“It’s done. The Leviathan will try and run auxiliary power to the containment field, but I’ve put other demands on it. It will only delay the inevitable by a little while.”
Somebody once said that the prospect of imminent death concentrates the mind. Katya looked around the chamber with all its exposed workings, units and equipment as a collection of entities for the first time instead of just a setting for her last moments. “What,” she asked slowly, an idea starting to form, “is the pressure in low Russalkin orbit?”
Kane was surprised by the question. “The pressure? So close to zero to make little difference.”
Katya walked over to the Baby and ran her hand over the hull. “The Baby’s rated down to four kilometres of ocean on her back. If she can stand that number of positive atmospheres, I’m sure she can bear no atmosphere at all.”
Kane stood up very straight. “Are you suggesting we use it as an escape pod?” Katya nodded, but Kane shook his head. “Yes, we’ll get caught in Russalka’s gravity and re-enter the atmosphere, but we’d come down like a meteorite. We’d burn up.”
“We have to be travelling fast to burn on re-entry.” And she pointed at the combat drones.
Kane looked at them, understanding visibly growing in his face. “Use the drone’s antigravity systems to neutralise most of the Baby’s mass? Like your Novgorod gambit?”
“Like my Novgorod gambit. I’m only ever going to have one bright idea in my life; I’m trying to get as much use out of it as I can.”
“Don’t do yourself down. If the drone’s AG units were activated once we were inside the outer atmosphere, it would be like deploying drogue parachutes. We might just survive it.”
“It’s a plan. Re-energise the antimatter containment while we get this worked out and you can switch it off again when we’re about to leave.”
Kane’s jubilant expression faded. “Ah,” he said quietly.
Katya’s own face fell. “You can’t.”
“If I could, so could the Leviathan. I had to lock out any attempt to re-activate it.” He moved quickly to the console. “The Leviathan’s doing everything it can to keep the antimatter safe, but it’s losing. We’ve got fifteen minutes at most, probably less.” He gestured hopelessly at the drones. “It would take that long to dismantle a drone to get the antigravity unit out and it would take at least two for us to stand a chance. There’s just no time. I’m sorry, Katya, it was a good idea. Fate doesn’t come much crueller.”
Katya wasn’t listening. She was already at one of the combat drones, opening its inspection hatch. “We’re not finished yet. If we can’t get the unit out in time, the whole damned drone is just going to have to come with us!”
She had the first drone’s contragravitic system’s fired up, before Kane got over his surprise. “I like you, Katya Kuriakova,” he said finally. “You’re mad, but I like that in moderation.”
She was too busy wrestling the great cylinder -- rendered almost weightless but still with all its inertia, out of its cradle and over to the Baby -- to reply. She did notice that he wasn’t helping, though.
She looked up from working on a second drone to see him opening a locker and pulling out a one piece suit, white and helmeted. “What’s that?” She bent back to her work.
“EVA suit. Extra-vehicular activity, that is. A spacesuit.” He pulled off his jacket and boots and started shrugging the suit on over the rest of his clothes. “Pretty good underwater, too.”
“Is there one for me?”
“No, but you won’t need one. You’ll be in the minisub.”
She stopped and looked suspiciously at him. “And where will you be?”
He pointed under the Baby. “Opening that hatch. It has to be done from the console. The chamber will have decompressed before I can get back so I’ll need an air supply. The plan is I open the hatch, run over and come in through your minisub’s dorsal airlock. You, meanwhile, sit tight in the pilot’s seat and bring the drones online slowly as we start to fall through the atmosphere. Like it?”
“Not much, but I don’t have anything better. When you’ve got that thing on, fetch me six connector leads from locker two and the tape gun in locker four.”
“Aye-aye, captain,” replied Kane and hurried himself into the suit.
‘Aye-aye, captain,’ thought Katya. ‘Your minisub’s airlock.’ He’s right; Uncle Lukyan never made a secret of his will. I own the Baby. I am her captain. My first command.
She busied herself with the drone before the thought that the Baby might also be her last command had time to crystallise.
The Baby’s hull was pocked at frequent intervals with socket covers, each covering two sockets that allowed her to interface with equipment attached to her hull. A standard minisub would never be the master of any trade, so it had to content itself being a jack of many. The Baby had, at various times, mounted manipulator waldo arms, extra light banks, cable laying gear, a specialised magnetometer array and a thermic lance. It was unlikely the manufacturers had ever imagined her with two combat drones strapped to her hull. Katya had been counting on the drones complying with the same interface standards as the Vodyanoi, which she had noticed used the types of plugs and sockets that were Russalka standard. It made sense; Russalka may have won its independence from Earth, but the Terran technical conventions they’d inherited were well tried and tested. There was little point in changing things simply for a misguided show of independence from the old world. Even so, she gave an audible sigh of relief when the connector cables snapped home at both ends and the communication lights glowed, showing that the Baby had successfully detected the drone’s anti-gravity units and could control them.
Kane looked at the web of metal tape that Katya had created to clamp the drones in position to make sure the aft hatch and the dorsal airlock were clear and accessible. Satisfied, he hurried back to the console and checked the state of the Leviathan. “How are we doing?” called Katya as she stowed Kane’s coat and boots into a locker.
“Just barely in time. Two minutes, I think. Get that hatch sealed, we’re doing it now.”
Katya slammed that aft hatch and locked it shut, made her way forward to the plot’s seat and strapped herself in. She checked the Judas box — all lights were green. “Just you stay that way,” she muttered.
Outside, Kane sealed his suit’s helmet, made a quick check that its life-support systems were working correctly, and turned his attention to the active console. The antimatter containment was in a bad way. He guessed it would fail in ninety seconds, perhaps even less. He pulled up the ship’s operations controls and ordered the docking bay’s hatch to open. The control flashed green and the hatch started to dilate. Somewhere a decompression warning sounded.
“Category one,” said a voice in Kane’s ear, so close he turned expecting somebody to be standing by him. It took him a moment to realise it was coming through his suit’s communicator. A sense of great and immediate peril, even beyond the Leviathan’s imminent death, overtook him and he started to run for the Baby. He was a metre away when the grappling cable snaked down from the chamber’s roof and grabbed his leg. Suddenly he was dangling upside down over the Baby. He could see how wide the hatch had opened beneath the minisub and knew it must start falling slowly through in any moment. He reached and his hand barely touched the rail beside the dorsal lock before he was pulled still higher.