Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

Katya realised at the same moment as the crowd that the dour woman had to be an Alpha Plus — nobody else would or could invoke the Acts like that, or use the Deeps as a threat in public without the authority to back it up. They were in the presence of a senior member of the government; that fabled species. The knowledge cowed the crowd, and soon enough it would start Katya thinking about what was really happening to her. That would be later, though. Currently, her whole attention was focused on a single thing.

The Deeps. They were sending her to the Deeps.

She wished the first interrogator had executed her while he had the chance.

There were another five minutes of shouting and spitting, death threats and insults. One man shouted that he would find her family and kill them. Katya smiled humourlessly inside her hood at that. Then, with the abruptness of the door that slid shut behind them, the sound of the crowd was instantly cut off.

She heard somebody ahead approach and recognised the voice of her second Secor interrogator. “Well, that went rather well, I thought,” he said, as if talking about the first rehearsal of an infant school play.

“I have saliva on me,” replied the Alpha Plus with brittle resentment.

“There’s a restroom just over there, ma’am. In the meantime, we’ll get the prisoner into some clean clothes and get her packed off.”

They had more clean clothes waiting? Katya was beginning to appreciate the degree of stage management in all this. She was led off by the female officers again, released from her restraints and the hood, and told to change her coveralls. The previous set was slimy with spit, and some stains that suggested food or worse had been thrown at her. She ignored it; it didn’t matter what people thought. All they knew is what the FMA had told them. She couldn’t blame them; she’d spent most of her sixteen years believing that what the FMA said and the truth, were plainly the same thing.

When she had changed, they cuffed her again but didn’t bother with the bag. Another walk, this time with just the Secor agent and the two female officers. The Alpha Plus had disappeared, presumably off to lie down in a dark room after having to share a corridor with Gammas, thought Katya, a thought that was neither charitable nor essentially inaccurate.

They took her down narrow access corridors, lined with cables, pipes, and conduits on both sides and across the arched ceiling. At the end, another pair of troopers, not nearly as handsome as the ones who’d accompanied her through the screaming gauntlet earlier, waited.

Beyond the corridor was a military boat dock, a moon pool design with a small lake within an artificial cavern. There were several small vessels around, and another she recognised instantly. The hulking black form of the Novgorod seemed to overwhelm all the other boats there. The last time Katya had seen her, she’d been lying half-beached up a ramp in another moon pool, her skin torn by weapons fire, her heart stilled. It was strange seeing her alive and imposing like this. Her hatches were up, and torpedoes were currently being lowered in through the massive forward accesses into her weapons rooms. Many Novgorods were on deck or by the dockside, directing operations. On her conning tower, Katya saw a group of senior offices watching the loading. One of them stood noticeably taller than the others, and as she realised she recognised him, he looked over at her. The loading operations ceased to be of great interest to him and he walked to the tower’s rail to watch her.

The Secor officer noticed the attention and asked, “Who’s your admirer, Katya?” He laughed when she shot him a filthy look.

She knew it was stupid to feel ashamed. She knew she had done the right thing. The ones who should be ashamed were the ones up in the Alpha Plus corridors, not that she thought they were capable of it anymore. Yet for all that, she still couldn’t bring herself to look up and meet the gaze of Lieutenant Anatoly Petrov, a man she respected and who, until this minute, she thought might still respect her. Now he just watched her go by from on high, looking down upon her in all senses.

Still feeling Petrov’s gaze upon her, she was actually glad to reach the military boat that would be taking her to the Deeps, perhaps the first time anyone wearing a convict’s yellow uniform had been eager to get under way as soon as possible. She was heading for the patrol boat at the end of the quay when one of her escort stopped her and gestured at the boat they were passing. “In there, prisoner.”

She looked at her guards as if they were idiots. They had stopped by a military shuttle; a small vessel not so much larger than her own boat. More comfortable, a little bit faster, but less flexible in its mission capabilities than the Lukyan , the shuttle sat at full buoyancy by the quay with an ineffable air of smugness about it, as if to say it had a proper toilet aboard it and didn’t care who knew. Katya’s newfound self-image as a major war criminal was taking a little bit of a knock. All they could be bothered sparing for her was a shuttle?

“It’s going to take almost three days to reach the Deeps in this thing,” she said to the Secor agent.

“Perhaps you’ll be rendezvousing with a larger vessel, Katya,” said the agent.

“Will I?”

“Perhaps. Well, here’s where I say goodbye for the moment. I may be called in later for some follow-up work on your debriefing…”

“Debriefing?” Katya tried to reconcile “debriefing” with blood and pain.

“…but that’s only a ‘maybe.’ Otherwise, this is goodbye, Katya.”

Katya thought that if he was expecting her to wish him a fond farewell, he would be waiting for a good while. Instead she said, “One question. What happened to the other Secor agent? The one before you?”

“Him? Oh, he was reassigned. You upset him, Katya. He’s a sensitive soul.”

Without another word, the Secor agent turned on his heel and walked away. Katya watched him go with disbelief before her escort grew impatient and hustled her across the gangplank and onto the shuttle’s small deck. As she descended the ladder, she could see Petrov atop the Novgorod ’s conning tower turning away from her. Petrov was a sensible, intelligent man, she consoled herself. One day he would understand why she had done what she had done.

She had never been aboard a shuttle before. Her uncle had always been hugely dismissive of them as “boats for corridor rats” and she had absorbed much of his disdain. It was pleasantly appointed within, with comfortable seating, plenty of space, a small galley, and, of course, a proper toilet. The boat’s air of smugness, distinct enough outside, was overpowering within. Katya hated it.

“So how long are we in this scow before transferring to a real boat?” she asked.

Her escort ignored her question, and instead busied themselves removing her wrist tapes so that she would fit more easily into the restraints of her seat. Katya guessed that these straps were a recent addition, unless — just possibly — this was actually an admiral’s personal launch, in which case they were probably a standard feature. The private hobbies of FMA admirals were a running joke amongst all submariners. Absolutely any sin or eccentricity could be put at their doors whether it was true or not; not all the prizes of rank are looked for.

The other feature of the shuttle that she wasn’t used to was that the pilots’ positions were behind a bulkhead. It felt strange not to able to look forward and see them sitting there. Instead there was just a beige bulkhead with a screen on it that cycled a vastly simplified status screen, then an active navigational chart, then a view ahead with some navigational data overlayed upon it, and then back around again. Since the passenger chairs all faced a central aisle, she had to look to her left to look at the screen, and she knew watching it for any length of time would give her neck pain.