She looked at her guards as if they were idiots. They had stopped by a military shuttle; a small vessel not so much larger than her own boat. More comfortable, a little bit faster, but less flexible in its mission capabilities than the Lukyan, the shuttle sat at full buoyancy by the quay with an ineffable air of smugness about it, as if to say it had a proper toilet aboard it and didn’t care who knew. Katya’s newfound self-image as a major war criminal was taking a little bit of a knock. All they could be bothered sparing for her was a shuttle?
“It’s going to take almost three days to reach the Deeps in this thing,” she said to the Secor agent.
“Perhaps you’ll be rendezvousing with a larger vessel, Katya,” said the agent.
“Will I?”
“Perhaps. Well, here’s where I say goodbye for the moment. I may be called in later for some follow-up work on your debriefing…”
“Debriefing?” Katya tried to reconcile “debriefing” with blood and pain.
“…but that’s only a ‘maybe.’ Otherwise, this is goodbye, Katya.”
Katya thought that if he was expecting her to wish him a fond farewell, he would be waiting for a good while. Instead she said, “One question. What happened to the other Secor agent? The one before you?”
“Him? Oh, he was reassigned. You upset him, Katya. He’s a sensitive soul.”
Without another word, the Secor agent turned on his heel and walked away. Katya watched him go with disbelief before her escort grew impatient and hustled her across the gangplank and onto the shuttle’s small deck. As she descended the ladder, she could see Petrov atop the Novgorod’s conning tower turning away from her. Petrov was a sensible, intelligent man, she consoled herself. One day he would understand why she had done what she had done.
She had never been aboard a shuttle before. Her uncle had always been hugely dismissive of them as “boats for corridor rats” and she had absorbed much of his disdain. It was pleasantly appointed within, with comfortable seating, plenty of space, a small galley, and, of course, a proper toilet. The boat’s air of smugness, distinct enough outside, was overpowering within. Katya hated it.
“So how long are we in this scow before transferring to a real boat?” she asked.
Her escort ignored her question, and instead busied themselves removing her wrist tapes so that she would fit more easily into the restraints of her seat. Katya guessed that these straps were a recent addition, unless — just possibly — this was actually an admiral’s personal launch, in which case they were probably a standard feature. The private hobbies of FMA admirals were a running joke amongst all submariners. Absolutely any sin or eccentricity could be put at their doors whether it was true or not; not all the prizes of rank are looked for.
The other feature of the shuttle that she wasn’t used to was that the pilots’ positions were behind a bulkhead. It felt strange not to able to look forward and see them sitting there. Instead there was just a beige bulkhead with a screen on it that cycled a vastly simplified status screen, then an active navigational chart, then a view ahead with some navigational data overlayed upon it, and then back around again. Since the passenger chairs all faced a central aisle, she had to look to her left to look at the screen, and she knew watching it for any length of time would give her neck pain.
The view opposite was hardly fascinating, either; the male troopers had returned to the quay after making sure everything was in readiness and this left Katya with the two female officers sitting directly across the aisle from her. Katya was very hopeful that they would be meeting another boat to take her onwards; the prospect of staring at them while they stared at her for three days was a depressing one, probably for all of them.
The hatch lowered on powered hydraulics, sealing with a muffled clump and hiss, both of which Katya decided sounded unforgivably self-satisfied. There was a sound of grating metal as the gangway disengaged, and Katya felt the slight wallow of an untethered boat. A moment later, a gentle hum told her that the drives were engaged and that they were underway. The shuttle pulled away from the quay and headed for the tunnel cut through the mountain connecting the moon pool with the ocean. Almost immediately the pilot began flooding the ballast tanks; the tunnel was flooded along its full length from its mouth in the moon pool, down a shallow descent, and then exiting into open sea.
“So,” said Katya. “You girls do a lot of this sort of thing?” She’d seen how they watched the hatch close like a death sentence, and seemed disconcerted by the boat’s wallowing when they’d been on the surface. The logical deduction was that they’d been seconded from base security, and were not frequent travellers.
One of them got up and went to the toilet unit. The other sat there, pallid as they listened to her colleague being sick very audibly because of the imperfectly closed door. Throughout, Katya smiled pleasantly at the seated trooper.
She’d apparently broken the first Secor interrogator, after all; perhaps she could break a few more Feds before she reached the Deeps. She balled her hands into fists and felt the restraints around her wrists. Yes, she decided, it was good to have a hobby.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Admiral’s Launch
For the first couple of hours, the names of her escort were “None of your business, traitor.”
Then, for about the next five hours, they were called “Officers Volkova and Shepitko to you, prisoner.”
And finally they were Oksana and Alina, and Katya was now just “Katya.”
Neither of the officers seemed greatly motivated by their current mission and settled easily into scuttlebutt and scurrilous tales about their fellow officers, their watch commander, and one of their husbands, who was very dreamy by all accounts.
Katya tried to explain to them why she’d done what she’d done, about the drowned colony ship, slaughter at the evacuation site, the lies that threaded through every part of FMA operations, but Oksana just shushed her and said they’d been specifically ordered not to discuss the details of Katya’s case so, if it was all the same to her, wouldn’t she rather hear about the brilliant practical joke Oleg played on Grigory with a length of flexible piping, a quantity of liquid laxative, and a fire extinguisher? Katya had to admit that sounded pretty interesting, so they talked about it for a while. It turned out that Grigory stills hated Oleg because of the incident, and Katya said she couldn’t blame him, because Oleg had gone too far.
As the chronometer showed the standard “day” turning to standard “night,” Katya said, “Those pilots must have steel bladders. Do they have their own head up front or something?”
Oksana and Alina looked blankly at her, until she remembered that they’d probably never been on any submarine journey worth the name. “Head,” she explained. “It’s just the name for a boat’s toilet.”
“There aren’t any pilots,” said Alina. “Everything’s automatic.”
Katya looked at her in astonishment. “No pilots? What if anything goes wrong? Can you get to the pilot positions?”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” said Oksana, whose confidence in the competence of her superiors tended towards complacency.
“Maybe it won’t,” said Katya.
There was no point talking to her guards for anything other than information and amusement. Recruits for Base Security were not renowned for their native intelligence, just their loyalty and a modicum of common sense. Okasana and Alina were not much older than her, and she was sure they’d signed up for Security out of a sense of patriotism and a desire to help their fellow citizens. They were goodhearted, but they were not very bright. There was no possibility that they would realise what was going on, and that was exactly why they had been chosen for the job.