Jonathan Howard - Katya's War

Furious, Tasya turned to Senyavin. “What did you do?” she demanded. He said nothing, but only smiled. It was not a wilful smile, nor was it one of triumph. It was a smile of pure joy. Tasya drew her pistol from her belt and placed the muzzle against his forehead. “ What did you do ?” she snarled.

“Tasya, leave him,” said Katya. “We have to get out of here, right now!”

“What? Why?”

“He’s committing suicide, and he wants to take us all with him.”

Tasya looked at the governor, sitting on the floor, Durova’s corpse behind him. Then she looked suspiciously at Katya. “How do you know?”

Katya couldn’t say. She couldn’t explain how she could see the glow of an unearthly fire within Senyavin’s mind, how she could smell his sanity ablaze. So instead she said, “I saw it in his eyes.”

Tasya looked straight into Katya’s eyes and, remarkably, broke her gaze first. She seemed slightly rattled. She reached down, flicked away the stubs of the governor’s fingers, and recovered his dropped gun. “Come on,” she said, re-establishing control. As she reached the door, she gave the governor’s gun to Oksana. “The grip’s a little melted at the front, but it’s still serviceable,” she said, and walked out into the corridor. Oksana and Alina followed her, Oksana complaining that there appeared to be some skin still sticking to the melted polymer.

Katya tarried a moment in the doorway. The governor had made no move. He just sat there, smiling as if he had just seen the most beautiful thing in all creation or beyond it. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He looked at Katya, and he spoke, but too quietly for her to hear him. She wasn’t sure if she read his lips, or if she heard his voice in her mind, but she knew what he said.

“You understand.”

Tasya’s shout of “Come on , Kuriakova!” brought her back to the moment, but the half realisation fluttered at the edge of her consciousness, and scared her so badly she pushed it away to where she didn’t have to think about it.

She did. She did understand.

She ran after the others.

As they approached the straight length of corridor that would take them to the observation blister and its attached pod, Katya said, “What happened to the guards?”

In the corridor was a barricade of desks, chairs, and even a daybed that had all apparently been pulled out of nearby offices. Behind it crouched the sector leader and three of his men. Further down the corridor there was a flash of yellow coveralls visible in one of the doorways.

“Down!” barked Tasya, grabbing Katya and Alina by the sleeves and dragging them down. There was a sharp crack and Oksana cried out.

Katya grabbed her belt and pulled her down with them. “I’m hit!” said Oksana, looking in disbelief at the burn hole in her upper sleeve.

“Maybe next time I tell you to get down, you’ll do it.”

“But I’m hit!”

“And still talking, so it can’t be that bad.” Tasya turned her back on the aggrieved woman and said to the sector leader, “What’s the situation?”

“They must have found an unsecured arms locker. There’s a bunch of six or seven with carbines and pistols. The only good news is that they’re not good shots, and they didn’t take any of the riot gas grenades or they’d have used them by now. What happened with Governor Senyavin, ma’am?”

“His mind’s gone. I disarmed him and left him there.”

“The computers…?”

“He’s locked everyone out, even himself. We’re stuck here until the next boat arrives.”

“That’s not the procedure. If security is totally compromised, we’re to lock down the computers, grab as many weapons as we can, and take the escape pods. There’s one at the end of here, past these scum. The plan is to kill them, take their weapons, and abandon the base.”

“How many people can a pod take?”

“Ten.”

Katya saw the real reason behind Tasya’s question — whether she would have to kill the guards or not once the inmates had been dealt with. Ten places meant they might live yet. Tasya might have been on Katya’s side — at least for the moment — but there was barely a thing Tasya did or a thought she expressed that didn’t frighten or sicken her.

An inmate ducked out of a side door about twenty metres away and fired a burst from his carbine. All the bolts went high, burning away the corridor’s already utilitarian wall covering and melting long score marks in the plastic laminate beneath. Tasya watched him with evident disdain over the top of the overturned day bed, lifted her pistol, and shot him dead.

“Did you see that? Out of cover and he fired from the hip. They’ve got their training from watching dramas. No professionalism at all.”

Another convict stepped out from a doorway on the other side of the corridor, shouting something incoherent about how he was going to get the Feds because they shot his friend. He held his pistol on its side with the back of his hand uppermost and fired indiscriminately, bolts hissing down the corridor over their heads or splashing ineffectually against the metal of the office furniture barricade.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Tasya peevishly, and killed him too.

She either didn’t notice or didn’t deign to notice how perturbed she had made the Federal guards. “Yes,” Katya said to them. “She scares me, too.”

“The only way those idiots are going to represent a threat is if you get careless and do something stupid,” said Tasya, adding insult to Oksana’s injury. “Are any of these offices connected?”

“No. They’re all discrete rooms.”

“So much for flanking. We’ll just have to do this the hard way. Clear and secure. Volkova’s hit in her main arm, so she’s out of this. That leaves you, your team, Shepitko, and myself. We’ll split into two teams of three, I’ll take…” she cast an eye over the sector leader’s men, “Glazov,” she read from one of the guard’s name patches. “The teams alternate, cover/clear, all the way down to the pod.”

She noticed the leader, Sevnik, looking at her oddly. “What’s wrong?” she said. Shielded by her body from Sevnik, but visible to Katya, Tasya’s hand tightened on her pistol. Was it possible that he’d recognised her?

“I’ve… I’m sorry, ma’am, it’s just all the Secor I’ve ever met have been… well…”

“Useless in a fight, expecting others to go at the front and they tidy up afterwards? No offence taken. But I was recruited from anti-piracy operations. I’m used to combat.”

The explanation seemed to convince and, indeed, impress him. “Anti-piracy? I envy you. I put in for that, and ended up here. Glazov, you’re with… I don’t even know your rank.”

“Colonel, but you have command here, captain.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Glazov, you’re with Colonel Litvyak.” He nodded at Katya. “What about you, ma’am?” he asked Katya.

She was momentarily at a loss what to say, but Tasya had an almost-lie ready and waiting. “Ms Kuriakova is a civilian volunteer for this mission. She’s not a combatant.”

Captain Sevnik grinned. “I knew all that stuff about you being a traitor had to be rubbish,” he said to Katya. “You won the Hero of Russalka. They don’t just hand those out to anybody.”

“I’ve always tried to do what was right,” Katya replied, and managed a wan smile. She shrugged the carbine’s strap over her head, feeling like a fraud.

“Could we get on, please?” said Tasya, taking the weapon. “These inmates aren’t going to just shoot themselves, you know.”

Naturally, Tasya insisted on clearing the first room, much to the consternation of Glazov and Shepitko. While Sevnik’s team provided covering fire, she moved up, Glazov and Shepitko stacking up on her position as she reached the door. Katya heard Tasya say to her team, “You have done this before, haven’t you?” and Shepitko say, “Uh…”