Katya did not like the way she said it so easily. First, do no harm. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. You can get a couple of guns in here?”
“I could get an entire armoury in here. I am a senior ranking officer of the Security Organisation directorate. It will not be a problem.” Durova looked at her, and Katya was very aware of the analytical processes going on inside the interrogator’s head. “I won’t get one for you,” she said finally. “You show too much compassion to be reliable in a gunfight.”
Katya felt slightly stung by that, although she had a feeling it was almost a compliment. “I don’t like guns,” she said, and moved on quickly. “How will the Vodyanoi know the pod’s been released? Oh, wait. I can answer that myself. The pod’ll be transmitting a distress signal and a sonar pulse to aid detection, won’t it? That’s automatic.”
“Any other questions? Really, Katya, all you have to do is as you’re told.”
Katya was beginning to think this was less a “rescue,” and more a “recovery.” Fine — if they were so sure all she had to do was follow them around and keep her mouth shut then that was what she would do. “Tasya said the same thing.”
“Tasya is right. All done then?”
It was a simple plan, and it would probably have worked. They would never know.
The first hint that all was not well was when the next day was declared an “Extraordinary Freedom Day.” Not only would it actually last all day and not just an hour, but the doors were opened between the prisoners’ sectors. For the first time, the male prisoners would mix with the females. The guards withdrew from the wings on the governor’s command, but they were clearly unhappy about what such an event might do to discipline.
Katya found herself a quiet corner and prepared to wait the day out. Male inmates started appearing in the wing within minutes, and she didn’t like the look of them at all. It seemed the culture in the male wings was very different from the female; whereas the women generally just accepted their incarceration philosophically and continued to act much as they had in their free lives, the men had adopted behaviours that would have been entirely unacceptable in the corridors of a settlement. Tattooing was unknown on Russalka, but the men seemed to have re-adopted it as some sort of tribal ritual. Katya couldn’t even guess what they were using for ink, and in many cases it seemed ink hadn’t been used at all, resulting in scarification. She thought it looked hideous and alien, and the men scared her. She was very relieved when Tasya found her.
“What is wrong with the men?” said Katya. “Why have they done that to themselves?”
“Fear,” said Tasya, her disgust plain. “They pretend all this machismo and then tattoo themselves to fit in and to show loyalty to one gang or another. If they weren’t scared, they wouldn’t do it. If they actually had any guts, they wouldn’t need to. But they’re animals, and animals need a pack.”
They looked around the wing with disquiet. The atmosphere was becoming tenser by the second. Most of the women were in for non-violent crimes, and even the murderers had used non-violent methods more often than not — a dash of poison here, a sabotaged life support unit there. The men, it seemed, liked to use their hands, and almost every uniform bore the word MURDERER.
“One of the old timers in my wing says she’s never heard of an ‘Extraordinary Freedom Day,’” said Tasya. “And she’s been here for fifteen years. This is insane, Katya. They’ll have a riot before the end of the day.”
“What about the plan?” asked Katya in a half-whisper. It was hardly necessary to whisper at all — the sound of chatter was becoming deafening.
“The plan… That, I am worried about. I don’t like this, and I really don’t like the timing. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I’m not fond of ‘maybe.’ I can’t decide if this will help us or hinder us. I’m tending towards the latter. We should postpone the escape.”
“But the Vodyanoi’s waiting for us!”
“It can wait a bit longer. Just a day. Kane will hang around for up to a week, depending on how hot the surrounding water gets with Fed boats.”
Across from them, one of the male inmates who had been talking to a couple of the more impressionable girls from Katya’s wing was pushed aside by another man. There was some terse language, and a punch was thrown. “Fifteen minutes. That’s all it took.” Tasya looked up at the security cameras that were swivelling to lock onto the fight. The inmates called them “cameras” to try to make them seem less threatening — the camera was actually only a tiny part of the device. Most of it was a maser. “Come on, then. A warning shot. At least use the directional speaker to break it up.”
But the camera/gun did neither. It just watched the fight as it developed, now drawing in more men from the original antagonists’ respective gangs.
Katya noticed a lot of the women looking up at the cameras with confused expressions. It had always been explained in terrifying detail what would happen if any prisoner laid hands upon another and, now that maser bolts were not raining down into the rapidly developing brawl, it was as if righteous believers in a wrathful god had just discovered that the atheists had been right all along.
Then, God spoke. Or, at least, the public address system hummed into life with its usual introductory three notes to gain the attention of the inmates. At the same time the main display screens changed from their usual image of the Federal Penal Office logotype to show Governor Senyavin at his desk. He was flanked to his right by the head of security, a man whose name Katya had never heard but who wore a major’s uniform, and to his right by Dr Durova. The major was looking red in the face, like a man who’d just been overruled in an argument. The doctor looked even paler and more drawn than usual. Only the governor seemed relaxed, even pleased.
“Inmates,” he said, and his voice boomed into every corner and crevice of the facility, bringing an end to fights that the notice announcement chimes had not.
Senyavin paused, and smiled beatifically out of the screen.
“Inmates. Today is a truly extraordinary day, a propitious day, a day that may well live in history. I want to share with you, with all of you, a few deep truths about our existence here on Russalka, a few revelations that I have recently been blessed by, and that will light all our paths in what must follow.” He clasped his hands together and continued. “I would like you all to ask yourselves a very important question: why are we here?”
“Because we got caught!” shouted one of the men who’d only recently been fighting. Those around him laughed, even those from the opposing gang.
“Why are we here on this world? Russalka got along perfectly well for untold millions of years all by itself. What did we bring? We brought ourselves. We brought filth. We brought evil. We have taken from this world, and we have given… nothing. Nothing but pollution and corruption and the cancer we call humanity. Oh, we speak of high aims and morality and such, but really, look at us. We are just a virus that spreads across planets. But, and here is the vital point, at least we are a virus that may recognise ourselves as such. I have a dream, a recurring dream. In it, I see us for what we are, a pestilence, and I see you, the inmates of this foul, pus-filled abscess it pleases us to call a correctional facility, as a particularly malignant strain.”
“Insane,” said Tasya.
Katya was watching Dr Durova. She was looking at the back of the governor’s head as if she could see within, to where twisting worms of madness were eating the governor’s mind. Katya knew the doctor was thinking of the Secor reports of clinical paranoia. Durova looked sideways at the security chief, but he was looking straight ahead, his astonishment at his senior officer’s speech apparent in his eyes.