Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) (24 page)

“Yes, she does. She’s painted it up a bit, and it’s not a complete suit – the torso section mainly – but, yes, it’s definitely not Russalkin.”

“How does she look in it?”

“I bet she looks
awesome
!” said Alina, and they all laughed. It seemed, Katya thought, that Tasya’s fan club extended even beyond the Yagizban, who certainly held her in awe.

Yet, slow as the journey was, it still had to come to an end. Katya found the shadow of her uncertain future deepening around her again, and her guards were sorry too, for they had come to like one another. They spent the last six hours of the approach tidying up the inside of the shuttle, which had begun to look like a dormitory, chatting about almost anything but their destination. Alina said at least they’d been going about as fast as the shuttle could manage; the shadowing warboat or boats would only have been making a fraction of their usual cruising speed. She mimed the helmsman pushing forward an imaginary throttle control a tiny bit and then slowly tapping his fingers while wearing an expression of slack-jawed boredom. She snapped back to herself, announced “Three days later!” and instantly returned to the same expression and finger tapping. Oksana and Katya laughed and Alina joined in.

Katya decided not to mention how glad she was that she hadn’t murdered the pair of them earlier, no matter how kindly meant the comment was.

With an hour to go, the shuttle was in pristine order. Officers Volkova and Shepitko were in their duty uniforms, masers holstered. The prisoner, Katya Kuriakova, was in her yellow convict uniform sitting in restraints opposite to them. While the scene was very similar to that of three days earlier, the tone was very different. Officer Alina Shepitko had apologised when one of Prisoner Kuriakova’s wrists was nipped by its restraining strap as it was tightened. Where once they had glared at her, now they cast her sympathetic glances.

“It’ll be OK,” Officer Oksana Volkova told the prisoner. “Just keep your head down. Don’t piss off the guards. We’ll give you a great report when we’re debriefed. Model prisoner. They’ll go easy on you.”

Katya smiled. It was a weak, unconvincing smile, for she was touched by the kindness of her escorts, but she also knew what was waiting for her, and she was afraid. “Thanks, Oksa… Officer Volkova. I appreciate that. They’re not bringing me to the Deeps just to lock me away, though.” Her smile dissolved away altogether. “They’re taking me there because it has the main Secor interrogation facility. They’re going to torture me, and then they’re going to kill me.” She made a half sob sound in her throat and looked at them without hope. “I’m really scared.”

“No,” said Alina. “No, they won’t do that.”

“Two Secor agents have told me that is exactly what they’re going to do.” She tried to smile to reassure them that it was alright, none of this was their fault, but the muscles in her face twisted it into a grimace.

The shuttle carried out the approach to the Deeps perfectly, handing over to the prison station’s drone control for the final docking. The screen on the forward bulkhead flickered from the status display to an image from the shuttle’s nose-camera, enhanced and augmented with sonar, transponder, and positional data to summon the great bulk of the notorious prison out of its submarine gloom.

It was vast. She knew it would be, but seeing the scale metrics define it, brought it home to her. The only other thing she’d ever seen that huge had been the Yagizban floating settlement
FP-1
. The Deeps was not quite as big as that artificial island, but at a little over half a kilometre in diameter and eighty metres or so high, it was big enough. It was also, in a small irony, of Yagizban design, an artefact from the days when the FMA fondly believed that the Yagizban were happy with Federal rule.

The Deeps was unique, a tethered station; essentially a great submarine without impellers, its ballast tanks adjusted to be just on the positive side of neutral buoyancy. They could plainly see the metre-thick cables running from the boom-mounted ballast tanks down to huge pitons driven into the narrow plateau over which it hung, holding the prison in place.

“It was supposed to be a mobile originally, but they couldn’t get it to move fast enough,” said Alina, unable to keep the awe from her voice.

“Why would they want a mobile prison?” asked Oksana.

Alina grimaced at her. “It wasn’t
supposed
to be a prison, stupid. It was supposed to be a military base. Rather than scrap it, they made it into the Deeps.” She turned her attention back to the screen. “Nobody’s
ever
escaped from it.”

“Good to know,” said Katya in a small voice.

Alina blushed.

The airlock cycled out the water, the doors opened and Prisoner Kuriakova stepped through, her hands in restraining tapes behind her back, followed a few paces behind by her guards. Four prison guards were waiting, along with a man in the uniform of a colonel of the marines, and a woman who looked so commonplace, inoffensive and every-day, that she might as well have had “Secor” tattooed across her forehead.

Officer Shepitko saluted the colonel and offered him her memo pad. “Prisoner Katya Kuriakova, sir. Please sign.”

The colonel took the pad, signed it with the stylus and placed his thumb on the pad’s reader to confirm receipt of the prisoner. As he did so, his gaze never left Katya.

Shepitko took the pad back and stowed it in her jerkin pocket. “Thank you, sir. You’ll have our reports on the journey within the hour.” Katya knew what was going to be in the reports; she’d helped the officers write much of them.

“There’s no hurry,” said the colonel. Katya didn’t like his voice at all. She’d been expecting something gruff and military, but instead he spoke quietly with an undercurrent of subtle menace.

She’d once seen a domovoi, a type of Russalkin eel with short horns jutting out on either side of its jaws. Its body was as thick as a man’s, and its teeth could penetrate a light ADS. Something about the cast of its face, however, gave it an undeserved air of intelligence. Domovoi lay in small caves, their heads at the entrance, watching the world go by with an expression of mild interest. When anything edible made the mistake of coming too close, however, it generally didn’t last long enough to realise the error.

There was something of the domovoi about the colonel, and Katya decided it would be wise not to antagonise him unless absolutely necessary.

“No hurry at all,” he continued. “You’ll be shown to your quarters and you can finish your reports once you’ve settled in.”

“Settled in, sir?” Officer Shepitko shot an uncertain glance back at Officer Volkova. “Our orders were to return to Atlantis as soon as possible.”

“We’re with Atlantis Base Security,” said Volkova, a little unnecessarily.

“You’ve been seconded,” said the colonel.

Shepitko started to say something, but a look from the colonel made her response die in her throat. “Yes, sir,” she said, saluted, and stepped back.

Behind her, Katya could hear Volkova whisper urgently, “But we
can’t
stay here! My mother and father are expecting me back before the end of the week!” Shepitko shushed her, and they fell silent.

The colonel was unconcerned by the domestic worries of a couple of junior officers. He walked up to Katya and stopped a half step away, looking down on her like a biologist with an interesting new specimen to dissect.

“I am Colonel Radomir Senyavin, governor of the Deeps. We are used to dealing with the worst of the worst here, prisoner. You are not even close to that. You will never escape. You will never leave. Put those thoughts from your mind now. If you are a good prisoner, you will grow old and die here. If not,” something like a smile flickered momentarily around his lips, and Katya realised that this was a man who enjoyed fulfilling threats, “if not, then you will be denied the opportunity to grow old first.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

HARD TIME

They called it “induction.” Katya had taken this as meaning much the same as it might if she were being introduced into a new workplace – where the toilets were, what time lunch was, perhaps a “safety in the workplace” lecture. The Deeps’ induction programme was very different.

First they shaved her hair down to stubble. Then, under the emotionless supervision of two female guards, she was stripped, searched, and “showered” with a high pressure hose. The whole ritual was intended to dehumanise and humiliate her, and succeeded magnificently in the latter.

They made a show of bagging her old clothes “for incineration,” watched while she dried herself with a towel that did its job about as well as a piece of plastic sacking, and then gave her a new uniform with her name already stencilled on the left breast. Beneath
Kuriakova, K
was the word
TRAITOR
.

She pointed at it. “You must be joking! The other prisoners will kill me if they see this!”

One of the guards shrugged. “Shouldn’t have committed treason then, should you?”

“I’ve not been charged, never mind convicted!”

“I don’t care.”

The other guard had suddenly taken an interest in proceedings. She walked up to where Katya stood naked with the bundle of clothes in her arms. The guard’s baton swept out of its belt loop and into Katya’s ribs in a practiced arc. She fell heavily to the tiled floor, dropping her clothes and gasping.

“When you speak to any officer or official in this station, prisoner,” said the guard standing over Katya, “every sentence you say finishes with
sir
if you’re talking to a male,
ma’am
if it’s a female. Failure to comply is subject to punishment. Do you understand?”

Katya could only clutch her side and sob with pain. The guard raised her baton. “
Do you understand
?”

“Yes,” Katya whispered. Then quickly added, “Ma’am. Yes, ma’am.”

The guard lowered her baton and smirked at her colleague. “You’re going to be a good prisoner,” she said to Katya. “Aren’t you?”

Katya spent the next couple of days trying her very best to be a “good prisoner.” Not because she had submitted to the Deeps’ regime, she told herself, but simply because she didn’t want to draw any more attention to herself than the word
TRAITOR
already attracted, and because she didn’t want to spend all her time aching from the bruises the guards handed out for the slightest infringement of the rules. There were a lot of rules. She told herself that was why she was trying to be a model prisoner, but sometimes after lights out when she lay in her bunk, she wondered if she was just fooling herself. Perhaps the Deeps was slowly beating her into a compliant inmate, after all.

Her cell was much like those in a cell hotel – a dormitory wing consisted of a hallway with two layers of cells laid into each wall. Each evening the women in her wing sounded off like troops as they filed in, climbing into their individual cells, the transparent doors sliding shut and locking behind them. If they had to use the toilet in the night, they used a call buzzer mounted into their cell’s wall. They were then escorted to the end of the hall where they would be let into the “surveillance head,” a toilet with a security camera watching the inmate. After her first experience of it, Katya tried to be sure never to have to use it again.

Two things surprised her about the first few days of her incarceration. Firstly, she was not the only one with
TRAITOR
on her uniform. They weren’t as common as
THIEF
or even
MURDERER
, but there were five or six just in her wing. She managed to talk with a couple of them, and told them what a relief it was that she wasn’t the only one. She had never even heard of anybody being convicted of treason, yet here they were. One of them was an angular woman called Dominika Netrebko. She could seem washed out and waiting for death one second, then vibrant and angry, burning with life the next.

“The FMA has a broad definition of treason. I used to produce news programmes. One day I put forward an idea for a thread about how long martial law had been in place and maybe we could step down from it. Next day I get a visit from Secor. I’ve been here for four years now.”

“I don’t understand why your trial wasn’t in the news,” said Katya.

“Trial? What a quaint idea. ‘Traitor’ on your uniform means you’ve never had a trial.”

“How is that legal?”

“It’s martial law, they have military fiat. Do you know what that means? It means they can do anything they like. The Alpha Pluses, they may swan around in expensive clothes and look like senior administrators. But there isn’t a single one of them that doesn’t carry a rank and have a fancy military uniform hanging in the closet.”

One thing she didn’t expect to trouble her, yet it did, was the construction of the Deeps. The vast majority of ocean habitations were hollowed out from the rocky sides of Russalka’s innumerable drowned mountains. It wasn’t easy work, but it was straightforward enough to melt out a cave using plasma or fusion bores, seal it off, drain it, and then continue the work in relative comfort.

The Deeps was not like that at all. Alina had been right about its origins as an experimental mobile station. When that didn’t work out, the project was cancelled when the hull was almost finished. The need for a prison had been growing for some time, however, and it seemed a shame to scrap such a nice construction when instead it could have its drive rooms given new functions, be filled with serious criminals, sunk into the black waters, and tethered below the test depths of most civilian boats.

The Deeps became a terror to those who broke the law, and a nightmare to those who might.

To Katya it was both of these things, but also a minor niggling irritation. She had grown up living in excavated settlements and travelling around in submarines. The Deeps behaved like a settlement, but felt like a submarine. Sometimes she was sure she could feel the deck moving beneath her feet as the ocean flow drew the facility more strongly against one set of tethers than the others. It bothered her subconsciously, as if some small part of her was expecting the Deeps to one day arrive at some unknown destination.