Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

With surprisingly little noise, the ladder section fell away quickly enough to snap its connections to the next section down, and dropped down the shaft with the quietest sound of sheering air that ended with a small splash as it landed vertically five levels below, slicing cleanly through the dark, waiting water.

“Oh, shit,” said Katya in a small voice. Her hands were starting to slide down the ladder verticals.

Making an instant decision that certainly saved her life, she released her right hand’s grip and slapped it onto the first rung she could find. Her left hand followed suit, but this time she reached up to grab the next rung up. Using the panic-borne adrenalin to power her screaming muscles, her feet scrambling at the wall to find whatever footholds they could, she progressed up the ladder in a series of short, staccato pull-and-grabs until a foot found a rung and she was able to pause, relatively safe.

Now reaction set in, and she felt cold sweat prickle across her even as her muscles seemed to weaken. She had to make the most of the dwindling strength the near fall had given her, and used it to drive herself up the ladder, not thinking of anything but the next rung, and then the next rung, and then the next rung. Only when she had climbed three levels, found another door held up with a jack, and stepped smartly across did she have a chance to be afraid, only then did she allow herself to think about what the broken ladder meant for her future.

Her planned escape route was now impassable.

So much for the carefully worked-out plan. Kane had been frank in explaining that her chances of getting away were no better than 50/50. Now they had just lengthened considerably.

She had a paranoid thought that perhaps the ladder had been sabotaged for exactly this reason, but that made no sense. She could just as easily have died in the lift shaft, mission incomplete, and that would have profited no one but the FMA, who would never have known about it. No, it was just one of those things. One of those silly, random things that, in this case, pretty much guaranteed a death sentence.

Katya’s sense of fatalism deepened. Her future now contained only two potential outcomes — she either successfully completed the mission, or she didn’t. That something bad would subsequently happen to her was a foregone conclusion, so she disregarded that. Success or failure was all she need concern herself with, and she much preferred to be a successful martyr to global peace than another of the war’s faceless dead.

She made her way along the dark, damply smelling hallways, second right, first left, first right and found herself in a cul-de-sac where the old abutted the new. Here there was a locked door, using an old-style keystick lock of a type that had been deemed obsolete even before her parents had been born. Katya searched around until she found amongst the debris in the corner what looked like an abandoned toolkit box. Inside she found a keystick and a change of clothes. Kane had said she’d get filthy in the old corridors and that wasn’t even taking into account the scuffs and tears her coveralls had taken during the incident in the lift shaft.

Changing clothes in an abandoned corridor was possibly not the strangest thing she’d ever done in her life, but it felt odd all the same. Once, this had been a busy place, and a ghost of that liveliness still hung around it. It seemed strange to be in her underwear there, leaning against the wall with one hand while trying to kick off her dirty coveralls, which had taken on a sudden emotional attachment to her right ankle.

After another five minutes of undignified hopping around while she tried to keep as much grime as she could off the new clothes while dressing in them, she was ready. She made sure her identity card and the keystick were in her left breast pocket, ran the route she had been given through her mind one last time, and doused the torch.

In darkness, she stood close by the door and listened. It was vitally important that she was not seen emerging from the door — even the dullest observer might wonder why somebody had been in the disused sections — and so she waited for a full minute simply to get used to the sound levels beyond.

Kane had told her that it was little more than an access corridor, well off the main byways, and few people should be walking them. She heard one pair of feet walk by and then a muffled greeting that brought the footsteps to a halt. A conversation ensued, rendered irritating by its length and boring by being muffled into meaninglessness by the door. Finally, after almost ten minutes, the conversationalists remembered they had jobs to be getting on with and they parted. Katya waited until all the footfalls had faded away before sliding the keystick into the slot in the lock. There was a very solid clunk , terrifying in the quiet, and the door opened easily under her hand.

She regretted not leaving the torch on until the last moment when she stepped into the brightly lit corridor and had to blink away tears as she tried to adjust to it after the darkness. It had seemed like a clever idea at the time, to take away light so she could focus entirely on sound. If anyone turned the corner now, however, they would have found a strange young woman blundering blindly about with an open door behind her which was marked with a prominent sign, “KEEP SEALED. DANGEROUS CORRIDORS BEYOND THIS POINT.” Katya’s cover story was not likely to survive such a spectacle.

The corridor remained obligingly empty for the minute it took her vision to clear, however. She closed and locked the door, quickly checked that she hadn’t got any dirt on her fresh clothes that might mark her out as somebody who had recently been in the DANGEROUS CORRIDORS, hoped her short blonde hair didn’t look like a pipe brush, and mentally retuned herself to be somebody who had every right to be in that hall.

In one sense, she did. Every person on that level had at least a Beta grade security pass. Kane had been grudgingly complimentary about the standard of the passes.

“Gammas are easy to fake, and Gamma Pluses not much more so. There’s a huge jump in the standard between Gamma Plus and Beta, though. Nanoscale identifiers, unique polymer tagging, even some fancy business with quantum encipherment. What that all means is that Beta passes and upwards cannot be forged. Not by us, or even by the Yagizban and, believe me, we’ve tried. We can come up with something that fools the eye easily enough but, as soon as it gets scanned, the game is over. Where you’re going, you can’t operate a console or even open a door unless your card’s in a reader. Borrowing yours or stealing one is no good, either. There is a variety of biometric tests to confirm the user is who it’s supposed to be. I’m sorry, Katya — you’re the only person we know who could walk those corridors and stand any chance of getting away with it.”

Lucky me , thought Katya as she walked the Beta security level corridors.

From the door she walked coolly and confidently right, first left, second right, up a short set of steps leading to a section that was slightly offset to the rest of the maze, turned right, first left, all the way along to the end of the corridor where it opened out into a round chamber.

Katya knew that the lack of bulkheads meant that she was well inside the mountain into which Atlantis was built. This was fortunate, as she could guarantee that every bulkhead would require her ID before allowing her to proceed. The further she could go without using it, the better her chances.

The whole episode of the disused corridors had been to avoid her having to enter the Beta graded section by the usual routes, all of which involved an ID check. Her card was authentic, but she had no reason to be here. Attention would have been called to her and that would have been the end of that. Her Beta Plus was like her medal: an honour of no practical use.