“There seems little doubt that this huge ore deposit that so mysteriously vanished was actually the vessel that then went on to attack you,” said Petrov. “Its stealth capabilities are astonishing. I wonder why it had them all deactivated when you first detected it lying on the seabed?”
“We don’t know it is a vessel,” said Tokarov. “It doesn’t behave like any submarine I’ve ever encountered or heard of.”
“Of course it’s a vessel,” scoffed Petrov, “what else could it be? Or are you suggesting it’s some sort of sea monster?”
“Leviathan,” said Katya to herself.
“What was that, Ms Kuriakova?” Zagadko’s hearing was apparently as sharp as his intellect.
“Oh, uh… nothing,” she replied, flustered. “Just a name I heard. My father once told me that Russalka has no myths or legends yet, but it would grow them because people needed them. He told me that Earth’s history had been full of monster legends and we’d follow suit.”
“Fond of Earth, is he?” asked Petrov tartly.
“He died in the Battle of Lyonesse, fighting the Terran marines.” Tokarov shot Petrov a dirty look. Petrov bit his lip. “I hardly remember him. Just little things. He taught me the names of the Terran monsters and I remembered them at first because they were fun to say. Then I remembered them because they reminded me of that day.” She spoke the names softly like a prayer. “Kraken. Scylla. Leviathan.”
Zagadko broke the uneasy silence that followed. “Ms Kuriakova, what do you think we’re facing?”
She realised with a small shock that the captain of one of the most powerful warboats on the planet was asking her opinion. Petrov still seemed embarrassed by his gaff, but Tokarov also seemed interested in her views. She thought carefully and said, “I think it’s a machine. But I don’t think it’s a submarine, at least no sort of boat that has ever come out of our shipyards, and I don’t know how it got here. Maybe it was here all along.”
“Aliens?” said Petrov, but he wasn’t scoffing now. Humanity had always half hoped and half feared to discover other intelligent life out among the stars. Up to now it had been half disappointed and half relieved to find none.
“Maybe,” she conceded, “but then, wouldn’t we be the aliens?”
“No, that’s not possible,” said Petrov. “No signs of intelligent life having been here before us has ever been found.”
“But the whole planet hasn’t been fully mapped,” pointed out Zagadko. “We have no idea what lies beneath the Soup. Sonar just bounces off it.”
Katya remembered how close to a Soup lake they’d detected the “ore” deposit. In her mind’s eye, she could see that great bulk now crawling from the lake, slowly, painfully, until it had collapsed exhausted in the middle of the Weft. Then along they’d come and…
“It was defending itself!” she said suddenly. “Of course, I’ve been so stupid.” She looked at the officers. “We shot a probe at it. How was it to know we weren’t attacking? It cloaked itself somehow and fell off our sensors, killed the probe and retaliated.” The realisation only served to depress her. Uncle Lukyan was dead because of a misunderstanding.
“That may be so,” said the captain slowly as he weighed up the implications, “but it doesn’t account for its attack on the Novgorod. We didn’t attack it. We didn’t even see it.”
“Besides,” said Tokarov, studying the Baby’s frantic last seconds on the computer log, “its tactics are completely different. Look at this. There are four or five small contacts out there and the hull damage report issued to the distress buoy’s memory in the last moment before it was launched show multiple breaches. Hmmm, still no explosions on the hydrophones. Against us, there was one contact and damage control reports one, possibly two holes in the salvage maw and that’s it, the limit of the attack on us. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes perfect sense.”
Zagadko whirled in irritation towards Kane, who had spoken. “If you’re going to join the conversation then kindly do so, Mr Kane. I, for one, find your habit of hanging around at the edges deeply annoying.”
“Very well.” Kane got up from the seat he’d taken without permission and stepped closer to them. “I said it makes perfect sense.” When he was sure he had their attention, he continued, “The Baby was destroyed quickly because it was perceived to be a threat. This vessel, entity, whatever you want to call it, Leviathan is as good a name as any, thought it was being attacked and defended itself. Now, it punches a couple of holes in a much larger boat and then runs away. Why? Any ideas?”
“It didn’t intend to sink us,” said Tokarov.
“You’re quick. That’s right. Why didn’t it want to sink the Novgorod?”
Katya thought Kane sounded like a maniac teacher. Who knew why the Leviathan — the more she used the name, the more fitting it seemed — had only damaged them? They’d just limp off to drydock, get fixed up and come straight back out, looking for a fight. What could it possibly gain? Then Katya thought through that sequence again and suddenly knew.
“It wanted to see where we’d run. It wanted to know where the Novgorod called home.”
“Lemuria.” Zagadko was grim. “It wanted us to lead it right to Lemuria so it could… God’s teeth, if it hadn’t hurt us more than it had intended, we’d have led it right there. What would it have done?”
“I think we can make a pretty good guess,” said Kane. “That thing against an almost undefended base… They wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
“But that means,” said Petrov, “it’s out there, right now, tracking us.”
CHAPTER 5
Environmental Control
Katya had known it intuitively, even if consciously she had elected not to think about it. Of course the Leviathan was probably after them; it would hardly have attacked and then just swum off, giving them grace to lick their wounds. Of course it wanted to know where they would run. The only “of course” she could not supply was what it would do when it realised that they had made a bolthole of an abandoned mining base. She doubted it would just give them up as a bad job and go off to harass somebody else.
She’d watched the Baby’s distress log four times before the captain had decided that she was past the point of analytical interest and well into obsession. “There was nothing you could have done,” he’d told her, not without kindness. Of course there wasn’t. Of course he was right.
Of course.
It was difficult to take one’s gaze away from the main screen, which still continued to show the Novgorod’s course and maximum range. The centre of the map was still the submarine herself; the map updated thirty times a second and she got closer and closer to the abandoned mine with every minute. The red circle grew smaller each minute too, but the mine stayed within its circumference. Just, only just.
The lack of a safety margin obviously vexed Captain Zagadko so much that he was even prepared to listen to Kane.
“Have you ever flown a fixed-wing aircraft, captain?” asked Kane.
“I’ve flown CG craft, but what’s your point?” Katya noticed Petrov give Kane a very suspicious look as Zagadko answered.
“The point is, you’re going to have to treat this boat like an aircraft on the final approach. A fixed-wing aircraft doesn’t handle anything like a CG, believe me. You’ve got a source of thrust — propellers, jets, whatever — and that’s it. The aircraft develops lift through its aerodynamic lifting surfaces. You can’t slow down to think things through, you fly on gut reaction and experience.”