Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) (6 page)

Then, finally, Tasya reached a door, opened it and waved Katya inside. Katya went with poor grace; she was reasonably sure that if they were going to murder her, they’d had plenty of opportunities up to now and passed on all of them. Thus, she felt fairly safe in giving Tasya the evil eye as she passed her. Then she looked into the room and any thought of such one-upmanship left her.

The poorly lit, dirty little room must have been some sort of supervisor’s office once, a long, long time ago. Charts and schematics still hung from the walls, discoloured and watermarked. There was an old desk, a steel thing that had probably been manufactured on Earth, and an old holoconsole of a type that Russalka was currently incapable of making because the technology behind it was of limited use and not vital to survival.

Sitting behind the desk was the most wanted man on the planet.

“Hello, Katya,” said Havilland Kane.

CHAPTER FOUR

TOTAL WAR

Katya was literally lost for words for several long seconds. This didn’t make any sense. Tasya had worked with Kane when Kane – the “great pirate” and “terror of the world ocean” – had been working for the Yagizban. But then Kane had betrayed the Yagizban, and Tasya – a colonel of the Yagizban military, for crying out loud – had stopped being his friend
very
abruptly. Indeed, there had been some name-calling.

And shooting. There had definitely been shooting.

Yet here they were, the pirate-king and the war criminal, all cosy together. Unless…

Turning to Tasya, she said, “Is Kane your prisoner?”

Tasya looked nonplussed, then she followed Katya’s logic and laughed. “No. Havilland is not my prisoner, nor am I his. We’re working together again.”

“Just like that? I don’t believe it.” She turned to Kane. “The Yags would never work with you. Not after what you pulled on them.”

“Yags, Katya?” He seemed pained. “
Yags
? Really? You sound like one of those FMA scream sheets.”

Katya had had enough of this already. She’d had enough of it the very second she saw Kane’s face. “Take me back,” she said to Tasya. “I’ve got nothing to say to you, and I’ve got even less to say to
him
.” She indicated Kane with a perfunctory jerk of her head. “Take me back right now and let me get on with my life without having lunatics like you and scum like Kane in it.”

Tasya raised an eyebrow. “Her diplomatic skills have simply come on in leaps and bounds, haven’t they, Havilland?”

“Katya,” said Kane sharply, “stop behaving like a little brat and listen to me. Do you think we took a risk like coming to Atlantis unless there was a very good reason?”

“Of course there’s a good reason,” said Katya, “but it’s a good reason that profits you and the Yags. I’m not helping either of you. That’s all there is to it. And if you’re not going to take me out of here,” she said to Tasya, “I’ll find my own way.”

Kane grunted with displeasure. He still looked much as she remembered him; in his late thirties, lean, an aesthete in appearance. He always looked as if he should be lecturing in philosophy or literature, not leading a crew of stranded Terrans as his pirate crew around the deep waters of Russalka. He looked a little older now, though. There was grey at his temples that certainly had not been there before. She doubted that was because of the stress of being Federal Enemy No.1; he’d been that for years now and it didn’t seem to bother him very much. There was another, darker possibility – that his long-term dependence on the drug “Sin” was finally taking its toll. Sin was no pleasure; it was a method of enslavement. If Kane didn’t receive regular doses of it, he would slowly die in agony. Even though he had the formula and a steady supply of the stuff, it was hard to believe that having something so terrible in his system could do anything but harm eventually.

“The Yagizban wanted to win,” Kane said. “Me, I just want to stay alive and to keep my people alive.”

“Whoopee for you, Kane. You and every family in this…” She stopped as she fully analysed what he had said. “What do you mean, the Yagizban
wanted
to win? I was an unwilling spectator to a shooting match with one of those Vodyanoi copies on our way here. I think its crew were still trying to win. All the torpedoes swimming around, they were a strong hint.”

“No,” said Tasya, leaning against the doorjamb. “What you saw was the prosecution of a war. That’s not the same as trying to win it. That’s just not lying down and giving up.”

Katya was having problems with the conversation that extended beyond its location and the other speakers. They were talking as if the Yagizban were at least thinking of giving up. It certainly didn’t sound as if they had much belly for the fight. Kane was ahead of her.

“Don’t think the Yagizba Enclaves are thinking of surrendering. Because they’re not.”

“We can’t,” added Tasya with quiet emphasis.

Katya was still near the door with a strong impulse to leave, but she wasn’t leaving. She would in a moment, she was sure. Any minute now, she’d be gone. Any moment.

Just as soon as she’d found out what the hell they were talking about.

“What does that mean, ‘we can’t’?” she said. “It’s very easy. You say to the Feds, ‘We surrender.’ There’s no big trick to it.”

Kane shook his head. “This war is more complicated than you realise, Katya.”

He reached inside the long coat he always insisted on wearing, even in the temperature and humidity controlled submarine environments, the freak. Mind you, he liked the surface, liked standing around on surfaced submarine decks and on the Yagizban floating platforms, even in the howling cold and rain. She’d seen him do it herself, and it still mystified her even if it explained his attachment to his coat.

She decided she needed a stronger word than “freak” to really sum Kane up. Then she remembered that he was Terran by birth; he was already the most extreme form of freak imaginable.

Meanwhile, the freak in question had found what he was looking for. He pulled a waterproof envelope from his inside pocket, unsealed it and produced several sheets of hard copy. “These documents are all top secret,” he said offhandedly, as if everybody carried secret papers around with them. “The Yagizba Enclaves have already made diplomatic overtures towards equitable terms for a cessation of hostilities.” He looked at Katya. “That means they’re trying to end the war, by the way.”

“I know what it means,” said Katya, although she hadn’t been completely sure.

Unabashed, Kane held up one of the sheets. “This is what they suggested. Immediate ceasefire, normalisation of relations, independence for the Enclaves from Federal authority, and a claim of about an eighth of the planet’s surface.”

“An eighth?” Katya was astounded and disgusted. That sounded like a lot.

“Yes, an eighth. Bear in mind that the Yagizban represent about a quarter of the planet’s human population. An eighth is actually pretty modest. The eighth they want contains no Federal facilities, stations, developed mining sites, or anything else that would need to change hands. It’s untouched apart from what the Yagizban already have there.”

“What has this got to do with me?”

“As a Federal citizen, it has everything to do with you. Did you know the Yagizban had tried to negotiate? No. Their terms sound better than a war, don’t they?”

Katya said nothing. She could see the other sheets Kane had taken from the envelope and scattered on the desk. One of them had the FMA seal in the corner. Kane picked it up.

“This is the Federal response to that olive branch.” He saw her frown and added, “Sorry, that’s an Earth term that apparently didn’t make the trip here. It just means a peaceful overture. Here, read it yourself.” He passed her the FMA document.

She took it and skim read it. Unfortunately, it was couched oddly, full of strange legal terms and skimming it did her no good. With the full knowledge that she had four people watching her as she read, she went back to the beginning and went through it more carefully. The first and obvious thing was that the FMA had dismissed the Yagizban peace plan. Most of the rest of the document was a counter-proposal, but even here some of the terms weren’t very clear to her. There was something about the Yagizban surrendering unconditionally, something about territories and…

“I don’t know this word,” she admitted. “I haven’t seen it before. What’s ‘indenturement’?”

Kane didn’t reply immediately. He looked at Tasya first. Katya followed his glance, and saw Tasya had gone pale with anger. Abruptly, she stirred from her place in the door and walked out into the corridor.

“It’s when you contract to work for someone in return for food, clothes, somewhere to sleep.”

Katya was confused. What was a proviso like that doing in a peace negotiation? Now she knew what it meant, she could make sense of the sentences around it. Her eyes widened. They couldn’t be serious.

“
All
Yagizban?” she asked Kane. “Mandatory indenturement for a period of thirty years on
all
Yagizban? But, if it’s mandatory, if they
have
to do it…”

“Slavery,” said Tasya reappearing at the door. “They want to enslave my people. This is what they call a ‘peaceful overture.’” Her anger was in danger of boiling over. She took off her Secor cap and threw it in the corner as if it were diseased.

Katya was used to bickering and haggling over terms with traders, and was very familiar with the idea of starting with an outrageous offer. But buying a load of crimson squid fillets and negotiating a ceasefire couldn’t work exactly the same, could they? You
couldn’t
start by threatening the other party with enslavement or extermination. That was how wars started, not how they ended.

Then she read the last clause. It said in unequivocal terms that this was the FMA’s first and only offer. The Yagizba Enclaves must accept it or suffer the consequences.

“I don’t understand,” Katya said to Kane. “This is a declaration of war for a war that’s already being fought. I just…” She looked at the document as if it was dry water or pale black or something else that had no right existing. “What’s going on, Kane? What are they doing?”

“Now that is an excellent question,” he said, looking at the other documents still on the desktop. “I know what it looks like they’re doing.” He looked her in the eye. “It looks like they’re trying to wipe out the Russalkin.”

“You mean the Yagizban.”

“I mean what I say.” He held up two of the sheets. “More documents I’m not supposed to have. I’ll give you the short version and you can read them yourself if you don’t believe me. That love letter from the FMA gives the impression that a Federal victory is inevitable. These documents,” he waved the two sheets, “are recent loss reports for both sides, and include projected losses. Katya, if the war continues with its current ferocity, in one year’s time the global population will be less than a thousand. The only people left will be the ones in the warboats, because they will have destroyed all the settlements.”

Katya shook her head. “That’s not possible. No conventional war is that destructive.”

Kane dropped the papers to the desktop and rubbed his eyes. “Oh, if only that were true. There are two problems with that idea, though. One, it only really applies in places where the planet itself isn’t trying to kill you. Russalka isn’t a nice place, Katya. We can only live here because we have the technology. We make environments to live in because the Russalkin environment would kill us in hours. Most of it wants to drown us, and the rest of it will kill us with hypothermia. We live in bubbles. All it takes is a big enough pin and any bubble can be burst. And that brings us to point number two.”

He slid another sheet towards Katya. From the heading she could see it was a Yagizban intelligence report. “It turns out that the FMA is developing a bigger pin. A fusion device, specifically intended to open underwater bases to the ocean across multiple decks, thus overwhelming compartmentalisation and bulkhead safety measures. Anybody who isn’t vaporised, blown up, or drowned in the detonation will just suffocate in the darkness as the life-support fails.” He smiled humourlessly. “Even my lot never stooped that low.”

“The
Leviathan
,” said Katya with pointed emphasis.

Kane winced. “Yes. That’s true. The
Leviathan
. But something went wrong with it. It wasn’t
supposed
to kill everyone. Just destroy any military capability. What the Feds are planning is genocide. Cold-blooded mass murder. Slavery or extermination. This is your government planning this, Katya. This is happening in your name.”

Katya turned to Tasya. “What are you doing about it, your government?”

Tasya pointed at the intelligence report. “We have warning. The Feds may have the numbers, but we’ve always had the technological edge. We’ll have fusion warheads by the time they do. If they attack the Enclaves with these weapons, we will destroy their settlements. If they want total war, they can have it.”

Katya shook her head. “This is crazy. This is all crazy. Are you seriously saying this war
has
to end with us all killing one another? I can’t… Over a century we’ve fought the planet just to survive, we fought the Grubbers when they tried to take it away from us, and you’re saying it’s all as good as over? We were our own worst enemies the whole time? No. No, I can’t accept that. We’re not that stupid.” The others were just looking at her. “We are
not
that stupid!”

She was angry now. Angry with them, angry with all this secret agent rubbish, but most of all she was angry because she had an ugly feeling gnawing away inside her that the Russalkin were more than capable of cutting their own throats rather than back down over a matter of pride.

Of course, all this still left one very large question.

“Why are you telling me this?”

Kane and Tasya exchanged glances. Katya realised that this was not a courtesy visit to tell her all this, or just to say hello and chat.

“We think we have a solution.” Katya looked at him suspiciously. Considering he was claiming to have found a way to prevent humans becoming nearly extinct on the planet, he didn’t seem very happy about it. “But, you’re not going to like it.”