Katya's War

CHAPTER TWENTY Retinal Identification

All of the lifts had been immobilised, so the party took to the stairwell to get to the command level of the administration sector.

As a submariner, Katya had already thought of the alternative escape route of taking any boat that happened to be in dock, but Oksana said the docking ports were all unoccupied. Even the shuttle that had brought them had long since departed on other Federal business. There was no alternative but to force the governor into enabling the escape pods. Katya wasn’t looking forward to seeing what sort of force Tasya would bring to bear.

The stairwell was imposing in itself; a great spiral in a steel tube running up the full height of the Deeps. Between every level a horizontal bulkhead ran across the shaft, a wide arced opening in it allowing personnel to climb and descend through it. If the bulkheads were to be closed, a heavy hatch slid across to cover the opening, its leading edge engaging with a step’s riser and then the whole thing locking and sealing. Russalkin tended not to dither in the openings of bulkheads equipped with automated doors — the spectre of being crushed by an emergency closure haunted their nightmares. A doorway can be stepped through in a moment, though; it took several to climb the steps through one of these horizontal guillotines. Even Tasya noticeably sped up as she passed through them, the quicker to be clear.

They reached the door leading out onto the topmost corridor and paused to listen.

“Can I have my gun back?” whispered Oksana.

“No,” said Tasya, and that was that.

Satisfied that there was no sound ahead, Tasya signalled that they should follow and moved forward. The group of them breasted the curve of the corridor together to discover several frustrated looking guards standing outside the governor’s office.

There was an astonished pause, and then Katya and Tasya found themselves looking down the barrels of six pistols, one of them — judging from his uniform — held by a sector leader. Katya froze from fear, Tasya from tactical common sense. She could see the guards were confused rather than aggressive — perhaps they could talk their way out of this. She just needed to come up with a convincing lie…

“Lower your guns, you idiots!” said Oksana. “They’re Secor!” She stepped past Tasya to speak to the guards. “They’re agents!”

The sector leader had a black eye and a bloody nose, apparently having already run into prisoners out of bounds. “What are you talking about?” he demanded, “they’re prisoners!”

“No, the White Death had them in here to spy on the inmates. Why did you think they had her,” she nodded sideways at Katya, “in for interrogation so many times? She was making her reports.”

The other guards looked confused enough to accept anything at this point, but the sector leader wasn’t going to be convinced so easily. “She’s got a gun,” he said, levelling his own at Tasya’s. “How do I know you haven’t been threatened into saying this?”

Oksana let her shoulders droop with visible exasperation. “I gave her my gun,” she said. “She’s a better shot than I am, to be honest. We’re not being held at gunpoint. Look…” She turned to Tasya and held her hand out. Without hesitation Tasya reversed the pistol and placed it in Oksana’s hand grip first. Oksana took it, held it up to show the sector leader that she was in full control of it, then returned it to Tasya in the same way. “She’s Secor. And an amazing shot. She put down Bubnov when he and his gang tried to get us.”

This news did more to convince the sector leader than even the demonstration with the gun. He lowered his own and said, “Bubnov? You killed Bubnov?”

“He was a threat,” said Tasya without emotion.

The sector leader smiled. “Oh, madam, you’re an angel among us all. You killed Bubnov. That’s the first piece of good news I’ve heard today.”

Tasya went to join the group of guards. Katya followed a pace behind, reapplying the mindset she had adopted while pretending to be a Secor operative in Atlantis. She found it in herself quite easily — mild arrogance, some impatience, and a limited sense of humour, all of it acid.

“He’s locked us out of his office,” said the sector head, “as well as the entire security system. There’s only one fully operational console in the whole facility, and it’s on the other side of this door.”

Katya weighed the door up, then looked at the group of guards. She pointed at the maser carbine that hung at the shoulder of one of them. “I’ll take that,” she said, fighting down the urge to say “please.”

With the reluctance of a child giving up a favourite toy, the guard handed the gun over. “OK,” said Katya, feeling very professional as she put the carbine’s shoulder sling over her head and let the weapon hang by her side. “We’re going to need a perimeter to protect this location while we work. If you could place a fire team one bulkhead down on the stairs, and then station some sentries to keep the other approaches covered, then that would do the job. Can you organise that for us, sir?” She said “sir” in the tone beloved of officials who mean “I am saying this as a courtesy, but we both know I am the more important one here.” Then she looked the sector leader in the eye.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said immediately. “Team 2! On the stairs, one bulkhead down. The rest of you, with me!” Four guards headed for the stairs while the rest ran off around the curve of the corridor until they were lost from sight. Katya waited until even the thumping of their boots had faded before sagging with relief.

“Good work, Kuriakova,” said Tasya. She looked at the door. “Now, our next problem. How do…”

She was interrupted by Katya raising her carbine and firing at the wall beside the door at about head height. She aimed down at knee height and fired again. “My mother worked in maintenance,” she explained. She shouldered the carbine again, put the flats of her hands against the metal of the door and started to drag her hands horizontally across it. Remarkably, it started to slide under her grip. “She once showed me that these internal doors are much less secure than they look. Two little metal catches holds them shut. That’s all.” The door was a few centimetres over in its frame by now, almost starting to show an open crack at the frame. “When the lock jams, they drill these catches out. Maser’s faster.”

The edge of the door was far enough clear of the frame to get fingers through. Alina grabbed it and pulled. Inside, Katya saw the large desk so familiar from the weekly “Words from the Governor” broadcasts, Radomir Senyavin himself sitting at it, regarding them with tranquil equanimity. But on the floor behind him, Katya could see the bodies of the security chief and of Dr Durova.

The governor rose from his chair as if to welcome them, and Katya thought this might go easier than she’d been anticipating. Then she saw his right hand rising, the heavy maser gripped in it.

The crack of a maser discharge was shockingly loud, but then, it wasn’t the governor’s that was firing. Tasya’s gun had gone off only a few centimetres from Katya’s ear. It wasn’t a very loud noise, but it was sharp, and would be ringing in her hearing for a few minutes.

The governor’s gun fell to the floor, and for a moment Katya feared Tasya had killed him. Then she noticed the governor’s middle and ring fingers were lying beside the dropped gun.

Senyavin looked down to examine his maimed hand with utter detachment, as if he had just noticed a hang nail. They were barely bleeding, the maser having cauterised the wounds as it made them. “You blew off my fingers,” he observed. “You’re a very good shot.”

Tasya walked quickly to him, kicked one of his legs out from beneath him and, moving behind him, applied a foot to the back of the other knee to bring him to his knees. “Thank you,” she said. “And just think, you have another six fingers and a couple of thumbs for me to amputate if you don’t do exactly as you’re told. Katya, get his identity card.”

As Katya went through the governor’s jerkin, giving him an apologetic smile as she patted his pockets, he said to Tasya, “So, you’re the Chertovka.”

“I am. How long have you known?”

“I knew they were contaminated,” he said, looking back at the bodies. “I planted surveillance bugs in the interrogation rooms and in the chief’s office. I listened to him making deals, misappropriating supplies. I listened to her making deals too. I knew it was too late for all of us then.” He nodded at Oksana and Alina, standing nervously by the door. “Even the newest guards have been corrupted by this sink of filth. Criminals, and deviants, and perverts. All of you.”

He looked at Katya then, and his eyes narrowed as if seeing something new. “But, what are you? The light burns… I can smell the truth in you…”

Katya had found the card and held it in her fingers. Governor Senyavin’s unblinking stare froze her, though. Froze her with a fear she hadn’t felt for a long time. A squirming in her mind that hinted that somehow she knew exactly what he was talking about.

Then Tasya impatiently snatched the card from her, and the moment was gone. Senyavin was just a raving maniac again, not the holder of some secret reality that Katya could almost, almost see.

Tasya swiped the card through the desk console’s reader. An eye scanner mounted by the display activated, its red targeting beams spiralling across the governor’s face as Tasya pulled him toward it. She noticed he had clamped his eyes tightly shut, a small act of defiance that did nothing for her temper.

“Open your eyes right now, you worthless bucket of vomit, or I will cut out your eyelids,” she hissed in his ear.

The threat apparently did little to frighten him, despite its undoubted sincerity. Instead, he smiled slowly and, just as slowly, opened his eyes. The red beam found his right eye, locked onto it and in a moment the screen displayed the Deeps’ top level system administration protocols.

Tasya shoved the governor to one side, sending him sprawling on the floor. He lay there watching her as she started to sort through the operations menus, seeking out the one that she wanted. The whole time, his smile did not waver.

Katya spared the display a sideways look, but she found she couldn’t look away from Senyavin. She had a feeling something was coming, something that was burning inside his head, that flooded him with a religious ecstasy, something she could almost perceive.

“Tasya…” she said. The sense of menace growing by the moment made her voice waver.

“In a moment,” said Tasya. “There! That’s what we want.” She tapped on the board display and was rewarded by a perky little upbeat bleep. “Escape pods are enabled. Now let’s get the hell out of here before the guards steal them all.”

“I embrace my destiny,” said Senyavin.

The console’s screen suddenly changed to a display of a complex waveform. “What the hell…?” said Tasya under her breath.

“By my sacrifice, I absolve us all,” said Governor Senyavin, and closed his eyes. His smile grew rapturous.

Too late, Tasya recognised a speech analysis program accepting a verbal trigger. She reached for the board, but the display had already changed to read, “Project: REVELATION active,” and then went blank. Tasya snatched up the governor’s identity card from where it lay on the desk and swiped it through. The console remained inactive, with not even a tone to indicate a failed card reading.

Furious, Tasya turned to Senyavin. “What did you do?” she demanded. He said nothing, but only smiled. It was not a wilful smile, nor was it one of triumph. It was a smile of pure joy. Tasya drew her pistol from her belt and placed the muzzle against his forehead. “What did you do?” she snarled.

“Tasya, leave him,” said Katya. “We have to get out of here, right now!”

“What? Why?”

“He’s committing suicide, and he wants to take us all with him.”

Tasya looked at the governor, sitting on the floor, Durova’s corpse behind him. Then she looked suspiciously at Katya. “How do you know?”

Katya couldn’t say. She couldn’t explain how she could see the glow of an unearthly fire within Senyavin’s mind, how she could smell his sanity ablaze. So instead she said, “I saw it in his eyes.”

Tasya looked straight into Katya’s eyes and, remarkably, broke her gaze first. She seemed slightly rattled. She reached down, flicked away the stubs of the governor’s fingers, and recovered his dropped gun. “Come on,” she said, re-establishing control. As she reached the door, she gave the governor’s gun to Oksana. “The grip’s a little melted at the front, but it’s still serviceable,” she said, and walked out into the corridor. Oksana and Alina followed her, Oksana complaining that there appeared to be some skin still sticking to the melted polymer.

Katya tarried a moment in the doorway. The governor had made no move. He just sat there, smiling as if he had just seen the most beautiful thing in all creation or beyond it. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He looked at Katya, and he spoke, but too quietly for her to hear him. She wasn’t sure if she read his lips, or if she heard his voice in her mind, but she knew what he said.

“You understand.”

Tasya’s shout of “Come on, Kuriakova!” brought her back to the moment, but the half realisation fluttered at the edge of her consciousness, and scared her so badly she pushed it away to where she didn’t have to think about it.

She did. She did understand.

She ran after the others.

As they approached the straight length of corridor that would take them to the observation blister and its attached pod, Katya said, “What happened to the guards?”

In the corridor was a barricade of desks, chairs, and even a daybed that had all apparently been pulled out of nearby offices. Behind it crouched the sector leader and three of his men. Further down the corridor there was a flash of yellow coveralls visible in one of the doorways.

“Down!” barked Tasya, grabbing Katya and Alina by the sleeves and dragging them down. There was a sharp crack and Oksana cried out.

Katya grabbed her belt and pulled her down with them. “I’m hit!” said Oksana, looking in disbelief at the burn hole in her upper sleeve.

“Maybe next time I tell you to get down, you’ll do it.”

“But I’m hit!”

“And still talking, so it can’t be that bad.” Tasya turned her back on the aggrieved woman and said to the sector leader, “What’s the situation?”

“They must have found an unsecured arms locker. There’s a bunch of six or seven with carbines and pistols. The only good news is that they’re not good shots, and they didn’t take any of the riot gas grenades or they’d have used them by now. What happened with Governor Senyavin, ma’am?”

“His mind’s gone. I disarmed him and left him there.”

“The computers…?”

“He’s locked everyone out, even himself. We’re stuck here until the next boat arrives.”

“That’s not the procedure. If security is totally compromised, we’re to lock down the computers, grab as many weapons as we can, and take the escape pods. There’s one at the end of here, past these scum. The plan is to kill them, take their weapons, and abandon the base.”

“How many people can a pod take?”

“Ten.”

Katya saw the real reason behind Tasya’s question — whether she would have to kill the guards or not once the inmates had been dealt with. Ten places meant they might live yet. Tasya might have been on Katya’s side — at least for the moment — but there was barely a thing Tasya did or a thought she expressed that didn’t frighten or sicken her.

An inmate ducked out of a side door about twenty metres away and fired a burst from his carbine. All the bolts went high, burning away the corridor’s already utilitarian wall covering and melting long score marks in the plastic laminate beneath. Tasya watched him with evident disdain over the top of the overturned day bed, lifted her pistol, and shot him dead.

“Did you see that? Out of cover and he fired from the hip. They’ve got their training from watching dramas. No professionalism at all.”

Another convict stepped out from a doorway on the other side of the corridor, shouting something incoherent about how he was going to get the Feds because they shot his friend. He held his pistol on its side with the back of his hand uppermost and fired indiscriminately, bolts hissing down the corridor over their heads or splashing ineffectually against the metal of the office furniture barricade.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Tasya peevishly, and killed him too.

She either didn’t notice or didn’t deign to notice how perturbed she had made the Federal guards. “Yes,” Katya said to them. “She scares me, too.”

“The only way those idiots are going to represent a threat is if you get careless and do something stupid,” said Tasya, adding insult to Oksana’s injury. “Are any of these offices connected?”

“No. They’re all discrete rooms.”

“So much for flanking. We’ll just have to do this the hard way. Clear and secure. Volkova’s hit in her main arm, so she’s out of this. That leaves you, your team, Shepitko, and myself. We’ll split into two teams of three, I’ll take…” she cast an eye over the sector leader’s men, “Glazov,” she read from one of the guard’s name patches. “The teams alternate, cover/clear, all the way down to the pod.”

She noticed the leader, Sevnik, looking at her oddly. “What’s wrong?” she said. Shielded by her body from Sevnik, but visible to Katya, Tasya’s hand tightened on her pistol. Was it possible that he’d recognised her?

“I’ve… I’m sorry, ma’am, it’s just all the Secor I’ve ever met have been… well…”

“Useless in a fight, expecting others to go at the front and they tidy up afterwards? No offence taken. But I was recruited from anti-piracy operations. I’m used to combat.”

The explanation seemed to convince and, indeed, impress him. “Anti-piracy? I envy you. I put in for that, and ended up here. Glazov, you’re with… I don’t even know your rank.”

“Colonel, but you have command here, captain.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Glazov, you’re with Colonel Litvyak.” He nodded at Katya. “What about you, ma’am?” he asked Katya.

She was momentarily at a loss what to say, but Tasya had an almost-lie ready and waiting. “Ms Kuriakova is a civilian volunteer for this mission. She’s not a combatant.”

Captain Sevnik grinned. “I knew all that stuff about you being a traitor had to be rubbish,” he said to Katya. “You won the Hero of Russalka. They don’t just hand those out to anybody.”

“I’ve always tried to do what was right,” Katya replied, and managed a wan smile. She shrugged the carbine’s strap over her head, feeling like a fraud.

“Could we get on, please?” said Tasya, taking the weapon. “These inmates aren’t going to just shoot themselves, you know.”