Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) by Jonathan L. Howard Page A

haven’t seen it before. What’s ‘indenturement’?”
    Kane didn’t reply immediately. He looked at Tasya first. Katya followed his glance, and saw Tasya had gone pale with anger. Abruptly, she stirred from her place in the door and walked out into the corridor.
    “It’s when you contract to work for someone in return for food, clothes, somewhere to sleep.”
    Katya was confused. What was a proviso like that doing in a peace negotiation? Now she knew what it meant, she could make sense of the sentences around it. Her eyes widened. They couldn’t be serious.
    “ All Yagizban?” she asked Kane. “Mandatory indenturement for a period of thirty years on all Yagizban? But, if it’s mandatory, if they have to do it…”
    “Slavery,” said Tasya reappearing at the door. “They want to enslave my people. This is what they call a ‘peaceful overture.’” Her anger was in danger of boiling over. She took off her Secor cap and threw it in the corner as if it were diseased.
    Katya was used to bickering and haggling over terms with traders, and was very familiar with the idea of starting with an outrageous offer. But buying a load of crimson squid fillets and negotiating a ceasefire couldn’t work exactly the same, could they? You couldn’t start by threatening the other party with enslavement or extermination. That was how wars started, not how they ended.
    Then she read the last clause. It said in unequivocal terms that this was the FMA’s first and only offer. The Yagizba Enclaves must accept it or suffer the consequences.
    “I don’t understand,” Katya said to Kane. “This is a declaration of war for a war that’s already being fought. I just…” She looked at the document as if it was dry water or pale black or something else that had no right existing. “What’s going on, Kane? What are they doing?”
    “Now that is an excellent question,” he said, looking at the other documents still on the desktop. “I know what it looks like they’re doing.” He looked her in the eye. “It looks like they’re trying to wipe out the Russalkin.”
    “You mean the Yagizban.”
    “I mean what I say.” He held up two of the sheets. “More documents I’m not supposed to have. I’ll give you the short version and you can read them yourself if you don’t believe me. That love letter from the FMA gives the impression that a Federal victory is inevitable. These documents,” he waved the two sheets, “are recent loss reports for both sides, and include projected losses. Katya, if the war continues with its current ferocity, in one year’s time the global population will be less than a thousand. The only people left will be the ones in the warboats, because they will have destroyed all the settlements.”
    Katya shook her head. “That’s not possible. No conventional war is that destructive.”
    Kane dropped the papers to the desktop and rubbed his eyes. “Oh, if only that were true. There are two problems with that idea, though. One, it only really applies in places where the planet itself isn’t trying to kill you. Russalka isn’t a nice place, Katya. We can only live here because we have the technology. We make environments to live in because the Russalkin environment would kill us in hours. Most of it wants to drown us, and the rest of it will kill us with hypothermia. We live in bubbles. All it takes is a big enough pin and any bubble can be burst. And that brings us to point number two.”
    He slid another sheet towards Katya. From the heading she could see it was a Yagizban intelligence report. “It turns out that the FMA is developing a bigger pin. A fusion device, specifically intended to open underwater bases to the ocean across multiple decks, thus overwhelming compartmentalisation and bulkhead safety measures. Anybody who isn’t vaporised, blown up, or drowned in the detonation will just suffocate in the darkness as the life-support fails.” He smiled humourlessly. “Even my lot never