Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) Read Online Free Page A

She felt little pain, but only an odd sense of regret as her skeleton splintered, her tongue was crushed, her eyeballs exploded.
    And she did not die.
    She was smeared, an atom thick, between the rock faces.
    And she did not die.
    She could feel the mass of the mountain, feel the shift in the drowned continental plate on which it stood, feel the countless billions tonnes of water flow across the planet’s surface drawn by an unseen moon beyond the unending clouds.
    An atom thick, no, thinner yet, as thin as thought, she enveloped the planet Russalka. Russalka – she’d always thought it a good name, but now she realised it was too small to encompass everything the world was. She could almost reach out and…
    The alarm was a relief and a huge frustration. The cubicle lights came up gently along with the slowly increasing volume of the alarm tones, and Katya found herself whole and sweating in the capsule room that showed no signs of wanting to be any smaller than it already was. She reached out reflexively and muted the alarm, looked up at the silent screen where the news was always changing yet reassuringly similar. Fierce battles, broad victories, solitary and inconsequential defeats, proud Feds, subhuman Yags.
    Her mind was still echoing with her dream, though. A dream of a united planet. She had felt good, powerful, and another emotion that she equated with confidence yet had been somehow different.
    Not such a bad dream, then, although she could have done without the bit about being crushed into liquid. That had been… not so enjoyable.
    She struggled into her old clothes, grabbed her overnight bag and left the capsule, its red light snapping over to amber as she swiped her card again and tapped the “Checking Out?” square on the status screen mounted on the outside of the hatch. Now, she decided, before she did anything else that day, she desperately needed a shower.
     
    Twenty minutes later, clean, in fresh clothes, and the last echoes of her dream fading, Katya joined Sergei in the station cafeteria for breakfast. He stirred his scrambled eggs (in reality a 1:3 ratio of Edible Protein Reconstitutes 78 and 80b) onto his slice of toast (Carbohydrate Staple Complex Synthetic – Bread 15, although at least it had seen the inside of a real toaster), and glowered across the table at her. He looked exactly as he always looked. His disreputable coveralls never seemed to get any dirtier, his moustache was never any longer or shorter, his stubble was always one missed shave old.
    “What are you so happy about?” he demanded, then shovelled some “egg” into his mouth as if he expected it to be taken from him any moment.
    “Had a strange dream,” she replied. She was eating kedgeree. The egg was as synthetic as Sergei’s, the rice was reconstituted starch pellets, and the spice paste had come out of a laboratory somewhere, but at least the fish was real. “I saw the whole world. I was the whole world, sort of. Y’know, Sergei, there’s not a problem that can’t be solved. I think we’re going to be OK.”
    Sergei’s shovelling stopped. “God. If you’re going to be like this all day, I’m resigning now.”
    “Seriously? OK. We both know I can handle the boat alone and the navy’s desperate for hands, so just hand in your reserved occupation papers and get yourself into uniform. Oh, and you’ll have to keep it clean. They’re pretty fussy about that.” She smiled sweetly at him.
    He looked at her stonily. “I bloody hate you, Kuriakova,” he said, and returned his attention to his breakfast.
    “‘I bloody hate you, Captain Kuriakova,’” she corrected him. “I will have discipline within my crew.”
    She carried on eating, having duly noted Sergei struggling not to smile.
     
    “Wake her up, Sergei.”
    They were aboard the boat, set to go with a small cargo of assorted parcels, mainly intended for friends and family of Mologa’s military staff at Atlantis. That and a few data sticks