looking for valuables amongst family heirlooms valuable to no one but the owner. Each memory accessed flared into colours and smells and sounds as if it were yesterday. No, as if it were now .

…her mother came in to comfort her and she ended comforting her mother, her mother saying “This stupid, stupid war” until Katya said “Stupid war” and her mother laughed or was it a sob and papa never came home again…

… she never liked her Uncle Lukyan, he was so big and he laughed too loud and here he was all quiet, his huge hands holding hers and saying, “My poor Katinka” and telling her something about an accident and how she would be living with him now…

… Sergei looking at the plot she had made on the practise table and scratching his head and asking, “Did you do this by yourself?” and showing Lukyan who smiled and said, “She’s a prodigy, that one” and looking up “prodigy” and being proud…

“Let her go! Let her go, machine!”

“Pushkin! Careful, man! Look out!”

… feeling sick, stomach cramps and no one to talk to, Uncle Lukyan asking if she were well as if she just has a cold and no one to talk to and her mama dead these five years…

… being expelled from the Federal Cadet League for gross insubordination, in front of all the others, the shame and humiliation turning to hysterical laughter, the commander snarling “You’re a disgrace, you’ll never wear a Federal uniform!” and telling Lukyan and him just saying, “You’ve got all the training out of that programme that’s worth having, plenty of civilian boats would be glad to have you”…

Something deeper, something in the shadows. An invasion? She thinks of the tendrils in Tokarov’s flesh and the antiseptic and the thought gratefully takes up the theme. Not an invasion, a wound. Antibodies rallying against it. Burning out the infection. Whose memory is this? she wonders. Not mine. Tokarov’s? Is that what another person’s memories are like? Disconnected images without context, ideas floating in vacuum. No, not that. The Leviathan? It must be, but why does it want to talk to me? What is wounded?

Motion, a pressure at the back of her head. “You might kill her!” “It’s not having her!” Not a pressure, a pulling, like when she used to wear a ponytail and Andrei Ivanovitch pulled it so hard she fell over backwards…

The agony was so exquisite, so far beyond anything she has ever experienced before, her only reaction was to open her eyes very, very wide. She had a momentary impression of Lukyan standing by her, a tentacle held in his fist, the end a tangle of fibres dripping… blood?

Then she collapsed and he grabbed her under one arm like he used to when she was young and they played monsters while her mother, Lukyan’s sister, looked on and shook her head ruefully.

“Go, Pushkin! GO !” She heard Kane bellow as if every devil from every hell was pursuing them.

“Category one. Confirmed.”

Katya heard a crack and Lukyan staggered. Then he straightened up and lumbered towards the exit, Kane running ahead of them. Another crack and then another, and another. Lukyan moaned miserably under his breath but kept running. Kane had reached the doorway and was unfolding something he’d had concealed under his jacket. As they neared, he raised it to his shoulder and it started making a very similar cracking noise. The agony was ebbing and Katya was now in a dull place of pain and distance. It took her a moment to realise that Kane’s weapon must be Terran and that made her wonder if it was one of the laser smallarms Earth was supposed to have. Then the similarity of the sound of the weapon to the sounds behind her sank in.

The Medusa sphere was firing. She wondered if she was being hit and the pain from being forcibly disconnected from the Leviathan was overshadowing the pain of laser wounds. Then Lukyan staggered again and she knew the truth of it. He was almost sobbing, not in pain but in desperation to reach the hatch before his strength failed and she finally understood how important his promise to look after her he had made to the memory of her mother was to him.

Lukyan collapsed just a metre from the hatch, falling to his knees. Kane looked down at him and saw there was little life in him, but still there was hope. Kane flicked a control on the laser carbine and fired. From a stubby barrel beneath the laser emitter, a rocket propelled shell flew out, hissing past them and towards the interface chair. Kane threw the weapon down behind him and grabbed Katya, dragging her through the hatch. She looked back then and saw her uncle for the last time; all but dead, his eyes tired and glazing, his face pallid. She could see the smoke rising from his back where the Medusa sphere had rained laser bolts into him, and she could only guess at what kind of man could have carried on this long.