Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) (19 page)

There was a metallic
plink!
, sharp and final. She hesitated, confused by the sound echoing from the concrete sides of the shaft, and then felt her lower body moving away from the wall. The ladder was constructed from two-metre lengths and while the length her hands were gripping was secure, the one her feet had landed on was anything but. The uppermost stanchion connecting the section to the wall had broken cleanly and now the length of ladder from her knees down was levering out into the shaft, pivoting at its lowest bracket.

Katya gasped and gripped the uprights even more fiercely as she felt the ladder beneath her push her legs away from the wall. She tried momentarily to keep her feet on the rung, but the free end of the ladder section was pushing painfully against her kneecaps and, a moment later, she felt her feet slide off the metal.

With surprisingly little noise, the ladder section fell away quickly enough to snap its connections to the next section down, and dropped down the shaft with the quietest sound of sheering air that ended with a small splash as it landed vertically five levels below, slicing cleanly through the dark, waiting water.

“Oh, shit,” said Katya in a small voice. Her hands were starting to slide down the ladder verticals.

Making an instant decision that certainly saved her life, she released her right hand’s grip and slapped it onto the first rung she could find. Her left hand followed suit, but this time she reached up to grab the next rung up. Using the panic-borne adrenalin to power her screaming muscles, her feet scrambling at the wall to find whatever footholds they could, she progressed up the ladder in a series of short, staccato pull-and-grabs until a foot found a rung and she was able to pause, relatively safe.

Now reaction set in, and she felt cold sweat prickle across her even as her muscles seemed to weaken. She had to make the most of the dwindling strength the near fall had given her, and used it to drive herself up the ladder, not thinking of anything but the next rung, and then the next rung, and then the next rung. Only when she had climbed three levels, found another door held up with a jack, and stepped smartly across did she have a chance to be afraid, only then did she allow herself to think about what the broken ladder meant for her future.

Her planned escape route was now impassable.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

DANGEROUS CORRIDORS

So much for the carefully worked-out plan. Kane had been frank in explaining that her chances of getting away were no better than 50/50. Now they had just lengthened considerably.

She had a paranoid thought that perhaps the ladder had been sabotaged for exactly this reason, but that made no sense. She could just as easily have died in the lift shaft, mission incomplete, and that would have profited no one but the FMA, who would never have known about it. No, it was just one of those things. One of those silly, random things that, in this case, pretty much guaranteed a death sentence.

Katya’s sense of fatalism deepened. Her future now contained only two potential outcomes – she either successfully completed the mission, or she didn’t. That something bad would subsequently happen to her was a foregone conclusion, so she disregarded that. Success or failure was all she need concern herself with, and she much preferred to be a successful martyr to global peace than another of the war’s faceless dead.

She made her way along the dark, damply smelling hallways, second right, first left, first right and found herself in a cul-de-sac where the old abutted the new. Here there was a locked door, using an old-style keystick lock of a type that had been deemed obsolete even before her parents had been born. Katya searched around until she found amongst the debris in the corner what looked like an abandoned toolkit box. Inside she found a keystick and a change of clothes. Kane had said she’d get filthy in the old corridors and that wasn’t even taking into account the scuffs and tears her coveralls had taken during the incident in the lift shaft.

Changing clothes in an abandoned corridor was possibly not the strangest thing she’d ever done in her life, but it felt odd all the same. Once, this had been a busy place, and a ghost of that liveliness still hung around it. It seemed strange to be in her underwear there, leaning against the wall with one hand while trying to kick off her dirty coveralls, which had taken on a sudden emotional attachment to her right ankle.

After another five minutes of undignified hopping around while she tried to keep as much grime as she could off the new clothes while dressing in them, she was ready. She made sure her identity card and the keystick were in her left breast pocket, ran the route she had been given through her mind one last time, and doused the torch.

In darkness, she stood close by the door and listened. It was vitally important that she was not seen emerging from the door – even the dullest observer might wonder why somebody had been in the disused sections – and so she waited for a full minute simply to get used to the sound levels beyond.

Kane had told her that it was little more than an access corridor, well off the main byways, and few people should be walking them. She heard one pair of feet walk by and then a muffled greeting that brought the footsteps to a halt. A conversation ensued, rendered irritating by its length and boring by being muffled into meaninglessness by the door. Finally, after almost ten minutes, the conversationalists remembered they had jobs to be getting on with and they parted. Katya waited until all the footfalls had faded away before sliding the keystick into the slot in the lock. There was a very solid
clunk
, terrifying in the quiet, and the door opened easily under her hand.

She regretted not leaving the torch on until the last moment when she stepped into the brightly lit corridor and had to blink away tears as she tried to adjust to it after the darkness. It had seemed like a clever idea at the time, to take away light so she could focus entirely on sound. If anyone turned the corner now, however, they would have found a strange young woman blundering blindly about with an open door behind her which was marked with a prominent sign, “KEEP SEALED. DANGEROUS CORRIDORS BEYOND THIS POINT.” Katya’s cover story was not likely to survive such a spectacle.

The corridor remained obligingly empty for the minute it took her vision to clear, however. She closed and locked the door, quickly checked that she hadn’t got any dirt on her fresh clothes that might mark her out as somebody who had recently been in the DANGEROUS CORRIDORS, hoped her short blonde hair didn’t look like a pipe brush, and mentally retuned herself to be somebody who had every right to be in that hall.

In one sense, she did. Every person on that level had at least a Beta grade security pass. Kane had been grudgingly complimentary about the standard of the passes.

“Gammas are easy to fake, and Gamma Pluses not much more so. There’s a huge jump in the standard between Gamma Plus and Beta, though. Nanoscale identifiers, unique polymer tagging, even some fancy business with quantum encipherment. What that all means is that Beta passes and upwards cannot be forged. Not by us, or even by the Yagizban and, believe me, we’ve tried. We can come up with something that fools the eye easily enough but, as soon as it gets scanned, the game is over. Where you’re going, you can’t operate a console or even open a door unless your card’s in a reader. Borrowing yours or stealing one is no good, either. There is a variety of biometric tests to confirm the user is who it’s supposed to be. I’m sorry, Katya – you’re the only person we know who could walk those corridors and stand any chance of getting away with it.”

Lucky me
, thought Katya as she walked the Beta security level corridors.

From the door she walked coolly and confidently right, first left, second right, up a short set of steps leading to a section that was slightly offset to the rest of the maze, turned right, first left, all the way along to the end of the corridor where it opened out into a round chamber.

Katya knew that the lack of bulkheads meant that she was well inside the mountain into which Atlantis was built. This was fortunate, as she could guarantee that every bulkhead would require her ID before allowing her to proceed. The further she could go without using it, the better her chances.

The whole episode of the disused corridors had been to avoid her having to enter the Beta graded section by the usual routes, all of which involved an ID check. Her card was authentic, but she had no reason to be here. Attention would have been called to her and that would have been the end of that. Her Beta Plus was like her medal: an honour of no practical use.

Until now. Right at that exact moment, the entry database was disconnected from the internal usage logs. Usually, the facility computer logged people into the site when they entered, and off it when they left. If a card was used on site that had not been logged in, there would have been a security alert. Currently, however, a small piece of computer code that had begun life in a Yagizban espionage sciences facility had separated the two and would continue to do so for another twelve hours. During that time, anybody with a Beta grade or above could wander around the place whether they had been logged in at an entrance or not. The security failure would only be discovered if and when somebody decided to go through the usage logs themselves.

Katya thought it was very likely that some poor soul would end up doing exactly that when the FMA discovered what she had done. Assuming she had a chance to do it.

The chamber was in the form of a hemisphere with its floor lower than the entry corridor. In the centre was the group of computers that handled traffic control and communications. They rose high, embraced with coolant systems, and ringed with a mesh walkway. Destroying them would cause the Federal forces perhaps a day of disruption before the workload could be fully assumed by the multiple redundancy back-ups dispersed elsewhere in the mountain. Katya, however, was not there to do anything as mundane as simple sabotage.

The situation was complicated by the discovery that the room was not unmanned. This was a surprise – the computers were very low maintenance, and would be left entirely alone for days at a time. It was just her lousy luck to walk in on one of the rare occasions when somebody else was working on something there.

A technician in white coveralls, his Beta card clipped to his pocket, was checking the valves feeding the coolant system. He looked up in surprise when Katya entered. “Oh! You made me jump,” he said. “I thought I was alone.” He smiled awkwardly.

Katya didn’t smile at all. “This is the traffic control and communications hub, yes?” she said curtly. She nodded at the open doorway. “I’m surprised there’s no secure access to this room. Why is that?” She said it as if it was his idea not to bother installing a pass-locked door.

“I… don’t know. I could ask?” The technician was in his twenties, possibly ten years older than Katya, but two wars had made such a mess of Russalka’s demographic spread, it was unsurprising to find seniority was not necessarily attached to age.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “I shall include it in my report.”

“Your report?” He looked her up and down, trying to decide who she might be. “Pardon me for asking, but may I see your identification?” Katya looked at him icily, trying to mimic the marrow-freezing effect that Tasya managed so well. “Please?” added the technician.

With an expression that indicated she was now sure she was talking to the facility idiot, she smoothly withdrew her pass from her breast pocket. There was no indication of job on it, but it did contain an entry for “Domicile.” Hers was marked “None.” On a Gamma card this wouldn’t have earned it a second glance; lots of submariners lived like Katya aboard their boats with the occasional night in rented rooms or a capsule hotel. Beta card holders didn’t live that sort of life, and a Beta Plus definitely wouldn’t. “Domicile: None” meant a senior grade that travelled constantly, and there weren’t many reasons for that.

All these thoughts had run through the technician’s head so obviously that Katya felt like a mind reader. He licked his lips nervously. “May I ask what your role is, please? Ma’am?”

“You may,” she conceded. “But do you
really
want to know?”

In a small psychological coup that she had not entirely understood until now, Tasya had ensured that Katya’s replacement coveralls would be dark grey, a shade not formally used by any section of the Federal apparatus. The impression thus created screamed, “Secor field agent” to all.

“No, ma’am,” he said meekly.

“I am merely having a look around. That, for example,” she pointed at a spiral metal staircase that ascended to a sealed hatch in the ceiling. “What’s up there?” Of course, she knew full well what was up there.

“Uh, nothing. Well, something, but nothing very important. Not really important. Just the data lines to the comms arrays.”

“Show me.”

“I can’t, ma’am. It’s a Beta Plus lock. But,” he waved vaguely at her left breast pocket, trying to indicate her card and not the breast. “But you can.”

Inwardly, she quailed. This would be the first time she had actually used the card here, and this would be the point where she discovered whether the Yagizban computer exploit had worked. If not, she would have armed company very quickly.

Showing substantially more confidence than she felt, she mounted the steps. She noticed the technician was following her and stopped.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded of him. “Beta Plus, remember? Go back to your work.”

He nodded, embarrassed, muttered some apologetic noises and descended again. She watched until he’d returned to the computers, then continued up to the sealed hatch.

The reader was mounted against the axis shaft of the steps. “This is a Beta Plus security point,” she read on its small screen. “Insert identification card to proceed.” Trusting to the distant genii of the Yagizba Enclaves, she slid her card into the reader’s slot.

No alarms went off. Instead the screen now read, “Retinal scan confirmation required. Please look at the red dot in the scanner with your right eye. Do not blink.”