Katya's World by Jonathan L. Howard Page B

carry vast amounts of inertia – she couldn’t hope to manoeuvre as tightly as a little sub like the Baby . The boat would get an even keel even as she continued to climb for a brief second or two. And in that time…
    “ Zero! Depth four-fifty! ” The navigator was almost shouting. On the main screen the mine entrance swept towards them and then out towards the edge of the display as it engulfed them. “ We’re in! ”
    But they weren’t out of trouble. The very inertia that Kane had used to perform a vertical skid still existed in their headlong rush. “ Full astern! ” snapped Zagadko. “ Forward cameras! Overlay on the sonar image! ”
    The main screen flickered and they were seeing through the Novgorod ’s eyes as it hurtled through the tunnel. The walls shot past them as if they were falling down a well. Suddenly, they broadened and they were out in the internal lake of the mine’s moon pool. The far wall rose up ahead of them.
    It would be an unfair irony, thought Katya, if they’d saved themselves from being smashed on the outside of a mountain only to be smashed on the inside of one. She’d hardly noticed that she’d dug her heels in against the floor plating as if she could bring the submarine to a halt by sheer force of will.
    “ Beaching ramp to port! ” called Kane and wrenched the controls over. Many such pools had beaching ramps where boats could be pulled out of the water for routine maintenance. Usually, the boat rode up on a custom-built wheeled cradle, all prim and pampered.
    The Novgorod hit the ramp with her bare belly and ran up screaming every centimetre of the way. A four hundred metre long vessel can build up quite a bow wave, especially with her hydroplanes in the vertical position to act as water brakes. The wave was three metres high when it hit the quayside and broke, running tonnes of water across ground where nobody had stood for five years. It hit the front of the empty traffic control offices and stove in the thick glass sheeting. Katya watched all this on the boat’s cameras. She wondered if somebody was going to have to pay for all this damage.
    “ Engines, all stop! ” commanded Captain Zagadko. “ And kill that damn sonar! ” With the sonar grids out of the water, they were just making a fierce whittering tone that echoed around the pool’s cavern. On the quay, the backwash of water from the bow wave gushed back into the moon pool.
    The engines died. T he sonar died .
    T he silence was beautiful.
    “ Damage report, ” demanded Zagadko as he unstrapped himself, standing up and testing the skewed angle of the deck with his feet.
    It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Structurally, the boat was intact. There were any number of minor pieces of damage, but they were largely unimportant to the operation of the vessel or easily fixed. The greatest problem was the actual physical situation. The Novgorod ’s first quarter was out of the water and there was no possible way of getting her back into the pool without heavy equipment. “ She’ll swim, ” the damage control officer concluded, “ but she’ll need help to do it. ”
    Tokorov was at the environmental controls. “ Captain, I’ve taken a sample of the air in the mining base. ”
    “ Is it breathable? ”
    “ It’s not just breathable, it’s at maintained levels. They must have left the environmental systems running when it was abandoned. Perhaps they thought somebody would be going back to finish stripping the place and it never happened. ”
    Zagadko nodded; there was an excellent chance that was exactly what happened. A typical failure in communications between two work crews hired through different contractors and both under the impression that the other would be the last ones out. With no personnel left there to put a strain on life-support, it could tick over quite happily on its fusion cells for ten or twenty years.
    “ That’s something, at least. We’re going to have to get a message out