The edge of the door was far enough clear of the frame to get fingers through. Alina grabbed it and pulled. Inside, Katya saw the large desk so familiar from the weekly “Words from the Governor” broadcasts, Radomir Senyavin himself sitting at it, regarding them with tranquil equanimity. But on the floor behind him, Katya could see the bodies of the security chief and of Dr Durova.
The governor rose from his chair as if to welcome them, and Katya thought this might go easier than she’d been anticipating. Then she saw his right hand rising, the heavy maser gripped in it.
The crack of a maser discharge was shockingly loud, but then, it wasn’t the governor’s that was firing. Tasya’s gun had gone off only a few centimetres from Katya’s ear. It wasn’t a very loud noise, but it was sharp, and would be ringing in her hearing for a few minutes.
The governor’s gun fell to the floor, and for a moment Katya feared Tasya had killed him. Then she noticed the governor’s middle and ring fingers were lying beside the dropped gun.
Senyavin looked down to examine his maimed hand with utter detachment, as if he had just noticed a hang nail. They were barely bleeding, the maser having cauterised the wounds as it made them. “You blew off my fingers,” he observed. “You’re a very good shot.”
Tasya walked quickly to him, kicked one of his legs out from beneath him and, moving behind him, applied a foot to the back of the other knee to bring him to his knees. “Thank you,” she said. “And just think, you have another six fingers and a couple of thumbs for me to amputate if you don’t do exactly as you’re told. Katya, get his identity card.”
As Katya went through the governor’s jerkin, giving him an apologetic smile as she patted his pockets, he said to Tasya, “So, you’re the Chertovka.”
“I am. How long have you known?”
“I knew they were contaminated,” he said, looking back at the bodies. “I planted surveillance bugs in the interrogation rooms and in the chief’s office. I listened to him making deals, misappropriating supplies. I listened to her making deals too. I knew it was too late for all of us then.” He nodded at Oksana and Alina, standing nervously by the door. “Even the newest guards have been corrupted by this sink of filth. Criminals, and deviants, and perverts. All of you.”
He looked at Katya then, and his eyes narrowed as if seeing something new. “But, what are you? The light burns… I can smell the truth in you…”
Katya had found the card and held it in her fingers. Governor Senyavin’s unblinking stare froze her, though. Froze her with a fear she hadn’t felt for a long time. A squirming in her mind that hinted that somehow she knew exactly what he was talking about.
Then Tasya impatiently snatched the card from her, and the moment was gone. Senyavin was just a raving maniac again, not the holder of some secret reality that Katya could almost, almost see.
Tasya swiped the card through the desk console’s reader. An eye scanner mounted by the display activated, its red targeting beams spiralling across the governor’s face as Tasya pulled him toward it. She noticed he had clamped his eyes tightly shut, a small act of defiance that did nothing for her temper.
“Open your eyes right now, you worthless bucket of vomit, or I will cut out your eyelids,” she hissed in his ear.
The threat apparently did little to frighten him, despite its undoubted sincerity. Instead, he smiled slowly and, just as slowly, opened his eyes. The red beam found his right eye, locked onto it and in a moment the screen displayed the Deeps’ top level system administration protocols.
Tasya shoved the governor to one side, sending him sprawling on the floor. He lay there watching her as she started to sort through the operations menus, seeking out the one that she wanted. The whole time, his smile did not waver.
Katya spared the display a sideways look, but she found she couldn’t look away from Senyavin. She had a feeling something was coming, something that was burning inside his head, that flooded him with a religious ecstasy, something she could almost perceive.
“Tasya…” she said. The sense of menace growing by the moment made her voice waver.
“In a moment,” said Tasya. “There! That’s what we want.” She tapped on the board display and was rewarded by a perky little upbeat bleep. “Escape pods are enabled. Now let’s get the hell out of here before the guards steal them all.”
“I embrace my destiny,” said Senyavin.
The console’s screen suddenly changed to a display of a complex waveform. “What the hell…?” said Tasya under her breath.
“By my sacrifice, I absolve us all,” said Governor Senyavin, and closed his eyes. His smile grew rapturous.
Too late, Tasya recognised a speech analysis program accepting a verbal trigger. She reached for the board, but the display had already changed to read, “Project: REVELATION active,” and then went blank. Tasya snatched up the governor’s identity card from where it lay on the desk and swiped it through. The console remained inactive, with not even a tone to indicate a failed card reading.
Furious, Tasya turned to Senyavin. “What did you do?” she demanded. He said nothing, but only smiled. It was not a wilful smile, nor was it one of triumph. It was a smile of pure joy. Tasya drew her pistol from her belt and placed the muzzle against his forehead. “What did you do?” she snarled.
“Tasya, leave him,” said Katya. “We have to get out of here, right now!”
“What? Why?”
“He’s committing suicide, and he wants to take us all with him.”
Tasya looked at the governor, sitting on the floor, Durova’s corpse behind him. Then she looked suspiciously at Katya. “How do you know?”
Katya couldn’t say. She couldn’t explain how she could see the glow of an unearthly fire within Senyavin’s mind, how she could smell his sanity ablaze. So instead she said, “I saw it in his eyes.”
Tasya looked straight into Katya’s eyes and, remarkably, broke her gaze first. She seemed slightly rattled. She reached down, flicked away the stubs of the governor’s fingers, and recovered his dropped gun. “Come on,” she said, re-establishing control. As she reached the door, she gave the governor’s gun to Oksana. “The grip’s a little melted at the front, but it’s still serviceable,” she said, and walked out into the corridor. Oksana and Alina followed her, Oksana complaining that there appeared to be some skin still sticking to the melted polymer.
Katya tarried a moment in the doorway. The governor had made no move. He just sat there, smiling as if he had just seen the most beautiful thing in all creation or beyond it. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He looked at Katya, and he spoke, but too quietly for her to hear him. She wasn’t sure if she read his lips, or if she heard his voice in her mind, but she knew what he said.
“You understand.”
Tasya’s shout of “Come on, Kuriakova!” brought her back to the moment, but the half realisation fluttered at the edge of her consciousness, and scared her so badly she pushed it away to where she didn’t have to think about it.
She did. She did understand.
She ran after the others.
As they approached the straight length of corridor that would take them to the observation blister and its attached pod, Katya said, “What happened to the guards?”
In the corridor was a barricade of desks, chairs, and even a daybed that had all apparently been pulled out of nearby offices. Behind it crouched the sector leader and three of his men. Further down the corridor there was a flash of yellow coveralls visible in one of the doorways.
“Down!” barked Tasya, grabbing Katya and Alina by the sleeves and dragging them down. There was a sharp crack and Oksana cried out.