“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 w
ould 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.”
Katya had to lift herself on her toes a little to get the scanner level with her eye. She had barely got herself in position when the scan was complete. “Identity confirmed. Welcome, Katya Kuriakova.” She read her name with a tight cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. Now there was incontrovertible proof that she had been here. Her last opportunity to walk away from the mission had just been destroyed before her eyes. Specifically, she corrected herself, her right eye.
Above her, with a thump of disengaging bolts and the hum of servo motors, the hatch slid back. Parsecs away on old Earth, condemned criminals had once mounted the hangman’s scaffold with the same slow tread that Katya now used as she climbed the steps into the restricted area.
The room at the top of the spiral staircase was small and spectacularly cluttered. The sheer profusion of wall-mounted boxes and identical blackly insulated cables running around the place like the limbs of a cybernetically-enhanced eikosipus family – a species similar to the terrestrial octopus, but with twenty tentacles rather than eight – panicked Katya for a second; how could she possibly find the right junction in this mess?
After she swallowed down her nerves, however, and looked again, she saw that there was actually an order underlying the apparent chaos. Indeed, when she looked closer still she found that all the boxes and all the cable sockets were clearly labelled. Thirty seconds of searching found her the one she was looking for.
Working quickly, conscious of the technician below who was probably bursting with curiosity to know what she was up to, Katya took the bland metal box from her bag. It was bare metal, a coolly glinting titanium alloy, whereas the boxes already there were all finished in a silken black. Yet it didn’t look too badly out of place once she had pulled out a lead from the wall box, and replaced it with one of the leads from hers. Its other lead was pushed into a power feed and that was that. She stowed it behind a mass of cables where they fed into the floor, arranging them to hide it as best as she could.
On the top edge of the box was the covered switch. She flipped back the cover, and flicked the switch. It glowed a reassuring green, although whether that meant anything truly reassuring at all, she had no idea. She closed the cover to hide the glow, took a deep breath, and then exhaled it slowly. She had done what she had come there to do. If the box was left alone for even a few minutes, it would do its job.
She turned to descend the steps and found the technician’s head poking up through the hatch. He frowned suspiciously up at her. “What’s going on in here?” he demanded. “I heard you messing around with things.”
“If I told you,” she said, her imperious descent forcing him to back away from her, “my colleagues would just have to untell you. Do you understand?” It was a threat she’d once heard on a drama and seemed very impressive coming from the formidable heroine.
Apparently it sounded far less impressive coming from her.
“You stay right there,” he said. “I’m calling my superior.”
“No, you’re not,” said Katya, and hit him in the side of the neck with Kane’s taser.
She was glad she’d had the foresight both to have it ready, and to lift her other hand from the metal staircase’s banister before using it. H
e had one hand on it, and she saw a couple of blue sparks leap between his knuckles and the metal. For an agonised second the technician shook and grimaced, then collapsed as the taser deactivated, falling into a heap across the steps.
Katya quickly checked his pulse, and was relieved to still find he had one. She hadn’t known quite what to expect from the taser, but she’d been hoping for a quick flutter of eyelids and a collapse into a dreamless sleep. What she’d actually got was a painful looking series of spasms, and the smell of burning hair in the air. Even the screen on the security lock had wavered in the taser’s electromagnetic field. That gave her an idea.
She set the hatch closing and, as soon as the locks had re-engaged, she tasered the card reader. The screen flashed on and off several times, then an ugly mass of random symbols came up and stayed there. It looked very broken to her.
She pocketed the taser and stepped over the technician. She considered dragging him down to the chamber floor and hiding him somewhere, but couldn’t help thinking she’d do him more harm than she already had if she tried. Besides, he was barely visible from the chamber exit.
She resisted the urge to run from the chamber, holding it down to a determined walk. She remembered when she’d passed herself off as a minor Yagizban official; that had gone reasonably well. Yes, she’d been caught, but not because her impersonation had been poor. All she had to do was look like she belonged.
She reached the side corridor that contained the sealed off access to the old facility without seeing even a single other person on the way, and this boosted her confidence enormously. It was only as she approached the door itself that it occurred to her that this was very much at odds with her experience when going the other way. Then she had seen several people in the hallways; that they were so empty now was a cause for suspicion, not comfort.
Four figures in FMA military uniforms turned the corner ahead of her as she reached the door to the DANGEROUS CORRIDORS. She would have attempted to bluff them by walking by if they hadn’t come to a concerted halt at the sight of her.
Katya's War (Russalka Chronicles) Page 15
