Katya's War

CHAPTER EIGHT Dead Water

The inner doors opened inwards into the body of the airlock, a common trait in locks that were expected to be used with less frequency. If the outer door were to leak water in, the mounting pressure would just close the inner doors all the more firmly. The logic for them was plain enough, but watching the two heavy steel doors swing inwards towards them made a small shudder travel across her shoulders. Katya didn’t believe in ghosts, a stupid Earth superstition if ever she’d heard one.

At least, she didn’t usually believe in ghosts.

But this was a place of the dead, and the doors gliding open like those of a crypt from a Grubber story did not help her nerves.

Katya drew a slow breath through her nose, half expecting to smell rotting flesh, but there was nothing, nothing but the scent of the sea and damp concrete. Irrationally, she started to wish she was armed, too. She had noticed that, like Tasya, Giroux was carrying a sidearm. Predictably, Kane was not.

Kane fished in his equipment bag and produced a translucent ball perhaps fifteen centimetres in diameter. “Here’s a pretty gadget from Earth,” he said, held the ball out in one hand and clicked a small device he had mounted on his harness with the other. Instantly the ball started to glow fiercely, rose from his hand and travelled forward three or four metres just above head height. It flew through the open doorway and hovered there, as if waiting for them to catch up.

“Not even military issue on Earth,” he said. “I picked it up from a camping supplies vendor.” Without pausing to explain what “camping” was, he walked forward, and the orb flew ahead, always maintaining the same distance from him and lighting the way. The others fell in behind him. Tasya was right behind Kane; she looked as cool and calm as she always did, but Katya noticed her unconsciously slip her holster’s retention band off the maser’s frame, freeing it for a fast draw. That a killer like Tasya found the facility unnerving did little for Katya’s state of mind.

They made their way slowly up a slight slope in the broad, dark corridor. The construction was of the lowest practical finish, and the speed with which the place had been built was evident in every economy. The corridor was wide and the walls were concave, caused by two overlapping fusion bores being used to cut it through the rock of the mountain. The floor had been levelled, filled with some black synthetic, but the walls and ceiling were bare stone. Over their heads cables ran in bundles, crudely stapled to the rock at frequent intervals by large steel “U” pins. Equally crude was the corridor lighting, consisting of utility lamps not even attached to the rock but simply hung from the underside of each staple and wired into a power cable in the bundle. With the base’s power off, the lamps hung dark and useless.

Ahead of them the corridor was blocked by a bulkhead that filled the six metre wide corridor, secured around its edge by more of the black synthetic used for the floor. In the middle of the bulkhead was a metre wide manual door, looking strange and out of proportion in the middle of the large bulkhead. It stood open, swung towards them on its hinges.

Katya coughed and everybody looked at her, startled. Kane noticed Tasya’s hand had fallen onto her pistol, and said. “I think we all need to take a moment. This facility is dead. We have no reason to think anyone but us is alive here. Not a nice thought, but nor is it a threatening one in the most realistic sense. Let us not have any… accidents, hmm?” Out of the corner of her eye, Katya saw Tasya thumb the retention band back into position and drop her hand away from the weapon. Katya thought this was probably the closest that the Chertovka would ever come to expressing shame.

Kane played around with the light globe’s control until he induced it to fly through the open hatch. It was fascinating to watch the device, which flew easily and quickly yet never let itself get closer than twenty or thirty centimetres to any surface. It clearly contained a contragravitic drive, but anything so small was unknown on Russalka. That it wasn’t even new technology to the Terrans was unsettling.

They followed Kane through the hatch and found themselves on a level section of corridor. It seemed likely that the previous section had been intended as a safety buffer between the auxiliary lock and the main body of the base, as subsidiary corridors were now visible branching off the main one.

“Mr Giroux,” said Kane. “Scout on ahead, will you, please? Find the next main bulkhead, but don’t go beyond it. Call in when you get there, yes?”

“Yes, captain,” said Giroux and went ahead in a dogtrot.

Katya had glanced at her own communications unit when Kane had mentioned Giroux calling in and noticed the display had changed. “Kane. I’ve got a problem with my gear. I’m not picking up the Vodyanoi’s channel anymore.”

“Really? Let me see.”

“None of us are,” said Tasya. “Not this side of the airlock, I’d say. This facility must be EM secure. It was supposed to be hidden, after all.”

“Ah,” said Kane. “That is a nuisance.”

“EM?” said Katya. “Electromagnetic?”

“The whole base is effectively inside a giant Faraday cage,” explained Kane. “No electromagnetic radiation gets in or out. It’s to hide the place from sensors. There’ll be a comms relay outside the cage that’s hardwired to the command centre by cable. We don’t have that luxury.”

“So… there’s no way we can talk to the Vodyanoi or the Lukyan?”

“None.” He brightened. “Still, we shouldn’t need to. We’ll just see what we need to see, and then leave.”

“And what exactly is that? Why can’t you just tell me?”

“You wouldn’t believe me.” Katya started to say something snide, but he stopped her. “And… even if you did, it’s not enough that you believe me. It’s not enough. You have to know. Know it first-hand. Know it for yourself so there’s no denial.” He looked around, searching. “No denial,” he repeated to himself. Then, “This way.”

“Why?” asked Katya, curious despite her desire to stay cold to Kane and his plans. “What’s this way?”

“I don’t know. But, whatever it is, it will probably be as good as anywhere else.” He walked on, unaware of the look Katya was giving him.

“That doesn’t work,” said Tasya, amused. “Believe me, if looks could kill, Kane would have been fish bait years ago.”

They followed him down one of the spur corridors, the glow of the light orb turning him into a walking shadow ahead of them. Katya kept looking around, trying to glimpse just what was so astounding that she had to see it with her own eyes. It was hard to believe it was the spy base itself; it was competently built for all the obvious haste, but otherwise entirely unremarkable. She had once been in an abandoned mining site and it had looked a little like this. The one thing that seemed odd was that it was so large. The phrase “spy base” had put images in her mind of some small stealthy facility tucked into a cleft in a mountainside, just large enough to serve a small sub crew in their work of sneaking around and monitoring Federal transmissions, and watching traffic from the edge of the Red Water. This place was an altogether larger proposition. They hadn’t even seen the living quarters yet, just a medical section and… She looked up at a sign stencilled onto the rock and stopped.

“Hold on,” she said. “We’re walking in a circle. This is the way to the medical section, but that was on the other side of the main corridor.”

Kane came to a halt. “Perhaps there is more than one medical section.” His voice was neutral and the flying globe kept him limned with light, reducing him to a silhouette, yet Katya caught something hidden in the comment.

“Why would a spy base have more than one medical section?” she demanded. “Hell, why does it even have one? All they’d need would be a sick bay. What were they doing here, Kane?”

But Kane wasn’t listening. He had moved to the wall and was examining it. Even in the oblique light cast by the orb, Katya could see there were windows set into the wall and, a little beyond, a door. For the first time she realised that every doorframe she’d seen had been sealed into its surround, every door had been waterproof.

Usually doors within the areas between bulkheads were conventional, both for reasons of economy and convenience. If something terrible happened and a section flooded, the bulkheads would contain the water within that section, but the doors of the rooms in the section would not stop the water for a second.

Yet this place was heavily compartmentalised. Why the paranoia?

Kane had unclipped his personal torch from his harness and was angling it, trying to look through the window. As Katya and Tasya approached, he suddenly stepped back from the glass as if startled.

“This is a mistake,” he said quickly, the words tumbling over one another. “I made a mistake bringing you here. I… I… There’ll be somewhere else here. Somewhere else for you to see. Not here, though. I never anticipated… We must go back.”

“What have you found?” said Tasya.

“It’s flooded in there. You can’t see anything. We’ll go back to the main corridor.”

“You’re a miserable liar, Havilland,” said Tasya. She sounded like somebody getting ready to lose her temper. “What’s in there?”

“Please, Tasya, I’m begging you. Don’t look.”

And he was begging her. Not on his knees, but plucking miserably at her arm as she strode past him to squint at the thick armour glass. There was condensation on it and she rubbed angrily at it with her sleeve, before putting her face close to the glass. After a moment, she copied Kane’s action in unclipping her torch and shining it close to the surface away from her face to cut down reflection.

Katya looked at Kane, but he barely acknowledged her, backing away from the windows in distress and horror.

“Oh, gods,” said Tasya, quietly. She stood, rooted to the spot by what she could see. Then she extinguished her torch and walked to one side. “They knew,” she said to Kane. “How could they not know?” She was calm now, an icy calm that scared Katya in ways that a towering rage could never have done. “The operation’s cancelled, Kane. Forget it.”

“Tasya…”

“Forget it, Kane. It’s war. It’s just war. Until we’re all dead. Just war.” Without a second glance, she clipped the torch back on her harness, switched it on, and walked back the way they had come.

“Tasya!” Kane shouted after her. “Think what you’re saying! Please! You can’t go back to your superiors and tell them to scrub this!” Tasya didn’t slow her walk at all, and Kane became angry. “I told you what would happen if you lost your temper! What would happen if you threatened the operation! I warned you!”

She didn’t stop. “That you’d kill me? Then perhaps you should have come out with a gun.”

His bluff called, Kane was reduced to running after her, calling at her to stop, to think, to talk.

And Katya was left alone, watching the bobbing light of the orb disappear down the corridor.

She looked across the corridor, at the dark windows. She could see the reflection of her own torch in the one directly opposite to her, but nothing else. There couldn’t simply be bodies on the other side, she thought. Kane had seen enough death, Tasya had caused enough death that it would take much more to make them react like that.

Katya looked down the corridor again. Kane’s light had vanished altogether.

She was very aware that she had a decision to make, and that once made it would be irrevocable. If she didn’t look through the window, they would soon leave here, probably forever, and she would never again have the opportunity to do so. But, if she did look, whatever she saw could never be unseen.

Kane said she needed to know something, something she would find here. If she looked, would it be simple curiosity, or because of a true need to know? It hardly mattered; what had happened here was as much her business as anyone else’s. Ignorance might be blissful, but bliss was not something she could look for when lives were being lost all around her.

With an ugly feeling that it wasn’t curiosity but rather some awful spiritual masochism that drew her towards the glass, an unsuspected and unwelcome taste for martyrdom, she walked slowly forward, unclipping her torch as she did so.

She hesitated then, a small beat of the passing present when she argued with herself one last time against looking, and lost. She pressed the torch against the glass as she had seen Kane and Tasya do, and looked into the flooded room.

At first she could make out nothing at all, the plankton and debris in the water close to the glass being the first thing she focused upon. With an effort, she looked beyond it, trying to make out what was so terrible in the room. It had been shocking enough to make Tasya blanch, which had led Katya to expect something obviously horrifying, but she could make out very little.

The room was painted in white, or at least some pale colour, and she could just see another door in the far wall. Unlike the door to her right, this one hung open. Having so many waterproof doors probably proved counterproductive, she thought. All that whirling the locking wheel one way, heaving the door open, climbing through, slamming it shut, whirling the wheel to relock the door into its frame — people were just people and that sort of irritating routine was exactly the first kind of thing that people got sloppy about. Before long they’d be leaving doors open because “I’ll be going back in a minute” and that would become “I’ll be going back in ten minutes” or an hour and, before long, people were forgetting to close them at all. When the Feds attacked and the base was inundated with water, probably half the doors were standing open.

There didn’t seem to be any obvious clues what the room was for, however. There were a few boxes or metal frames of some sort lying around, maybe as many as twenty. There was a lot of debris floating in the small trapped pockets of air that still existed in the deep ridges that some builder had cut with a fusion torch while squaring the curved sides of the room off in an attempt to make it more room-like, but whatever it was floating up there was hard to make out. Some sheets of material mixed in, perhaps, but the rest was just irregular forms. No bodies, she was relieved to see, or at least none within visible range.

And yet… part of her was telling her to move away, to rejoin the others. That small voice telling her to go, a voice cracking with horror, as if she was looking but not seeing, as if she was refusing to comprehend.

She wished for a long time afterwards that she had obeyed the small voice rather than concentrating harder on what lay beyond the glass. She wished that she had obeyed her instinct and not focused her intellect.

Katya angled her torch’s beam down to illuminate directly under the window, where several of the boxes she had noticed had been swept into an untidy pile by the flood water. The most mundane everyday object can be rendered exotic and unusual by placing it in a different context. The boxes, or crates, or frames or whatever they were seemed dull and inconsequential precisely because she had recognised them as soon as she had seen them, and the feeling associated with that stimulus was disinterest. Now she looked at them again, however, she consciously recognised them, and then the ramifications of their presence, and the identity of the room.

Her mouth fell open. She wanted to cry out, but pure horror froze the sound in her throat. She stepped back away from the glass, her mind filling in every element of what had occurred here in ruthless detail, her imagination acting it all out in sadistic clarity. She thought of the dark shapes floating in the air pockets in the ceiling and knew exactly what they were. It even explained why this room of all the rooms had windows facing out into a dead end corridor. The objects on the floor, twenty or so of them, were not simply boxes, or crates, or steel frames. They were cots.

Katya was looking into a flooded nursery.

She found Kane and Tasya close by the junction with the main corridor. Tasya was standing with crossed arms listening while Kane spoke quietly to her, his nervous hands speaking more loudly than his voice. He turned as Katya approached, took one look at her pallid complexion, and said, “You looked.”

“What were children… babies doing here, Kane?” she demanded. “Why?” She could feel a sob forming in her throat and choked it down. “Why?”

“The obvious reason,” answered Tasya. She sounded tired and depressed. “To escape the war.”

“This isn’t a spy base, Katya,” said Kane. “That’s a Federal lie. Yet another Federal lie. This was an evacuation site. There was nobody here but those too old, too young, or too injured to fight, and the staff needed to look after them. This facility is… was militarily unimportant.”

“The FMA couldn’t have known,” said Katya. “They couldn’t have known. They must have found the place and just attacked first.”

“Oh, Katya,” said Kane sadly. “Even in the middle of an atrocity, you’re still looking for some get out, some way of saying this was down to stupidity or incompetence.”

Tasya waved her over. “I found this when I came back this way.” She walked to the next spur corridor and shone her torch down it. The beam first picked out the wall. There was a ragged row of spots where the rock had melted momentarily, just enough to mark it. Half way along the row was a break and beneath the break — Tasya lowered the beam to light the corridor floor — lay a corpse. Katya recognised a medic’s insignia on the body’s sleeve.

“They came in?” said Katya. “They came in? But… they’d have seen…”

“And they did it all the same.” Kane was standing in the corridor entrance, his light globe bringing the scene of the murder into full relief. “There was no mistake here, Katya. They destroyed the main entrance and sent troops in through the auxiliary lock to clean up. There is no possible way they thought this was a military facility.”

Katya took an unsteady step towards the body. Perhaps — distant, hopeless, vain hope — perhaps they weren’t dead. Perhaps some small victory could be wrested from the clinging horror of the place. Tasya gripped her shoulder, stopping her in her tracks. “No!” she snapped. Then more gently, “The body’s booby-trapped. There’s a thermobaric grenade under it with the pin out.” She drew Katya into a crouch to show her. “If you moved the body, the arming spoon would release. I guarantee the fuse has been set to zero seconds.”

Katya straightened and backed away. The Feds couldn’t even leave the dead in peace. The Feds. Her side.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand how this happened. When did we become the bad guys?” The Grubbers, the loathed and loathsome Grubbers had fought a hard war against Russalka, but it had always been to cripple her military. The Grubbers only ever killed non-combatants by accident, as “collateral damage” in the phrase of the news reports. Her side, the great and heroic Federal Maritime Authority, protector of Russalka, champions of her independence, they were the ones who murdered infants, they were the ones who shot unarmed medics in cold blood and then planted traps on the corpses.

Her pride was gone, trampled in blood. She didn’t know what she was anymore.

“This was all more… traumatic than I expected, Katya,” said Kane. “I’m truly sorry. Even I had no idea the FMA would go so far. We should leave. I think we’re done here.”

“I’ll do what you want,” said Katya. Her voice was small, defeated.

Tasya looked away, seeing what they had done to Katya, and felt ashamed once more.

Kane clasped his hands together, and said, “You’ll be a traitor, Katya. Once they realise what you’ve done, they’ll hunt you down. They’ll probably shoot you on sight.”

“A traitor?” Katya laughed, a humourless coughing sound. “They betrayed me first. They betrayed all of us.”

“More than you know,” said Tasya. She said it as an aside, but Katya was on it in a second.

“What? What do you mean more than I know?”

Kane winced. With a reproving sideways glance at Tasya, he said, “It’s… it can wait.”

“Don’t lie to me, Kane. I am sick of lies. I want to know what she meant.”

The ping of an incoming signal from Kane’s radio provided an unexpected distraction that he gratefully leapt at. “That’ll be Giroux,” he said unnecessarily before opening the channel. “Hello, Mr Giroux. We were just wondering what had become of you.”

“My torch failed, captain. I’m using a cold light stick, but the illumination’s not so good. I’ve found the next main bulkhead.”

“Never mind. From what we’ve seen, the other side is flooded anyway. We’re heading back to the entry lock. How long do you think it will take you to get back?”

“Captain, there are signs of a fire fight up here. I can make out maser hits on the bulkhead and the walls.”

“Yes, we’ve seen them too. How long until you can get back?”

“There’s a body here, captain. Civilian clothes. It looks like…”

Kane drew breath to warn Giroux, but never had the chance to utter it. They sensed the detonation through the rock before they heard it, a wave of sensation through their boots as if the mountain itself had felt its flesh creep.

Tasya looked in the direction that Giroux had gone. “That’s no grenade…”

Then the shockwave reached them.