Katya tried not to react, but apparently did a poor job of it as the interrogator laughed.
“You’re not very good at this game, are you? I could have opened you like a clam inside twenty-four hours. Well inside. Don’t trust me until you’ve spoken to her. You would be a fool to believe anything I say before then. Until then, you might want to consider how a war criminal like her managed to get through the Deeps’ induction checks without being identified.”
There was a small amount of pain involved in the interrogation after all. Most of the subsequent hour (“The guards will wonder what’s going on if an interview takes less than an hour.”) was spent with Katya reading a patriotic novel on a memo pad while the interrogator rested her head on the table top and listened to a selection of Poliakov concertos, humming along quietly to them. Then, when the closing chords of his Fifth had died away, she roused herself, looked through her case, and located a small pressure syringe. Before Katya could react, the interrogator injected her through the skin of her wrist.
“It’s nothing much,” she told Katya. “Just a mild debilitant. If you’re not exhibiting any signs of interrogation, it would look odd.”
“I could have pretended!” said Katya, tugging uselessly at the hasp holding down her manacles.
The interrogator grimaced and shook her head. “Not you. You’re a terrible actor.”
By the time Oksana and the other guard arrived a few minutes later at the interrogator’s summons, Katya could barely stand.
“You can put her back into the general population,” the interrogator told them. “I’m done with her for the time being.”
The guards had to half carry Katya back to the lift. “What did they do to you?” asked Oksana.
“Don’t!” snapped the other guard. “Don’t ask. Never ask about Secor business.”
The guards took Katya to the sickbay, where they seemed to be expecting her. An orderly put her on a bed fully clothed and told her to sleep it off. Katya tried to say, “Thank you,” but her tongue just lolled uselessly around in her mouth. The orderly shook his head, rolled her into the recovery position, and left her there.
Prisons breed gangs, factions, and cliques. For her first month, Katya had steered around the edge of them with some help from Dominika. There was always a strong feeling however, that sooner or later, she would run into one or another group. On her return from interrogation, this feeling utterly evaporated. That Secor had its attention on Katya was more than enough reason to give her plenty of space.
It didn’t mean people weren’t curious, though. When Katya was having her first evening meal after her “interrogation,” she was joined at her table by a couple of inmates to whom she’d never spoken before. One had TRAITOR on her uniform and the other had MURDERER. Katya found herself just thinking of them by their crimes. Neither of them looked at all extraordinary; if it wasn’t for the cropped hair and the uniforms, she wouldn’t have looked at them twice had she seen them in a station corridor.
“Been a guest of Maya, have you?” said the Traitor.
Katya looked up from her broth and regarded them suspiciously. “Who?”
“Maya. Maya Durova, the ‘White Death.’”
It was clear from Katya’s expression that none of this meant much to her. While the Traitor slouched with irritation, the Murderer said, “The Secor woman. The redhead. Does the tortures.”
Katya wondered why they were interested. She remembered the interrogator — Maya Durova, apparently — telling her only she and Tasya were trustworthy, and that Katya should check with Tasya before even believing that. Since then, she’d avoided talking to anybody about what had happened during her interrogation. She might say something she shouldn’t, some subtle point that she didn’t even realise was fatal until it was too late. Now here she was, confronted by a couple of utter strangers who seemed far too concerned with her business.
“If you mean, was I taken to see her, yes. I was told not to say anything to anyone.” She returned her attention to her broth.
“She just sometimes pulls people out of general population to practise on,” said the Traitor. “Is that what she did with you? You looked pretty ill when they brought you back.”
Katya paused, her spoon almost at her mouth. She was getting irritated with these two, and showed it by emptying her spoon back into her bowl. “How would you know?”
The Traitor grinned and tapped her arm, where she wore a red band with “TRUSTEE” printed upon it. “I help out there. In the sickbay. I saw you.”
Katya looked at the pair of them and said, “You want to know what happened? Fine, I’ll tell you. They took me down, she played some music, she pumped me full of drugs, I don’t remember much else.” It was a true account as far as it went; the patriotic novel had been so blandly predictable that Katya had already forgotten almost everything about it. She returned to shovelling the reconstituted protein shapes in stock that it pleased the kitchen to call “broth” into her mouth.
“You didn’t tell her nothing, though, did you?”
Katya had had enough. She put her spoon down and said, “There’s nothing else to tell. They had it all from me in Atlantis. She didn’t ask me anything. Not a single question. She just said she hated traitors and she was going to shred the minds of every single traitor in the Deeps to pieces using sensory deprivation, psychotomimetic drugs, RNA stripping, the usual. And when she’d destroyed them, the drooling mess that was left would be going out of the airlock.” She picked up her spoon again and used it to point at the conviction flash on the Traitor’s uniform. “Every traitor.” She went back to eating her broth.
They left her alone after that.
Katya was called for further “interrogation” five more times over the next sixteen days. Neither Oksana nor Alina accompanied her on any of these occasions, which was just as well. Katya had felt guilty at Oksana’s concern for her after the first session; it felt like lying when she couldn’t reassure her that it was all just a charade. Not that she could have, not with the White Death’s parting gift of a dose of debilitating drug washing around in her bloodstream. She was always pale and nervous when she was taken down, and this was an honest reaction. Katya hated that drug.
On her third visit she made the mistake of telling Durova that.
“You should have told me earlier,” Durova said, sorting amongst the phials in her case. “I’ll use something different this time.” And she did; a drug used as part of a sensory deprivation torture cocktail. The syringe was hardly away from her skin before Katya went blind. “There,” said Durova, “that’s better, isn’t it?”
It wore off after four hours, but next time Katya said she appreciated the thought and all, but could she go back to the previous debilitating drug? Please?
Tasya found all this very amusing when they talked again at the next “Freedom Day.”
“Yes, Durova is one of ours. She enacted Secor protocols to get me in and to arrange it so I wasn’t identified.”
“Do you trust her?”
“Not really, but I can read her instincts. Those are all going our way. She’s intelligent, and she can see this war isn’t a winning proposition for anyone. She isn’t very loyal to the FMA, either. May have been once, but after what they’ve had her doing, I don’t think she’s got much idealism left in her. Where’s your friend Netrebko today?”
“Dominika? She went to visit her friend in her wing this time around.” Katya looked at Tasya. “She definitely knows who you are.”