Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

It was nice to be able to cross her arms. The new interrogator didn’t seem to believe in restraints and had neither had her strapped to her chair or had her wrists taped. He just sat there and talked about what was going on beyond the walls of the interrogation room.

He kept this up for two days. Finally, she interrupted a story he was telling her about an uncomfortable trip he’d once had aboard a shuttle when he was eight, by asking, “When do you start torturing me?”

“Soon,” he said, and then went back to describing the funny smell he remembered from the shuttle.

He had been very solicitous about her injuries and had called in a medic almost the minute he first saw her. The swelling to her eye had almost gone and the bruising was fading, the cut to her scalp where she’d fallen against the table was cleaned and sealed, and she’d been declared free of internal injuries from her beating.

With all his talking, reminiscing, gossiping, and reading out news stories from his memo pad, Katya found it easy to ignore him, and to think about her situation. She didn’t need her stereotypical Russalkin fatalistic streak to know that this was only a small diversion on the road to Hell. When he said she would be tortured soon, it was no idle threat. The only thing that she couldn’t guess was why they hadn’t started yet.

Other things she had managed to guess, though. The mystery of how Federal security had started looking for her so quickly, for one. It was an ugly conclusion at which she did not wish to arrive, and she tried a dozen others of increasing ridiculousness to try to avoid it. The most obvious conclusion is almost invariably the correct one, however, and that it saddened her so deeply did not alter the grim logic.

Sergei had betrayed her. It was the only thing that made any sense at all. He’d sat at Dunwich racked between his patriotism and his loyalty to her, and to the memory of Lukyan, his friend, her uncle. Finally, something had given way inside him, and he’d decided he needed to warn the Feds.

She could guess all the self-justifications — that she’d been led astray by Kane and Tasya, lied to, conned into doing some job for them. She could also guess that he would have begged the Feds he told his story to at Dunwich to go easy on Katya, that she was just a kid; that she didn’t know what she was doing. In her mind’s eye, she could see them giving him assurances that they never intended to keep, and poor, gullible Sergei walking away, believing them.

He wouldn’t have been able to tell them much, but it would have been enough. The search for her must have begun when she was already in the old corridors. She imagined Secor agents turning up at the coffee salon, asking questions. If she hadn’t stopped for coffee, she might have got away, or at least further. She might just have made it back into the water.

Then, of course, the base defences would have sunk her in seconds. No, she didn’t regret stopping for the coffee.

It must have been a shock when an internal reader reported her card being used; not one at an entrance to the Beta halls. So they’d called around everywhere in the vicinity but for the communications hub chamber where the card was in use, ordered everyone off the corridors, and been on their way to arrest her when she almost walked into them.

Poor Sergei. Lukyan would never have forgiven him for such a betrayal, and that meant he would never forgive himself.

On the morning of the third day, everything changed. She was taken from her cell and escorted to a sick bay, where she was given a cursory examination that seemed primarily concerned with her head injuries. They took some pictures, and a dour woman who stood silently in the corner throughout said, “Good enough” at the end of it.

The man with the camera went out into the corridor, and two tall and strikingly handsome Federal officers entered.

Katya looked at them suspiciously. “What’s this? What’s going on?”

“You’re leaving Atlantis soon,” said the Secor agent. “This is all part of the preliminaries. Don’t let them trouble you.”

“Preliminaries? What do you mean, ‘preliminaries’? What kind of preliminaries?”

“Don’t let them trouble you,” he repeated, and smiled blandly.

The officers took her out into the corridor, where the cameraman was already waiting, the small unit held at chest level. Katya didn’t care to be the subject of any more pictures and kept her head down as she was walked past him. She was surprised when she heard him say, “Perfect!”

She turned back to find the dour woman and the Secor agent looking at the camera as the cameraman replayed the scene of a moment before. The woman nodded. “It will do.”

“What’s going on?” demanded Katya, but nobody would answer her. She was led back to her cell and left there.

On the morning of the fourth day, they came for her while she was sleeping. She was dragged from her bunk, and a set of fresh underwear and some yellow coveralls were thrown at her as she blinked up in bewilderment from the floor.

“Clean clothes for you,” said the Secor officer, leaning against the doorframe. The officers were women, and forced her to change despite the male Secor officer never leaving his place by the door.

“Enjoying yourself?” she sneered at him, but he just smiled that infuriatingly bland smile of his, and nodded.

When she was dressed, they put her into an armlock while they placed restraint tapes on her wrists and hooded her. Then she was led out of her cell. They walked her for a long way until they reached a lift. From the subdued voices that stilled as she approached, she received the impression that her bodyguard was about to become an entourage. From the sounds of footfall, she guessed there were perhaps six or seven, perhaps even eight people with her in the lift when they entered.

They descended in silence for twenty seconds, which meant they must now be well outside the Beta levels. Katya was trying to deduce where they might be heading for when the lift slowed to a halt, and the door slid open.

Instantly, a wave of sound swept in, leaving her shaken by its violence. There were screams and shouts and catcalls. So many voices, so much hatred, and it was all directed at her.

“Traitor!”

“Kill her!”

“I hope you die, you bitch!”

Inside the hood, Katya’s eyes opened wide. She had a sudden terrible premonition that they were just going to throw her to the mob and stand by watching while she was torn apart.

“Back!” she heard an authoritative voice command — the dour woman. “Make way! You’re interfering in Federal business.”

“Make a hole!” demanded one of the Federal troops. “Coming through.”

Katya was taken forward, held by her upper arms on both sides by the troops.

“Traitor!” somebody shouted nearby. “Traitor to Russalka!”

There was the sound of scuffling to her left, and somebody hit her through the bag. It was a quick blow, its hastiness rendering it light, but the surprise of it made her cry out.

“Hey!” she heard the trooper to the left shout. “Try that again, friend, and I will break your arm in two places. You get me?”

“Enough of that!” said somebody else in her group. Katya wondered what they were talking about. Then she felt something pat against the cloth, and she knew they were spitting on her.

She was taken forward, an agonisingly small step at a time. She could only guess how many people were there, how large the crowd was. They’d come there to hate her, to curse and spit on her, and to kill her if they got the briefest chance.

“Give me that!” she heard the woman behind her say, and was then momentarily deafened by the woman’s amplified shouting through a public address override. “This prisoner is of use to the war effort. If any attempt is made to harm her from this moment onwards, it constitutes a schedule two felony under the Wartime Powers Acts. Lay so much as a finger on her and you can join her in the Deeps!”