“You’re an angel,” he said, but so quietly that she doubted anyone else heard it. Then he hissed slightly with discomfort as she used the suture pen to bind the edges of the cut together.
“Have you finished?” muttered Suhkalev. Katya didn’t even look at him. She closed up the kit and stowed it in its place before returning to her seat.
As she strapped herself in, she thought she heard Kane say, “Thank you, Katya Kuriakova,” but it was hard to be sure over the hum of the Baby’s systems.
The journey continued in a strained silence apart from the quiet curses of Uncle Lukyan as they entered the Weft. As predicted, the random currents were not their friends. The boat started to go off-course almost immediately and Katya and he had to wrestle the controls around before extemporising some new intermediate waypoints to try and get them out of the cross current that had them. They succeeded in that but ran quickly into a lazily twisting vortex that turned them around again and again. Lukyan was concerned that the extreme manoeuvring might upset their inertial guidance; Katya could see the strain on his face as he watched their coordinates like a hawk, waiting for a telltale lurch in their apparent location. After the vortex, they hit a head current that the Baby forged against with agonising slowness. “One hour it would have taken us to go around,” hissed Lukyan loudly enough for the Fed to hear. “We’ll be lucky to get out of here in five at this rate.”
Finally, the going became easier as they reached the centre of the system of complex currents. It was only a respite; things would become difficult again when they tried to leave, but at least they had a few minutes’ peace.
Katya spent the time thinking about their handcuffed passenger. She couldn’t believe it; Havilland Kane sitting right behind her. She didn’t know whether to be excited or scared and settled on faintly worried. Kane had been all over the news bulletins for the last six months. Commerce raids, drone intercepts, the disappearances of any vessels in the region had all been put at his door. There had been talk of crews murdered, too. The FMA hadn’t had an image to show, given any background on him, or even a reliable description and the idea had grown in her head that Kane must be some sort of monster. She’d envisioned him as ugly and hulking, unshaven and eyes devoid of the faintest glimmer of mercy. Now it turned out that he looked just like anybody else. If she’d passed him in a corridor, she’d have thought he was a tutor or a researcher. She frowned to herself. Maybe the FMA had messed it up. Looking at Officer Suhkalev, it was difficult to believe that they were infallible.
Any further reflections were blown away by one of the Baby’s automated alarms. It wasn’t one of the danger alerts — she knew well enough the difference between a status alert and the urgency of a failing major system alarm, but it made her jump all the same. Not nearly as far as Suhkalev, though.
“What’s that?” he blurted. “What’s happening?”
Lukyan had already switched his largest multi-function display to show a sonar map of the seabed. The computer represented it as interconnecting triangles of dull blue and red light drawn against blackness.
In the centre of the display, the seabed rose up to form a hump described in triangles that dimmed to orange where they joined the ocean floor. Pushkin’s Baby was, like many other private submarines, a jack-of-all-trades. Its insect-like yellow hull contained and carried many different types of equipment allowing it to do many jobs from geological survey to cargo carrier to salvage vessel. Katya knew the display was relaying data from the geological sensor array, but she had no idea what the hump was or why it was worth an alarm. She started to ask her uncle, but she saw the expression on his face and the question died. He had a rapt, focussed expression, like a man who has seen the merest hint that all his dreams were about to come true.
“Katya,” he said slowly. “We might be very, very rich.”
“A deposit?” she said. Russalka was rich in minerals, one of the reasons the Grubbers wanted it so much. Submarine mining, however, was difficult. Finding large deposits of ore just lying on the seabed wasn’t unknown, but it was very rare, and the savings meant the discoverer of such a deposit could more or less name their price. Katya read off the scale information on the nuclear magnetic resonance display and felt her own eyes widen with disbelief. It was huge.
Lukyan brought the Baby to a halt and adjusted the active sonar, increasing the frequency of the pulses to get a better picture.
“What? What are you doing?” The Fed spluttered in his outrage. “We have a prisoner to deliver here! We don’t have time…”
“You don’t have time. I’ve got all the time in the world for a beautiful sight like that.” Lukyan tapped the screen. “I can’t run a business running errands for the FMA. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
“You’ll be recompensed for your journey,” said Suhkalev, perhaps realising that he should have mentioned payment earlier.
“Oh, yes. An FMA scrip that will take years to be honoured, if it ever is. You can hold your water for a few minutes. Look at this, look at this!” He studied the sonar returns. “The signal’s good. No, the signal’s excellent. There’s a mound of ore down there. A hill of the stuff! It must be, I don't know, a hundred and fifty thousand tonnes. If it extends beneath the bed, maybe quarter of a million. Katya, arm a probe.”
Katya turned back to her controls, trying to look efficient. Although munitions and ordnance were among the co-pilot’s jobs, she’d never even studied the systems outside a training manual. She checked the launch tube’s inventory and found they were, indeed, carrying a couple of geo-survey probes. Getting them from their magazine into the tube was another matter. Her mouth felt very dry as she tried to work out how to do it quickly. The silence in the submarine drew out, punctuated only by the wheedling survey alarm. She felt they were all watching her make a mess of it and blushed, which just made her feel even more embarrassed.
Then her Uncle Lukyan lost his patience, leaned across and hit the right keys and switches to load and arm a probe, completing her humiliation. She just sat there feeling childish and useless as he returned to his own console and fired the device off. The hiss of the compressed air driving the stubby cylindrical torpedo out of its tube resonated through the hull.
“Survey probe away,” reported the computer primly.
Lukyan settled back in his seat, very pleased with himself and insensitive to Katya’s burning face. “On its way. Man alive, even if the quality's poor, there's so much of it, it's as makes no difference. You’re crew, Katya, you get a share too. What do you…” He turned and saw her expression. He seemed surprised for a moment and then his face fell as he realised how he’d inadvertently humiliated her in front of the Fed and Kane. “Oh, Katya. I’m…”
The computer interrupted. “Probe link lost.” Lukyan’s attention was back on the sensor readouts in an instant.
“What? But it’s right on the scope.”
But it wasn’t. The probe had vanished. And, quickly, before their startled eyes, so did the ore deposit. The great mound simply seemed to flow back into the seabed, flattening out in seconds, the polygons that it had been drawn in fading from the brilliant gold they had been a moment before to dull reds and blues, indistinguishable from the rest of the submarine landscape.