… Sergei looking at the plot she had made on the practise table and scratching his head and asking, “Did you do this by yourself?” and showing Lukyan who smiled and said, “She’s a prodigy, that one” and looking up “prodigy” and being proud…
“Let her go! Let her go, machine!”
“Pushkin! Careful, man! Look out!”
… feeling sick, stomach cramps and no one to talk to, Uncle Lukyan asking if she were well as if she just has a cold and no one to talk to and her mama dead these five years…
… being expelled from the Federal Cadet League for gross insubordination, in front of all the others, the shame and humiliation turning to hysterical laughter, the commander snarling “You’re a disgrace, you’ll never wear a Federal uniform!” and telling Lukyan and him just saying, “You’ve got all the training out of that programme that’s worth having, plenty of civilian boats would be glad to have you”…
Something deeper, something in the shadows. An invasion? She thinks of the tendrils in Tokarov’s flesh and the antiseptic and the thought gratefully takes up the theme. Not an invasion, a wound. Antibodies rallying against it. Burning out the infection. Whose memory is this? she wonders. Not mine. Tokarov’s? Is that what another person’s memories are like? Disconnected images without context, ideas floating in vacuum. No, not that. The Leviathan? It must be, but why does it want to talk to me? What is wounded?
Motion, a pressure at the back of her head. “You might kill her!” “It’s not having her!” Not a pressure, a pulling, like when she used to wear a ponytail and Andrei Ivanovitch pulled it so hard she fell over backwards…
The agony was so exquisite, so far beyond anything she has ever experienced before, her only reaction was to open her eyes very, very wide. She had a momentary impression of Lukyan standing by her, a tentacle held in his fist, the end a tangle of fibres dripping… blood?
Then she collapsed and he grabbed her under one arm like he used to when she was young and they played monsters while her mother, Lukyan’s sister, looked on and shook her head ruefully.
“Go, Pushkin! GO!” She heard Kane bellow as if every devil from every hell was pursuing them.
“Category one. Confirmed.”
Katya heard a crack and Lukyan staggered. Then he straightened up and lumbered towards the exit, Kane running ahead of them. Another crack and then another, and another. Lukyan moaned miserably under his breath but kept running. Kane had reached the doorway and was unfolding something he’d had concealed under his jacket. As they neared, he raised it to his shoulder and it started making a very similar cracking noise. The agony was ebbing and Katya was now in a dull place of pain and distance. It took her a moment to realise that Kane’s weapon must be Terran and that made her wonder if it was one of the laser smallarms Earth was supposed to have. Then the similarity of the sound of the weapon to the sounds behind her sank in.
The Medusa sphere was firing. She wondered if she was being hit and the pain from being forcibly disconnected from the Leviathan was overshadowing the pain of laser wounds. Then Lukyan staggered again and she knew the truth of it. He was almost sobbing, not in pain but in desperation to reach the hatch before his strength failed and she finally understood how important his promise to look after her he had made to the memory of her mother was to him.
Lukyan collapsed just a metre from the hatch, falling to his knees. Kane looked down at him and saw there was little life in him, but still there was hope. Kane flicked a control on the laser carbine and fired. From a stubby barrel beneath the laser emitter, a rocket propelled shell flew out, hissing past them and towards the interface chair. Kane threw the weapon down behind him and grabbed Katya, dragging her through the hatch. She looked back then and saw her uncle for the last time; all but dead, his eyes tired and glazing, his face pallid. She could see the smoke rising from his back where the Medusa sphere had rained laser bolts into him, and she could only guess at what kind of man could have carried on this long.
But she knew.
“Uncle.”
He tried to speak but no sounds came. His lips moved and she thought he said, “Katinka.” Then he reached forward, toppling as he did so. His hand slammed into the door control and the hatch slid shut.
Kane grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her to the floor at the same moment the fuse on the rocket he’d launched ran out. From the other side of the door, there was a ferocious concussion, a dull whump like a giant punching the wall. Instantly, alert sirens sounded.
Kane staggered back to his feet, collecting the laser carbine and stowing it away. “Rocket grenade. Nasty weapons, not really suitable for submarine actions. Blow down a bulkhead as soon as look at it.” He listened to the klaxons. “I think it may have hurt the Leviathan quite badly. We should go.”
She looked at him, dazed, then she shook her head. “My uncle,” she said and walked unsteadily back towards the hatch.
“Lukyan’s dead.”
She stopped, staring at the hatch, willing it to slide open and Lukyan to jump through, safe and sound.
“He gave his life to save you, Katya. You know that. The sphere was firing on him right from the moment he released you. I’ve never seen anything like it.” The hatch wasn’t opening. Katya thought it would probably never open again. Behind her, Kane was still talking, his voice low and intense. “I’m going to honour him by telling anybody who’ll listen about the bravest thing I ever saw, that I have ever even heard of. How are you going to honour him?”
She lowered her head. Then she turned and walked down the corridor towards the docking bay. “By living,” she said quietly as she passed him.
They reached the docking bay a minute later. Kane went in first, his gun drawn in case the docking cables were set to attack. The hemisphere in the ceiling was quiet, though; it seemed the Leviathan had other more pressing concerns.
“How do we get out of here without the Leviathan’s cooperation?”
“We override. This place has maintenance hatches and access panels very deliberately kept out of the areas that I had access to.” He examined the apparently smooth wall, found a couple of shallow indentations and dug his thumbs into them. With agonising slowness, he unscrewed a small circular hatch.
Katya was pacing up and down. It wasn’t fair that she should lose her last relative, and have him restored to her only to see him die. It wasn’t fair that her father had died in the war. It wasn’t fair that her mother had died in a stupid avoidable accident that wasn’t even her own fault. “It’s not fair.”
Kane looked over his shoulder at her. “No,” he answered. He turned back to his work. “It isn’t. It never is.”
“You don’t know what it’s like.” She was getting angry with him, and she didn’t want to. She needed to hurt him, but she didn’t want to.
“What you’re going through this minute? No, I don’t. I don’t know at all.” He twisted a release control inside the hatch fiercely and, around them, the whole chamber started to reconfigure itself. The smooth wall panels slid back to expose pipes and girders and…
“Combat drones!” She waited for one or all of them to suddenly rise from their cradles and turn their destroying eyes upon Kane and her. Instead, they stayed utterly inanimate.