Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) (15 page)

There was a distinct pause.

“The
Zarya
, sir?”

“Yes. I’m of a mind to show Ms Kuriakova just what her world was up against when Earth first invaded.”

Another pause.

When Ocello spoke again, it was in a quiet and very serious voice. “Captain. You will appreciate why I have to ask twice. Are you sure you want us to go to the
Zarya
?”

Kane looked as if he wasn’t sure at all. It seemed to take an effort of will for him to say, “Quite sure, Genevra.”

As soon as he closed the link Katya said, “But what about the weapons? We’ll be right over them!”

“The weapons aren’t what you think at all, Katya.” He got up to go. At the doorway, he said, “I’ve already apologised for what we saw in the evacuation site. I had no idea that would be the first thing we would discover. What I will show you at the grave of the
Zarya
, however, I make no apologies for. You said I kept too many secrets from you. If you’re not already wishing that you could unlearn some of those secrets, you soon shall.”

CHAPTER TEN

ZARYA

The hull groaned. Beyond it, Russalka was trying her very best to crush the
Vodyanoi
into a tattered wreck and drop her to crash beside the
Zarya
in the lightless deep.

“We’re two hundred metres past test depth. Continuing to descend.”

Kane was back in the captain’s chair, behaving a little too manically for Katya’s comfort. “I like the sound of a groaning hull. Don’t you, Katya?” he asked. “Makes you feel alive, when you think of all those millions of tonnes of water just out there, and how narrow a rope we walk in this life. Just one silly, inconsequential thing –
seemingly
,” he corrected himself, “
seemingly
inconsequential thing could kill us all in a tenth of the time it takes to think, ‘Well, gosh, that’s a lot of water.’”

Katya didn’t care for his fatalism, but she noticed that the bridge crew took no notice of him at all. She guessed that in the ten years they’d been stalking the depths, they’d seen their captain make far more outrageous little speeches than this.

Now and then Tasya would wander in, frown with impatience, and walk out again. It was easy to understand why; the plan Katya had flatly refused to help with at Atlantis and then agreed to at the evacuation site was complicated and desperate as it was without further difficulties being introduced. The plan depended on Katya being above suspicion, and that meant everything being normal. If she turned up back at Atlantis without her boat, even the slowest Fed might doubt that she’d swum there. They should have been looking for the
Lukyan
and yet, although this was formally the beginning of the search for the minisub, it was an odd place to start.

Odder still was that Tasya expressed her impatience with only a frown. This from a woman who had reputedly once shot someone dead for being ten minutes late. Katya had asked about that earlier, cagily approaching the subject sideways in case Tasya didn’t wish to be reminded.

“Did I kill someone for being ten minutes late to the beginning of an operation? No, that’s nonsense,” Tasya had said. “No, he was late
during
a mission. I just shot him in the foot at the end after exfiltration so he was taken off active duty and would never screw up anything important again.” She’d laughed at Katya’s silly little misunderstanding. “As if I’d kill somebody for being a little tardy.”

Whereas, it seemed, masering a hole through somebody’s foot for it was perfectly reasonable.

Yet here she was, clearly angry at the delay but saying nothing about it, never mind resorting to gunplay. Kane received a unique degree of tolerance from her. Some of Katya’s old school friends would have been quick to assign thwarted romantic feelings to Tasya, but that didn’t seem quite right to Katya. It was more like the protectiveness of an older sister to a slightly stupid younger brother. Havilland was actually the elder by a little way, but his eccentricities often made him seem very immature for his years.

“We’re here, captain,” reported the helm, “directly over the wreck of the
Zarya
. Continuing to descend.”

The news seemed to sober Kane. Indeed, the atmosphere on the bridge became sombre. Katya was not surprised; the Vodyanois were Terrans, and the
Zarya
must have contained hundreds of their compatriots.

“Take us down to fifty metres above the wreck, please. Mr Sahlberg, Mr Quinn, prepare a drone if you would.”

Every few seconds, the hull creaked again under the increasing pressure, but never as sharply or, at least, never as unexpectedly as the first time. It was an impossible sound to enjoy, but at least it became bearable in the knowledge that they would not be exceeding the
Vodyanoi
’s design depth, never mind its more problematical crush depth.

The drone was launched before the submarine reached its prescribed depth, travelling down ahead of its mothership. The water was relatively clear, and when the
Vodyanoi
activated the searchlights in its visual array, the great bulk of the stricken Terran starship immediately leapt into view.

Despite herself, Katya gasped. The array was scanning a directional sonar search over the
Zarya
assisted by the drone’s pulse emitter and superimposing the results over the camera image along with range and scale information. “It’s vast,” she said out loud.

“She’s big,” agreed Kane. “I remember being shocked when I saw her in the flesh for the first time.”

Katya looked at the smooth, wide lines of the drowned ship, and felt some small recollection nagging at her. Something from when she was just a kid. “Have you been here many times?”

“Yes. Once a year ever since I arrived on Russalka. But this isn’t how I remember her. The first time I saw her she was in space, in Earth’s orbit. I had gone up the orbital elevator from Libreville to the high port. She was just hanging there. In space, it can be difficult to get a sense of scale sometimes, but then I saw the shuttles going back and forth. I knew how big those were, and they were dwarfed by the
Zarya
.” Katya glanced sideways at him, and saw he was lost in the memory. “I watched her depart geostationary orbit, watched her until she was no bigger than the stars. Then, soon enough, she was gone. It was a hard thing, to watch her go, and to have to stay behind.”

Katya looked at him, confused. This did not match well with what she knew. “You were supposed to be aboard her?” He nodded absently, still looking at the image. “But, you weren’t in the military, were you? I don’t understand. Why were you supposed to be aboard an invasion ship?”

“There are invasions, and there are invasions. Look at her, Katya. Tell me what you see.”

Katya turned back to the main screen, her confusion not at all diminished. “She’s big. I suppose that’s not a surprise; she was carrying a whole invasion force. Very wide in the beam. Long, but not as long as the
Leviathan
. And…” It suddenly struck her that she wasn’t seeing something that should very definitely have been there. “Kane… where are her weapons?” The old memory from her school days nagged at her again and she could almost recall where she’d seen something very like the
Zarya
before.

Kane smiled a little sadly, like a teacher with a slow pupil who had finally understood a simple point. “There aren’t any.”

That didn’t make sense, except it did, but Katya didn’t want to think about that, because that way led something awful that she shied away from. So instead she scoffed and said, “It must have weapons. It’s an invasion ship.”

“The ships that came a year later, the ships that came in response to the
Zarya
’s last distress signal, that came to avenge her,
they
were armed. But that was a real invasion. The
Zarya
came to re-establish links with the lost colony of Russalka, to continue what had begun a century before.” He pointed at the screen. “Five thousand colonists. Mr Sahlberg’s sister, brother-in-law and two nephews. Ms Ocello’s sister, sister-in-law, nephew and niece. Two of Mr Lowe’s cousins.” He paused and swallowed, and said very quietly, “My wife and daughter.”

Katya remembered the toy Kane had once given her: a “yo-yo,” all the way from Earth. “I bought it for my daughter,” he’d told her. She had never asked why he still had it. She looked at the image on the screen. Somewhere in that wreck…

No. It couldn’t be so. It
could not be so
. The Grubbers started the war. Everybody knew that. The Grubbers turned up in a ship bristling with weapons and demanded obedience. They fired first. The FMA destroyed the invasion ship in a desperate and bravely fought battle. She’d seen dramas of it. She’d read about it in class. She’d heard war stories from veterans. It couldn’t all be lies.

“You’re lying. I don’t know what that ship is, but it can’t be the
Zarya
.”

Even as she said it, she knew she was wrong. The memory from school strengthened. It was a history lesson. The class was watching a recreation of the original colonisation. The broad, smooth lines of the colony ships…

“There are invasions, and there are invasions, Katya. The Terran government are not nice people, by and large. They monitor the population, curtail freedoms. Believe me when I say that the people who volunteer to be colonists are glad to leave the place. They came to Russalka expecting to find a well-established colony here. Or, just possibly, everybody dead, in which case they’d have to start again. Earth had tried to communicate with the place, but received no reply. So they assumed the FTL communications relay satellites had failed. Or, as I say, everybody was dead and there was no one to answer. It didn’t matter. The
Zarya
was supposed to be the second wave of the colonisation effort. A century late, but there’d been the small matter of a world war on Earth that turned hot. You don’t get over things like that quickly.”

“That’s not true. The FTL satellites were in place. We were using them to communicate with the other colonies. The Grubbers destroyed those satellites in orbit when they arrived.”

“Yes, they did. There was nothing wrong with them up to that point. You’re missing the obvious – Earth received no reply from Russalka because the FMA decided
not
to reply. They didn’t say a thing until the
Zarya
was in orbit. Then they told her they’d had satellite problems, were very glad to see them, and could they set down just
here
.” He pointed at the screen. “It was an ambush. She never stood a chance.”

Katya couldn’t find anything to say. Kane continued, quietly crushing almost everything she had ever believed. “What happened at that Yagizban evacuation site wasn’t an aberration, Katya. The Federal government hasn’t suffered some sort of personality change overnight. They have been doing things like this for years. Somewhere in that long century when Russalka was on its own, your ancestors gave the bureaucrats too much power. They became very comfortable with that power and very protective of it. So they sold you a lie: of things always being on a knife edge; of disaster being just around the corner. How you must all pull together or perish.

“The
Zarya
represented a huge threat to them. All those new faces, new minds that hadn’t been indoctrinated with generations of the lie, that would ask questions and have direct contact with Earth to discuss matters. The government could see the good times coming to an end. So, they just made the lie a bigger one still, but in a way that would appeal to the populace. Now you were the innocent victims of a warmongering colonial power. It was a beautifully convincing lie. The Russalkin bled and died for it in their thousands. The only risk the government could see was that they might lose the war, but I’m sure they had contingency plans in place for that.

“The one thing they didn’t anticipate was the Yagizban actually believing what the Terrans told them. When the war fizzled out and Earth didn’t send reinforcements, the Feds believed it was business as usual. You can see how well that worked out. Ten years of growing Yagizban resentment and a lovely new war that the Federal government thinks is worth fighting to the last drop of somebody else’s blood.”

Katya felt empty, exhausted, sickened. She wanted to cling to the reality she had grown up in, but now everywhere she touched it with her mind, it crumbled and rotted away.

She kept thinking of little things that she had always simply accepted, but that now made a new and terrible sense. The existence of Secor boats, and how it was always just expected that they would be part of flotillas and wolf packs. How many times had decent people fired on innocent targets using data and “pirate” identifications provided by the Secor command boats? The Russalkin had suffered, been called “heroes,” and regarded those who complained as verging on traitors. All the time they thought they had been proud warriors, they had been nothing but patsies for the biggest confidence game in the galaxy.

“You’re wasting your time searching a grid,” she said. “If Sergei is still at the controls, he’ll run for the nearest station where he feels safe. That will be Dunwich. Find him and the
Lukyan
, Kane. We can’t do this without them.” She left the bridge without another word.

They picked up the
Lukyan
twenty kilometres from Dunwich’s sensor line. Kane wasn’t in the mood for subtlety – the
Vodyanoi
swooped quickly on the minisub, approaching in her baffles so it wasn’t detected until it was too late. The salvage maw gaped wide and swallowed the
Lukyan
in a perfectly performed manoeuvre that hinted at how many times the crew had practised it in the past.

Tasya wanted to go into the maw with two others, all armed, but Katya wouldn’t hear of it. Sergei was her friend, her employee and her crew, the
Lukyan
her vessel, and every Russalkin knew better than to get between a captain and her boat. She climbed through the hatch into the maw as soon as it was drained, Tasya – armed of course – at her heels.