The robot deployed its faster-than-light communications array and relayed the data it was gathering about the world, then known only as RIC-23. Yes, its atmosphere was breathable. Yes, its temperature was bearable. Yes, its gravity was acceptable. What it couldn’t offer was the simplest thing. RIC-23 was an ocean world. But for its polar ice caps, there was not even a square meter of dry land on the whole planet. Disappointed, the humans left the robot to continue its survey while they turned their attention upon other less problematical worlds in the sector.

The robot dropped a lander from orbit that fell on gossamer drogue chutes through the angry storming skies and fell into the ocean, communicating its discoveries back to Earth via the robot above. Earth looked at the analysis with growing astonishment. RIC-23 was rich in rare minerals dissolved into the oceans. Perhaps it was not the most glamorous planet they had discovered, but it was certainly one of the most useful. If a colony was founded there, it could supply the other colonies in the sector.

A colonisation project was mounted. In common with all such projects, the colonists were all taken from a single ethnicity. Previous experience had shown that, in the stressful environment of a new world where disasters may occur at any time, people look for others to blame and ethnic differences were frequently where fracture lines formed. The RIC-23 project drew its personnel purely from an area spanning Moscow to New Petrograd. The first act of the thousands selected was to name their new home. They looked to folklore and chose the name Russalka, after a race of mermaids, beautiful and mysterious. If they had looked deeper into the myth, they might have changed their minds — a Russalka was a predator that would use her charms to draw men to the water, where they would be drowned and fed upon.

The humans found Russalka a difficult world to love. The storms that scoured the surface rarely quietened, the seas rarely grew peaceful. Still, it had never been the plan to live on the surface. The ocean depths were where the minerals were, and the storms could not touch them down there. Using their advanced technologies the colonists located submarine mountains and ridges, and melted tunnels and caves into them with fusion cutters that burnt as hot as a star. They sealed and drained these new cave systems, covered the bare rock with corridor walls and floor gratings, installed lighting and heating. The settlements started to spread, named for countries and cities lost to the sea on distant Earth.

On the surface, the technicians built floating platforms for the handful of aircraft they maintained, and the shuttles needed to reach the few short range starships parked in orbit they would use to maintain trading contacts with the other nearby colonies, close neighbours only a few light years away.

The first phases of the colonisation effort were not without their difficulties and setbacks, but they passed as planned, and the Russalkin — as they now called themselves — waited for further supplies and colonists to arrive from Earth. They waited, and they waited, and they waited in vain.

There had been tensions on Earth when they left, and even rumours of war, but the Russalkin found it hard to believe that it could ever really come to that. They listened for any FTL signals from Earth, but heard nothing, only from the other colonies saying that they too had heard no news.

Years passed, decades, generations, and Earth remained silent. The ships the colonies had were incapable of travelling the vast distance to Earth to investigate, and they lacked the technologies and knowledge to build such a ship. They could only guess at what had happened, that war had indeed broken out, and that terrible weapons whose very threat had always proved sufficient before had finally been armed and sent to evaporate cities, countries, whole civilisations. Earth was dead and gone.

A century passed, and the colonies had become well established. They felt at home on their worlds, and none still considered themselves Terran. Life was hard, more so on Russalka than most, but the Russalkin developed a deserved reputation for toughness and pragmatism, and that pleased them. It was dangerous living in purely manmade environments with a hostile ocean on the other side of every airlock, it was hard sometimes going years without even seeing the sky, travelling between the settlements in submarines. Of course, there were always the crews of the surface platforms who weathered the storms with a coolness that perturbed even the hardy submariners. The platforms travelled together in a fleet, and the crews came to call themselves the Yagizban, a private joke they didn’t care to share with those who lived in the depths. The Russalkin shrugged and ignored such Yagizban eccentricities. After all, the fleet — the Yagizban Enclaves, they called it — was where most of the planet’s cutting edge technologies were developed. If anybody could rediscover the secrets of long range star travel, it would be they.

As the colonists went into their second and third generations, it became apparent that some sort of unifying organisation would be necessary to keep all the settlements working in harmony and to deal with disagreements and even the occasional crime. The Federal Maritime Authority had been founded early on to handle submarine traffic control and, as it had a presence in every settlement, its officers were given a broader remit, to act as peacekeepers and police when necessary. It was never envisioned that the FMA would ever become military in nature, but then, nobody can tell what the future will bring.

One day, without warning or fanfare, the Terrans returned.

A great, hulking Terran warship entered the atmosphere and settled into the angry sea, the waves crashing against its hull. FMA vessels surfaced and hailed the ship, identifying themselves as representatives of the people of Russalka and welcoming the Terrans as long-lost relatives. The Terrans were in no mood for speeches and celebrations. Bluntly, they demanded that the FMA be dissolved and control of Russalka be given immediately to Terran governors. Earth had suffered a century of troubles, but those days had passed, Earth was under a new unified government, and now they were reasserting their grip upon the colonies. They didn’t care to hear about Russalka’s claim to independence, based on a hundred years of hard fought building, all done without aid from Earth. The FMA commander told them that Earth was no longer home to him and his people, that Earth had no claim on Russalka.

The Earth ship considered this for a moment.

Then it opened fire.

Two FMA subs were lost in the first salvo before they even had a chance to dive. The rest, ill-equipped to engage such a foe, launched torpedoes more in desperation than expectation. Their luck was good, however. One struck a killing blow, and the Terran ship was badly holed. Amid fire and explosion, it sank. Any sense of jubilation on the part of the Russalka was lost in the astonishment of such unjust demands from the home of their ancestors, and in the sure knowledge that there would be retaliation for their defiance.

The Russalkin worked desperately for a year, building new ships, preparing orbital defences, conscripting as many as they could into the FMA to be trained, drilled, prepared to fight to the death to protect their world against the invaders from Earth they knew were coming.

The war, when it came, was short, brutal, and inconclusive. The Terrans arrived, and attacked immediately.

First they destroyed everything the Russalkin had in space — their starships, defence satellites, and the irreplaceable FTL communications array that had been the world’s only link with its fellow colonies. Then the war moved from space into the seas. The Yagizban floating aerospace platforms were hunted down and destroyed within hours, and the Yagizban Enclaves were forced to flood their emergency ballast tanks and hide beneath the waves.

The FMA fought hard against a foe they barely understood. They outnumbered the Terrans, but the Terrans had brought with them advanced technologies that made up for their lack of troops. Settlements were destroyed with horrific losses of life. The Russalkin had prepared evacuation shelters where their children were to wait out the war; the truth of how many of their parents and older brothers and sisters were dying in the battles and massacres was kept from them. To the Russalkin the Terrans ceased to be human at all. They were merciless, degenerate killers. Dirty landgrubbers, come to wipe out the colony and take their world, grubbers who murdered and wrecked without hesitation or pity.

Then, after a little over a year, the war simply petered to a halt. The Terrans had given up, seemingly unable to maintain such a ferocious campaign over such a vast distance from their homeworld. The Russalkin watched the skies fearfully for months, and then they started to rebuild.

War leaves scars, though, and even ten years after the last shots were exchanged, the scars remain obvious. Almost a whole generation was lost, and the next generation found its childhood cut short as they were trained to take the places of their dead or missing parents, brothers, and sisters. The fear of a new attack runs deep, and the FMA has never stepped down from a war footing. New warboats were built, drowned settlements resealed and pumped out, martial law maintained. In the chaos of the aftermath, criminality broke out here and there, culminating in pirate attacks on civilian transports. It seemed that Russalka had fought off an enemy from without, only to find a new one within.

This is Russalka now.

Wounded. Isolated. Proud.

This is Katya’s world.

She took it back feeling slightly cheated. She must have looked at that card a hundred times since it had arrived from the Department of Matriculation, reading and rereading the fine print. Her family had been so happy for her, Uncle Lukyan especially. “Now you’re an adult, Katya!” he’d said, picking her up under the armpits like he’d been doing since she’d been born. “Being an adult isn’t a matter of age. It’s a matter of responsibility. And this card shows you’re ready for that!” There had been a little impromptu party and everything.

And now nobody seemed to care. She hadn’t been expecting fireworks, but she’d hoped for a friendly nod from the locksman, an acknowledgment that she was entering a great fellowship. Instead she was being ignored, standing to one side as the locksman and Uncle Lukyan — she mentally pulled herself up — Captain Pushkin were gossiping like old women while they went through the boat’s documentation and journey plan.

Suddenly, the locksman turned to her. “Going to Lemuria with your uncle, eh?” he said. He didn’t quite say “little girl” but the sense of it floated around. “Seeing relatives or doing some shopping?”

Katya looked at him blankly. This wasn’t going properly at all. She was just trying to come up with a reply that made her sound grown-up when her uncle cut in. “God’s teeth, Mikhail, didn’t you even look at her card properly? She’s an apprentice. This is her first voyage in a crew chair.”

The locksman had the decency to look abashed. “I’m very sorry,” he said to Katya, “may I trouble you for your card again?”

This time the response was much better. “A navigator?” he read and looked at her. “Difficult discipline.” He was still looking at her but the words were clearly meant for her uncle.

“Not for my niece,” said Uncle Lukyan with visible pride. “She has the brains for it. You should have seen her examination results. I think the examiner thought she’d been cheating. ‘Well, Captain Pushkin,’” he imitated the examiner’s wheedling tone, “’they are remarkably good results. Remarkably good.’”

The locksman laughed. “Durchev thinks people need crib sheets to put on their boots in the morning.”

Katya watched them chat and thought, one day I’ll be able to talk like that, to know everybody. There goes Katya Kuriakova, the best navigator in the water, they’ll say. She concentrated on trying to make her blue eyes steely, her chin determined, her nose… Her damned nose. She was just going to end up looking sweet and, in all likelihood, adorable. It always happened. She could drown a hospital and they’d still let her off for being in possession of a button-nose. She stopped trying to look heroically competent and concentrated on just not looking chronically winsome.

“Straight light haul to Lemuria, two seats full of electronic components,” her uncle was saying, going through the folder containing their itineraries and permissions. “Sergei will ride shotgun in a passenger position while Katya takes the co-pilot’s seat. Show her what it looks like from the sharp end.”

“Is she going to draw your plot?”

“Yes, I am,” said Katya, tired of them talking about her like she wasn’t there.

The locksman looked at her uncle with a question he didn’t want to say out loud. Lukyan laughed again. “Yes, she can do it. I’d trust her to give me a plot through the Consequentials, never mind an easy haul like Lemuria. She’s got talent, real talent.” He ruffled her short blond hair affectionately. “She’s the family genius.” He closed the folder and put it back in his documents case. “We’d better move or we’ll miss our departure slot. Come on, Katya.”

When they reached the waypoint, the officer insisted that they go to automatic pilot. Katya regretfully gave up control to the wayfinder. Now that the boat’s computers were in charge, there wasn’t a great deal to do except monitor systems that were automatically monitored by other systems anyway. Every time she’d been aboard the Baby in the past, switching onto automatic pilot would have been the cue for one or other of the crew to unstrap and come back for a chat or a game of chess. With the compartment full of passengers and cargo, that would have been difficult. With the stifling presence of the Fed, who seemed to carry the full powers of the FMA around with him like a bad smell, it was impossible. Katya and her uncle were reduced to reading checklists off to one another until that got boring. Then they lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. The trip to the Deeps couldn’t be over fast enough for either of them.

The prisoner, on the other hand, kept trying to start conversations with everybody. He asked Lukyan how long he’d owned the Baby. He asked Katya what her favourite subject had been at school and why she’d liked it. He even asked the Fed what the interview for the FMA officer’s job had been like as he was considering applying himself.

“Shut up,” said the Fed.

“Just wondering. Once all this misunderstanding is sorted out, I was wondering what I might do for a job and then I thought, don’t just go for a job, go for a career. It’s a man’s life in the FMA. Since you and I have been acquainted, Officer Suhkalev, I’ve become very impressed with the FMA. Specifically its low standards. I thought to myself, well, if he can get in…”

He stopped suddenly with a cough of pain. Katya looked back to see him doubling up; Suhkalev had elbowed him hard by the look of it. “Hey!” she called back. “Cut that out!”

“Don’t tell me my business, girl,” the officer snapped.

“How about I do?” said Lukyan. The officer was silent, his expression resentful. “You’ve got your gun on your right hip. You’re sitting to the left of your prisoner. Did it ever cross your mind that he can reach your gun at least as easily as you can?”

Suhkalev glared at Lukyan, but he drew his gun and put it to his left all the same.

“Damn,” said the prisoner, “I was looking forward to getting that. Oh,” he added in a different tone, “I’m very sorry but I seem to be bleeding on your deck.”

“Hell, that head wound has opened again,” growled Lukyan. “Katya, could…”

But Katya was already out of her seat and taking down the first aid kit from its locker. She looked around for somewhere to rest it while she opened it and the prisoner indicated his lap. “Put it here, it’ll be handy.”

“I didn’t say he could be treated,” said Suhkalev.

“You don’t need to,” replied the prisoner. “It’s in FMA regs on the treatment of and conditions for prisoners. You ought to read it sometime.”

Katya rested the box on the prisoner’s lap and opened it. “How do you do?” he said, peering over the raised lip of the lid as she pulled on surgical gloves and located the necessary medications. “We haven’t been introduced. I’m Havilland Kane.”

Katya looked up sharply. Had he just said… “Havilland Kane?”

He smiled, amused. “My infamy precedes me.”

“You’re the… pirate?” It couldn’t be? This bedraggled, painfully polite man couldn’t be Kane.

His eyebrows rose. “Am I? Perhaps I am. I’ve been accused of so many nonsensical charges it becomes difficult to keep track.” His smile broadened but — and perhaps it was just Katya’s imagination — seemed to grow colder. “And your name is?”

She didn’t answer, instead busying herself with a swab. She cleaned his wound quickly but carefully. He barely winced though the cut was deep and was already showing some signs of a mild infection. “I’m going to close it up now. I’ve put in some antibiotic matrix,” she said, carefully neutral, “but it needs seeing to properly. Make sure the medics at the Deeps know about it.”

“You’re an angel,” he said, but so quietly that she doubted anyone else heard it. Then he hissed slightly with discomfort as she used the suture pen to bind the edges of the cut together.

“Have you finished?” muttered Suhkalev. Katya didn’t even look at him. She closed up the kit and stowed it in its place before returning to her seat.

As she strapped herself in, she thought she heard Kane say, “Thank you, Katya Kuriakova,” but it was hard to be sure over the hum of the Baby’s systems.

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.”

“He tried to save me,” said Katya. She wanted to cry, but something seemed broken inside. She could only talk, she didn’t seem able to feel anymore. “He was shouting about the Lox packs.” She touched the emergency respirator. Its trademark name was a LoxPak, Lox supposedly meaning liquid oxygen. It was a misnomer and unpopular among mechanics who dealt in the real thing; real liquid oxygen would kill anybody who tried to fill their lungs with it, an agonising death as their throat and chest froze solid. In contrast, the green fluid in LoxPaks was merely saturated in oxygen, releasing it directly into the lung tissue.

The fluid also scrubbed nitrogen rapidly from the blood, vital if a victim of a submarine disaster was to stand any chance of surviving a rapid ascent from a few hundred metres down to the surface. She wasn’t in agony, blind or dead, so at least she knew her LoxPak had saved her from the worst symptoms of decompression sickness. The worst symptoms, but Katya now realised, not all the symptoms.

One of the lesser symptoms was the “rapture of the deep.” Hallucinations. Katya knew she’d suffered from them now. Her guardian angel bearing her to a better place had been a notorious pirate taking her to the surface, where she could die more slowly. She laughed out loud, surprising Kane, but the laugh finished with her bringing up more Lox liquid and by the time she’d stopped coughing, the opportunity to ask her what she thought was so funny had passed.

They floated in silence for some time. Then Katya said, “What happened to your handcuffs?”

“They were an inconvenience,” said Kane. “I got rid of them.” He caught Katya’s expression. “I’m sorry, that sounded fatuous, but they were a nuisance. While you were tending to the cut on my head, I borrowed a probe from the medical kit. FMA ‘cuffs really are primitive. I could teach you how to pick them in ten minutes.”

“You’ve practised?”

“Of course I’ve practised. The Feds might not be the brightest intellects in the universe but even the stupid get lucky sometimes. I like to be prepared.”

Another minute passed. “How did they catch you anyway?” asked Katya.

“You ask a lot of questions,” replied Kane.

“I can’t feel my feet.”

Kane looked at her seriously. Hypothermia would be setting in soon. The sea was freezing and slowly leaching the heat from them. They needed to concentrate and talking might be the thing to give them a few more minutes.

“How did they catch me,” repeated Kane. “It wasn’t brilliant detective work, put it that way. It was the reward money that did it. I was informed on.” He noted Katya’s blank expression. “I was grassed on. Done up like a kipper.” None of this seemed to be getting through. He tried again. “Sold out?”

Katya finally seemed to understand what he meant, so he continued. “Did a bit of business with a man who I’d have thought would know better, walked out straight into three officers waiting for me with masers drawn. That’s the trouble with this planet; all the criminals are such amateurs. How is Russalka ever going to get a real criminal underworld going if anybody will grass up anybody for a fistful of small change? It’s divisive.”

“You’re not from Russalka?” She’d thought not. Not with that name and that accent. She’d met people from other colonies before. Now they were all trapped on Russalka since the Grubbers had attacked and destroyed their few starships.

“No, I’m not from Russalka. If I could leave tomorrow, I would, too. This place is a dump. Why did anybody ever decide it was a good idea to colonise a planet with no dry land at all?”

“Minerals.”

“I know. I was talking rhetorically.”

“So if you hate it so much, why did you come?” She knew Russalka was considered a freak world to colonise. No land to speak of, just one great global rolling ocean with a couple of icecaps. Nothing had ever evolved to grow on them though. The ocean teemed with life, but the icecaps and the sky were dead. Everybody else from the Grubbers — the Terrans — through to the other colonies had land to stand on. Out of all the colony worlds, Russalka was unique and difficult, and the Russalkins were proud of that.

“I didn’t want to. Circumstances dictated it.”

Katya wondered what he meant by that, but something in his tone warned her off, and she didn’t press him for an explanation. “Well, you’re stuck here for a while then,” she said.

During the war, all Russalka’s space assets had been destroyed; her communication, navigation and meteorological satellites, the launch platforms and the handful of starships held in the great floating hangars had all been wrecked by the Grubbers to deny Russalka any line of defence from orbit out to the transition shelf where starships entered the star system.

In the end it had all been for nothing — the war had just stopped. The Grubbers never sent any diplomats or anybody to explain why they weren’t going to fight anymore, they’d just stopped coming. One morning Russalka woke up and there were no new incursions, no more targeted asteroid hits, no more robot hunter/killers splashing down. The war just stopped. The wise money was that the Grubbers had trouble at home or another colony closer to them had agitated for independence and they’d redirected their war budget at them instead. Whatever the reason, after eighteen months of fierce combat the Grubbers went home and took their war with them, leaving Russalka badly wounded and gasping on the ropes.

As far as it went, Kane was right about organised crime on Russalka being a bad joke, but that was true of everything. They’d lost a lot of people and a lot of technology. Thankfully Russalka was a mineral rich planet with a lot of energy to be had; they would rebuild, but it would take time.

There was a lot to do before Kane could leave Russalka for somewhere more suitable for a career criminal. New launch platforms would have to be built, new starships built to be launched from them, new satellites put up to feed the ships the accurate astronomical data they needed before hitting the transition shelf and initiating quantum drive. It would take a lot of effort, a lot of will, a lot of money and, the worst thing for Kane, a lot of time.

“I heard Lyonesse was building a platform,” said Kane conversationally. A wave rolled over him and Katya waited until he’d finished coughing before answering.

“I heard it was just for sub-orbital transports. Nobody’s interested in space, Kane. We’ve got enough problems on planet without worrying about what’s overhead.”

“What if it’s the Grubbers who are overhead?”

“Then…” Katya paused. She was glad her uncle wasn’t here to hear her say this, but she believed it all the same. “We should surrender.”

Kane made a point of getting eye contact before he replied. “Do you really think so?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “If they attack again, they’ll kill us all. Let them bring their stormtroopers. They can’t be any worse than the FMA.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that. The FMA are light entertainment compared to stormtroopers.”

“It doesn’t matter. The travel time is what will do the trick. It takes a year to get to Russalka; it’s not a cheap trip to take. Anybody they send will end up going native, just like we did. They won’t be sending occupiers, they’ll be sending new colonists.”

“Interesting thought. I think you underestimate the Terrans, but you’re right about surrendering. If they can scrape together the budget for another invasion taskforce, this world’s in no shape to resist.” He looked up at the tip of the buoy’s spire, a metre above them. Upon it, a brilliant white light flashed rhythmically.

They watched it in silence for a minute or so. Katya was beginning to feel very tired. It was so cold in that sea, and she knew it was killing them slowly. She tried to wedge her arm into the spire’s frame so if she fell unconscious, she wouldn’t simply slip under the waves. The spire’s supports were too close together, though, and she couldn’t manage it. She looked at the dark sea beneath the sullen sky, and death felt all too close. “Do you think somebody will save us?” asked Katya.

Kane thought for a moment as if working out an exact answer, but then only said, “Maybe. At least whoever put that hole in the sub didn’t come after us to finish the job.”

“Who do you think that was?”

“I don’t know,” replied Kane, a little too quickly.

Katya had no intention of dying with questions unanswered. She was about to ask him again when her mouth stopped in mid-syllable, and she was left with a foolish expression. Kane looked at her oddly and then followed her line of sight.

Perhaps five hundred metres away, the sea had begun to boil. As they watched, the commotion grew more focussed, more kinetic and Katya realised it was coming closer. She also realised what it was.

“It’s a bow wave! There’s something headed right for us!”

“I’m glad you worked that out for yourself; it saves me having to explain it,” said Kane. “Survival tip, Katya. Take a deep breath just before it hits us. That should be enough, but keep your LoxPak handy in case.”

The mound of angry sea was almost upon them. “In case of what?” she screamed as the roaring of the waters grew deafening.

“Oh, you know,” said Kane, looking straight at the mound, which was quickly turning into a mountain, “stuff.”

The front of the great pile of sea charging towards them seemed to tear and sheer away as the great muzzle of the object was finally exposed. With a hideous, shuddering whine, the muzzle split into three equal jaws — one below and two opening up and away to the left and right. The waters, thrashed until they were milky, sluiced violently over them and back into the sea. The jaws devoured Katya, Kane and the distress buoy all, slowly closing again as the monstrous thing sank back into the ocean. In a few seconds, there was no sign that they had ever been there.

“Hold onto it for the moment, Deliav. We have more pressing business at present.”

“Permission to enter the bridge, captain,” said Katya crisply. She knew enough about the military not to go barging around on their boats like they were on a pleasure trip.

Zagadko shot them a look. “I’m afraid not, Ms Kuriakova. We’re in a state of battle readiness. There’s no place for you here. Go to the ready room, please.”

Kane cleared his throat. “With respect, captain, Katya was at the controls when her boat was attacked. If you may be engaging the same foe..?”

Zagadko was not the sort of man to dither. “Point taken. If you could stand just over there, Ms Kuriakova, and endeavour to stay out of the way.” They made a move towards the bulkhead the captain had pointed at, but he stopped them. “Not you, Mr Kane.”

Kane blinked with surprise. “But, captain…”

“You weren’t at the controls, were you? Unless there’s something you’re not telling me?”

The two men looked at each other for a moment. It was Kane who broke eye contact first. “I’ll be in the ready room if you need me,” he said and walked out with what dignity he could.

Zagadko watched him go. When the hatch had closed behind Kane, he said to Katya, “You and I are going to have a conversation when Mr Kane isn’t present. Count on it.” He turned away from her, leaving her feeling guilty and worried.

“Range to the wreck?”

“Three thousand metres.”

Katya started. They’d been hunting the wreck of the Baby? The captain noticed her surprise when he turned back. “I wasn’t about to leave her lying there for pirates to pick over, Ms Kuriakova.”

“Captain!” Zagadko turned to one of the sensor technicians. “I have something on hydrophones. Low, really low.”

Katya remembered the ghostly sound she’d picked up herself over the Baby’s hydrophones. She watched as the operator dropped the frequency translation range, just as she had done. This was a military vessel; she wondered how much better the Novgorod’s sensors were in comparison.

“Sonar?” demanded Zagadko.

The sonar operator sat hunched over his screen, looking carefully over every square millimetre of it. “Nothing, sir. Nothing on passive.”

Zagadko humphed. “Pulse.”

“Sir?” It was the first officer, a thin, dark man with heavy-lidded eyes. “We’ll give away our position.”

Katya thought that was a redundant thing to say. Zagadko was a veteran; of course he knew sending an active sonar pulse would be like lighting a match in a dark room. They would be able to see better, but everything else would be able to see them all the more easily.

“They already know full well where we are, Petrov. Active pulse, sensors.”

The sonar pulse rang through the hull as it emanated out from the Novgorod. The Baby’s sonar had made a chirpy little “ping!” It had sounded somehow friendly to Katya. The Novgorod’s pulse, however, was a dull, mournful beat of sound that seemed to buzz inside her bones long after her ears had ceased to hear it.

The sonar officer checked his screen again. “I don’t understand it, sir. We’re picking up some sound; we should be able to get a passive lock on it.” He waited for the sonar echoes to return. He seemed to wait a long time. “No bounce from the pulse, sir. I’m trying for an IC resolution — it’s giving me a range of a thousand metres but won’t give me a full solution. It’s like hunting a ghost.”

Katya remembered her own encounter. She realised that she was sweating. The Novgorod was a hundred times bigger than the Pushkin’s Baby but she still had a horrible feeling, squirming in her gut, that history was about to repeat itself.

The hydrophones operator looked up. “I’m getting something… Cavitation noise, captain!”

Katya blanched. “Oh no,” she said in a desperate little voice. Captain Zagadko looked around at the sound and was surprised to see her almost hugging herself in fear. “Cavitation,” she said in a whisper. “Then it attacks.”

Captain Zagadko was becoming quite sick of this mysterious foe. He didn’t like the way it was avoiding detection, he didn’t like the way it had moved into an attack with none of the usual preamble of submarine combat, and — very especially — he didn’t like the way it kept being referred to as “it” all the time.

He was sure it was a submarine, and a submarine is a “she,” just like any ocean-going vessel. There was an atmosphere on the bridge as if they were facing some mythical sea monster and he wasn’t having it.

“Petrov!” he barked, “sweep the external cameras, floodlights on!”

“Aye-aye, captain.” The first officer moved to the salvage controls. “The water’s not too bad,” he reported as the cameras flicked into instant life. “With enhancement running we should be able to see anything within a thousand. Nothing in the forward quarter, searching…”

“Incoming!” called out the sensors operator. “Single contact. Eight o’clock high. Fast, very fast.”

“Eight o’clock high!” snapped Zagadko at Petrov. Petrov started swinging the lights and cameras to look that way. Zagadko was already standing over another crewmember at her position. “Weapons! Two torpedoes on a reciprocal, forty-five degree search cones, three minute dry. Helm! Hard to port, dive for the isotherm, flank speed.”

“Torpedoes away, launched and running. Noisemakers, Captain.?”

“Yes, and wait for my signal. Petrov, have you..?”

But Petrov was looking at the main viewing screen on the forward bulkhead with sheer astonishment. Zagadko looked too and was struck dumb himself for several long seconds. All across the bridge, the crew paused to look up from their stations. Katya didn’t want to look, but she really couldn’t help herself.

“What,” said one of the crew in blank disbelief, “is that?”

On the screen, a shape, a massive shape loomed out of the dark, the smallest part of it illuminated by the Novgorod’s searchlights. It was unbelievably, shockingly huge, dwarfing the Novgorod. Smooth and almost featureless, it was impossible to say whether it was a machine or a creature. It swept gracefully by them, almost silent and invisible to sonar, and it never seemed to end.

Kaya heard a voice in the silence speak, so quietly that she was sure she was the only one to hear it. “Leviathan.” She looked sharply at the speaker.

It was Kane, standing by the hatch. Before she had a chance to speak, an alarm klaxon suddenly started bleating raucously, shattering the awful moment.

“We’re taking on water forward!” called an officer.

“What?” Zagadko was bemused. “With no detonation?”

“No explosion, sir,” reported the hydrophones operator, “but there was a lot of hiss, a little cavitation. It reminded me of the steam bubbles rising from a volcanic vent, very similar sound.”

“Sonar? Are you getting anything?”

The sonar operator shook his head. “I don’t know what’s going on, captain. That contact I took to be a torpedo of some sort made a close pass and then pulled away. It’s returning to… that thing — whatever it is — now. And,” he looked embarrassed and confused, “I’ve lost our torpedoes. They just… disappeared.”

“Damage control, what’s the flooding situation?”

“Much faster than the pumps can deal with, captain. We’re taking about four tonnes a minute. We’re losing trim.”

“Can we surface?”

“No, sir. We’re already too far gone.”

Zagadko stood a moment in deep thought, rubbing his earlobe. Every captain loves his vessel almost more than life itself, but every captain has to be ready to abandon that vessel at a moment’s notice if there is no alternative. “Where’s the hostile now?” he asked.

Neither the hydrophones nor the sonar operator could find any trace of the huge shape that had attacked them. “It’s gone, captain. It’s just vanished.”

“This is very calculated,” said Captain Zagadko. “It hurts us just enough to sink us and then withdraws. What’s it up to?”

Katya was wondering about that too. “Captain? He turned to her with a mild expression of surprise and she realised he’d forgotten she was there. “Captain, when it attacked us, we had multiple contacts. The Baby never stood a chance..”

“She’s right,” said Kane from the hatchway. “I was conscious throughout. It really laid into us.”

“I thought I told you to go to the ready room, Mr Kane.”

“Yes, you did. It was rather dull so I came back again.”

“You are not helping,” said Zagadko, his irritation starting to show. “Leave my bridge and…”

“What’s the point, captain? We’re sinking and you can’t stop that. There’s nothing out here but the Soup. We really don’t stand much of a chance.”

Just when she thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. “We’re over the Soup here?” she said, pleasing herself by keeping a waver out of her voice.

The Soup was one of the great mysteries and attractions of Russalka. In the deepest parts of the world ocean, beneath the crush depths of all but the strongest hulls, a thick mineral solution formed lakes and submarine seas. It was far denser than water but still liquid and it existed in standing bodies all over the planet. Little was known of it. A few small experimental samples had been taken and these showed the Soup, as it quickly became known, was rich in metallic salts including some of rare elements. Simply put, the Soup was worth a fortune to whoever worked out a way of extracting it. Many rich men had tried and left poorer. Many poor men had tried and their bodies had not been recovered. The sheer density of the Soup was one of the things that made it so difficult to manipulate and the depth at which it existed made for a very dangerous working environment. Even a vessel capable of diving to great depths like the Novgorod could not hope to enter the Soup and survive. Every litre of Soup weighed — depending where in the world it had been gathered — as much as twenty kilograms, twenty times denser than water. Diving five metres into the Soup was like diving a hundred metres of water. The few boats that could dive that deep were already past their test depth if they reached the surface of the Soup. A few metres down would send the pressure rocketing past the crush depth equivalent and the submarine would be crumpled like a paper boat in a giant’s hand.

Unless they abandoned ship immediately, they would soon be too deep for LoxPaks to save them. Then they would have no choice but to ride the stricken vessel down into the Soup, where they would be crushed in a moment.

Kane coughed. “If anybody’s got any bright ideas, now would be a good moment to share them.”

Katya had an idea, but it was so stupid, she debated sharing it for a moment.

“Blow tanks!” ordered Zagadko.

The hull thrummed as water was driven out of the ballast tanks. “That’s helping, sir,” reported the steerswoman “We’re still sinking but nowhere near as fast. The nose is heavy but we can pull it up a little on the hydroplanes.”

“Not enough,” murmured the captain, watching the depth gauge. “Navigator!” Katya looked up, but he was talking to his own navigator. Of course, thought Katya, don’t be stupid. “Can we make Lemuria?”

The navigator stabbed at some controls — Katya was once again impressed by how much better the Novgorod’s technology was than anything she was familiar with. On the main screen, a map of the area appeared with the stricken sub in the middle. “At our current rate of descent, we will make it,” a red circle appeared on the map, “this far.” The red circle was nowhere near large enough to encompass Lemuria Station.

The captain stepped up closer to the display. “All right, so we can’t hope to reach Lemuria. Anything else in the area? Research bases or mining encampments? Anything?”

The navigator checked his files and shook his head. Captain Zagadko swore under his breath.

So, that was that. They were all going to die and, it struck Katya, that even if she did make a complete idiot of herself, there would be no witnesses soon enough.

“Captain? Does the Novgorod carry any ship’s vessels?”

“A couple of EVA pods and that’s about it. I’m afraid we don’t have enough to evacuate the whole crew.”

Great, thought Katya, now he thinks I’m a coward and just want to grab a pod. “I was thinking of reconnaissance vehicles. Flying reconnaissance vehicles.”

The captain was confused now. “Two CG craft, but we have to be surfaced to launch them. I don’t…” His eyes lit up. “Great gods! Yes, I do! Tokarov!”

Lieutenant Tokarov had already seen what Katya was getting at. “On my way, captain!”

As he left the bridge at a dogtrot, Zagadko said to Katya, “Go with him, please, Ms Kuriakova. Take a flyer each.” Katya didn’t need a second bidding.

She’d watched the Baby’s distress log four times before the captain had decided that she was past the point of analytical interest and well into obsession. “There was nothing you could have done,” he’d told her, not without kindness. Of course there wasn’t. Of course he was right.

Of course.

It was difficult to take one’s gaze away from the main screen, which still continued to show the Novgorod’s course and maximum range. The centre of the map was still the submarine herself; the map updated thirty times a second and she got closer and closer to the abandoned mine with every minute. The red circle grew smaller each minute too, but the mine stayed within its circumference. Just, only just.

The lack of a safety margin obviously vexed Captain Zagadko so much that he was even prepared to listen to Kane.

“Have you ever flown a fixed-wing aircraft, captain?” asked Kane.

“I’ve flown CG craft, but what’s your point?” Katya noticed Petrov give Kane a very suspicious look as Zagadko answered.

“The point is, you’re going to have to treat this boat like an aircraft on the final approach. A fixed-wing aircraft doesn’t handle anything like a CG, believe me. You’ve got a source of thrust — propellers, jets, whatever — and that’s it. The aircraft develops lift through its aerodynamic lifting surfaces. You can’t slow down to think things through, you fly on gut reaction and experience.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“It is. That’s why everybody uses contra-gravity; it’s much more forgiving. Usually, a sub handles like a CG aircraft but, with this steady sinking, we’re behaving more like a fixed-wing aircraft at the moment. She’s constantly fighting going down and crashing.”

“I ask again, what’s your point?”

“We’ve got a good head of speed up at the moment. That can make us climb if we use the hydroplanes like the wings of an aircraft.”

“And that’s it?” said Petrov dismissively. “You think we don’t already know that?”

“Oh yes, you know it intellectually. But you don’t know it in here.” Kane tapped his chest over his heart. “You’re going to try to translate too late and we won’t climb far enough or too early and we’ll stall.”

“Stall?” said Zagadko.

“If you burn off too much speed, you’ll sink like a brick and it’ll be ‘next stop, crush depth.’”

“Let me understand you. Are you asking to be at the helm when we make our approach on the mine?”

Kane smiled. “I’ve done something similar in the past. I can do this. Trust me.”

Zagadko didn’t hesitate. “You’ll have the helm at a thousand metres off the mine.”

Petrov’s jaw drooped with incredulity for a moment. “What? Sir?”

Zagadko looked at him steadily. “I hope you’re not intending to debate your captain’s command, lieutenant?”

He clearly wanted to do just that, but discipline overrode it. “No, sir. Of course not.”

“Good.” Then to Kane, “The helm position uses a perfectly standard yoke. You might want to run a couple of simulations before the real thing to get the feel of the vessel.”

Kane, who’d apparently been expecting some argument at least, was almost as taken aback by Zagadko’s agreement as Petrov. “Yes. Yes, that would be helpful. Thank you very much, captain.”

Only Katya saw the captain’s expression when Kane turned away to set up a simulation and she didn’t like it at all.

Kane, on the other hand, was too focussed on the work at hand to pay much attention to anything else. It was the work of only a couple of minutes to set up a simulation of the Novgorod approaching the mine from a range of a thousand metres, engines at full power and the nose pulling down harder than the rest of the sub could lift back. The one unknown was the exact proportions of the mine’s moon pool. “We don’t have time to model it anyway,” Kane told Tokarov who’d assisted in setting up. “I’ll concentrate on hitting the outer entrance and then make up the rest as we go along. Going from full speed to a dead stop in perhaps a couple of hundred metres is going to be quite a party trick in itself.”

“What if the entry tunnel is shorter than a couple of hundred metres?”

“Then we’ll be making a dead stop no matter what I do. Ready?”

Tokarov checked a display and nodded. Kane pulled on a headset, braced himself in his seat and nodded. “Let’s go, then.”

Katya stood behind him as the screen flared into light and movement. Novgorod was running fast and noisy; there was no possibility that the Leviathan could not detect them. Indeed, it was probably right behind them at that very moment. With stealth no longer a concern, the captain had given Kane leave to use active sonar on the approach. A little more noise would hardly make a difference. He’d set up a tight cone of rapid pulses to give high resolution to the imaging sonar. In the same way a terrestrial bat would build up a picture of its surroundings in pitch darkness by using sound pulses, the Novgorod’s computers would be using the sonar returns to make a model of the mountain and the tunnel entrance.

On Kane’s display, the rocky finger of the underwater mountain thrust up from the seabed six kilometres below. Four hundred and fifty metres below the sea surface, high on the mountain, the tunnel entrance stood out in pulsing red. The Novgorod’s current depth was one and half thousand. Kane immediately paused the simulation. “I know we’re at flank speed, but is that flank flank, or is there a little bit held back for special occasions?”

Tokarov shook his head. Kane nodded. “Okay. This is going to be difficult.” He toggled the speed display from kilometres per hour over to knots and started the simulation again.

The mountainside flew towards them at shocking speed; Kane was like her uncle in preferring to work in knots but Katya was a kph woman herself. She did the calculation in her head quickly and grimaced. The Novgorod was doing one hundred and ten kph. They would cover the thousand metres in a little less than thirty-three seconds. Kane immediately started pulling back on the yoke, making the hydroplanes dig and the boat climb. They would have to climb over a thousand metres in a thousand metres of forward travel. Katya didn’t need to delve into sines and cosines to know that was at least a forty-five degree climb. She looked around her, looking for a bulkhead she could sit against when the deck tilted up like that.

The simulated Novgorod climbed quickly and smoothly, but its velocity was withering away with every metre faster than she would have believed possible. As her speed dropped, the intercept time drifted upwards from thirty-three seconds. At forty-six seconds, the Novgorod stalled, her forward speed no longer enough to make the hydroplanes bite. The nose went down and she ploughed into the mountainside fifty metres below the entrance.

“Only a first attempt,” said Kane, a little unsteadily. “I’ll do better next time.”

“You don’t have a next time,” said Zagadko stepping up beside him and looking at the display with disgust as the virtual Novgorod scraped down the virtual mountainside with her virtual nose crumpled and her virtual crew dying. “In one minute, you have the helm.” He went to his command chair, swivelled it forward and clamped it. As he strapped himself in, he ordered a collision warning.

“All hands secure! Brace for impact!” squawked the usually placid computer voice throughout the boat.

Tokorov found a vacant seat for Katya and put her there when he saw her making to sit on the floor. “We’re likely to hit something pretty fast and pretty hard,” he warned her. “If you’re not strapped in, you’ll smash your brains out on the far bulkhead.” She didn’t need a second warning, strapping herself in quickly and efficiently just as Sergei had shown her. She hoped she wouldn’t need Kane to get her out again in as much of a hurry as last time.

“Twelve hundred metres. You might as well have the helm now, Mr Kane. Good luck,” said Zagadko, his voice carefully toneless as if he was handing down a death sentence.

The “active” light on Kane’s console turned to green. The sonar image on his screen was now the real thing and Katya imagined how very useful it would be if the “pause” control still worked, freezing the boat in the water while they worked out something cleverer than simply flinging themselves at the side of a mountain.

Kane pulled back on the yoke, but nowhere near as violently as he had in the simulation. The deck started to tilt back as the Novgorod began to climb towards the surface. He didn’t want to kill their speed so badly this time, but now he ran the risk of not climbing far enough in the short distance they had. The hull thrummed with the water rushing rapidly over the hydroplanes, angling back further and further.

“Eight hundred metres,” read off the navigator. “Depth thirteen-fifty.”

It’s not going to work, thought Katya, not with numbers like those. We’re not going to do it.

Zagadko clearly thought the same. “Weapons,” he ordered, his voice tight, “dump all the torpedoes. Don’t bother arming anything; just get them out of the tubes.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” replied the weapons officer. A warship has to be in a tight position before it will willingly disarm itself, but nobody could argue that things weren’t desperate. Even the lightest of the weapons weighed several hundred kilos and that might make the difference.

The hiss of torpedo launches sounded again and again as the autoloaders shoved every weapon from the magazines into the tubes. Katya winced at the thought of all that live armament drifting down into the depths. Kane was already pulling the yoke back much harder. The Novgorod was climbing rapidly, but she was losing speed just as quickly.

“Four hundred. Depth six hundred.”

Katya stared. How was that possible? Then she saw the attitude indicator had drifted far past forty-five degrees. They were on course to hit the docking tunnel but at this angle they would blow into its ceiling and the journey would end abruptly and fatally.

Suddenly, Kane shoved the yoke forward. What was he doing? In her mind’s eye, Katya saw the Novgorod start to tip nose down while her depth… what? Of course, a boat as big as this would carry vast amounts of inertia — she couldn’t hope to manoeuvre as tightly as a little sub like the Baby. The boat would get an even keel even as she continued to climb for a brief second or two. And in that time…

“Zero! Depth four-fifty!” The navigator was almost shouting. On the main screen the mine entrance swept towards them and then out towards the edge of the display as it engulfed them. “We’re in!”

But they weren’t out of trouble. The very inertia that Kane had used to perform a vertical skid still existed in their headlong rush. “Full astern!” snapped Zagadko. “Forward cameras! Overlay on the sonar image!”

The main screen flickered and they were seeing through the Novgorod’s eyes as it hurtled through the tunnel. The walls shot past them as if they were falling down a well. Suddenly, they broadened and they were out in the internal lake of the mine’s moon pool. The far wall rose up ahead of them.

It would be an unfair irony, thought Katya, if they’d saved themselves from being smashed on the outside of a mountain only to be smashed on the inside of one. She’d hardly noticed that she’d dug her heels in against the floor plating as if she could bring the submarine to a halt by sheer force of will.

“Beaching ramp to port!” called Kane and wrenched the controls over. Many such pools had beaching ramps where boats could be pulled out of the water for routine maintenance. Usually, the boat rode up on a custom-built wheeled cradle, all prim and pampered.

The Novgorod hit the ramp with her bare belly and ran up screaming every centimetre of the way. A four hundred metre long vessel can build up quite a bow wave, especially with her hydroplanes in the vertical position to act as water brakes. The wave was three metres high when it hit the quayside and broke, running tonnes of water across ground where nobody had stood for five years. It hit the front of the empty traffic control offices and stove in the thick glass sheeting. Katya watched all this on the boat’s cameras. She wondered if somebody was going to have to pay for all this damage.

“Engines, all stop!” commanded Captain Zagadko. “And kill that damn sonar!” With the sonar grids out of the water, they were just making a fierce whittering tone that echoed around the pool’s cavern. On the quay, the backwash of water from the bow wave gushed back into the moon pool.

The engines died. The sonar died.

The silence was beautiful.

“Damage report,” demanded Zagadko as he unstrapped himself, standing up and testing the skewed angle of the deck with his feet.

It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Structurally, the boat was intact. There were any number of minor pieces of damage, but they were largely unimportant to the operation of the vessel or easily fixed. The greatest problem was the actual physical situation. The Novgorod’s first quarter was out of the water and there was no possible way of getting her back into the pool without heavy equipment. “She’ll swim,” the damage control officer concluded, “but she’ll need help to do it.”

Tokorov was at the environmental controls. “Captain, I’ve taken a sample of the air in the mining base.”

“Is it breathable?”

“It’s not just breathable, it’s at maintained levels. They must have left the environmental systems running when it was abandoned. Perhaps they thought somebody would be going back to finish stripping the place and it never happened.”

Zagadko nodded; there was an excellent chance that was exactly what happened. A typical failure in communications between two work crews hired through different contractors and both under the impression that the other would be the last ones out. With no personnel left there to put a strain on life-support, it could tick over quite happily on its fusion cells for ten or twenty years.

“That’s something, at least. We’re going to have to get a message out somehow. Put together a party, Lieutenant Tokarov, and see if there’s any communications gear still in place. Even the bare terminals of a transmitter array will do — we can provide the rest.” Tokarov saluted smartly and moved off to put together a landing party.

Zagadko pursed his lips and grimaced. “Which leaves me with one last unpleasant duty.” In a single smooth action, he drew his sidearm and clapped the barrel against the back of Kane’s skull as he sat at the controls. “Hands clear of the yoke, Mr Kane. I have no desire to kill you so please don’t make it a necessity.”

Kane slowly raised his hands. He didn’t look at all surprised. Katya, on the other hand, was outraged. “What are you doing, captain? He just saved all our lives!”

Zagadko shot her a sideways glance. “I don’t deny it, Ms Kuriakova. But the fact remains that I have reasonable grounds to believe Mr Kane here is an agent of a foreign power. I’d be failing in my duty if I didn’t take him into custody. Which reminds me — Mr Kane, by the authority vested in me by the Federal Maritime Authority and by the Russalkin legislature, you’re under arrest.”

“So I gather,” replied Kane. He seemed faintly amused by it all. Katya couldn’t see anything funny about having a maser pistol tight against the back of your skull. “May I ask under what charge?”

“Suspicion of insurgent activity, acting against the interests of Russalka, farting in a confined space… does it really matter, Kane? There’s something wrong about you and I intend to find out what it is. Specifically, I intend to hand you over to Secor and they can find out.”

“But…” started Katya.

“I’m fully aware of the service that Mr Kane has afforded this vessel, Ms Kuriakova,” Zagadko interrupted her. She saw he was becoming angry and shut up. “And I’m not unappreciative. I shall make that clear in my report. The fact remains that he’s said enough things that make me think he’s a Terran. That’s enough reason for me to arrest him and more than enough for you to accept it.”

“Don’t argue with the captain, Katya,” said Kane softly. “I’d do exactly the same in his place.”

Katya fumed. Why did they insist on talking down to her like this? “How can you be so calm? Do you know what Secor will do to you?”

Secor was the popular name for the FMA Security Organisation and was the only popular thing about it. Nobody liked to think about what went on in Secor establishments or what its agents did with the carte blanche they’d been given by a desperate government during the war. Now, ten years later, the government seemed too terrified to withdraw those powers.

Kane smiled. “Sensory deprivation, psychotomimetic drugs, RNA stripping, the usual. They’re quite old fashioned in their ways, bless them.”

Zagadko had Kane taken to the brig by a couple of marines. He seemed embarrassed to have Kane present on the bridge for any longer than was necessary, Kane’s calm acceptance of his arrest unnerving him somewhat.

For her part Katya watched him go with very mixed emotions. He was a ruthless pirate, a murderer who had saved her life. He was probably a Terran, a Grubber, one of the filth who had killed her father and thousands more, yet he had also saved the Novgorod and everybody aboard her. Katya didn’t know what to think. She couldn’t bring herself to hate him, but she certainly couldn’t like him either. That only left her the option of indifference, and Kane was a hard man to be indifferent about. She settled on something like grudging respect, but that just made what Secor were going to do to him feel all the worse.

Tokarov arrived back to report he’d put together his party. “Shall I have weapons issued, sir?”

The captain looked at him as if he was mad for a second, but then his brow clouded and he nodded. “Yes. Yes, that would be wise. I don’t like the way Kane knew so much about this place and the way the life-support has so conveniently been left running. We may not be alone here.”

Katya watched the party troop up the deck, restlessness growing in her. She didn’t care to be trapped in the Novgorod with the likes of Captain Zagadko. She’d known Kane was a criminal, but Secor? They’d tear his mind to pieces looking for Grubber conspiracies and leave him a hollowed-out wreck. She’d heard too many ugly stories of what Secor agents did to amuse themselves, from friends and from Sergei in his darker moments. If even half of what they said was true… Why couldn’t Zagadko just have said he’d hand Kane over to the normal law enforcement agencies?

“Captain,” she began.

“Request denied,” replied Zagadko blandly without even looking away from the damage report he’d just been handed.

“You don’t even know what…”

“You were going to ask permission to go ashore.” He finally favoured her with a look. “Weren’t you?”

She had been, but she just glared at him as her answer.

“Well,” he continued without giving her any more time to answer, “that’s impossible. I’m not convinced that this mining site is nearly as abandoned as Mr Kane tried to suggest.”

“What?” said Katya, anger making her incautious and impolite.” You think the Terran army is hiding here?”

The captain ignored the venom in her voice. “Criminals tend to associate with criminals, greater and lesser. I think our Mr Kane is the former, and that he will associate with the latter. Pirates, perhaps? People who have little to lose by working for somebody like him.”

“You’re making a lot of guesses, captain.”

The captain’s face hardened. “With all due respect, Ms Kuriakova, you know nothing.” The grimness of his voice indicated that she was due precious little respect, from him at least. “The war was only ten years ago, not even a generation, and you know nothing of it.”

“My father…”

“Died in it? Lots of fathers died in it. And mothers. And sons. And daughters. You dishonour their memory. The first strikes were against our air arm. Remember that much?”

“The Andrev Platform was destroyed. Of course I…”

“And what kind of aircraft were destroyed there? Eh?”

Katya couldn’t answer; she had no idea. Her mouth opened and closed a few times until the captain lost patience.

“Contragravitic craft, girl! CG craft just like the ones in the forward compartment! They were all we had; ideal for lifting from a submersible platform. How then,” he leaned close and she could suddenly feel the weight of that war on his shoulders, all that loss and agony expressing itself in the cold fury of his glance, “did Kane have experience flying fixed-wing aircraft? Those are Terran!” He spat the word out like diseased phlegm.

He drew himself up and took a long calming breath. “No Russalkin could have saved our lives in the way that he did,” he finished quietly.

“Theoretically I’m not allowed in here without an invitation.” She looked up. Lieutenant Petrov was standing in the doorway, his hands on the top frame, looking speculatively around. “I’m the first officer,” he continued, “so I’m not really a junior officer anymore. Tradition says I don’t go any further without being asked.”

Katya looked at him for a long second. She wasn’t sure she liked him; she still remembered the look on his face when Kane had made the slip about aircraft that had condemned him. If the captain hadn’t picked it up, she was sure Petrov would have informed him of his suspicions. But, like so much else, it was duty. Duty and tradition. Traditions from old Earth, strangely enough — the world they cursed in one breath and held in grudging respect the next. “Come in,” she said.

Petrov looked too tall to be a submariner, she thought as he folded himself through the door and slid with practised ease but little grace into the seat opposite her. With his close-cropped hair and his cold grey eyes, he was almost a parody of the stereotypical Secor officer. A Russalka spider-crab made human.

He sat in silence, regarding her for a moment. Then he opened his breast pocket and reached inside. “I have something for you.” He slid her navigator’s card out and put it down on the table in front of her. As she took it, he added, “It was in your clothes. I thought you’d like it back.”

Katya was looking at her picture on the card. There she was looking so seriously back out at herself and Katya thought that was taken eighteen days ago. Why do I look like such a child? “Thank you.” She put the card away. “You searched my clothes?”

“Of course,” said Petrov, unsurprised and unembarrassed by the question. “You came aboard with a criminal. I wanted to make sure your story, at least, was true.”

She felt oddly complimented. Petrov hadn’t thought she’s just a girl; he’d thought she might be a desperate criminal. He was the first person the whole day who had treated her like an adult. No, that wasn’t quite true. “Have you heard anything from Lieutenant Tokarov yet?”

“No. Not yet. These tunnels will play havoc with communications though, so that doesn’t necessarily signify anything untoward.”

“But you’re worried?”

He raised an eyebrow. “What gives you that idea?”

Katya shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps the way you’re so keen to explain away the fact he hasn’t reported in yet.”

Petrov looked at her blankly. Then he smiled. It didn’t light up his face and looked like it rarely had many opportunities to show itself, but it was a smile nonetheless. “Your prodigious talents extend further than just navigation, I see. A student of human nature too.”

“Prodigious?”

“I read your card, remember. Your scores are excellent. With more experience you could walk onto any boat in the ocean and they’d be pleased to have you. I haven’t seen such impressive scores since, well, my own. I was something of a wunderkind too, you see.” The smile flickered briefly again.

Katya’s gaze seemed distant, and Petrov wondered what she was seeing. Then she looked him in the eye and said, “My uncle’s dead.”

She said it flatly, as if the words and their meaning had become disconnected in her mind.

Petrov’s smile instantly went. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

“What I don’t understand is, why don’t I care?” She shook her head. “I loved him. He was there for us right after papa died, has always been there. Why can’t I cry for him?”

“Perhaps,” said Petrov, “because he’s always been there. You know he’s gone but, part of you, a very great part of you does not believe it. You expect him to walk through the door at any minute.”

She looked at the door, an open door aboard a boat Uncle Lukyan had never set foot aboard in his entire life. Yet somehow, she could see him in her mind’s eye, stepping around the frame, looking up and seeing her, that slightly prepossessed air that he usually carried turning to the great smile he’d reserved for her ever since she’d been born. She willed him to be there, for the whole thing to have been a dreadful mistake or a stupid joke. No Leviathan, no attack, no drowned corpse strapped into the wreck of the Baby. She couldn’t do it. She knew she could never do it. Finally she started to cry.

Petrov stood, unfolding himself easily out from the confinement of the table and chair and left her silently to her grief.

Uncle Lukyan was showing no sign of releasing her from the bearhug he’d flung around her the first chance he had. “I thought you were dead, Katinka,” he kept saying, more than a suspicion of a sob in his voice, “I thought you were dead.” He rarely used the familiar form of her name, preferring Katya. It took a lot to make him use Katinka.

When he finally let her go, she said, “I thought the same of you, uncle.” She could feel the tears running down her cheeks and was aware of some of the pirates watching their reunion and not being subtle about it. She really didn’t care. “Yet here you are. Here we are. Here we are.” She couldn’t speak anymore and hugged him close, her eyes clenched shut.

“I tried to save you, Katinka. But the damned LoxPak wouldn’t go on and, by the time I had it secure, you’d vanished. I saw that the top hatch had been blown and hoped… prayed for you to have got clear. The next thing I know, that filthy pirate scow had swallowed the Baby whole. As soon as they’d drained the salvage maw, they were waving guns in our faces and demanding to know where Kane was. That Federal cur, Suhkalev, he’d have sold them his own grandmother he was so scared.”

Katya let Lukyan go, and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She looked over where Suhkalev sat on the rock floor of the dock, separate from the Novgorod’s crew. They’d treated him with contempt ever since the pirates had concentrated all their prisoners into one group under the unnerving gaze of the deck-sweeper guns aboard the pirate boat. The Fed had his knees drawn up, his chin resting on them, a look of abject misery on his face. He knew he’d disgraced himself and his uniform. Katya thought he looked like he wanted to die. She hoped he wouldn’t do anything stupid.

“We really didn’t know what had happened, though. The acting captain, Tasya something — the one they call the Chertovka — she’s a clever one. She put the boat on silent running and we just hung at neutral buoyancy for what seemed like hours while they listened for whatever had attacked us. They heard something in the distance, but couldn’t get a decent lock until it hit the surface. She went up on one third ahead to investigate but there was nothing there. The Baby’s distress beacon cut out at the same time and she guessed it had been picked up.”

“It had. Kane and I were hanging onto it when the Novgorod picked it up,” said Katya.

Lukyan nodded. “So they brought us here while they figured out what to do next. Next thing we know the pirates are running around because they thought the mining site was under attack by the Feds.” He sighed. “She played the FMA people for fools and they fell for it. What happened to bring you here in such a great hurry, Katya?” Katya noticed he’d dropped the familiar form of her name. He must be calming down.

Slowly, putting in as much detail as she could remember, she told Lukyan about how they’d been attacked again by the same thing that had attacked the Baby, the thing Kane called Leviathan. He listened quietly, asking only a few questions to clarify her story and iron out ambiguities.

“Leviathan,” he said when she’d finished. “That’s an old Earth name for a sea monster. Is…?”

“He’s from Earth,” she confirmed. “He didn’t even try to deny it when I confronted him with it. He seems proud of it.”

“He would be. He should be. A man who has no pride for his birthplace is a hollow man. I don’t begrudge him that much. Still…” his expression darkened, “…Earth.”

It was no secret that there were still Grubbers on Russalka even ten years after they’d lost the war. Stranded away from their units, trapped when the Terran ships ignited their drives and ran back to Earth with their tails between their legs. Abominated and loathed by the Russalkin, it was hardly surprising that most ended up in the world of crime. She’d seen lots in action dramas; pirates, terrorists and insane killers. They’d always seemed so ineffectual, though. Perhaps, she thought, it was time to stop watching everything that came out of the drama studios of the Department of Public Enlightenment quite so uncritically.

“What about the Chertovka?” she asked. “She seems Russalkin.”

“She is,” growled Lukyan, “to our shame. She was a collaborator during the war. She worked for the Grubbers against her own kind. If the FMA ever capture her, there’s nothing waiting for her but a maser bolt through the brain in a quiet cell.”

“And Secor?”

He looked at her suspiciously. “What about Secor?”

“The captain of the Novgorod, Captain Zagadko, he was going to hand Kane over to Secor.”

Lukyan frowned. “Well, I don’t suppose it’s any less than he deserves,” he muttered, but Katya doubted he really meant it. He looked past her and his frown deepened. “Speak of the devil…”

Kane and Tasya were approaching with a couple of pirates acting as bodyguards. Tasya looked like she could look after herself pretty well and wouldn’t need guards, but Kane looked tired and ill.

“Captain Pushkin, Ms Kuriakova,” said Tasya, nodding politely at each.

“Hello again, Katya,” said Kane. His voice sounded strained, the pleasantries forced. “We meet again, Captain Pushkin. I’m very happy you made it.”

Lukyan said nothing but glared at them both.

“The Novgorod’s captain,” said Tasya, “Zagadko. Where is he?”

“We’re telling you nothing,” spat Lukyan.

“He’s dead,” said Katya. She caught her uncle’s furious glance. “So what if I tell them, uncle? None of us are ever leaving this place.”

Tasya laughed, a pleasantly throaty sound. “This sea monster Havilland has been telling me about?” It took Katya a moment to remember that was Kane’s first name. “We travelled from the North docks right around the mountain and came into the moon pool at speed, making plenty of noise. We weren’t attacked. Whatever it is, it’s long gone.”

Kane shook his head slowly like an old man. Katya couldn’t believe the change that had come over him so quickly. It was as if he was dying before her eyes. “Oh, Tasya, no. Whatever it is, it’s outside. It has cunning, you see.”

Tasya gave him an exasperated look and, Katya realised, one with some underlying affection. “So why didn’t it attack, hmmm? Tell me that.”

Kane opened his mouth, but it was Katya who answered. “Now it only has to watch one docking tunnel. It’s got both boats trapped in the same moon pool. You won’t get out as easily as you got in.”

“She’s right,” said Kane. His voice was so weak that even Tasya, who’d seemed blind to his rapid deterioration, noticed.

“You ought to go aboard,” she whispered urgently, moving closer to Kane in an attempt to make the conversation private.

“I will,” replied Kane in a croak that wouldn’t have seemed out of place coming from a man in his last minutes. “Don’t fuss so, Tasya. I’ll be fine.”

“Captain!” the shout floated across from the pirates who were securing the Novgorod.

“Damn,” said Kane. “Now what?”

Katya rolled over and found Petrov crouching nearby the engineer who’d asked the question. Of course, she thought; with Captain Zagadko dead then Petrov was the new commanding officer. As in any military hierarchy, the chain of command is never broken.

“We’re leaving,” said Petrov bluntly. “I think the Vodyanoi’s crew have their hands full and don’t sound as if they’re having an easy time of it. If we stay here, whatever is killing them will exterminate us like fish in a liquidiser.” He stood up. “Everybody! We’re leaving here and heading for the second dock. This place is still well signposted, Lieutenant Tokarov? Good. Make your own way there and don’t be afraid to take circuitous routes. Getting there quickly isn’t important, only getting there alive matters. Don’t bunch up and don’t get killed. Go!”

He was the first to the door and, after a fast look to check that the pirates really were too involved in combat to notice them, led the way. Katya felt her uncle take her hand in his but didn’t look up at him. “Is he doing the right thing, uncle?” she asked.

“It’s crazy to go out there. It’s suicide to stay. Yes, it’s the right thing to do. Let some more Feds go and then we’ll take our chance.” They waited in the shadows as the room thinned out by ones and twos. Katya had assumed some crewmembers were behind them so it was a shock when they found that they were the last ones. They crept closer to the destroyed wall and listened but could only hear the occasional crack of maser fire, now sporadic and reflexive. Lukyan squeezed her hand and they stepped out into the corridor.

Tasya the Chertovka, the She-Devil, was waiting for them, her gun levelled and ready. “Kane sent me to let you out. Said you deserved a chance. And here I find you scurrying into the shadows like vermin.” Her lips thinned and she raised the gun to aim at the ceiling. “Very wise.”

“What’s attacked?” demanded Katya. “How can the Leviathan reach us in here? It’s too big, it can’t possibly have got up that tunnel.”

“It didn’t need to. Come on, we have to get moving unless you want to end up like that.” She gestured casually at the floor. Katya looked down and found the pirate who’d threatened her at the door - or half of him at least. From the navel upwards he’d been vaporised. He’d been right on the other side when whatever had hit the wall had struck. He had never stood a chance. Strangely, the sight was less horrifying than she would have thought; grotesque rather than nauseating. The stench of burnt human flesh was something else altogether, though, and she covered her mouth and nostrils with her hand until the half-corpse was behind them. Katya and Lukyan followed Tasya into the warren of tunnels at a trot.

The emergency lighting was patchy; whole stretches of corridor were in darkness and they had to stumble along holding hands. “We can’t slow down,” hissed Tasya at one point, “it can see in the dark.”

“What is it?” asked Lukyan, full of frustration, but the She-Devil didn’t answer. Perhaps she just wants to get us out of the way and then abandon us, thought Katya. Or perhaps shoot us and report back to Kane that she couldn’t find us. This was the woman who’d led Terran troops through the maintenance tunnels beneath the Dory industrial complex to launch an attack on half-built warboats as they sat in their dry docks, the woman who’d murdered the yard’s supervisor in front of the workers because he wouldn’t open the hatches to the munitions stores. She was a war-criminal, a cold-blooded killer, a traitor to the Russalkin people and she was holding Katya’s hand right that minute. Katya tried to concentrate on not tripping over anything rather than the possibility that the last thing she’d ever know would be the Chertovka’s gun barrel being clapped to her temple. It wasn’t easy.

Then the darkness started to thin with red light leaking around the angle of the corridor ahead and Katya could see a little again. What she couldn’t see was Lukyan.

“Where’s your uncle?” asked Tasya suspiciously.

“He was holding your hand,” Katya snapped back. “What have you done?”

“My hand? He was holding your hand.” She looked back into the gloom from which they were emerging. “He’ll have to make his own way. Come on.”

“No!” Katya shook herself free from the Chertovka’s grip. “I’m going back for him!”

“Suit yourself.” The Chertovka started on ahead. “But you’ll never find him. We’ve passed the heads of a dozen corridors in the dark. He could have wandered down any of them. You’ve more chance of running into…” She paused and looked back. “Come on, girl. You don’t know what’s back there. I wouldn’t leave my worst enemy to that thing.”

“What about my uncle?”

“He’s a survivor. I know his type — clever and cautious. He won’t take any chances. You’ve got a rendezvous point, haven’t you?” Katya reluctantly nodded. “Then he’ll be there. You should be concentrating on reaching it too. He’ll be worried if you’re not there to meet him.” Katya knew she was right, but pride made her hesitate for a moment before following.

They walked in silence for a few minutes before Katya asked, “What attacked you?”

Tasya chuckled dryly. “You’ve been bursting to ask me that ever since we met in that corridor, haven’t you?” She sobered. “Some sort of robotic drone. It came out of the moon pool and opened fire before we knew it was there.”

“It carries a laser, doesn’t it?”

The Chertovka paused in her walking and looked at Katya with an eyebrow raised as if examining an interesting specimen. She started walking again. “Havilland has quite a high opinion of you, Katya Kuriakova. I can see why. What makes you say it has a laser?”

“I saw what it did to the wall of the room we were being held in. A maser wouldn’t do that. I’ve read about lasers but I’ve never seen one in operation.” She frowned. “None of this makes sense.”

“Why not?” Katya noticed that Tasya had slowed her walk, the better to look at her. She didn’t know whether being of such interest to a woman like the Chertovka was a desirable situation.

“Look, masers are common sidearms because they’re great for killing people, but not so good for punching through metal and plastic, right?” Tasya nodded. Of course, Katya thought, she would know all about weapons. “Lasers and bullets penetrate; that makes them bad choices. A gunfight that lets the ocean in doesn’t leave any winners.”

“Then we should be careful because, believe me, that drone carries a big laser.”

Katya shook her head. “But that’s not the point. Why is it carrying a laser at all? We went through all this in tech classes. High energy lasers are expensive to build, and they’d make pathetic weapons underwater anyway. Even with an X-ray laser, water refracts the beams. That’s apart from the water boiling and then turning into plasma in front of the beam, giving you even worse scattering. The effective range of a laser with a range of hundreds of kilometres in air will be a few metres at most underwater.”

“That’s all they needed. I’ve looked at your uncle’s minisub. One of those drones sunk it with a laser bolt; same with the hole in the Novgorod’s salvage maw. They can get close enough, that’s a given.”

“But why? Why go to all the trouble when a normal torpedo with a simple explosive warhead could do the same with none of the cost and trouble? It makes no sense. The Leviathan’s drones have only shown what they’re really capable of when one has got out of the water.”

“And that’s your conclusion?”

Katya hadn’t been deliberately working towards a conclusion, but suddenly realised that this answered the questions that had been bothering her all along. “It was never designed for submarine combat. Its drones can do the job, but its real function is to fight in the dry.” She imagined what would happen if it reached Lemuria, standing off while its drones patrolled the corridors, cutting down all resistance with their terrible laser cannon, not caring if they brought the ocean crashing through ruptured walls. “We can’t let it reach Lemuria,” she breathed, shaken by the terrible vision.

“Very much what Havilland said,” replied Tasya, “but he was short on details as to how to manage it too. One drone killed five or six of the Vodyanois before they had a chance to draw their guns. Even when we returned fire, we did nothing to it. Maser bolts barely register and bullets bounce off. If you’ve got any bright ideas on how we can stop it, I’d be fascinated to hear them.” Katya was silent. “Thought as much. In that case, we’ll just carry on running.”

Two hundred metres further down the corridor, Tasya abruptly pulled Katya to one side, putting her hand over her mouth, and Katya thought she’d finally lost her patience and was going to kill her. Instead, she signalled Katya to be silent and left her crouching in the shadows while she moved ahead in utter silence, her gun drawn. She braced against the edge of an alcove where some equipment must once have stood before the base was stripped, focussed, and spun around the edge as she brought the maser pistol to bear. Katya thought she heard a gasp of surprise and terror. The Chertovka growled with exasperation and reached into the alcove with her free hand.

“Get out of there, you worm,” she hissed, and dragged Suhkalev out into the open. He was whimpering so pathetically that Katya couldn’t help but feel at least a little sorry for him.

“You’re a poor excuse for a Federal agent, aren’t you?” Tasya said as he sprawled on the plastic decking plates. “If they were all like you, life would be a lot easier for the likes of me. Stop that blubbering before I stop it for you.”

“Leave him alone,” Katya found herself saying. “He’s been through a lot.”

Tasya looked at her with surprise. “No more than you, Katya Kuriakova, and you’re bearing up well.”

Katya knew it was true but wasn’t going to agree. She didn’t know why she hadn’t come apart at the seams yet; she found it hard to believe it had anything to do with bravery. She didn’t feel brave and surely you felt it when you were brave? She felt scared most of the time. The only thing that seemed to keep her going was the pragmatic streak that had used to drive her friends mad whenever they wanted to just be crazy and have some fun once in a while. “I’m scared,” she said to Suhkalev, “I’m scared too. But we have to keep moving.”

“We’re all scared,” growled Tasya, exasperated. She was looking back down the corridor as if she expected the Leviathan’s drone to appear at any moment.

She probably did. It possibly might.

“Show me a man without fear and I’ll show you someone with a death wish. They make poor brothers in arms, believe me.”

“I didn’t…” Suhkalev spoke in a careful voice, terror threatening to flood over every syllable, “I didn’t want this… I don’t like it. I don’t like it.” He sounded like a frightened child.

Please don’t say his mind has broken, thought Katya. If he can’t function, how can we save him as well as ourselves?

Tasya, apparently a disciple of applied practical psychiatry, simple backhanded Suhkalev hard. He was sent sprawling on the floor. In a second he was back on his feet and charging at her in a fury. Getting the muzzle of her maser pistol, a big ugly gun that made Zagadko’s look quite civilised, placed neatly between his eyes slowed him to a stony halt.

“Better,” said Tasya. “You do have some fight in you after all.” She reached around to the small of her back, drew a gun and lobbed it at him. He caught it and stood there uncomprehendingly. “It won’t do you much good against what’s after us, but it may come in handy.”

It certainly did. He snapped it up to a firing pose and barked, “You’re under arrest! Drop your weapon!”

“Yes, yes. Plenty of time for that later. Come along.” She carried on up the corridor. Suhkalev followed a few paces behind, assuring her that, really, she was under arrest. He meant it. He did. Katya sighed and followed him.

He continued to inform Tasya she was under arrest for the next fifteen minutes and Tasya ignored him for every second of it. Katya tried telling him he was wasting his time, but he just looked at her with an expression of faint embarrassment and carried on. Eventually, Katya started to wonder if the whole pantomime to appear competent and capable was being put on for her behalf.

Tasya put up with being arrested three to four times a minute very well for quite a while until even her patience finally gave out as they were entering a T–junction. “Look. I’m pleased you’re not blubbing like a baby anymore. I’m pleased we have somebody else along who’s had arms training. I’m pleased you’re so motivated now. On the other hand, if you offer to put me in FMA custody once more, I’m going to forget all about how pleased I am and burn your head into a smoking stump just to make you shut up. Do you get a faint feeling for how irritated you’re making me? Hmm?”

For his answer, he pushed her to one side and opened fire down the corridor. Tasya braced herself and looked, brought her gun up and fired a couple of shots before shouting, “It’s useless! Run!”

Before they hared back down the corridor they’d just walked up, Katya risked a quick peek around the corner at what was pursuing them.

When Tasya had spoken of a “robotic drone,” Katya had formed a mental picture of something like a mining drone; a fat little body, tracks, stubby arms with tools or, in this case, weapons at the ends. The reality was entirely different. The drone looked like nothing so much as a torpedo three metres in length and half a metre in diameter. It hung effortlessly a metre from the floor and glided soundlessly but with infinite menace towards her. The end towards her was fronted with a reflective port like the lensed casing of a searchlight. That seemed likely to contain its sensors, she thought. Belatedly, it also struck her that this would be the focussing element for the drone’s devastating laser. She threw herself sideways barely in time. The corridor bloomed with brilliant light and the corridor junction was suddenly full of smoke and flying droplets of molten rock. One pattered to the floor right in front of her face where she lay prone. The drone could reduce cold stone to lava in less than a blink of an eye. This is what had sunk the Baby and crippled the Novgorod. How could they possibly beat it? Katya got her feet back underneath her and ran madly in pursuit of Tasya and Suhkalev.

Suhkalev had slowed to flag her down a side corridor, Tasya was nowhere to be seen but the rhythmic pounding of her combat boots as she sprinted in the half darkness could still be heard. “Where’s the Chertovka gone?” demanded Katya.

“She said she was scouting ahead,” replied Suhkalev. “I wish it wasn’t quite so far ahead.” He smiled unexpectedly and then ran down the corridor too, Katya close on his heels.

They almost ploughed into Tasya coming back. “Dead… end…” she said between trying to get her breath back. “Old… mine workings. We have to… get back to the main corridor before it cuts us off.”

It was too late. The silent cigar shape of the drone was already turning the corner ahead of them. They pulled back and dog-trotted in as near silence as they could manage down a side gallery. Soon, the corridors became more and more roughly fashioned until they were moving through mine workings. The floor had been smoothed for equipment to track more easily across, but all manner of tools and debris littered the tunnels — a strange mix of mechanically excavated shafts and plasma-melted passages — making it almost impossible to move quickly and quietly. “This is hopeless,” muttered Katya, “a blind man could find us with all the noise we’re making.”

“What’s that?” Up ahead a dark shape lurked in the patchy illumination of work lights that might well have been running for the last five years. Tasya pulled a torch from her belt and revealed the shape to be some great hulking piece of mining equipment. “Well,” she said sourly, “I suppose we could hide behind that for the few milliseconds it takes the drone to vaporise it.”

“It’s a plasma cutter,” said Suhkalev slowly.

“How would you know?”

“Mining family,” he replied. “You see some of the work-related injuries miners get, and joining the Federal services looks pretty good. What I’m saying is, it’s a plasma cutter. Why’s it still here?” He walked up to it and started pressing buttons.

“Suhkalev!” gasped Katya. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He didn’t look up, but spoke as he worked. “These things cost a fortune. My father spent ages scraping together enough money to buy one with my uncle and aunts. If it had come down to a choice between leaving a cutter behind or a family member, they’d have had to think hard about it. These don’t just get dumped. If I can get this running…”

“We might be able to do to the drone what it was planning on doing to us. Best plan we’ve got. Only plan we’ve got.” The Chertovka kicked among some of the junk on the floor and picked up a handheld plasma cutter, a tiny cousin of the mining machine. “I don’t think it’ll let us get close enough to use something like this on it.” She moved to the bend in the tunnel and peered cautiously around it. “Quick as you like, Fed. It’ll be here soon.”

Katya stood beside Suhkalev and watched him punch buttons with increasing irritation while he watched a small display screen set in the cutter’s side. There seemed to be a lot of red print appearing. “How bad is it?”

“It’s a crock,” he said as he read the diagnostic report. He winced. “It might be reparable, but not in the time we have. The fusion generator’s working and the coolant system is running. It’s sucking and liquefying nitrogen out of the atmosphere right now. Stupid of me; even if the plasma torch had been working, the safety cut-outs would have prevented ignition until the coolant tanks were full. I guess we’re sunk.”

“How long to fill those tanks?” asked Tasya, who’d been listening to the bad news.

“They hold twenty litres full. They’re up to about eight litres now.”

“Eight, in the couple of minutes it’s been running? That’s impressive.” She looked at the machine, her eyes narrowing with concentration. “Is that thing mobile?”

“Too cheap a model to have a contragravitic system,” he reported as he bent to look underneath. “Just tracks.”

“Okay,” she nodded. “Anybody want to hear my stupid plan that’s going to get us all killed?”

Now she did have cause to understand him and he’d been right. He’d also been right to pray that it wouldn’t happen. But, here she was, running through tunnels trusting her life to, and willing to risk her life for, an arrogant Fed and a war criminal. It was, as her Grandfather Vanya would tell anybody who stopped near his chair for more than a few seconds, a funny life.

They were passing signs for the secondary docking area more frequently now and Katya was relieved that they had seen no sign of any further drones. It was impossible that something as large as the Leviathan only carried the one. It was more of a mystery why the corridors weren’t full of hovering cigar-shapes eager to evaporate any human that crossed their laser sights. The Leviathan was being very careful with its resources it seemed, but why? She knew they were relying on Kane having the answers. Tasya seemed confident that his knowledge was available simply for the asking, but Katya had her doubts; he’d been very cagey about everything up until now. Sometimes he behaved as if the Leviathan would simply go back to sleep if nobody spoke about it. Katya, on the other hand, knew perfectly well that ignorance was not safety.

They arrived at the docking area to find it apparently deserted. “Get up!” barked Tasya at the old crates lying around the staging area. “Do we look like a combat drone?”

There was no reply, and then Lukyan stood up from behind a tarpaulin covered stack of cargo pallets. His face lit up when he saw Katya and he rushed over and gave her the second painful bear hug of the day. As she wriggled her way loose, other faces were appearing from behind cover.

“Where’s Kane?” demanded Tasya.

“Behind you.” They spun around to find Kane standing there with a metal cylinder in his hand. “I’ve been behind you for a while, in fact.”

“You’ve been following us?” said Katya.

“In effect, but I wasn’t shadowing you, I was trying to catch up. Previous to that, I had been shadowing, but that was when I was following the drone. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to see you kill it. Very good work, incidentally.”

“Don’t patronise me, Kane,” said Tasya. She pointed at the cylinder. “What’s that?”

“What is it? It’s ant pheromone… a password… our golden key to the kingdom of wonders. This is why it took me so long to catch up with you. Fancy killing something like that drone and not taking a trophy. I stayed a minute to get this little beauty.”

“Did a rock fall on your head when you were in the mine workings?” asked Katya, losing patience.

Kane looked at her, disappointment on his face. “Oh, Katya. I thought you had a poetic heart. Very well, if you want to reduce everything to the bare bones, it’s the drone’s IFF unit.”

Katya thought she had a vague memory of the letters from her uncle’s war stories. “Identify Friend or Foe?” she hazarded on the faint recollection.

“Exactly. This is the best bit of luck we’ve had since that monstrosity woke up.”

It bothered Katya when he spoke like that. She wanted some definite information. Apparently Tasya felt the same. “For God’s sake, Havilland, what exactly is the Leviathan? You talk about it as if it’s a machine one minute and a living creature the next. Which is it?”

Kane’s expression sobered. “From one minute to the next, I’m not sure.”

“Uncle?” said Katya, suddenly spotting a flaw in the plan.

“Hmm?”

“How are we supposed to find the Leviathan? It’s virtually invisible when it wants to be. We could swim backwards and forwards all day two hundred metres from it in this murk and never see it.”

“Ah, well,” said Lukyan in a voice that indicated that he hadn’t considered this either, but wasn’t about to admit it.

Kane saved him by saying, “It will find us. It will interrogate the IFF unit with a coded signal, detect the correct reply — if we’ve made a mess putting in the IFF then that will be about the point where this pleasure cruise finishes — and try to bring us in on remote control or command the drone’s artificial intelligence to bring itself in. Neither will work, it will assume there’s been damage, and recover us for repairs.”

“How violent is this recovery likely to be?” asked Tokarov.

“Not violent at all. You’ll see.”

“You said the drone had artificial intelligence?” said Katya.

“Yes. They have to have some autonomy. Those tunnels block communications so the drone was given its orders and left to complete them.”

“But the Leviathan itself has a synthetic intelligence?”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the difference?”

“Is this relevant?” Tokarov interrupted.

“No,” said Kane, “but it’s better than listening to your weak puns. An artificial intelligence, Ms Kuriakova,” Katya noticed the formal use of her name, “only looks like intelligence. A machine is taught a lot of responses to assorted situations and uses them if such a situation arises. The more contingencies are covered, the more intelligent the AI seems. The best have heuristic routines programmed in; that means they observe how well what they’ve been taught works and how other approaches work. If something else is better, then they’ll start using that in future instead. They’re ‘learning,’ for want of a better word. Artificial intelligences can get very good, even passing the Turing test.”

“What’s…?”

“It’s a rule of thumb test for intelligence. If you can talk to an AI for a few hours and never realise that you were talking to a machine all along, then it’s passed the Turing test. That’s artificial intelligences; they’re artificial because they’re not real minds, just good impersonations. A synthetic intelligence is something else again. The Leviathan carries a massive silicon analogue of a brain. At the moment nothing much more sophisticated than a good artificial intelligence programme is in it. The idea was for it to interface with a human…”

“You,” said Tokarov, fascinated.

“…me, and the human intelligence would act as a catalyst to spark the same sort of cascading sapient effect in the synthetic brain. The result would be a single intellect, the will and experiences of the human combined with the massive knowledge resources and capabilities of the Leviathan.

“It’s not just a theory either. They’ve done it on Earth. Nothing quite like the Leviathan, though.”

“What’s different?”

“The interface had to be more… I’m not sure how to describe it. Thorough, perhaps. Intimate.”

Tokarov laughed. “You make it sound like a marriage.”

Kane didn’t laugh along with the joke. He only said, “’Til death do us part.”

Katya’s right-hand multi-function display started showing a flashing box and bleeped urgently. “The IFF unit has been hailed,” she said quietly. A faint sense of fear was growing in her. She’d secretly hoped the Leviathan had moved on, but the indicator on the MFD showed that to be a vain hope. How many times did she think she could encounter that monstrosity and live? She was starting to hate the stupid pride that had made her volunteer for the mission.

“I’d cut the engines, if I were you,” suggested Kane to Lukyan. “There’s less chance of an accident if we’re not moving when it takes us.”

Katya didn’t like the sound of being taken at all. It made them sound like prey. But Lukyan cut the engines and now they had only the sound of the life-support fans and their breathing as they waited and listened for the Leviathan to make its move.

The seconds turned into a minute and then minutes. Katya was wondering whether to suggest sending an active sonar pulse to try and provoke the Leviathan into doing something (she wasn’t wondering it very hard, though, since it didn’t seem to respond well to having sound waves blasted at it) when something touched the hull. A whispering light scraping as something travelled cautiously across the Baby’s skin.

“Here we go,” whispered Kane.

Suddenly the boat lurched and then started to move swiftly and smoothly upwards.

“What’s happening?” growled Lukyan. “Have we been grappled?” He looked to Kane for a reply, and the pirate nodded.

Grappled. Somehow the Leviathan had managed to attach lines to the Baby with barely any warning at all. Katya had read and seen stories of historical grappling actions and having harpoons banged through your hull was usually a very obvious process. This was something else again. The hiss of water travelling quickly over the hull modulated into a gruff roar for a moment and then, suddenly, they were bathed in harsh, white light.

Out of the ports, they could see the Baby was being dragged through a great hatch in the floor of a white circular chamber, perhaps twenty metres in diameter. Through the top porthole, they could see cables as thick as a man’s wrist running from a cluster in the roof and down to where they encircled the minisub. They flexed and moved like the arms of a russquid, Katya thought, even though they were obviously made from metal. She’d never seen anything like them before. Beneath the Baby, a great iris valve slid shut, sealing them off from the sea. They were trapped in the belly of the beast now.

The tentacle-cables — or cable-tentacles, Katya didn’t know which — gently lowered the Baby to the floor of the chamber and then slid back into the ceiling above. As they watched the metallic hemisphere in the ceiling into which the cables had retracted, they saw its image distort with ripples and realised the chamber was being pumped out. The water level dropped rapidly, much faster than the dock had flooded back in the mining site. Within a very few minutes, the minisub was sitting on its landing skids in the middle of the white chamber, dripping dry as the last dregs of water were efficiently sucked away from the floor.

They sat in silence for a few seconds, everybody waiting for somebody else to make the first move.

Tokarov was the first to find his voice. “Now what?”

Kane unbuckled his seat restraints. “The aft hatch, please.” Uncle Lukyan flicked a switch, and the aft hatch unsealed and swung open. Kane walked back and stopped just before stepping out. “You might as well follow,” he said. “There’s no getting the sub back out of this chamber without the Leviathan permitting it, so there’s not much point in staying behind.” The others released their restraint buckles and climbed out after him.

Katya stood by the Baby and looked around in wonderment at the chamber. It was so harshly white in here, with no obvious source of light as though the walls themselves were glowing. Everything was white except for the unpainted and untarnished dome in the ceiling, pocked with the large regular holes in its surface that were home to the tentacles, and the iris valve they were standing on. She couldn’t see any way of getting into the rest of the Leviathan from here.

Lukyan obviously thought the same thing.

“Kane, is this place connected to the rest of the boat?”

“Anything’s possible,” replied Kane vaguely. He crossed his arms and said “Open internal access.” Nothing happened. He cleared his throat and tried again. Still nothing happened.

“Great. Now what do we do?” asked Katya.

Kane looked uncomfortable. “It’s been years since it’s heard my voice. Maybe it’s changed more than I thought.” He tried again. “Open internal access.” Nothing. As an afterthought, he tried adding “Please.”

One side of the circular chamber started to draw back, the flat white plates sliding to expose a broad armoured door five metres across by three high. “Manners maketh the man,” Katya heard Kane say to himself. Tokarov made a step towards the door but Kane stopped him. “Me first, lieutenant. It might be nervous around strangers.”

“It’s nervous?” said Tokarov.

“It’s alive in a way,” said Kane. “It has its foibles, a little like a small child.”

“Oh? It might throw a tantrum?”

“Yes, it might. And its tantrums come with a body count. Follow me.”

The layout of the Leviathan was nothing like any vessel Katya had ever seen or been taught about at school. There was no sense of space being at a premium, of every cubic centimetre of ship being functional. Instead, it felt like being inside an iceberg. Everything was white and there was no feeling that, beyond the bland walls and ceilings, there was anything she could have looked at and recognised as part of a boat. Even the word “boat” — traditionally applied to even the largest submarines — failed to express the alien nature of the Leviathan.

“How big is this thing?” she asked.

Kane looked back at her and she was relieved that he no longer seemed as angry and distant as he had been back at the mining site. “Big enough. Just short of seven million cubic metres, I believe.”

Lukyan stopped so abruptly that Tokarov walked into him. “Seven million?” he echoed in disbelief.

“Not quite. I was rounding up.” Kane said, not even slowing his walk.

“Strangest boat I’ve ever been on,” said Tokarov. “Strangest one I’ve even heard of. Where are the stations? The berths?”

Kane stopped by a hatch set into the wall. “This is the only berth aboard. It used to be mine. You have to get it into your head, lieutenant, it isn’t a ship or a boat or any kind of vessel of any type that you’re familiar with. It’s a weapon. A really big, intelligent weapon that happens to have a small living space aboard for a pet human.”

“A pet?” said Lukyan. “That’s not a good comparison, is it? It wouldn’t have let a pet go.”

“Maybe it had no use for me,” said Kane.

“I thought the whole point of it having you along was…”

But Kane was walking away and the question was never asked.

The corridor ended abruptly with another hatch much like the one that had led to Kane’s old quarters. He stopped and stood before it as if steeling his nerve. His nervousness communicated itself to Katya.

“Is that the bridge?” she asked.

“No,” he answered in a strange, distracted voice. “There’s no bridge.” He reached out and touched the door very gently, barely brushing it with his fingertips. Immediately, they heard the hiss of seals being released, the door swung smoothly inwards and to one side. Kane took a deep breath and stepped through the opened portal. After a moment, they followed him.

The chamber they had entered was similar in form and proportions to the bay where they’d left the Baby. If anything, however, it was almost more spartan. Here there was no iris valve taking up much of the floor and metal dome on the ceiling housing cable tentacles. There was only one thing of note here, but a thing so extraordinary, it drew their gaze irresistibly.

Mounted exactly in the middle of the room was a chair. No, chair is too small a word. Mounted exactly in the middle of the room was a throne. An ugly, brutal thing made from dark metals and dark imaginations. It sat… it crouched in front of them, grey metal spires rising from its back and its feet merging into a circle of the same materials that seemed almost like a plug thrust into the floor.

Katya allowed a gaping expression of utter disbelief onto her face. The chair was as out of place as it was possible to imagine. “What,” she said, “is that?”

“It’s a chair,” said Kane, accurately but unhelpfully. Lukyan made a step towards it but Kane grabbed his arm. “No!” he said, both fretful and fearful. “Don’t go near that. It’s the single most dangerous thing the Leviathan possesses.”

Lukyan looked at him as if he were mad; they were aboard a synthetically intelligent killing machine armed with attack drones that were so far ahead of anything Russalka had that they were bordering on magical. It seemed absurd to suggest that these were somehow less dangerous than furniture.

“It’s the interface. It’s where the Leviathan and a human…” he looked for a term they might understand, something that explain the horror he felt inside towards the throne. He could think of nothing. “…interface,” he finished, weakly.

“And what’s that?” asked Katya, pointing upwards.

In the centre of the gently vaulted ceiling, a circular aperture had appeared so silently and so neatly that none of them had even noticed it open. From the deep darkness within the aperture, a sphere was slowly descending. A metre in diameter, utterly black, the sphere came down upon a thin supporting rod as elegantly as a drop of oil rolling down a metal surface. When it had descended perhaps three metres, it stopped abruptly and without a tremor.

“What is it?” demanded Tokarov, but he demanded quietly. The sphere was so perfect and so utterly inscrutable, it was easy to imagine terrifying levels of violence lurking within.

“It’s a Medusa sphere,” said Kane. “Nobody make any sudden moves.”

“A Medusa sphere?”

“You asked whether the Leviathan had any internal security measures,” replied Kane, “I can now assure you that it has. The sphere will…” He stopped as a ghostly violet dot appeared on his chest. Slowly it moved upwards until it was lying between his eyes.

Katya looked back to Lukyan to point it out but found him rooted to the spot by an identical dot. Tokarov was the same. Katya’s hackles raised and her stomach tightened. “Uncle,” she asked, sounding far more in control of her emotions than she felt, “Have I got a purple dot of light on my forehead?” Lukyan looked at her sideways without turning his face from the sphere and nodded slightly.

“I don’t want to be overly dramatic at this point,” said Kane, “but we have all been targeted by the sphere with lasers. If the Leviathan decides it doesn’t like us being here, these beams will intensify inside perhaps a thousandth of a second and the results will be painless, but terminal. Therefore, please don’t do anything to antagonise the Leviathan.”

Katya knew very little about the legends of Earth, but she knew what a Medusa was, and the sphere’s name was well chosen. In the stories, the Medusa was a woman so hideous that to look upon her face turned the hapless observer to stone. Here, the four of them stood there terrified to move, to do anything that the Leviathan might consider aggressive. They might not have been literally turned to stone, but they were still petrified.

“What are you going to do, Kane?” said Tokarov, trying not to move his lips.

“I have no idea,” Kane replied in a tone of resignation.

“No idea,” echoed Lukyan, with hollow disgust.

“No idea at all. I wasn’t expecting garlands and flowers when I came back, but I was hoping for a little tolerance at least. Perhaps I should have come by myself.”

Nobody answered, but nobody argued. Suddenly more beams sparked out of the sphere, bright reds and blues, the dots travelling across the walls clearly visible against the slightly reflective whiteness. They swept and whirled and then quickly drew together on Kane. They travelled quickly across him like scurrying beetles. The only one that didn’t move was the dull violet dot in the middle of his forehead.

“You are identified.”

Katya had no idea where the voice came from, it seemed to be in the air all around. Deep and sonorous, like the dying tones of metal striking metal in a large cavern, the voice was full of incorrect inflexions and emphasis. It was clearly not the product of a human throat.

Kane looked upwards, uncertain how to respond. Finally, he tried. “Hullo.”

“You were rejected. You have no function here.”

“Yes, I know. I was…” he shrugged, rolled his eyes looking for inspiration, “…just passing. Thought I’d drop in.”

“Where is drone six? The object in the retrieval bay is not drone six.”

Lukyan winced to hear his beloved Baby called an “object.”

“I’m afraid it, drone six, that is, I’m afraid it met with a bit of an accident.” Kane waited for an immediate reply, but none was forthcoming. “Sorry for your loss.” Still no answer. “So, I took its IFF unit so I could visit you.”

“You were rejected,” repeated the voice of the Leviathan. Katya wondered what it meant by that. Kane had simply left, not been rejected. At least, that’s the way he said it had happened. “You have no function here.”

“I think I do have a function here. It’s your current activities; they are not within your operational parameters.”

“Operations are within acceptable parameters.”

“No,” replied Kane in a chiding voice, “they are not. I’m very familiar with them and you are operating outside them.” He crossed his arms — slowly so as not to antagonise the Medusa sphere — and started to lecture the Leviathan. “You are pursuing a seek and destroy strategy. You know full well you’re not supposed to do anything that is actively aggressive without a human in that seat over there. Self-defence is all very well, but you saw off the vessel that first reactivated you. That should be that. You should have stood down afterwards, because that’s what your standing orders tell you to do.” Kane stopped and waited with his chin thrust forward as if expecting an apology.

“You are incorrect,” said the Leviathan.

Kane couldn’t have looked more surprised if he’d been told he been spelling his name wrong for the last year.

“What do you mean, incorrect?”

“Parameters state that when discovered, strategies of covert offence are to be employed. These strategies are being employed.”

“That’s not right,” said Kane under his breath. Then, speaking up, “What are your targeting priorities?”

“Category one combatants comprise the following.” The Leviathan started to list possible targets in the most abstract ways. Katya could follow them at first, but after a while even Tokarov started to look confused. Then Kane interrupted the list.

“Hold on, hold on. I need some clarification here. Which target category are we in now? Three? Four?”

“One.”

The colour leeched out of Kane’s face. “But you were listing civilian categories. Non-combatants. You were listing babies and the sick.”

“Category one targets.”

Kane spoke as if he didn’t want to hear the answers. “What is in category two?”

“Category two contains no definitions.”

“Category three. What’s in category three?”

“Category three contains no definitions.”

“What is in category blue?”

Katya looked sharply at him. During school, they’d seen historical simulations of important battles of the War of Independence. Category blue was the generic name for allies.

The Leviathan replied immediately.

“Category blue contains no definitions.”

Something was terribly, terribly wrong. The Leviathan was prepared to attack and destroy even vessels from Earth. There was only one possible conclusion; the great warship was insane.

“No!” Kane looked in as much shock as the others. His eyes wavered around even as he tried to explain himself, as if he were trying to deal with the present and the future simultaneously.

“Dirty Grubber…” Lukyan wanted to say something so vicious that it exceeded even his vocabulary. Instead he reached for the sidearm he’d strapped on before they’d left the mining station.

“Hold on,” snapped Tokarov, grabbing his wrist. Lukyan glared at him as if to say he could be next if he liked, but Tokarov’s steady eye-contact gave him pause. “If you draw that gun, the Leviathan will kill you before you’ve even got the safety off. Calm down. It’s the only way we’re going to get through this.”

Lukyan slowly subsided, but the looks he gave Kane were still venomous.

“I’m sorry,” said Kane hopelessly to nobody in particular, “I’m so sorry. I forgot that I ever said such a thing. I was desperate, I had to get out. I’d have said anything. I did say anything.”

“Leviathan,” rumbled Lukyan, his fury suppressed but evident, “why was this man here, Kane, you said he was rejected. Why?”

The reply was curt, factual and unhelpful. “Interface misphasing.”

“What does that mean?”

Kane shook his head. “You’re wasting your time. It doesn’t understand language in the same way you do. It was never programmed to act like a thesaurus.”

Lukyan turned on him. “Fine. You tell me then. What the blazes is ‘interface misphasing’?”

“I don’t think this is the time or the…”

“It’s exactly the time and the place,” said Lukyan, darks threats in his voice.

“It’s not like we can walk out of here,” said Katya. “Please, Kane. If you were rejected, we need to know why. Maybe we can make it reject all of us.”

Kane heaved an exasperated sigh. “Simply put,” he said with a sideways glance at Lukyan, “it means the Leviathan couldn’t interface with my nervous system. It’s supposed to attach itself to nerve endings and the grey and white matter of the spine and brain for full interface. For some reason my nervous system rejected it, or it rejected my nervous system. I don’t know which. All I know was that the attempt was very painful.” He shuddered at the memory.

Tokarov looked cynical. “You don’t know why it happened?”

“No. I don’t know why it happened.”

“It just strikes me as strange that the Terrans should choose you to go with this extraordinary vessel…”

“I volunteered.”

“Were you the only volunteer?”

Kane’s lips narrowed. “No.”

“Well then, chose you from a pool of volunteers to be part of a vital mission and entrusted this astonishing craft, the Leviathan, to you. They did all this, gave you such a responsibility and never tested you for compatibility with it?”

“They tested me.” Kane seemed to be growing, in his own way, as angry as Lukyan under this inquisition. “I was fully compatible.”

“So what went wrong when it came time to do it for real?”

Kane’s voice was tight and Katya half expected him to refuse to answer or even to strike Tokarov. “If I could tell you,” he hissed through clenched teeth, “I would tell you.”

She was getting a little angry herself. All this bunch of so-called “adults” was doing was making enemies of one another when what they really needed to be concentrating on was how to get out alive.

“Leviathan!” Her voice sounded less impressive echoing around the chamber than she’d hoped, but it still stopped the men bickering. They looked at her in bewilderment. “When one of us is selected, what will become of the rest?”

“They will be without function. They will be stored until a function arises.”

“Clarify stored in this context.” Katya had spoken to enough artificial intelligences to know the terms it was easiest to communicate in. At the moment, the Leviathan was clever in military AI terms, but nowhere near as intelligent as it would be when it got its human… component? Victim? At the moment, it could be fooled easily enough if you were careful and clever.

“Confined to living quarters.”

“Those were designed for one person,” groaned Kane behind her. She ignored him.

“What if we had a function to fulfil for you? Would we be allowed to leave then?”

“That would be dependent on the priority of the utilisation.”

“We will attempt to recover drone six for you,” said Katya. “You cannot build new drones, each one you lose must be a serious drain on your resources. We can try and get it back.”

She heard Tokarov make a pleased little “Heh!” sound and Lukyan said, “That’s my niece.”

“That is of utility,” said the Leviathan.

“Then we can go? And try and get it for you, that is?”

The Leviathan didn’t hesitate. “No.”

“What?” She thought she heard herself echoed by at least two of the others. “Why not?”

“Recovery of drone six is of a lower priority than locating a replacement for Kane, Havilland. A human is required for maximum efficiency. This is the higher priority.”

Katya wasn’t beaten yet. “Kane, when you sat in that seat, when the interface with the Leviathan failed, were you forced into it?”

“I had no choice.”

“But that Medusa sphere up there was a surprise to you just now. It didn’t force you into the seat at gunpoint, so why did you sit down?”

“Because I had no choice. I couldn’t leave and there was nothing else to do except grow old in here. It kept demanding I took the seat, but I was never forced to. I just…” he closed his eyes and hung his head, “wanted to get it over with.”

“Fine. Thanks.” She turned to face them all. “I’ll stay.”

“Katya..?” said her uncle, appalled.

Kane’s eyes had snapped open and he stared fiercely at her. “You must not. The process is irreversible.”

Katya shook her head, they just didn’t get it. “I’m not going to sit down in that ugly great heap of a chair. I’m just going to stay here for a while — like you did, Kane.”

Tokarov was looking at her curiously. “For how long?”

They really didn’t get it. “Until you figure out a way to rescue me, of course. I’ll be fine. I’m patient.”

Nobody seemed very impressed. “That’s not a very good idea,” said Kane, “you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.”

“If you’ve got a brighter idea, let’s hear it,” she countered.

“I’ll stay,” said Lukyan.

“Uncle!”

“No, Katinka. You are young. I’ve already lived, seen a lot. Perhaps too much. I’ll stay.”

“What rank were you, Captain Pushkin?” asked Tokarov. “You’re a veteran, aren’t you?”

“I am,” replied Lukyan, but he did not swell with pride the way Katya had seen in the past. His great patriotic war was starting to look like it had only been paused, not won. If the Russalkin had won, it was only through default. “I made chief petty officer.”

“And you’re in the reserve?”

Lukyan nodded.

“Then, by the powers vested in me by the Federal Maritime Authority, I recall you to duty, Chief Petty Officer Lukyan Pushkin.”

Lukyan looked confused. “But, why?”

Tokarov smiled wearily. “Because now you’re under military discipline. And I outrank you. You’re not staying, Pushkin. You’re leaving with Kane and Katya. That’s an order.”

“I…” The desperate need to find some flaw in what Lieutenant Tokarov had done was clear in Lukyan’s expression just as the failure to find that flaw was evident a few moments later. “Yes. Yes, sir,” he said numbly.

“Oh, no,” said Katya firmly. “This was my stupid idea. I’m the one who should do it.”

“As you said yourself, Ms Kuriakova, all I have to do is sit around and wait to be rescued. As long as I don’t sit in that chair.” He smiled again as he jerked his thumb at the interface chair.

There was something going on within him, some aspect of all this that was torturing him. He’d believed the Leviathan was gone and arranged his life accordingly. Now it was back and it thought the war was still on. He wanted to stop the Leviathan, she was sure of it, but the damage was already done. People knew too much about him for his own security and comfort. Even if they stopped the Leviathan, what would he do next?

The Leviathan, she scolded herself. It will cause untold misery and death. You need to know what Kane knows and you need to know it now. She knocked, waited a second, and entered.

Perhaps she should have waited until he’d asked her to come in. She found him in a frenzy of concealment, throwing an awkward handful of things into an open desk drawer and slamming it shut. Something stopped the drawer closing completely and he slammed it twice more in frustration before pushing the obstruction down inside and finally getting the drawer shut. He turned to Katya and spoke with false calmness.

“How can I help you, Ms Kuriakova?”

Katya pointed at the closed drawer. “What was that?”

“None of your concern. Now, what…”

“It was a syringe, a pressure syringe.”

He looked at the drawer and then back at her. “You’re mistaken.”

“I had to train to use those things for the paramedic certification on my officer’s card. Don’t treat me like some idiot off the corridors, Kane. I know a pressure syringe when I see one.”

“I don’t care what… Wait!”

Katya, anger growing in her, had stepped the two short steps needed to take her across the small stateroom to the desk and jerked it open. It was a syringe all right, and nestling against it was a slim loading-bottle of an inky black fluid. It had no label. It didn’t need one. She snatched up the syringe. The dose chamber was empty, but there were still the faint traces of black fluid there. She turned on Kane, her anger becoming fury. “You!” She almost screamed it. They’d trusted so much to him and all the time… this. “You’re a waster!” She flung the syringe at him. It bounced off his chest and fell into his lap.

He looked at it sadly, as if somebody had just flung a gift back in his face. He picked it up and put it back into the drawer, slowly and carefully this time. He slid the drawer shut and looked at her. “Ms Kuriakova. Katya… this isn’t what you think.”

Not what she thought? Ever since she’d been born, a loathing of wasters had been drilled into her. It was inconceivable to her why anybody should want to corrupt their bodies with drugs just for a brief… What? A release from reality? Why? Reality was all there was. Russalka society tolerated alcohol, but it was controlled to levels that would have appalled their ancestors. Russalka was as unforgiving as the hard vacuum of space. Being drunk could kill you. Being tired could kill you. Hell’s teeth, even being momentarily distracted could kill you. Not just you, either. With such a small overall population, everybody had a weight to carry for everybody else. Every Russalkin shouldered responsibility, and they shouldered it young. Deliberately using drugs was a dereliction of that responsibility and that could not, would not be countenanced. She’d heard tales of men from the early days of the colony, bad men, who’d tried to make themselves rich by supplying drugs, creating wasters and so creating their own little herd of criminals who needed the next little bottle of stolen or illegally synthesised narcotics more than they needed their pride. These bad men, so the stories went, ended up inside airlocks without breathing gear while grim faced citizens on the other side of the door cycled open the outer lock and let in Russalka’s implacable ocean. After a very short while, there were no bad men left.

Kane seemed to know pathetic it would sound but he said it anyway. “It’s not what you think. It’s medicinal.”

“In an unmarked bottle? How stupid do you think I am?” His weakness earlier, his collapse aboard the Novgorod, it all made sense to her now. He must have been unable to use his “medicine” since the FMA captured him. With the trouble in the mining site, unable to get back to this stateroom and the bottle it held, every minute must have stretched on unbearably with his addiction gnawing away at him. Finally, the withdrawal symptoms had become too much and he’d passed out, reducing him to a doddering wreck first.

“There are different types of medicine. You think I’m a waster. Technically, I suppose you’re right, but there’s more to it than that.”

Katya waved his explanations away. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said, moving towards the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Where do you think I’m going? I’m going to tell my uncle and Lieutenant Petrov that maybe everything you’ve told us is garbage. For all we know, it was the filth in that bottle talking.”

“I’ve told you the truth.” He was quiet, firm, as if convincing her was the only thing that mattered.

She laughed bitterly. “The whole truth?”

“I’ve told you the truth,” he insisted. “You want more of it? Then listen.”

They looked at each other in silence for a minute. Then Katya drew the chair out from under the chair and sat down, facing Kane as he sat on his bunk. “Okay,” she said, exuding cynicism. “I’m listening.”

Kane suddenly seemed uncertain what he was going to say. Making up his mind, he opened the drawer and took out the loading-bottle. The thick black liquid sloshed lazily inside.

“I’m going to have to fill in a few details first. You need to know exactly what this stuff is to understand. To understand why I have to use it. You don’t know much about Earth, do you? That blasted war closed the door on your roots for you and your contemporaries. If you’re anything to go by, the Russalkin don’t much care for their old world.”

“Why should we? You invaded us! You wanted to bring your dirty, wasteful ways here and, when we wouldn’t just let you stroll in to take what you wanted, you invaded!”

“Did we? Somebody once said that history belongs to the victor. As I think I’ve already told you, that war was never won one way or the other. Earth just decided it was too expensive. The Leviathan was their last shot. When it was lost, they just gave the whole thing up as a bad job. You didn’t win a war; you just won a battle at most. Earth hasn’t finished with Russalka yet. The failure of the Leviathan to exterminate the lot of you has given you some breathing time, which — incidentally — you can thank me for.”

Katya looked at him with disgust. “I should thank you for being a reject? I was there, remember? I heard what the Leviathan said about you. You were as useless to the Leviathan as you are to us now. I’m not sure thanks would be enough. Maybe we should throw you a big state banquet or something for services to redundancy.”

“Such sarcasm in one so young,” Kane said wryly. “Yes, the Leviathan rejected me. Yes, that saved your world, at least if has for the last ten years. But Petrov was right. I was extensively tested. I was compatible.” He held up the bottle again, rolling it slightly to make the viscous fluid lap against the glass walls. “This stuff is called Sin. There’s a complicated literary reason for calling it that; I won’t bore you with it. Just some biochemist with pretensions of grandeur coming up with a smart-arse name. It is a narcotic in the strict dictionary definition. It is incredibly addictive; one dose normally causes full dependency. As a way of having a good time, it rates slightly lower than having your eyes burnt out with red-hot wire loops. The first dose you have will make you a little light-headed, probably nauseous too. After that, you feel nothing at all when you take it. You might as well be giving yourself a shot of sterile saline.”

Katya was wondering how good her understanding of the wasters’ vice was. “I thought the idea was it made you feel good?”

“Not Sin. It’s the ultimate progression of what drug dealers want in a drug. Total dependency. Sin doesn’t make you feel good; it addicts you and then, if you don’t get regular doses, it kills you.” He looked at the bottle with a strange expression somewhere between loathing and longing. “Sin was never created to give wasters some pathetic escape from reality. It was created to enslave. The Terran government, when Earth finally got one after the collapse, commissioned this stuff. One injection and you’ve got a slave for life. It doesn’t affect the performance of their duties, but if they don’t get another dose when the last one starts to wear off, they descend into Hell, one ring at a time. It’s indescribable, foul. Nobody willingly takes this stuff, Katya.”

She looked at him, her mouth open in shock. Her anger of only a few minutes ago had quite gone, replaced by pity and disbelief that people could do such a thing to another human being. “Before you came, they used it on you? To make you obey orders?”

He was surprised. “Heavens, no. This stuff was banned sixty years ago.” He smiled wanly at her obvious confusion. “I managed to secure a copy of the formula and synthesised it before I left Earth. Katya, I used it on myself.” He put the bottle away before continuing. “It was my insurance policy. When I left Earth, I had visions of what Russalka would be like. A colony world fallen into barbarism, people capable of the most brutal, merciless things. That’s what I believed when I offered myself to the Leviathan programme. As the day came closer, I started having doubts. I wasn’t sure if I’d want to be a part of such a devastating attack if it turned out the situation wasn’t right. I wasn’t a soldier, you see. My motives… it wasn’t patriotism. So, I made Sin and smuggled it aboard.” He frowned as he thought back. “Russalka wasn’t anything like I’d expected. I just found a hardy race of survivors trying to hang on. This should never have come to a war. There should have been negotiations, we should have sent diplomats, tried to salvage something from the mess. Instead we sent ships and troops and certain death in the form of the Leviathan. If I let it interface with me, I had no idea what it would do to me. My personality might have been destroyed, my doubts about the war lost. I had to escape.”

Katya nodded slowly. She was beginning to understand. “And the only way you could get away was to be rejected. So you used the Sin, knowing it would interfere with the interfacing process.”

Kane leaned back against the bulkhead and crossed his arms. “You are clever. Everybody says so.”

“But, the addiction..?”

“Permanent.”

“There must have been some other way,” she protested, “some other drug?”

He shook his head. “No. Believe me. I researched it very thoroughly. If anything else could have done the trick reliably, I’d have used it. It had to be that stuff, though. You can imagine how I felt when I finished the database search and only that…” he nodded at the drawer, “…would do. I was going to be sacrificed one way or the other. The only question was would I be sacrificed to Sin or the Leviathan?” He paused. “That sounds very biblical, doesn’t it?”

“So, you really did stop the Leviathan?”

“Without undue modesty, yes, I did. I wish I could have done it by just pulling out a fuse or by pissing through a transformer cover but, as you saw, the Leviathan is very touchy about letting people near its vitals.” He stopped, thoughtful. Then he reached into his jacket pocket. “Which brings me onto this.”

Before he could show Katya what he had, the communicator mounted on the wall clicked into life. “Kane?” It was Tasya’s voice, sounding distracted and puzzled. “Come to the bridge immediately.” She’d broken the connection before Kane had a chance to reply and he glared at the communicator with frustration.

“It’s always something, isn’t it?” he said peevishly to Katya and his theatrical irritation made her smile. “Come on, you’re as much a part of all this as anyone.”

As she followed him out of the cabin, she noticed on a bookshelf by the door the small maser pistol she’d used to hold Kane at gunpoint aboard the Novgorod. It felt strange and unexpected to see it abandoned like that and, acting on an impulse she barely understood, she picked it up and slipped it in her pocket.

On the bridge, Tasya was in the captain’s chair. She made no effort to relinquish it when Kane entered, but neither did he make any move towards it, instead perching on the edge of an inactive console. “Well, what’s so fascinating?”

Tasya nodded at the main screen. “Our large lumbering friend has developed a sense of direction again.”

Katya was already looking at the screen as Tasya spoke. The Leviathan had, indeed, pulled itself out of the doldrums and was travelling with a definite sense of purpose. But, she noticed, it wasn’t heading north towards Lemuria. Instead, it was heading roughly easterly, perhaps eighty degrees. “Where’s it going?”

“Not sure yet, Ms,” said the sensors operator. “Working on it.”

Katya looked around and saw the navigator’s position was empty. She knew the Novgorod’s navigator had died in the pirate attack. It seemed that the pirates had lost their own to the combat drone. Without asking permission, she sat at the post and pulled on the headset. Behind her Tasya shot a glance at Kane, who just smiled slightly and shrugged.

Katya took a few moments to familiarise herself with the layout of the position’s interface and a few moments more to reorganise it to her liking. The Terran-designed interface wasn’t hugely different from its Russalkin counterpart, but that was hardly surprising. There had to be a point where the interface couldn’t be improved much further and all versions would tend towards that. The only thing she could think of that might move it on would be interfacing directly with the computer. An image of the Leviathan’s interface throne loomed in her mind and she pushed it away, nauseated. No, she’d stick with the sort of interface you could walk away from afterwards.

She requested the sensor data via her console and fed it to the navigational systems. It was simple stuff; she’d done far more complicated plots to get her card. When she was satisfied she’d got it right, she issued the data to the main screen. A relief map of Russalka sprang up upon the screen. Marked in exaggerated size was the Vodyanoi and, not nearly so exaggerated, the Leviathan, the pair hanging between the submerged mountain ranges like airships traversing a valley. Katya tapped in a command and a red line sprang out of the Leviathan’s prow, streaking away until it was lost off the edge of the screen. Katya pulled back the viewpoint, further and further until some objects appeared, the red line of the Leviathan’s projected path running neatly through the tight cluster. Katya selected them and zoomed rapidly in.

Kane slowly stood, his face grim. “That would make a lot of sense.”

Tasya stood too, but her expression was in stark contrast to Kane’s. Where he seemed sanguine, she was horrified. “The Yagizba Conclaves!”

Katya could see Kane’s point, but she couldn’t move herself to feel empathy with Tasya. The Yagizba Conclaves were a confederation of floating towns. The fact they spent most of their time on Russalka’s angry surface was strange enough when they could withdraw easily to the serene depths, but the Yagizban also bore reputations of arrogance and vile eccentricities. They were, however, also the production powerhouses for the whole planet. In their robot factories were built almost all the machines that the submarine communities depended upon. Yes, there were other production facilities elsewhere, but Yagizban technology was of a consistently high quality and reasonably priced. When the war against Earth had opened, their floating cities had been obvious targets, especially since the Conclaves were the only serious users of aircraft and had floating airstrips dotted around the seas. The first Terran attacks had sunk every one of the airstrips and two of the smaller towns before the others had managed to flood their ballast tanks and sink to a safe depth of their own volition and choosing.

The Yagizban had been the backbone of the resistance, supplying boats and war materiel wherever it was needed. Towards the end, however, even their resources had drawn thin. It was just as well, Katya reflected, that the Terrans’ had drawn even thinner.

The Conclaves had remained aloof from the victory celebrations when the embattled Russalkin finally realised that the Terrans had given up. They had pulled together what floating towns they had left and moved off to rebuild. Now they held their distance from the rest of the planet’s settlements, supplying technology as they had always done and being paid in resources but never going any further towards integrating themselves. Uncle Lukyan called them a strange people. Katya had heard others call them much worse.

She zoomed in still further until the mapping image resolved into a cluster of five main domes and perhaps eight smaller ones. The red line ran unerringly right through the middle of the group. “It means to destroy our main means of production.”

“It would seem so.” Despite his words, Kane seemed unconvinced. “Lemuria can breathe easy, at least for the moment.” He rubbed his chin and stared at the screen, deep in thought.

“If it attacks them, we’ve lost before we start,” said Tasya. Her face was taut with some emotion. Concern? Indecision? Fear? Katya couldn’t identify it, but she would never have expected it on the Chertovka’s face, whatever it was. Even from their brief acquaintance, Tasya had only ever seemed to run from grim determination to grim humour. “We have to warn them.”

“We can’t, Tasya,” said Kane gently. “You know we can’t.”

“Why not?” said Katya.

Kane turned and spoke abruptly, angered at her breaking into his conversation. “Because we don’t carry a long wave array. Who would we want to talk to? And if we use a narrow-beam submarine transmission, it will go straight past the Leviathan who will certainly intercept it and probably jam it. If we’re lucky, that’s all it would do.”

Katya decided not to ask what might happen if they were unlucky. Instead, she turned back to her console, trying to hide the fact that her cheeks had turned red. Kane had been right to bark at her, she knew; butting in like that had just made her look like a big-mouthed kid.

She busied herself with the navigational data, trying to take her mind off what an idiot she was. She concentrated on plotting and replotting the Leviathan’s course, on the small chance that she had made some sort of childish mistake in her earlier plots, but no. Every time she went through the stages, the red line still struck neatly through the middle of the Conclaves. It was a sharp piece of navigating on the part of the Leviathan, she thought. Considering that the Yagizba Conclaves weren’t even permanently anchored…

A horrible thought occurred to her. The Yagizba Conclaves weren’t permanently anchored. Ten years ago, they’d been in an entirely different part of the Russalkin ocean.

“Hail the Leviathan.” Kane’s sudden order cut across her train of thought and she looked up at him in confusion.

“What?” Lukyan roused himself from where he’d been leaning against the wall looking over the sensor officer’s shoulder. “Are you mad? You’ve said yourself that monstrosity is trigger-happy. If an active sonar ping is enough to put it on the warpath, what will it make of a tight-beam transmission right up its baffles?”

Kane looked seriously at him. “I am very much afraid, very much afraid that the situation has changed, and not for the better. Communications, hail the Leviathan.”

The communications officer looked at him uncertainly and looked back at Tasya for confirmation. She seemed worried herself, not the confident and commanding personality Katya was used to at all. Finally she nodded quickly, as if wanting the act over and done with.

With obvious misgivings, the communications officer opened a channel. “Leviathan from Vodyanoi, Leviathan from Vodyanoi. Come in, please.”

“Put it on the speakers,” ordered Kane. Immediately the bridge was filled with the gentle hiss of an empty communications channel, rising and falling slowly. They listened in silence for almost a minute before Kane ordered another hail.

No happier than last time, the communications officer complied. “Leviathan from Vodyanoi, Leviathan from Vodyanoi. Are you receiving, please?”

Silence was the only reply. Kane waited impatiently. After a minute there was still no response. “Sensors, any change in the Leviathan’s speed and heading?” The sensors officer shook his head without looking away from his instruments. On Katya’s console, the red line never wavered. Kane grunted with frustration. “Hail it again.”

The communications officer looked beseechingly at Tasya, but she only nodded curtly. For the third time, he sent a hail.

This time, Leviathan spoke.

“This is… is Leviath…” The rest of the sentence seemed to fade away. They waited for a moment, but nothing more came.

“Hail it again,” said Kane slowly, brooking no argument.

“Leviathan from Vodyanoi, Leviathan from…”

“This… is… Lev… i… a…” Every syllable seemed to be a gargantuan effort. Katya listened to it with a mixture of trepidation and hope. Perhaps Tokarov had somehow managed to sabotage it. Even its voice, so controlled and sterile before, seemed shot through now with uncertainty and, what was that? Fear? Fear; now she realised it had been fear on Tasya’s face. How odd. But not as odd as a machine showing fear. That was so…

“Oh no,” she said out loud. “Oh no!”

The voice of the Leviathan continued, still halting, but becoming stronger now. “This is… Leviath… This… This… is… I… I am…”

Katya couldn’t speak anymore. Her hands were over her mouth in revulsion and terror and in pity. Kane’s eyes were shut as he awaited the inevitable.

“I…” the machine’s voice was strong now, certain, “…am…” and it contained tones and undertones that had never been programmed into it.

“Tokarov,” said Kane. “You fool.”

And the machine that was now more than a machine and the man who was now less than a human spoke as one, filling the bridge with their unified voice.

“I AM LEVIATHAN!”

Kane had called an immediate council of war with Tasya, Petrov, and even Uncle Lukyan. Katya, however, had been excluded. She felt she should have been insulted, but instead felt oddly relieved. She had hardly had a moment to herself since the Baby had left the locks. And how long ago had that been? She was losing track of time. Two days ago? Three? Brief moments of sleep had broken the time into awkward irregular lumps of recollection, and she longed to simply put her head down and sleep eight hours at a stretch so she could start counting days once more. She’d never thought that something as simple as a handful of hours sleep could mean so much to her.

Now she had a little while to collect her thoughts and stop pretending to have all the answers. On the one hand she was flattered that intelligent men like Kane and Petrov thought she, too, was intelligent. On the other, she just wanted to be divorced from responsibility for a little while. Just for a few minutes, she wanted to be fifteen-almost-sixteen again.

She found the senior officers’ mess, or what would have been the senior officer’s mess if the Vodyanoi still had any senior officers after the carnage at the mining complex. She thought it was empty at first and stepped in. By the time she realised her mistake it was too late to back out. Suhkalev was sitting in the corner at the far end of the bench at the table.

She hadn’t seen him at all since they’d arrived at the mine’s northern docking area and, she realised with a small shock, hadn’t thought of him at all since then either. Despite their successful sally against the Leviathan’s combat drone, he’d fallen completely off her list of things and people to worry about. She felt slightly ashamed for that and sat down on the opposing bench at the end nearest the door. She might spend a little time with him, but that didn’t mean it had to be spent very close to him.

He managed a wan smile as she sat. “I hear you’ve been having adventures. Been aboard the Leviathan.” He shook his head. “What’s happening there? Something to do with Lieutenant Tokarov. Nobody will give me a straight answer.”

Katya sighed. This was going to be difficult. Slowly, as much to explain recent events to herself as him, she went through the recent developments, the nature of the Leviathan’s artificial intelligence, its capability for synthetic intelligence and the fact that this capability had now been achieved. She didn’t explain why Kane had been unsuitable as the seed from which the Leviathan’s synthetic intelligence had been intended to grow ten years before. That was Kane’s business. She half wished she didn’t know about it either.

When she had finished, Suhkalev didn’t seem very much the wiser. “So the Leviathan must have absorbed Lieutenant Tokarov against his will?”

“Not according to Kane. The Leviathan was never programmed to expect anybody but a volunteer. The lieutenant would have had to sit in the interface chair himself.”

Suhkalev looked at her dubiously. “But the way you tell it, it’s suicide. Why would he do it after only a few hours? I can imagine a man doing it if he was trapped in there for months and months…” Like Kane had been, thought Katya. “…but he was only in there for, what? Three hours? Why would he do it?”

Katya shrugged; she had no idea. She wasn’t the only one.

The first thing Kane had asked Petrov as soon as the communications channel with the Leviathan was closed was, “Lieutenant Petrov, you know Tokarov best here. In your opinion, is he, was he sane?”

Petrov had not hesitated. “He’s a good officer, a rock solid man. I’ve entrusted my life to him on more than one occasion in the past. I would have done so again without any reservations. I cannot explain why he has done this.” For once, even Petrov’s cool demeanour seemed shaken. “I cannot explain it at all.”

All she could offer Suhkalev was, “Maybe we can board the Leviathan again, try and find out what happened.”

“You think it will let you?”

“Maybe. We can barely keep up with it at the moment, though, and the Vodyanoi’s a fast boat. The Baby wouldn’t have a chance. Anyway,” she said, changing the subject, “how are you? Aren’t the Novgorods talking to you still?”

“They’re not so bad, now. I think helping to kill that drone and get it’s IFF unit got me some respect. They’re glad a Fed was involved, even if it was just some punk from base security.”

“You can’t blame them. Secor mainly draws from the bases.” She looked at him, trying to work him out. “Why’d you join base security in the first place? You know everybody hates them.”

“Fast career track. I wouldn’t mind ending up in Secor. You’re bright, you must have thought of it.”

“Hah!” she laughed sarcastically. “For about half a second!” She could see him flushing with humiliation and made an effort to tone down her contempt. “Oh, c’mon. People are scared of Secor. I don’t want to scare people. It doesn’t matter how good the job is; they’ve got reputations out of horror stories. You can’t want that.”

He didn’t answer her or even meet her eyes. Her shoulders sagged with dismay. “That’s a selling point with you, is it? Look,” she got up to leave, “Suhkalev, there are better ways to get respect. What you did in the mine workings, staying cool getting that machine working with the drone bearing down on us, that was brave. That’s got you some respect. Real respect, not that fake stuff that Secor have. That’s just fear by another name. If that’s all you want, be my guest. I think you’re a better man than that.”

She left the officers’ mess and headed back to the small cabin she’d been given wondering whether her words had made any impact at all.

Moltsyn regarded her with hooded eyes. “And how long have you been in the Federal forces, Ms Kuriakova?”

Kane laughed. “She’s not with the FMA, major. She’s a civilian. Her clothes were ruined by seawater so she was given these aboard the Novgorod.”

Katya felt pathetically thankful as the major’s slightly threatening expression abruptly lightened, but there was also a spasm of guilt that she was escaping whatever fate the Yagizban had lined up for the FMA people. She felt like she was abandoning Petrov and the rest, and yet she still felt relief. She simmered at her own cowardice. The major didn’t help when he said, “Well, we’ll have to get you some proper clothes, Ms Kuriakova,” as if she was wearing filthy rags.

“No,” she said, with a little iron in her voice, “I’m fine with these. I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“Nonsense,” laughed Kane, even as he flashed her a don’t be stupid look. “I’m sure the major can find you something better than an old and, I hope you’ll forgive me for saying so, very ill-fitting uniform.”

“Yes, we can find you some civilian clothing when we reach the Conclaves.”

Katya pricked up her ears. “When will that be?”

The major checked his watch. “In about an hour, Ms Kuriakova.” He chuckled. “Can’t wait to be in some proper clothes, eh?”

She’d actually wanted to know so she could make a swift calculation as to how quickly the transport was flying — she estimated 600kph, perhaps a little more — but the major’s comment was revealing. He seemed to regard the FMA uniform as about as pleasant as a skin disease. She’d never been to the Yagizba Conclaves — very few had — and had never met anybody from there either but, even so, the difference in mindset, mores, and behaviour was surprising. She’d thought all Russalkin were as one; united by the war and unified in their hatred of Earth and trust in the Federal authorities. Yes, everybody grumbled about them, but there was no doubt that Federal leadership had brought the Terran invasion to a standstill and that the authorities did a good job in these difficult times. To meet somebody who regarded the FMA and its sister organisations with utter contempt was outside her experience and expectations.

Katya hugged herself against a chill that existed only in her mind. “Were there ever any pirates? Or was it just you?”

Kane smiled. “Nobody else has ever worked that out. No, we weren’t the only ones, but there were never more than five pirate vessels operating at any time. The transports could take us anywhere, drop us off and, as far as the Federals knew, it was another boat operating. You’ve seen the news reports. They thought there were as many as sixty pirate vessels out there and all the time it was just us, we few, keeping busy. If they’d stopped to think about it logically, they might have realised that there simply wasn’t enough trade to support that many pirates. They never did. You know, maybe they really don’t deserve to govern.”

“That’s why the Vodyanoi was so keen to bust you out. They couldn’t afford you talking under interrogation.”

“No, that would have been very bad for the Conclaves. I’m fairly feisty… I think I would have held out for a while. The Deeps, though, they have a bad, a fearsome bad reputation. Sooner or later, they’d have threatened to break a particularly favourite bone or dislocate some joint that I would rather stay correctly located and I’d have talked. It’s more or less impossible to break anybody out of the Deeps, so they always intended to rescue me before reaching the facility. Your little submarine was earmarked for interception as soon as that appalling little man Suhkarov commandeered it in his usual charmless fashion.”

“Or they might just have sunk us to stop you talking.”

“Yes,” replied Kane philosophically. “They might have sunk us. I like Tasya and, in her own faintly psychotic way, I think she likes me. She’d have fired without hesitation if she thought it was the only way, though.”

“Perhaps you can tell her, tell them, the Yagizbans, that there’s no need to hurt the Novgorod’s crew. You’ve already won the war. We can’t fight the Leviathan. Enough people have already died.”

“I know. I think they do too. That’s why Petrov and the rest are being held rather than being unceremoniously shot and dumped overboard. No point in starting the new world order with an unnecessary massacre.” He was speaking blithely, but Katya caught a note of bitterness there too.

“You’re on the winning side, Kane,” she said, “but you don’t sound very happy about it.”

Kane got up and paced the floor. “I’m happy that the FMA is finally going to be dissolved. It’s been a blight on the Russalkin ever since it was founded. It’s just a glorified customs and excise service, you know. How it was ever allowed to sprawl into so many other duties and roles I can’t imagine. Administrative creep, I suppose. Government by bureaucracy rarely bodes well.”

“It did the job.”

“It did it very badly. If it’s all you’ve ever seen, it’s hard to imagine other forms of government but they exist, I assure you. The Yagizban intend to run the planet as a meritocratic technocracy.”

Katya snorted derisively. “And what’s that?”

Kane stopped pacing and looked at her. “It means if you’re a good scientist, you get ahead. You have a good mind, Katya. You should do well.”

She ignored the compliment, if that was what it was meant to be. “And that’s it? No say in how things go? What if we don’t want a meritocratic technocracy? What then?”

“Not really your decision. It isn’t a democracy.”

“A what?”

“Never mind.” Kane checked his wristwatch. “Come on. I was supposed to collect you, not divulge all the Yagizbans’ nefarious schemes. Don’t let on that you already know. Let them have their moment of glory; it’s rude to spoil a gloat.”

“Thank you, Ms Kuriakova,” said Petrov. They were already in the lift and on their way to the bridge. The cars, although large, could only hold ten people fairly close together and Petrov had said it would be better to take in ten people who had enough room to get out quickly than sixteen and be packed in there like krill on a manta whale’s baleen. Lukyan had argued against Katya going in, but she had insisted on going as the only one amongst them who had been to the command deck and knew how it was set out. Petrov had agreed and taken the furious Lukyan aside, talking quietly to him for a few minutes until Lukyan’s rage subsided. “You can’t protect her forever,” she’d overheard. “It’s what she wants to do.” Lukyan had come back and stared at her for the longest time before saying she could go. Then he added that he was coming too and he’d tear the head off anybody who said otherwise.

“The plan is simple,” Petrov told the present crew. “We go in, deal with the guards, take their weapons and then it will probably turn into a fire fight with the remaining troopers. An alert will almost certainly be called. When that happens, the other half of our number will make their way to the docks and secure a boat. We target the Leviathan, launch everything we can and then destroy the command stations so they cannot issue destruct orders to the torpedoes after we leave. We head straight for the decks in time to board the boat that has been commandeered for us. Any questions?”

There were none. Even to Katya, the plan seemed childishly simple. The best plans were always the simple ones, she’d heard. This was her chance to find out.

“Ready?” Petrov asked Olya. She nodded and hefted the carbine. “Good. You go right, I’ll go left.” The lift door opened.

The size of the FP-1’s bridge awed Katya a little even now, but her attention was drawn to something else. Or rather the lack of something else. The bridge was deserted. The idea slithered through her mind like mercury on steel and came out of her mouth before the doors had even finished opening. “It’s a trap!”

Petrov slapped the door close control but it didn’t respond, overridden by the main computer. “Down!” he shouted. Olya wasn’t listening; she was still following Plan B, unaware that they were being forced to come up with a Plan C. She stepped out of the lift and headed right. There was no guard there and she stood uncertainly for a moment, looking for a target. Somewhere over by the starboard hologram projector, there was a crack of a maser, and she sprawled onto the deck.

“Novgorods!” Lukyan roared the battlecry, and surged out of the lift like a torpedo from its tube.

“Pushkin!” shouted Petrov after him. “Don’t be a fool, man!” Then he looked around at his huddled crew and realised that the only choice left to them might be whether to die fighting or trapped in that lift. “Novgorods!” he bellowed, running forward, the tiny maser pistol in his hand cracking repeatedly.

It seemed that the Yagizban had been expecting the escaped prisoners to behave rationally and surrender. There was a stunned silence that lasted the few seconds before a lucky shot from Petrov’s maser caught a poorly concealed trooper in the arm and he fell screaming. Then the shooting really started.

Lukyan snatched up Olya’s carbine and swung himself up against a wall behind a support stanchion. Using the small rifle as a large pistol he started laying down suppressing fire, giving the rest of the Novgorods a chance to scuttle out of the lift and to the cover of the nearest console stations.

Katya slid frantically across the floor until she reached cover. Petrov ducked down beside her, checking the charge left in the pistol.

“Not going quite to plan, lieutenant,” said Katya as maser bolts cracked overhead. She wondered at her own apparent unconcern, as if they were playing a game. Maybe she couldn’t take this seriously because she still wasn’t quite used to the idea of people trying to kill her. It was a good state of mind, she decided. If she really accepted the danger she was in, she might never move again.

“No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, Ms Kuriakova,” he replied, ejecting the pistol’s depleted cell and replacing it with a new one, fresh from the manufacturer’s wrapper. Katya was going to ask him where he’d got it and the decided that she didn’t care very much under the circumstances.

She looked over at Lukyan who was pushing himself as small as he could go behind the stanchion as a hail of maser bolts cracked and hissed off the metal. He saw her and shrugged, out of ideas himself. Katya smiled as bravely as she could manage and looked around. This was crazy, she concluded. There were nine of them altogether with only two guns between them. They should have had a contingency plan, but who could have guessed that they were heading into a trap? They weren’t going to be able to shoot their way out of this. Either they surrendered or… what?

Katya wished that Kane was there with them; they could definitely have done with his infuriating habit of thinking off at tangents, seeing possibilities beyond the obvious. She made a mental effort and imagined him there, pinned down with the rest of them, and then she imagined what he might do, what ideas he might have.

He’d say that not only their plan, but their plan’s objectives were no longer possible. Specifically the secondary objective of taking the bridge. That simply was not going to happen with them pinned down by any number of troopers…

“Give it up, Petrov!” shouted a familiar voice. “Don’t get anybody else killed for no reason!”

…and the Chertovka. They were caught between the She-Devil and the deep black sea. But the primary aim had always been launching the attack on the Leviathan and perhaps that, at least, was still possible. Whatever they did, they had better do it quickly; the alarms had been blaring for the last minute and the rest of the Novgorods would already be on the way to capture a boat. They’d fight to the last ensign to hold it in the hope that Petrov’s party would be joining them. For their sakes as much as their own, they had to get out of there.

“How do you think they knew we were coming here, Petrov?” Katya asked.

He took a moment to fire a couple of blind shots over the edge of the console they were cowering behind before replying. “Monitoring the lift system, they must have been. Looks like they did find we’d gone after all, but just played it quiet.”

“So when they realised the lift was coming here, they just grabbed what troopers they could? That’s what I thought, too.”

Petrov nodded. “If they’d had more warning they’d have set up a crossfire across the lift door. We’d all be dead or recaptured by now.” He looked at her seriously. “What’s your point?”

“My point,” she swivelled onto her knees and slowly poked her head up as far as she dared. The rake of the console’s controls and the bulk of its monitor bank hid her from the trooper’s guns but allowed her to examine what was there. Typical Conclave interface and, as the Conclave’s supplied everybody else, that meant she was very familiar with the console’s operation. “My point is that we don’t need to take the bridge to open fire on the Leviathan.”

She accessed the console and reconfigured it to the targeting protocols. The fire controls were locked, but only at a low level to prevent accidental launch. It took her less than a minute to bypass them.

The firing had trickled to a halt for lack of targets. “Petrov!” called Tasya again. “You’re just delaying the inevitable. Your situation is hopeless. Surrender now and we’ll go easy on you and your people.”

Petrov was watching Katya with open admiration, not so much for her ability with the controls as thinking of doing this in the middle of a fire fight in the first place. “Yes, okay,” he called back vaguely, “I’ll think about it. Give us a minute.”

On the main holographic display, the Leviathan still surged through the waves towards FP-1. Suddenly a large red targeting reticle appeared framing the Leviathan. “Target acquired,” a computer announced.

Immediately there was pandemonium amongst the Yagizban. “What is going on?” demanded a voice Katya recognised as Major Moltsyn. “What the thunder is going on?”

“They’ve accessed the weapons systems, you idiot!” That was Tasya. “You! Lock them out!”

I don’t think so, thought Katya. She’d already prioritised her console and forced a system lockdown across the weapons multi-user protocols.

“I… I can’t, colonel,” she heard. “They’ve locked us out!”

Tasya again. Cold and very sincere. “If they fire, I will kill you.” Suddenly Katya understood why they called her the She-Devil. On her console, a series of options she didn’t understand came up. “What are lanterns?” she hissed at Petrov. “It says ‘Lanterns — 10%’ here.”

“Torpedoes set to constant active sonar. They don’t tend to last long but they light the target up like a phosphor worm for the rest of the torpedo spread. Set it to 20% of the spread — we want the Leviathan to know it’s being attacked.”

Katya quickly upped the ratio to twenty, clicked through the next couple of screens and was met with ‘Ready to fire — enter authorisation code.’

“Uh-oh.”

“What do you mean, ‘uh-oh’?” asked Petrov. He raised his head far enough to look at the screen. “Ah. Uh-oh.” He ducked back down again. “Listen to me, we’re not sunk yet. That’s not a security measure, it’s just another failsafe to make sure weapons aren’t fired accidentally. Go around it, through the system maintenance screens. Do you know how to get to those?”

“Are you kidding me?” said Katya, putting the request on hold and accessing the system maintenance screens. “Front end interfaces are for corridor rats. I can get around it.”

I think I can get around it, she added to herself. It didn’t appear that the Yagizban wanted to give her the chance. She was half aware of Petrov going flat on his belly and slithering off between the consoles before more of her attention was claimed by a new wave of maser bolts sizzling past her, cracking off bulkheads and supports. The attack came a moment later, troopers threading their way through the maze of consoles and abandoned seats at a run. Lukyan fired a scatter of shots into the middle of the Yagizban line causing a few troopers to dive for cover, but the ones close to the walls kept coming on. Then one right at the limit of the flank fell with a cry. Hardly had he vanished from sight behind a work station, than Petrov reared up, the fallen trooper’s assault maser blazing off shots in a wild suppression pattern. Caught unawares from the side, a couple of troopers were hit and fell wounded. The others took cover and returned fire, but Petrov had already vanished.

“Damn you snivelling cowards!” It was Tasya, her fury almost incandescent as she swept through the clutter of stations and consoles, indomitable and unstoppable. Lukyan fired on her but her return fire was so accurate that he was forced to break the partial cover of the stanchion and seek more complete protection behind a processor bank.

“Weapons free,” intoned the computer. “Launch in progress. Stand by.”

The room seemed to freeze but for every face turning to the main display. On the holographic image, green crosses trailing short green dotted tails were squirming away from the circle labelled FP-1 towards the arrowhead called LEV. Tasya looked at it for a long moment, anger and dismay working her features.

Then she saw movement and levelled her gun as Petrov rose, his rifle already aimed directly at her. Tasya was faster but Petrov was cooler, taking his time while her maser bolts fanned harmlessly around him. He returned fire, a three pulse burst, and she crumpled without a sound.

Then every console and all three displays in the place went dark. A moment later, they flickered back into subdued life, diagnostic data sliding across them.

Petrov was suddenly by Katya. “What did you do?” he demanded.

“Re-initialised their system. By the time it’s up and running again, it will be too late to stop the torpedoes.” She looked around at the dim flickering lights. “Can we go now?”

“Good time for it,” agreed Petrov. He stood up and laid down a withering fire on the Yagizbans, already in disarray from the reversal of the ambush and the loss of the Chertovka. Lukyan, a second lieutenant who’d taken Katya’s pistol, and another who’d grabbed a carbine dropped by one of the injured troopers all joined in. The Yagizban weren’t in flat retreat, but the FMA crew were able to force a pass to a secondary exit and went through in a run.

“Now what?” asked Lukyan from one side of the doorway as he laid down covering fire for the FMA withdrawal.

Petrov scattered some shots from his position on the other side of the door. “The docks. Let’s hope and pray the other party were able to secure a ride out of here.” As the last of their number ran crouching past them, Lukyan dragged the door shut and melted the lock with a welter of closely placed bolts.

“I can do this,” Suhkalev kept muttering to himself as he examined the controls, “I can do this.” The sweat beading his lip did not lend confidence. “The lift controls are normal contragravity but, these,” he waved at a display of inscrutably complex figures and status levels, “I don’t know what they are. They should be the thrusters, but I’ve never seen anything like them.”

Petrov thought back to the blue fire streaming from the engines of the transporter that had collected the Vodyanoi from the ocean. “They’re Goddard units. Space manoeuvre drive, almost reactionless. Rediscovering how to build them is something else they didn’t bother telling the FMA.”

“You know how they work?” asked Suhkalev with pathetic hope.

“Of course I don’t. The principle was lost during the original colonisation. Try and use the lift units to get us into the open air before engaging the thrusters. At least we won’t have walls in front of us when you light them up.”

Suhkalev visibly steeled himself and put his hand on the lift controls. As they wound up to power, the transporter jolted slightly on its landing-pylons. Slowly, the hydraulic shock absorbers extended as the aircraft lifted uncertainly from the deck. Almost immediately, one corner sagged lower than the others and the whole vehicle started to slowly drift to one side as it spun gently, if not actually out of control, certainly not entirely within it.

“What are you doing, Suhkalev?”

Suhkalev was barely listening. He was chanting “I can do this, I can do this, I can do this,” under his breath as he manually rebalanced the lifters, slowing the spin and angling the drift to take them under the open hatches.

Looking out of the cockpit window Petrov saw something to worry him. He walked back, keeping his balance by gripping the rails that ran along the ceiling for exactly that purpose until he was back in the crew disembarkation room aft of the flight deck. The remaining crew of the Novgorod looked up at him from where they sat cross-legged on the floor. All of them had weapons lying across their laps taken from the transporter’s arms locker. They looked about as confident as Petrov felt. “They’ve brought up some sort of support weapon. I don’t know what it is, but it’s about two metres long and looks like it’s shoulder-fired. Best shots to the door so they don’t have an easy time using it.”

Three Novgorods moved to the main external hatch, pleased to have something to do rather than sitting and waiting for Suhkalev to fly them into a steel wall.

The hatch slid open and the storm blew in. Suhkalev had managed to manoeuvre the transporter beneath the open hatch in the FP-1’s topmost landing area and was now gingerly making it ascend. The rate of climb was slow and it would be almost a minute before they were hidden from the Yagizban troopers scattered around the deck below, plenty of time for them to score several hits. The Novgorod’s best surviving shots braced themselves against the door frame and took aim.

The Yagizban weapons team had been drilled in using the rocket launcher, they had been trained in maintaining it and its ammunition, they had even been trained in how to carry it in victory parades. Nobody, however, had ever shown them what to do in the event of the target shooting back. As the first maser bolts, fired more in hope than expectation of hitting anything, came raining down from the escaping aircraft, the weapons team dumped the launcher and scattered for cover.

Interesting, thought Petrov. Once again they have the technology but they don’t have the training, or perhaps the will to fight. They want their toys to take all the risks for them. That’s a weakness.

It was not a weakness shared by all the Yagizban, though. The Chertovka was living up to her name, throwing terrified troopers out of her path as she made a bee-line for the discarded rocket launcher.

“A standard FMA reward bonus to whoever kills that woman,” said Petrov.

Bonuses were handed out by the FMA with miserly tight-fistedness. Instantly, all three rifle barrels twitched onto the new target and started firing careful bursts. Petrov knew that the chances of hitting her at this range from a moving platform with what felt like half of Russalka’s oceans pouring down on it were vanishingly small, but they only had to slow down her advance for the few seconds it would take the transporter to clear the lip of the hatch and get into the open sky.

Tasya was built of much sterner stuff than the rocket team, that much was clear. She zig-zagged from cover to cover, reaching the dropped weapon far too quickly for Petrov’s comfort. She was down on one knee with the launcher tube over her shoulder and her eye to the targeting scope inside five seconds. A second after that, fire flared from the rear of the tube and a rocket zipped from the front. Petrov heaved his snipers back inside and slammed the door shut. “Brace for impact!” he barked at his crew. The command was usually applied to a submarine crew when a torpedo was about to hit or the boat was about to ram or be rammed. Petrov had never used it except in exercises and hoped they would understand what he meant by it in this situation. They seemed to, as they scurried for places where they could hang on if the transporter was thrown about. He didn’t have time to make sure they were all safe, he was already throwing himself into the cockpit. He landed at full stretch, grabbed the supports at the back of the co-pilot’s seat and shouted at Suhkalev, “Thrusters! Now!”

Suhkalev had been listening to the situation in the disembarkation area over his headset and didn’t need telling twice. They were still an agonising five metres short of the hatch, but he cut the aft lifters and the transport suddenly swung nose upwards. The forward lifters whined alarmingly as they tried to take the full weight of the transporter by themselves and their status displays flashed red. Suhkalev was aware of Petrov’s grunt of surprise as he suddenly found himself dangling from the co-pilot’s chair by his arms but didn’t have time to pay him any more heed than that. Suhkalev reckoned he’d figured out the thruster controls. Now was the moment to discover whether he was right. Already the transporter was falling backwards, the forward lifters unable to take the whole weight.

I can do this, he thought, and opened the main thruster throttles.

“I don’t think they’ve managed to lay a finger on the Leviathan,” she reported. “It’s like fighting a shadow.” Another flash on a display board, sound converted into light for easy viewing. “That was the FP-1. She’s taking a real beating. She’ll sink if the Leviathan doesn’t cease fire.”

Lukyan didn’t comment on it. Instead he flicked the switch that activated the IFF unit.

Katya watched the green light on the Judas box cycle on and off, sending out an electronic lie to the Leviathan, that the Baby was its long lost #6 combat drone. “If it sees through this, Kane, what will it do?”

Kane considered. “If it was just the Leviathan, it would ignore it. If it detected us, it would kill us without hesitation, now its list of enemies is so extensive. But it’s not just the Leviathan. Its behaviour is moderated by Tokarov and I didn’t know Tokarov well enough to be able to make any guesses.”

“None of us did.” Lukyan’s voice was cold. “None of us. I still can’t understand how a man could… do that. It’s worse than suicide.”

“No.” Kane was quiet. “No, it’s a lot like suicide. If Zagadko was still alive - or Petrov - they might have been able to predict his behaviour. Especially Petrov. He’d have made captain soon enough. Good judge of character.”

They sat in silence. Katya had been trying not to think about the message the Vodyanoi had intercepted from the aircraft sent to hunt Petrov’s stolen transporter. So Tasya had shot them down. They were all dead, Petrov, Suhkalev and all the others. She thought back to how it had been Petrov who’d tried to comfort her in his own distant fashion when she’d thought her uncle was dead. “I liked him,” she said into the silence.

Another light flashed on her display, more insistent, brighter. At the same moment she realised what it was, the telltale pulsing tone started to sound through the hull.

“Torpedo!” called Lukyan. He was already pulling the steering yoke over and down. “Evading!”

Katya remembered the last time he’d done this, he’d trusted the Navcom to perform the evasion. Of course, on that occasion they were hit multiple times and almost died.

She felt the Baby pitch sharply and perform a corkscrew descent as Lukyan made for the next deepest thermal layer scattering noisemakers in their wake. Through the din in her headset, she could still plainly hear the fast pulses of the Yagizban torpedo’s sonar and the hiss of its impeller motor until, abruptly, it stopped. The pinging ceased altogether and the hum of the impeller turned to a dying shriek even as it diminished in amplitude.

“There’s something wrong with it,” she reported. “I think it’s sinking?” She checked for an IC resolution and it confirmed that the torpedo was tumbling into the depths. A moment later it exploded. She looked at the others. “I have no idea what happened there.”

Kane looked around as if he could see through the hull. “I can make a guess.”

Lukyan nodded and killed the Baby’s engines, neutralising their buoyancy so they coasted along for a few metres under no power. Katya suddenly understood.

“The Leviathan?”

Lukyan looked grim, and there was misery in his voice when he said, “Why didn’t I try harder to leave you behind, Katya?”

“Where there’s life, there’s hope,” said Kane. “They say that where I come from.” He coughed. “Of course, they say all sorts of rubbish, but I think that one’s true. While we live, nothing is certain. We walked out of the Leviathan once; perhaps we can do it again.”

Lukyan was unconvinced. “And what if it just sinks us?”

“You’re a cheerful soul, aren’t you? Think about it; if it had wanted us dead, it would hardly have bothered stopping that torpedo. It saved us for a reason.” They gripped the sides of their seats as the Baby was abruptly jerked upwards. “We’re about to find out why.”

Kane raised his index finger in admonishment. “Now, I never actually said the Leviathan was a submarine. Not just a submarine”

Katya was only half listening. “This explains so much. Using lasers underwater is so incredibly inefficient. Tasya said it was a crazy way of arming the drones. Not if they were always meant to operate in the air.” She looked up at Kane. He looked faintly embarrassed. “Or space. This thing is space capable, isn’t it? It’s a starship?”

“How did you work that out?”

“Every time you talked about how you came to Russalka, you said you were inside this thing. That doesn’t really make sense unless there was no transporter starship carrying it. I actually wondered how big a ship would be needed to carry the Leviathan here and what happened to it after it finished its job. There’s no mention of such a large Terran ship in the war records I’ve read. So there never was such a vessel. The Leviathan came here under its own power.” She frowned. “Why did you never tell anybody? Why did you let everybody carry on thinking this was just a submarine?”

Kane sat down on one of the Baby’s outrider rigs and sighed. “I’ve been having doubts about the Yagizba Conclaves for a while. I was in no hurry to tell them that a starfaring battleship was about to hand itself over to them. Actually, that’s not quite true. The Leviathan’s stardrive is slag; they only work once. Still, it can reach space. The important thing was that it would have given the Yagizban control of the planet from orbit. I wasn’t sure if they deserved that advantage.” He scratched his nose. “I wasn’t sure if anybody on this benighted planet deserves that.”

Katya chose to ignore that last comment and looked out of the porthole again. “Why has it only chosen to fly now?”

“Because it’s hurt. Its stealth systems work well underwater, not so well in the air or space, but I think its stealth must have been damaged by the explosion. Probably its hull integrity too. It uses a forcefield to lend its hull strength.” He noticed Katya looking blankly at him. “A forcefield. It’s… well, it’s complicated. A projected energy field that exhibits some of the qualities of matter.” From her expression, that was not a good explanation. He gave up. “All you need to know is that the Leviathan’s skin is protected by a very powerful forcefield. It deflects attacks that actually reach it and, just as importantly, holds the hull together when it’s under stress. It allowed the Leviathan to rest far deeper than a conventional boat’s hull could bear. Between losing its stealth and its hull not being able to bear the same pressures, it feels vulnerable. It’s running for high ground where it knows it can’t be reached.”

“Taking us with it.”

“It has to prioritise its problems. We’re probably pretty low in the list. It will use its damage control systems to fix itself up and then, when it’s got a minute, it will kill us.”

“I know. We have to get out of here.” She looked down through the porthole. Russalka looked a long way away. “Any ideas?”

Kane walked over to join her and they watched the clouds become distant. “In a word, no.” He cocked his head and admitted, “Well, one, but it isn’t to get us out of here. Let me show you something.” They walked to the console Kane had been studying. “The Leviathan uses two power sources. When it can get water, it uses simple electrolysis to break it down into oxygen and hydrogen and stores the hydrogen.”

“To use as fuel for a fusion power plant. Any boat much bigger than the Baby does that.”

“True, but fusion doesn’t give the large amounts of quick I need it now power something as big as this needs in, say, combat. Which brings us to the second power source.” He tapped the display where a figure read 5.56Kg.

“So educate me. What masses 5.56 kilograms?”

Kane looked seriously at her. “Antimatter. It certainly didn’t have that much when I left it. It must have been sitting at the bottom of the sea for ten years using fusion energy to make the stuff. Something else it’s not supposed to do. If it had lost power to the antimatter containment field and it had come in contact with the side of its container… Katya, do you have the faintest idea what antimatter is?”

She shook her head. “I was hoping you’d tell me that.”

Kane sighed. “Simply put, it’s matter’s evil twin. When matter and antimatter come in contact, they obliterate each other, right down to the subatomic level. BANG!” Katya jumped. “Total conversion into energy! The amount of the stuff the Leviathan is carrying would produce a staggeringly huge explosion. It would have been suicide to destroy the Leviathan while it was still in the ocean; it would have caused a shockwave that would have travelled around the world wreaking untold damage. At least we can prevent that.”

Katya looked curiously at the console readings. “How?”

“By making it explode up here where it won’t do any harm. I can access the antimatter containment field from here, turn it off. A few minutes later it will decay to the point where the antimatter comes in contact with the matter wall of its container, and that will be that. The jig will be over for the Leviathan.”

“And us.”

“And us. Yes. What can I say? This always had the air of a suicide mission. All we can do is to try and protect Russalka.”

Katya thought about it. Was it really such a loss, to give her life up like this? She had no family left. She had never really had any friends. It was a shame that the people down there would never know the sacrifice she made for them, but that was little enough compared to the lives that would be saved. “Why should you care, anyway? You’re not even Russalkin.”

“We’re all human,” said Kane simply. He gestured at the controls. “What do you say? Shall we?”

Katya nodded quickly, not trusting herself to speak. Kane reached for the controls, his hands hesitated above them momentarily, his fingers twitched once, then he tapped out some instructions. It took him less than five seconds to sign their death warrants. When he was finished, he stepped back.

“It’s done. The Leviathan will try and run auxiliary power to the containment field, but I’ve put other demands on it. It will only delay the inevitable by a little while.”

Somebody once said that the prospect of imminent death concentrates the mind. Katya looked around the chamber with all its exposed workings, units and equipment as a collection of entities for the first time instead of just a setting for her last moments. “What,” she asked slowly, an idea starting to form, “is the pressure in low Russalkin orbit?”

Kane was surprised by the question. “The pressure? So close to zero to make little difference.”

Katya walked over to the Baby and ran her hand over the hull. “The Baby’s rated down to four kilometres of ocean on her back. If she can stand that number of positive atmospheres, I’m sure she can bear no atmosphere at all.”

Kane stood up very straight. “Are you suggesting we use it as an escape pod?” Katya nodded, but Kane shook his head. “Yes, we’ll get caught in Russalka’s gravity and re-enter the atmosphere, but we’d come down like a meteorite. We’d burn up.”

“We have to be travelling fast to burn on re-entry.” And she pointed at the combat drones.

Kane looked at them, understanding visibly growing in his face. “Use the drone’s antigravity systems to neutralise most of the Baby’s mass? Like your Novgorod gambit?”

“Like my Novgorod gambit. I’m only ever going to have one bright idea in my life; I’m trying to get as much use out of it as I can.”

“Don’t do yourself down. If the drone’s AG units were activated once we were inside the outer atmosphere, it would be like deploying drogue parachutes. We might just survive it.”

“It’s a plan. Re-energise the antimatter containment while we get this worked out and you can switch it off again when we’re about to leave.”

Kane’s jubilant expression faded. “Ah,” he said quietly.

Katya’s own face fell. “You can’t.”

“If I could, so could the Leviathan. I had to lock out any attempt to re-activate it.” He moved quickly to the console. “The Leviathan’s doing everything it can to keep the antimatter safe, but it’s losing. We’ve got fifteen minutes at most, probably less.” He gestured hopelessly at the drones. “It would take that long to dismantle a drone to get the antigravity unit out and it would take at least two for us to stand a chance. There’s just no time. I’m sorry, Katya, it was a good idea. Fate doesn’t come much crueller.”

Katya wasn’t listening. She was already at one of the combat drones, opening its inspection hatch. “We’re not finished yet. If we can’t get the unit out in time, the whole damned drone is just going to have to come with us!”

She had the first drone’s contragravitic system’s fired up, before Kane got over his surprise. “I like you, Katya Kuriakova,” he said finally. “You’re mad, but I like that in moderation.”

She was too busy wrestling the great cylinder -- rendered almost weightless but still with all its inertia, out of its cradle and over to the Baby -- to reply. She did notice that he wasn’t helping, though.

She looked up from working on a second drone to see him opening a locker and pulling out a one piece suit, white and helmeted. “What’s that?” She bent back to her work.

“EVA suit. Extra-vehicular activity, that is. A spacesuit.” He pulled off his jacket and boots and started shrugging the suit on over the rest of his clothes. “Pretty good underwater, too.”

“Is there one for me?”

“No, but you won’t need one. You’ll be in the minisub.”

She stopped and looked suspiciously at him. “And where will you be?”

He pointed under the Baby. “Opening that hatch. It has to be done from the console. The chamber will have decompressed before I can get back so I’ll need an air supply. The plan is I open the hatch, run over and come in through your minisub’s dorsal airlock. You, meanwhile, sit tight in the pilot’s seat and bring the drones online slowly as we start to fall through the atmosphere. Like it?”

“Not much, but I don’t have anything better. When you’ve got that thing on, fetch me six connector leads from locker two and the tape gun in locker four.”

“Aye-aye, captain,” replied Kane and hurried himself into the suit.

‘Aye-aye, captain,’ thought Katya. ‘Your minisub’s airlock.’ He’s right; Uncle Lukyan never made a secret of his will. I own the Baby. I am her captain. My first command.

She busied herself with the drone before the thought that the Baby might also be her last command had time to crystallise.

The Baby’s hull was pocked at frequent intervals with socket covers, each covering two sockets that allowed her to interface with equipment attached to her hull. A standard minisub would never be the master of any trade, so it had to content itself being a jack of many. The Baby had, at various times, mounted manipulator waldo arms, extra light banks, cable laying gear, a specialised magnetometer array and a thermic lance. It was unlikely the manufacturers had ever imagined her with two combat drones strapped to her hull. Katya had been counting on the drones complying with the same interface standards as the Vodyanoi, which she had noticed used the types of plugs and sockets that were Russalka standard. It made sense; Russalka may have won its independence from Earth, but the Terran technical conventions they’d inherited were well tried and tested. There was little point in changing things simply for a misguided show of independence from the old world. Even so, she gave an audible sigh of relief when the connector cables snapped home at both ends and the communication lights glowed, showing that the Baby had successfully detected the drone’s anti-gravity units and could control them.

Kane looked at the web of metal tape that Katya had created to clamp the drones in position to make sure the aft hatch and the dorsal airlock were clear and accessible. Satisfied, he hurried back to the console and checked the state of the Leviathan. “How are we doing?” called Katya as she stowed Kane’s coat and boots into a locker.

“Just barely in time. Two minutes, I think. Get that hatch sealed, we’re doing it now.”

Katya slammed that aft hatch and locked it shut, made her way forward to the plot’s seat and strapped herself in. She checked the Judas box — all lights were green. “Just you stay that way,” she muttered.

Outside, Kane sealed his suit’s helmet, made a quick check that its life-support systems were working correctly, and turned his attention to the active console. The antimatter containment was in a bad way. He guessed it would fail in ninety seconds, perhaps even less. He pulled up the ship’s operations controls and ordered the docking bay’s hatch to open. The control flashed green and the hatch started to dilate. Somewhere a decompression warning sounded.

“Category one,” said a voice in Kane’s ear, so close he turned expecting somebody to be standing by him. It took him a moment to realise it was coming through his suit’s communicator. A sense of great and immediate peril, even beyond the Leviathan’s imminent death, overtook him and he started to run for the Baby. He was a metre away when the grappling cable snaked down from the chamber’s roof and grabbed his leg. Suddenly he was dangling upside down over the Baby. He could see how wide the hatch had opened beneath the minisub and knew it must start falling slowly through in any moment. He reached and his hand barely touched the rail beside the dorsal lock before he was pulled still higher.

“Kane?” Katya’s voice was loud inside the suit’s helmet. “What was that? What’s happening?”

Kane swung up and grabbed the tentacle-like cable. He tugged frantically, but it didn’t budge a centimetre. “I… Unh! The Leviathan. It won’t let me go!” He felt utterly helpless and allowed himself to flop limply like a rag doll in the cable’s grip. “Sorry, Katya. You’re going to have to make the descent yourself.”

“No! No! I will not…”

“Out of our hands, Katya. For what it’s worth, I’m glad I met you.”

“Shut up! I’m not letting that thing have you!”

“Look after yourself, Katya. Don’t think about me. You need to…”

The tentacle dropped him. He fell slowly; the chambers artificial gravity had been deactivated when the hatch started to open. Even with only Russalka’s gravity, weakened by their distance above it, he still hit the top of the Baby hard and rolled off it. As he lay stunned, he heard the Leviathan speak to him for the last time.

“Go.”

Beside him, the Baby fell through the hatch, but all he could do was gaze up at the cable retracting lazily into the ceiling. Its voice… there had been something about its voice…

Suddenly, he realised his ride was leaving without him. He rolled over and pushed himself out after the Baby, shunting himself off from the hatch edge. It was little enough impetus, but just barely enough to catch up with the minisub. He grabbed one of the metal strips that secured the drones and then quickly transferred his grip to a stanchion rail running down beside the aft hatch before the sharp-edged tape had a chance to cut his glove.

“Kane! Speak to me! I can’t see you!”

“I’m clear of the Leviathan. I’m hanging onto the Baby.”

“You’re clear? How?”

“I don’t know.” He looked upwards to where he could see the diminishing shape of the Leviathan between his feet, accelerating hard away from Russalka, away from them. In a moment, it was almost too small to see “It just… let me go.”

“Can you reach the dorsal hatch?”

He laughed. “No. Not a chance. I’m only holding on with one hand. I can’t move anywhere.”

There was silence for a moment. Then Katya said, “Kane, even with the drones, the passage through the atmos…”

Behind them, the Leviathan exploded. For a moment, it glowed brighter than any sun as matter and antimatter combined in its heart and eliminated one another, changing directly to energy in the process. In an instant, the vessel, its huge but corrupt artificial mind and the bodies of two brave men were turned to plasma.

Kane was looking away and that saved his sight as the flash enveloped them, and made the cloud tops so far below turn to a rolling sea of white fire for achingly long seconds. Kane’s helmet filled with interference as the communication frequencies were jammed by the brief burst of radiation generated by the explosion. Kane knew his suit would absorb it and that the minisub’s hull would protect Katya. What he was more worried about was the possibility of debris raining across them and puncturing his suit.

Long seconds passed, but he was not perforated by a storm of metal particles travelling at hyperkinetic speeds.

This was small comfort. The re-entry into the atmosphere was still sure to kill him.

He heard Katya’s voice penetrate and grow in clarity as the radiation died away. “Kane? Are you there? Did you say something?”

“I just said that today has just been one long round of jumping out of frying pans into successively larger fires.”

“What? I don’t understand you.”

“I’ll explain later.” The Baby was starting to shudder as they entered the thickening atmosphere. Should there be a later, he thought. “Activate the drones, Katya.”

“I already have. We need to get you in quickly. You won’t be able to hang on during the turbulence.”

Feeling the strain on his arm, Kane strongly doubted he would even last until the turbulence. “Don’t worry about me.”

“I’ve heard your brave farewell speech once, Kane. You’re not dying today.”

Kane’s heart froze as he realised what was going through her mind. “Do not open the hatch, Katya! You will die!”

“What kind of idiot do you take me for?” He was never so glad to have somebody talk to him so contemptuously. “I’ve got an idea, but you’ll have to be strong and hang on just for a minute. Can you do that?”

“A minute? I think so.”

His arm burned with exhaustion. Even a minute seemed an eternity. He counted slowly to sixty to take his mind off the pain of the tortured muscles, deliberately losing count a couple of times and starting back a few numbers. He wondered what her plan was. He assumed the Baby might have a manipulator arm folded away somewhere that could hold onto him, but he couldn’t see such an arm and, anyway, what would it be doing at the back of the minisub?

He was just about to ask Katya what the plan really was when he discovered it for himself. The aft hatch unsealed and started to open before him. His eyes widened; Katya was going to get herself killed to save him.

He knew it was already too late to try and stop her — the compartment would already have lost its air — now he had to think of some way to get inside and repressurise the Baby rapidly. A couple of plans flitted through his mind, but they foundered on the immediate fact that he was trailing from a plummeting minisub several kilometres in the air by the fingertips of one hand. Then the hatch finished opening and there was Katya, as grim as death.

As grim as death, but very much alive. Strapped over her face was an emergency respirator pack. She’d punched a small hole at the base from which the green oxygen-rich fluid was fountaining across her clothes. Through the transparent mouth piece of the LoxPak, he could see the stuff foaming violently as the oxygen boiled out of it in the very low pressure. She’d known enough not to try and use the breather as a simple life-support unit — the pressure difference between her lungs and outside could have been fatal. Instead she was letting it make a breathable atmosphere inside the mask, the gases making their way into her lungs under their own pressure while she just kept her mouth open. It would be like breathing at the top of a mountain, but it was breathing. Not for the first time, Kane was astonished by her ability to think clearly when danger threatened and time was short. He would have hugged her but for that small detail of trailing behind a plummeting minisub by the fingertips of one hand.

She reached out and snapped a lanyard loop around his wrist, drawing it tight with a reflexive tug. Then she braced herself against the hatchway and started to pull him in on the line, hand over hand. The flow of fluid stuttered and stopped. She was running only on the oxygen in her bloodstream now. Summoning up his every reserve, Kane reached forward with his free hand and managed to grab hers. She placed one foot on either side of the hatch so she was horizontal to the Baby’s floor and, screaming silently with a desperate rage, she straightened her legs. Kane was half through the hatch now. He used the hand with the line wrapped around it to grab the internal stanchion rail above the door and heaved himself in. It took achingly long seconds to clamber around so he could close the hatch without falling out again, seconds in which he knew Katya was suffocating. Finally, the hatch slammed shut and he released the automatic pressure valves Katya had disabled to prevent the minisub venting all its air in a vain attempt to repressurise a compartment open to space.

Air flooded in. Katya lay on her back hyperventilating, her colour an ugly blue. Kane cursed the slowness of the pressure gauge, tore open the medical kit and gave her oxygen directly from its emergency cylinder.

With a rapidity that surprised and relieved him, her colour and breathing returned to normal.

“Katya? Katya?”

Her eyes flickered open, but she could say nothing more cogent than “Nnnh?”

He levelled a finger at her. “Don’t you ever save my life again.” He didn’t know whether his anger was mock or real.

Katya nodded slightly. “’Kay.”

“Lieutenant?” The voice was tentative, respectful.

“What is it, ensign?” he said. He didn’t want to open his eyes, he had a feeling it would be too bright on the other side of his eyelids, and would give him a headache. Perhaps he already had a headache, he mused. His mouth felt dry, too.

“You’re awake!” The relief in the voice was unmistakable.

Oh, dear. Was he meant to be on duty? That would explain why he felt so guilty for oversleeping. But why couldn’t he remember going to bed in the first place?

He took a deep breath. “Tell Captain Zagadko that Lieutenant Petrov sends his apologies, and will be on bridge presently.” Oh, he was in trouble now.

“Sir? Sir… Captain Zagadko is dead.”

Petrov’s eyes snapped open and he instantly regretted it. He’d been right; it was far too bright outside his skull. He tried to sit up but whoever had been talking to him took a gentle but firm grip of his shoulders and forced him back supine. “You shouldn’t get up too quickly, sir. You took quite a knock.”

It certainly felt like it. How could he have forgotten the captain was dead?

He looked around the room. He was lying in a sickbay, but of no boat or class he recognised. “What happened?” He looked up and recognised Officer Suhkalev. “I remember lifting from the Yagizban place — what was it? FP-1 — and then… not much. We were hit, weren’t we?” Try as he might, the events in his memory just came to a ragged end and no amount of clawing after details seemed to help fill the blank. “Were we?”

Suhkalev nodded. “One engine took a missile. I lost control for a minute. You were hanging on behind me and, the next time I looked, you weren’t there. You must have been thrown around in the manoeuvres and kissed a bulkhead. You were hurt. Hurt badly.” Petrov reached up and found his head was bandaged. “We thought we might lose you for a while. I patched you up as best I could and…”

“You did?”

Suhkalev nodded again, slightly embarrassed. “The Novgorod’s medic was lost during the escape. I did a paramedic course. It didn’t really cover severe head trauma, but luckily this place,” he indicated the sickbay with a jerk of his thumb, “is well equipped. Lots of automated stuff.”

“Where is ‘this place’ anyway? We’re not still on the transporter, are we?”

“No, sir. We had to ditch in the ocean. I had to ditch in the ocean. We’d already detected the FP-1 launching pursuit craft and, if we didn’t sink and drown, they’d have blown us out of the water anyway. The thing is, the transporter handling so badly even under one engine surprised me. It made me think.” That slightly embarrassed smile again. “It made me think maybe the reason she handled like a manta whale in calf was maybe she was carrying something big and heavy in her hold.”

The surroundings suddenly made perfect sense to Petrov and he settled back into his sick bed with a pleased smile. “This is a Yagizban boat? One of those Vodyanoi copies?”

“It was just sitting there in the belly. So we all got aboard, opened the transporter’s ventral doors and swam out in this thing. The transporter sank like a stone after the hold flooded. The Yagizban interceptors must have thought we’d died in the crash or drowned in the sinking. They didn’t drop depth charges or torpedoes or even sonar buoys. They just went home.”

It didn’t surprise Petrov. “They may have the toys, but they don’t know how to play with them.”

“We’re making best speed towards FMA waters, but being quiet about it. There’s always the chance they might send in search boats to look for wreckage and Mr Retsky thinks running into them at full speed or trying to get a message out could bring this trip to a sudden end. Another day and it should be safe to hail for FMA vessels.”

“Mr Retsky is very prudent. Send him my compliments and… No, I’ll tell him myself.” He started to get up to Suhkalev’s alarm.

“No! Sir! You’re not fit to command yet! You’ll…”

“My mother’s not dead, Suhkalev. You can’t have her job. Anyway, relax. I’m just going to show my face and then come straight back here. I want to congratulate the crew on a job well done. You, too. Now help me up.” As he got slowly to his feet, he rested his hand against the bulkhead for support. He looked at the metal, patted it gently. “What’s she called?”

“The boat? She doesn’t have a name, sir. You know what they’re like in the Conclaves; she’s got a number. YCV-K2301, I think. Something like that anyway”

Petrov curled his lip. “YCV-K2301?” he said, disgusted. “What goes through their minds? How can anybody develop a sense of belonging to something called the YCV-K2301? No sense of esprit de corps, the Yagizban. Is she a good boat?”

“Your crew seem to like her. The general opinion is that she’s not quite as nice as the Vodyanoi because she doesn’t have Terran equipment aboard, but she’s a good copy. Oh, the big difference is she doesn’t have a salvage maw like the Vodyanoi. The bow’s taken up with an extended weapons room. More fish, more tubes.”

Petrov smiled a predatory smile. “I like her already. But that name’s got to go.”

“As senior officer it’s your privilege to rename the prize, sir.”

Petrov nodded slowly to avoid provoking his headache. If the Yagizba Conclaves thought they were going to have their surprise attack against the Federal settlements as planned, they were going to be bitterly disappointed. The counterstrike started now.

“Then take a note, Officer Suhkalev. As of this moment, the vessel formerly known as the YCV-K2301, taken in combat by the surviving crew of the RMV Novgorod and an element of the Federal law-enforcement fraternity on behalf of the Federal Maritime Authority, will now and henceforth be known as the RMV…”

He paused. He didn’t even have to wait for inspiration; a name had already offered itself. The pause was his doubt about its suitability. Was it really an appropriate name for an FMA boat? A warboat should have a noble name, not what he had in mind. Then he thought of what the Yagizban had planned, their lying and treason and he knew it was perfect. There would be no nobility in the next war fought in the seas of Russalka.

“…the RMV Vengeance.”

The Vodyanoi had started to cautiously follow, assuming that the Leviathan, invisible to their sensors, would be doing the same. Instead they had detected a massive disturbance behind them; almost seven million displacement tonnes of vessel surfacing at speed and tearing itself from the ocean top. They had released a camera buoy to the surface and watched the Leviathan fly upwards, upwards until it was lost in the boiling clouds.

For lack of anything else that they could do, they waited. Thirty minutes later, the clouds glowed white above them and the communication channels filled with random noise.

For lack of anything else it could be, they knew the Leviathan was destroyed, and that their captain was dead.

They were debating what to do next when, through the slowly clearing channels, they detected the transponder signal of the Baby. Triangulation showed it was not in the sea, but in the air. A long way up in the air. The most likely explanation was it had been blown free in the blast and was falling back to Russalka like an artificial meteorite. But it fell, and it fell and it fell and it took its own sweet time doing it. The camera buoy, coming back online after the radiation wave had temporarily silenced it, showed them the truth. The Baby, lightened to the point of almost no effective weight by the combat drones strapped to it, floating slowly towards the ocean, as slow as a soap bubble.

Finally, it touched down. The Vodyanoi was waiting for it.