Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

Katya thought for a moment and said, “How about this? I pay, and you give the money to the Veterans’ Welfare Fund? Then we’re all happy.”

The waiter nodded and accepted her payment. “You’re a good woman, Ms Kuriakova,” he said. “I’m proud to have met you.”

He returned to the counter, leaving Katya feeling wretched. The warm happiness the coffee had given her had all but burnt away. Guilt was growing within her. “I’m proud to have met you.” Not for long, you won’t be .

Out on the corridors again, Katya decided that she should just get on with her mission as soon as possible. The longer she delayed, the longer she would dwell on what she had to do and what it would result in, and the greater the guilt would grow. She doubted she would decide not to do it for practical or moral grounds, but the possibility that such guilt would make a coward of her haunted her.

She needed to harden herself somehow, to find some way to make herself as ruthless as she needed to be. Unbidden, the image of Tasya Morevna materialised in her imagination. Was this what had happened to her? She had to make a hard decision, and the only way she could go through with it was to make herself into a monster? Perhaps it was the only way Katya was going to be able to do this. She smiled to herself; she had never expected to find herself earnestly wondering, “What would the Chertovka do?” A war criminal, perhaps. A cold-blooded killer, certainly. Oh, Katya, what wonderful inspirational figures you worship these days. The pirate and the She-Devil .

The door was on one of the less grand shopping corridors, small permanent stalls lining it on both sides. Perhaps a third of them were locked up, the businesses within them gone, the signs removed or painted out. They had probably sold silly fripperies, at least by Russalkin standards, and the economies of war had starved them of revenue. It was sad, but convenient, as the door she was heading for was between two such abandoned stalls and thereby hidden from casual observation.

Exercising the skill of a professional criminal in giving the impression that she had every right to do such a thing, Katya walked to the door, tapped the sequence Tasya had taught her into the lock pad, and entered. The door clicked behind her, and the mission was on.

Not for the first time, Katya wondered just where Kane got all these pieces of information and, not for the first time, she thought it just as well she didn’t ask. Door codes, blueprints, schedules, procedures… he had touched upon so many things in his briefing that he had no right to know, yet mysteriously did. His network of informants and fixers ranged wide and their services ran deep, but there was one thing they could not provide him with, and that one thing was why she was there.

Katya was in darkness. She had been told not to switch on the lights as there was a chance the power usage in that area might be noticed. In the moment she had the door open, however, she had seen the electric torch sitting on the floor inside the disused access corridor, just as Kane had said it would be. She felt for it now, found it, and switched it on. In its light, she took her identity card from her pocket and examined it.

It had been slightly disappointing to discover that Kane didn’t really need her for the mission; he needed her security clearance. Beta Plus was a grade usually only entrusted to senior military and high ranking officials. Most people had Gamma ratings and might go their whole lives without even seeing a blue Beta card. In a purely practical sense, it was a greater honour than her medal, her Hero of Russalka decoration in its beautiful wooden box. That was aboard the Vodyanoi now, in a locked drawer of Kane’s desk where he’d put it for safekeeping. It wasn’t so much the medal she treasured, but — when her disgrace inevitably came — she couldn’t bear to think of them taking away the box.

She started to follow the route she had memorised through the forgotten corridors. Not that it was entirely necessary to trust to her memory — whoever had prepared this part of her journey in advance had left clear tracks in the grime and dust. It was faintly disappointing that she had memorised the directions when somebody had left a trail that any fool could have followed. Out of sheer bloody-mindedness, she primarily used the directions, only glancing at the disturbed layer of dirt on the floor to corroborate them.

She was not amused when she discovered the route took her into a lift shaft, the doors braced open with a misappropriated hydraulic jack. Her instructions had merely been, “Climb three levels” at this point. That skipped the trifling fact that this would mean stepping across a void that was too deep for her torch’s beam to reach the bottom, but which — judging by the echoes of lapping water beneath her — would end in a fairly considerable splash should she fall.

Muttering foul curses down on the heads of Kane, Tasya, and whichever genius had reconnoitred the route yet failed to mention it involved gymnastics, Katya shifted her bag so the weight fell on the small of her back and squared up to step across to the maintenance ladder running up the left of the shaft.

She stepped back from the edge and looked at her torch; it was too big to hold between her teeth, so she would either have to make the step with only one hand free or in pitch darkness. She ruminated for a moment, then picked up a piece of broken ceramic from the floor. It looked like it had once been part of an electrical insulator, probably something very important in the running of the lift. She doubted the thing would ever run again even if it was powered up.

She tossed the ceramic chip into the shaft and waited, counting off the seconds. The splash when it came seemed very distant. She did a couple of quick calculations in her head and made a guess that there were five levels to fall before hitting water. Even better, the fatalistic part of her mind told her, if she managed to climb the ladder and then slipped, she’d have eight levels to fall, and wouldn’t that be fun?

Finally, she clipped the torch into one of the side-pockets of her shoulder bag so that it shone onto the wall to her right. It wasn’t perfect, but at least the reflected light was better than nothing. Rallying her courage, she shuffled to the very edge of the shaft, took a deep breath in and out, and stepped out into nothingness.

The shadows played hell with her depth perception, but she had made a point of gauging the distance when the ladder had been under the full beam of her torch, and she trusted to that knowledge rather than the shifting shapes cast before her now. It worked; her leading foot came down heavily on a rung a split second before her hands found the verticals and held on firmly. It was just as well she did, because the firm blow her foot had delivered to its rung seemed to disengage something in the ladder’s structure that was not supposed to disengage. Some catch or ratchet or bolt or screw had been quietly corroding away there for years, and all it took was one good thump to make it fail.

There was a metallic plink! , sharp and final. She hesitated, confused by the sound echoing from the concrete sides of the shaft, and then felt her lower body moving away from the wall. The ladder was constructed from two-metre lengths and while the length her hands were gripping was secure, the one her feet had landed on was anything but. The uppermost stanchion connecting the section to the wall had broken cleanly and now the length of ladder from her knees down was levering out into the shaft, pivoting at its lowest bracket.

Katya gasped and gripped the uprights even more fiercely as she felt the ladder beneath her push her legs away from the wall. She tried momentarily to keep her feet on the rung, but the free end of the ladder section was pushing painfully against her kneecaps and, a moment later, she felt her feet slide off the metal.