The Locket

I was young. So young. I was there at the laying of the keel of this lucky corvette, the RFS Sergey Gorshkov, and I rode the mighty sluices and slaps along the 1000 meter cut into the Baltic, from Baltiysky Zavod shipyard into the cold Baltic Sea, and so did Ekaterina. Ekaterina Galina Sokolova, my beloved, who pushed her hand deep into my jacket pocket so that others might not see, and pressed her locket into my palm. I had bought the jewelry for her at a fine store in town, and put a picture of us in each side, facing one another.

Fast and fearless our descent into the sea was, as was this love, a rival to Yuri and Lara, Winston and Julia, Eugene and Tatyana. An act of fools. We would be harshly dealt with if we were discovered. There were strict rules of separation between the sexes, and we flaunted them carefully, but as history shows, never carefully enough.

Before the Belarusan incursion into Lithuania, Kana’s presence would have been impossible. Female personnel were discouraged, culturally and as a policy, from entering military service. It was also dangerous. Dedovshchina was a practice of hazing so extreme that many deaths had resulted. It could include beatings, sexual torture, rape, and even murder. It had been largely eradicated by the senior officers, but there were still attacks on women by some in the upper echelons.

We were now being overrun in the Baltics by the forest guerrillas, of which the Lithuanians made up no small portion. We were pushing a new ethno-nationalism to cannabalize the villages. Baltic guerrillas were, despite the support from Moscow, holding the lines.

It was the kontraktniki policy that allowed women into the military. Conscription began. We were short of troops, so women were needed to swell the ranks of the Imperium.

Kana and I were inseparable before embarkation, meeting nightly at different hotels. I bought her trinkets. She was especially fond of the locket.

After we boarded, it was nearly impossible to meet. Sex by decks, and everyone travelled in pairs.

We were on patrol but five days when we engaged the frigate. The battle lasted minutes, but we both took a beating. Our optical and radar sensors were knocked clear off their housings during our skirmish. We got in a lucky torpedo hit, in her low port, and the frigate veered away fast, out of our range to avoid another fortunate poke. Kapitan Terasova opted not to set chase and re-engage, and we were all glad of it. A warrior of another time would have attacked. Today was different. We had received word ballistic missiles were airborne, launched from every country capable. This was the end of the world. We were a blind and leaking ship, our pumps hard-pressed to do any battle during Armageddon.

The missile fell while many of us were on the weather deck, all unaware, working mop-up. It fell perhaps twenty klicks before us. I found Ekaterina at her station when the ship’s klaxons went off. There had been a shout from the port-fore quarter, and all looked up to see a spike of light drop out of the sky, through a thread of cirrus clouds. It touched the ocean like a needle, and vanished. Moments later, the skin of the sea opened and spread. A fountain fifty meters high took to the skies. Around it, a globe formed. Its pressure lifted our bow high out of the water. The yadernaya boyegolovka triggered. The water spouted straight back out, surrounded by a red sun that spread from its strike point and back toward us.

I was young, but I became old in a flash. It is a thing that came upon me faster than I thought possible. My skin came loose, and I found it hard to see around the blind spots that had burned their way into my eyes when I glanced around the bulkhead to see Ekaterina. I cannot hear; the compression having blown out my drums and all the tender workings behind them. My left hand is a claw, which is good for clasping and hanging, but not for much else. My left arm is a blackish thing, a tree root up to my elbow, hardly recognizable as an arm, the skin pulled so taut it might rip and bleed if stretched too far. The radiation is in my blood already. I can feel it in my marrow, a thing deep, hot and murderous. I am twenty. I am old.

All crewmen found deck space out of the line of view of the bomb, but when the light hit the Gorshkov, we all knew we were caught out no matter the shelter we took. I covered Ekaterina, but the light burned through me, making me no shelter at all. We dropped to the deck, her back to the wall, her body balled up in mine. She screamed. The hardened amalgam sheets behind her burned her back where they touched her. We were supposed to cover our eyes, and though we did, we could still see our bones. I stared through Kana and saw her skull, and the flow of her thickening blood. I saw her heart, a single beat before my eyes burn so hard I had to look away, or they might catch fire.

The ship yawed, turning in a fashion unnatural, and the fine and lucky Gorshkov was nearly swamped. A maelstrom, normally not a threat for a ship as large as our corvette, had developed and caught us, setting us on a rip-spin to the bottom. Rivets popped from the tightened bulwarks and bowed skins like bullets, hitting sailors still at their stations. She was at the top of a vortex and bending as a vice. She would be swallowed. Kapitan Terasova set rudders hard starboard against the suck of Charybdis. The crew below could hear the strain of fine Russian alloys creaking against the force of black waters coupled with tritium’s might unleashed. Kapitan pushed the drives to near-cavitation against her secondaries, and pulled us out of the hungry spin.

The force of the spin knocked me off Kana and around the corner of the bulkhead. I gripped her hand, and a rivet shot into my wrist, screwing me to the boat. Kana had somehow taken hold of a rail, and there we waited a second. Against all sanction and sanity, I peeked around the corner and saw into the heart of the blast. Kana was taking the brunt of the heat side, and it was terrible. I could not cover her.

She was vanishing. No skin, no organs, no bones. I held her arm with my bolted arm, and covered my face with the other. Even with my eyes closed I could still see the bones of my arm and wrist and my vanishing woman. She, much like Lots’ wife was looking at the Wrath of the God-made atom and she was crumbling to dust.

Now I screamed.

The shock wave slammed us next. It rattled our insides. Half the crew were knocked into the air and overboard, drowned in the stir as we spun, pulled over the gunwales into the waters as we rolled a full 90º and righted again, ladling up the freezing Baltic into our bilge and lower decks.

I ripped the bolt free, and pulled Kana’s arm to me as we steadied, but nothing came. She was gone. I sat up, and turned to look down the aft beam. Just a shadow stamped on a wall. No bones. No ash. Just the locket in my palm.

My arm, the one that had been holding hers was hard and black to the elbow. I dug out the Baltiysky Zavod shop locket from my palm, and draped it over my neck. My love. Such was the heat, and the force of her grip, it had been half-buried there. I did not want to, but I could still open it. The pictures inside were burned away, but there were tiny heat shattered mirrors all about the insides. I wended my way through the repeating images of me seeking her until called to duty. Names were being called by The Kapitan. If there was no answer after one minute, she assumed the crewman was dead. She called Ekaterina.

I was called to station later. My crewmates staggered and tumbled over the bulwarks, their skin falling from the meat beneath like rags, eye sockets white, the corneas cooked.

I took my post and awaited my orders. It was a quarter-hour before a scratchy voice came over the Lamar analog comm.

“I need a navigator. Old school. We were shielded below, but the EMP from Bomba still fried us well. We have no computer guidance. No radar. You know these waters?”

“I was born near here.

“You speak Lithuanian?”

“Passable. I was born on the Russian border.”

“I am advancing you to Petty Officer, 2nd Class.”

“I have done nothing to warrant an advancement, tovarisch Kapitan.”

“You have survived. A pulse has its privileges.”

“Heading?”

“A nice soft cradle to beach my boat.”

“Understood.”

“And Petty Officer, 2nd Class Dimitry Vasiliev. My condolences for your loss.”

She knew. She could have arrested us anytime.

“Thank you, tovarisch Kapitan.”

From a set of drawers I pulled out triangles, protractor, rulers, compasses, dividers, a sextant of such fine craftsmanship I decided to steal it, and take it to the bottom with me should we get hit again. A wide sweep compass, an astrolabe, an octant, an array of telescopes, and an EMP-proof chronometer. I placed them on the back staff. I knew the beach I wanted. Juodkrantė is a Lithuanian seaside resort located on the East Curonian Spit, with a permanent population of about 700 people. Easy landing, enough for our forces to overtake. A slaughter of sodomites. It was the second largest settlement on Lithuania's spit and without defense, but the guerillas.

We had one-hundred seven crewmen when we first set underway from Baltiysky Zavod shipyard. We were not hardened then, but ready to take on a frigate at close range. Now all we had at best count was forty-three. But we had at least twenty heavy guns to cut up the beachhead, and fifty small arms, and ammo and food for months, to push back any siege. We knew the stories of the “sixty-six thousand” Forest Brothers, but it was doubtful they were concentrated there, and we were a fortress, impregnable.

When I lined us to our target, I asked tovaritch Kapitan to let me take the helm. I watched the sky and brought her in on high tide. We came in on a soft straight skid, slid due west, with no spin. I managed all this with two overlapping, sparkling blind spots in the center of my eyes, limned in Mandelbrots of electric blue.

“Kapitan. May I be dismissed? My eyes. I have been injured by the bomb.”

“To sick bay. Dima. How did you? Never mind. Sickbay. Immediately.”

I made up my mind I would not stay a night in Ekaterina’s tomb. I left my station. I passed a body with a gun. I took it and leapt overboard, my arm burning enough to make me nearly black out. I walked the twenty klicks to Klaipėda. Looking up, the moon and my blind spots overlapped.

Just then, I was struck from behind, my gun lost.

“Russian. Kill him,” said another. I looked at the Moon once more, the doubly overlapped blindspots in my eyes making a cardioid shape.

"How do you know? He has no clothes."

"That's how I know. Burned off."

“Okay.”

The gun went off. There was a bright light and the double balls in my eyes drew closer for the final time.

A locket was the last thing I saw.