Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

The colonel was unconcerned by the domestic worries of a couple of junior officers. He walked up to Katya and stopped a half step away, looking down on her like a biologist with an interesting new specimen to dissect.

“I am Colonel Radomir Senyavin, governor of the Deeps. We are used to dealing with the worst of the worst here, prisoner. You are not even close to that. You will never escape. You will never leave. Put those thoughts from your mind now. If you are a good prisoner, you will grow old and die here. If not,” something like a smile flickered momentarily around his lips, and Katya realised that this was a man who enjoyed fulfilling threats, “if not, then you will be denied the opportunity to grow old first.”

They called it “induction.” Katya had taken this as meaning much the same as it might if she were being introduced into a new workplace — where the toilets were, what time lunch was, perhaps a “safety in the workplace” lecture. The Deeps’ induction programme was very different.

First they shaved her hair down to stubble. Then, under the emotionless supervision of two female guards, she was stripped, searched, and “showered” with a high pressure hose. The whole ritual was intended to dehumanise and humiliate her, and succeeded magnificently in the latter.

They made a show of bagging her old clothes “for incineration,” watched while she dried herself with a towel that did its job about as well as a piece of plastic sacking, and then gave her a new uniform with her name already stencilled on the left breast. Beneath Kuriakova, K was the word TRAITOR .

She pointed at it. “You must be joking! The other prisoners will kill me if they see this!”

One of the guards shrugged. “Shouldn’t have committed treason then, should you?”

“I’ve not been charged, never mind convicted!”

“I don’t care.”

The other guard had suddenly taken an interest in proceedings. She walked up to where Katya stood naked with the bundle of clothes in her arms. The guard’s baton swept out of its belt loop and into Katya’s ribs in a practiced arc. She fell heavily to the tiled floor, dropping her clothes and gasping.

“When you speak to any officer or official in this station, prisoner,” said the guard standing over Katya, “every sentence you say finishes with sir if you’re talking to a male, ma’am if it’s a female. Failure to comply is subject to punishment. Do you understand?”

Katya could only clutch her side and sob with pain. The guard raised her baton. “ Do you understand ?”

“Yes,” Katya whispered. Then quickly added, “Ma’am. Yes, ma’am.”

The guard lowered her baton and smirked at her colleague. “You’re going to be a good prisoner,” she said to Katya. “Aren’t you?”

Katya spent the next couple of days trying her very best to be a “good prisoner.” Not because she had submitted to the Deeps’ regime, she told herself, but simply because she didn’t want to draw any more attention to herself than the word TRAITOR already attracted, and because she didn’t want to spend all her time aching from the bruises the guards handed out for the slightest infringement of the rules. There were a lot of rules. She told herself that was why she was trying to be a model prisoner, but sometimes after lights out when she lay in her bunk, she wondered if she was just fooling herself. Perhaps the Deeps was slowly beating her into a compliant inmate, after all.

Her cell was much like those in a cell hotel — a dormitory wing consisted of a hallway with two layers of cells laid into each wall. Each evening the women in her wing sounded off like troops as they filed in, climbing into their individual cells, the transparent doors sliding shut and locking behind them. If they had to use the toilet in the night, they used a call buzzer mounted into their cell’s wall. They were then escorted to the end of the hall where they would be let into the “surveillance head,” a toilet with a security camera watching the inmate. After her first experience of it, Katya tried to be sure never to have to use it again.

Two things surprised her about the first few days of her incarceration. Firstly, she was not the only one with TRAITOR on her uniform. They weren’t as common as THIEF or even MURDERER , but there were five or six just in her wing. She managed to talk with a couple of them, and told them what a relief it was that she wasn’t the only one. She had never even heard of anybody being convicted of treason, yet here they were. One of them was an angular woman called Dominika Netrebko. She could seem washed out and waiting for death one second, then vibrant and angry, burning with life the next.

“The FMA has a broad definition of treason. I used to produce news programmes. One day I put forward an idea for a thread about how long martial law had been in place and maybe we could step down from it. Next day I get a visit from Secor. I’ve been here for four years now.”

“I don’t understand why your trial wasn’t in the news,” said Katya.

“Trial? What a quaint idea. ‘Traitor’ on your uniform means you’ve never had a trial.”

“How is that legal?”

“It’s martial law, they have military fiat. Do you know what that means? It means they can do anything they like. The Alpha Pluses, they may swan around in expensive clothes and look like senior administrators. But there isn’t a single one of them that doesn’t carry a rank and have a fancy military uniform hanging in the closet.”

One thing she didn’t expect to trouble her, yet it did, was the construction of the Deeps. The vast majority of ocean habitations were hollowed out from the rocky sides of Russalka’s innumerable drowned mountains. It wasn’t easy work, but it was straightforward enough to melt out a cave using plasma or fusion bores, seal it off, drain it, and then continue the work in relative comfort.

The Deeps was not like that at all. Alina had been right about its origins as an experimental mobile station. When that didn’t work out, the project was cancelled when the hull was almost finished. The need for a prison had been growing for some time, however, and it seemed a shame to scrap such a nice construction when instead it could have its drive rooms given new functions, be filled with serious criminals, sunk into the black waters, and tethered below the test depths of most civilian boats.

The Deeps became a terror to those who broke the law, and a nightmare to those who might.

To Katya it was both of these things, but also a minor niggling irritation. She had grown up living in excavated settlements and travelling around in submarines. The Deeps behaved like a settlement, but felt like a submarine. Sometimes she was sure she could feel the deck moving beneath her feet as the ocean flow drew the facility more strongly against one set of tethers than the others. It bothered her subconsciously, as if some small part of her was expecting the Deeps to one day arrive at some unknown destination.

That sense of something always on the very edge of happening haunted Katya’s days. She waited for the inevitable day when she would be escorted off to the Secor interrogation centre, to be tortured and killed, but now they had her safe and secure in the Deeps they seemed in no hurry at all to get on with it. For the first few days she was on a knife’s edge of terror, every guard walking her way seeming to be the angel of death come to collect her.

Then she decided that this was all part of their plan, to keep her nervous and disorientated, to weaken her defences for when the blow finally fell. She felt angry that they could play such games, and the fear abated as she adjusted her view of her future. She imagined herself having some fatal disease that had shortened her life to days or weeks, yet had no symptoms until the final one. It was a grim prognosis to give herself, but a sensible one under the circumstances and, most importantly, it allowed her to function. Indeed, it made every day precious.