“That’s not true. The FTL satellites were in place. We were using them to communicate with the other colonies. The Grubbers destroyed those satellites in orbit when they arrived.”
“Yes, they did. There was nothing wrong with them up to that point. You’re missing the obvious — Earth received no reply from Russalka because the FMA decided not to reply. They didn’t say a thing until the Zarya was in orbit. Then they told her they’d had satellite problems, were very glad to see them, and could they set down just here.” He pointed at the screen. “It was an ambush. She never stood a chance.”
Katya couldn’t find anything to say. Kane continued, quietly crushing almost everything she had ever believed. “What happened at that Yagizban evacuation site wasn’t an aberration, Katya. The Federal government hasn’t suffered some sort of personality change overnight. They have been doing things like this for years. Somewhere in that long century when Russalka was on its own, your ancestors gave the bureaucrats too much power. They became very comfortable with that power and very protective of it. So they sold you a lie: of things always being on a knife edge; of disaster being just around the corner. How you must all pull together or perish.
“The Zarya represented a huge threat to them. All those new faces, new minds that hadn’t been indoctrinated with generations of the lie, that would ask questions and have direct contact with Earth to discuss matters. The government could see the good times coming to an end. So, they just made the lie a bigger one still, but in a way that would appeal to the populace. Now you were the innocent victims of a warmongering colonial power. It was a beautifully convincing lie. The Russalkin bled and died for it in their thousands. The only risk the government could see was that they might lose the war, but I’m sure they had contingency plans in place for that.
“The one thing they didn’t anticipate was the Yagizban actually believing what the Terrans told them. When the war fizzled out and Earth didn’t send reinforcements, the Feds believed it was business as usual. You can see how well that worked out. Ten years of growing Yagizban resentment and a lovely new war that the Federal government thinks is worth fighting to the last drop of somebody else’s blood.”
Katya felt empty, exhausted, sickened. She wanted to cling to the reality she had grown up in, but now everywhere she touched it with her mind, it crumbled and rotted away.
She kept thinking of little things that she had always simply accepted, but that now made a new and terrible sense. The existence of Secor boats, and how it was always just expected that they would be part of flotillas and wolf packs. How many times had decent people fired on innocent targets using data and “pirate” identifications provided by the Secor command boats? The Russalkin had suffered, been called “heroes,” and regarded those who complained as verging on traitors. All the time they thought they had been proud warriors, they had been nothing but patsies for the biggest confidence game in the galaxy.
“You’re wasting your time searching a grid,” she said. “If Sergei is still at the controls, he’ll run for the nearest station where he feels safe. That will be Dunwich. Find him and the Lukyan, Kane. We can’t do this without them.” She left the bridge without another word.
They picked up the Lukyan twenty kilometres from Dunwich’s sensor line. Kane wasn’t in the mood for subtlety — the Vodyanoi swooped quickly on the minisub, approaching in her baffles so it wasn’t detected until it was too late. The salvage maw gaped wide and swallowed the Lukyan in a perfectly performed manoeuvre that hinted at how many times the crew had practised it in the past.
Tasya wanted to go into the maw with two others, all armed, but Katya wouldn’t hear of it. Sergei was her friend, her employee and her crew, the Lukyan her vessel, and every Russalkin knew better than to get between a captain and her boat. She climbed through the hatch into the maw as soon as it was drained, Tasya — armed of course — at her heels.
Katya cast an eye already rendered professional by a few months of ownership over the Lukyan, noting the damage caused by its violent capture. Scuffed paintwork, punctured air tank, snapped strut on the lighting rig — four to six hours to repair if she and Sergei worked on it together.
She walked around the front to look in through the forward observation bubble, but the internal lights were out. The light from the maw’s own illumination strips seemed to show a dark bundle on the floor next to the crate of plumbing supplies which Sergei had insisted on keeping aboard.
Katya walked back to the minisub’s aft hatch where Tasya was waiting. “I can see something on the floor in there. It might be a body.”
“Only one?”
“Why guess?” said Katya, and operated the hatch control.
A strange organic smell rolled out of the open door, and it took Katya a moment to identify the mixed scent of blood and urine. Tasya didn’t wait that moment; she stepped inside, drawing and aiming her maser at the shape as she did so. She kicked it, and it whimpered.
“On your feet,” she ordered.
The shape clambered painfully up, and Katya saw it was Sergei. Her joy at seeing him alive was immediately dissipated by the state he was in. He had a deep cut down the left side of his brow, and the blood had splashed all the way down his habitual green coveralls to the waist. But there was blood, too, on his sleeve cuffs.
“We need a medic,” Katya called back to the open maw hatch where Kane and a couple of the crew stood watching. Sergei cried out, making her turn quickly back.
Tasya had him held against the wall of the minisub by his throat with one hand while the other held her gun unwaveringly between his eyes. The last time Katya had seen a gun held to someone like that, a second later Filipp Shurygin was dead. “Tasya? What the hell are you doing?”
“Where’s Vetsch?” demanded Tasya, her voice cold with suppressed violence.
“Katya!” croaked Sergei through Tasya’s firm grip on his windpipe. “Help!”
“Tasya, let him go! He can hardly breathe!”
Tasya released his throat, but kept the maser’s muzzle aiming steadily between his eyes. “Don’t make me wait for my answer, Ilyin,” she said.
Sergei shot her a terrified glance, although somebody unexpectedly knowing his surname was probably enough to do that. “He attacked me. Look!” He pointed at the cut.
“Sergei,” said Katya gently in an attempt to calm him, “please, tell us what exactly happened.”
“He was as nice as anything to start with. I thought he was OK for a pirate.” Belatedly realising what he had said, he started to stumble out some apologies, but Tasya just waved the barrel of her gun impatiently. This served to concentrate his mind wonderfully.
“Then he said the boat was his.”
“The Vodyanoi?” asked Kane, stepping into the maw. He noticed Tasya bristle, and added, “Never mind me. Just an interested party. Carry on. You were saying?”