Katya's War

CHAPTER TWELVE Last Request

The Lukyan was directed to dock at lock fifteen at Atlantis. This was the same dock where the Lastochka, Shurygin’s boat, had been when he was murdered. When she stepped out of the hatch, her foot came down on the exact spot where he had died. Like many Russalkin, Katya professed a disbelief in omens and portents, yet noted them all the same. This didn’t seem like a very good one.

Not that it mattered; she expected to be dead within the next twenty hours. Completing the mission was all that mattered. She remembered heroes going off to face certain death in the dramas. “My life isn’t important,” they’d say while the romantic interest wept messily over them. Then they’d go off and somehow survive anyway.

Katya couldn’t see it working out that way for her. If she didn’t manage to escape Atlantis and reach her rendezvous with the Vodyanoi, she would either be shot, or captured, interrogated, and then shot. They’d throw her to Secor, and there was no escape from them. When they finally put a gun to her head, it would come as a mercy after a Secor interrogation.

The official checking her permits was frowning. “Where’s your co-pilot, Ms Kuriakova?” He examined the documents. “Mr Ilyin. Where is he?”

“Sergei fell ill when we were at Dunwich.”

“Anything serious?”

“Not really, but not the kind of thing you’d enjoy sharing a minisub with. Put it this way — we were transporting plumbing supplies there. Sergei must be pretty pleased their bathroom facilities are up to spec at the moment.”

The officer winced sympathetically. “Will he be coming here when he’s better, or are you going back?”

“The plan is to find a cargo for Dunwich and I’ll go back and pick him up. Things are so tight, every trip has to pay its way.”

Katya felt she was standing outside herself, watching as she chatted with the officer, so calm and normal. If he asked to check her shoulder bag as he was perfectly entitled to do, he would find a strangely bland piece of equipment, an aluminium box twenty centimetres by thirty centimetres by four centimetres, with a couple of metre lengths of cable, tightly coiled and tied, plugged into one end, and a covered switch at the other.

It clearly wasn’t a standard piece of equipment. If asked, she was to say it was a custom unit she had designed to filter hydrophone data to help in the war effort, but disappointingly the device didn’t work as well as she’d hoped. Any technician who opened the box would see this was a lie. Katya knew the cover story was thin, and that her best chance of succeeding in her mission was for no Federal officer, agent, or technician to even see the box until after it had done its job.

“Well, good luck finding a cargo for Dunwich,” said the officer, signing off her papers. “We don’t get much traffic heading for there. It’s pretty much self-sufficient.”

Katya nodded as she accepted her papers and crew card back. “I sometimes get lucky with personal mail and packages.”

The officer cast a cautious look around. “Secor’s tightening up on that sort of cargo,” he said quietly. “It’s getting so they have to read every letter and open every parcel.”

“Yes. True. That packing directive was Secor, then?”

The customs officer wrinkled his nose as if even the word “Secor” smelled bad. “Yes, but don’t tell anyone that. They ran it through our channels, so now we have to pretend it was our idea.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” said Katya, smiling. She waved the officer goodbye, and went off into the halls of Atlantis to commit high treason.

Katya liked coffee, real coffee, but it was an expensive and rare treat. She went into the most elegant drinks salon she could find, and ordered a pot. It was a terrible extravagance, but as she was going to be dead soon, she wanted to have at least one thing happen in her last hours that she could wholeheartedly enjoy.

“Elegant” did not say a great deal on Russalka, but the place was clean and quiet and convivial, and the staff took justifiable pride in how they prepared the coffee. Her coveralls did not earn her cold looks as they might on other worlds; here almost everyone wore them at some time of the day. The salon staff wore white shirts and dark red trousers, which alone made it the fanciest place she had ever been. Everyone wore uniforms, she knew, but the novel thought of a world where it was not expected occurred to her now as she drank the first cup from the pot.

There was so much that she had never really considered. So many things about her life that she had always accepted because that’s the way things were. Everybody had this view of the Federal government as an amorphous brain constructed from pure bureaucracy. It did what it did, and there was no point in arguing because nobody was really responsible for policy. It just happened.

The way Kane explained it, it was very different. There was a political class physically concentrated in the higher security areas of the major settlements, Atlantis being the largest. Everything went through them. They were essentially born into the job and, as they didn’t put much effort into it, there were no dissenters from the lifetime of ease it offered. Thus, the amorphous bureaucracy brain that ruled the planet was not frighteningly intelligent. It was, however, very jealous.

The military and security arms of the FMA were charged to hunt, locate, and eliminate dissent, even if the navy in particular never quite understood that was the nature of their work. Dissent was dressed up in all manner of exciting terms like “terrorism,” “piracy,” “anarchism,” and “rogue Terran sabotage,” but often the people who ended up being quietly dumped out of airlocks or sent on one way trips to the Deeps high security facility had just made the mistake of wondering if the governance of Russalka might just possibly be done in a better way.

“The government’s riding for a fall, of course,” Kane had said. “They’ve tried to keep Secor violent but stupid, so it never becomes a threat to them. They’ve put so much trust into Secor now, though, they’ve had to step back a little, and clever people have ended up being recruited. Well, I say clever, but I really mean not entirely stupid. If they knew their Earth history, they’d know how much trouble they’re heading for. Give it a year or two and, in the normal run of things, there’ll be a coup d’etat.”

“Meaning what?” Katya had asked.

“Meaning Russalka would end up being run by the military. That always works terrifically well. People just love being ordered around by soldiers. But, not to worry. The way things are, Russalka doesn’t have a year or two. No pressure, Katya, but the fate of the world rests on your shoulders.”

Or to be exact, Katya thought as she poured her second cup, in the electronic box of tricks that I have in my bag.

At least there wasn’t a gun in the bag with it. Tasya had offered her a small maser, but Katya had declined. She’d used one once and never wanted to do so again. Besides, if things ended up in a fire fight, the mission was a failure anyway. Kane had run off to his cabin and returned with another piece of Terran technology that she might accept instead. It was a small black cylinder about twenty five centimetres long and two and a half in diameter, a press-and-hold button on the shaft, and a smooth metal plate at the end.

“Taser stunner,” he’d explained. “Good for about four shocks. Small chance of killing your target, but it really is small. Otherwise, they’re stunned or unconscious for about five minutes. Oh, and make sure there’s no contact between you and them apart from the plate when you press the button, or you’ll be dancing together into the arms of Morpheus.” Katya and Tasya had both stared at him until he had added, “I mean, it will electrocute you too. Nobody appreciates classical allusions anymore, do they?”

The coffee was good, even now that she was getting down to the grounds. It was as good to smell as it was to drink, and as often as not she inhaled its rich, heavy scent before actually letting the liquid flow across her tongue. She’d long since realised that coffee was the only luxury she truly craved, and it was right and proper that she indulge herself in it now. But, quickly enough, the coffee in her cup was gone, the pot was empty and that was that.

She called for the bill, but when it arrived she was bemused to discover that it came to a grand total of nothing at all. “We decided to waive it,” said the waiter. “We recognised you from the news when the war started. Helping the crew of the Novgorod escape from the Yagizban, and everything.”

“Thanks,” said Katya, a pit filled with concentrated embarrassment opening beneath her feet, “I appreciate the thought, but, really, I can’t accept.”

“Your money’s no good here, Ms.” The waiter smiled, aware of how awkward the situation was becoming but staying his course.

Katya thought for a moment and said, “How about this? I pay, and you give the money to the Veterans’ Welfare Fund? Then we’re all happy.”

The waiter nodded and accepted her payment. “You’re a good woman, Ms Kuriakova,” he said. “I’m proud to have met you.”

He returned to the counter, leaving Katya feeling wretched. The warm happiness the coffee had given her had all but burnt away. Guilt was growing within her. “I’m proud to have met you.” Not for long, you won’t be.

Out on the corridors again, Katya decided that she should just get on with her mission as soon as possible. The longer she delayed, the longer she would dwell on what she had to do and what it would result in, and the greater the guilt would grow. She doubted she would decide not to do it for practical or moral grounds, but the possibility that such guilt would make a coward of her haunted her.

She needed to harden herself somehow, to find some way to make herself as ruthless as she needed to be. Unbidden, the image of Tasya Morevna materialised in her imagination. Was this what had happened to her? She had to make a hard decision, and the only way she could go through with it was to make herself into a monster? Perhaps it was the only way Katya was going to be able to do this. She smiled to herself; she had never expected to find herself earnestly wondering, “What would the Chertovka do?” A war criminal, perhaps. A cold-blooded killer, certainly. Oh, Katya, what wonderful inspirational figures you worship these days. The pirate and the She-Devil.

The door was on one of the less grand shopping corridors, small permanent stalls lining it on both sides. Perhaps a third of them were locked up, the businesses within them gone, the signs removed or painted out. They had probably sold silly fripperies, at least by Russalkin standards, and the economies of war had starved them of revenue. It was sad, but convenient, as the door she was heading for was between two such abandoned stalls and thereby hidden from casual observation.

Exercising the skill of a professional criminal in giving the impression that she had every right to do such a thing, Katya walked to the door, tapped the sequence Tasya had taught her into the lock pad, and entered. The door clicked behind her, and the mission was on.

Not for the first time, Katya wondered just where Kane got all these pieces of information and, not for the first time, she thought it just as well she didn’t ask. Door codes, blueprints, schedules, procedures… he had touched upon so many things in his briefing that he had no right to know, yet mysteriously did. His network of informants and fixers ranged wide and their services ran deep, but there was one thing they could not provide him with, and that one thing was why she was there.

Katya was in darkness. She had been told not to switch on the lights as there was a chance the power usage in that area might be noticed. In the moment she had the door open, however, she had seen the electric torch sitting on the floor inside the disused access corridor, just as Kane had said it would be. She felt for it now, found it, and switched it on. In its light, she took her identity card from her pocket and examined it.

It had been slightly disappointing to discover that Kane didn’t really need her for the mission; he needed her security clearance. Beta Plus was a grade usually only entrusted to senior military and high ranking officials. Most people had Gamma ratings and might go their whole lives without even seeing a blue Beta card. In a purely practical sense, it was a greater honour than her medal, her Hero of Russalka decoration in its beautiful wooden box. That was aboard the Vodyanoi now, in a locked drawer of Kane’s desk where he’d put it for safekeeping. It wasn’t so much the medal she treasured, but — when her disgrace inevitably came — she couldn’t bear to think of them taking away the box.

She started to follow the route she had memorised through the forgotten corridors. Not that it was entirely necessary to trust to her memory — whoever had prepared this part of her journey in advance had left clear tracks in the grime and dust. It was faintly disappointing that she had memorised the directions when somebody had left a trail that any fool could have followed. Out of sheer bloody-mindedness, she primarily used the directions, only glancing at the disturbed layer of dirt on the floor to corroborate them.

She was not amused when she discovered the route took her into a lift shaft, the doors braced open with a misappropriated hydraulic jack. Her instructions had merely been, “Climb three levels” at this point. That skipped the trifling fact that this would mean stepping across a void that was too deep for her torch’s beam to reach the bottom, but which — judging by the echoes of lapping water beneath her — would end in a fairly considerable splash should she fall.

Muttering foul curses down on the heads of Kane, Tasya, and whichever genius had reconnoitred the route yet failed to mention it involved gymnastics, Katya shifted her bag so the weight fell on the small of her back and squared up to step across to the maintenance ladder running up the left of the shaft.

She stepped back from the edge and looked at her torch; it was too big to hold between her teeth, so she would either have to make the step with only one hand free or in pitch darkness. She ruminated for a moment, then picked up a piece of broken ceramic from the floor. It looked like it had once been part of an electrical insulator, probably something very important in the running of the lift. She doubted the thing would ever run again even if it was powered up.

She tossed the ceramic chip into the shaft and waited, counting off the seconds. The splash when it came seemed very distant. She did a couple of quick calculations in her head and made a guess that there were five levels to fall before hitting water. Even better, the fatalistic part of her mind told her, if she managed to climb the ladder and then slipped, she’d have eight levels to fall, and wouldn’t that be fun?

Finally, she clipped the torch into one of the side-pockets of her shoulder bag so that it shone onto the wall to her right. It wasn’t perfect, but at least the reflected light was better than nothing. Rallying her courage, she shuffled to the very edge of the shaft, took a deep breath in and out, and stepped out into nothingness.

The shadows played hell with her depth perception, but she had made a point of gauging the distance when the ladder had been under the full beam of her torch, and she trusted to that knowledge rather than the shifting shapes cast before her now. It worked; her leading foot came down heavily on a rung a split second before her hands found the verticals and held on firmly. It was just as well she did, because the firm blow her foot had delivered to its rung seemed to disengage something in the ladder’s structure that was not supposed to disengage. Some catch or ratchet or bolt or screw had been quietly corroding away there for years, and all it took was one good thump to make it fail.

There was a metallic plink!, sharp and final. She hesitated, confused by the sound echoing from the concrete sides of the shaft, and then felt her lower body moving away from the wall. The ladder was constructed from two-metre lengths and while the length her hands were gripping was secure, the one her feet had landed on was anything but. The uppermost stanchion connecting the section to the wall had broken cleanly and now the length of ladder from her knees down was levering out into the shaft, pivoting at its lowest bracket.

Katya gasped and gripped the uprights even more fiercely as she felt the ladder beneath her push her legs away from the wall. She tried momentarily to keep her feet on the rung, but the free end of the ladder section was pushing painfully against her kneecaps and, a moment later, she felt her feet slide off the metal.

With surprisingly little noise, the ladder section fell away quickly enough to snap its connections to the next section down, and dropped down the shaft with the quietest sound of sheering air that ended with a small splash as it landed vertically five levels below, slicing cleanly through the dark, waiting water.

“Oh, shit,” said Katya in a small voice. Her hands were starting to slide down the ladder verticals.

Making an instant decision that certainly saved her life, she released her right hand’s grip and slapped it onto the first rung she could find. Her left hand followed suit, but this time she reached up to grab the next rung up. Using the panic-borne adrenalin to power her screaming muscles, her feet scrambling at the wall to find whatever footholds they could, she progressed up the ladder in a series of short, staccato pull-and-grabs until a foot found a rung and she was able to pause, relatively safe.

Now reaction set in, and she felt cold sweat prickle across her even as her muscles seemed to weaken. She had to make the most of the dwindling strength the near fall had given her, and used it to drive herself up the ladder, not thinking of anything but the next rung, and then the next rung, and then the next rung. Only when she had climbed three levels, found another door held up with a jack, and stepped smartly across did she have a chance to be afraid, only then did she allow herself to think about what the broken ladder meant for her future.

Her planned escape route was now impassable.