“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.
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 the
ir 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.
Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) Page 20