She had stood there, willing herself to stay ramrod straight, and told Sergei that his captain, her uncle, his best friend since childhood was dead. Death wasn’t so strange on Russalka, after all. The dangerous world killed people all the time for the silliest mistakes and the most fleeting of inattentions. Sergei was made of tough stuff, she had told herself. He’d take it stoically.
But he didn’t. He sat down heavily on the floor — on the floor! — and cried like a child. There was no denial, not a single “Are you sure?” She said she’d been there, told him how Lukyan had died, and that was enough. He’d sobbed and looked ridiculous, his face red and snot running out of his nose, and he hadn’t cared. Finally she’d sat by him, put her arm around him and cried too. Her tears had been silent, though.
Perhaps Sergei had been wise after all. He had come to terms with his grief quickly and accepted Lukyan was gone forever, his lifelong friend lost for good. She still saw him grow quiet and reflective sometimes, and he might touch the corner of his eye as if dust had got into it, but that was all.
He didn’t spend his nights crying himself to sleep in a soundproof cell.
Quarter of an hour later she felt exhausted, puffy-eyed, and again empty of grief and the guilt of the survivor for a while, at least. But, she did not feel sleepy. This seemed very unfair.
Finally she gave up trying to will herself into unconsciousness. Instead she found the gently illuminated controls for the screen and switched it on — perhaps she could bore herself to sleep.
The first feed was an old action drama she was sure she’d seen years before and which hadn’t been new even then, made during or just after the war against Earth. It was about an isolated station where a Fed boat has to stop to make repairs and finds itself stuck there with some refugees. Somebody amongst them is a traitor working for the Grubbers and there was a lot of stuff with people accusing one another and then something else happens that means the accused person must be innocent, and so they accuse somebody else.
That the villain turned out to be a Yag — even though he’s really a Grubber infiltrator — was probably why they were rerunning such a steaming piece of melodrama about the war in the first place.
The war. Katya realised that nobody had yet got around to coming up with a name for the new conflict. When people said “the war,” they always meant the war against Earth, the war that was eleven, almost twelve years ago now. It was a civil war they were currently fighting, but nobody called it that. Nobody called it anything at all.
Katya changed the feed and found herself watching a news channel. There was little new here; the Feds were doughty and honourable warriors while the Yag were dirty, sneaky scum who it turned out had been colluding with the Terrans during the war.
Being caught out as traitors hadn’t really been the declaration of independence the Yags had been planning on, but you can’t always get what you want, can you?
Katya turned down the sound and dimmed the screen brightness. She lay in the flickering darkness watching earnest newsreaders, pictures of smiling Federal sailors and marines coming back from successful sorties, a few bedraggled and wretched Yagizban prisoners being paraded for the cameras, public information proclamations, some newly decorated hero going back to his old school to give a speech about duty and honour. It was just another man in a dark blue FMA naval uniform until he took his cap off for the cameras and she laughed with delighted surprise.
Suhkalev! From spotty little thug to a “Knight of the Deep” as the caption proclaimed him, and all in only six months. They’d given him a medal and everything, just like they’d given to her.
Look at us now, Suhkalev, she thought. Look at us with our medals, heroes all. Knights of the Deep.
She finally passed out soon after that, the screen still flickering images of resistance to the enemy and glorious victory above her face. Her mouth moved, and she may have been saying “Knights of the Deep” as she sank into unconsciousness, then she half laughed, and then she was asleep.
CHAPTER TWO
Jarilo
Katya awoke in total darkness. Her first thought was a power failure, but then she realised it couldn’t be — every station had back-up generators and slow-bleed capacitors to ensure a total power failure could not happen. After all, a facility without power would be a facility without life before very long. It was more likely to be a local failure, she thought, probably a power bus to the hotel had simply overloaded and was waiting to be reset. Well, if the power had failed, so had her wake up alarm. Sergei was probably down in the pens right now, tutting and muttering as they lost their departure slot.
She checked her chronometer and was nonplussed to discover its face dark. Fumbling with its buttons didn’t produce even a flicker of illumination. Now she was becoming worried; a local power failure was one thing, but even personal electronics dying? Probably just a coincidence. Probably. The possibility that the Yagizban had triggered some sort of electro-magnetic pulse weapon and scrambled Mologa’s electronics entered her mind and was just as quickly dispatched. Every station’s electronics were gauss-hardened against EMP weapons and had been since the war. No, something else was going on here. Well, lying in the dark wasn’t going to give her any answers.
She started to reach back to get her clothes when a sudden sharp sound made her freeze — a single loud crack, shockingly close. She froze, her heart suddenly pounding very fast and hard which only served to dull her hearing as the beats sounded through her head. She stayed still for ten, twenty, thirty seconds, but the noise was not repeated.
The silence was less reassuring than she had hoped. Then she realised how absolute the silence was. The tiny yet infinitely comforting sound of the ventilation fan was absent. While she doubted it was possible to suffocate in a capsule room, she didn’t care to find out. Besides, the air was growing cloying and hot. She reached for her clothes again, and as she did there was the same awful cracking noise, but this time it continued, and grew. A heavy splintering, a grinding of stone upon stone. The realisation that the stone around her was suffering some sort of structural failure filled her with urgent terror.
She decided she would rather face the humiliation of being on the corridors in her underwear than stay in the capsule a second longer and abandoned her clothes in favour of getting out. As she sat up, however, her forehead banged forcefully into the screen mounted on the capsule ceiling. The screen was probably undamaged, being a flexible polymer laminate sheet, but directly behind it was a single insulation layer and then solid stone. Katya fell back, her head landing on the pillow pad. She blinked away the pain and tried to understand how she could possibly have hit her head on a ceiling that had given her comfortable space to sit up the previous night. Now the ceiling seemed to be lower. How was that possible?
There was another loud crack, the grating of stone against stone, and she finally understood. The capsule’s collapsing, she realised. Move! Move! Move!
She tried to sit up as far as the ceiling would allow, but now it was barely above her face. She started shuffling towards the hatch as fast as she could manage. The hatch’s locking handle would be a problem, but perhaps she might be able to disengage it with a kick. She had hardly managed to get five centimetres before the smooth plastic of the screen brushed her face. The ceiling didn’t seem to be lurching down at all, but smoothly descending like a hydraulic press.
She tried to move but it was bearing down on her now, pushing her backward into the shallow mattress. She squirmed hopelessly, her face to one side. How had this happened? Had the station been hit by some new and strange weapon of the Yagizban?