Katya's World (9 page)

Katya had known it intuitively, even if consciously she had elected not to think about it. Of course the Leviathan was
probably
after them; it would hardly
have attacked and then just swu
m off, giving them grace to lick their wounds. Of course it wanted to know where they would run. The only
“
of course
”
she could not supply was what it would do when it realised that they had made a bolthole of an abandoned mining base. She doubted it would just give them up as a bad job and go off to harass somebody else.

She’d watched the
Baby
’s distress log four times before the captain had decided that she was past the point of analytical interest and well into obsession.
“
There was nothing you could have done,
”
he’d told her, not without kindness. Of course there wasn’t. Of course he was right.

Of course.

It was difficult to take one’s gaze away from the main screen, which still
continued to show
the
Novgorod
’s course and maximum range. The centre of the map was still the submarine herself
;
the map updated thirty times a second and she got closer and closer to the abandoned mine with every minute. The red circle grew smaller each minute too, but the mine stayed within its circumference. Just, only just.

The lack of a safety margin obviously vexed Captain Zagadko so much that he was even prepared to listen to Kane.

“
Have you ever flown a fixed-wing aircraft, captain?
”
asked Kane.

“
I’ve flown CG craft, but what’s your point?
”
Katya noticed Petrov give Kane a very suspicious look as Zagadko answered.

“
The point is, you’re going
to
have to treat this boat like an aircraft on the final approach. A fixed-wing aircraft doesn’t handle anything like a CG, believe me. You’ve got a source of thrust – propellers, jets, whatever – and that’s it. The aircraft develops lift through its aerodynamic lifting surfaces. You can’t slow down to think things through, you fly on gut reaction and experience.
”

“
Sounds dangerous.
”

“
It is. That’s why everybody uses contra-gravity; it’s much more forgiving. Usually, a sub handles like a CG aircraft but, with this steady sinking, we’re behaving more like a fixed-wing aircraft at the moment. She’s constantly fighting going down and crashing.
”

“
I ask again, what’s your point?
”

“
We’ve got a good head of speed up at the moment. That can make us climb if we use the hydroplanes like the wings of an aircraft.
”

“
And that’s it?
”
said Petrov dismissively.
“
You think we don’t already know that?
”

“
Oh yes, you know it intellectually. But you don’t know it in here.
”
Kane tapped his chest over his heart.
“
You’re going to try to translate too late and we won’t climb far enough or too early and we’ll stall.
”

“
Stall?
”
said Zagadko.

“
If you burn off too much speed, you’ll sink like a brick and it’ll be ‘next stop, crush depth.’
”

“
Let me understand you. Are you asking to be at the helm when we make our approach on the mine?
”

Kane smiled.
“
I’ve done something similar in the past. I can do this. Trust me.
”

Zagadko didn’t hesitate.
“
You’ll have the helm at a thousand metres off the mine.
”

Petrov’s jaw drooped with incredulity for a moment.
“
What? Sir?
”

Zagadko looked at him steadily.
“
I hope you’re not intending to debate your captain’s command, lieutenant?
”

He clearly wanted to do just that, but discipline overrode it.
“
No, sir. Of course not.
”

“
Good.
”
Then to Kane,
“
The helm position uses a perfectly standard yoke. You might want to run a couple of simulations before the real thing to get the feel of the vessel.
”

Kane, who’d apparently been expecting some argument at least, was almost as taken aback by Zagadko’s agreement as Petrov.
“
Yes. Yes, that would be helpful. Thank you very much, captain.
”

Only Katya saw the captain’s expression when Kane turned away to set up a simulation and she didn’t like it at all.

Kane, on the other hand, was too focussed on the work at hand to pay much attention to anything else. It was the work of only a couple of minutes to set up a simulation of the
Novgorod
approaching the mine from a range of a thousand metres, engines at full power and the nose pulling down harder than the rest of the sub could lift back. The one unknown was the exact proportions of the mine’s moon pool.
“
We don’t have time to model it anyway,
”
Kane told Tokarov who’d assisted in setting up.
“
I’ll concentrate on hitting the outer entrance and then make up the rest as we go along. Going from full speed to a dead stop in perhaps a couple of hundred metres is going to be quite a party trick in itself.
”

“
What if the entry tunnel is shorter than a couple of hundred metres?
”

“
Then we’ll be making a dead stop no matter what I do. Ready?
”

Tokarov checked a display and nodded. Kane pulled on a headset, braced himself in his seat and nodded.
“
Let’s go, then.
”

Katya stood behind him as the screen flared into light and movement.
Novgorod
was running fast and noisy; there was no possibility that the Leviathan could not detect them. Indeed, it was probably right behind them at that very moment. With stealth no longer a concern, the captain had given Kane leave to use active sonar on the approach. A little more noise would hardly make a difference
. He’d set up a tight cone of rapid pulses to give high resolution to the imaging sonar. In the same way a terrestrial bat would build up a picture of its surroundings in pitch darkness by using sound pulses, the
Novgorod
’s computers would be using the sonar returns to make a model of the mountain and the tunnel entrance.

On Kane’s display, the rocky finger of the
underwater
mountain thrust up from the seabed six kilometres below. Four hundred and fifty metres below the sea surface, high on the mountain, the tunnel entrance stood out in pulsing red. The
Novgorod
’s current depth was one and half thousand. Kane immediately paused the simulation.
“
I know we’re at flank speed, but is that
flank
flank, or is there a little bit held back for special occasions?
”

Tokarov shook his head. Kane nodded.
“
Okay. This is going to be difficult.
”
He toggled the speed display from kilometres per hour over to knots and started the simulation again.

The mountainside flew towards them at shocking speed; Kane was like her uncle in preferring to work in knots but Katya was a kph woman herself. She did the calculation in her head quickly and grimaced. The
Novgorod
was doing one hundred and ten kph. They would cover the thousand metres in a little less than thirty-three seconds. Kane immediately started pulling back on the yoke, making the hydroplanes dig and the boat climb. They would have to climb over a thousand metres in a thousand metres of forward travel. Katya didn’t need to delve into sines and cosines to know that was at least a forty-five degree climb. She looked around her, looking for a bulkhead she could sit against when the deck tilted up like that.

The simulated
Novgorod
climbed quickly and smoothly, but its velocity was withering away with every metre faster than she would have believed possible. As her speed dropped, the intercept time drifted upwards from thirty-three seconds. At forty-six seconds, the
Novgorod
stalled, her forward speed no longer enough to make the hydroplanes bite.
Th
e nose went down and she ploughed into the mountainside fifty metres below the entrance.

“
Only a first attempt,
”
said Kane, a little unsteadily.
“
I’ll do better next time.
”

“
You don’t have a next time,
”
said Zagadko stepping up beside him and looking at the display with disgust as the virtual
Novgorod
scraped down the virtual mountainside with her virtual nose crumpled and her virtual crew dying.
“
In one minute, you have the helm.
”
He went to his command chair, swivelled it forward and clamped it. As he strapped himself in, he ordered a collision warning.

“
All hands secure! Brace for impact!
”
squawked the usually placid computer voice throughout the boat.

Tokorov found a vacant seat for Katya and put her there when he saw her making to sit on the floor.
“
We’re likely to hit something pretty fast and pretty hard,
”
he warned her.
“
If you’re not strapped in, you’ll smash your brains out on the far bulkhead.
”
She didn’t need a second warning, strapping herself in quickly and efficiently just as Sergei had shown her. She hoped she wouldn’t need Kane to get her out again in as much of a hurry as last time.

“
Twelve hundred metres. You might as well have the helm now, Mr Kane. Good luck,
”
said Zagadko, his voice carefully toneless as if he was handing down a death sentence.

The
“
active
”
light on Kane’s console turned to green. The sonar image on his screen was now the real thing and Katya imagined how very useful it would be if the
“
pause
”
control still worked, freezing the boat in the water while they worked out something cleverer than simply flinging themselves at the side of a mountain.

Kane pulled back on the yoke, but nowhere near as violently as he had in the simulation. The deck started to tilt back as the
Novgorod
began to climb towards the surface. He didn’t want to kill their speed so badly this time, but now he ran the risk of not climbing far enough in the short distance they had. The hull thrummed with the water rushing rapidly over the hydroplanes, angling back further and further.

“
Eight hundred metres,
”
read off the navigator.
“
Depth thirteen-fifty.
”

It’s not going to work, thought Katya, not with numbers like those. We’re not going to do it.

Zagadko clearly thought the same.
“
Weapons,
”
he ordered, his voice tight,
“
dump all the torpedoes. Don’t bother arming anything; just get them out of the tubes.
”

“
Aye-aye, sir,
”
replied the weapons officer. A warship has to be in a tight position before it will willingly disarm itself, but nobody could argue that things were
n’t
desperate. Even the lightest of the weapons weighed several hundred kilos and that might make the difference.

The hiss of torpedo launches sounded again and again as the autoloaders shoved every weapon from the magazines into the tubes. Katya winced at the thought of all that live armament drifting down into the depths. Kane was already pulling the yoke back much harder. The
Novgorod
was climbing rapidly, but she was losing speed just as quickly.

“
Four hundred. Depth six hundred.
”

Katya stared. How was that possible? Then she saw the attitude indicator had drifted far past forty-five degrees. They were on course to hit the docking tunnel but at this angle they would blow into its ceiling and the journey would end abruptly and fatally.

Suddenly, Kane shoved the yoke forward. What was he doing? In her mind’s eye, Katya saw the
Novgorod
start to tip nose down while her depth… what? Of course, a boat as big as this would carry vast amounts of inertia – she couldn’t hope to manoeuvre as tightly as a little sub like the
Baby
. The boat would get an even keel even as she continued to climb for a brief second or two. And in that time…

“
Zero! Depth four-fifty!
”
The navigator was almost shouting. On the main screen the mine entrance swept towards them and then out towards the edge of the display as it engulfed them.
“
We’re in!
”

But they weren’t out of trouble. The very inertia that Kane had used to perform a vertical skid still existed in their headlong rush.
“
Full astern!
”
snapped Zagadko.
“
Forward cameras! Overlay on the sonar image!
”