“I… Yes?” said Katya, promptly wishing she hadn’t admitted to her identity, and then immediately glad she had. It didn’t pay to lie to Secor. That might make them angry with you, and that might make you dead.
“We have some questions for you,” said the captain. Her tone was officious and curt. “You will come with us.”
“What? But we’ve just been debriefed once.”
“Irrelevant. This is Secor business.”
To his credit, Sergei was having none of this. “We haven’t slept in over a day, captain,” he said, managing to be courteous for once. Speaking to somebody with the power of life and death, with an unpleasant period of “harsh” interrogation between the two, can have that effect. “Can’t this wait?”
The Secor captain looked at him as if Sergei was something that might be found in a cess tank. “And you are..?”
Sergei had an awkward habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and getting himself into trouble. Katya stepped in to stop him coming out with anything they might both regret. “He’s my co-pilot. Do you need both of us, captain? I’m fine going with you, but my co has business to attend to.”
Sergei shot her a “What are you playing at?” expression.
“The cargo still needs to be handed over to the dispersals agent at the dock. Yes, yes,” she stopped him interrupting, “I know I said we could leave that until we’d had some rest, but we’re overdue as it is. People are waiting for those parcels and letters, Sergei. We should hand them over as soon as possible.”
Sergei narrowed his eyes. He knew there was nothing he could say or do that would have any influence on Secor with the possible exception of making them angry, but he didn’t want to just leave it at that. Despite the current tension between them, his loyalty was still to her.
“I’ll be fine, Sergei. I’ll just answer the captain’s questions and then we can get on with cashing in the scrips and finding some more work, OK?”
With every sign of not finding it OK in the least, Sergei nodded. “Take care, Katya,” he said as he reluctantly took his leave. “I’ll see you back at the boat, yes?”
“I’ll see you there. Bye for now, Sergei.”
He walked back towards the docks slowly, looking over his shoulder now and then.
“He’s very protective of you,” said the captain.
“Yes,” agreed Katya, turning away from Sergei to face her. “He’s a family friend.”
“How nice, considering you don’t have any family left.”
Katya blanched. “You’re such a bastard, Tasya Morevna. Hard to believe you ever had a family. What did you do, eat them?”
The “Secor captain” smiled slightly. She’d been called much worse in her life, and accused of much worse. Sometimes the charges had even been true. “Lovely to see you again too, Kuriakova,” she said. “I was wondering if you’d recognised me. I’ve even dyed my hair.”
“How about I shout the place down, Chertovka?” demanded Katya, exhaustion making her reckless. “How about I point at you and denounce you as a war criminal and a traitor? You won’t get out of here alive.”
Tasya Morevna, unkindly nicknamed the “Chertovka” or “She-Devil,” seemed supremely unimpressed by the threat, even if the two “troopers” with her looked a little worried. “No,” she admitted, “we probably wouldn’t. Of course, neither would you. And then we’d all be dead, and you wouldn’t have found out why we’d gone to all this trouble to speak to you.” She smiled icily. “You’d die curious, and I know how much that would irritate you. Walk with me, Kuriakova. We’re attracting attention standing here.”
Grim and angry, Katya allowed herself to be cajoled into walking alongside Tasya, the two “troopers,” whom were certainly Yagizban agents in reality, following up the rear, their maser carbines carried at a “full port” position across their bodies. People avoided looking at the little group; Katya’s surly expression, Tasya’s smirk, and the two troopers were the popular image of a typical Secor arrest in progress, whether the detainee was guilty or not. Nobody wanted to stare, because that might mean sharing their fate. Even before the conflict against the Yagizba Enclaves had begun, Secor had enjoyed an unsavoury reputation. Now that people’s fear of spies and saboteurs — a fear the FMA was happy to encourage — was running wild, Secor did almost anything they liked, as long as it was not considered too overt or damaging to public morale by the ruling council. Impromptu public executions, such as had occurred in the first month of the conflict, had been stamped out. Most Federal citizens assumed they had simply been replaced with impromptu private executions. In this, they were correct.
The advantage of the almost supernatural levels of fear that accompanied Secor agents was that it meant anyone dressed as one was essentially invisible. It was an easy bet that not one of the dozens of people that passed them by would have been able to provide anything but the vaguest of descriptions for anyone in the party.
Tasya led the group to a restricted door into a disused maintenance area, the card she swiped through the lock looking suspiciously like an authentic Secor pass to Katya. She had assumed up to this point that the uniforms had been stolen from a storeroom somewhere, but now she was beginning to have misgivings. Where the Chertovka was involved, it was all too easy to imagine a storeroom with the corpses of a Secor officer and two troopers somewhere, stripped of their uniforms.
The door clanged to and locked behind them, cutting them off from the busy thoroughfare and leaving them in a suddenly very quiet, dank, barely lit access corridor to some part of Atlantis’ infrastructure that it probably didn’t even use anymore. “There,” said Tasya with satisfaction. “This is much cosier, isn’t it?”
Without waiting for the obvious reply, she moved ahead and Katya — for lack of other options — followed her. The corridor really was an archaeological site, in Russalkin terms at any rate, probably dating back to the foundation of Atlantis over a century before. At some point it had become surplus to requirements and was now just home to a few leaky pipes and some corroded power and control cabling, none of which had carried so much as a joule of energy since before she was born. Tasya clearly knew her way through the narrow corridors of what turned out to be a labyrinthine route. Behind them, the Yagizban “troopers,” pleased at no longer having to playact soldiers, slung their carbines over their backs by their straps and held a brief muttered conversation about being glad to be off the thoroughfare as they followed Tasya and Katya.
Katya was both irritated at all the clandestine sneaking around, and slightly smug because she was memorising the route. She might not have many talents, she thought, but trying to trip her up on a matter of navigation was just stupid. She knew they had already re-crossed their path twice, so she was positive Tasya was trying to disorientate her. Well, if crossing the Vexations with an unreliable inertial compass hadn’t caused her any great problems, then wandering around a few corridors — each of which was littered with plenty of distinctive features to remember — was insultingly easy. She didn’t tell Tasya that, of course; let her think she’d succeeded in baffling poor little Katya.
Then, finally, Tasya reached a door, opened it and waved Katya inside. Katya went with poor grace; she was reasonably sure that if they were going to murder her, they’d had plenty of opportunities up to now and passed on all of them. Thus, she felt fairly safe in giving Tasya the evil eye as she passed her. Then she looked into the room and any thought of such one-upmanship left her.