“What’s going on?” demanded Katya, but nobody would answer her. She was led back to her cell and left there.
On the morning of the fourth day, they came for her while she was sleeping. She was dragged from her bunk, and a set of fresh underwear and some yellow coveralls were thrown at her as she blinked up in bewilderment from the floor.
“Clean clothes for you,” said the Secor officer, leaning against the doorframe. The officers were women, and forced her to change despite the male Secor officer never leaving his place by the door.
“Enjoying yourself?” she sneered at him, but he just smiled that infuriatingly bland smile of his, and nodded.
When she was dressed, they put her into an armlock while they placed restraint tapes on her wrists and hooded her. Then she was led out of her cell. They walked her for a long way until they reached a lift. From the subdued voices that stilled as she approached, she received the impression that her bodyguard was about to become an entourage. From the sounds of footfall, she guessed there were perhaps six or seven, perhaps even eight people with her in the lift when they entered.
They descended in silence for twenty seconds, which meant they must now be well outside the Beta levels. Katya was trying to deduce where they might be heading for when the lift slowed to a halt, and the door slid open.
Instantly, a wave of sound swept in, leaving her shaken by its violence. There were screams and shouts and catcalls. So many voices, so much hatred, and it was all directed at her.
“Traitor!”
“Kill her!”
“I hope you die, you bitch!”
Inside the hood, Katya’s eyes opened wide. She had a sudden terrible premonition that they were just going to throw her to the mob and stand by watching while she was torn apart.
“Back!” she heard an authoritative voice command — the dour woman. “Make way! You’re interfering in Federal business.”
“Make a hole!” demanded one of the Federal troops. “Coming through.”
Katya was taken forward, held by her upper arms on both sides by the troops.
“Traitor!” somebody shouted nearby. “Traitor to Russalka!”
There was the sound of scuffling to her left, and somebody hit her through the bag. It was a quick blow, its hastiness rendering it light, but the surprise of it made her cry out.
“Hey!” she heard the trooper to the left shout. “Try that again, friend, and I will break your arm in two places. You get me?”
“Enough of that!” said somebody else in her group. Katya wondered what they were talking about. Then she felt something pat against the cloth, and she knew they were spitting on her.
She was taken forward, an agonisingly small step at a time. She could only guess how many people were there, how large the crowd was. They’d come there to hate her, to curse and spit on her, and to kill her if they got the briefest chance.
“Give me that!” she heard the woman behind her say, and was then momentarily deafened by the woman’s amplified shouting through a public address override. “This prisoner is of use to the war effort. If any attempt is made to harm her from this moment onwards, it constitutes a schedule two felony under the Wartime Powers Acts. Lay so much as a finger on her and you can join her in the Deeps!”
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.”