“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.
CHAPTER NINE
FALLEN ANGELS
There was no sense of intervening time. Katya was standing near Tasya and Kane when Giroux called in. Then she was lying on the ground, Tasya leaning over her and shaking her roughly. “Get up, Kuriakova! Wake up, damn you!”
Katya blinked at her, trying to patch events together and failing. Tasya’s harness torch was playing its beam directly in her face, and she only had the vaguest impression of Tasya being behind it. The voice, tone, and the violence of the shaking was all the evidence Katya needed for a positive identification, however.
“What happened?” said Katya, trying to sit up and regretting it as nausea wracked her. “Where’s Kane? Giroux?”
“Oh, you found her!” she heard Kane say, answering the first question. Tasya turned as he arrived. Kane held up a handful of pieces of smashed plastic. “The orb didn’t ride the blast wave very well,” he said ruefully. “I don’t suppose the supplier does mail order deliveries at interstellar distances, so no chance of a replacement. Perhaps I can repair it.” So saying, he placed the fragments in a belt pouch with the guileless optimism of a young child who believes anything can be fixed.
“Where’s Giroux?”
Kane looked surprised. “Oh, you must have taken a knock, Katya. Your short term memory…”
“Giroux’s dead,” said Tasya bluntly. “He found a body and, like an idiot, searched it. It was booby trapped.”
“I remember a body with a grenade under it…” Katya’s memories were beginning to sort themselves out although she would never remember the few seconds before the explosion. She remembered the body, the maser marks, and then she remembered the flooded room. She felt cold and finally realised that there was a thin sheen of water on the floor, flowing past them in the direction of the auxiliary lock.
“The one Giroux disturbed must have been a detonator. That explosion sounded more like emplaced charges. The upper bulkhead’s been compromised. The sea’s getting in.” Tasya stood and held out her hand. Katya took it and allowed herself to be drawn to her feet. “We’re just lucky those Fed bastards aren’t as good at setting charges as they are at killing babies or we’d be sucking water now.”
A deep vibration thrummed through the structure, making them all look into the darkness in the direction of the damaged bulkhead. “It’s giving way,” said Tasya. “Run!”
The ingrained Russalkin fear of water was with them in that moment. They turned and ran for the auxiliary lock as they had never run before, Tasya pulling quickly ahead with long, loping strides, Katya following in a hard sprint, and Kane at the rear in an untidy kinetic mass of flailing arms and pumping legs.
They reached the first bulkhead at the head of the slope leading down to the auxiliary lock and stumbled through the small door in the large wall. The water level was already well over the door’s lower lintel and beginning to surge as a much greater volume of water entered the flooding section behind them. As soon as Kane was through, Tasya threw herself at the door to try and close it, but the water was on the side the builder’s had reasonably concluded was the less likely to be a threat. Now the pressure of water was forcing the door open, not shut, and that pressure was rising.
“Go, go, go!” she shouted at Katya and Kane. “I’ll hold it as closed as I can.”
Katya hesitated for a moment, but Kane grabbed her arm and pulled her away. They ran down the incline, the water sluicing past their legs. Ahead of them in the dancing beams of their torches, Katya could see the auxiliary lock’s doors open before them, fifty metres away, but she could also see the water climbing over the lintel and starting to flood the interior of the airlock. The realisation that simply reaching the lock might not be enough to save their lives chilled her for the moment it took for it to crystallise in her mind. Then she put it aside; there lay panic, and panic would kill them.
She reached the door ten strides ahead of Kane and jumped through. She was on her communicator the second her feet splashed down in the shin-deep water. “Tasya! We’re in – come on!”
“Close the doors.”
Katya frowned; she had misheard. She must have misheard. “Say again?”
“Close the airlock doors, Kuriakova.”
Katya looked uncomprehendingly at Kane. He gave her what was presumably intended as a reassuring nod, and said, “Understood. Closing doors now.” Before Katya could stop him, he had reached out and twisted the door controls. With a hum of power, they began to swing shut.
“Kane! What are you doing?”
He smiled a little nervously. “I’m trusting her. You have to remember one thing about Tasya.” He turned on the lock’s internal lights, then joined Katya where she stood. He pointed through the narrowing gap up the slope of the corridor. “She’s a survivor.”
Into the glow of the lights, the steady sheen of water abruptly became a wave, a surge that could only mean Tasya had
abandoned the door and let the rising water through. And in the middle of that surge, she rode down. Almost standing, almost lying, leaning back into the wave with her legs together and her arms steering her, she shot down the corridor towards the closing doors.
At the very last, she folded her arms across her chest, straightened her legs and made an arrow of her body, an arrow that shot into the airlock, brushing both her shoulders against the steel doors. They slammed shut behind her, a single sardonic clap of applause for the latest exploit of the legendary Chertovka.
“You truly have the luck of the Devil,” said Kane casually, as if it was a dull day that only featured one death-defying escape. He set the lock controls to drain away the water that was lapping around their thighs. Katya just gawped.
“I’m soaked,” said Tasya, as she rose from the waters. “These coveralls are going to ride up in the ADS, there’s nothing more certain. Nothing’s ever comfortable in this world.”
Kane was leaning into the back of his diving suit and fiddling with the more powerful communications unit in it. “Still no signal. We’re going to have to get into the water before we can talk to the boat. Right, Katya first, I think.”
The airlock’s floor was now only wet, not flooded, and Kane helped her doff her gear and stow it away in the MMU. Then with help from Tasya, he lifted Katya up she could get into the suit once more. As they locked her in, Tasya said, “What about Giroux’s suit?”
Katya heard Kane’s bitter sigh. “Poor Bruno. Despite all we’ve seen in this world, he was probably the only Vodyanoi who wouldn’t have believed somebody could stoop so low as to booby trap a corpse. We’ll seal up his suit and Sahlberg can bring it in under drone control once he’s brought in Katya.”
“I was looking at the controls on the way in,” offered Katya. “I think I could pilot it. Well enough to get back to the Vodyanoi anyway.”
Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) Page 10