Jonathan Howard - Katya's World

“Maybe it was methane,” said a voice from the back, Kane. “Perhaps it was methane gas from rotting plant matter caught in a mat of sunken vegetation. You punctured it with your probe and it just…” he shrugged, “deflated.”

Lukyan turned slowly in his chair, his surprise and disappointment turning to sneering anger. “The only gasbag around here is sitting in handcuffs. The NMR was lit up like a birthday cake, that thing was magnetically aglow. Methane…” He turned back to face forward, still muttering angrily. “Methane, he says.”

“Whatever it was, it’s gone now. Maybe we ought to get moving,” said Kane. Suhkalev looked at him suspiciously.

“You seem to be in a big hurry to get to a holding cell, Kane.”

“I just don’t like…” Kane shrugged and laughed lightly. “I just don’t like hanging around under three hundred metres of water in the middle of the Weft. It’s a bad place to be.”

Katya didn’t need to look back at Kane to know there was something else bothering him. A submariner of his experience must know that the Weft was a nuisance but certainly no danger. That laugh had been altogether too mannered and a little strained.

“No,” said Lukyan, his disappointment still evident in his voice. “We’re going nowhere until I’ve run a diagnostic analysis of the sensors. I’ve never seen a ghost return like that. If they’re feeding us garbage data, then we’re blind. Worse than blind. I’m not risking going through the rest of the Weft until I’m happy.”

Predictably, Suhkalev was not happy. “You’ve wasted enough time here, captain. Get us under way!”

“No. My authority over my vessel is absolute in matters of operational safety. You can’t tell me to go anywhere until I’m happy with the operation of this boat.”

“He’s right,” said Kane. Suhkalev shot him a dirty look. Kane grinned unapologetically back. “It’s no good getting shirty over it with me. It’s in the maritime regulations. The FMA maritime regs, that is. Like I say, you really ought to read them some time. Gripping stuff. I laughed, I cried.”

Katya tried to ignore them. Why did Kane keep provoking Suhkalev? All it would get him would be another beating.

Abruptly, another alarm sounded; the proximity alarm. Now it seemed the Baby thought there was danger of collision with something. She toggled the alarm off and nestled her headset on more comfortably.

Lukyan watched her silently while she — her hearing younger and more acute than his — listened carefully through the submarine’s ears. In the Baby ’s hull were mounted highly sensitive microphones. When relayed to a human listener, they provided a stereophonic sound image of the marine environment. She sat in absolute silence, her eyes shut as she concentrated entirely on what was coming through the headset speakers.

“Hydrophones are picking something up,” she said finally, eyes still shut. “Can’t make it out. Very low frequency.”

“Manta-whale?” asked her uncle.

“No, nothing like a manta. There’s no song. Just a hum, slight pulse.” She dipped the hydrophones’ active frequencies so they translated sounds normally too low to be heard by the human ear up into the audible range. “Really quiet. Almost silent, but it’s there.”

Kane said, almost to himself, “We really ought to go,” but everybody ignored him.

Katya’s eyes fluttered open, her expression confused like somebody waking from a cryptic dream. “I thought I heard cavitation. Just for a moment.”

“A sub?” said Lukyan, his frown as puzzled as his niece’s. Cavitation was the sound caused by water travelling swiftly over an imperfectly streamlined surface. It developed into tiny water vapour-filled bubbles that hissed in the water and sounded clearly through audio sensors. It had long been the bane of war submarines; the faster you went, the greater the cavitation noise. In submarine warfare, silence is life. A loud boat is a dead boat.

Lukyan had fought before and he knew that golden rule. Katya seemed to be describing the barely-detectable sound of a war sub. Lukyan knew that an opening torpedo tube door, the gap in the hull flawing the otherwise perfect teardrop design, could have caused the momentary sound of cavitation.

Perhaps he was being paranoid, but he’d rather be paranoid than dead.

“Nobody make any noise,” he whispered as he switched off the impellers that were holding their position, the sound relays, even the ventilator fans. Pushkin’s Baby drifted freely, silent and — Lukyan fervently hoped — invisible to hostile hydrophones and passive sonar.

“Pirates!” hissed Suhkalev at Kane. “Your crew, no doubt?”

“I said quiet !” whispered Lukyan, only keeping his voice down with a massive effort of will.

Kane said nothing. He just sat looking at the deck, his hands clasped in front of him. Katya was meanwhile trying to get more of an idea of what they were dealing with, or at least where it was. About the only thing she could think of that might work in this situation was a complex technique called integrated coordination. This combined simple triangulation with examining the Doppler shift in any sound data. It usually needed so much data drawn over such a long period that it was of very limited use when dealing with a moving target. It could, however, at least give an idea of range.

Lukyan looked at what she had pulled up on her main screen and nodded approvingly. The seconds ticked by, turning into minutes.

Katya was lost in concentration, only faintly aware of the increasing tension in the three men who watched and waited for her to perform her mathematical magic. She needed a decent frequency shift, she thought, as target and listener moved relative to one another. Just a few millihertz, she wasn’t greedy. When the Baby drifted into a tendril of the Weft and moved smoothly away from the target for a few seconds it was all she needed.

“I have an IC resolution,” she whispered, gently tapping the numbers into the workpad. Then, her normal voice sounding like a shout after the quiet, “Oh no! 800 metres! Closing rapidly!”

Both submarines had seen each other simultaneously.

The time for stealth had gone. “Navcom!” barked Lukyan at the computer. “Evade! Evade!”

The impellers whirred into life as the navigational computer started running the evasion programs that had been standard on every Russalkin boat since the war. “Evading now,” it reported. Then, “multiple contacts in the water, closing one two zero knots.”

Katya couldn’t believe it. “ How fast?” She’d never heard of a torpedo that could beat a hundred knots. To go faster meant using very loud drives and — she listened intently through the hydrophones — she could just hear some faint cavitation noise. The torpedoes were almost silent.

“We’re not at war, are we?” asked Suhkalev from the back in a shaky voice.

“Uncle?” said Katya as she pulled off her headset, “I’m not picking up any active sonar pings. What kind of torpedo doesn’t use active sonar?”

Lukyan wasn’t listening; he’d opened communications channels. “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is RRS 15743 Kilo Pushkin's Baby . We are under attack! Repeat, under attack! Requesting urgent assistance.”

Katya was horrified. The chances of anybody being within range when Suhkalev’s orders had taken them so far off the recognised lanes were minimal. Her uncle must know that. With a sense of cold sickness deep in her belly, Katya realised how desperate their situation was.

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is RRS 15743 Kilo Pushkin's Baby . We are under attack! Repeat, under attack! Requesting urgent assistance. We are…” He paused as the sensor screens suddenly filled with red emergency light. The impact-warning klaxon sounded. “Oh, no…”