Down there the corridors were grey-walled and contained only utility lighting, apparently a legacy of their original intended function as drive rooms. The bleakness of the echoing walls may have been as much a reason for their retention as economy; it was impossible to walk them without sensing something terrible waiting around every corner.
They took her to a room much like the room in which she had been beaten in Atlantis. Two seats, one of them bolted to the floor, a table also bolted down, restraints straps on the secure chair, and a steel hasp on the table surface to hold a manacle’s cable. Sitting in the interrogator’s chair was the pale, fragile-looking woman Katya remembered from her welcoming committee over a month before. The woman looked up briefly when Katya was brought in, but promptly lost interest, studying her memo pad and drinking water from a plastic cup as the guards shackled Katya and then restrained her in the chair, locking her manacles’ cable down, her ankles and waist held in the chair.
When they were done, Oksana and the other female guard stood by the door. The Secor agent looked at them with faint surprise. “You’re dismissed. You’ll be called when I want you to remove the prisoner.”
Oksana looked uneasy at the phrase “remove the prisoner,” an uneasiness Katya shared. It sounded like an order to remove something inanimate. The other guard said, “Are you sure, ma’am? We could wait here in case you need us.”
“I don’t require an audience,” said the interrogator. “Besides, these are early days. Ms Kuriakova and I will just be getting to know one another.” To punctuate the thought, she lifted a medical case from the floor and laid it on the table.
Katya remembered something Kane had once said about Secor interrogation techniques, “Sensory deprivation, psychotomimetic drugs, RNA stripping, the usual. They’re quite old fashioned in their ways, bless them.” Now some of the tools of torture were sitting before her, she couldn’t find it in herself to be as flippant as Kane.
Nor was she the only one affected by the case’s appearance. Oksana flinched and the second guard took an involuntary step back.
“There’s a guard room by the lift,” said the interrogator. “Get yourself some food. I shall be a little while here. I shall call you when we’re done.”
The guard Katya didn’t know didn’t need any further encouragement and was out into the corridor in a second. Oksana lingered a moment, her anxiety evident, but then she was gone too.
Katya looked back to find the interrogator looking keenly at her. There seemed something disarranged about the woman, as if great passions surged behind that placid face. Her skin was pale, her cheekbones pronounced, her red hair pulled back into a bun that was just short of perfect, the few stray strands adding to the impression that all was not well within her.
“That guard seems very concerned about you, Kuriakova. Why do you suppose that is?”
Katya had made her mind up that she wasn’t going to give anything up to Secor, not even the time of day. She would make them drag each syllable out of her with iron pincers if need be. Thus, she sat there in hostile silence, and glared at her tormentor.
The interrogator found this amusing. “Oh, I know why, of course. Three young women shut up in a shuttle for that length of time, naturally you talked.”
She reached inside her jerkin and produced a recorder that she set down on the table between them. She watched Katya’s face as she pressed the “Play” stud.
It took a moment for Katya to realise what she was listening to, to place the disembodied voices. She remembered the conversation before she realised one of the voices was her own. It was Oksana, Alina, and herself aboard the shuttle. Katya recognised the tail-end of Alina’s anger with Oksana for leaving her pistol out where Katya could have taken it, and with a sudden sick feeling remembered what they had spoken of next.
“So,” she heard Alina’s recorded voice say, “just what did you do?”
The interrogator reached out and clicked the recorder off. “And you told her, didn’t you? You told both those poor innocents just what an ugly world they actually live in, and what a foul, evil little empire the Federal Maritime Authority truly is, didn’t you?” Her face hardened. “You’ve doomed them, you realise. The FMA cannot tolerate that sort of information in the hands of a couple of stupid girls like Shepitko and Volkova.”
She glared at Katya’s pallid face. Katya was starting to sweat as shock gave way to fear. The interrogator continued, ruthlessly driving home what was going to happen and that it was all Katya’s fault.
“Secor won’t allow them to return to Atlantis when there is the slightest chance they might tell anyone what you told them. Nor can they stay here. They’ll talk sooner or later, Kuriakova. They’ll hint, to try and seem clever. Somebody will ask them what they mean by that, and they’ll talk just like you did. Some thoughts and ideas are as deadly as any disease. The one you’ve contaminated those women with will kill them just as surely.”
She leaned back and regarded Katya with unconcealed disgust. “What did you hope to accomplish by telling them?”
Katya glared at her, shaking with hatred. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you lay a finger on them, you parasite.”
“Oh,” said the interrogator in very understated mock fear. “Threats now?”
“You’ve got the upper hand for the moment, but that won’t last long. You’d better start making some friends because the day is going to come when you will need them.”
“And it will come soon.” The interrogator had become serious. “I know.”
Katya shut her mouth before she said anything else that might reveal too much. The Secor interrogator didn’t seem to care. She gestured at the cameras mounted in opposite corners of the room.
“They’re switched off. I’m allowed to do that. I pulled a couple of leads to make absolutely sure. They’re all scared of me anyway. They know the kind of things I’ve done to prisoners in here.” She smiled to herself, as if torture and executions were lovable whims. “Apart from the governor. I don’t think he’s scared of anything. He’s a strange man. Fancies himself as a marine biologist, you know. Almost every day he has drones out going down into the valley below to seek out new creatures, some of which he then has cooked and eats. As I say, a strange man.”
Katya could only stare at the interrogator, and strain quietly and uselessly at her restraints. If the interrogator decided to draw a knife and cut Katya’s wrists, there wasn’t a thing she could do to stop her.
“You’re frightened, aren’t you? Me, too. Seven years I’ve been a member of Secor. Before that, I was in Base Security in Lemuria. Ten years… almost eleven now, I suppose… eleven years ago, we fought Terran troopers — commandoes, they were — when they attacked Lemuria. Corridor fighting. We outnumbered them, but they were so well equipped, so well trained. It was a victory every time we managed to bring down even one of them. I thought we were going to lose, then. Not just that battle. The whole war. I was terrified.” She blinked, bringing herself back from the past. “Then the war just faded away. We were default victors, but we pretended we’d earned it. Oh, the celebrations.
“We’re losing this one, too, and so are the Yagizban. I have Alpha clearance. I see the reports. I’ve had Yagizban agents sitting exactly where you’re sitting, and when I’ve peeled away all the training, the lies, all the defences and I’m left with the pure naked truth within, I see the same thing that I see within myself.”
She took Katya’s hands in her own, just as Dominika had. “You shouldn’t say anything. It’s wiser if you don’t. There are two people that you can trust on this station and two only. The Chertovka and me.”