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

Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles)
Book: Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) Read Online Free
Author: Jonathan L. Howard
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containing messages in written and video form, both official and personal. Lines of communication were often among the first casualties in wartime. The landlines, never very reliable, had mainly been severed by enemy action, and the surface long wave relays – tethered communication buoys floating above the settlements – were too easy to intercept and jam. That’s if some enterprising raider didn’t slap them with a couple of torpedoes, of course. With rapid communications difficult, almost everything had to be done by couriers.
    Katya had noticed among the parcels some actual letters, forming their own envelopes with a tab of tape to seal them.
    “Letters. Imagine that,” she’d said, waving one of them at Sergei. “Writing. On paper.” Sergei had said nothing, so she’d added, “Amazing!” to emphasise the novelty of it.
    “People sent letters on paper in the war,” he’d said. It was an extruded fibre weave, but it looked and behaved in much the same fashion as real wood pulp paper, the kind they had on Earth. “Sometimes, y’know, sometimes words on a screen aren’t enough. You want something you can carry with you. Sometimes it’s all that’s left of someone.”
    Now the bags were stowed, and twenty hours of submarine travel awaited. Twenty hours of brain-freezing tedium, possibly mixed with bouts of bowel-loosening terror should the major in traffic control be wrong about local Yag activity. At least, Katya reflected, the cess tank was empty.
    It was the co-pilot’s job to run down the pre-launch checklist, and the captain’s to oversee it, so Sergei counted off the items and called “check” at each positive, and it was Katya who watched him do it. It was ridiculous, she thought. In her entire maritime career to date, she had done that job once. Once, and only once, she had been co-pilot/navigator. Then she had inherited the boat and become captain. “A battlefield promotion,” Uncle Lukyan would have called it.
    She snapped herself out of her reverie before it could become maudlin, and listened to Sergei finish the list. “All lights green, captain. All systems go.”
    Katya opened the communications channel to traffic control. “We’re clear to disengage, traffic control. No last minute reports of Yag boats in the vicinity?”
    “Nothing new, captain.” She recognised the voice of the major. “I can only recommend you stay sharp, and take care. Launch when ready, RRS 15743 Kilo Lukyan . Good luck.”
    “Thank you, major,” replied Katya. “Disengaging now. Lukyan out.”
    With a thud as the docking clamps released the boat, and the hum of the impellers taking them out into open water, the voyage was underway.
    It had seemed like a good idea at the time, renaming her uncle’s boat from Pushkin’s Baby to the Lukyan . It had seemed like a good way to honour him, to remember him. But now every time the boat’s name was used, she had to fight the urge to look at the left hand seat to see if he was there. Really, that should have been her seat as captain, but she just couldn’t bring herself to take it. She felt a big enough fraud calling herself “captain.” Claiming the captain’s seat, Lukyan’s seat… no. That was too much.
    Sergei hadn’t wanted it either, but he had seen how she looked at the seat almost superstitiously and decided that he was going to have to be the stoic, pragmatic one. He didn’t like it, though, and had spent much of the first couple of months complaining that the seat felt wrong, that no matter how he adjusted it, it just felt wrong .
    Katya steered until they were clear of Mologa Station’s approach volume and then switched on the autopilot. The inertial guidance systems took what data they could from the baseline of Mologa’s precise location on the charts and took over, taking them on a slow downward gradient into seabed clutter to try and make them a difficult contact to acquire should a Yagizban boat happen by. In peacetime, echo beacons

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