Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) (5 page)

Still Sergei said nothing. In the heavy silence, Katya hand-plotted a change to the logged route that would take them around the battleground and then back on course for Atlantis.

Finally, she’d had enough of it. “Speak up or stop making that faulty valve noise with your nose, Sergei. You’ve got something to say. Let’s hear it.”

For several seconds he just stared at her as if he’d never really looked at her before and didn’t like what he saw. Then he said, “Why? Why did you do that?”

“The Jarilo didn’t stand a chance. We had to do something.”

“No,” he replied with cold emphasis. “We didn’t
have
to do anything. We’re just a little boat keeping its head down and out of trouble. We can’t change anything. Don’t you get it?”

Katya looked at him and some of that sense of revelation came to her, too. Sergei
was
afraid. Sergei had always been afraid. All these years she had seen him just as an adjunct to Uncle Lukyan, or even to the boat, a sidekick to one, an organic module of the other. She had never really looked at him as a person, and what she saw disturbed her and, to her great sorrow, disappointed her. He was just a man with small dreams and small hopes who’d latched onto Lukyan and followed him wherever big, bluff Lukyan wanted to go. All he wanted in life was a steady job and not to be afraid, and not being afraid meant never taking risks.

Once, not so long ago, she would not only have sympathised, she would have agreed with him wholeheartedly. The world had been much simpler then. Now, however… now she’d seen the kind of people who start wars at first hand. The experience had not filled her with confidence that they would be doing everything in their power to bring things to a peaceful conclusion. The FMA was furious with the Yagizban because the Yags had betrayed them not once but twice, first conspiring with the Terrans during the war, and then by preparing for a Terran return that never came. For their part, the Yagizban were sick of the Federals for getting into a war with Earth in the first place, and then using it as an excuse for never-ending martial law. They would fight like zmey over a manta-whale carcass, until one of them was dead, and the manta was torn to pieces.

“No, Sergei. I don’t get it. Not anymore.” She turned her attention to the controls. “If you want to resign, I’ll give you a good reference.”

She’d suggested much the same at breakfast, but then it had been in jest. The hard truth was resignation really
did
mean being promptly conscripted into the Federal forces. By the time she realised it was a threat, the chance to withdraw the comment was gone.
Misunderstandings
, she thought.
This is how wars start
.

The following seventeen hours were not the most comfortable either of them had ever spent. Sergei was surlier than usual, and barely spoke. Katya tried to jolly him along for the first couple of hours, but grew tired of his wilful recalcitrance and was soon only speaking to him when she needed to. There was no chance of any more hands of poker and certainly none of a game of chess, so she pulled up a book on a non-luminescent plastic paper screen and read to pass the time. The Russalkin loathing of all things Terran perhaps unsurprisingly did not extend to Earth art in general and literature in particular, so she felt no tremors of spiritual treason in reading a book called
Moby Dick
. It was about a man who had grown obsessed with hunting and killing a sea monster, a great white whale in one of the Terran oceans. Katya doubted it would end well.

It was a relief for both of them when they picked up the Atlantean approach markers, and even when they were interrogated at torpedo point by a patrol boat, because at least it gave them something to focus on outside the toxic levels of animosity inside the
Lukyan
. With the patrol boat captain’s suspicions allayed, they were permitted to enter the minisub pens on the western side of the largest pressurised environment on the planet. Some of the Atlanteans went so far as to call it a city, but cities were a grubby Terrestrial conceit, and the term had never really stuck. Its population of a million and a half did make it comfortably larger than any other base or station, however, and it was large enough to support non-vital services.

Katya had heard that Atlantis was the only place on the planet where it was possible to forget that the Yagizban were trying to kill you, at least for a while. There was no chance of that during a three-hour debriefing, however. It was necessary to hand in a journey report to the authorities on arrival. Usually this simply consisted of a copy of the logged course, a plot of the actual course taken, and a brief description of anything that might be of interest to the FMA, although by far the most common style of report was the solitary sentence, “Nothing to report.” An actual plot that deviated wildly from the logged course and a description that included the phrases “Vodyanoi/2 warboat,” “Jarilo transport,” “anticipated ambush,” “noisemaker launched,” and “torpedoes detected” was never going to go by with a mildly interested nod from the authorities.

By the time they were released, they had been awake for over twenty-four hours with only a few short catnaps, and tiredness made Katya and Sergei even snappier with one another, especially since Sergei appeared to harbour a suspicion that their lengthy debriefing had been all part of a surreal plan of Katya’s to make him even more miserable.

They walked down the main southern promenade of the settlement silent and angry, barely exchanging a word.

It was a shame they were so tired and so ill-tempered, because Atlantis was like no other place on Russalka. It had actual shopping “streets,” wide concourses with recessed shops and freestanding stalls selling admittedly minor variations of each other’s stock. Once, Katya knew, these stalls had also dealt with goods brought in from the other Earth colonies, but that was before the war, when Russalka still had ships capable of reaching their near neighbours. Now there were some odd trinkets, curiosities like bone coral growths and the preserved forms of some of the more unusual fish from the world ocean. One stall was even topped by the massive skull of a zmey – a sea dragon. Neither Katya nor Sergei had time for any of this, though; both wanted sleep and to be out of one another’s company; and they wanted these things as soon as possible.

When the Federal officer and two troopers stopped them, it just seemed like another lousy thing to top off another lousy day.

“Captain Kuriakova?” said the officer. Katya had the impression of a tall and efficient woman in the uniform, but what raised her concerns most was the small black insignia at the end of the officer’s rank patch on her left breast pocket. She was a captain in Secor, the Federal security organisation. When Secor took an interest in your business, it never boded well. There were grim little rumours about Secor arresting those they found suspicious, spiriting them off to remote secure facilities like the Deeps or R’lyeh, where they would be interrogated, perhaps tortured, and dumped out of an airlock when Secor had squeezed every drop of useful information out of them.

“I… Yes?” said Katya, promptly wishing she hadn’t admitted to her identity, and then immediately glad she had. It didn’t pay to lie to Secor. That might make them angry with you, and that might make you dead.

“We have some questions for you,” said the captain. Her tone was officious and curt. “You will come with us.”

“What? But we’ve just been debriefed once.”

“Irrelevant. This is Secor business.”

To his credit, Sergei was having none of this. “We haven’t slept in over a day, captain,” he said, managing to be courteous for once. Speaking to somebody with the power of life and death, with an unpleasant period of “harsh” interrogation between the two, can have that effect. “Can’t this wait?”

The Secor captain looked at him as if Sergei was something that might be found in a cess tank. “And you are..?”

Sergei had an awkward habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and getting himself into trouble. Katya stepped in to stop him coming out with anything they might both regret. “He’s my co-pilot. Do you need both of us, captain? I’m fine going with you, but my co has business to attend to.”

Sergei shot her a “What are you playing at?” expression.

“The cargo still needs to be handed over to the dispersals agent at the dock. Yes, yes,” she stopped him interrupting, “I know I said we could leave that until we’d had some rest, but we’re overdue as it is. People are waiting for those parcels and letters, Sergei. We should hand them over as soon as possible.”

Sergei narrowed his eyes. He knew there was nothing he could say or do that would have any influence on Secor with the possible exception of making them angry, but he didn’t want to just leave it at that. Despite the current tension between them, his loyalty was still to her.

“I’ll be fine, Sergei. I’ll just answer the captain’s questions and then we can get on with cashing in the scrips and finding some more work, OK?”

With every sign of not finding it OK in the least, Sergei nodded. “Take care, Katya,” he said as he reluctantly took his leave. “I’ll see you back at the boat, yes?”

“I’ll see you there. Bye for now, Sergei.”

He walked back towards the docks slowly, looking over his shoulder now and then.

“He’s very protective of you,” said the captain.

“Yes,” agreed Katya, turning away from Sergei to face her. “He’s a family friend.”

“How nice, considering you don’t have any family left.”

Katya blanched. “You’re such a bastard, Tasya Morevna. Hard to believe you ever had a family. What did you do, eat them?”

The “Secor captain” smiled slightly. She’d been called much worse in her life, and accused of much worse. Sometimes the charges had even been true. “Lovely to see you again too, Kuriakova,” she said. “I was wondering if you’d recognised me. I’ve even dyed my hair.”

“How about I shout the place down, Chertovka?” demanded Katya, exhaustion making her reckless. “How about I point at you and denounce you as a war criminal and a traitor? You won’t get out of here alive.”

Tasya Morevna, unkindly nicknamed the “Chertovka” or “She-Devil,” seemed supremely unimpressed by the threat, even if the two “troopers” with her looked a little worried. “No,” she admitted, “we probably wouldn’t. Of course, neither would you. And then we’d all be dead, and you wouldn’t have found out why we’d gone to all this trouble to speak to you.” She smiled icily. “You’d die curious, and I know how much that would irritate you. Walk with me, Kuriakova. We’re attracting attention standing here.”

Grim and angry, Katya allowed herself to be cajoled into walking alongside Tasya, the two “troopers,” whom were certainly Yagizban agents in reality, following up the rear, their maser carbines carried at a “full port” position across their bodies. People avoided looking at the little group; Katya’s surly expression, Tasya’s smirk, and the two troopers were the popular image of a typical Secor arrest in progress, whether the detainee was guilty or not. Nobody wanted to stare, because that might mean sharing their fate. Even before the conflict against the Yagizba Enclaves had begun, Secor had enjoyed an unsavoury reputation. Now that people’s fear of spies and saboteurs – a fear the FMA was happy to encourage – was running wild, Secor did almost anything they liked, as long as it was not considered too overt or damaging to public morale by the ruling council. Impromptu public executions, such as had occurred in the first month of the conflict, had been stamped out. Most Federal citizens assumed they had simply been replaced with impromptu private executions. In this, they were correct.

The advantage of the almost supernatural levels of fear that accompanied Secor agents was that it meant anyone dressed as one was essentially invisible. It was an easy bet that not one of the dozens of people that passed them by would have been able to provide anything but the vaguest of descriptions for anyone in the party.

Tasya led the group to a restricted door into a disused maintenance area, the card she swiped through the lock looking suspiciously like an authentic Secor pass to Katya. She had assumed up to this point that the uniforms had been stolen from a storeroom somewhere, but now she was beginning to have misgivings. Where the Chertovka was involved, it was all too easy to imagine a storeroom with the corpses of a Secor officer and two troopers somewhere, stripped of their uniforms.

The door clanged to and locked behind them, cutting them off from the busy thoroughfare and leaving them in a suddenly very quiet, dank, barely lit access corridor to some part of Atlantis’ infrastructure that it probably didn’t even use anymore. “There,” said Tasya with satisfaction. “This is
much
cosier, isn’t it?”

Without waiting for the obvious reply, she moved ahead and Katya – for lack of other options – followed her. The corridor really was an archaeological site, in Russalkin terms at any rate, probably dating back to the foundation of Atlantis over a century before. At some point it had become surplus to requirements and was now just home to a few leaky pipes and some corroded power and control cabling, none of which had carried so much as a joule of energy since before she was born. Tasya clearly knew her way through the narrow corridors of what turned out to be a labyrinthine route. Behind them, the Yagizban “troopers,” pleased at no longer having to playact soldiers, slung their carbines over their backs by their straps and held a brief muttered conversation about being glad to be off the thoroughfare as they followed Tasya and Katya.

Katya was both irritated at all the clandestine sneaking around, and slightly smug because she was memorising the route. She might not have many talents, she thought, but trying to trip her up on a matter of navigation was just stupid. She knew they had already re-crossed their path twice, so she was positive Tasya was trying to disorientate her. Well, if crossing the Vexations with an unreliable inertial compass hadn’t caused her any great problems, then wandering around a few corridors – each of which was littered with plenty of distinctive features to remember – was insultingly easy. She didn’t tell Tasya that, of course; let her think she’d succeeded in baffling poor little Katya.