Katya's War

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Traitor’s Gate

The next Secor interrogator Katya had was interesting in that he barely asked any questions.

He came in and chatted at her. Not with her, because Katya had decided to maintain a stony silence when asked about anything to do with her immediate situation. If he asked her what she would like for lunch, she would tell him. If he asked her what had been the function of the Yagizban device, she would just look at him with her arms crossed.

It was nice to be able to cross her arms. The new interrogator didn’t seem to believe in restraints and had neither had her strapped to her chair or had her wrists taped. He just sat there and talked about what was going on beyond the walls of the interrogation room.

He kept this up for two days. Finally, she interrupted a story he was telling her about an uncomfortable trip he’d once had aboard a shuttle when he was eight, by asking, “When do you start torturing me?”

“Soon,” he said, and then went back to describing the funny smell he remembered from the shuttle.

He had been very solicitous about her injuries and had called in a medic almost the minute he first saw her. The swelling to her eye had almost gone and the bruising was fading, the cut to her scalp where she’d fallen against the table was cleaned and sealed, and she’d been declared free of internal injuries from her beating.

With all his talking, reminiscing, gossiping, and reading out news stories from his memo pad, Katya found it easy to ignore him, and to think about her situation. She didn’t need her stereotypical Russalkin fatalistic streak to know that this was only a small diversion on the road to Hell. When he said she would be tortured soon, it was no idle threat. The only thing that she couldn’t guess was why they hadn’t started yet.

Other things she had managed to guess, though. The mystery of how Federal security had started looking for her so quickly, for one. It was an ugly conclusion at which she did not wish to arrive, and she tried a dozen others of increasing ridiculousness to try to avoid it. The most obvious conclusion is almost invariably the correct one, however, and that it saddened her so deeply did not alter the grim logic.

Sergei had betrayed her. It was the only thing that made any sense at all. He’d sat at Dunwich racked between his patriotism and his loyalty to her, and to the memory of Lukyan, his friend, her uncle. Finally, something had given way inside him, and he’d decided he needed to warn the Feds.

She could guess all the self-justifications — that she’d been led astray by Kane and Tasya, lied to, conned into doing some job for them. She could also guess that he would have begged the Feds he told his story to at Dunwich to go easy on Katya, that she was just a kid; that she didn’t know what she was doing. In her mind’s eye, she could see them giving him assurances that they never intended to keep, and poor, gullible Sergei walking away, believing them.

He wouldn’t have been able to tell them much, but it would have been enough. The search for her must have begun when she was already in the old corridors. She imagined Secor agents turning up at the coffee salon, asking questions. If she hadn’t stopped for coffee, she might have got away, or at least further. She might just have made it back into the water.

Then, of course, the base defences would have sunk her in seconds. No, she didn’t regret stopping for the coffee.

It must have been a shock when an internal reader reported her card being used; not one at an entrance to the Beta halls. So they’d called around everywhere in the vicinity but for the communications hub chamber where the card was in use, ordered everyone off the corridors, and been on their way to arrest her when she almost walked into them.

Poor Sergei. Lukyan would never have forgiven him for such a betrayal, and that meant he would never forgive himself.

On the morning of the third day, everything changed. She was taken from her cell and escorted to a sick bay, where she was given a cursory examination that seemed primarily concerned with her head injuries. They took some pictures, and a dour woman who stood silently in the corner throughout said, “Good enough” at the end of it.

The man with the camera went out into the corridor, and two tall and strikingly handsome Federal officers entered.

Katya looked at them suspiciously. “What’s this? What’s going on?”

“You’re leaving Atlantis soon,” said the Secor agent. “This is all part of the preliminaries. Don’t let them trouble you.”

“Preliminaries? What do you mean, ‘preliminaries’? What kind of preliminaries?”

“Don’t let them trouble you,” he repeated, and smiled blandly.

The officers took her out into the corridor, where the cameraman was already waiting, the small unit held at chest level. Katya didn’t care to be the subject of any more pictures and kept her head down as she was walked past him. She was surprised when she heard him say, “Perfect!”

She turned back to find the dour woman and the Secor agent looking at the camera as the cameraman replayed the scene of a moment before. The woman nodded. “It will do.”

“What’s going on?” demanded Katya, but nobody would answer her. She was led back to her cell and left there.

On the morning of the fourth day, they came for her while she was sleeping. She was dragged from her bunk, and a set of fresh underwear and some yellow coveralls were thrown at her as she blinked up in bewilderment from the floor.

“Clean clothes for you,” said the Secor officer, leaning against the doorframe. The officers were women, and forced her to change despite the male Secor officer never leaving his place by the door.

“Enjoying yourself?” she sneered at him, but he just smiled that infuriatingly bland smile of his, and nodded.

When she was dressed, they put her into an armlock while they placed restraint tapes on her wrists and hooded her. Then she was led out of her cell. They walked her for a long way until they reached a lift. From the subdued voices that stilled as she approached, she received the impression that her bodyguard was about to become an entourage. From the sounds of footfall, she guessed there were perhaps six or seven, perhaps even eight people with her in the lift when they entered.

They descended in silence for twenty seconds, which meant they must now be well outside the Beta levels. Katya was trying to deduce where they might be heading for when the lift slowed to a halt, and the door slid open.

Instantly, a wave of sound swept in, leaving her shaken by its violence. There were screams and shouts and catcalls. So many voices, so much hatred, and it was all directed at her.

“Traitor!”

“Kill her!”

“I hope you die, you bitch!”

Inside the hood, Katya’s eyes opened wide. She had a sudden terrible premonition that they were just going to throw her to the mob and stand by watching while she was torn apart.

“Back!” she heard an authoritative voice command — the dour woman. “Make way! You’re interfering in Federal business.”

“Make a hole!” demanded one of the Federal troops. “Coming through.”

Katya was taken forward, held by her upper arms on both sides by the troops.

“Traitor!” somebody shouted nearby. “Traitor to Russalka!”

There was the sound of scuffling to her left, and somebody hit her through the bag. It was a quick blow, its hastiness rendering it light, but the surprise of it made her cry out.

“Hey!” she heard the trooper to the left shout. “Try that again, friend, and I will break your arm in two places. You get me?”

“Enough of that!” said somebody else in her group. Katya wondered what they were talking about. Then she felt something pat against the cloth, and she knew they were spitting on her.

She was taken forward, an agonisingly small step at a time. She could only guess how many people were there, how large the crowd was. They’d come there to hate her, to curse and spit on her, and to kill her if they got the briefest chance.

“Give me that!” she heard the woman behind her say, and was then momentarily deafened by the woman’s amplified shouting through a public address override. “This prisoner is of use to the war effort. If any attempt is made to harm her from this moment onwards, it constitutes a schedule two felony under the Wartime Powers Acts. Lay so much as a finger on her and you can join her in the Deeps!”

Katya realised at the same moment as the crowd that the dour woman had to be an Alpha Plus — nobody else would or could invoke the Acts like that, or use the Deeps as a threat in public without the authority to back it up. They were in the presence of a senior member of the government; that fabled species. The knowledge cowed the crowd, and soon enough it would start Katya thinking about what was really happening to her. That would be later, though. Currently, her whole attention was focused on a single thing.

The Deeps. They were sending her to the Deeps.

She wished the first interrogator had executed her while he had the chance.

There were another five minutes of shouting and spitting, death threats and insults. One man shouted that he would find her family and kill them. Katya smiled humourlessly inside her hood at that. Then, with the abruptness of the door that slid shut behind them, the sound of the crowd was instantly cut off.

She heard somebody ahead approach and recognised the voice of her second Secor interrogator. “Well, that went rather well, I thought,” he said, as if talking about the first rehearsal of an infant school play.

“I have saliva on me,” replied the Alpha Plus with brittle resentment.

“There’s a restroom just over there, ma’am. In the meantime, we’ll get the prisoner into some clean clothes and get her packed off.”

They had more clean clothes waiting? Katya was beginning to appreciate the degree of stage management in all this. She was led off by the female officers again, released from her restraints and the hood, and told to change her coveralls. The previous set was slimy with spit, and some stains that suggested food or worse had been thrown at her. She ignored it; it didn’t matter what people thought. All they knew is what the FMA had told them. She couldn’t blame them; she’d spent most of her sixteen years believing that what the FMA said and the truth, were plainly the same thing.

When she had changed, they cuffed her again but didn’t bother with the bag. Another walk, this time with just the Secor agent and the two female officers. The Alpha Plus had disappeared, presumably off to lie down in a dark room after having to share a corridor with Gammas, thought Katya, a thought that was neither charitable nor essentially inaccurate.

They took her down narrow access corridors, lined with cables, pipes, and conduits on both sides and across the arched ceiling. At the end, another pair of troopers, not nearly as handsome as the ones who’d accompanied her through the screaming gauntlet earlier, waited.

Beyond the corridor was a military boat dock, a moon pool design with a small lake within an artificial cavern. There were several small vessels around, and another she recognised instantly. The hulking black form of the Novgorod seemed to overwhelm all the other boats there. The last time Katya had seen her, she’d been lying half-beached up a ramp in another moon pool, her skin torn by weapons fire, her heart stilled. It was strange seeing her alive and imposing like this. Her hatches were up, and torpedoes were currently being lowered in through the massive forward accesses into her weapons rooms. Many Novgorods were on deck or by the dockside, directing operations. On her conning tower, Katya saw a group of senior offices watching the loading. One of them stood noticeably taller than the others, and as she realised she recognised him, he looked over at her. The loading operations ceased to be of great interest to him and he walked to the tower’s rail to watch her.

The Secor officer noticed the attention and asked, “Who’s your admirer, Katya?” He laughed when she shot him a filthy look.

She knew it was stupid to feel ashamed. She knew she had done the right thing. The ones who should be ashamed were the ones up in the Alpha Plus corridors, not that she thought they were capable of it anymore. Yet for all that, she still couldn’t bring herself to look up and meet the gaze of Lieutenant Anatoly Petrov, a man she respected and who, until this minute, she thought might still respect her. Now he just watched her go by from on high, looking down upon her in all senses.

Still feeling Petrov’s gaze upon her, she was actually glad to reach the military boat that would be taking her to the Deeps, perhaps the first time anyone wearing a convict’s yellow uniform had been eager to get under way as soon as possible. She was heading for the patrol boat at the end of the quay when one of her escort stopped her and gestured at the boat they were passing. “In there, prisoner.”

She looked at her guards as if they were idiots. They had stopped by a military shuttle; a small vessel not so much larger than her own boat. More comfortable, a little bit faster, but less flexible in its mission capabilities than the Lukyan, the shuttle sat at full buoyancy by the quay with an ineffable air of smugness about it, as if to say it had a proper toilet aboard it and didn’t care who knew. Katya’s newfound self-image as a major war criminal was taking a little bit of a knock. All they could be bothered sparing for her was a shuttle?

“It’s going to take almost three days to reach the Deeps in this thing,” she said to the Secor agent.

“Perhaps you’ll be rendezvousing with a larger vessel, Katya,” said the agent.

“Will I?”

“Perhaps. Well, here’s where I say goodbye for the moment. I may be called in later for some follow-up work on your debriefing…”

“Debriefing?” Katya tried to reconcile “debriefing” with blood and pain.

“…but that’s only a ‘maybe.’ Otherwise, this is goodbye, Katya.”

Katya thought that if he was expecting her to wish him a fond farewell, he would be waiting for a good while. Instead she said, “One question. What happened to the other Secor agent? The one before you?”

“Him? Oh, he was reassigned. You upset him, Katya. He’s a sensitive soul.”

Without another word, the Secor agent turned on his heel and walked away. Katya watched him go with disbelief before her escort grew impatient and hustled her across the gangplank and onto the shuttle’s small deck. As she descended the ladder, she could see Petrov atop the Novgorod’s conning tower turning away from her. Petrov was a sensible, intelligent man, she consoled herself. One day he would understand why she had done what she had done.

She had never been aboard a shuttle before. Her uncle had always been hugely dismissive of them as “boats for corridor rats” and she had absorbed much of his disdain. It was pleasantly appointed within, with comfortable seating, plenty of space, a small galley, and, of course, a proper toilet. The boat’s air of smugness, distinct enough outside, was overpowering within. Katya hated it.

“So how long are we in this scow before transferring to a real boat?” she asked.

Her escort ignored her question, and instead busied themselves removing her wrist tapes so that she would fit more easily into the restraints of her seat. Katya guessed that these straps were a recent addition, unless — just possibly — this was actually an admiral’s personal launch, in which case they were probably a standard feature. The private hobbies of FMA admirals were a running joke amongst all submariners. Absolutely any sin or eccentricity could be put at their doors whether it was true or not; not all the prizes of rank are looked for.

The other feature of the shuttle that she wasn’t used to was that the pilots’ positions were behind a bulkhead. It felt strange not to able to look forward and see them sitting there. Instead there was just a beige bulkhead with a screen on it that cycled a vastly simplified status screen, then an active navigational chart, then a view ahead with some navigational data overlayed upon it, and then back around again. Since the passenger chairs all faced a central aisle, she had to look to her left to look at the screen, and she knew watching it for any length of time would give her neck pain.

The view opposite was hardly fascinating, either; the male troopers had returned to the quay after making sure everything was in readiness and this left Katya with the two female officers sitting directly across the aisle from her. Katya was very hopeful that they would be meeting another boat to take her onwards; the prospect of staring at them while they stared at her for three days was a depressing one, probably for all of them.

The hatch lowered on powered hydraulics, sealing with a muffled clump and hiss, both of which Katya decided sounded unforgivably self-satisfied. There was a sound of grating metal as the gangway disengaged, and Katya felt the slight wallow of an untethered boat. A moment later, a gentle hum told her that the drives were engaged and that they were underway. The shuttle pulled away from the quay and headed for the tunnel cut through the mountain connecting the moon pool with the ocean. Almost immediately the pilot began flooding the ballast tanks; the tunnel was flooded along its full length from its mouth in the moon pool, down a shallow descent, and then exiting into open sea.

“So,” said Katya. “You girls do a lot of this sort of thing?” She’d seen how they watched the hatch close like a death sentence, and seemed disconcerted by the boat’s wallowing when they’d been on the surface. The logical deduction was that they’d been seconded from base security, and were not frequent travellers.

One of them got up and went to the toilet unit. The other sat there, pallid as they listened to her colleague being sick very audibly because of the imperfectly closed door. Throughout, Katya smiled pleasantly at the seated trooper.

She’d apparently broken the first Secor interrogator, after all; perhaps she could break a few more Feds before she reached the Deeps. She balled her hands into fists and felt the restraints around her wrists. Yes, she decided, it was good to have a hobby.