She paused in front of the door, straightened her short, blond hair for the third time, tried to think administrative thoughts and went out. She walked to the lift as if she had every right to do so and called it. It arrived after a very long minute and she stepped inside.
This was where her plan became a little vague. The overall scheme was to find out what the Yagizban were up to with their unreported transports and, even this, the first replacement for the aircraft platforms destroyed in the war of independence, and how the pirates were involved. Where might be a good place to find secrets was not something she had considered in any great detail.
She stood for a moment wracked with indecision. Then, as she had seen Mila do, she pressed a key on the lift’s control panel and said in a clear voice, “Command centre.” She hoped the system didn’t carry out voice identifications as a matter of routine or her little adventure would be stopping very abruptly.
The lift didn’t electrocute her, gas her or hold her until security arrived. Instead it just said in a bored mechanical voice, “Destination unrecognised. Please restate.”
She tried again and it rejected it again. Perhaps, she wondered, it was a naming issue. In her experience, settlements almost always called their command centres command centres, but would the Yagizban? Most of the Conclaves were submersible habitats, capable of moving around the globe if they so desired. In that case, “Bridge.”
“Complying,” replied the lift and moved off.
The lift rose smoothly for a few seconds and Katya belatedly realised that what she had taken for some sort of ceramic finish to the compartment’s wall was actually transparent, the lift shaft beyond being so close and so featureless that she had not noticed until now. She was just wondering why the lift would have a transparent wall when it suddenly stopped, paused for a few moments as if ruminating, and then abruptly headed sideways.
Technologically, it was probably no major feat, but it was unexpected enough to catch her off balance and she leaned against the wall bracing herself for another change in direction. The surprise she got, however, had nothing to do with her vector.
The lift compartment suddenly emerged into a transparent tube running high above the floor of a massive internal section. Katya stepped forward cautiously at first to see what the floor was used for. Then she was up against the wall, eager not to miss a detail.
The area was a large manufacturing facility. Workers moved steadily around the place as robot arms struck and welded, gripped and lifted. As she had come to expect from the Conclaves, the air was of almost inhuman efficiency, but she had no reason to expect what they were actually building, and the realisation made her gasp out loud. Across the shop floor were four cradles in which vessels were being built, submarines. Two were little more than keels, another’s hull was forming, but the forth was nearing completion and its form was very familiar to Katya, from the sleekness of its lines to the rakish slant of the low conning tower. The Yagizban were building a fleet of Vodyanoi-class boats. Fast, effective hunter-killers, these new hybrids presumably combined Terran design with Russalka technology. She saw now that the flying transport that had picked them up had not been built specifically to carry the Vodyanoi, but any of its sisters too. Being able to deliver a wolfpack of such boats anywhere in the world, over the waves, uninterceptable, undetectable.
The Yagizban were tooling for war, there was no other possibility. And who could the war be against if not the FMA and all the rest of the world’s people it represented and protected?
Then the lift compartment finished its travel across the work area and moved back into the bland tunnels. Katya’s mind was racing. Who could she tell? Uncle Lukyan? He was a great man in his own way, but what could he do? If she told Petrov, she’d put his life in peril, along with the rest of his crew. She clenched her fists with frustration. This was crazy. The planet was on the brink of civil war and then into the mix comes the Leviathan. Perhaps the Yagizban fleet would be enough to defeat it. But then what? Uncle Lukyan said they’d left Earth in the first place to leave the politics behind. Now it seemed they had brought it with them on their boots.
Her train of thought was brought to an abrupt end as the car stopped and opened its doors. Beyond lay the FP-1’s bridge. Katya had imagined something like the bridge of the Vodyanoi or the Novgorod and was unprepared for what she found.
It made sense that the bridge was going to be a little larger, but the scale of it amazed and awed her. It was a great sprawling room, full of military and bureaucratic uniforms striding around with such a sense of purpose that she felt immediately that she was making herself obvious by the very act of standing still. Putting her head down and trying to look as if she had as much right to be there as anybody she walked out of the lift.
It was difficult not to stare: the scale of the place was impressive as was the number of people working there. She’d never seen a free-standing holographic display before but this extraordinary place had three of them, the largest and most central being a colossal representation of Russalka herself in harsh display colours, a sphere ten metres across. She could see all the settlements marked, the current locations of the Conclaves, smaller icons that she assumed to be Yagizban ships and several markers in the less explored parts of the world. She had an ugly feeling that these were more aircraft stations, undeclared and unknown to the Federal forces. How could they know? The Federal forces were drawn as tight as a falling hawser just watching the standard shipping lanes between the main settlements. There was no possibility that they could just search millions of square kilometres of open sea on the off chance that they might find a secret Yagizban platform, even one as large as the FP-1, a small town by itself.
FP-1, she thought bitterly. How many more FP-somethings are out there?
She kept walking, imagining herself to be a minor administrative assistant carrying documents for somebody or other in her case. If you can fool yourself that you’re who you’re pretending to be, she told herself, it makes it easier to fool others. She was just walking past a console near one of the great curving walls at the edge of the chamber when she saw something that stopped her in her tracks. Two men were standing with headsets on watching a scene on a bank of flat monitors. On each screen was a slightly different view of Kane being debriefed by Yagizban military personnel, military intelligence by the looks of them. Kane was relaxed, almost bored, as he answered their questions. Now and then he would look up at one or other of the cameras and gaze at it steadily for a moment before his attention wandered again. Whatever sound was being relayed she couldn’t hear, but the two observers with their headsets could.
“This complicates matters,” said one of the men. “This was not covered in any of the contingency plans.”
“How could it?” replied his colleague. “Nobody expected anything of the sort. This is… outside our experience.”
The first man nodded at the screen. “Do we trust him? He’s… in theory at least… he should be reliable. But sometimes…”
“Lack of motivation. We understand his limitations and can allow for them. Anyway, he’s only confirming what we’ve already been told. Now we need to formulate a response.”