Katya's War

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN White Death

The guards turned up midmorning during a citizenship lecture. That most of those present would never again be a free citizen was not an irony that escaped them, and the presentation did not go without a commentary from the inmates. They grew quiet when the guards entered, identified Katya, and took her away with them. Katya had believed Tasya, and was so shocked she had trouble standing when they called her name. They led her off and the lecture continued more soberly than before.

It didn’t help that one of the guards was Oksana Volkova, because the other was not Alina Shepitko, and so they could not talk openly. The only comfort to be had from Oksana’s presence was a sympathetic glance from her when the other guard was looking away for a moment. Otherwise, the group walked in silence to the Deeps hub to take a lift down to the lowest level of the administration wing.

Down there the corridors were grey-walled and contained only utility lighting, apparently a legacy of their original intended function as drive rooms. The bleakness of the echoing walls may have been as much a reason for their retention as economy; it was impossible to walk them without sensing something terrible waiting around every corner.

They took her to a room much like the room in which she had been beaten in Atlantis. Two seats, one of them bolted to the floor, a table also bolted down, restraints straps on the secure chair, and a steel hasp on the table surface to hold a manacle’s cable. Sitting in the interrogator’s chair was the pale, fragile-looking woman Katya remembered from her welcoming committee over a month before. The woman looked up briefly when Katya was brought in, but promptly lost interest, studying her memo pad and drinking water from a plastic cup as the guards shackled Katya and then restrained her in the chair, locking her manacles’ cable down, her ankles and waist held in the chair.

When they were done, Oksana and the other female guard stood by the door. The Secor agent looked at them with faint surprise. “You’re dismissed. You’ll be called when I want you to remove the prisoner.”

Oksana looked uneasy at the phrase “remove the prisoner,” an uneasiness Katya shared. It sounded like an order to remove something inanimate. The other guard said, “Are you sure, ma’am? We could wait here in case you need us.”

“I don’t require an audience,” said the interrogator. “Besides, these are early days. Ms Kuriakova and I will just be getting to know one another.” To punctuate the thought, she lifted a medical case from the floor and laid it on the table.

Katya remembered something Kane had once said about Secor interrogation techniques, “Sensory deprivation, psychotomimetic drugs, RNA stripping, the usual. They’re quite old fashioned in their ways, bless them.” Now some of the tools of torture were sitting before her, she couldn’t find it in herself to be as flippant as Kane.

Nor was she the only one affected by the case’s appearance. Oksana flinched and the second guard took an involuntary step back.

“There’s a guard room by the lift,” said the interrogator. “Get yourself some food. I shall be a little while here. I shall call you when we’re done.”

The guard Katya didn’t know didn’t need any further encouragement and was out into the corridor in a second. Oksana lingered a moment, her anxiety evident, but then she was gone too.

Katya looked back to find the interrogator looking keenly at her. There seemed something disarranged about the woman, as if great passions surged behind that placid face. Her skin was pale, her cheekbones pronounced, her red hair pulled back into a bun that was just short of perfect, the few stray strands adding to the impression that all was not well within her.

“That guard seems very concerned about you, Kuriakova. Why do you suppose that is?”

Katya had made her mind up that she wasn’t going to give anything up to Secor, not even the time of day. She would make them drag each syllable out of her with iron pincers if need be. Thus, she sat there in hostile silence, and glared at her tormentor.

The interrogator found this amusing. “Oh, I know why, of course. Three young women shut up in a shuttle for that length of time, naturally you talked.”

She reached inside her jerkin and produced a recorder that she set down on the table between them. She watched Katya’s face as she pressed the “Play” stud.

It took a moment for Katya to realise what she was listening to, to place the disembodied voices. She remembered the conversation before she realised one of the voices was her own. It was Oksana, Alina, and herself aboard the shuttle. Katya recognised the tail-end of Alina’s anger with Oksana for leaving her pistol out where Katya could have taken it, and with a sudden sick feeling remembered what they had spoken of next.

“So,” she heard Alina’s recorded voice say, “just what did you do?”

The interrogator reached out and clicked the recorder off. “And you told her, didn’t you? You told both those poor innocents just what an ugly world they actually live in, and what a foul, evil little empire the Federal Maritime Authority truly is, didn’t you?” Her face hardened. “You’ve doomed them, you realise. The FMA cannot tolerate that sort of information in the hands of a couple of stupid girls like Shepitko and Volkova.”

She glared at Katya’s pallid face. Katya was starting to sweat as shock gave way to fear. The interrogator continued, ruthlessly driving home what was going to happen and that it was all Katya’s fault.

“Secor won’t allow them to return to Atlantis when there is the slightest chance they might tell anyone what you told them. Nor can they stay here. They’ll talk sooner or later, Kuriakova. They’ll hint, to try and seem clever. Somebody will ask them what they mean by that, and they’ll talk just like you did. Some thoughts and ideas are as deadly as any disease. The one you’ve contaminated those women with will kill them just as surely.”

She leaned back and regarded Katya with unconcealed disgust. “What did you hope to accomplish by telling them?”

Katya glared at her, shaking with hatred. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you lay a finger on them, you parasite.”

“Oh,” said the interrogator in very understated mock fear. “Threats now?”

“You’ve got the upper hand for the moment, but that won’t last long. You’d better start making some friends because the day is going to come when you will need them.”

“And it will come soon.” The interrogator had become serious. “I know.”

Katya shut her mouth before she said anything else that might reveal too much. The Secor interrogator didn’t seem to care. She gestured at the cameras mounted in opposite corners of the room.

“They’re switched off. I’m allowed to do that. I pulled a couple of leads to make absolutely sure. They’re all scared of me anyway. They know the kind of things I’ve done to prisoners in here.” She smiled to herself, as if torture and executions were lovable whims. “Apart from the governor. I don’t think he’s scared of anything. He’s a strange man. Fancies himself as a marine biologist, you know. Almost every day he has drones out going down into the valley below to seek out new creatures, some of which he then has cooked and eats. As I say, a strange man.”

Katya could only stare at the interrogator, and strain quietly and uselessly at her restraints. If the interrogator decided to draw a knife and cut Katya’s wrists, there wasn’t a thing she could do to stop her.

“You’re frightened, aren’t you? Me, too. Seven years I’ve been a member of Secor. Before that, I was in Base Security in Lemuria. Ten years… almost eleven now, I suppose… eleven years ago, we fought Terran troopers — commandoes, they were — when they attacked Lemuria. Corridor fighting. We outnumbered them, but they were so well equipped, so well trained. It was a victory every time we managed to bring down even one of them. I thought we were going to lose, then. Not just that battle. The whole war. I was terrified.” She blinked, bringing herself back from the past. “Then the war just faded away. We were default victors, but we pretended we’d earned it. Oh, the celebrations.

“We’re losing this one, too, and so are the Yagizban. I have Alpha clearance. I see the reports. I’ve had Yagizban agents sitting exactly where you’re sitting, and when I’ve peeled away all the training, the lies, all the defences and I’m left with the pure naked truth within, I see the same thing that I see within myself.”

She took Katya’s hands in her own, just as Dominika had. “You shouldn’t say anything. It’s wiser if you don’t. There are two people that you can trust on this station and two only. The Chertovka and me.”

Katya tried not to react, but apparently did a poor job of it as the interrogator laughed.

“You’re not very good at this game, are you? I could have opened you like a clam inside twenty-four hours. Well inside. Don’t trust me until you’ve spoken to her. You would be a fool to believe anything I say before then. Until then, you might want to consider how a war criminal like her managed to get through the Deeps’ induction checks without being identified.”

There was a small amount of pain involved in the interrogation after all. Most of the subsequent hour (“The guards will wonder what’s going on if an interview takes less than an hour.”) was spent with Katya reading a patriotic novel on a memo pad while the interrogator rested her head on the table top and listened to a selection of Poliakov concertos, humming along quietly to them. Then, when the closing chords of his Fifth had died away, she roused herself, looked through her case, and located a small pressure syringe. Before Katya could react, the interrogator injected her through the skin of her wrist.

“It’s nothing much,” she told Katya. “Just a mild debilitant. If you’re not exhibiting any signs of interrogation, it would look odd.”

“I could have pretended!” said Katya, tugging uselessly at the hasp holding down her manacles.

The interrogator grimaced and shook her head. “Not you. You’re a terrible actor.”

By the time Oksana and the other guard arrived a few minutes later at the interrogator’s summons, Katya could barely stand.

“You can put her back into the general population,” the interrogator told them. “I’m done with her for the time being.”

The guards had to half carry Katya back to the lift. “What did they do to you?” asked Oksana.

“Don’t!” snapped the other guard. “Don’t ask. Never ask about Secor business.”

The guards took Katya to the sickbay, where they seemed to be expecting her. An orderly put her on a bed fully clothed and told her to sleep it off. Katya tried to say, “Thank you,” but her tongue just lolled uselessly around in her mouth. The orderly shook his head, rolled her into the recovery position, and left her there.

Prisons breed gangs, factions, and cliques. For her first month, Katya had steered around the edge of them with some help from Dominika. There was always a strong feeling however, that sooner or later, she would run into one or another group. On her return from interrogation, this feeling utterly evaporated. That Secor had its attention on Katya was more than enough reason to give her plenty of space.

It didn’t mean people weren’t curious, though. When Katya was having her first evening meal after her “interrogation,” she was joined at her table by a couple of inmates to whom she’d never spoken before. One had TRAITOR on her uniform and the other had MURDERER. Katya found herself just thinking of them by their crimes. Neither of them looked at all extraordinary; if it wasn’t for the cropped hair and the uniforms, she wouldn’t have looked at them twice had she seen them in a station corridor.

“Been a guest of Maya, have you?” said the Traitor.

Katya looked up from her broth and regarded them suspiciously. “Who?”

“Maya. Maya Durova, the ‘White Death.’”

It was clear from Katya’s expression that none of this meant much to her. While the Traitor slouched with irritation, the Murderer said, “The Secor woman. The redhead. Does the tortures.”

Katya wondered why they were interested. She remembered the interrogator — Maya Durova, apparently — telling her only she and Tasya were trustworthy, and that Katya should check with Tasya before even believing that. Since then, she’d avoided talking to anybody about what had happened during her interrogation. She might say something she shouldn’t, some subtle point that she didn’t even realise was fatal until it was too late. Now here she was, confronted by a couple of utter strangers who seemed far too concerned with her business.

“If you mean, was I taken to see her, yes. I was told not to say anything to anyone.” She returned her attention to her broth.

“She just sometimes pulls people out of general population to practise on,” said the Traitor. “Is that what she did with you? You looked pretty ill when they brought you back.”

Katya paused, her spoon almost at her mouth. She was getting irritated with these two, and showed it by emptying her spoon back into her bowl. “How would you know?”

The Traitor grinned and tapped her arm, where she wore a red band with “TRUSTEE” printed upon it. “I help out there. In the sickbay. I saw you.”

Katya looked at the pair of them and said, “You want to know what happened? Fine, I’ll tell you. They took me down, she played some music, she pumped me full of drugs, I don’t remember much else.” It was a true account as far as it went; the patriotic novel had been so blandly predictable that Katya had already forgotten almost everything about it. She returned to shovelling the reconstituted protein shapes in stock that it pleased the kitchen to call “broth” into her mouth.

“You didn’t tell her nothing, though, did you?”

Katya had had enough. She put her spoon down and said, “There’s nothing else to tell. They had it all from me in Atlantis. She didn’t ask me anything. Not a single question. She just said she hated traitors and she was going to shred the minds of every single traitor in the Deeps to pieces using sensory deprivation, psychotomimetic drugs, RNA stripping, the usual. And when she’d destroyed them, the drooling mess that was left would be going out of the airlock.” She picked up her spoon again and used it to point at the conviction flash on the Traitor’s uniform. “Every traitor.” She went back to eating her broth.

They left her alone after that.

Katya was called for further “interrogation” five more times over the next sixteen days. Neither Oksana nor Alina accompanied her on any of these occasions, which was just as well. Katya had felt guilty at Oksana’s concern for her after the first session; it felt like lying when she couldn’t reassure her that it was all just a charade. Not that she could have, not with the White Death’s parting gift of a dose of debilitating drug washing around in her bloodstream. She was always pale and nervous when she was taken down, and this was an honest reaction. Katya hated that drug.

On her third visit she made the mistake of telling Durova that.

“You should have told me earlier,” Durova said, sorting amongst the phials in her case. “I’ll use something different this time.” And she did; a drug used as part of a sensory deprivation torture cocktail. The syringe was hardly away from her skin before Katya went blind. “There,” said Durova, “that’s better, isn’t it?”

It wore off after four hours, but next time Katya said she appreciated the thought and all, but could she go back to the previous debilitating drug? Please?

Tasya found all this very amusing when they talked again at the next “Freedom Day.”

“Yes, Durova is one of ours. She enacted Secor protocols to get me in and to arrange it so I wasn’t identified.”

“Do you trust her?”

“Not really, but I can read her instincts. Those are all going our way. She’s intelligent, and she can see this war isn’t a winning proposition for anyone. She isn’t very loyal to the FMA, either. May have been once, but after what they’ve had her doing, I don’t think she’s got much idealism left in her. Where’s your friend Netrebko today?”

“Dominika? She went to visit her friend in her wing this time around.” Katya looked at Tasya. “She definitely knows who you are.”

“Oh, yes. But she’s smart enough to keep that to herself. Informers don’t do very well in places like this. So, anyway, what’s the escape plan?”

Katya looked at her with astonishment. “What? You don’t have one?”

“Of course I don’t,” said Tasya, unabashed. Finally understanding Katya’s concern, she added, “And I don’t expect you to come up with one, either. The good Dr Durova is supposed to be doing that. She’s the one who’s been here for years and has all the pass codes. Hasn’t she told you what she’s come up with?”

“No. She told me I shouldn’t trust her until you’d confirmed I should.”

“That’s wise, I suppose. What have you been talking about in your interrogation sessions, then?”

“Nothing. I read a bad book, she listens to music. Usually Poliakov, although she listened to some Kapitsa last time. Then she doses me with something to make it look I’ve been undergoing chemical questioning and calls the guards. If I’m lucky, I don’t throw up in the lift.”

“You have all the fun.”

“Want to swap?”

Tasya smiled wryly, and shook her head. “Sorry about that. I wasn’t expecting her to use interrogations as a way of communicating with you. It makes sense, but I thought she’d use intermediates. I can see why she didn’t. Her way’s far more secure. Anyway, next time you’re in with her, find out what the plan is. The sooner we’re out of here, the better. The Vodyanoi’s waiting in the Enclaves for word. She’ll need at least three days’ notice if she’s going to be here to pick us up.”

“How are we going to tell them?”

“We’ve got a senior Secor agent aboard this dump on our side and you’re wondering how we can get a message out? Come on, Kuriakova. Use your imagination.”

Katya accepted the logic of that, but something else was bothering her. “If the White Death is supposed to be planning all this, why are you here, Tasya?”

“Two reasons. One, because you’d never have accepted a Secor interrogator’s word without some assurance that she was telling the truth.”

“I might have.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Two, I’m here to expedite things once the plan gets under way.”

Katya knew Tasya too well to see “expedite” as anything other than a euphemism for “kill anyone who gets in the way.”

“I really hope you don’t have to do any of that.”

“Expediting?”

“You know what I mean.”

Tasya looked at her, all levity gone. “That very much depends on how good Durova’s plan is.”

Katya nodded. Then she asked, “Is she really a doctor?”

Tasya’s grim smile returned. “With specialities in psychology and pharmacology. Kane tells me that on Earth, doctors have to make an oath. Starts with, ‘First, do no harm.’ Maybe we should have something like that on Russalka, too.”