Katya's World by Jonathan L. Howard

strapped into the wreck of the Baby . She couldn’t do it. She knew she could never do it. Finally she started to cry.
    Petrov stood, unfolding himself easily out from the confinement of the table and chair and left her silently to her grief.
     
    Some time later the speaker in the wardroom’s bulkhead burst into life. “ Battle stations! ” barked the captain’s voice, tense with anger. “ All crew to battle stations! Prepare to repulse boarders! ”
     
    Katya’s head jerked up. She’d been drifting in a shallow sleep, exhaustion finally catching up with her. For a moment she had no idea where she was or how she’d come to be there. Then it all came back in a sickening flood. She might have sat there in indefinite despair if the captain’s words hadn’t finally sunk in. Her eyes widened.
    Repel boarders?
    The gangways were in frenzy when she stuck her head out of the door. Ratings and officer s were hurrying back and forth and she realised with a shock that they were all carrying weapons. Not just the sidearms that the senior officers wore but longarms – maser rifles, close-assault guns, even a flamer pack.
    She followed the flow of personnel to the bridge and found it almost empty. The top hatch was open and she could hear shouting going on outside, the voices echoing around the great cavern of the moon pool. Then the shooting started.
    She had no idea how far away the firing was between the echoes and the sound coming down the hatch but it didn’t sound that close. There was the sporadic krak! Of ballistic smallarms and a couple of bursts of full automatic fire. It quickly became obvious it was coming closer.
    “ What’s happening? ” she called up the hatch.
    A face appeared above her, a female sublieutenant she didn’t recognise. “ Stay there! ” she was ordered. “ Stay off the deck! ” Then the face was gone.
    More firing. She could hear the captain up top giving terse commands. Fine, she thought, I don’t have to be up there to find out what’s happening. She walked to the station where she’d seen Petrov operate the lights and exterior cameras and examined the controls briefly. Her cybernetics teacher had always said that the more sophisticated a system was and the better designed it was, the simpler it seemed to be. “ All the functionality, none of the knobs and dials, ” recited Katya under her breath. Whoever had designed this console had known their trade well. In a few seconds she was using the Novgorod ’s cameras as easily as she once operated the Baby ’s.
    Captain Zagadko had deployed his marines and armed crew behind any available cover facing into the tunnels; crates, raised hatches, even the boat’s exposed hull all sheltered waiting crew as the shooting in the tunnels got closer. There was little time for tension to build further before Lieutenant Tokarov and his team came into sight, the ones at the front pausing to provide covering fire for the ones at the rear as they moved to the front and returned the favour, the tactical leapfrogging that Katya had only ever seen in screen dramas about the war and crime thrillers. As soon as the angle of the tunnel gave them enough cover from their pursuers, they just ran for the Novgorod .
    They’d barely made it when their foes surged out after them. Katya thought there must have been about fifteen or twenty of them, mainly men but she spotted a couple of women. There was no pattern or consistency in their clothing or armament; they looked like a mass escape from an FMA holding facility that had bolted through a weapons museum.
    So this was what real pirates looked like.
    Unlike the ordered retreat of Tokarov’s team, they ran headlong into the cavern and stopped in a shocked rabble when they saw the mass of the FMA boat beached there. She snorted derisively – how did that bunch of morons think the Feds had got into the mining complex in the first place? That they’d swum there? All of a sudden, the smart and wily pirates of