“Oh, you found her!” she heard Kane say, answering the first question. Tasya turned as he arrived. Kane held up a handful of pieces of smashed plastic. “The orb didn’t ride the blast wave very well,” he said ruefully. “I don’t suppose the supplier does mail order deliveries at interstellar distances, so no chance of a replacement. Perhaps I can repair it.” So saying, he placed the fragments in a belt pouch with the guileless optimism of a young child who believes anything can be fixed.
“Where’s Giroux?”
Kane looked surprised. “Oh, you must have taken a knock, Katya. Your short term memory…”
“Giroux’s dead,” said Tasya bluntly. “He found a body and, like an idiot, searched it. It was booby trapped.”
“I remember a body with a grenade under it…” Katya’s memories were beginning to sort themselves out although she would never remember the few seconds before the explosion. She remembered the body, the maser marks, and then she remembered the flooded room. She felt cold and finally realised that there was a thin sheen of water on the floor, flowing past them in the direction of the auxiliary lock.
“The one Giroux disturbed must have been a detonator. That explosion sounded more like emplaced charges. The upper bulkhead’s been compromised. The sea’s getting in.” Tasya stood and held out her hand. Katya took it and allowed herself to be drawn to her feet. “We’re just lucky those Fed bastards aren’t as good at setting charges as they are at killing babies or we’d be sucking water now.”
A deep vibration thrummed through the structure, making them all look into the darkness in the direction of the damaged bulkhead. “It’s giving way,” said Tasya. “Run!”
The ingrained Russalkin fear of water was with them in that moment. They turned and ran for the auxiliary lock as they had never run before, Tasya pulling quickly ahead with long, loping strides, Katya following in a hard sprint, and Kane at the rear in an untidy kinetic mass of flailing arms and pumping legs.
They reached the first bulkhead at the head of the slope leading down to the auxiliary lock and stumbled through the small door in the large wall. The water level was already well over the door’s lower lintel and beginning to surge as a much greater volume of water entered the flooding section behind them. As soon as Kane was through, Tasya threw herself at the door to try and close it, but the water was on the side the builder’s had reasonably concluded was the less likely to be a threat. Now the pressure of water was forcing the door open, not shut, and that pressure was rising.
“Go, go, go!” she shouted at Katya and Kane. “I’ll hold it as closed as I can.”
Katya hesitated for a moment, but Kane grabbed her arm and pulled her away. They ran down the incline, the water sluicing past their legs. Ahead of them in the dancing beams of their torches, Katya could see the auxiliary lock’s doors open before them, fifty metres away, but she could also see the water climbing over the lintel and starting to flood the interior of the airlock. The realisation that simply reaching the lock might not be enough to save their lives chilled her for the moment it took for it to crystallise in her mind. Then she put it aside; there lay panic, and panic would kill them.
She reached the door ten strides ahead of Kane and jumped through. She was on her communicator the second her feet splashed down in the shin-deep water. “Tasya! We’re in — come on!”
“Close the doors.”
Katya frowned; she had misheard. She must have misheard. “Say again?”
“Close the airlock doors, Kuriakova.”
Katya looked uncomprehendingly at Kane. He gave her what was presumably intended as a reassuring nod, and said, “Understood. Closing doors now.” Before Katya could stop him, he had reached out and twisted the door controls. With a hum of power, they began to swing shut.
“Kane! What are you doing?”
He smiled a little nervously. “I’m trusting her. You have to remember one thing about Tasya.” He turned on the lock’s internal lights, then joined Katya where she stood. He pointed through the narrowing gap up the slope of the corridor. “She’s a survivor.”
Into the glow of the lights, the steady sheen of water abruptly became a wave, a surge that could only mean Tasya had abandoned the door and let the rising water through. And in the middle of that surge, she rode down. Almost standing, almost lying, leaning back into the wave with her legs together and her arms steering her, she shot down the corridor towards the closing doors.
At the very last, she folded her arms across her chest, straightened her legs and made an arrow of her body, an arrow that shot into the airlock, brushing both her shoulders against the steel doors. They slammed shut behind her, a single sardonic clap of applause for the latest exploit of the legendary Chertovka.
“You truly have the luck of the Devil,” said Kane casually, as if it was a dull day that only featured one death-defying escape. He set the lock controls to drain away the water that was lapping around their thighs. Katya just gawped.
“I’m soaked,” said Tasya, as she rose from the waters. “These coveralls are going to ride up in the ADS, there’s nothing more certain. Nothing’s ever comfortable in this world.”
Kane was leaning into the back of his diving suit and fiddling with the more powerful communications unit in it. “Still no signal. We’re going to have to get into the water before we can talk to the boat. Right, Katya first, I think.”
The airlock’s floor was now only wet, not flooded, and Kane helped her doff her gear and stow it away in the MMU. Then with help from Tasya, he lifted Katya up she could get into the suit once more. As they locked her in, Tasya said, “What about Giroux’s suit?”
Katya heard Kane’s bitter sigh. “Poor Bruno. Despite all we’ve seen in this world, he was probably the only Vodyanoi who wouldn’t have believed somebody could stoop so low as to booby trap a corpse. We’ll seal up his suit and Sahlberg can bring it in under drone control once he’s brought in Katya.”
“I was looking at the controls on the way in,” offered Katya. “I think I could pilot it. Well enough to get back to the Vodyanoi anyway.”
“It would save some time,” said Tasya, with a tone of approval that Katya was slightly embarrassed to realise she enjoyed. Now she cared about the opinion of war criminals, she thought. How much further could she fall? But she was only a war criminal because the Federal authorities said she was; the same people who had planned, sanctioned, and carried out the extermination of a civilian evacuation centre.
At least you knew where you were with the Chertovka. Usually in deep trouble.
They finished sealing Katya into her suit and turned their attention to other matters. While Tasya stored her and Kane’s gear — she found the pouch with the fragments of the light orb in and shook her head like a long-suffering mother emptying the pockets of her son’s clothes — Kane closed Giroux’s suit and assigned its MMU a drone control channel. Then he went to his own suit and tried gamely to clamber in, an action which, without a stepladder, proved challenging to him. Still showing a long-suffering expression, Tasya gave him a boost which he gratefully accepted. As Tasya closed his suit he asked, “How will you get into your suit, Tasya?”
“By being competent,” she answered, and Kane shut up after that.
“Pride comes before a fall” was proving to be an idiom with which Tasya had little if any experience. She got into her suit with ridiculous ease, and had it sealed and secure by herself faster than either Katya or Kane had managed with help. She had even had the foresight to “walk” her suit on the corners of the MMU’s base so she could reach the airlock controls once she was in it.
“Flooding airlock,” she called before pressing the valve controls.