“Hail the Leviathan.” Kane’s sudden order cut across her train of thought and she looked up at him in confusion.
“What?” Lukyan roused himself from where he’d been leaning against the wall looking over the sensor officer’s shoulder. “Are you mad? You’ve said yourself that monstrosity is trigger-happy. If an active sonar ping is enough to put it on the warpath, what will it make of a tight-beam transmission right up its baffles?”
Kane looked seriously at him. “I am very much afraid, very much afraid that the situation has changed, and not for the better. Communications, hail the Leviathan.”
The communications officer looked at him uncertainly and looked back at Tasya for confirmation. She seemed worried herself, not the confident and commanding personality Katya was used to at all. Finally she nodded quickly, as if wanting the act over and done with.
With obvious misgivings, the communications officer opened a channel. “Leviathan from Vodyanoi, Leviathan from Vodyanoi. Come in, please.”
“Put it on the speakers,” ordered Kane. Immediately the bridge was filled with the gentle hiss of an empty communications channel, rising and falling slowly. They listened in silence for almost a minute before Kane ordered another hail.
No happier than last time, the communications officer complied. “Leviathan from Vodyanoi, Leviathan from Vodyanoi. Are you receiving, please?”
Silence was the only reply. Kane waited impatiently. After a minute there was still no response. “Sensors, any change in the Leviathan’s speed and heading?” The sensors officer shook his head without looking away from his instruments. On Katya’s console, the red line never wavered. Kane grunted with frustration. “Hail it again.”
The communications officer looked beseechingly at Tasya, but she only nodded curtly. For the third time, he sent a hail.
This time, Leviathan spoke.
“This is… is Leviath…” The rest of the sentence seemed to fade away. They waited for a moment, but nothing more came.
“Hail it again,” said Kane slowly, brooking no argument.
“Leviathan from Vodyanoi, Leviathan from…”
“This… is… Lev… i… a…” Every syllable seemed to be a gargantuan effort. Katya listened to it with a mixture of trepidation and hope. Perhaps Tokarov had somehow managed to sabotage it. Even its voice, so controlled and sterile before, seemed shot through now with uncertainty and, what was that? Fear? Fear; now she realised it had been fear on Tasya’s face. How odd. But not as odd as a machine showing fear. That was so…
“Oh no,” she said out loud. “Oh no!”
The voice of the Leviathan continued, still halting, but becoming stronger now. “This is… Leviath… This… This… is… I… I am…”
Katya couldn’t speak anymore. Her hands were over her mouth in revulsion and terror and in pity. Kane’s eyes were shut as he awaited the inevitable.
“I…” the machine’s voice was strong now, certain, “…am…” and it contained tones and undertones that had never been programmed into it.
“Tokarov,” said Kane. “You fool.”
And the machine that was now more than a machine and the man who was now less than a human spoke as one, filling the bridge with their unified voice.
“I AM LEVIATHAN!”
CHAPTER 13
Vodyanoi
Through nameless waters, the Vodyanoi pursued the Leviathan. Near her maximum speed, although still comfortably short of what they knew the Leviathan was capable, the Vodyanoi struggled to maintain sensor contact. If it had wanted to, the Leviathan could have shaken them off in a minute either through accelerating or by performing its feat of near invisible stealth and vanishing from the passive sonar screens. Yet it did neither, as if contemptuous of anything the little Vodyanoi could throw against it.
Kane had called an immediate council of war with Tasya, Petrov, and even Uncle Lukyan. Katya, however, had been excluded. She felt she should have been insulted, but instead felt oddly relieved. She had hardly had a moment to herself since the Baby had left the locks. And how long ago had that been? She was losing track of time. Two days ago? Three? Brief moments of sleep had broken the time into awkward irregular lumps of recollection, and she longed to simply put her head down and sleep eight hours at a stretch so she could start counting days once more. She’d never thought that something as simple as a handful of hours sleep could mean so much to her.
Now she had a little while to collect her thoughts and stop pretending to have all the answers. On the one hand she was flattered that intelligent men like Kane and Petrov thought she, too, was intelligent. On the other, she just wanted to be divorced from responsibility for a little while. Just for a few minutes, she wanted to be fifteen-almost-sixteen again.
She found the senior officers’ mess, or what would have been the senior officer’s mess if the Vodyanoi still had any senior officers after the carnage at the mining complex. She thought it was empty at first and stepped in. By the time she realised her mistake it was too late to back out. Suhkalev was sitting in the corner at the far end of the bench at the table.
She hadn’t seen him at all since they’d arrived at the mine’s northern docking area and, she realised with a small shock, hadn’t thought of him at all since then either. Despite their successful sally against the Leviathan’s combat drone, he’d fallen completely off her list of things and people to worry about. She felt slightly ashamed for that and sat down on the opposing bench at the end nearest the door. She might spend a little time with him, but that didn’t mean it had to be spent very close to him.
He managed a wan smile as she sat. “I hear you’ve been having adventures. Been aboard the Leviathan.” He shook his head. “What’s happening there? Something to do with Lieutenant Tokarov. Nobody will give me a straight answer.”
Katya sighed. This was going to be difficult. Slowly, as much to explain recent events to herself as him, she went through the recent developments, the nature of the Leviathan’s artificial intelligence, its capability for synthetic intelligence and the fact that this capability had now been achieved. She didn’t explain why Kane had been unsuitable as the seed from which the Leviathan’s synthetic intelligence had been intended to grow ten years before. That was Kane’s business. She half wished she didn’t know about it either.
When she had finished, Suhkalev didn’t seem very much the wiser. “So the Leviathan must have absorbed Lieutenant Tokarov against his will?”
“Not according to Kane. The Leviathan was never programmed to expect anybody but a volunteer. The lieutenant would have had to sit in the interface chair himself.”
Suhkalev looked at her dubiously. “But the way you tell it, it’s suicide. Why would he do it after only a few hours? I can imagine a man doing it if he was trapped in there for months and months…” Like Kane had been, thought Katya. “…but he was only in there for, what? Three hours? Why would he do it?”