Katya's War

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Hard Time

They called it “induction.” Katya had taken this as meaning much the same as it might if she were being introduced into a new workplace — where the toilets were, what time lunch was, perhaps a “safety in the workplace” lecture. The Deeps’ induction programme was very different.

First they shaved her hair down to stubble. Then, under the emotionless supervision of two female guards, she was stripped, searched, and “showered” with a high pressure hose. The whole ritual was intended to dehumanise and humiliate her, and succeeded magnificently in the latter.

They made a show of bagging her old clothes “for incineration,” watched while she dried herself with a towel that did its job about as well as a piece of plastic sacking, and then gave her a new uniform with her name already stencilled on the left breast. Beneath Kuriakova, K was the word TRAITOR.

She pointed at it. “You must be joking! The other prisoners will kill me if they see this!”

One of the guards shrugged. “Shouldn’t have committed treason then, should you?”

“I’ve not been charged, never mind convicted!”

“I don’t care.”

The other guard had suddenly taken an interest in proceedings. She walked up to where Katya stood naked with the bundle of clothes in her arms. The guard’s baton swept out of its belt loop and into Katya’s ribs in a practiced arc. She fell heavily to the tiled floor, dropping her clothes and gasping.

“When you speak to any officer or official in this station, prisoner,” said the guard standing over Katya, “every sentence you say finishes with sir if you’re talking to a male, ma’am if it’s a female. Failure to comply is subject to punishment. Do you understand?”

Katya could only clutch her side and sob with pain. The guard raised her baton. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Katya whispered. Then quickly added, “Ma’am. Yes, ma’am.”

The guard lowered her baton and smirked at her colleague. “You’re going to be a good prisoner,” she said to Katya. “Aren’t you?”

Katya spent the next couple of days trying her very best to be a “good prisoner.” Not because she had submitted to the Deeps’ regime, she told herself, but simply because she didn’t want to draw any more attention to herself than the word TRAITOR already attracted, and because she didn’t want to spend all her time aching from the bruises the guards handed out for the slightest infringement of the rules. There were a lot of rules. She told herself that was why she was trying to be a model prisoner, but sometimes after lights out when she lay in her bunk, she wondered if she was just fooling herself. Perhaps the Deeps was slowly beating her into a compliant inmate, after all.

Her cell was much like those in a cell hotel — a dormitory wing consisted of a hallway with two layers of cells laid into each wall. Each evening the women in her wing sounded off like troops as they filed in, climbing into their individual cells, the transparent doors sliding shut and locking behind them. If they had to use the toilet in the night, they used a call buzzer mounted into their cell’s wall. They were then escorted to the end of the hall where they would be let into the “surveillance head,” a toilet with a security camera watching the inmate. After her first experience of it, Katya tried to be sure never to have to use it again.

Two things surprised her about the first few days of her incarceration. Firstly, she was not the only one with TRAITOR on her uniform. They weren’t as common as THIEF or even MURDERER, but there were five or six just in her wing. She managed to talk with a couple of them, and told them what a relief it was that she wasn’t the only one. She had never even heard of anybody being convicted of treason, yet here they were. One of them was an angular woman called Dominika Netrebko. She could seem washed out and waiting for death one second, then vibrant and angry, burning with life the next.

“The FMA has a broad definition of treason. I used to produce news programmes. One day I put forward an idea for a thread about how long martial law had been in place and maybe we could step down from it. Next day I get a visit from Secor. I’ve been here for four years now.”

“I don’t understand why your trial wasn’t in the news,” said Katya.

“Trial? What a quaint idea. ‘Traitor’ on your uniform means you’ve never had a trial.”

“How is that legal?”

“It’s martial law, they have military fiat. Do you know what that means? It means they can do anything they like. The Alpha Pluses, they may swan around in expensive clothes and look like senior administrators. But there isn’t a single one of them that doesn’t carry a rank and have a fancy military uniform hanging in the closet.”

One thing she didn’t expect to trouble her, yet it did, was the construction of the Deeps. The vast majority of ocean habitations were hollowed out from the rocky sides of Russalka’s innumerable drowned mountains. It wasn’t easy work, but it was straightforward enough to melt out a cave using plasma or fusion bores, seal it off, drain it, and then continue the work in relative comfort.

The Deeps was not like that at all. Alina had been right about its origins as an experimental mobile station. When that didn’t work out, the project was cancelled when the hull was almost finished. The need for a prison had been growing for some time, however, and it seemed a shame to scrap such a nice construction when instead it could have its drive rooms given new functions, be filled with serious criminals, sunk into the black waters, and tethered below the test depths of most civilian boats.

The Deeps became a terror to those who broke the law, and a nightmare to those who might.

To Katya it was both of these things, but also a minor niggling irritation. She had grown up living in excavated settlements and travelling around in submarines. The Deeps behaved like a settlement, but felt like a submarine. Sometimes she was sure she could feel the deck moving beneath her feet as the ocean flow drew the facility more strongly against one set of tethers than the others. It bothered her subconsciously, as if some small part of her was expecting the Deeps to one day arrive at some unknown destination.

That sense of something always on the very edge of happening haunted Katya’s days. She waited for the inevitable day when she would be escorted off to the Secor interrogation centre, to be tortured and killed, but now they had her safe and secure in the Deeps they seemed in no hurry at all to get on with it. For the first few days she was on a knife’s edge of terror, every guard walking her way seeming to be the angel of death come to collect her.

Then she decided that this was all part of their plan, to keep her nervous and disorientated, to weaken her defences for when the blow finally fell. She felt angry that they could play such games, and the fear abated as she adjusted her view of her future. She imagined herself having some fatal disease that had shortened her life to days or weeks, yet had no symptoms until the final one. It was a grim prognosis to give herself, but a sensible one under the circumstances and, most importantly, it allowed her to function. Indeed, it made every day precious.

The Deeps looked roughly circular from the outside, but internally was based upon a regular pentagon, the only external expression of this being the five outrider ballast tanks on their dual pylon mounts. One of the five sectors comprised the docking areas, the guards’ barracks, and the administration sections arranged over four decks. Another three sectors contained the male prisoners, and the last was the female sector. Each of the four decks in the prisoner sectors was called a “wing,” although it was nothing of the sort. Dominika told Katya that at least once a year there was a “shakeup,” when all inmates were randomly assigned new cells. The official explanation was that it was to disrupt any long-term escape plans, but nobody believed that. It was believed the shakeup procedure was purely to break up any friendships that may have formed and to keep the inmates feeling stateless and with no control over their destinies.

Once a month, however, the wings within a sector were allowed common time, a brief hour to spend with friends split up by the spiteful churning of the shakeups. Katya had been in the Deeps for just under three weeks when she experienced the first of these. Immediately after lunch had been completed in the communal hall of her wing, the guards withdrew, leaving them under the watchful eyes of the security cameras with their coaxial masers, ready to burn down any troublemakers.

Then the access doors at the outer end of the wing opened automatically, sliding up into the walls. Several women who had gathered by the doors ran through as soon as they opened, while others hung back, waiting. Moments later, women from the wing below were running in to be greeted with cries of delight. Katya watched them embrace and wondered if their number would include her one day. She saw Dominika waving at a short woman with her cropped hair grey at the temples, and their joyful reunion. Feeling that she was intruding, she picked up one of the media pads that gave the inmates something to do, and went off to a bench to read.

She had been reading for perhaps ten minutes when a woman came to sit by her. Katya felt awkward, and looked fixedly at her screen in the hope the woman would take the hint.

“Don’t worry, Kuriakova,” the woman said. “I’m not here to make a woman of you. I doubt either of us are that desperate for human contact yet.”

Katya looked up sharply. Tasya Morevna, hair cropped and in prison uniform, sat by her side.

“They captured you?” said Katya, whispering in shock. “You? I always thought…” She dithered to a halt.

“You thought right. They’d kill me on sight. That’s why I’m…” she turned to Katya so she could show the name printed on her uniform, LITVYAK, T. THIEF “The T stands for ‘Tasya,’ still,” she explained. “I wanted to be a murderer, but Havilland thought that might draw too much attention. I wasn’t very keen on his counterproposal either, so we compromised on me being a thief.”

Katya was still having problems with the entire situation that extended far beyond which particular crime Tasya had decided to have on her uniform. “What are you doing here?” she whispered.

For once Tasya looked uncomfortable. “I’m here to help rescue you.”

“From the Deeps? How? It’s impossible! Tasya, it’s suicide! Kane’s crazy for sending you in here.”

Tasya looked at Katya for a long moment, wrestling with what she was to say next. “Kane didn’t send me, Katya. This is my plan.”

Katya could only gawp at her.

Tasya hurried on. “I screwed up. You should never have been left without support at Atlantis. Kane’s got this idea that you’re blessed, or lucky or something, and that you’d exfiltrate the Beta levels without any trouble. It went against my instincts, but I agreed. I shouldn’t have. Even if we couldn’t have gone onto the Beta corridors ourselves, I could have led a team to cover you going up to them and coming back. I should have led a team to cover you.”

“We’d never have got out. The lock defences…”

“There wouldn’t have been any lock defences by the time I’d finished with them. There’s no excuse. I failed you, Kuriakova.”

Tasya was apologising. To her. The She-Devil, the terror of the World Ocean, was apologising to her. And she’d broken into the most secure location in the world to do it.

Katya had sworn not to let the Deeps make her cry, ever, for any reason, but she had to swallow now. “You could just have said sorry,” she managed to say.

Tasya grinned wolfishly and lightly backhanded Katya’s arm. “This is my way of saying sorry.”

“How did you get in here?”

“There’s a lot of detail you don’t need to know right now. It’s best if you don’t hear it at all. From your point of view, you don’t have to do anything. There will come a time when I come and get you. When I do, you do as I tell you without questions or hesitation. Understand?”

Katya nodded, and said, “They were expecting you to try and rescue me on the way here. They set a trap.”

Tasya raised an eyebrow. “What? They told you that?”

“I worked it out.”

Tasya laughed. “I keep forgetting what a clever one you are. Yes, the Novgorod no less, and a couple of patrol boats in wide flanking positions a couple of isotherms above. We shadowed the Novgorod right from the minute it passed beyond the range of the picket sensors. We could have killed it easily.” She pulled a disgusted face. “That was a really boring three days.”

“So, why didn’t you?”

“The volume would have filled up with torpedoes. Ours, theirs, the patrol boats weighing in. Sooner or later one would have lost its lock, gone onto a search pattern and perhaps locked up your shuttle. It was too dangerous to risk.”

“I’m glad you didn’t, and not just for me. Petrov’s still an officer aboard her.”

“Petrov?” Tasya nodded appreciatively. “A worthy foe.”

“Maybe he made captain? The FMA fawned over everybody else who had anything to do with the Leviathan and FP-1. Medals and promotions for everyone.”

“Maybe so. If he is the master and commander of the Novgorod these days, I’m glad we stayed well back.”

Before Katya could ask any more questions, Dominika walked over with the woman she’d greeted earlier. “Katya!” she said smiling. “This is my friend, Naida.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Naida. She seemed like a very nice person at first impression, but her uniform carried the word MURDERER.

“Good to see you’re meeting people, too,” said Dominika, looking at Tasya. Tasya said nothing, but rose to her feet, smiling slightly. Dominika looked up at her and frowned slightly, as if victim to a nagging half memory. “Have we met before?” she asked.

Then the skin on her face grew taut and her eyes widened as she finally located the memory.

“I don’t know who you are,” Dominika said tonelessly.

“That’s right,” said Tasya. The slight smile was still there, and Katya recognised it as the contemplative one she wore when discussing favourite acts of violence. “You don’t know who I am.”

Dominika glanced at Katya, and Katya thought she saw fear and pity in her eyes. Dominika made some mumbled farewells and almost dragged the confused Naida away with her.

Tasya watched her go. “What sort of treason is she in here for?”

“She worked in a news service. Wrote something the FMA didn’t like. What was all that about, Tasya?”

“News. That makes sense. She recognised me.”

“She what? How can you be so calm about it? What if she…”

“She won’t say a thing. She’s scared of me. That friend of hers, though, that Naida, she might be trouble. She’s in my wing. I know her sort. She’ll be sniffing around trying to find some sort of advantage.” Tasya fell into a thoughtful silence.

Katya noticed the slight smile had reappeared. “Don’t you dare kill her!” she whispered.

“Can’t promise that, Kuriakova,” said Tasya with an easy complacency that frightened and sickened Katya. “Only as a last resort, though.” She smiled a little mockingly as she sketched a cross over her heart. “Promise.”

Katya knew Tasya’s list of alternatives to killing people who might present problems was very short, so it wasn’t much of a promise. It was, however, the best she was going to get.

“I’d better go and wander around. It’s not a good idea for us to be seen too much together,” said Tasya. “Keep watching for anything unusual and, unless things move ahead quickly, I’ll see you next time.”

“I can’t believe you’re fine with staying in this cess silo for as long as that,” said Katya.

Tasya shrugged. “Do you know if the unit activated properly?”

“Yes. They actually showed it to me. The inside was molten slag.”

“Good job, Kuriakova. Then the war’s as good as over. Might take a few months, though, and here’s as good a place to wait that out as anywhere. Take care, stay out of trouble, and I’ll see you in a month.”

“If Secor haven’t got around to interrogating and killing me before then.”

“They won’t. You worry too much, Katya. Be cool.” And so saying, Tasya wandered off amongst the chattering groups.

Katya didn’t know how Tasya could be so confident, but events proved her right. The days after the so-called “Freedom Day” mounted up and still Secor couldn’t seem to develop any sense of urgency.

Dominika had wanted to talk to Katya immediately after the inmates returned to their respective wings (“All inmates have five minutes to return to their correct wings. Any inmate found in the wrong wing or on the stairwells after that time will receive a Level Two demerit and associated punishments”), but the governor called a general appel — the name used for a head count in the Deeps — and there was no time.

After the evening meal, however, Dominika managed to take Katya to one side. “That woman you were talking to, she’s dangerous, Katya. Just a piece of advice, but you should stay away from her, as far as you can get.”

“She’s just a thief. Misallocated food supplies for the black market or something. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

Dominika shook her head emphatically. “Katya, you have no idea…”

Katya took Dominika’s hands in hers and looked her in the eyes. “She’s just a thief. She’s nobody special. I wouldn’t give her another thought if I were you.”

Finally Dominika understood. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Katya.” The evening tidy up was called at that point. Dominika squeezed Katya’s hands and let them go. “Be safe.”

Then, ten days after Tasya had assured her that Secor had lost interest in her, guards came to escort Katya to the interrogation section.