Lukyan hushed them both by pointing at the main screen. “Look at this.”
The passive track of the Leviathan had been replaced by a slowly spinning computer model. “Is that the Leviathan?” breathed Tasya. Katya belatedly remembered that none of the Vodyanoi’s crew had actually seen the Leviathan; that dubious pleasure had belonged only to the Novgorod’s, as it had swept past them before attacking.
“Yes, ma’am,” replied the sensor operator from his position. “The amount of passive sound energy out there is just about giving us enough information to get an idea what the whole thing looks like. I’m running the data through the sonar imaging suite and making a few guesses to help it come up with something that’s fairly accurate. At least, I think it’s more accurate. What do you think?”
Submarines, by their very nature, don’t tend to look very interesting to the eye and the larger they get, the more streamlined and featureless they become. The Baby was a minisub and its hull was busy with waldo-arms and lighting mounts, all finished in a yellow and black livery. The Leviathan, by stark contrast, was so smooth it seemed organic. Long gentle curves that rolled like titanium surf across the machine-monster’s hull before being lost in tapering aft surfaces. It seemed wrong that it didn’t have a tail or fins. It reminded Katya of the tiny amorphous creatures that the manta whales fed upon, filtering them from the seas of Russalka. As if a tiny protozoan had been frozen in a single languidly elegant form and then made colossal.
“Where are its drive ports?” asked Petrov stepping closer to the display to peer at the details.
“That’s a mystery, sir. I can’t find anything that might be drive systems. No drive ports, impeller tubes or even an old fashioned sea screw. I’m not even picking up engine noise; what ambient sound it’s creating is all being caused simply by the water travelling over the hull at speed. Microcavitation effects. That’s why the image has so much guesswork in it. It’s just not making the amount of noise something that big should be.”
A possible explanation jumped into Katya’s head, but she didn’t consider voicing it until it had become plausible. By the time it had reached that point, however, it was suggesting some other possibilities about the Leviathan. These corollaries bothered her for a moment and she mentally went to swat them away. Then she stopped herself. Suddenly, she could see the explanation for some other little details that had been bothering her.
“Are you all right?” said Lukyan. “You look terrible, like you’d seen a ghost.”
She almost laughed, but she knew it would have sounded hysterical. She wished she had seen a ghost. What she had just deduced was much, much worse.
“I… I’m fine Uncle Lukyan. I… may I be excused?” She left without waiting for anybody to say yes or no. She walked aft looking for the officers’ cabins. Only Kane could tell her if she was right. But, a small voice inside her asked, if it is true, then this is something he has deliberately concealed. Why? And what will he do when he knows you know his secret?
CHAPTER 12
Sin Bottle
She didn’t even have to ask her way; the doors were labelled. In less time than she would have liked, she was standing in front of one of the Vodyanoi’s executive officers’ staterooms, the door simply labelled KANE. She stood indecisively for a long moment, wondering whether it would be better to suggest her idea to the others back on the bridge. It would be so much easier to put the problem into somebody else’s hands. But… she looked at the name plate again. Kane knew it all. If she came here from the bridge leading a mob, he’d shut up and claim ignorance.
There was something going on within him, some aspect of all this that was torturing him. He’d believed the Leviathan was gone and arranged his life accordingly. Now it was back and it thought the war was still on. He wanted to stop the Leviathan, she was sure of it, but the damage was already done. People knew too much about him for his own security and comfort. Even if they stopped the Leviathan, what would he do next?
The Leviathan, she scolded herself. It will cause untold misery and death. You need to know what Kane knows and you need to know it now. She knocked, waited a second, and entered.
Perhaps she should have waited until he’d asked her to come in. She found him in a frenzy of concealment, throwing an awkward handful of things into an open desk drawer and slamming it shut. Something stopped the drawer closing completely and he slammed it twice more in frustration before pushing the obstruction down inside and finally getting the drawer shut. He turned to Katya and spoke with false calmness.
“How can I help you, Ms Kuriakova?”
Katya pointed at the closed drawer. “What was that?”
“None of your concern. Now, what…”
“It was a syringe, a pressure syringe.”
He looked at the drawer and then back at her. “You’re mistaken.”
“I had to train to use those things for the paramedic certification on my officer’s card. Don’t treat me like some idiot off the corridors, Kane. I know a pressure syringe when I see one.”
“I don’t care what… Wait!”
Katya, anger growing in her, had stepped the two short steps needed to take her across the small stateroom to the desk and jerked it open. It was a syringe all right, and nestling against it was a slim loading-bottle of an inky black fluid. It had no label. It didn’t need one. She snatched up the syringe. The dose chamber was empty, but there were still the faint traces of black fluid there. She turned on Kane, her anger becoming fury. “You!” She almost screamed it. They’d trusted so much to him and all the time… this. “You’re a waster!” She flung the syringe at him. It bounced off his chest and fell into his lap.
He looked at it sadly, as if somebody had just flung a gift back in his face. He picked it up and put it back into the drawer, slowly and carefully this time. He slid the drawer shut and looked at her. “Ms Kuriakova. Katya… this isn’t what you think.”
Not what she thought? Ever since she’d been born, a loathing of wasters had been drilled into her. It was inconceivable to her why anybody should want to corrupt their bodies with drugs just for a brief… What? A release from reality? Why? Reality was all there was. Russalka society tolerated alcohol, but it was controlled to levels that would have appalled their ancestors. Russalka was as unforgiving as the hard vacuum of space. Being drunk could kill you. Being tired could kill you. Hell’s teeth, even being momentarily distracted could kill you. Not just you, either. With such a small overall population, everybody had a weight to carry for everybody else. Every Russalkin shouldered responsibility, and they shouldered it young. Deliberately using drugs was a dereliction of that responsibility and that could not, would not be countenanced. She’d heard tales of men from the early days of the colony, bad men, who’d tried to make themselves rich by supplying drugs, creating wasters and so creating their own little herd of criminals who needed the next little bottle of stolen or illegally synthesised narcotics more than they needed their pride. These bad men, so the stories went, ended up inside airlocks without breathing gear while grim faced citizens on the other side of the door cycled open the outer lock and let in Russalka’s implacable ocean. After a very short while, there were no bad men left.