Katya's War

CHAPTER NINETEEN Extraordinary Freedom

The next interrogation session involved the reading of no further adventures of firm-chinned heroes of the FMA seeing off enemies of the state, and not nearly so much music either. Once she had confirmed that Tasya had spoken to Katya about her, Dr Durova said, “Good, because I’ve already sent the message to bring the Vodyanoi on station.” Then she set her recorder to play some keyboard pieces by Poliakov.

“You’ve done what?” said Katya. Tasya had said it would only take the Vodyanoi three days to reach them. Surely the escape couldn’t be happening so soon?

“We need to move ahead as soon as possible. The governor is behaving oddly. I think he is suffering from stress.” She steepled her fingers, every centimetre the psychiatrist. “I offered to talk to him. He declined.”

Katya couldn’t help but look at the medical case, full of things specifically intended to make the patient feel a great deal worse. She could sympathise with the governor’s decision.

“I detect growing paranoia in Governor Senyavin. He has become withdrawn, stays in his office throughout the day, and rarely speaks to his subordinates, just handing down increasingly petty edicts. At the least, I would expect him to impose changes on the prison’s routine. At worst, he may decide he does not trust his senior staff and change them. It would be difficult for him to displace me — he has no direct authority with Secor — but it isn’t impossible.”

“Yes, I see what you mean, then. It would…” An ugly thought occurred to Katya. “Paranoid, you said?”

“Yes. It’s come on quite quickly, which leads me to conclude that either the FMA is putting him under pressure of which I am unaware, or there are problems in his personal life that are creating stress in his professional one.”

“Or something else. There have been some odd things happening in the stations, doctor. Secor is keeping them quiet, but they’re happening all the same.”

Durova raised an eyebrow and took up her memo pad. “Perhaps I’ve been lax in reading the general Secor alerts. So little of its business directly affects the Deeps, except what walks in through the airlock.” She touched the pad’s screen a few times, and cocked her head to one side in evident interest. “You’re right. Marked increases in psychotic fugues experienced. They’ve put it down to a stress disorder. I find that hard to believe. There was nothing like this in the war against Earth.” She scrolled through the reports, tapped in a couple of search parameters, and read in silence for a couple of minutes.

“Some nonsense about the possibility of it being due to some sort of Yagizban biological or chemical weapon. Delivered how, exactly? Besides, in confined environments like ours, the chance of them biting their creators is too great. The FMA has considered and dropped any number of viral and chemical projects down the years for exactly that reason. No. There’s something else going on. If Secor command could concentrate its faculties on finding a common thread between these occurrences instead of just covering them up, we might have some idea of what’s causing them.”

Abruptly she shook her head and put the pad down. “This is a discussion for some other time. You need to be briefed on the escape. The secret of any successful operation is simplicity; therefore my plan is very simple. I bring in the Chertovka for questioning… yes?”

Katya raised a hand. “She doesn’t really like being called the Chertovka. At least, not to her face. You might want to get into the habit of thinking of her as Colonel Morevna.”

The doctor considered this for a second. “Very well, I bring in Colonel Morevna for questioning and have her put in the holding cell next to this one. Then while she ‘stews,’ I have you brought in for your interrogation. I call an emergency lockdown, release Morevna, and the three of us make our way to the escape pod at the end of the corridor. We leave in it, and are picked up by the Vodyanoi, which should reach its surveillance position in the next few hours.”

“Next few..? It takes three days to get here.”

Dr Durova looked at Katya as if she were slightly stupid. “I sent the message to come three days ago.”

“What?” Katya would have liked to raise her hands in an expression of surprise, but the manacles held by the staple on the table-top prevented it. “But I hadn’t even seen Tasya about you then!”

“I knew she would confirm my story, Katya. Why wait?”

Which left Katya at an impasse. Indeed, why wait?

Keen to not look like a complete idiot, Katya turned her attention to finding problems with the plan. “What about the guards?”

“Both Morevna and I shall be armed. The guard room is in the opposite direction to the pod access, and it is unlikely we will even see the guards. If they attempt to intervene, we will kill them.”

Katya did not like the way she said it so easily. First, do no harm. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. You can get a couple of guns in here?”

“I could get an entire armoury in here. I am a senior ranking officer of the Security Organisation directorate. It will not be a problem.” Durova looked at her, and Katya was very aware of the analytical processes going on inside the interrogator’s head. “I won’t get one for you,” she said finally. “You show too much compassion to be reliable in a gunfight.”

Katya felt slightly stung by that, although she had a feeling it was almost a compliment. “I don’t like guns,” she said, and moved on quickly. “How will the Vodyanoi know the pod’s been released? Oh, wait. I can answer that myself. The pod’ll be transmitting a distress signal and a sonar pulse to aid detection, won’t it? That’s automatic.”

“Any other questions? Really, Katya, all you have to do is as you’re told.”

Katya was beginning to think this was less a “rescue,” and more a “recovery.” Fine — if they were so sure all she had to do was follow them around and keep her mouth shut then that was what she would do. “Tasya said the same thing.”

“Tasya is right. All done then?”

It was a simple plan, and it would probably have worked. They would never know.

The first hint that all was not well was when the next day was declared an “Extraordinary Freedom Day.” Not only would it actually last all day and not just an hour, but the doors were opened between the prisoners’ sectors. For the first time, the male prisoners would mix with the females. The guards withdrew from the wings on the governor’s command, but they were clearly unhappy about what such an event might do to discipline.

Katya found herself a quiet corner and prepared to wait the day out. Male inmates started appearing in the wing within minutes, and she didn’t like the look of them at all. It seemed the culture in the male wings was very different from the female; whereas the women generally just accepted their incarceration philosophically and continued to act much as they had in their free lives, the men had adopted behaviours that would have been entirely unacceptable in the corridors of a settlement. Tattooing was unknown on Russalka, but the men seemed to have re-adopted it as some sort of tribal ritual. Katya couldn’t even guess what they were using for ink, and in many cases it seemed ink hadn’t been used at all, resulting in scarification. She thought it looked hideous and alien, and the men scared her. She was very relieved when Tasya found her.

“What is wrong with the men?” said Katya. “Why have they done that to themselves?”

“Fear,” said Tasya, her disgust plain. “They pretend all this machismo and then tattoo themselves to fit in and to show loyalty to one gang or another. If they weren’t scared, they wouldn’t do it. If they actually had any guts, they wouldn’t need to. But they’re animals, and animals need a pack.”

They looked around the wing with disquiet. The atmosphere was becoming tenser by the second. Most of the women were in for non-violent crimes, and even the murderers had used non-violent methods more often than not — a dash of poison here, a sabotaged life support unit there. The men, it seemed, liked to use their hands, and almost every uniform bore the word MURDERER.

“One of the old timers in my wing says she’s never heard of an ‘Extraordinary Freedom Day,’” said Tasya. “And she’s been here for fifteen years. This is insane, Katya. They’ll have a riot before the end of the day.”

“What about the plan?” asked Katya in a half-whisper. It was hardly necessary to whisper at all — the sound of chatter was becoming deafening.

“The plan… That, I am worried about. I don’t like this, and I really don’t like the timing. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I’m not fond of ‘maybe.’ I can’t decide if this will help us or hinder us. I’m tending towards the latter. We should postpone the escape.”

“But the Vodyanoi’s waiting for us!”

“It can wait a bit longer. Just a day. Kane will hang around for up to a week, depending on how hot the surrounding water gets with Fed boats.”

Across from them, one of the male inmates who had been talking to a couple of the more impressionable girls from Katya’s wing was pushed aside by another man. There was some terse language, and a punch was thrown. “Fifteen minutes. That’s all it took.” Tasya looked up at the security cameras that were swivelling to lock onto the fight. The inmates called them “cameras” to try to make them seem less threatening — the camera was actually only a tiny part of the device. Most of it was a maser. “Come on, then. A warning shot. At least use the directional speaker to break it up.”

But the camera/gun did neither. It just watched the fight as it developed, now drawing in more men from the original antagonists’ respective gangs.

Katya noticed a lot of the women looking up at the cameras with confused expressions. It had always been explained in terrifying detail what would happen if any prisoner laid hands upon another and, now that maser bolts were not raining down into the rapidly developing brawl, it was as if righteous believers in a wrathful god had just discovered that the atheists had been right all along.

Then, God spoke. Or, at least, the public address system hummed into life with its usual introductory three notes to gain the attention of the inmates. At the same time the main display screens changed from their usual image of the Federal Penal Office logotype to show Governor Senyavin at his desk. He was flanked to his right by the head of security, a man whose name Katya had never heard but who wore a major’s uniform, and to his right by Dr Durova. The major was looking red in the face, like a man who’d just been overruled in an argument. The doctor looked even paler and more drawn than usual. Only the governor seemed relaxed, even pleased.

“Inmates,” he said, and his voice boomed into every corner and crevice of the facility, bringing an end to fights that the notice announcement chimes had not.

Senyavin paused, and smiled beatifically out of the screen.

“Inmates. Today is a truly extraordinary day, a propitious day, a day that may well live in history. I want to share with you, with all of you, a few deep truths about our existence here on Russalka, a few revelations that I have recently been blessed by, and that will light all our paths in what must follow.” He clasped his hands together and continued. “I would like you all to ask yourselves a very important question: why are we here?”

“Because we got caught!” shouted one of the men who’d only recently been fighting. Those around him laughed, even those from the opposing gang.

“Why are we here on this world? Russalka got along perfectly well for untold millions of years all by itself. What did we bring? We brought ourselves. We brought filth. We brought evil. We have taken from this world, and we have given… nothing. Nothing but pollution and corruption and the cancer we call humanity. Oh, we speak of high aims and morality and such, but really, look at us. We are just a virus that spreads across planets. But, and here is the vital point, at least we are a virus that may recognise ourselves as such. I have a dream, a recurring dream. In it, I see us for what we are, a pestilence, and I see you, the inmates of this foul, pus-filled abscess it pleases us to call a correctional facility, as a particularly malignant strain.”

“Insane,” said Tasya.

Katya was watching Dr Durova. She was looking at the back of the governor’s head as if she could see within, to where twisting worms of madness were eating the governor’s mind. Katya knew the doctor was thinking of the Secor reports of clinical paranoia. Durova looked sideways at the security chief, but he was looking straight ahead, his astonishment at his senior officer’s speech apparent in his eyes.

“You corrupt others.” The governor seemed to be talking to every one of the inmates. “Did you know that? Your sins have put you not only beyond correction, but you are causing others — good, decent people — to become monsters too. I know, I know. I couldn’t believe it at first, either, but then I started to look, to really look, and what I found horrified me.

“It humbled me, too. I am only human, and I know I am no stronger than those around me. I am contaminated by your evil. I am corrupted by your sin. There is no hope for me, but by my actions, perhaps there is still hope for Russalka.”

“Oh, no,” breathed Katya. “Oh, no!” She could almost sense Senyavin’s madness, and worse yet, she knew how it would find expression. “Tasya! He means…”

Senyavin rose from his chair, and all the inmates and the guards saw the heavy maser pistol in his hand. The doctor and the major were the only people in the Deeps who, standing behind the governor, could not.

Senyavin turned to the major. “Thief,” he said simply, and shot the man in the head before he could react.

Doctor Durova cried out in surprise and backed away. Senyavin brought the gun to bear on her calmly, almost leisurely. “Traitor,” he said, and shot her.

There were shouts and gasps of disbelief from the inmates. On the screens, Senyavin sat down again, placed the pistol on the desk top, and looked into the camera. “Two good, reliable, honest people, turned to scum by contact with you. As for the guards, they are in contact with you every day. They are all compromised. We all are. We are all inmates. We are all beyond redemption.” He turned to his desk console and tapped in a few commands.

“Warning. All secure bulkheads are opening,” said the automated voice of the central computer in the slightly testy tone computers the planet over always took when issuing a warning. The bulkhead doors that had closed off the areas the guards had withdrawn to less than half an hour earlier started to slide back.

“The inmates outnumber the guards five to one,” said Tasya. “This is going to turn into a massacre.”

“But the guards are armed,” said Katya, watching in growing anxiety as the two formerly opposed gangs started to move together towards an opened door. By it a sign read “No Inmates Beyond This Point.”

“I’m not saying it’s the guards who’ll be massacred. Some of these scum are wily, though. If there’s a way to get their hands on guns, they’ll find it. This is going to get messy really quickly.” Tasya took Katya’s wrist. “We’re going to have to get moving.”

“Where to?”

“We’ll find an escape pod and a guard or somebody else with clearance to open it for us.”

“What? Why do we need clearance?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, this is a prison. You can’t have the escape pods being easy to get into. The late Dr Durova was supposed to be doing the honours for us, but I think we can say that whole plan is in ashes now. We’re just going to have to make this up as we go along.”

Tasya pulled Katya along, heading for the door the gang of men had just gone through. As she was dragged along in the Chertovka’s wake, Katya was muttering balefully.

“It’s a simple plan. Nothing can possibly go wrong.”

By the time they reached the door, there was shouting beyond it. The male inmates were challenging and swearing at the guards, invisible beyond the wall of yellow convicts’ uniforms. The guards were telling the inmates to return to the hall immediately or suffer the consequences. The guards sounded young and frightened. Katya recognised them.

“That’s Oksana and Alina!” she said. Tasya looked at her questioningly. “The guards who brought me from Atlantis.”

“The guards who…? And you’re on first name terms? You really do know how to make friends and influence people, don’t you, Kuriakova?”

Through the crowded corridor, Katya caught a glimpse of them and realised that Oksana and Alina were alone, backing away from the advancing inmates, masers drawn and levelled, but looking terrified all the same.

“Those are the sorts of friends we could do with at the moment,” said Tasya, a calculating look in her eye. “Stay right behind me. Don’t stop for anything.”

Without waiting for Katya to say anything Tasya strode forward. When she reached the men, she started shoving them aside. “Stand aside. Coming through. Make a hole there.”

The men parted, the conditioned reflex of any Russalkin to step aside at the sound of the magical phrase “Make a hole” too deeply ingrained to be resisted. Tasya cleared the front rank of the men and walked steadily towards Oksana and Alina. Both of them swung their guns to aim at her.

“No! Don’t shoot!” said Katya, running to catch up. “It’s OK, Tasya’s OK!”

The young guards saw her and wavered. In that moment, Tasya reached them. “Do as I tell you and we will live through this,” she said to Alina while simultaneously and in a single smooth motion putting Oksana’s gun arm into a lock hold and taking the maser from her momentarily paralysed hand. Tasya released Oksana, who sank to her knees, clutching her wrist.

The men shouted their approval at seeing a gun in the hands of a fellow inmate and started to surge forward. They got less than two steps before the leaders realised that the fellow inmate in question was pointing the maser at them. In the sudden quiet, the sound of Tasya thumbing the maser’s safety catch to the “off” position seemed very loud. Alina started to point her gun at Tasya but Katya quickly stepped between them, shaking her head and mouthing “No!” urgently.

“What these girls wanted you to do still stands. Back the way you came, and don’t come back through here if you value your lives.”

One of the men’s leaders was a massively built specimen, whose uniform predictably bore the crime MURDERER. The sleeves of his coveralls were rolled up to reveal densely muscled forearms, covered in gang scars. He laughed at Tasya. “Is that so, bitch?” he said, took a mocking step forward, grinning malevolently as he did so.

He died instantly, a maser wound appearing exactly at the top of his nose, between his eyes.

The men shuffled a horrified half step backwards as they looked at the dead man and then at Tasya.

“I am Colonel Tasya Morevna of the Yagizban Special Forces Executive,” she said in loud, clear tones. “Sometimes called the Chertovka. I have killed many, many times. If I kill every one of you, it won’t even come close to doubling the number of lives I have taken.” The group of about thirty men stood indecisive. “I will start shooting at the count of three. I rarely miss. One…”

The men ran.

Tasya watched them go with evident distaste. “Such children. Playing in gangs at their age.”

Oksana had climbed back to her feet and was looking at Tasya with wide eyes. “You’re… not really the She-Devil… are you?”

“I am Tasya Morevna. I’m not much concerned with what people choose to call me. Keep rubbing your wrist. The sensation will return soon.” She nodded at the corridor through to the wing, now populated only by the corpse of an over-confident man. “Can you seal that door?”

“No,” said Alina, her gun now down by her side. “The governor’s overridden all the lock codes. We can’t do a thing with them. We were trying when the inmates came through.”

“Never mind,” said Tasya. “Where’s the nearest escape pod?”

“What?”

“We’re escaping. There are pods for that. Where’s the nearest one?”

“We can’t…”

“We’re coming with you,” said Oksana. They all looked at her, Alina with her jaw dropping open. “The Deeps is screwed, Alina. If we can’t keep the inmates back, we’re worse than dead.”

“We’ve got the guns!”

“Alina! Don’t you get it? The governor has unlocked all the doors. All of them!”

Alina suddenly understood. “Oh, gods. The weapon lockers.”

“Weapon lockers?” said Tasya. “We have to get moving right away.”

“The nearest escape pod is this way,” said Oksana. She ran off up the corridor.

It was close, no more than fifty metres away, but even before they reached it, the red lights on the status board next to the pod’s entrance hatch did not bode well.

“Has somebody already taken it?” said Katya.

Alina looked at the board while Oksana ran her identity card through the hatch control reader to no effect. “It’s locked,” Alina said. “The governor’s ahead of us. He’s locked down all the escape pods.”

“Then I shall just have to persuade him to unlock them. The security systems, I see they use retinal scanners. Do they check whether the eye is in a living body?”

Oksana looked sick. Alina said, “Yes, they check whether there’s a pulse in the eye’s blood vessels.”

Tasya was disgruntled. “Damn,” she said. “There goes my first plan. OK, lead us to the governor’s office. We’ll have to take him alive.”