Two things surprised her about the first few days of her incarceration. Firstly, she was not the only one with TRAITOR on her uniform. They weren’t as common as THIEF or even MURDERER, but there were five or six just in her wing. She managed to talk with a couple of them, and told them what a relief it was that she wasn’t the only one. She had never even heard of anybody being convicted of treason, yet here they were. One of them was an angular woman called Dominika Netrebko. She could seem washed out and waiting for death one second, then vibrant and angry, burning with life the next.
“The FMA has a broad definition of treason. I used to produce news programmes. One day I put forward an idea for a thread about how long martial law had been in place and maybe we could step down from it. Next day I get a visit from Secor. I’ve been here for four years now.”
“I don’t understand why your trial wasn’t in the news,” said Katya.
“Trial? What a quaint idea. ‘Traitor’ on your uniform means you’ve never had a trial.”
“How is that legal?”
“It’s martial law, they have military fiat. Do you know what that means? It means they can do anything they like. The Alpha Pluses, they may swan around in expensive clothes and look like senior administrators. But there isn’t a single one of them that doesn’t carry a rank and have a fancy military uniform hanging in the closet.”
One thing she didn’t expect to trouble her, yet it did, was the construction of the Deeps. The vast majority of ocean habitations were hollowed out from the rocky sides of Russalka’s innumerable drowned mountains. It wasn’t easy work, but it was straightforward enough to melt out a cave using plasma or fusion bores, seal it off, drain it, and then continue the work in relative comfort.
The Deeps was not like that at all. Alina had been right about its origins as an experimental mobile station. When that didn’t work out, the project was cancelled when the hull was almost finished. The need for a prison had been growing for some time, however, and it seemed a shame to scrap such a nice construction when instead it could have its drive rooms given new functions, be filled with serious criminals, sunk into the black waters, and tethered below the test depths of most civilian boats.
The Deeps became a terror to those who broke the law, and a nightmare to those who might.
To Katya it was both of these things, but also a minor niggling irritation. She had grown up living in excavated settlements and travelling around in submarines. The Deeps behaved like a settlement, but felt like a submarine. Sometimes she was sure she could feel the deck moving beneath her feet as the ocean flow drew the facility more strongly against one set of tethers than the others. It bothered her subconsciously, as if some small part of her was expecting the Deeps to one day arrive at some unknown destination.
That sense of something always on the very edge of happening haunted Katya’s days. She waited for the inevitable day when she would be escorted off to the Secor interrogation centre, to be tortured and killed, but now they had her safe and secure in the Deeps they seemed in no hurry at all to get on with it. For the first few days she was on a knife’s edge of terror, every guard walking her way seeming to be the angel of death come to collect her.
Then she decided that this was all part of their plan, to keep her nervous and disorientated, to weaken her defences for when the blow finally fell. She felt angry that they could play such games, and the fear abated as she adjusted her view of her future. She imagined herself having some fatal disease that had shortened her life to days or weeks, yet had no symptoms until the final one. It was a grim prognosis to give herself, but a sensible one under the circumstances and, most importantly, it allowed her to function. Indeed, it made every day precious.
The Deeps looked roughly circular from the outside, but internally was based upon a regular pentagon, the only external expression of this being the five outrider ballast tanks on their dual pylon mounts. One of the five sectors comprised the docking areas, the guards’ barracks, and the administration sections arranged over four decks. Another three sectors contained the male prisoners, and the last was the female sector. Each of the four decks in the prisoner sectors was called a “wing,” although it was nothing of the sort. Dominika told Katya that at least once a year there was a “shakeup,” when all inmates were randomly assigned new cells. The official explanation was that it was to disrupt any long-term escape plans, but nobody believed that. It was believed the shakeup procedure was purely to break up any friendships that may have formed and to keep the inmates feeling stateless and with no control over their destinies.
Once a month, however, the wings within a sector were allowed common time, a brief hour to spend with friends split up by the spiteful churning of the shakeups. Katya had been in the Deeps for just under three weeks when she experienced the first of these. Immediately after lunch had been completed in the communal hall of her wing, the guards withdrew, leaving them under the watchful eyes of the security cameras with their coaxial masers, ready to burn down any troublemakers.
Then the access doors at the outer end of the wing opened automatically, sliding up into the walls. Several women who had gathered by the doors ran through as soon as they opened, while others hung back, waiting. Moments later, women from the wing below were running in to be greeted with cries of delight. Katya watched them embrace and wondered if their number would include her one day. She saw Dominika waving at a short woman with her cropped hair grey at the temples, and their joyful reunion. Feeling that she was intruding, she picked up one of the media pads that gave the inmates something to do, and went off to a bench to read.
She had been reading for perhaps ten minutes when a woman came to sit by her. Katya felt awkward, and looked fixedly at her screen in the hope the woman would take the hint.
“Don’t worry, Kuriakova,” the woman said. “I’m not here to make a woman of you. I doubt either of us are that desperate for human contact yet.”
Katya looked up sharply. Tasya Morevna, hair cropped and in prison uniform, sat by her side.
“They captured you?” said Katya, whispering in shock. “You? I always thought…” She dithered to a halt.
“You thought right. They’d kill me on sight. That’s why I’m…” she turned to Katya so she could show the name printed on her uniform, LITVYAK, T. THIEF “The T stands for ‘Tasya,’ still,” she explained. “I wanted to be a murderer, but Havilland thought that might draw too much attention. I wasn’t very keen on his counterproposal either, so we compromised on me being a thief.”
Katya was still having problems with the entire situation that extended far beyond which particular crime Tasya had decided to have on her uniform. “What are you doing here?” she whispered.
For once Tasya looked uncomfortable. “I’m here to help rescue you.”
“From the Deeps? How? It’s impossible! Tasya, it’s suicide! Kane’s crazy for sending you in here.”
Tasya looked at Katya for a long moment, wrestling with what she was to say next. “Kane didn’t send me, Katya. This is my plan.”
Katya could only gawp at her.
Tasya hurried on. “I screwed up. You should never have been left without support at Atlantis. Kane’s got this idea that you’re blessed, or lucky or something, and that you’d exfiltrate the Beta levels without any trouble. It went against my instincts, but I agreed. I shouldn’t have. Even if we couldn’t have gone onto the Beta corridors ourselves, I could have led a team to cover you going up to them and coming back. I should have led a team to cover you.”