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

being designated available again. She had little idea of how often the units were cleaned out. Perhaps twice a day, she guessed. It didn’t matter; she would do what she always did and walk most of the way along, and pass most of the two hundred capsule “rooms.” That far along, she was already walking past plentiful numbers of greens and some ambers. She deduced that whoever was supposed to clean the capsules perhaps only bothered with the far end of the tunnel once a day, maybe less. Once she might have been outraged at such a dereliction of duty. Right now, however, she just wanted to sleep.
    She found a capsule that was identical to all its neighbours, but that she took a shine to on a whim. Her boat’s docking fee included two capsule rentals, one for her and one for Sergei, although she suspected he’d sleep aboard again. Over fifty hours in that confined space apparently wasn’t too much for Sergei Ilyin. Well, good luck to him. She swiped her ID card, waited for the click, and swung the door open.
    In the same way that you couldn’t really call it a hotel, you couldn’t really call it a room. It was no more than a burrow a metre and a half square at the entrance and two and a half metres deep. The walls were covered with a smooth epoxy coating in a “restful” shade of pale blue that was apparently what the sky looked like on Earth, and which the primitive parts of their minds found comforting, or so she was told. The floor of the capsule was covered by a mattress that could be removed and hosed down for cleaning if need be, and there was a clean blanket rolled up to one side. Set into the ceiling above where the occupant would lay their head was a screen on which could be watched a selection of dull programming, available on demand. Beneath the capsule floor was a cubby for putting boots, and Katya sat in the hatchway while she removed them and her thin socks before storing them in there. When she crawled in and closed the hatch behind her, the cubby was covered and kept secure, too.
    She struggled out of her clothes, made more of an attempt at folding them than she felt was really necessary, and ended up tossing them into the alcove at the capsule end along with her overnight bag. She pulled the thin blanket over herself, more from habit than necessity as the temperature was maintained at a comfortable level, set the alarm for oh-seven-thirty, and turned off the light.
    She couldn’t sleep. Tired and listless, she was desperate to, yet her disloyal head kept buzzing and denied her the ease she needed to drift off. She wished she hadn’t mentioned her uncle to the major in traffic control, wished he hadn’t known Lukyan, hadn’t said he was a good man. Yes, her uncle had been a good man, and she missed him so much that it hurt. She felt the tears and did nothing to stop them. It was natural to grieve, even months later. She knew it would be months more before the pain stopped being quite so sharp, when it didn’t make her wish she had died along with him.
    Each capsule had half a metre of stone between itself and its neighbours, and the doors were designed to be soundproof, but even so this was why she always chose a capsule as far from others as possible, so nobody might hear her cry.
    Sergei had cried. In the pause between the threat of the Leviathan killing everyone on the planet being lifted, and the beginning of the civil war that threatened to result in everybody killing one another instead, she had got back home and sought him out immediately. She had to be the one to tell him, it was what Lukyan would have wanted.
    She had stood there, willing herself to stay ramrod straight, and told Sergei that his captain, her uncle, his best friend since childhood was dead. Death wasn’t so strange on Russalka, after all. The dangerous world killed people all the time for the silliest mistakes and the most fleeting of inattentions. Sergei was made of tough stuff, she had told herself. He’d take it