Murmansk-13

“Tired, yes.” Tor turned from the light, Diego stood pensively behind the hover dolly positioning it between himself and the Captain. Tor tried to massage his eyelids, the eyeballs beneath felt grainy. “Let’s go find Sammy.” Tor said, and hope he’s in a better state than Falmendikov or Mihailov.

☣☭☠

The wide passageway toward the central superstructure was perfectly flat to the eye and yet Nilsen couldn’t shake the impossible feeling he was walking downhill. It was clear the further they walked from the service corridor the weaker the centrifugally generated gravity became. The problem was endemic with all centrifugal stations and the primary reason most counter-rotating ring stations housed only a drive at their core.

Murmansk-13 was peculiar, the Central Command superstructure served as both the engineering core, where the inertial drives and stabilizing thruster compartments could be found, but also as a kind of conning station akin to the bridge of a ship. “They must have needed an artificial gravity generator inside the superstructure,” Nilsen thought out loud, assuming both Hernandez and Pettersson were experiencing the same effect. It stood to reason, the station was vast, so vast in fact that an off-centre control position would have been impractical, unmanageable and difficult to police.

“So when is it going to kick in then?” Hernandez asked trying to control the hover dolly. They were notoriously difficult to handle in any atmospheres above 0g but below 1.

“Maybe they shut it off,” Pettersson surmised. “Before they abandoned the station.”

“Then why draw all but the emergency power to the core?” Nilsen said, his hooping voice echoed in the curved deckhead above, he’d never liked how his voice sounded when he spoke in English.

“Keep the drives alive, perhaps the Russians are remotely controlling the thrusters, trying not to scuttle her. Maybe they’re trying to sell her.”

“I don’t buy it, Oscar,” Nilsen said, not looking at the second engineer behind him.

“You think someone is here?”

“Where did our good Doctor go?”

Pettersson never answered and Nilsen never expected him too.

Not looking, Nilsen imagined Pettersson scrunching his usually manful, chiselled features up as he realized he’d overlooked the obvious. It wasn’t an unusual look for the Swede. Pettersson exuded professionalism with his permanently neat trimmed hair and immaculate coveralls, but it was all a facade. Pettersson had earned promotions through sycophancy and coercion within the Saudi fleet and often found himself in way over his head as a Second Engineer aboard the Riyadh. His preoccupancy with recreating a floor plan of Murmansk-13 lent him a veil of distant calm Nilsen found dangerously misplaced as the ship died around them.

In many ways, Pettersson reminded Nilsen of Tor when the Captain first joined the company. A shoegazing fop who’d ascended the ranks by virtue of his ability to adlib competency like a talking doll mimics emotion. While he was bereft of Tor’s charisma, his quiet self-assuredness made him a more trustworthy figure to the tight buttoned manning agents back home, more employable and in Nilsen’s estimation far more dangerous than the Captain who recognized his own faults.

Unfortunately, Pettersson had also become the only crewman Nilsen felt he could truly rely on in any capacity and his immunity to the cancer that swaddled the Riyadh had been reassuring.

The broad steel doors that had punctuated the horizon of the empty corridor since they’d left Tor – demarking the transit from outer ring to Central Command – loomed before them. Close up, Nilsen realized they were several-inches-thick steel built to survive a significant pressure loss situation with automatic servos discreetly placed at the sides. They were also, predictably, closed.

Above and beside a large extraneous sign welcoming them to Murmansk-13 in several languages, a single cylindrical surveillance camera stared lazily toward the way Nilsen had come. He’d monitored the camera the entire distance of the arterial corridor, it never moved and yet Nilsen could not shake the feeling he was being watched back.

“Shall I get to work?” Asked Hernandez, the Mexican parked the dolly and removed a cankered looking electricians screwdriver from a beat-up tool belt. Hernandez sighed at the state of his replacement tool armoury as he approached the door keypad.

☣☭☠

Sammy lent breathlessly within the recessed entranceway to District Six, half shrouded by shadow, his cheekbones etched in darkness. The old steward looked pale, even in the scant light of the service corridor, his chin resting against the gold helmet coupling on his EVA suit.

“He doesn’t look so good, Cap,” said Diego, quietly enough so as to not offend the steward.