Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) Read Online Free PDF

combing the Mologa approaches. Not even three hours out and a Yag warboat sniffing around? It seemed… all too likely. The ocean deeps were vast and even a large carrier could shuffle around out there with a whole fleet looking for it and probably stay safe. The station approaches, though… there the game went from looking for a fish in an ocean to looking for a fish in a bath. It was dangerous for the hunters if the station defences picked them up, of course, but war is all about risks.
    Another twenty seconds of tracking the unidentified contact passed before the computer decided it had enough information to offer its analysis. “Eighty seven per cent likelihood contact Alpha is a Vodyanoi/2 class hunter-killer submarine of the Yagizba Enclaves,” it told them. “It is therefore designated an enemy .” And to show them what it thought of enemies, the computer changed the contact’s symbol on the sonar display from yellow to red.
    “A Vodyanoi?” said Sergei hollowly. He had gone very pale, or at least his stubble seemed much more clearly defined. “One of their new boats? The Grubber design? It would be.” His tone was bitter. “We’ve never dealt with one of those before.”
    It wasn’t good news. The Yag’s Vodyanoi/2 class was a development of a Terran boat called the Vodyanoi , the vessel of the notorious pirate Havilland Kane, no less. She had met Kane, and she had been aboard the Vodyanoi . It was a highly sophisticated boat, but she knew the Yag copies were not its match; necessary compromises had to be made in their production to keep down costs, and some aspects of the original’s technology were beyond Russalkin manufacturing methods. Even so, the Vodyanoi/2s were dangerous predators. If it got a clear lock on them, they were as good as dead.
    So, they did the only thing a minisub could do against such a killer; they remained quiet and hoped for the best.
    “Do you think they’d hear our ballast tanks vent?” said Katya in a whisper. When you knew people who were keen on the idea of killing you weren’t very far away and were actively listening for you, it was difficult not to whisper. “We’re about fifty metres above a thermocline. We’d be a bit safer under it.”
    Sergei shook his head. “I know it’s tempting, but it’s best not to do a thing, Katya. If they’re low on munitions, they might not bother, but if they’re flush, they might stick a fish in our direction on a search pattern, and then we’d be pretty screwed.”
    By “fish,” he meant “torpedo.” By “pretty screwed,” he meant “very thoroughly dead.”
    Katya knew good advice when she heard it, so she leaned back in her seat and crossed her arms so she wouldn’t be tempted to press any buttons just to relieve the tension.
    The only thing they could do was watch the sonar screen as the passive return grew stronger. The Yag boat was heading almost directly for them; it would pass by about three hundred metres above them and a little in front. It would be a close call whether they ended up in its baffles – the conical volume astern of a boat in which its own engines blinded its sonar.
    Katya had no idea how broad a cone that was. If they were hidden by the Yag’s engine noise, they could risk the descent to the thermocline and hide behind the layer of the water where the temperature above was lower than that below, and which could reflect sonar waves. If they weren’t, however, the Yag would hear the air venting from their ballast tanks as they gained negative buoyancy, and then the Yag would kill them. Given how nice a boat the Vodyanoi was, she reckoned its baffles were small, and that the baffles of her clones might be small too. It wasn’t worth the risk.
    Katya kept her arms very folded.
    Sergei leaned forward. “What the hell is that?” he murmured.
    Behind them, a new trace had appeared. If they had been under way the contact would have been lost in their own baffles. Only that they were running