Katya’s gaze seemed distant, and Petrov wondered what she was seeing. Then she looked him in the eye and said, “My uncle’s dead.”
She said it flatly, as if the words and their meaning had become disconnected in her mind.
Petrov’s smile instantly went. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“What I don’t understand is, why don’t I care?” She shook her head. “I loved him. He was there for us right after papa died, has always been there. Why can’t I cry for him?”
“Perhaps,” said Petrov, “because he’s always been there. You know he’s gone but, part of you, a very great part of you does not believe it. You expect him to walk through the door at any minute.”
She looked at the door, an open door aboard a boat Uncle Lukyan had never set foot aboard in his entire life. Yet somehow, she could see him in her mind’s eye, stepping around the frame, looking up and seeing her, that slightly prepossessed air that he usually carried turning to the great smile he’d reserved for her ever since she’d been born. She willed him to be there, for the whole thing to have been a dreadful mistake or a stupid joke. No Leviathan, no attack, no drowned corpse strapped into the wreck of the Baby. She couldn’t do it. She knew she could never do it. Finally she started to cry.
Petrov stood, unfolding himself easily out from the confinement of the table and chair and left her silently to her grief.
Some time later the speaker in the wardroom’s bulkhead burst into life. “Battle stations!” barked the captain’s voice, tense with anger. “All crew to battle stations! Prepare to repulse boarders!”
Katya’s head jerked up. She’d been drifting in a shallow sleep, exhaustion finally catching up with her. For a moment she had no idea where she was or how she’d come to be there. Then it all came back in a sickening flood. She might have sat there in indefinite despair if the captain’s words hadn’t finally sunk in. Her eyes widened.
Repel boarders?
The gangways were in frenzy when she stuck her head out of the door. Ratings and officers were hurrying back and forth and she realised with a shock that they were all carrying weapons. Not just the sidearms that the senior officers wore but longarms — maser rifles, close-assault guns, even a flamer pack.
She followed the flow of personnel to the bridge and found it almost empty. The top hatch was open and she could hear shouting going on outside, the voices echoing around the great cavern of the moon pool. Then the shooting started.
She had no idea how far away the firing was between the echoes and the sound coming down the hatch but it didn’t sound that close. There was the sporadic krak! Of ballistic smallarms and a couple of bursts of full automatic fire. It quickly became obvious it was coming closer.
“What’s happening?” she called up the hatch.
A face appeared above her, a female sublieutenant she didn’t recognise. “Stay there!” she was ordered. “Stay off the deck!” Then the face was gone.
More firing. She could hear the captain up top giving terse commands. Fine, she thought, I don’t have to be up there to find out what’s happening. She walked to the station where she’d seen Petrov operate the lights and exterior cameras and examined the controls briefly. Her cybernetics teacher had always said that the more sophisticated a system was and the better designed it was, the simpler it seemed to be. “All the functionality, none of the knobs and dials,” recited Katya under her breath. Whoever had designed this console had known their trade well. In a few seconds she was using the Novgorod’s cameras as easily as she once operated the Baby’s.
Captain Zagadko had deployed his marines and armed crew behind any available cover facing into the tunnels; crates, raised hatches, even the boat’s exposed hull all sheltered waiting crew as the shooting in the tunnels got closer. There was little time for tension to build further before Lieutenant Tokarov and his team came into sight, the ones at the front pausing to provide covering fire for the ones at the rear as they moved to the front and returned the favour, the tactical leapfrogging that Katya had only ever seen in screen dramas about the war and crime thrillers. As soon as the angle of the tunnel gave them enough cover from their pursuers, they just ran for the Novgorod.
They’d barely made it when their foes surged out after them. Katya thought there must have been about fifteen or twenty of them, mainly men but she spotted a couple of women. There was no pattern or consistency in their clothing or armament; they looked like a mass escape from an FMA holding facility that had bolted through a weapons museum.
So this was what real pirates looked like.
Unlike the ordered retreat of Tokarov’s team, they ran headlong into the cavern and stopped in a shocked rabble when they saw the mass of the FMA boat beached there. She snorted derisively — how did that bunch of morons think the Feds had got into the mining complex in the first place? That they’d swum there? All of a sudden, the smart and wily pirates of fiction looked like a grand exaggeration of the truth.
“This is Captain Alexander Zagadko of the FMA boat, the Novgorod!” roared the captain’s voice from above. It was perfectly audible through the open hatch and Katya quickly wound down the volume on the hull sensor relays before the speakers blew. “By the authority vested in me by the Federal Maritime Authority and by the Russalkin legislature, you’re all under arrest! Drop your weapons immediately! Surrender or die!”
The pirates, to their credit, had a third alternative. As one, they ran back down the tunnel before the captain could give the order to fire.
Zagadko swore a pithy but venomous oath of the kind that comes easily to sailors. “Tokarov! Report!”
“We just ran into them in the corridors, sir. They looked more surprised to see us than we were to see them. We’d already found signs this place was occupied.”
“Any idea where their boat is?”
“We saw signage about another dock on the other side of the mountain. They must be moored there.”
“Kane’s people,” growled Zagadko. “No wonder he knew so much about it. Well, perhaps he’s done us a favour. Do you think you could reach this other dock quickly, lieutenant?”
Tokarov considered the question quickly. “Yes, sir. If that’s where they’re headed, we’ll be on their heels the whole way.”
“Take the marines. I want their boat. It’s our way out of here. What are you waiting for? Jump to it, man!”
Tokarov was off and running to the captain of the marines in a moment.
Katya didn’t like it. The crew were trained in combat, but wouldn’t have the sharp edge of the marines. She could see the captain’s reasoning, but she really didn’t like the thought of the boat’s defences being cut like this. It made her feel vulnerable and she’d heard too many ugly stories about what pirates did with prisoners to want to take risks.
There was something else she didn’t like either. Something about the pirates she’d seen on the cameras. She sat down and watched the screens as Tokarov and the marines headed off into the tunnels in pursuit and tried to put her finger on what was bothering her. There was an imbalance somewhere, an inequality. On the one hand there were those pirate clowns and on the other, there were… There was…
“Kane!” she said, her eyes widening in horror. “Oh no! Oh no, no, no, no!”
She skittered up the ladder, her feet on the rungs clattering like gunfire. Once on deck, she ran to where Zagadko was giving orders to the same sublieutenant who’d ordered her to stay below.