Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) (20 page)

Katya had to lift herself on her toes a little to get the scanner level with her eye. She had barely got herself in position when the scan was complete. “Identity confirmed. Welcome, Katya Kuriakova.” She read her name with a tight cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. Now there was incontrovertible proof that she had been here. Her last opportunity to walk away from the mission had just been destroyed before her eyes. Specifically, she corrected herself, her right eye.

Above her, with a thump of disengaging bolts and the hum of servo motors, the hatch slid back. Parsecs away on old Earth, condemned criminals had once mounted the hangman’s scaffold with the same slow tread that Katya now used as she climbed the steps into the restricted area.

The room at the top of the spiral staircase was small and spectacularly cluttered. The sheer profusion of wall-mounted boxes and identical blackly insulated cables running around the place like the limbs of a cybernetically-enhanced eikosipus family – a species similar to the terrestrial octopus, but with twenty tentacles rather than eight – panicked Katya for a second; how could she possibly find the right junction in this mess?

After she swallowed down her nerves, however, and looked again, she saw that there was actually an order underlying the apparent chaos. Indeed, when she looked closer still she found that all the boxes and all the cable sockets were clearly labelled. Thirty seconds of searching found her the one she was looking for.

Working quickly, conscious of the technician below who was probably bursting with curiosity to know what she was up to, Katya took the bland metal box from her bag. It was bare metal, a coolly glinting titanium alloy, whereas the boxes already there were all finished in a silken black. Yet it didn’t look too badly out of place once she had pulled out a lead from the wall box, and replaced it with one of the leads from hers. Its other lead was pushed into a power feed and that was that. She stowed it behind a mass of cables where they fed into the floor, arranging them to hide it as best as she could.

On the top edge of the box was the covered switch. She flipped back the cover, and flicked the switch. It glowed a reassuring green, although whether that meant anything truly reassuring at all, she had no idea. She closed the cover to hide the glow, took a deep breath, and then exhaled it slowly. She had done what she had come there to do. If the box was left alone for even a few minutes, it would do its job.

She turned to descend the steps and found the technician’s head poking up through the hatch. He frowned suspiciously up at her. “What’s going on in here?” he demanded. “I heard you messing around with things.”

“If I told you,” she said, her imperious descent forcing him to back away from her, “my colleagues would just have to
untell
you. Do you understand?” It was a threat she’d once heard on a drama and seemed very impressive coming from the formidable heroine.

Apparently it sounded far less impressive coming from her.

“You stay right there,” he said. “I’m calling my superior.”

“No, you’re not,” said Katya, and hit him in the side of the neck with Kane’s taser.

She was glad she’d had the foresight both to have it ready, and to lift her other hand from the metal staircase’s banister before using it. He had one hand on it, and she saw a couple of blue sparks leap between his knuckles and the metal. For an agonised second the technician shook and grimaced, then collapsed as the taser deactivated, falling into a heap across the steps.

Katya quickly checked his pulse, and was relieved to still find he had one. She hadn’t known quite what to expect from the taser, but she’d been hoping for a quick flutter of eyelids and a collapse into a dreamless sleep. What she’d actually got was a painful looking series of spasms, and the smell of burning hair in the air. Even the screen on the security lock had wavered in the taser’s electromagnetic field. That gave her an idea.

She set the hatch closing and, as soon as the locks had re-engaged, she tasered the card reader. The screen flashed on and off several times, then an ugly mass of random symbols came up and stayed there. It looked very broken to her.

She pocketed the taser and stepped over the technician. She considered dragging him down to the chamber floor and hiding him somewhere, but couldn’t help thinking she’d do him more harm than she already had if she tried. Besides, he was barely visible from the chamber exit.

She resisted the urge to run from the chamber, holding it down to a determined walk. She remembered when she’d passed herself off as a minor Yagizban official; that had gone reasonably well. Yes, she’d been caught, but not because her impersonation had been poor. All she had to do was look like she belonged.

She reached the side corridor that contained the sealed off access to the old facility without seeing even a single other person on the way, and this boosted her confidence enormously. It was only as she approached the door itself that it occurred to her that this was very much at odds with her experience when going the other way. Then she had seen several people in the hallways; that they were so empty now was a cause for suspicion, not comfort.

Four figures in FMA military uniforms turned the corner ahead of her as she reached the door to the DANGEROUS CORRIDORS. She would have attempted to bluff them by walking by if they hadn’t come to a concerted halt at the sight of her.

The lieutenant leading them pointed directly at her. “That’s Kuriakova.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

LITTLE FLAG

Katya didn’t hesitate. She drew the keystick, stabbed it into the lock, and was through the door before the startled marine troopers could even reach for their sidearms. She slammed the door behind her and was rewarded by the solid clicks of bolts being inserted into all four sides of the frame. There were heavy footfalls on the other side of the door, and the handle was wrenched up and down in frustrated fury from the other side.

On an impulse Katya placed the contact plate of the taser on the metal of the handle and triggered a charge. There was a cry of pain, and the sound of a fall. She moved away from the door just as she heard the cracks of maser bolts hitting the door. They didn’t penetrate, but it had been ridiculous using them against the metal of the door in the first place – the whole point of using masers was that they were as bad at penetrating metal as they were good at punching through flesh. This way a missed shot wouldn’t result in letting in the whole ocean.

Katya had the torch on and was running back the way she had come. At the same time, she was trying to think of a way out of Atlantis. The escape route she had been given was broken, and somehow the Feds had found out who she was.

Her first thought was that the Yagizban computer hack had failed, but then she realised that this could not be so. If it had failed, then the reader on the communications room would have interrogated the entry system, found she wasn’t supposed to be there, and refused to open.

Had somebody found the technician? Had he woken up within seconds of her leaving rather than minutes, and raised the alarm himself? But the empty corridors, if not a coincidence, suggested a quiet evacuation of the area had been taking place even while she’d been installing the Yagizban electronics unit.

None of it made sense. She was missing something.

Any further thoughts on the matter were interrupted by finding herself at the lift shaft. Three levels down was a gap in the ladder that she wouldn’t have tried to negotiate in full light and a drop of three metres onto a foam mattress. That she would be trying it in the deep shadows cast by a torch pointing almost everywhere except where it would do some good, and that the drop was five levels and finished in water that had, at the very least, a jagged section of ladder waiting beneath the surface, put her right off the idea.

Should she stay on the same level, then, or try her luck on one of the others she could reach from the lift shaft? She would have to prise the doors open, but doubted that would be too difficult. In a nearby office she found a chair, its seat broken, lying on its side. A minute’s work with her multi-tool’s screwdriver had a leg off. She slipped it into her bag and went back to the shaft.

Trusting to obtuse light and ageing architectural fittings with all the enthusiasm she had displayed last time, Katya stepped into the void and found the ladder with her hands and leading foot. The ladder creaked alarmingly under her weight, but obliged her by not coming away from the wall and dropping her eight levels into the inky waters that waited below. She paused; from somewhere she heard a loud bang that echoed around the walls of the abandoned level. They were through the door, and would be following the trail through the dirt soon enough right to the lift shaft. Fear spurring her, she started to climb.

One level didn’t seem to be enough, so she pushed on to the next. Here she climbed up far enough that she could step across to the concrete lintel below the door edge with one foot, her other still on the ladder. Bracing herself against the cool metal of the doors, she drew the chair leg from her bag and jammed it into the crack that separated them and heaved. The door slid over a centimetre or so, then stopped dead with solid certainty.

Katya glared at it as if it had personally insulted her, and leaned hard against the chair leg. She could see it bowing slightly under the force, but the lift door remained solid. Below her she could hear boots running, echoing, growing closer. The fear grew in her; they were almost there. In a moment they would be at the lift shaft, they would look up, and it would all be over. In desperation she put her body weight into it, pushing as hard as she humanly could in such a position. Something gave inside the door, the chair leg slid free, and she found herself thrown against the inner side of the left hand door. Her hands scrabbled hopelessly at the sheet steel for a moment, and then she fell, the chair leg falling down the shaft, ricocheting off the sides as it went, announcing her presence to all.

She cried out and grabbed at anything she could find. Nothing for a moment, then she crashed heavily against the concrete lintel, knocking the breath from her. Her hand found a structural stanchion beneath the lintel and she held on for her life.

A torch beam shone up at her from the open door two levels below her. “She’s here!” a male voice called. “I found her!”

The lift shaft was illuminated by another torch. Looking up, she could see the shaft in better detail than ever before. The door she had bounced off stood open perhaps thirty centimetres. It looked like whatever had been holding it shut had finally given way. She could see the ladder not far away. If she swung her right foot into it, she could be on it in a couple of seconds, another three or so to climb up to where she’d been a moment ago, step across, grab the door edges, open it, dive through. In fifteen seconds she could be running again.

“Shoot her,” said the lieutenant.

Katya realised she was never going to run again, because in fifteen seconds her corpse would be in the water, ten levels down.

There was nothing she could do. A half-formed thought that perhaps it would be better to fall than be shot and fall. At least she would be the one who made the final decision of her life.

“Belay that order!” A new voice, confident, authoritative, and angry. “Do not fire!”

“Sir!” she heard the lieutenant say, then they stepped away from the mouth of the shaft and she couldn’t make out anymore.

Then there was a distinct, “Yes, sir!” and the lieutenant was leaning out to look at her.

“Can you reach the ladder?”

“I think so,” she called back.

“Then do so. You have my gun at your back. If you attempt to escape, I will kill you without hesitation, Kuriakova. Do you understand?”

She understood very well. Moving slowly, she got her foot onto the ladder and slid her hands along the stanchion until she could reach the rungs. Here she rearranged her shoulder bag so that the strap was no longer across her chest, but only hung on one shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

“The strap’s caught on the rung,” she called back. “It’s alright. It’s free now.” She climbed down at half the speed she had ascended, giving the lieutenant no excuse to fire. When she reached the level where he waited, she stepped across and stumbled very deliberately. Her bag slid from her shoulder and fell down the shaft. “My torch!” she cried as she grabbed the doorframe, trying to give the impression that was all she was concerned about, and not that she was trying to get rid of any evidence that it might contain. A taser of Grubber manufacture would be hard enough to explain by itself.

Her upper arms were grabbed painfully hard and she was half lifted, half dragged out of the lift shaft, before being dumped on the filthy floor of the corridor.

She looked up and found herself ringed by the four Federal troops she had seen in the corridor. Then she saw the fifth man and her heart sank. He was one of the Secor agents who had interrogated her after Shurygin was shot. She’d always had a feeling that she might cross paths with Secor again sooner or later, but had been very much hoping for “later.”

“You owe me your life, Ms Kuriakova,” said the agent.

Ringed in harsh torch light, she squinted up at him. “I’d rather they’d killed me.”

Her arms were dragged behind her and she felt restraint strips being wound around her wrists. She started to struggle, but they were too strong. A fabric bag was pulled down over her head and secured around her neck.

“Yes,” admitted the agent. “You’ll find yourself thinking that often over the next few days.”

They led her back to the door into the Beta grade section. When they reached the door, they had her lift her feet high and she thought it must be because they had blown down or cut through the door, and there was still a bit of it in the bottom of the frame. She never knew for sure.

After that, she had no idea where they took her. The corridors were silent and she guessed they were still evacuated. They took her to another level in a lift, along more corridors, and nobody spoke. It was only when they took her through another door and the sound ambience seemed to change that she realised that she was now in a room, and not a large one. She was put in a chair and she felt straps being secured around her upper arms even though her wrists were still restrained. They double checked her wrists, then she heard the door close.