She turned the Lukyan to starboard and headed away, hoping for the best. The hydrophones were full of the sound of control surface cavitation, torpedo drives, and noisemakers being shot off in all directions, all of which boded well — the big boys were too busy with one another to worry about a little bug like theirs. There was still the possibility of a torpedo performing a search pattern picking them up, but every second they ran broadened their chances. After ten minutes Katya and Sergei were breathing more easily. After twenty they were as sure as they could be that they’d escaped the battle. Katya slowed to a crawl and “cleared the baffles” to be sure, performing a quiet three hundred and sixty degree circle that allowed the sensors to scan the entire environs. There was nothing out there but the kind of fish that doesn’t carry a warhead.
Still Sergei said nothing. In the heavy silence, Katya hand-plotted a change to the logged route that would take them around the battleground and then back on course for Atlantis.
Finally, she’d had enough of it. “Speak up or stop making that faulty valve noise with your nose, Sergei. You’ve got something to say. Let’s hear it.”
For several seconds he just stared at her as if he’d never really looked at her before and didn’t like what he saw. Then he said, “Why? Why did you do that?”
“The Jarilo didn’t stand a chance. We had to do something.”
“No,” he replied with cold emphasis. “We didn’t have to do anything. We’re just a little boat keeping its head down and out of trouble. We can’t change anything. Don’t you get it?”
Katya looked at him and some of that sense of revelation came to her, too. Sergei was afraid. Sergei had always been afraid. All these years she had seen him just as an adjunct to Uncle Lukyan, or even to the boat, a sidekick to one, an organic module of the other. She had never really looked at him as a person, and what she saw disturbed her and, to her great sorrow, disappointed her. He was just a man with small dreams and small hopes who’d latched onto Lukyan and followed him wherever big, bluff Lukyan wanted to go. All he wanted in life was a steady job and not to be afraid, and not being afraid meant never taking risks.
Once, not so long ago, she would not only have sympathised, she would have agreed with him wholeheartedly. The world had been much simpler then. Now, however… now she’d seen the kind of people who start wars at first hand. The experience had not filled her with confidence that they would be doing everything in their power to bring things to a peaceful conclusion. The FMA was furious with the Yagizban because the Yags had betrayed them not once but twice, first conspiring with the Terrans during the war, and then by preparing for a Terran return that never came. For their part, the Yagizban were sick of the Federals for getting into a war with Earth in the first place, and then using it as an excuse for never-ending martial law. They would fight like zmey over a manta-whale carcass, until one of them was dead, and the manta was torn to pieces.
“No, Sergei. I don’t get it. Not anymore.” She turned her attention to the controls. “If you want to resign, I’ll give you a good reference.”
She’d suggested much the same at breakfast, but then it had been in jest. The hard truth was resignation really did mean being promptly conscripted into the Federal forces. By the time she realised it was a threat, the chance to withdraw the comment was gone. Misunderstandings, she thought. This is how wars start.
The following seventeen hours were not the most comfortable either of them had ever spent. Sergei was surlier than usual, and barely spoke. Katya tried to jolly him along for the first couple of hours, but grew tired of his wilful recalcitrance and was soon only speaking to him when she needed to. There was no chance of any more hands of poker and certainly none of a game of chess, so she pulled up a book on a non-luminescent plastic paper screen and read to pass the time. The Russalkin loathing of all things Terran perhaps unsurprisingly did not extend to Earth art in general and literature in particular, so she felt no tremors of spiritual treason in reading a book called Moby Dick. It was about a man who had grown obsessed with hunting and killing a sea monster, a great white whale in one of the Terran oceans. Katya doubted it would end well.
It was a relief for both of them when they picked up the Atlantean approach markers, and even when they were interrogated at torpedo point by a patrol boat, because at least it gave them something to focus on outside the toxic levels of animosity inside the Lukyan. With the patrol boat captain’s suspicions allayed, they were permitted to enter the minisub pens on the western side of the largest pressurised environment on the planet. Some of the Atlanteans went so far as to call it a city, but cities were a grubby Terrestrial conceit, and the term had never really stuck. Its population of a million and a half did make it comfortably larger than any other base or station, however, and it was large enough to support non-vital services.
Katya had heard that Atlantis was the only place on the planet where it was possible to forget that the Yagizban were trying to kill you, at least for a while. There was no chance of that during a three-hour debriefing, however. It was necessary to hand in a journey report to the authorities on arrival. Usually this simply consisted of a copy of the logged course, a plot of the actual course taken, and a brief description of anything that might be of interest to the FMA, although by far the most common style of report was the solitary sentence, “Nothing to report.” An actual plot that deviated wildly from the logged course and a description that included the phrases “Vodyanoi/2 warboat,” “Jarilo transport,” “anticipated ambush,” “noisemaker launched,” and “torpedoes detected” was never going to go by with a mildly interested nod from the authorities.
By the time they were released, they had been awake for over twenty-four hours with only a few short catnaps, and tiredness made Katya and Sergei even snappier with one another, especially since Sergei appeared to harbour a suspicion that their lengthy debriefing had been all part of a surreal plan of Katya’s to make him even more miserable.
They walked down the main southern promenade of the settlement silent and angry, barely exchanging a word.
It was a shame they were so tired and so ill-tempered, because Atlantis was like no other place on Russalka. It had actual shopping “streets,” wide concourses with recessed shops and freestanding stalls selling admittedly minor variations of each other’s stock. Once, Katya knew, these stalls had also dealt with goods brought in from the other Earth colonies, but that was before the war, when Russalka still had ships capable of reaching their near neighbours. Now there were some odd trinkets, curiosities like bone coral growths and the preserved forms of some of the more unusual fish from the world ocean. One stall was even topped by the massive skull of a zmey — a sea dragon. Neither Katya nor Sergei had time for any of this, though; both wanted sleep and to be out of one another’s company; and they wanted these things as soon as possible.
When the Federal officer and two troopers stopped them, it just seemed like another lousy thing to top off another lousy day.
“Captain Kuriakova?” said the officer. Katya had the impression of a tall and efficient woman in the uniform, but what raised her concerns most was the small black insignia at the end of the officer’s rank patch on her left breast pocket. She was a captain in Secor, the Federal security organisation. When Secor took an interest in your business, it never boded well. There were grim little rumours about Secor arresting those they found suspicious, spiriting them off to remote secure facilities like the Deeps or R’lyeh, where they would be interrogated, perhaps tortured, and dumped out of an airlock when Secor had squeezed every drop of useful information out of them.