“Neutral,” called Giroux, closely followed by the others.
“Looking good across all units,” confirmed Ocello. “Opening the jaws now.”
Katya looked up and saw the two seams running along the ceiling slowly start to widen. As they separated, she could see nothing beyond but darkness. That was the sea, the naked, angry sea of Russalka. She would not be frightened, she swore to herself. She would not let herself down. She imagined Lukyan watching her, and she determined to make him proud.
The Vodyanoi’s jaws reached their furthest extreme, leaving the four suits floating in the void between them.
“Right,” said Kane. “Here we go. Single file. Follow me.”
The murk illuminated in her suit’s lights suddenly stirred violently as Kane triggered his manoeuvre unit’s impellers and then he was moving smoothly away from her. On her helmet’s head-up display, a small navigational caret glowed, showing her their destination.
“This is Sahlberg. Here we go, Katya.” She felt the vibration of her own MMU’s impellers coming to life and, almost instantly, she was moving steadily forward through the water. She watched the jaws taper away over her head before they vanished altogether from view. She was clear of the maw, now. In the open sea. And she felt… She barely had to examine her feelings.
She felt great. The fear had been for nothing. She felt safe, she felt protected, she felt excited for the adventure of it all. She was surrounded by the world ocean on every side, no part of her skin more than a few centimetres from the great deadly, terrifying, wonderful waters, and she felt suddenly so ecstatically good she could almost have wept for joy.
She had always loved her world, but it had been a love for the Russalkin civilisation, its spirit, and its courage, even its more human flaws. Now, though… now she felt love for the world itself, the great glorious grey orb floating in space, the majesty of the waters, the elemental fury of its skies somewhere far above them.
“It’s beautiful,” she said under her breath.
“It is,” replied Kane, startling her. The microphone pick-ups were much more acute than she’d expected.
“What are you talking about?” said Tasya, somewhere behind them. “You can’t see anything but plankton.”
“Even plankton has its charms,” said Kane mildly. It was a comment designed to shut Tasya up, which it did. Katya smiled and said nothing more. She knew what she had meant, and she knew Kane did too.
The column travelled onwards in silence for a few minutes. When Katya and her friends had been playing at being ADS-equipped super agents, they’d run around with their heads down, mimicking the torpedo-like movement of the agents’ suits in the drama. This was very different. They travelled almost upright, but for a very slight forward lean. They were presenting a lot of surface area, and the drag was terrific, but if they had been travelling head first, they wouldn’t have been able to see a thing through the opaque helmet tops. As in so many things, fiction was more exciting that the sensible reality.
“I can see the lock,” said Kane suddenly. He slowed and, a moment later, Katya felt Sahlberg gently slacking off her own manoeuvre unit’s motors too. She had considered asking for a minute of two of manual operation, just to see what steering the suit was like. The time didn’t seem right, however. Perhaps she’d ask on the way back.
Out of the gloom, detail started to build around the navigation lights on Kane’s suit as Katya grew closer. “Sahlberg, use Katya’s suit as a drone and relay pictures of the lock. Let’s see what we’re dealing with here. Sorry, Katya. Needs must.”
“That’s OK,” she replied. “I want to see the lock anyway.” Sahlberg took her in past where Kane hung almost motionless, and switched up her lights to full intensity. Out of the darkness, she could make out an artificially exact and level overhang, the top edge of the airlock’s surround. She descended slightly as she advanced, slowly gliding beneath it.
“I see it,” she said. “Looks untouched.”
“Good,” said Kane. “Anything you can add to that, sensors?”
“I’m looking at an enhanced image here, captain,” reported Sahlberg. “And it seems fine here too. You should be able to get in once the lock’s powered up.”
“Understood. Move Katya out to the side, please, but keep her lights on the access panel. Giroux, you’re on.”
The impellers hummed and Katya was carried gracefully backwards to halt a couple of metres away from the lock, her lights focused exactly on the panel beside the auxiliary airlock. She had to admit, Sahlberg had an extraordinarily sure touch on the controls. Every move he made with the suit felt as natural as walking.
Giroux was just as competent at his job. He swept by her, decelerating as he approached the panel and coming to a full stop by grabbing the panel cover. The cover, intended to prevent marine life taking up residence in the power sockets and manual crank mechanism rather than keeping water out, opened easily. Giroux unclipped the power unit from the side of his MMU and mounted it on the hook provided by the socket for exactly that reason. He unrolled half a metre of cable, pushed the plug home and twisted it. In that one simple move, the water was expelled from within the hermetic seal between plug and socket, and the power unit was activated. They all saw the panel’s lights glow, but Giroux reported “Power unit placed and active” all the same. “Cycling the airlock now.”
As they watched the lock’s outer doors slide open, Katya found her mind wandering onto what was on the other side of the airlock. She knew it wouldn’t be pretty, but that was war. Precious little glory, but plenty of hardship, and fear, and horror. The Yags had placed a spy base close by Federal shipping lanes, hidden in Red Water. The Feds had detected it and wrecked the place, probably killing everybody inside. She couldn’t blame the Yags for building the place, she couldn’t blame the Feds for destroying it. It was an ugly incident, but wartime is made up of ugly incidents. Once again, she wondered what Kane hoped to gain by bringing her here.
“The lock was already flooded,” said Kane. “Interesting.”
Katya understood him to mean that whoever had last used the lock had been exiting the base. Had somebody escaped?
The interior of the lock was large enough to accept a minisub, so they had no trouble manoeuvring in and setting down on the concrete floor, Giroux starting the pump cycle before joining them. As Katya watched the water level drop past the front of her visor, she realised that she was feeling tense again. She didn’t want to leave her suit in this strange, forbidding place, but she had no choice; out of the water and even with the MMUs detached, the suits were too heavy to walk around in for long. From a symbol of a potentially dangerous journey through the waters, her suit had become one of security. She was very sorry to see the water level reach floor level, and to hear Kane order them to emerge from their armour.
In her case, she had no idea how to open the ADS from within and had to wait for Giroux to help her. With the back panel open and the helmet forward, she was just wondering how to climb out when she felt his hands under her armpits and she was effortlessly lifted out. As he put her down, she could see Tasya managing it for herself, drawing her arms from the sleeves, gripping the shoulders and pulling herself up to sit on the lower edge of the open back of the suit. It was just as well that the MMUs were so heavy, anchoring the suit upright while their occupants wriggled out.
The lock stank of sea water, and the pump gullies were still awash with it as the last few dozen litres were drained. Katya’s feet came down with a splash in a puddle left on the concrete. She looked at the closed outer doors and noticed a small trickle of water running down between them. “That seal’s not perfect.”