Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) (2 page)

Katya was making her way along the side of the long curved tunnel, when she heard footfalls approaching from the other direction. A moment later, two FMA base security officers – police officers in all but title – walked by her. One ignored her entirely, too busy adjusting the baton in his belt, the other stared straight at Katya as they passed, as if daring her to return the look. Katya did not; she had no desire to get into a battle of wills with them. At the very least they’d demand to see her identity card, and she was too tired for those kinds of status games.

They passed her without slowing and she kept walking, grateful that there was nothing between her, the hotel, and sleep. Nothing, that is, until she turned the corner and found the sobbing man.

He was crouched by the wall, his back to her, crying like a child in a pool of his own blood. Katya stopped sharply enough to make her boots squeal on the concrete. The man gasped with terror and looked furtively over his shoulder at her. She saw his nose was broken, and the white of one eye was bloodshot, the pupil blown.

“Oh, gods,” she managed. “What happened? Are you alright?”

The second question was almost as stupid as the first, but she’d had to say
something
. It was as plain that he’d been badly beaten as it was that, no, he wasn’t alright at all.

The bloodied eye looked past her, and she realised what he was looking for. “No, it’s alright,” she said in a quiet, reassuring tone. “They’ve gone. Why did they do this to you?”

He didn’t answer, but she saw the fear grow in him, and the tears mix with the blood and snot from his ruined nose. She saw the defence injures on the back of his hands as he cowered from her, at least two fingers on his right hand seeming broken; she saw his belt lying by his feet on the concrete floor; she saw the smashed teeth and the straight bruises, as wide as a baton’s contact area, across his brow.

They remained in tableau for long moments, the only sound the man’s miserable soul-deep weeping.

“I’ll take you to the medical centre, OK?” she said finally. She crouched by him. “I’ll take you to the medical centre. You’ll be OK.”

She didn’t ask again why the FMA officers had done this. It could have been something or nothing. She’d heard it didn’t take much to earn a beating these days – a word in the wrong place about rationing, how the war was being handled, how the Feds had their noses into everything – but she’d believed it had been exaggerated in the telling. It seemed she had been the one deluding herself.

The man shook his head, said something like, “I’m fine,” rose and walked painfully away from her, back in the direction of the docks. He leaned against the wall as he went, leaving a trail of bloody handprints, each dimmer than the last.

“That’s the direction they were going in!” she called after him, but he did not respond.

She called it in. She found a communications point a little further up the corridor and asked specifically for the major in traffic control. When she was put through, she explained what had happened, and that there was a man heading in his direction who desperately needed medical attention.

“I’ll alert a response team. Don’t worry, captain. He’ll be attended to.”

“What about the officers?”

The line was silent for a moment. “Did you actually see the assault?”

“No,” said Katya, “but there was no one else in the corridor. It had to have been…”

“That’s supposition. You’re not a witness. It will be dealt with, don’t worry.”

“But I
am
a witness, aren’t I? After the fact, but I’m still a witness. Don’t you want a statement or anything?”

Another silence. Katya suddenly wondered if the major was consulting with somebody else.

“That won’t be necessary. Base security can take it from here.”

Katya wanted to say, “But they won’t investigate their own people properly,” when she caught herself.

It really didn’t take much to earn a beating these days.

“I understand,” she said. “I’ll leave it with you, major.”

“Thank you for calling it in, Captain Kuriakova. Good night.”

The line closed before she could reply.

Katya looked back along the corridor. The man’s belt was still lying there. She turned and walked away, feeling she’d failed a test.

It wasn’t what you’d call a hotel. Many of the larger settlements contained hotels or hostels or similar establishments, but Mologa Station was too small for that. Originally a mining site, its tunnels cut by fusion torches in strange organic curves and meanders to follow mineral seams, Mologa was now primarily a heavy engineering plant producing boats and mobile facilities for the war effort, hence the tight security and strong Federal presence.

Katya’s security grade was Beta Plus, a full three grades higher than most civilians and the product of being in the FMA’s good books after the events of six months earlier, the very events that had begun the war. In the same waterproof container that held the boat’s papers and her personal documents was a small box made of wood.

Real wood. Real, actual wood, grown as a luxury in one of the larger hydroponics farms. Inside the box was a medal on a little red ribbon, upon which was her name, and the legend,
Hero of Russalka
. There was also a slip of paper, the citation for the medal, which explained why it had been awarded. It used a lot of words like “heroic” and “selfless” when talking about her, and “villainy” and “traitorous” when talking about the Yagizban. It also gave the date on which the honour had been presented to her. That was a little lie, though; the medal had never been presented to her at all. Instead it had been delivered by courier, who’d just had her submit to a retinal scan, handed over a package, and left. The box had been in the package, and the medal had been in the box.

She’d barely looked at the medal. Had read the citation once and experienced trouble finishing it, racked by embarrassment and a faint sense of disgust. It hadn’t been like that. It just hadn’t. But it was the official version now, and who was she to argue with the Federal Maritime Authority’s telling of events? After all, she had only been there, had only lived through it all.

The wooden box, though… the box she liked. Sometimes she would just hold the box, stroking its cover gently with the pad of her thumb, sensing the fine grain against her skin. What must it be like to see trees just… there? Growing where they liked, randomly dotted about?

Still, this was nature, too. Stone was natural, even if the torches had melted it smooth. She hadn’t needed to follow the signs to the Mologa Hotel – she’d been there often enough – but lost in her reverie, listening to her own tired thoughts and the sound of her boots on the decking grates, it was a surprise when she turned a corner and there it was. Mologa Hotel, a long, dimly lit tunnel with staggered rows of hatches set into each wall. Admittedly, it looked more like a mass morgue, but it was better than nothing.

She walked along, looking for a green vacancy light. Unsurprisingly, the ones nearest the tunnel entrance all showed red “Occupied” flashes with a few amber lights to show freshly vacated units that still had to be cleaned before being designated available again. She had little idea of how often the units were cleaned out. Perhaps twice a day, she guessed. It didn’t matter; she would do what she always did and walk most of the way along, and pass most of the two hundred capsule “rooms.” That far along, she was already walking past plentiful numbers of greens and some ambers. She deduced that whoever was supposed to clean the capsules perhaps only bothered with the far end of the tunnel once a day, maybe less. Once she might have been outraged at such a dereliction of duty. Right now, however, she just wanted to sleep.

She found a capsule that was identical to all its neighbours, but that she took a shine to on a whim. Her boat’s docking fee included two capsule rentals, one for her and one for Sergei, although she suspected he’d sleep aboard again. Over fifty hours in that confined space apparently wasn’t too much for Sergei Ilyin. Well, good luck to him. She swiped her ID card, waited for the click, and swung the door open.

In the same way that you couldn’t really call it a hotel, you couldn’t really call it a room. It was no more than a burrow a metre and a half square at the entrance and two and a half metres deep. The walls were covered with a smooth epoxy coating in a “restful” shade of pale blue that was apparently what the sky looked like on Earth, and which the primitive parts of their minds found comforting, or so she was told. The floor of the capsule was covered by a mattress that could be removed and hosed down for cleaning if need be, and there was a clean blanket rolled up to one side. Set into the ceiling above where the occupant would lay their head was a screen on which could be watched a selection of dull programming, available on demand. Beneath the capsule floor was a cubby for putting boots, and Katya sat in the hatchway while she removed them and her thin socks before storing them in there. When she crawled in and closed the hatch behind her, the cubby was covered and kept secure, too.

She struggled out of her clothes, made more of an attempt at folding them than she felt was really necessary, and ended up tossing them into the alcove at the capsule end along with her overnight bag. She pulled the thin blanket over herself, more from habit than necessity as the temperature was maintained at a comfortable level, set the alarm for oh-seven-thirty, and turned off the light.

She couldn’t sleep. Tired and listless, she was desperate to, yet her disloyal head kept buzzing and denied her the ease she needed to drift off. She wished she hadn’t mentioned her uncle to the major in traffic control, wished he hadn’t known Lukyan, hadn’t said he was a good man. Yes, her uncle had been a good man, and she missed him so much that it hurt. She felt the tears and did nothing to stop them. It was natural to grieve, even months later. She knew it would be months more before the pain stopped being quite so sharp, when it didn’t make her wish she had died along with him.

Each capsule had half a metre of stone between itself and its neighbours, and the doors were designed to be soundproof, but even so this was why she always chose a capsule as far from others as possible, so nobody might hear her cry.

Sergei had cried. In the pause between the threat of the Leviathan killing everyone on the planet being lifted, and the beginning of the civil war that threatened to result in everybody killing one another instead, she had got back home and sought him out immediately. She had to be the one to tell him, it was what Lukyan would have wanted.

She had stood there, willing herself to stay ramrod straight, and told Sergei that his captain, her uncle, his best friend since childhood was dead. Death wasn’t so strange on Russalka, after all. The dangerous world killed people all the time for the silliest mistakes and the most fleeting of inattentions. Sergei was made of tough stuff, she had told herself. He’d take it stoically.

But he didn’t. He sat down heavily on the floor – on the floor! – and cried like a child. There was no denial, not a single “Are you sure?” She said she’d been there, told him how Lukyan had died, and that was enough. He’d sobbed and looked ridiculous, his face red and snot running out of his nose, and he hadn’t cared. Finally she’d sat by him, put her arm around him and cried too. Her tears had been silent, though.

Perhaps Sergei had been wise after all. He had come to terms with his grief quickly and accepted Lukyan was gone forever, his lifelong friend lost for good. She still saw him grow quiet and reflective sometimes, and he might touch the corner of his eye as if dust had got into it, but that was all.

He didn’t spend his nights crying himself to sleep in a soundproof cell.

Quarter of an hour later she felt exhausted, puffy-eyed, and again empty of grief and the guilt of the survivor for a while, at least. But, she did not feel sleepy. This seemed very unfair.

Finally she gave up trying to will herself into unconsciousness. Instead she found the gently illuminated controls for the screen and switched it on – perhaps she could bore herself to sleep.

The first feed was an old action drama she was sure she’d seen years before and which hadn’t been new even then, made during or just after the war against Earth. It was about an isolated station where a Fed boat has to stop to make repairs and finds itself stuck there with some refugees. Somebody amongst them is a traitor working for the Grubbers and there was a lot of stuff with people accusing one another and then something else happens that means the accused person must be innocent, and so they accuse somebody else.

That the villain turned out to be a Yag – even though he’s really a Grubber infiltrator – was probably why they were rerunning such a steaming piece of melodrama about the war in the first place.

The war. Katya realised that nobody had yet got around to coming up with a name for the new conflict. When people said “the war,” they always meant the war against Earth, the war that was eleven, almost twelve years ago now. It was a civil war they were currently fighting, but nobody called it that. Nobody called it anything at all.

Katya changed the feed and found herself watching a news channel. There was little new here; the Feds were doughty and honourable warriors while the Yag were dirty, sneaky scum who it turned out had been colluding with the Terrans during the war.

Being caught out as traitors hadn’t really been the declaration of independence the Yags had been planning on, but you can’t always get what you want, can you?

Katya turned down the sound and dimmed the screen brightness. She lay in the flickering darkness watching earnest newsreaders, pictures of smiling Federal sailors and marines coming back from successful sorties, a few bedraggled and wretched Yagizban prisoners being paraded for the cameras, public information proclamations, some newly decorated hero going back to his old school to give a speech about duty and honour. It was just another man in a dark blue FMA naval uniform until he took his cap off for the cameras and she laughed with delighted surprise.