Jonathan Howard - Katya's World

Katya couldn’t believe how quickly the water came in. It was as if a spar of ice had punched through the Baby , stabbing clean through her metal and plastic hull and then instantly turning back to liquid. By the time she thought we’ve been holed the water was already up to her knees.

It all became confused then; too many stimuli, not enough time to examine each of them. She saw her uncle punch the emergency surface control and felt the Baby lurch as her trim weights were dumped and her ballast tanks were blown empty with compressed air. The depth gauge stopped falling, even rose for a couple of metres, but they’d taken on too much water and started to fall again. She heard her uncle shouting “Locks! Locks!” but that made no sense. Then she felt the water rise cold and deadly over her hands and was shocked by how high it was. She reached down and tried to release her harness but it wouldn’t unlock. She thought she really should have asked Sergei about the seat’s eccentricities and she’d make a point of asking him next time.

Then she thought, except there won’t be a next time because I’m going to die before the next time .

She tugged at the seat’s webbing until she realised the water was up to her neck and she ought to worry about breathing. Then something happened — she guessed that the Baby had lost trim and rolled — and she was completely underwater. She fought with the straps a bit more but it was no good, they simply weren’t going to let her go. She looked up and saw the Judas box. Almost all the lights were red, especially the ones across the top row. Hull integrity, motive power, life support — all her favourite green lights had gone red and that saddened her as the cold water leeched the life out of her.

She couldn’t care anymore. She couldn’t concentrate enough to care. She couldn’t even feel her fingers anymore.

She looked across at her Uncle Lukyan and found he was looking right at her. There was an expression of such horror on his face. For a moment, she thought he was afraid to die, but then she realised that he was horrified that she was going to die. She wished she could have hugged him, told him it was all right, that she couldn’t care anymore, but the straps held her firmly into her seat and she couldn’t care about that either. Then the power failed and they were in darkness. She watched the lights on the Judas box flicker out and wondered if the Judas box had a Judas box indicator on it. She guessed not, or else there would be a lone red light burning there now, to tell them that the Judas box was broken.

In the darkness, death snuggled up close to her. She realised that she was still holding her breath and wondered why she was bothering, now death had finally showed up to embrace her. She tried to hold her breath a little longer just to show she could, but death wanted her to come with him. She didn’t want to be impolite. The stale air bubbled out of her mouth and nose. Liquid flooded in.

She thought, in the brief moment before the darkness claimed her, that it was a shame she’d died just before her sixteenth birthday. There was going to be a party. It would have been fun.

If Russalka had a global religion, it was atheism.

Colonising a new planet had given the settlers a long-range perspective on the workings of religion and it all seemed so distant to them here; so irrelevant, so faintly childish. Religions were still studied, though, if only as mythologies, and as a way of understanding some aspects of Terran politics and history.

But nobody was very interested in knowing much about the past of that distant world now, anyway. People had much more important things to worry about.

Katya was raised as an atheist from birth, but she knew about angels. When she died, she was slightly surprised to find herself taken to Heaven by one.

The angel carried her upwards through the darkness of space, leaving Russalka behind. Higher and higher they rose, until she saw the distant lights of the Celestial City.

She wondered how she was going to apologise to God for being wrong all the time about Him. Still, she wouldn’t be being taken up in rapture from her worldly existence unless He was a forgiving God; the vengeful version suggested in other comparative religion files would have left her in Limbo or worse. No, she was sure He’d be able to accept an apology in the spirit in which it was meant and they could start afresh. She wondered if He played chess.

Then the light grew bright and she flew strongly and happily towards it, borne by her angel. They struck it and the light shattered into a thousand million fragments, scattering around her, droplets of Heaven falling back into the sea.

The sea.

The sea?

Where she had been in rapturous certainty a moment ago, now she felt panic and confusion. She wasn’t in Heaven at all. There was no God waiting for her with the chess pieces already set out. There was only the sea and the lightning flashing spasmodically across an angry sky. Was this Hell? Was she still on Russalka? Were they — the thought flittered momentarily and vanished before she could settle upon its intimations — the same thing?

More lightning, distorted through water drops on plastic. She realised she was wearing goggles, but how..?

She was wearing an emergency respirator pack, but she could not remember putting it on, nor could she remember escaping the Baby . She couldn’t even remember managing to undo her seatbelt. Her tongue felt strange in her mouth, impeded somehow and she suddenly realised her mouth was full of liquid. She moved to tear away the respirator pack’s mask but a hand restrained her. She spun around in the water and found herself face to face with Kane.

His emergency respirator mask made him look insect-like and sinister. Part of the breathing mechanism itself was clear and she could see a green fluid inside. She cursed herself for her stupidity. The whole near-death experience suddenly made perfect, if humiliating, sense.

He gestured to her to follow and swam towards a beacon-buoy floating a few metres away. With a sick feeling, she knew it was the Baby ’s beacon, automatically released when all else had failed, and she knew what it meant. The Baby was gone, and Uncle Lukyan was dead.

They clung to the side of the small buoy as the waves slapped half-heartedly at them. The weather report had been right; the sea wouldn’t go out of its way to drown them. It didn’t have to; Russalka’s electrical storms were notoriously disruptive to communications. They’d be lucky if anybody detected the distress signal the buoy was transmitting for hours. They’d be dead from exposure long before then.

Kane hooked his arm around a stanchion on the buoy, closed the respirator’s valves and took it off. The green fluid ran from his nostrils as he vomited up the fluid that was in his lungs. It wasn’t really vomiting — lungs simply aren’t equipped for dumping liquid contents like stomachs — but it allowed him to breathe the thick Russalka atmosphere.

When he’d got about as much out as he was likely to under the circumstances, he helped Katya to do the same. It was an ugly sensation; she’d grown used to the feel of the liquid in her throat and lungs since she’d come around. Feeling cold air flooding her mouth and trachea right down inside her chest was uniquely unpleasant.

“Are… are you all right?” asked Kane, coughing up more of the fluid.

“My uncle, what happened?”

Kane looked away from her, out across the choppy sea. “I’m sorry. I could only try and save whoever was closest to me. That was either going to be you or that worthless FMA bletherskite. I couldn’t have got to your uncle in time.”