Katya grabbed her belt and pulled her down with them. “I’m hit!” said Oksana, looking in disbelief at the burn hole in her upper sleeve.
“Maybe next time I tell you to get down, you’ll do it.”
“But I’m hit!”
“And still talking, so it can’t be that bad.” Tasya turned her back on the aggrieved woman and said to the sector leader, “What’s the situation?”
“They must have found an unsecured arms locker. There’s a bunch of six or seven with carbines and pistols. The only good news is that they’re not good shots, and they didn’t take any of the riot gas grenades or they’d have used them by now. What happened with Governor Senyavin, ma’am?”
“His mind’s gone. I disarmed him and left him there.”
“The computers…?”
“He’s locked everyone out, even himself. We’re stuck here until the next boat arrives.”
“That’s not the procedure. If security is totally compromised, we’re to lock down the computers, grab as many weapons as we can, and take the escape pods. There’s one at the end of here, past these scum. The plan is to kill them, take their weapons, and abandon the base.”
“How many people can a pod take?”
“Ten.”
Katya saw the real reason behind Tasya’s question — whether she would have to kill the guards or not once the inmates had been dealt with. Ten places meant they might live yet. Tasya might have been on Katya’s side — at least for the moment — but there was barely a thing Tasya did or a thought she expressed that didn’t frighten or sicken her.
An inmate ducked out of a side door about twenty metres away and fired a burst from his carbine. All the bolts went high, burning away the corridor’s already utilitarian wall covering and melting long score marks in the plastic laminate beneath. Tasya watched him with evident disdain over the top of the overturned day bed, lifted her pistol, and shot him dead.
“Did you see that? Out of cover and he fired from the hip. They’ve got their training from watching dramas. No professionalism at all.”
Another convict stepped out from a doorway on the other side of the corridor, shouting something incoherent about how he was going to get the Feds because they shot his friend. He held his pistol on its side with the back of his hand uppermost and fired indiscriminately, bolts hissing down the corridor over their heads or splashing ineffectually against the metal of the office furniture barricade.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Tasya peevishly, and killed him too.
She either didn’t notice or didn’t deign to notice how perturbed she had made the Federal guards. “Yes,” Katya said to them. “She scares me, too.”
“The only way those idiots are going to represent a threat is if you get careless and do something stupid,” said Tasya, adding insult to Oksana’s injury. “Are any of these offices connected?”
“No. They’re all discrete rooms.”
“So much for flanking. We’ll just have to do this the hard way. Clear and secure. Volkova’s hit in her main arm, so she’s out of this. That leaves you, your team, Shepitko, and myself. We’ll split into two teams of three, I’ll take…” she cast an eye over the sector leader’s men, “Glazov,” she read from one of the guard’s name patches. “The teams alternate, cover/clear, all the way down to the pod.”
She noticed the leader, Sevnik, looking at her oddly. “What’s wrong?” she said. Shielded by her body from Sevnik, but visible to Katya, Tasya’s hand tightened on her pistol. Was it possible that he’d recognised her?
“I’ve… I’m sorry, ma’am, it’s just all the Secor I’ve ever met have been… well…”
“Useless in a fight, expecting others to go at the front and they tidy up afterwards? No offence taken. But I was recruited from anti-piracy operations. I’m used to combat.”
The explanation seemed to convince and, indeed, impress him. “Anti-piracy? I envy you. I put in for that, and ended up here. Glazov, you’re with… I don’t even know your rank.”
“Colonel, but you have command here, captain.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Glazov, you’re with Colonel Litvyak.” He nodded at Katya. “What about you, ma’am?” he asked Katya.
She was momentarily at a loss what to say, but Tasya had an almost-lie ready and waiting. “Ms Kuriakova is a civilian volunteer for this mission. She’s not a combatant.”
Captain Sevnik grinned. “I knew all that stuff about you being a traitor had to be rubbish,” he said to Katya. “You won the Hero of Russalka. They don’t just hand those out to anybody.”
“I’ve always tried to do what was right,” Katya replied, and managed a wan smile. She shrugged the carbine’s strap over her head, feeling like a fraud.
“Could we get on, please?” said Tasya, taking the weapon. “These inmates aren’t going to just shoot themselves, you know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Falling Forward
Naturally, Tasya insisted on clearing the first room, much to the consternation of Glazov and Shepitko. While Sevnik’s team provided covering fire, she moved up, Glazov and Shepitko stacking up on her position as she reached the door. Katya heard Tasya say to her team, “You have done this before, haven’t you?” and Shepitko say, “Uh…”
“You’re in third, in that case. Glazov, whichever way I go, you go the other way and clear the door so Shepitko can come in and engage ahead and above. Move fast and don’t pause in the doorway unless you like being repeatedly shot. Got it?”
Whether they got it or not, she wasn’t waiting. She reached the door, tapped its control, and led through, swinging right, Glazov was through immediately behind her sweeping left, and Shepitko came through on their tails, looking worried. They vanished out of sight. There was a pause of a few seconds before Tasya reappeared, using the doorframe as cover. “Clear,” she said with obvious disappointment. “Your turn, captain.”
Sevnik nodded, girding himself for danger. Just as he and his team were about to break cover, however, an inmate leaned out of one of the doors further down the corridor. There was a hollow “pop” sound, and something sailed through the air towards them, trailing a thin streamer of smoke.
“Gas!” shouted Sevnik, ducking back behind cover.
When things happen together, it is in the nature of humans to first assume that the events must be related, no matter how unlikely. When the gas grenade bounced off the Feds’ barricade, it landed on the floor, rolled back a metre, and then coughed gently as the fuse initiated the payload and riot gas started to flow out from it in thick, opaque waves. At the same moment, the Deeps shook with a sudden violence that was enough to knock Katya over. In a moment it had gone, but no dweller in the Russalkin depths ever feels a corridor floor vibrate and then dismisses it as nothing.
There was a horrified silence after the vibration, and they remained in tableaux, waiting for an aftershock. Then Sevnik said, “The gas grenade.” At first Katya thought he was suggesting the grenade was responsible, but then she heard the tinny rumble over the hiss of the gas. Holding her breath and squinting, she looked quickly over the barricade.
The grenade was rolling away from them, back towards the prisoners’ positions.
On the one hand, it should have made her happy. The grenade had barely started to produce gas, and although there was enough of it in the air to make her eyes sting and water a little, there wasn’t nearly enough of it to be debilitating. On the other hand, it was rolling. All floors in stations and facilities were level to several decimal places. Any slopes within them were deliberate with black and yellow danger stripes at both ends and plentiful signage. Nowhere else could you drop a ball and expect it to roll away from you.