Kane smiled. “Sensory deprivation, psychotomimetic drugs, RNA stripping, the usual. They’re quite old fashioned in their ways, bless them.”
Zagadko had Kane taken to the brig by a couple of marines. He seemed embarrassed to have Kane present on the bridge for any longer than was necessary, Kane’s calm acceptance of his arrest unnerving him somewhat.
For her part Katya watched him go with very mixed emotions. He was a ruthless pirate, a murderer who had saved her life. He was probably a Terran, a Grubber, one of the filth who had killed her father and thousands more, yet he had also saved the Novgorod and everybody aboard her. Katya didn’t know what to think. She couldn’t bring herself to hate him, but she certainly couldn’t like him either. That only left her the option of indifference, and Kane was a hard man to be indifferent about. She settled on something like grudging respect, but that just made what Secor were going to do to him feel all the worse.
Tokarov arrived back to report he’d put together his party. “Shall I have weapons issued, sir?”
The captain looked at him as if he was mad for a second, but then his brow clouded and he nodded. “Yes. Yes, that would be wise. I don’t like the way Kane knew so much about this place and the way the life-support has so conveniently been left running. We may not be alone here.”
Katya watched the party troop up the deck, restlessness growing in her. She didn’t care to be trapped in the Novgorod with the likes of Captain Zagadko. She’d known Kane was a criminal, but Secor? They’d tear his mind to pieces looking for Grubber conspiracies and leave him a hollowed-out wreck. She’d heard too many ugly stories of what Secor agents did to amuse themselves, from friends and from Sergei in his darker moments. If even half of what they said was true… Why couldn’t Zagadko just have said he’d hand Kane over to the normal law enforcement agencies?
“Captain,” she began.
“Request denied,” replied Zagadko blandly without even looking away from the damage report he’d just been handed.
“You don’t even know what…”
“You were going to ask permission to go ashore.” He finally favoured her with a look. “Weren’t you?”
She had been, but she just glared at him as her answer.
“Well,” he continued without giving her any more time to answer, “that’s impossible. I’m not convinced that this mining site is nearly as abandoned as Mr Kane tried to suggest.”
“What?” said Katya, anger making her incautious and impolite.” You think the Terran army is hiding here?”
The captain ignored the venom in her voice. “Criminals tend to associate with criminals, greater and lesser. I think our Mr Kane is the former, and that he will associate with the latter. Pirates, perhaps? People who have little to lose by working for somebody like him.”
“You’re making a lot of guesses, captain.”
The captain’s face hardened. “With all due respect, Ms Kuriakova, you know nothing.” The grimness of his voice indicated that she was due precious little respect, from him at least. “The war was only ten years ago, not even a generation, and you know nothing of it.”
“My father…”
“Died in it? Lots of fathers died in it. And mothers. And sons. And daughters. You dishonour their memory. The first strikes were against our air arm. Remember that much?”
“The Andrev Platform was destroyed. Of course I…”
“And what kind of aircraft were destroyed there? Eh?”
Katya couldn’t answer; she had no idea. Her mouth opened and closed a few times until the captain lost patience.
“Contragravitic craft, girl! CG craft just like the ones in the forward compartment! They were all we had; ideal for lifting from a submersible platform. How then,” he leaned close and she could suddenly feel the weight of that war on his shoulders, all that loss and agony expressing itself in the cold fury of his glance, “did Kane have experience flying fixed-wing aircraft? Those are Terran!” He spat the word out like diseased phlegm.
He drew himself up and took a long calming breath. “No Russalkin could have saved our lives in the way that he did,” he finished quietly.
CHAPTER 6
Deck Sweeper
Katya sat in the otherwise deserted junior officers’ ward room and wondered how so much can go so wrong in so little time. The memories kept running around her head in a jumbled mess: clinging to the distress buoy; that idiot Fed Suhkalev; getting dressed that morning, so carefully putting her navigator’s card in her pocket; the ghost return from the “ore mountain”; torpedoes in the water. Most of all, she remembered her Uncle Lukyan. He’d survived the war only to die on some stupid milk run. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair. It was not fair.
“Theoretically I’m not allowed in here without an invitation.” She looked up. Lieutenant Petrov was standing in the doorway, his hands on the top frame, looking speculatively around. “I’m the first officer,” he continued, “so I’m not really a junior officer anymore. Tradition says I don’t go any further without being asked.”
Katya looked at him for a long second. She wasn’t sure she liked him; she still remembered the look on his face when Kane had made the slip about aircraft that had condemned him. If the captain hadn’t picked it up, she was sure Petrov would have informed him of his suspicions. But, like so much else, it was duty. Duty and tradition. Traditions from old Earth, strangely enough — the world they cursed in one breath and held in grudging respect the next. “Come in,” she said.
Petrov looked too tall to be a submariner, she thought as he folded himself through the door and slid with practised ease but little grace into the seat opposite her. With his close-cropped hair and his cold grey eyes, he was almost a parody of the stereotypical Secor officer. A Russalka spider-crab made human.
He sat in silence, regarding her for a moment. Then he opened his breast pocket and reached inside. “I have something for you.” He slid her navigator’s card out and put it down on the table in front of her. As she took it, he added, “It was in your clothes. I thought you’d like it back.”
Katya was looking at her picture on the card. There she was looking so seriously back out at herself and Katya thought that was taken eighteen days ago. Why do I look like such a child? “Thank you.” She put the card away. “You searched my clothes?”
“Of course,” said Petrov, unsurprised and unembarrassed by the question. “You came aboard with a criminal. I wanted to make sure your story, at least, was true.”
She felt oddly complimented. Petrov hadn’t thought she’s just a girl; he’d thought she might be a desperate criminal. He was the first person the whole day who had treated her like an adult. No, that wasn’t quite true. “Have you heard anything from Lieutenant Tokarov yet?”
“No. Not yet. These tunnels will play havoc with communications though, so that doesn’t necessarily signify anything untoward.”
“But you’re worried?”
He raised an eyebrow. “What gives you that idea?”
Katya shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps the way you’re so keen to explain away the fact he hasn’t reported in yet.”
Petrov looked at her blankly. Then he smiled. It didn’t light up his face and looked like it rarely had many opportunities to show itself, but it was a smile nonetheless. “Your prodigious talents extend further than just navigation, I see. A student of human nature too.”
“Prodigious?”
“I read your card, remember. Your scores are excellent. With more experience you could walk onto any boat in the ocean and they’d be pleased to have you. I haven’t seen such impressive scores since, well, my own. I was something of a wunderkind too, you see.” The smile flickered briefly again.