Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

Kane had unclipped his personal torch from his harness and was angling it, trying to look through the window. As Katya and Tasya approached, he suddenly stepped back from the glass as if startled.

“This is a mistake,” he said quickly, the words tumbling over one another. “I made a mistake bringing you here. I… I… There’ll be somewhere else here. Somewhere else for you to see. Not here, though. I never anticipated… We must go back.”

“What have you found?” said Tasya.

“It’s flooded in there. You can’t see anything. We’ll go back to the main corridor.”

“You’re a miserable liar, Havilland,” said Tasya. She sounded like somebody getting ready to lose her temper. “What’s in there?”

“Please, Tasya, I’m begging you. Don’t look.”

And he was begging her. Not on his knees, but plucking miserably at her arm as she strode past him to squint at the thick armour glass. There was condensation on it and she rubbed angrily at it with her sleeve, before putting her face close to the glass. After a moment, she copied Kane’s action in unclipping her torch and shining it close to the surface away from her face to cut down reflection.

Katya looked at Kane, but he barely acknowledged her, backing away from the windows in distress and horror.

“Oh, gods,” said Tasya, quietly. She stood, rooted to the spot by what she could see. Then she extinguished her torch and walked to one side. “They knew,” she said to Kane. “How could they not know?” She was calm now, an icy calm that scared Katya in ways that a towering rage could never have done. “The operation’s cancelled, Kane. Forget it.”

“Tasya…”

“Forget it, Kane. It’s war. It’s just war. Until we’re all dead. Just war.” Without a second glance, she clipped the torch back on her harness, switched it on, and walked back the way they had come.

“Tasya!” Kane shouted after her. “Think what you’re saying! Please! You can’t go back to your superiors and tell them to scrub this!” Tasya didn’t slow her walk at all, and Kane became angry. “I told you what would happen if you lost your temper! What would happen if you threatened the operation! I warned you!”

She didn’t stop. “That you’d kill me? Then perhaps you should have come out with a gun.”

His bluff called, Kane was reduced to running after her, calling at her to stop, to think, to talk.

And Katya was left alone, watching the bobbing light of the orb disappear down the corridor.

She looked across the corridor, at the dark windows. She could see the reflection of her own torch in the one directly opposite to her, but nothing else. There couldn’t simply be bodies on the other side, she thought. Kane had seen enough death, Tasya had caused enough death that it would take much more to make them react like that.

Katya looked down the corridor again. Kane’s light had vanished altogether.

She was very aware that she had a decision to make, and that once made it would be irrevocable. If she didn’t look through the window, they would soon leave here, probably forever, and she would never again have the opportunity to do so. But, if she did look, whatever she saw could never be unseen.

Kane said she needed to know something, something she would find here. If she looked, would it be simple curiosity, or because of a true need to know? It hardly mattered; what had happened here was as much her business as anyone else’s. Ignorance might be blissful, but bliss was not something she could look for when lives were being lost all around her.

With an ugly feeling that it wasn’t curiosity but rather some awful spiritual masochism that drew her towards the glass, an unsuspected and unwelcome taste for martyrdom, she walked slowly forward, unclipping her torch as she did so.

She hesitated then, a small beat of the passing present when she argued with herself one last time against looking, and lost. She pressed the torch against the glass as she had seen Kane and Tasya do, and looked into the flooded room.

At first she could make out nothing at all, the plankton and debris in the water close to the glass being the first thing she focused upon. With an effort, she looked beyond it, trying to make out what was so terrible in the room. It had been shocking enough to make Tasya blanch, which had led Katya to expect something obviously horrifying, but she could make out very little.

The room was painted in white, or at least some pale colour, and she could just see another door in the far wall. Unlike the door to her right, this one hung open. Having so many waterproof doors probably proved counterproductive, she thought. All that whirling the locking wheel one way, heaving the door open, climbing through, slamming it shut, whirling the wheel to relock the door into its frame — people were just people and that sort of irritating routine was exactly the first kind of thing that people got sloppy about. Before long they’d be leaving doors open because “I’ll be going back in a minute” and that would become “I’ll be going back in ten minutes” or an hour and, before long, people were forgetting to close them at all. When the Feds attacked and the base was inundated with water, probably half the doors were standing open.

There didn’t seem to be any obvious clues what the room was for, however. There were a few boxes or metal frames of some sort lying around, maybe as many as twenty. There was a lot of debris floating in the small trapped pockets of air that still existed in the deep ridges that some builder had cut with a fusion torch while squaring the curved sides of the room off in an attempt to make it more room-like, but whatever it was floating up there was hard to make out. Some sheets of material mixed in, perhaps, but the rest was just irregular forms. No bodies, she was relieved to see, or at least none within visible range.

And yet… part of her was telling her to move away, to rejoin the others. That small voice telling her to go, a voice cracking with horror, as if she was looking but not seeing, as if she was refusing to comprehend.

She wished for a long time afterwards that she had obeyed the small voice rather than concentrating harder on what lay beyond the glass. She wished that she had obeyed her instinct and not focused her intellect.

Katya angled her torch’s beam down to illuminate directly under the window, where several of the boxes she had noticed had been swept into an untidy pile by the flood water. The most mundane everyday object can be rendered exotic and unusual by placing it in a different context. The boxes, or crates, or frames or whatever they were seemed dull and inconsequential precisely because she had recognised them as soon as she had seen them, and the feeling associated with that stimulus was disinterest. Now she looked at them again, however, she consciously recognised them, and then the ramifications of their presence, and the identity of the room.

Her mouth fell open. She wanted to cry out, but pure horror froze the sound in her throat. She stepped back away from the glass, her mind filling in every element of what had occurred here in ruthless detail, her imagination acting it all out in sadistic clarity. She thought of the dark shapes floating in the air pockets in the ceiling and knew exactly what they were. It even explained why this room of all the rooms had windows facing out into a dead end corridor. The objects on the floor, twenty or so of them, were not simply boxes, or crates, or steel frames. They were cots.

Katya was looking into a flooded nursery.

She found Kane and Tasya close by the junction with the main corridor. Tasya was standing with crossed arms listening while Kane spoke quietly to her, his nervous hands speaking more loudly than his voice. He turned as Katya approached, took one look at her pallid complexion, and said, “You looked.”