The Deeps was unique, a tethered station; essentially a great submarine without impellers, its ballast tanks adjusted to be just on the positive side of neutral buoyancy. They could plainly see the metre-thick cables running from the boom-mounted ballast tanks down to huge pitons driven into the narrow plateau over which it hung, holding the prison in place.
“It was supposed to be a mobile originally, but they couldn’t get it to move fast enough,” said Alina, unable to keep the awe from her voice.
“Why would they want a mobile prison?” asked Oksana.
Alina grimaced at her. “It wasn’t supposed to be a prison, stupid. It was supposed to be a military base. Rather than scrap it, they made it into the Deeps.” She turned her attention back to the screen. “Nobody’s ever escaped from it.”
“Good to know,” said Katya in a small voice.
Alina blushed.
The airlock cycled out the water, the doors opened and Prisoner Kuriakova stepped through, her hands in restraining tapes behind her back, followed a few paces behind by her guards. Four prison guards were waiting, along with a man in the uniform of a colonel of the marines, and a woman who looked so commonplace, inoffensive and every-day, that she might as well have had “Secor” tattooed across her forehead.
Officer Shepitko saluted the colonel and offered him her memo pad. “Prisoner Katya Kuriakova, sir. Please sign.”
The colonel took the pad, signed it with the stylus and placed his thumb on the pad’s reader to confirm receipt of the prisoner. As he did so, his gaze never left Katya.
Shepitko took the pad back and stowed it in her jerkin pocket. “Thank you, sir. You’ll have our reports on the journey within the hour.” Katya knew what was going to be in the reports; she’d helped the officers write much of them.
“There’s no hurry,” said the colonel. Katya didn’t like his voice at all. She’d been expecting something gruff and military, but instead he spoke quietly with an undercurrent of subtle menace.
She’d once seen a domovoi, a type of Russalkin eel with short horns jutting out on either side of its jaws. Its body was as thick as a man’s, and its teeth could penetrate a light ADS. Something about the cast of its face, however, gave it an undeserved air of intelligence. Domovoi lay in small caves, their heads at the entrance, watching the world go by with an expression of mild interest. When anything edible made the mistake of coming too close, however, it generally didn’t last long enough to realise the error.
There was something of the domovoi about the colonel, and Katya decided it would be wise not to antagonise him unless absolutely necessary.
“No hurry at all,” he continued. “You’ll be shown to your quarters and you can finish your reports once you’ve settled in.”
“Settled in, sir?” Officer Shepitko shot an uncertain glance back at Officer Volkova. “Our orders were to return to Atlantis as soon as possible.”
“We’re with Atlantis Base Security,” said Volkova, a little unnecessarily.
“You’ve been seconded,” said the colonel.
Shepitko started to say something, but a look from the colonel made her response die in her throat. “Yes, sir,” she said, saluted, and stepped back.
Behind her, Katya could hear Volkova whisper urgently, “But we can’t stay here! My mother and father are expecting me back before the end of the week!” Shepitko shushed her, and they fell silent.
The colonel was unconcerned by the domestic worries of a couple of junior officers. He walked up to Katya and stopped a half step away, looking down on her like a biologist with an interesting new specimen to dissect.
“I am Colonel Radomir Senyavin, governor of the Deeps. We are used to dealing with the worst of the worst here, prisoner. You are not even close to that. You will never escape. You will never leave. Put those thoughts from your mind now. If you are a good prisoner, you will grow old and die here. If not,” something like a smile flickered momentarily around his lips, and Katya realised that this was a man who enjoyed fulfilling threats, “if not, then you will be denied the opportunity to grow old first.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Hard Time
They called it “induction.” Katya had taken this as meaning much the same as it might if she were being introduced into a new workplace — where the toilets were, what time lunch was, perhaps a “safety in the workplace” lecture. The Deeps’ induction programme was very different.
First they shaved her hair down to stubble. Then, under the emotionless supervision of two female guards, she was stripped, searched, and “showered” with a high pressure hose. The whole ritual was intended to dehumanise and humiliate her, and succeeded magnificently in the latter.
They made a show of bagging her old clothes “for incineration,” watched while she dried herself with a towel that did its job about as well as a piece of plastic sacking, and then gave her a new uniform with her name already stencilled on the left breast. Beneath Kuriakova, K was the word TRAITOR.
She pointed at it. “You must be joking! The other prisoners will kill me if they see this!”
One of the guards shrugged. “Shouldn’t have committed treason then, should you?”
“I’ve not been charged, never mind convicted!”
“I don’t care.”
The other guard had suddenly taken an interest in proceedings. She walked up to where Katya stood naked with the bundle of clothes in her arms. The guard’s baton swept out of its belt loop and into Katya’s ribs in a practiced arc. She fell heavily to the tiled floor, dropping her clothes and gasping.
“When you speak to any officer or official in this station, prisoner,” said the guard standing over Katya, “every sentence you say finishes with sir if you’re talking to a male, ma’am if it’s a female. Failure to comply is subject to punishment. Do you understand?”
Katya could only clutch her side and sob with pain. The guard raised her baton. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Katya whispered. Then quickly added, “Ma’am. Yes, ma’am.”
The guard lowered her baton and smirked at her colleague. “You’re going to be a good prisoner,” she said to Katya. “Aren’t you?”
Katya spent the next couple of days trying her very best to be a “good prisoner.” Not because she had submitted to the Deeps’ regime, she told herself, but simply because she didn’t want to draw any more attention to herself than the word TRAITOR already attracted, and because she didn’t want to spend all her time aching from the bruises the guards handed out for the slightest infringement of the rules. There were a lot of rules. She told herself that was why she was trying to be a model prisoner, but sometimes after lights out when she lay in her bunk, she wondered if she was just fooling herself. Perhaps the Deeps was slowly beating her into a compliant inmate, after all.
Her cell was much like those in a cell hotel — a dormitory wing consisted of a hallway with two layers of cells laid into each wall. Each evening the women in her wing sounded off like troops as they filed in, climbing into their individual cells, the transparent doors sliding shut and locking behind them. If they had to use the toilet in the night, they used a call buzzer mounted into their cell’s wall. They were then escorted to the end of the hall where they would be let into the “surveillance head,” a toilet with a security camera watching the inmate. After her first experience of it, Katya tried to be sure never to have to use it again.