“Listen to me,” said Katya, “there’s nothing we can do about it, but I’m going to tell you what your superior didn’t when he gave you this mission. We will not be rendezvousing with another boat. A piece of junk like this…”
“It’s an admiral’s launch!” said Alina, scandalised.
“Maybe twenty years ago it was an admiral’s launch. These seats are new to this boat. If you look under yours, you can see new mountings have been drilled for them. Same thing with the display on the forward bulkhead. You can see the outline of the original one, which was a little bit wider. You can still smell the gel filling agent they used to neaten things up a bit. Believe me, two days ago this scow was sitting in storage.”
Alina fell quiet and Katya continued, “A piece of junk like this will not be able to carry out an automatic docking at sea. It will be going all the way to the Deeps. I guarantee I will need the head before then. Now, back that way,” she nodded towards the rear of the boat, “no closer than five thousand metres and no farther than ten, there is at least one boat following us. I’d make a guess at the Novgorod. She was preparing to leave when we boarded. She knows the exact route we’ll be taking because we’re on automatic pilot and you can bet our shadows have the exact waypoint and timings list for the whole journey.”
Oksana looked at her suspiciously. “How do you know all this?”
“I don’t know it. Not for a fact. But I’ve lived my whole life in submarines and there are ways of doing things, and when those ways are changed you have to ask yourself, why?”
Oksana shrugged. “Well, even if you’re right, having a warboat like the Novgorod is a good thing. I feel safer,” she added, speaking to Alina.
Oksana’s unquestioning belief in the nobility of her masters had irked Katya in their earlier conversations, but now it was beginning to look like wilful ignorance.
“You shouldn’t. Think about it — if a warboat is shadowing us all the way to the Deeps for our protection, why didn’t they just ship us there in the warboat?” She let that sink in before adding, “We’re bait.”
“Bait? What are you talking about?” demanded Alina. Katya had already come to the conclusion that Alina was less impressed by her superiors than Oksana.
“Well, I’m the bait, obviously. You’re… bait minders, I suppose.” She could see Oksana was about to express her resentment at the term, so she quickly said, “You see, somewhere that way,” she nodded her head forward, “they’re hoping the Vodyanoi is waiting, or maybe some Yagizban boats. They try to rescue me, and our shadows jump in for the kill.”
Oksana’s eyes had grown large. “That’s exciting!”
Alina looked at her as if she was insane. “Oksana! It’s not exciting! It’s terrifying!”
Oksana snorted dismissively. “They won’t shoot at us.”
“They won’t have to,” said Katya. “Torpedoes are pretty smart, but once they’re off guidance, if they’ve lost target lock, they’ll search to re-acquire it. This scow must be as noisy as hell. We might as well have a target painted on our tail. If we could control her, the smart thing would be to kill the drives and just dive quietly trying to find an isotherm to hide under. But we can’t. Alina’s right to be worried, Oksana. If we end up with, say, the Novgorod on one side and the Vodyanoi on the other exchanging torpedo fire, we’re as good as dead.”
“But,” Oksana was trying to find a flaw in the logic, “but you’re a high value prisoner. They wouldn’t dare!”
“Maybe, but I’m not as big a prize as the Vodyanoi. She’s been weed in the FMA’s fans since the war. They’d sacrifice me in a second if it meant sinking the Vodyanoi. Sacrifice us.” Oksana’s face fell; this was an argument she could understand. Alina already looked sick with fear. Katya smiled sympathetically. “Not that I want to worry you or anything.”
After that, an air of doom-laden pessimism set in with her guards and they became far less strict with Katya. First they freed her hands, the theory being that she couldn’t reach them across the aisle while her ankles were still restrained. It was a reasonable theory and she had no desire to provoke them any further by trying anything suspicious. She did consider for a while pointing out that their main threat was far more likely to be boredom rather than torpedoes, since she had neglected to point out that Kane would never be stupid enough to fall for such an obvious trap. But frightened people tend to cling together, and she preferred the comradeship the phantom threat had created aboard the little shuttle.
Then they let her use the head unsupervised, and — without prompting — let her walk up and down the aisle for a few minutes every couple of hours to keep her circulation up. One or other of them would sit with their gun in hand as a matter of form, but without enthusiasm. Katya considered ways of taking control of the shuttle, but every plan foundered on the necessity of shooting one or both of her guards once she’d taken one of the poorly protected pistols, and then the certainty that the shadowing submarine would never allow her to get away even if she somehow managed to gain entrance to the control section.
Katya was pleased that the former reason influenced her decision not to attempt an escape more than the latter. Despite everything, she hadn’t turned into the Chertovka yet.
At least the little boat’s supplies included changes of clothing for Katya. Oksana and Alina’s kitbags had already been loaded when they’d come aboard and, when they had realised that they would be in the small vessel for almost three days, they had changed from duty uniforms to much more comfortable fatigues.
By halfway through the second day, they were no longer bothering to restrain Katya at all. This change in affairs had been caused when, during one of her exercise walks up and down the aisle, she noticed Oksana’s gun lying by her folded uniform on one of the seats while Oksana was in the head using the shower unit. Katya coughed and, when Alina looked up from reading a book on her memo pad, pointed at the unattended maser. “You might want to put that somewhere where I can’t get it so easily,” advised Katya.
The knowledge that their prisoner could have killed the pair of them — yet didn’t — convinced them that Katya was not at all violent, which made her status as a traitor all the more baffling to them. After Alina had finished shouting at Oksana about the pistol, she said to Katya, “So, just what did you do?”
“Alina!” Oksana was scandalised at the flouting of their orders like this, but Alina just fobbed her off with an impatient flap of her hand.
So Katya told them. She told them of how she’d been involved with the beginning of the war, and of how she discovered the Yagizban treason, although she did not tell them of the Leviathan because her story was complicated enough as it was. She described how she had become a darling of the news services for a day or two, of her decoration as a Hero of Russalka and of how much she loved the medal’s wooden box. Then she told them of the axis of enemies, of Havilland “Killer” Kane (who wasn’t the monster he was made out to be) and Tasya “Chertovka” Morevna (who pretty much was). Then she told them of how her boat was hijacked by the Vodyanoi, her voyage into Red Water, and what she found there — the massacre of Yagizban civilians, the grave of the Terran colonists.
“The war has to stop,” she finished. “FMA versus Yagizban doesn’t matter anymore. The survival of the Russalkin is all that matters. That’s why I did what I did.”