Katya felt awkward and confused. Two halves of her were at war: one side that knew full well that her great grandparents had come from Earth, that they had been good people and she quite literally owed them everything for their bravery in making such a long and dangerous journey; one side that could see the history files of the atrocities that the Grubbers had heaped upon Russalka when they had invaded and knew that Earth was a festering heap of evil — rapacious and violent — that took what it wanted and didn’t mind how many died to get it. She wanted to hate the Terrans. That would be easiest. Why did Kane insist on making everything so difficult?
“I renamed this boat the Vodyanoi for a couple of reasons,” he was saying. “I think both of them are good. In Russian mythology, the vodyanoi were the husbands of the Russalki. It seemed, I don’t know, poetic to me. Things are difficult here; even before the war they were difficult. I thought a little poetry wouldn’t go amiss. The other reason is because of what the vodyanoi looked like. They could change their form. A handsome young man one second, a hideous ogre the next. They travelled in the water, sometimes above it. They were neither one thing nor the other. This boat is a little like that. Once it was a legal warboat of one world. Now it’s a very illegal pirate vessel on another. Few vessels can claim to have a history like that. Quite the sea change.” He laughed a little but quickly sobered. “I don’t suppose you know any Shakespeare either?” He took her blank expression for agreement. “No poetry here. None at all.”
Tasya had walked in close to the beginning of Kane’s explanations and had been listening intently with Petrov. “You say that as if it’s a surprise to you, Kane,” she said and then, as if to prove her point, said to Petrov, “what are your thoughts about the Leviathan, lieutenant?”
“Tokarov’s in danger every minute he’s aboard that… vessel. We have to think of some way to get him out safely. How we do that, I have no idea. I’ll have to think on it.” He turned towards Kane. “One thing that interests me, though, is why that thing rejected you. You must have been hand-picked. It doesn’t make sense that you were incompatible.”
Kane shrugged and looked away, but Katya saw the same hunted expression she’d noticed in him aboard the Leviathan. He looked like a cornered animal, and she didn’t believe him when he said, “I don’t know. The selection process was governmentally organised. Stupid mistakes are virtually guaranteed.” Petrov narrowed his eyes, making her think that he didn’t believe Kane either.
Tasya didn’t seem to care. She was already mulling over rescue plans. “Sensors,” she demanded crisply. “Where is the Leviathan now?”
The Vodyanoi’s own sensor officer must have died in the mining base as the position was taken by the Novgorod’s. If he resented taking orders from a pirate, he showed no sign of it. “Whatever its stealth capability, it’s not using it. Between passive sonar and the amount of noise it’s making manoeuvring, I’m having no trouble tracking it.”
Something Kane had said suddenly came back to Katya. If it had been impractical to transport submarines much larger that the Vodyanoi or the Raleigh or whatever you wanted to call it, how could the Leviathan then be explained? It dwarfed the Vodyanoi, but it had been brought the huge distance from Earth. How large a transporter starship would that have required? It boggled the imagination. She made up her mind to ask him the next chance she got. After Petrov’s pointed comments, Kane seemed in no mood to answer any more questions for the moment.
Tasya had taken the captain’s seat with no argument from Kane. He had claimed to be captain, but Katya thought it looked more like they took turns at being captain and first officer. “What course is it on?” Tasya asked.
“Nothing you can really call a course, ma’am. It was running slow but steadily north while the Baby minisub was aboard, but now…” he quickly punched a few keys and the main display echoed his own station’s display. A blip labelled Leviathan was tracing out lazy loops and zigzags in the ocean. “Now it’s lost all direction. It just seems to be wandering about.”
There was some puzzled mutterings from the other crew positions. Tasya cut across it. “Is it searching for something?”
“That’s no search pattern I’ve ever seen. It really does seem to be dawdling about. It’s as if it doesn’t know what to do next.”
“It’s a machine,” snapped Kane, his tiredness flashing into irritation. “It doesn’t ‘dawdle.’ If it’s got nothing to do, it does nothing.” He watched the blip draw a lazy ‘S’ on the screen. “I do not like this. There’s no reason for this behaviour.” Suddenly remembering something, he reached inside his jacket and produced a grimy handkerchief. He looked at it closely for a few seconds, said, “If you’ll all excuse me, I’ll be in my cabin,” and left the bridge.
Tasya barely gave him a sideways glance as he left. “He has these little episodes,” she said to nobody in particular. Turning her attention back to the display, her eyes narrowed. “We should consider what to do next. I doubt it will wander around like this for much longer.”
“You could try attacking it,” said Lukyan.
Katya sat up, astonished he could say such a thing. “Lieutenant Tokarov’s still aboard, uncle!”
Her uncle looked at her grimly and she read something she didn’t like in his expression. Looking at Tasya and Petrov, they too had it. “You think he’s already as good as dead, don’t you?” she said, accusation in her voice.
“From what your uncle’s told me,” said Tasya, “that thing won’t release him unless he gets a better candidate and perhaps not even then. I’d love to go in there with guns blazing and get him out, but we’d all be dead before we even got close. If the opportunity to rescue him arises, that’s well and good. Otherwise, we count him among the dead.”
Petrov’s lips thinned but didn’t argue with her. Katya couldn’t believe this; after what he’d done to save them, they were just going to abandon him?
“Katya,” said Lukyan, “try to understand. He knew perfectly well he wasn’t going to be getting out. What he did, it was like fighting a rearguard action. He got us and the information we gathered out of there. If we try and rescue him, the Leviathan will kill us all and then there will nobody to stand in its way and he will still be trapped.”
Tasya was looking thoughtful. “The IFF box would get us in again,” said Tasya, reluctantly. “There’s a good chance of it, anyway. We didn’t do anything to antagonise it last time, so it won’t have learned not to trust that way of approaching it. It would be a risk, but I think we could get away with it once more. If we do try it, then, it had better be with a plan because there won’t be a third visit.”
Katya felt torn. Of course she wanted to get Tokarov out if it was at all possible, but the memory of that black featureless eye of the Medusa made her cold with dread. “Once we’re in, we’re bound to upset it, though,” she said, “and that Medusa sphere will punch us full of holes. You didn’t see it, it never stops tracking you.”
Tasya gave her a complacent look. “Then the plan had better cover that too, hadn’t it? Believe me, girl, I have no desire to enter that monstrosity without a fighting chance of getting out again. If we can’t find a plan to beat the Leviathan’s security system, we have no plan at all.”