Katya's World by Jonathan L. Howard Page A

she could sit against when the deck tilted up like that.
    The simulated Novgorod climbed quickly and smoothly, but its velocity was withering away with every metre faster than she would have believed possible. As her speed dropped, the intercept time drifted upwards from thirty-three seconds. At forty-six seconds, the Novgorod stalled, her forward speed no longer enough to make the hydroplanes bite. Th e nose went down and she ploughed into the mountainside fifty metres below the entrance.
    “ Only a first attempt, ” said Kane, a little unsteadily. “ I’ll do better next time. ”
    “ You don’t have a next time, ” said Zagadko stepping up beside him and looking at the display with disgust as the virtual Novgorod scraped down the virtual mountainside with her virtual nose crumpled and her virtual crew dying. “ In one minute, you have the helm. ” He went to his command chair, swivelled it forward and clamped it. As he strapped himself in, he ordered a collision warning.
    “ All hands secure! Brace for impact! ” squawked the usually placid computer voice throughout the boat.
    Tokorov found a vacant seat for Katya and put her there when he saw her making to sit on the floor. “ We’re likely to hit something pretty fast and pretty hard, ” he warned her. “ If you’re not strapped in, you’ll smash your brains out on the far bulkhead. ” She didn’t need a second warning, strapping herself in quickly and efficiently just as Sergei had shown her. She hoped she wouldn’t need Kane to get her out again in as much of a hurry as last time.
    “ Twelve hundred metres. You might as well have the helm now, Mr Kane. Good luck, ” said Zagadko, his voice carefully toneless as if he was handing down a death sentence.
    The “ active ” light on Kane’s console turned to green. The sonar image on his screen was now the real thing and Katya imagined how very useful it would be if the “ pause ” control still worked, freezing the boat in the water while they worked out something cleverer than simply flinging themselves at the side of a mountain.
    Kane pulled back on the yoke, but nowhere near as violently as he had in the simulation. The deck started to tilt back as the Novgorod began to climb towards the surface. He didn’t want to kill their speed so badly this time, but now he ran the risk of not climbing far enough in the short distance they had. The hull thrummed with the water rushing rapidly over the hydroplanes, angling back further and further.
    “ Eight hundred metres, ” read off the navigator. “ Depth thirteen-fifty. ”
    It’s not going to work, thought Katya, not with numbers like those. We’re not going to do it.
    Zagadko clearly thought the same. “ Weapons, ” he ordered, his voice tight, “ dump all the torpedoes. Don’t bother arming anything; just get them out of the tubes. ”
    “ Aye-aye, sir, ” replied the weapons officer. A warship has to be in a tight position before it will willingly disarm itself, but nobody could argue that things were n’t desperate. Even the lightest of the weapons weighed several hundred kilos and that might make the difference.
    The hiss of torpedo launches sounded again and again as the autoloaders shoved every weapon from the magazines into the tubes. Katya winced at the thought of all that live armament drifting down into the depths. Kane was already pulling the yoke back much harder. The Novgorod was climbing rapidly, but she was losing speed just as quickly.
    “ Four hundred. Depth six hundred. ”
    Katya stared. How was that possible? Then she saw the attitude indicator had drifted far past forty-five degrees. They were on course to hit the docking tunnel but at this angle they would blow into its ceiling and the journey would end abruptly and fatally.
    Suddenly, Kane shoved the yoke forward. What was he doing? In her mind’s eye, Katya saw the Novgorod start to tip nose down while her depth… what? Of course, a boat as big as this would