Free Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) by Jonathan L. Howard

you were in here doing all that mad brooding after Secor had finished with you, I went to the cafe, remember? Next table, the weapons officers of the two – count ‘em – two warboats that were shadowing the Jarilo, arguing over what happened. They can’t have heard about your report, yet. Anyway, gist of the discussion, lots of torpedoes, lots of confusion, no hits. Not even the Jarilo got tabbed.”
    Katya sighed deeply. “I was lucky.”
    Sergei made a dismissive sound. “We make our luck.”
     
    Atlantis Traffic Control ran them quickly through the departure protocols and bid them the traditional wish for a safe journey as the Lukyan slipped out of her lock and into the open sea. Within her, the atmosphere was a great deal more relaxed than when she’d docked. Sergei was a pragmatist at the core, even if he hid it beneath a deep crust of cynical pessimism. Rationally, he was satisfied that Katya’s actions had been reasonable after all, even if they hadn’t seemed that way at the time. Emotionally, he had no desire to stay angry at her for long. Katya might not have been blood family, but he felt like an honorary uncle to her, always had done, and now Lukyan was gone he took that role all the more seriously. An hour out of Atlantis he expressed his desire to put the past behind them in the manner time-honoured within the little submarine.
    “Would you like a game of chess?” he said with an unconvincing attempt at casualness.
    Katya looked over at him and grinned. Only an hour , she thought. He’s mellowing .  
    “I’d love a game, sure. Let me just get us to the first deep waypoint and I’ll hand over to the autopilot.” She had plotted a tortuous route to Dunwich Down, a small fish farming, protein processing, and hydroponics food facility built into a former mining site. The facility was in a cleft in the ocean bed, and there were few submarine mountains or even hills near it. This meant there was little cover on the approaches and unwary submarines could potentially be detected from kilometres away. In peacetime that was unimportant; Dunwich was not the sort of high value target that attracted pirates, and so civilian boats had travelled there and back without fear of attack. All the rules changed in war, however. Food was vital to the Federal war effort. A single Vodyanoi class warboat could target every transporter in the volume around Dunwich from a safe distance, and be away before the first torpedoes were even detected. This was hunters’ territory now, and the transport captains were justifiably fearful to go there.
    Stretched tight, the FMA could only afford to have a single obsolete Sadko class patrol boat circle the site, its drives adjusted to give the impression to listening enemies that it was something larger and more dangerous. If the Yagizban had any sort of intelligence network in place, this was a wasted effort, as everybody knew about the hapless Sadko and its fake acoustic signature. Indeed, it was joked about in every base in Federal waters.
    Given the high likelihood that the Yagizban knew all about Dunwich’s paper tiger, this meant that civilian pilots remained very cautious approaching and leaving the facility. In Katya’s case, she had plotted a complex route that took advantage of every rockfall, mound, and isotherm she could find in the newest navigational charts. The Lukyan was programmed to creep, dash, and scuttle its way from cover to cover like a nervous parack, a form of five-legged crustacean native to Russalka that would never be a byword for bravery. To have steered the route manually would have been painfully wearing on anyone’s nerves. Katya, grown as pragmatic as Sergei in her experiences, was content to leave it to the computer. She still had her pride, however; she would steer to the first waypoint on the evasive pattern close to the sea bed before handing over.
    As they descended in a long gentle arc into the depths, Katya experimentally waggled the