“Perhaps they were just talking and said something that set one another off. Yes, I know — like what? I have no idea, Kane.”
“This planet of yours, Katya. No other world amongst the colonies is a water world. Well, there’s Novus Hellespont, I suppose, but they’ve got an archipelago they built on there, and it doesn’t storm all the time either. Perhaps extended submarine living drives people crazy after a while.”
“These cases are recent, Kane. We’ve been fine up to now.”
“Ah, but the war. And now another war. A combination of factors, resulting in psychosis. Vetsch, possibly Giroux, the Fed you saw, the other cases they seem to be covering up.” He grunted a semi-laugh. “Even the Leviathan went mad.” He suddenly fell silent. When he looked at Katya again, his expression was serious. “Even the Leviathan went mad,” he repeated. He unfolded his arms and started sifting through files on the console. “There’s a pattern. There’s something going on here. And,” he concluded, “it’s not going to be among the timesheets.”
He switched off the display and turned to her. “You said you’d take the mission, but you said it when you were shocked. You’ve had a chance to think about it now.”
In her mind, waypoints glittered, charting her path through the next few days. It was all she had. “I’ll do it.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Last Request
The Lukyan was directed to dock at lock fifteen at Atlantis. This was the same dock where the Lastochka, Shurygin’s boat, had been when he was murdered. When she stepped out of the hatch, her foot came down on the exact spot where he had died. Like many Russalkin, Katya professed a disbelief in omens and portents, yet noted them all the same. This didn’t seem like a very good one.
Not that it mattered; she expected to be dead within the next twenty hours. Completing the mission was all that mattered. She remembered heroes going off to face certain death in the dramas. “My life isn’t important,” they’d say while the romantic interest wept messily over them. Then they’d go off and somehow survive anyway.
Katya couldn’t see it working out that way for her. If she didn’t manage to escape Atlantis and reach her rendezvous with the Vodyanoi, she would either be shot, or captured, interrogated, and then shot. They’d throw her to Secor, and there was no escape from them. When they finally put a gun to her head, it would come as a mercy after a Secor interrogation.
The official checking her permits was frowning. “Where’s your co-pilot, Ms Kuriakova?” He examined the documents. “Mr Ilyin. Where is he?”
“Sergei fell ill when we were at Dunwich.”
“Anything serious?”
“Not really, but not the kind of thing you’d enjoy sharing a minisub with. Put it this way — we were transporting plumbing supplies there. Sergei must be pretty pleased their bathroom facilities are up to spec at the moment.”
The officer winced sympathetically. “Will he be coming here when he’s better, or are you going back?”
“The plan is to find a cargo for Dunwich and I’ll go back and pick him up. Things are so tight, every trip has to pay its way.”
Katya felt she was standing outside herself, watching as she chatted with the officer, so calm and normal. If he asked to check her shoulder bag as he was perfectly entitled to do, he would find a strangely bland piece of equipment, an aluminium box twenty centimetres by thirty centimetres by four centimetres, with a couple of metre lengths of cable, tightly coiled and tied, plugged into one end, and a covered switch at the other.
It clearly wasn’t a standard piece of equipment. If asked, she was to say it was a custom unit she had designed to filter hydrophone data to help in the war effort, but disappointingly the device didn’t work as well as she’d hoped. Any technician who opened the box would see this was a lie. Katya knew the cover story was thin, and that her best chance of succeeding in her mission was for no Federal officer, agent, or technician to even see the box until after it had done its job.
“Well, good luck finding a cargo for Dunwich,” said the officer, signing off her papers. “We don’t get much traffic heading for there. It’s pretty much self-sufficient.”
Katya nodded as she accepted her papers and crew card back. “I sometimes get lucky with personal mail and packages.”
The officer cast a cautious look around. “Secor’s tightening up on that sort of cargo,” he said quietly. “It’s getting so they have to read every letter and open every parcel.”
“Yes. True. That packing directive was Secor, then?”
The customs officer wrinkled his nose as if even the word “Secor” smelled bad. “Yes, but don’t tell anyone that. They ran it through our channels, so now we have to pretend it was our idea.”
“I won’t tell a soul,” said Katya, smiling. She waved the officer goodbye, and went off into the halls of Atlantis to commit high treason.
Katya liked coffee, real coffee, but it was an expensive and rare treat. She went into the most elegant drinks salon she could find, and ordered a pot. It was a terrible extravagance, but as she was going to be dead soon, she wanted to have at least one thing happen in her last hours that she could wholeheartedly enjoy.
“Elegant” did not say a great deal on Russalka, but the place was clean and quiet and convivial, and the staff took justifiable pride in how they prepared the coffee. Her coveralls did not earn her cold looks as they might on other worlds; here almost everyone wore them at some time of the day. The salon staff wore white shirts and dark red trousers, which alone made it the fanciest place she had ever been. Everyone wore uniforms, she knew, but the novel thought of a world where it was not expected occurred to her now as she drank the first cup from the pot.
There was so much that she had never really considered. So many things about her life that she had always accepted because that’s the way things were. Everybody had this view of the Federal government as an amorphous brain constructed from pure bureaucracy. It did what it did, and there was no point in arguing because nobody was really responsible for policy. It just happened.
The way Kane explained it, it was very different. There was a political class physically concentrated in the higher security areas of the major settlements, Atlantis being the largest. Everything went through them. They were essentially born into the job and, as they didn’t put much effort into it, there were no dissenters from the lifetime of ease it offered. Thus, the amorphous bureaucracy brain that ruled the planet was not frighteningly intelligent. It was, however, very jealous.
The military and security arms of the FMA were charged to hunt, locate, and eliminate dissent, even if the navy in particular never quite understood that was the nature of their work. Dissent was dressed up in all manner of exciting terms like “terrorism,” “piracy,” “anarchism,” and “rogue Terran sabotage,” but often the people who ended up being quietly dumped out of airlocks or sent on one way trips to the Deeps high security facility had just made the mistake of wondering if the governance of Russalka might just possibly be done in a better way.