Kane seemed to know pathetic it would sound but he said it anyway. “It’s not what you think. It’s medicinal.”
“In an unmarked bottle? How stupid do you think I am?” His weakness earlier, his collapse aboard the Novgorod, it all made sense to her now. He must have been unable to use his “medicine” since the FMA captured him. With the trouble in the mining site, unable to get back to this stateroom and the bottle it held, every minute must have stretched on unbearably with his addiction gnawing away at him. Finally, the withdrawal symptoms had become too much and he’d passed out, reducing him to a doddering wreck first.
“There are different types of medicine. You think I’m a waster. Technically, I suppose you’re right, but there’s more to it than that.”
Katya waved his explanations away. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said, moving towards the door.
“Where are you going?”
“Where do you think I’m going? I’m going to tell my uncle and Lieutenant Petrov that maybe everything you’ve told us is garbage. For all we know, it was the filth in that bottle talking.”
“I’ve told you the truth.” He was quiet, firm, as if convincing her was the only thing that mattered.
She laughed bitterly. “The whole truth?”
“I’ve told you the truth,” he insisted. “You want more of it? Then listen.”
They looked at each other in silence for a minute. Then Katya drew the chair out from under the chair and sat down, facing Kane as he sat on his bunk. “Okay,” she said, exuding cynicism. “I’m listening.”
Kane suddenly seemed uncertain what he was going to say. Making up his mind, he opened the drawer and took out the loading-bottle. The thick black liquid sloshed lazily inside.
“I’m going to have to fill in a few details first. You need to know exactly what this stuff is to understand. To understand why I have to use it. You don’t know much about Earth, do you? That blasted war closed the door on your roots for you and your contemporaries. If you’re anything to go by, the Russalkin don’t much care for their old world.”
“Why should we? You invaded us! You wanted to bring your dirty, wasteful ways here and, when we wouldn’t just let you stroll in to take what you wanted, you invaded!”
“Did we? Somebody once said that history belongs to the victor. As I think I’ve already told you, that war was never won one way or the other. Earth just decided it was too expensive. The Leviathan was their last shot. When it was lost, they just gave the whole thing up as a bad job. You didn’t win a war; you just won a battle at most. Earth hasn’t finished with Russalka yet. The failure of the Leviathan to exterminate the lot of you has given you some breathing time, which — incidentally — you can thank me for.”
Katya looked at him with disgust. “I should thank you for being a reject? I was there, remember? I heard what the Leviathan said about you. You were as useless to the Leviathan as you are to us now. I’m not sure thanks would be enough. Maybe we should throw you a big state banquet or something for services to redundancy.”
“Such sarcasm in one so young,” Kane said wryly. “Yes, the Leviathan rejected me. Yes, that saved your world, at least if has for the last ten years. But Petrov was right. I was extensively tested. I was compatible.” He held up the bottle again, rolling it slightly to make the viscous fluid lap against the glass walls. “This stuff is called Sin. There’s a complicated literary reason for calling it that; I won’t bore you with it. Just some biochemist with pretensions of grandeur coming up with a smart-arse name. It is a narcotic in the strict dictionary definition. It is incredibly addictive; one dose normally causes full dependency. As a way of having a good time, it rates slightly lower than having your eyes burnt out with red-hot wire loops. The first dose you have will make you a little light-headed, probably nauseous too. After that, you feel nothing at all when you take it. You might as well be giving yourself a shot of sterile saline.”
Katya was wondering how good her understanding of the wasters’ vice was. “I thought the idea was it made you feel good?”
“Not Sin. It’s the ultimate progression of what drug dealers want in a drug. Total dependency. Sin doesn’t make you feel good; it addicts you and then, if you don’t get regular doses, it kills you.” He looked at the bottle with a strange expression somewhere between loathing and longing. “Sin was never created to give wasters some pathetic escape from reality. It was created to enslave. The Terran government, when Earth finally got one after the collapse, commissioned this stuff. One injection and you’ve got a slave for life. It doesn’t affect the performance of their duties, but if they don’t get another dose when the last one starts to wear off, they descend into Hell, one ring at a time. It’s indescribable, foul. Nobody willingly takes this stuff, Katya.”
She looked at him, her mouth open in shock. Her anger of only a few minutes ago had quite gone, replaced by pity and disbelief that people could do such a thing to another human being. “Before you came, they used it on you? To make you obey orders?”
He was surprised. “Heavens, no. This stuff was banned sixty years ago.” He smiled wanly at her obvious confusion. “I managed to secure a copy of the formula and synthesised it before I left Earth. Katya, I used it on myself.” He put the bottle away before continuing. “It was my insurance policy. When I left Earth, I had visions of what Russalka would be like. A colony world fallen into barbarism, people capable of the most brutal, merciless things. That’s what I believed when I offered myself to the Leviathan programme. As the day came closer, I started having doubts. I wasn’t sure if I’d want to be a part of such a devastating attack if it turned out the situation wasn’t right. I wasn’t a soldier, you see. My motives… it wasn’t patriotism. So, I made Sin and smuggled it aboard.” He frowned as he thought back. “Russalka wasn’t anything like I’d expected. I just found a hardy race of survivors trying to hang on. This should never have come to a war. There should have been negotiations, we should have sent diplomats, tried to salvage something from the mess. Instead we sent ships and troops and certain death in the form of the Leviathan. If I let it interface with me, I had no idea what it would do to me. My personality might have been destroyed, my doubts about the war lost. I had to escape.”
Katya nodded slowly. She was beginning to understand. “And the only way you could get away was to be rejected. So you used the Sin, knowing it would interfere with the interfacing process.”
Kane leaned back against the bulkhead and crossed his arms. “You are clever. Everybody says so.”
“But, the addiction..?”
“Permanent.”
“There must have been some other way,” she protested, “some other drug?”
He shook his head. “No. Believe me. I researched it very thoroughly. If anything else could have done the trick reliably, I’d have used it. It had to be that stuff, though. You can imagine how I felt when I finished the database search and only that…” he nodded at the drawer, “…would do. I was going to be sacrificed one way or the other. The only question was would I be sacrificed to Sin or the Leviathan?” He paused. “That sounds very biblical, doesn’t it?”
“So, you really did stop the Leviathan?”
“Without undue modesty, yes, I did. I wish I could have done it by just pulling out a fuse or by pissing through a transformer cover but, as you saw, the Leviathan is very touchy about letting people near its vitals.” He stopped, thoughtful. Then he reached into his jacket pocket. “Which brings me onto this.”