The Leviathan released them from the docking bay with no ceremony, threats or reminders. It was as mundane and banal as any recorded voice in a navigational simulation. Except, Katya reminded herself as the Baby hummed quietly away from the immense bulk of the warship, simulations weren’t likely to kill you in an instant if you got anything wrong. When they were several thousand metres away and there was no indication that they were being followed (“Not that we’d stand any chance of detecting it if we were,” Kane noted with mock cheerfulness), Katya laid in a course for the moon pool entrance of the mining complex. The Baby’s inertial locator indicated that the Leviathan had been moving away from the site in a neutral direction the whole time they’d been aboard. Apparently it had lost interest in the Novgorod, the Vodyanoi and their crews.
Katya knew appearances could be deceptive and that a machine-mind like the Leviathan’s would not abandon its attack simply because it had grown bored with it. Everything was organised in priorities, complex relationships of function against requirements. If it had left, it was because there was something more pressing that it was going to apply itself to. She wondered what that might be with a sense of dread.
Unexpectedly, the communications channel crackled into life making them all jump. “Vodyanoi to minisub Pushkin’s Baby. Do you read me? Come in, please.”
Lukyan toggled open a channel. “Pushkin here. Who is this?”
Katya reached across and patched her own headset into the link. “Katya here, Lieutenant Petrov. Good to hear your voice again.”
Abruptly she had her headset pulled off. She started to protest but then saw the anger in Kane’s face as he put it on. “Kane here, Petrov. Making yourself comfortable aboard my boat, are you?”
“Quite comfortable, Captain Kane. She’s an interesting vessel.”
“Let me speak to Tasya this instant!”
There was a moment’s pause, then, “Calm down, Havilland.”
“Tasya?”
“Yes.” Her calming voice filled the cabin. “It’s all right. We have an agreement. When it looked like the Leviathan was going to leave us alone, we went back to the moon pool. It hadn't touched the Vodyanoi, so we piled in and got out while we still could.”
“But Petrov…”
“Relax. We don’t have enough people left to man the boat at battle stations, not after those damn drones cut half of them down. Between our attack on them and some of their people running into the drone in the tunnels, there’re not a lot of the Feds left either. We think there must have been more than one drone; maybe as many as three or four. The upshot is that neither we nor the Feds have got enough people left to properly crew a boat by themselves. Working together, we can do it.”
“And this agreement?”
“They don’t try and take control or try to arrest us, any nonsense like that. We don’t kill them and dump them in deep waters. When this is over, we drop them somewhere safe and sound. The enemy is the Leviathan. I think we can all agree about that.”
Kane frowned, but only as an expression of his reluctance to accept the reasonable. “Well, where are you then?”
“About a hundred metres behind you. We’ve been shadowing you for the last couple of minutes.”
“What? What for?”
“Just to make sure the Leviathan was keeping its distance before we hailed you. Are you ready to be taken aboard?”
Lukyan didn’t seem any happier than Kane about the way things had moved on in their absence, but neither could he deny the practicality of it. He spoke with a coldness verging on ill-grace. “Slowing to five knots. Level and steady.”
They waited in taut silence for almost a minute before the Baby started to be buffeted by the turbulence of the Vodyanoi’s open salvage maw. It became worse as they were slowly overtaken and engulfed by the gaping mouth and then, abruptly, it became very calm. Lukyan cut the engines without comment and sat with his arms folded as the maw closed around them.
Petrov’s first words when they reached the Vodyanoi’s bridge were, “Where’s Tokarov?” While Lukyan explained with the occasional clarification from Kane, Katya looked around the boat’s bridge with interest.
It was very alien to anything she’d ever seen before. The whole philosophy of design was different from FMA or civil boats, all of which, of course, came from the same yards. Where a federal boat like — the poor Novgorod, for example — had all the crew stations ranged around the main screen, the Vodyanoi contained niches for most of the bridge officers, each with their own small screens. Only the captain’s position — a much more imposing seat with armrests imbedded with repeater displays and communications controls — the weapons officer, and the helm faced a modestly sized but high definition main viewer. It was so unlike anything in her experience, there was only one thing it could be.
“This is a Grubber boat, isn’t it?” she asked Kane.
“Hmm?” He turned from listening to Lukyan’s conversation with Petrov. “A what?”
“This is from Earth, isn’t it? It’s a Terran vessel?”
He raised his eyebrows in mild surprise, as if he’d thought they’d been talking about kelp all along and had only just realised his mistake. “The Vodyanoi? Why, yes. She was built on Earth and transported here.” He smiled. “She’s not very big, at least by Earth standards — about equivalent to a frigate if that means anything to you — but you’ll appreciate the problems of transporting anything of any size over the best part of fifty light years. She was originally the Raleigh, but it seemed altogether too noble a name for a… well, you know.”
Katya had no idea who Raleigh was, but she guessed he wouldn’t have been happy to have a pirate ship named after him.
“So I renamed her the Vodyanoi. It seemed appropriate.”
“Did it?” said Katya. She had no idea who “Vodyanoi” was either.
“Yes.” He looked at her closely. “You don’t know what a vodyanoi is, do you?”
“Why should I?”
“Because your ancestors were Russian.”
“I’ve heard that. I don’t know what it means.” She saw the shock on Kane’s face and added spitefully, “And I don’t care either. Russians are Grubbers. We’re Russalkin now.”
Kane looked at her seriously, then walked over to an unoccupied crew position and gestured to her to sit by him. Reluctantly she complied.
“Don’t throw away your past, Katya.” He spoke with quiet emphasis. “As a race, we’re built from memories. There’s an old saying, those who don’t learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them. You’re too intelligent to do that.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“More than you know about me, I assure you. These Russians, whose memory you so lightly cast aside; they came here on a trip that took years, putting all their hopes and fears into one great gamble, that they could make a home here on this world. Things were starting to deteriorate on Earth, they could see that. You’re a product of their fondest wishes.”
“So?” She was sounding like a little girl again, Katya thought.
“So, they brought Earth with them. Don’t you know why this world is called Russalka? The Russalki were water nymphs from Russian folklore, beautiful and clever. Your ancestors didn’t miraculously become Russalkin as soon as they’d shaken the dust of Terra from their feet, you know. They saw this planet in the view screens as they approached and they saw a new home, but they could never forget their old one. Don’t you honour them enough to at least understand that?”