Showing substantially more confidence than she felt, she mounted the steps. She noticed the technician was following her and stopped.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded of him. “Beta Plus, remember? Go back to your work.”
He nodded, embarrassed, muttered some apologetic noises and descended again. She watched until he’d returned to the computers, then continued up to the sealed hatch.
The reader was mounted against the axis shaft of the steps. “This is a Beta Plus security point,” she read on its small screen. “Insert identification card to proceed.” Trusting to the distant genii of the Yagizba Enclaves, she slid her card into the reader’s slot.
No alarms went off. Instead the screen now read, “Retinal scan confirmation required. Please look at the red dot in the scanner with your right eye. Do not blink.”
Katya had to lift herself on her toes a little to get the scanner level with her eye. She had barely got herself in position when the scan was complete. “Identity confirmed. Welcome, Katya Kuriakova.” She read her name with a tight cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. Now there was incontrovertible proof that she had been here. Her last opportunity to walk away from the mission had just been destroyed before her eyes. Specifically, she corrected herself, her right eye.
Above her, with a thump of disengaging bolts and the hum of servo motors, the hatch slid back. Parsecs away on old Earth, condemned criminals had once mounted the hangman’s scaffold with the same slow tread that Katya now used as she climbed the steps into the restricted area.
The room at the top of the spiral staircase was small and spectacularly cluttered. The sheer profusion of wall-mounted boxes and identical blackly insulated cables running around the place like the limbs of a cybernetically-enhanced eikosipus family — a species similar to the terrestrial octopus, but with twenty tentacles rather than eight — panicked Katya for a second; how could she possibly find the right junction in this mess?
After she swallowed down her nerves, however, and looked again, she saw that there was actually an order underlying the apparent chaos. Indeed, when she looked closer still she found that all the boxes and all the cable sockets were clearly labelled. Thirty seconds of searching found her the one she was looking for.
Working quickly, conscious of the technician below who was probably bursting with curiosity to know what she was up to, Katya took the bland metal box from her bag. It was bare metal, a coolly glinting titanium alloy, whereas the boxes already there were all finished in a silken black. Yet it didn’t look too badly out of place once she had pulled out a lead from the wall box, and replaced it with one of the leads from hers. Its other lead was pushed into a power feed and that was that. She stowed it behind a mass of cables where they fed into the floor, arranging them to hide it as best as she could.
On the top edge of the box was the covered switch. She flipped back the cover, and flicked the switch. It glowed a reassuring green, although whether that meant anything truly reassuring at all, she had no idea. She closed the cover to hide the glow, took a deep breath, and then exhaled it slowly. She had done what she had come there to do. If the box was left alone for even a few minutes, it would do its job.
She turned to descend the steps and found the technician’s head poking up through the hatch. He frowned suspiciously up at her. “What’s going on in here?” he demanded. “I heard you messing around with things.”
“If I told you,” she said, her imperious descent forcing him to back away from her, “my colleagues would just have to untell you. Do you understand?” It was a threat she’d once heard on a drama and seemed very impressive coming from the formidable heroine.
Apparently it sounded far less impressive coming from her.
“You stay right there,” he said. “I’m calling my superior.”
“No, you’re not,” said Katya, and hit him in the side of the neck with Kane’s taser.
She was glad she’d had the foresight both to have it ready, and to lift her other hand from the metal staircase’s banister before using it. He had one hand on it, and she saw a couple of blue sparks leap between his knuckles and the metal. For an agonised second the technician shook and grimaced, then collapsed as the taser deactivated, falling into a heap across the steps.
Katya quickly checked his pulse, and was relieved to still find he had one. She hadn’t known quite what to expect from the taser, but she’d been hoping for a quick flutter of eyelids and a collapse into a dreamless sleep. What she’d actually got was a painful looking series of spasms, and the smell of burning hair in the air. Even the screen on the security lock had wavered in the taser’s electromagnetic field. That gave her an idea.
She set the hatch closing and, as soon as the locks had re-engaged, she tasered the card reader. The screen flashed on and off several times, then an ugly mass of random symbols came up and stayed there. It looked very broken to her.
She pocketed the taser and stepped over the technician. She considered dragging him down to the chamber floor and hiding him somewhere, but couldn’t help thinking she’d do him more harm than she already had if she tried. Besides, he was barely visible from the chamber exit.
She resisted the urge to run from the chamber, holding it down to a determined walk. She remembered when she’d passed herself off as a minor Yagizban official; that had gone reasonably well. Yes, she’d been caught, but not because her impersonation had been poor. All she had to do was look like she belonged.
She reached the side corridor that contained the sealed off access to the old facility without seeing even a single other person on the way, and this boosted her confidence enormously. It was only as she approached the door itself that it occurred to her that this was very much at odds with her experience when going the other way. Then she had seen several people in the hallways; that they were so empty now was a cause for suspicion, not comfort.
Four figures in FMA military uniforms turned the corner ahead of her as she reached the door to the DANGEROUS CORRIDORS. She would have attempted to bluff them by walking by if they hadn’t come to a concerted halt at the sight of her.
The lieutenant leading them pointed directly at her. “That’s Kuriakova.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Little Flag
Katya didn’t hesitate. She drew the keystick, stabbed it into the lock, and was through the door before the startled marine troopers could even reach for their sidearms. She slammed the door behind her and was rewarded by the solid clicks of bolts being inserted into all four sides of the frame. There were heavy footfalls on the other side of the door, and the handle was wrenched up and down in frustrated fury from the other side.
On an impulse Katya placed the contact plate of the taser on the metal of the handle and triggered a charge. There was a cry of pain, and the sound of a fall. She moved away from the door just as she heard the cracks of maser bolts hitting the door. They didn’t penetrate, but it had been ridiculous using them against the metal of the door in the first place — the whole point of using masers was that they were as bad at penetrating metal as they were good at punching through flesh. This way a missed shot wouldn’t result in letting in the whole ocean.
Katya had the torch on and was running back the way she had come. At the same time, she was trying to think of a way out of Atlantis. The escape route she had been given was broken, and somehow the Feds had found out who she was.
Her first thought was that the Yagizban computer hack had failed, but then she realised that this could not be so. If it had failed, then the reader on the communications room would have interrogated the entry system, found she wasn’t supposed to be there, and refused to open.