Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) (27 page)

“That’s wise, I suppose. What have you been talking about in your interrogation sessions, then?”

“Nothing. I read a bad book, she listens to music. Usually Poliakov, although she listened to some Kapitsa last time. Then she doses me with something to make it look I’ve been undergoing chemical questioning and calls the guards. If I’m lucky, I don’t throw up in the lift.”

“You have all the fun.”

“Want to swap?”

Tasya smiled wryly, and shook her head. “Sorry about that. I wasn’t expecting her to use interrogations as a way of communicating with you. It makes sense, but I thought she’d use intermediates. I can see why she didn’t. Her way’s far more secure. Anyway, next time you’re in with her, find out what the plan is. The sooner we’re out of here, the better. The
Vodyanoi
’s waiting in the Enclaves for word. She’ll need at least three days’ notice if she’s going to be here to pick us up.”

“How are we going to tell them?”

“We’ve got a senior Secor agent aboard this dump on our side and you’re wondering how we can get a message out? Come on, Kuriakova. Use your imagination.”

Katya accepted the logic of that, but something else was bothering her. “If the White Death is supposed to be planning all this, why are you here, Tasya?”

“Two reasons. One, because you’d never have accepted a Secor interrogator’s word without some assurance that she was telling the truth.”

“I might have.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Two, I’m here to expedite things once the plan gets under way.”

Katya knew Tasya too well to see “expedite” as anything other than a euphemism for “kill anyone who gets in the way.”

“I really hope you don’t have to do any of that.”

“Expediting?”

“You know what I mean.”

Tasya looked at her, all levity gone. “That very much depends on how good Durova’s plan is.”

Katya nodded. Then she asked, “Is she really a doctor?”

Tasya’s grim smile returned. “With specialities in psychology and pharmacology. Kane tells me that on Earth, doctors have to make an oath. Starts with, ‘First, do no harm.’ Maybe we should have something like that on Russalka, too.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EXTRAORDINARY FREEDOM

The next interrogation session involved the reading of no further adventures of firm-chinned heroes of the FMA seeing off enemies of the state, and not nearly so much music either. Once she had confirmed that Tasya had spoken to Katya about her, Dr Durova said, “Good, because I’ve already sent the message to bring the
Vodyanoi
on station.” Then she set her recorder to play some keyboard pieces by Poliakov.

“You’ve done what?” said Katya. Tasya had said it would only take the
Vodyanoi
three days to reach them. Surely the escape couldn’t be happening so soon?

“We need to move ahead as soon as possible. The governor is behaving oddly. I think he is suffering from stress.” She steepled her fingers, every centimetre the psychiatrist. “I offered to talk to him. He declined.”

Katya couldn’t help but look at the medical case, full of things specifically intended to make the patient feel a great deal worse. She could sympathise with the governor’s decision.

“I detect growing paranoia in Governor Senyavin. He has become withdrawn, stays in his office throughout the day, and rarely speaks to his subordinates, just handing down increasingly petty edicts. At the least, I would expect him to impose changes on the prison’s routine. At worst, he may decide he does not trust his senior staff and change them. It would be difficult for him to displace me – he has no direct authority with Secor – but it isn’t impossible.”

“Yes, I see what you mean, then. It would…” An ugly thought occurred to Katya. “
Paranoid
, you said?”

“Yes. It’s come on quite quickly, which leads me to conclude that either the FMA is putting him under pressure of which I am unaware, or there are problems in his personal life that are creating stress in his professional one.”

“Or something else. There have been some odd things happening in the stations, doctor. Secor is keeping them quiet, but they’re happening all the same.”

Durova raised an eyebrow and took up her memo pad. “Perhaps I’ve been lax in reading the general Secor alerts. So little of its business directly affects the Deeps, except what walks in through the airlock.” She touched the pad’s screen a few times, and cocked her head to one side in evident interest. “You’re right. Marked increases in psychotic fugues experienced. They’ve put it down to a stress disorder. I find that hard to believe. There was nothing like this in the war against Earth.” She scrolled through the reports, tapped in a couple of search parameters, and read in silence for a couple of minutes.

“Some nonsense about the possibility of it being due to some sort of Yagizban biological or chemical weapon. Delivered how, exactly? Besides, in confined environments like ours, the chance of them biting their creators is too great. The FMA has considered and dropped any number of viral and chemical projects down the years for exactly that reason. No. There’s something else going on. If Secor command could concentrate its faculties on finding a common thread between these occurrences instead of just covering them up, we might have some idea of what’s causing them.”

Abruptly she shook her head and put the pad down. “This is a discussion for some other time. You need to be briefed on the escape. The secret of any successful operation is simplicity; therefore my plan is very simple. I bring in the Chertovka for questioning… yes?”

Katya raised a hand. “She doesn’t really
like
being called the Chertovka. At least, not to her face. You might want to get into the habit of thinking of her as Colonel Morevna.”

The doctor considered this for a second. “Very well, I bring in Colonel Morevna for questioning and have her put in the holding cell next to this one. Then while she ‘stews,’ I have you brought in for your interrogation. I call an emergency lockdown, release Morevna, and the three of us make our way to the escape pod at the end of the corridor. We leave in it, and are picked up by the
Vodyanoi
, which should reach its surveillance position in the next few hours.”

“Next few..? It takes three days to get here.”

Dr Durova looked at Katya as if she were slightly stupid. “I sent the message to come three days ago.”

“What?” Katya would have liked to raise her hands in an expression of surprise, but the manacles held by the staple on the table-top prevented it. “But I hadn’t even seen Tasya about you then!”

“I knew she would confirm my story, Katya. Why wait?”

Which left Katya at an impasse. Indeed, why wait?

Keen to not look like a complete idiot, Katya turned her attention to finding problems with the plan. “What about the guards?”

“Both Morevna and I shall be armed. The guard room is in the opposite direction to the pod access, and it is unlikely we will even see the guards. If they attempt to intervene, we will kill them.”

Katya did not like the way she said it so easily.
First, do no harm
. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. You can get a couple of guns in here?”

“I could get an entire armoury in here. I am a senior ranking officer of the Security Organisation directorate. It will not be a problem.” Durova looked at her, and Katya was very aware of the analytical processes going on inside the interrogator’s head. “I won’t get one for you,” she said finally. “You show too much compassion to be reliable in a gunfight.”

Katya felt slightly stung by that, although she had a feeling it was almost a compliment. “I don’t like guns,” she said, and moved on quickly. “How will the
Vodyanoi
know the pod’s been released? Oh, wait. I can answer that myself. The pod’ll be transmitting a distress signal and a sonar pulse to aid detection, won’t it? That’s automatic.”

“Any other questions? Really, Katya, all you have to do is as you’re told.”

Katya was beginning to think this was less a “rescue,” and more a “recovery.” Fine – if they were so sure all she had to do was follow them around and keep her mouth shut then that was what she would do. “Tasya said the same thing.”

“Tasya is right. All done then?”

It was a simple plan, and it would probably have worked. They would never know.

The first hint that all was not well was when the next day was declared an “Extraordinary Freedom Day.” Not only would it actually last all day and not just an hour, but the doors were opened between the prisoners’ sectors. For the first time, the male prisoners would mix with the females. The guards withdrew from the wings on the governor’s command, but they were clearly unhappy about what such an event might do to discipline.

Katya found herself a quiet corner and prepared to wait the day out. Male inmates started appearing in the wing within minutes, and she didn’t like the look of them at all. It seemed the culture in the male wings was very different from the female; whereas the women generally just accepted their incarceration philosophically and continued to act much as they had in their free lives, the men had adopted behaviours that would have been entirely unacceptable in the corridors of a settlement. Tattooing was unknown on Russalka, but the men seemed to have re-adopted it as some sort of tribal ritual. Katya couldn’t even guess what they were using for ink, and in many cases it seemed ink hadn’t been used at all, resulting in scarification. She thought it looked hideous and alien, and the men scared her. She was very relieved when Tasya found her.

“What is
wrong
with the men?” said Katya. “Why have they done that to themselves?”

“Fear,” said Tasya, her disgust plain. “They pretend all this machismo and then tattoo themselves to fit in and to show loyalty to one gang or another. If they weren’t scared, they wouldn’t do it. If they actually had any guts, they wouldn’t need to. But they’re animals, and animals need a pack.”

They looked around the wing with disquiet. The atmosphere was becoming tenser by the second. Most of the women were in for non-violent crimes, and even the murderers had used non-violent methods more often than not – a dash of poison here, a sabotaged life support unit there. The men, it seemed, liked to use their hands, and almost every uniform bore the word
MURDERER
.

“One of the old timers in my wing says she’s never heard of an ‘Extraordinary Freedom Day,’” said Tasya. “And she’s been here for fifteen years. This is insane, Katya. They’ll have a riot before the end of the day.”

“What about the plan?” asked Katya in a half-whisper. It was hardly necessary to whisper at all – the sound of chatter was becoming deafening.

“The plan… That, I am worried about. I don’t like this, and I really don’t like the timing. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I’m not fond of ‘maybe.’ I can’t decide if this will help us or hinder us. I’m tending towards the latter. We should postpone the escape.”

“But the
Vodyanoi
’s waiting for us!”

“It can wait a bit longer. Just a day. Kane will hang around for up to a week, depending on how hot the surrounding water gets with Fed boats.”

Across from them, one of the male inmates who had been talking to a couple of the more impressionable girls from Katya’s wing was pushed aside by another man. There was some terse language, and a punch was thrown. “Fifteen minutes. That’s all it took.” Tasya looked up at the security cameras that were swivelling to lock onto the fight. The inmates called them “cameras” to try to make them seem less threatening – the camera was actually only a tiny part of the device. Most of it was a maser. “Come on, then. A warning shot. At least use the directional speaker to break it up.”

But the camera/gun did neither. It just watched the fight as it developed, now drawing in more men from the original antagonists’ respective gangs.

Katya noticed a lot of the women looking up at the cameras with confused expressions. It had always been explained in terrifying detail what would happen if any prisoner laid hands upon another and, now that maser bolts were not raining down into the rapidly developing brawl, it was as if righteous believers in a wrathful god had just discovered that the atheists had been right all along.

Then, God spoke. Or, at least, the public address system hummed into life with its usual introductory three notes to gain the attention of the inmates. At the same time the main display screens changed from their usual image of the Federal Penal Office logotype to show Governor Senyavin at his desk. He was flanked to his right by the head of security, a man whose name Katya had never heard but who wore a major’s uniform, and to his right by Dr Durova. The major was looking red in the face, like a man who’d just been overruled in an argument. The doctor looked even paler and more drawn than usual. Only the governor seemed relaxed, even pleased.

“Inmates,” he said, and his voice boomed into every corner and crevice of the facility, bringing an end to fights that the notice announcement chimes had not.

Senyavin paused, and smiled beatifically out of the screen.

“Inmates. Today is a truly extraordinary day, a propitious day, a day that may well live in history. I want to share with you, with all of you, a few deep truths about our existence here on Russalka, a few revelations that I have recently been blessed by, and that will light all our paths in what must follow.” He clasped his hands together and continued. “I would like you all to ask yourselves a very important question: why are we here?”

“Because we got caught!” shouted one of the men who’d only recently been fighting. Those around him laughed, even those from the opposing gang.

“Why are we here on this world? Russalka got along perfectly well for untold millions of years all by itself. What did we bring? We brought ourselves. We brought filth. We brought evil. We have taken from this world, and we have given… nothing. Nothing but pollution and corruption and the cancer we call
humanity
. Oh, we speak of high aims and morality and such, but really, look at us. We are just a virus that spreads across planets. But, and here is the vital point, at least we are a virus that may recognise ourselves as such. I have a dream, a recurring dream. In it, I see us for what we are, a pestilence, and I see you, the inmates of this foul, pus-filled abscess it pleases us to call a correctional facility, as a particularly malignant strain.”