Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

“Yes, I see what you mean, then. It would…” An ugly thought occurred to Katya. “ Paranoid , you said?”

“Yes. It’s come on quite quickly, which leads me to conclude that either the FMA is putting him under pressure of which I am unaware, or there are problems in his personal life that are creating stress in his professional one.”

“Or something else. There have been some odd things happening in the stations, doctor. Secor is keeping them quiet, but they’re happening all the same.”

Durova raised an eyebrow and took up her memo pad. “Perhaps I’ve been lax in reading the general Secor alerts. So little of its business directly affects the Deeps, except what walks in through the airlock.” She touched the pad’s screen a few times, and cocked her head to one side in evident interest. “You’re right. Marked increases in psychotic fugues experienced. They’ve put it down to a stress disorder. I find that hard to believe. There was nothing like this in the war against Earth.” She scrolled through the reports, tapped in a couple of search parameters, and read in silence for a couple of minutes.

“Some nonsense about the possibility of it being due to some sort of Yagizban biological or chemical weapon. Delivered how, exactly? Besides, in confined environments like ours, the chance of them biting their creators is too great. The FMA has considered and dropped any number of viral and chemical projects down the years for exactly that reason. No. There’s something else going on. If Secor command could concentrate its faculties on finding a common thread between these occurrences instead of just covering them up, we might have some idea of what’s causing them.”

Abruptly she shook her head and put the pad down. “This is a discussion for some other time. You need to be briefed on the escape. The secret of any successful operation is simplicity; therefore my plan is very simple. I bring in the Chertovka for questioning… yes?”

Katya raised a hand. “She doesn’t really like being called the Chertovka. At least, not to her face. You might want to get into the habit of thinking of her as Colonel Morevna.”

The doctor considered this for a second. “Very well, I bring in Colonel Morevna for questioning and have her put in the holding cell next to this one. Then while she ‘stews,’ I have you brought in for your interrogation. I call an emergency lockdown, release Morevna, and the three of us make our way to the escape pod at the end of the corridor. We leave in it, and are picked up by the Vodyanoi , which should reach its surveillance position in the next few hours.”

“Next few..? It takes three days to get here.”

Dr Durova looked at Katya as if she were slightly stupid. “I sent the message to come three days ago.”

“What?” Katya would have liked to raise her hands in an expression of surprise, but the manacles held by the staple on the table-top prevented it. “But I hadn’t even seen Tasya about you then!”

“I knew she would confirm my story, Katya. Why wait?”

Which left Katya at an impasse. Indeed, why wait?

Keen to not look like a complete idiot, Katya turned her attention to finding problems with the plan. “What about the guards?”

“Both Morevna and I shall be armed. The guard room is in the opposite direction to the pod access, and it is unlikely we will even see the guards. If they attempt to intervene, we will kill them.”

Katya did not like the way she said it so easily. First, do no harm . “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. You can get a couple of guns in here?”

“I could get an entire armoury in here. I am a senior ranking officer of the Security Organisation directorate. It will not be a problem.” Durova looked at her, and Katya was very aware of the analytical processes going on inside the interrogator’s head. “I won’t get one for you,” she said finally. “You show too much compassion to be reliable in a gunfight.”

Katya felt slightly stung by that, although she had a feeling it was almost a compliment. “I don’t like guns,” she said, and moved on quickly. “How will the Vodyanoi know the pod’s been released? Oh, wait. I can answer that myself. The pod’ll be transmitting a distress signal and a sonar pulse to aid detection, won’t it? That’s automatic.”

“Any other questions? Really, Katya, all you have to do is as you’re told.”

Katya was beginning to think this was less a “rescue,” and more a “recovery.” Fine — if they were so sure all she had to do was follow them around and keep her mouth shut then that was what she would do. “Tasya said the same thing.”

“Tasya is right. All done then?”

It was a simple plan, and it would probably have worked. They would never know.

The first hint that all was not well was when the next day was declared an “Extraordinary Freedom Day.” Not only would it actually last all day and not just an hour, but the doors were opened between the prisoners’ sectors. For the first time, the male prisoners would mix with the females. The guards withdrew from the wings on the governor’s command, but they were clearly unhappy about what such an event might do to discipline.

Katya found herself a quiet corner and prepared to wait the day out. Male inmates started appearing in the wing within minutes, and she didn’t like the look of them at all. It seemed the culture in the male wings was very different from the female; whereas the women generally just accepted their incarceration philosophically and continued to act much as they had in their free lives, the men had adopted behaviours that would have been entirely unacceptable in the corridors of a settlement. Tattooing was unknown on Russalka, but the men seemed to have re-adopted it as some sort of tribal ritual. Katya couldn’t even guess what they were using for ink, and in many cases it seemed ink hadn’t been used at all, resulting in scarification. She thought it looked hideous and alien, and the men scared her. She was very relieved when Tasya found her.

“What is wrong with the men?” said Katya. “Why have they done that to themselves?”

“Fear,” said Tasya, her disgust plain. “They pretend all this machismo and then tattoo themselves to fit in and to show loyalty to one gang or another. If they weren’t scared, they wouldn’t do it. If they actually had any guts, they wouldn’t need to. But they’re animals, and animals need a pack.”

They looked around the wing with disquiet. The atmosphere was becoming tenser by the second. Most of the women were in for non-violent crimes, and even the murderers had used non-violent methods more often than not — a dash of poison here, a sabotaged life support unit there. The men, it seemed, liked to use their hands, and almost every uniform bore the word MURDERER .

“One of the old timers in my wing says she’s never heard of an ‘Extraordinary Freedom Day,’” said Tasya. “And she’s been here for fifteen years. This is insane, Katya. They’ll have a riot before the end of the day.”

“What about the plan?” asked Katya in a half-whisper. It was hardly necessary to whisper at all — the sound of chatter was becoming deafening.

“The plan… That, I am worried about. I don’t like this, and I really don’t like the timing. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I’m not fond of ‘maybe.’ I can’t decide if this will help us or hinder us. I’m tending towards the latter. We should postpone the escape.”

“But the Vodyanoi ’s waiting for us!”

“It can wait a bit longer. Just a day. Kane will hang around for up to a week, depending on how hot the surrounding water gets with Fed boats.”

Across from them, one of the male inmates who had been talking to a couple of the more impressionable girls from Katya’s wing was pushed aside by another man. There was some terse language, and a punch was thrown. “Fifteen minutes. That’s all it took.” Tasya looked up at the security cameras that were swivelling to lock onto the fight. The inmates called them “cameras” to try to make them seem less threatening — the camera was actually only a tiny part of the device. Most of it was a maser. “Come on, then. A warning shot. At least use the directional speaker to break it up.”