Kane looked up at the Medusa sphere. “Learnt about fear, have you?” He took another step back. “That’s not necessarily a good thing.”
“I know what you did, Kane. It’s all in the Leviathan’s memory. I know how you poisoned yourself to prevent interface.”
Lukyan shot a hard glance at Kane, who was at pains not to return it. “Yes, well. Desperate times make for…”
“That was clever,” interrupted Tokarov in the Leviathan’s voice. “I wish I’d been as clever.”
“Not your fault. Maybe I should have been more specific in my warnings. Anyway, you didn’t have the resources handy.” Kane slid his hand nonchalantly into his jacket pocket. When it came out again, Katya saw it cradled a pressure syringe. In its transparent barrel, a black liquid. She kept her face expressionless with a massive effort of will and returned to looking straight ahead.
“The Leviathan wanted to kill you. As soon as I… we detected the drone #6 signal, it knew you were coming back and it wanted to kill you. Kane is a category… I confused it… supposed to make allowances during interface… follow my instincts even if it doesn’t understand them… I didn’t want you to die.”
Where there’s life, there’s hope, thought Katya. She stepped forward. “Does it trust me?”
“You are unrecognised,” said the Leviathan, before immediately adding, “You’re a clever girl, you saved the Novgorod. Category one… category blue…”
As Katya walked slowly forward, she took the syringe from Kane’s hand. He wasn’t expecting the action and almost dropped it before she had it from him and concealed along the line of her forearm. He glared intensely at her as she walked past. “It could kill you in a second.”
“Tokarov’s doing everything he can to keep it off balance and sacrificing himself to do it. In a minute, everything he ever was will be gone. We can’t waste that minute.” She said it quietly as she continued to walk and wasn’t even sure if Kane caught all of it. Perhaps, she wondered, she was just saying it to herself to root herself in the moment and the minute to follow.
She walked steadily, neither so slow that time was frittered away or so quickly that it might antagonise the Leviathan despite its scattered priorities. She wondered how many targeting dots the Medusa sphere had painted on her; none or ten? She wondered if the sphere killed painlessly, or only silently. And, before she had time to wonder anything else, she was standing before Tokarov.
The interface threads, cables and tentacles flexed slowly as if connected to some great, ponderous heart, beating a thin ichor of machine hatred into Tokarov to replace his red, human blood. The tentacles running into his eye sockets must surely have destroyed the eyes and Katya remembered they had been a hazel brown once. She looked upon him unflinchingly, saw where his eyelids were rubbed raw from being unable to close but trying all the same, smelled the surgical scent of antiseptics and antibiotics the machine must be using to keep his body functioning until it had no further use for it, and felt the fear of an ebbing mind.
“Tokarov,” she said gently. “It’s me, Katya.”
“I know,” he half whispered, half sobbed through his own mouth rather than through the Leviathan. “I know. It can see you. Watching you.”
A thought occurred to her and it seemed a ridiculous thought at first, but then she immediately realised that it wasn’t ridiculous at all. For Tokarov at that moment, it might be the most important question anybody had ever asked him, so she asked it. “What’s your name? I can’t just call you Tokarov. What’s your whole name?”
He sat silently. The tentacles imbedded in him shuddered slightly as if discomforted and suspicious. He opened his mouth and spoke, one word on each exhalation. “Pyotr… Grigorevich… Tokarov.”
Katya nodded, as quiet and comforting as any nurse at the deathbed. “Pyotr Grigorevich Tokarov. I shall remember you.”
Then she stabbed him in the neck with the syringe. Her aim was good; the blunt end of the pressure syringe slammed up hard against his carotid artery and she kept her thumb on the dosage release until the whole chamber was empty.
She felt none of the sickness or self-loathing that she had felt so quickly when she’d shot the Yagizban trooper. That had been an impulse and the thought that violence lived so close to the surface in her was a terror to her. This though, this was an act of humanity.
Perhaps the large dose of Sin would kill him immediately, perhaps the rejection process would, perhaps the Leviathan would kill all of them in retaliation, Tokarov included. It didn’t matter — there had been no choice.
The effect was instantaneous. Katya had seen deep ocean worms that shied from the touch of searchlight beams as if they were fire. The Leviathan’s tentacles slid out of Tokarov as if his touch was poison. To the Leviathan, perhaps he was. In a great thrashing mass, the cables and tentacles and hair-thin threads withdrew and hung back, their tendrils waving in an unfelt breeze.
“Interface prematurely halted,” said the Leviathan, any trace of Tokarov gone from its voice.
Tokarov slumped back into the throne, gasping violently. His flesh was a wreck, his eyelids had mercifully been able to close and Katya was spared the sight of the ruined sockets. But she’d seen that frantic clawing for breath once before; back in the mines when a crewman injured during the Vodyanoi’s attack had died. Katya knew he was going to die just as surely as that crewman and that, just as surely, there was nothing she could do.
“I’m sorry, Pyotr,” she whispered.
But there was to be no dignity in death here. A cable, thicker than the others, separated from the mass and snaked around Tokarov’s neck. Before Katya could react, he was jerked into the air and thrown aside, nothing more than a failed component.
Katya saw him hit the wall with a horrible crack of breaking bone and took a step forward. Thus, she never saw the tentacle that hit her.
“New replacement selected,” said the Leviathan. “Interface process initiating.”
Katya felt the tip of the tentacle break the skin at the back of her neck, directly where it joined the skull. She felt it separate into roots and then into threads, penetrating muscle and bone. Even though she knew it was impossible, she felt it penetrate her brain.
Somewhere distant, she thought she head screams and shouts; her uncle, Kane, perhaps even herself. Before she could wonder why everybody seemed to be so upset, the Leviathan was in her mind and, worse yet, she was inside its.
She saw it greedily access her memories, looking for intelligence, experience, tactics and strategies, human cunning and human guile. She felt it ransack her mind like a thief looking for valuables amongst family heirlooms valuable to no one but the owner. Each memory accessed flared into colours and smells and sounds as if it were yesterday. No, as if it were now.
…her mother came in to comfort her and she ended comforting her mother, her mother saying “This stupid, stupid war” until Katya said “Stupid war” and her mother laughed or was it a sob and papa never came home again…
… she never liked her Uncle Lukyan, he was so big and he laughed too loud and here he was all quiet, his huge hands holding hers and saying, “My poor Katinka” and telling her something about an accident and how she would be living with him now…