“Captain!” blurted Katya. “Please, I’ve got an awful feeling…”
“Not now, Ms Kuriakova,” said Zagadko. “I’m busy.” He continued telling the officer his orders to set up defensive positions along the dock.
“It can’t wait!” Katya was in a fury of indecision. Was it really worth antagonizing the captain over? It was just a gut feeling she had really. Was it enough?
“Didn’t I order you to stay below?” said the sublieutenant.
“Yes, but this is important!” Every second Tokarov and the marines were getting further from the moon pool. Every second the danger was increasing. If she was right.
Zagadko sighed. “Carry on,” he told the sublieutenant who left to carry out his orders with a backward narrow-eyed glance at Katya. He turned to Katya and looked down at her, crossing his arms. “Very well, Ms Kuriakova. What is so important?”
Now she had his attention, she didn’t know where to start. “Those pirates, didn’t they bother you?”
“I’ve encountered worse. What do you know about it, anyway? You were below decks during the attack, such as it was.”
“I was watching on the hull cameras.” She saw the captain’s eyebrows rise and pushed on before he got into a lecture about illicit use of FMA equipment. “They were a joke. I can’t imagine that bunch getting dressed without help. Can you?”
Zagadko laughed. “No, not really. Who’d have thought Kane would…” Then his slightly patronising smile abruptly faded. “Oh, gods,” he said hoarsely. Then in a full throated roar, “Petrov! Recall Tokarov! NOW!”
Petrov whirled to face his captain, saw this wasn’t a time to ask for clarification and jerked the radio from his belt. “Tokarov!” he said into the handset. “Pull back to the boat! Captain’s orders, most urgent!” For answer he only got the dead tone of a clear digital channel. Petrov shook his head. “I’m sorry, captain. These damn tunnels soak up signals like sponge.”
“Take two men. Catch up with them and get them back here immediately. Go!”
Petrov had barely taken three steps before the surface of the moon pool exploded off to the starboard of the Novgorod.
“Down!” shouted Zagadko, grabbing Katya fiercely by the arm and almost throwing her at the open hatch. She sprawled on the metal as the wave smashed into the Novgorod’s side, making the boat roll ten or fifteen degrees, her hull groaning hideously under the strain. It swept over the deck, blinding Katya for a moment as she covered her head for protection. Zagadko’s legs were swept out from beneath him and he fell heavily before being carried back and almost dumped off the port side. The huge wave hitting the docks caught the Novgorod’s crew by total surprise. Katya cleared her face of seawater in time to see the sublieutenant who’d ordered her around previously caught in the backwash as the tonnes of water rolled back into the pool. She looked like the wave had first smashed her against the wall; Katya couldn’t tell if she was dead or only unconscious. Katya jumped to her feet to run to her aid, but the captain’s voice stopped her in her tracks.
“No, Ms Kuriakova! Below! Get below!” He was crawling forward, his sidearm maser — a monster of a gun and definitely not FMA standard issue — drawn and aiming out into the moon pool. Katya stole a sideways look and almost froze. Another submarine was in the pool — leaner and smaller than the Novgorod but just as deadly. Its hydroplanes were up and Katya realised the massive wave had been deliberate. Hatches were already clanging open on her deck and atop her rakish conning tower, and people — pirates — were streaming out. She watched in horror as a forward hatch opened and a great pintle-mounted weapon rose on a cargo lift, two pirates already manning it. Katya had heard enough war stories from her Uncle Lukyan to know a “deck-sweeper” when she saw it; a great brute of a Gatling machinegun engineered so that no two bullets would travel quite the same path. Accuracy wasn’t its strength, just massive firepower delivered in broad strokes.
Behind her, she heard the distinctive half krak, half hisssss of a maser and realised the captain had opened fire. Part of her was watching all this as if it was happening to somebody else. I don’t want to see anyone die, she thought, the sick feeling of fear beginning to grow in her gut.
One of the pirates at the Gatling gun stepped back as if they’d just remembered something important and then collapsed. Katya knew he was dead. Then she saw the Gatling gun come to bear on her and its barrels started to spin with a high electrical whine. She dived headlong down the hatch as the first large calibre rounds hailed heavily against the Novgorod’s hull, stripping off matte-black anechoic tiling and blowing it into the air in a shower of lightless fragments.
She got tangled with the rungs of the gangway ladder and hit the bridge deck heavily, sprawling on her back. Hurt and stunned, she listened to the scream of the Gatling for a few seconds, realising that the captain was very probably dead by now. They’d been fooled, conned by the pirates with their display of comical incompetence into underestimating them. All the while, the pirate vessel had been making its way around the mountain to attack them from behind. And now the captain was probably dead, Tokarov and the marines had probably been ambushed and were dead, Petrov had probably run into the ambushing force and was dead, even that tight-lipped sublieutenant who’d been so off-hand with Katya was probably dead. There was only one thing left to do.
She found the arms locker easily enough. It was still unlocked; after the urgent arming to repel boarders, they’d obviously been in too much of a hurry to secure it. Besides which it was empty, stripped bare.
Almost bare. In one corner there were some small drawers containing spare parts, cleaning kits and manuals. In the lowermost, she found a box that held what she needed.
Havilland Kane was lying on the bunk in the brig when Katya opened the door. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye and then went back to considering the ceiling.
“Noisy outside,” he commented. “I gather my Brethren of the Deep, to coin a phrase, are making life difficult for the good captain?”
“The captain’s dead.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Truly I am. My colleagues can be a little heavy-handed at times.”
“You planned all this.” Katya’s hand closed around the little maser pistol concealed in her pocket. Lukyan had never balked at showing her how to maintain, activate and operate weapons. The very fact that she didn’t like guns had encouraged him. If she’d been fascinated by them, he’d once told her, he would have taught her about hydroponics gardens instead.
“Planned? No, that’s a very strong term for what I’ve done. I’ve extemporised. Made it up as I went along. I certainly didn’t plan for your uncle’s craft to be attacked or this one, for that matter. I just took advantage of opportunities as they’ve presented themselves. I’m sorry about the violence, though. Without my calming influence, my crew can get… excitable.”
His self-control and the knowledge that he’d been stringing them along all the way were almost more than she could bear. “You dirty Grubber,” she snarled.
Nothing seemed to bother him. “You know, I’ve never liked that term. It says more about some vague Russalkin sense of inadequacy than anything bad about Earth. Land-grubbers…” He snorted. “What do most Russalkin know about it? You’ve never had real ground under your feet, just blasted rock or deck sections. You’ve never lain on your back in a field and reached up,” he raised his arm towards the ceiling, “feeling you can almost touch the clouds. Fluffy white clouds against a cobalt blue sky this is, not those filthy dark clouds that Russalka gets all the time. You think I want to be on your foul little planet? If I could leave, I would have left ten years ago.”