Murmansk-13

Tala interrogated the note, squinting at the fuzziest words. “He said at the junction between District Seven and Central Command,” Tala looked up from the note, Jamal appeared stricken, his lips parted in anguish. “What’s wrong? Do you know it?”

Jamal nodded, wordlessly at first, then said. “There is something I haven’t told you. I don’t know why, I didn’t think it would be important. At least, I hoped…” Jamal turned to Oleg who stood guard beside their conduit. His face betrayed a darkening knowledge of whatever Jamal was alluding to.

“Jamal?” Tala asked, her brows knotting with concern.

“District Four wasn’t the only band of survivors aboard Murmansk-13,” Jamal began, then paused to look behind him as if expecting the bogeyman to be stood there. “In the months after our transport crashed, two distinct groups coalesced.

“The first you’ve met, Gennady’s group. We were the moderates, the wrongly accused, the petty criminals and dissidents.”

“And Ilya and Kirill,” Tala interrupted.

Jamal grimaced, “Ilya was an outlier, he never belonged. He was one of the last to come into the District Four fold and I think that was because he was too much of a threat to Igor. Kirill was a puppet, the Unseen Hand got to him, told him if he sold us up the river he’d be granted freedom and a return to Earth. I guess he was willing to believe anything after four years.

“Even in these two groups there are factions and agendas, but the numbers are too small. There’s only three options in the group, you can toe the line, try to influence the leader or…”

“Or?”

Jamal smiled mischievously. “Or you walk out the door and you die, alone. You kill yourself, maybe by becoming infected, or blasting yourself out of an airlock or doing something more traditional, like slash your wrists or hang yourself. You become so consumed with your own agenda or sorrow or loss of hope or fucking madness that you do that.”

“And who is Igor, this man you think was threatened by Ilya?” Tala asked flinching at the memory of Ricky Velasquez.

“A man I saved, my bench mate on the transport, although I’d never met the guy until they shipped us out to deep space,” Jamal shook his head. “He’d be dead if it wasn’t for me, and I wish I’d fucking let him die too.”

Oleg spoke up trying to fill in the blanks as Jamal paced to the opposite side of the corridor. “He is a bad man, a rapist. He became leader of District Seven survivors. Murderers and sex offenders, all of them. They were from penitentiary, not Gulag.”

“How does a group like that function?” Asked Katja, her voice small, her head peering from beyond the removed grating of the wiring conduit.

Oleg shrugged, unable or unwilling to answer.

“Like any impromptu prison gang,” said Jamal thickly from the shadows of the corridor bulkhead. “It doesn’t take a strong man to kill someone, or rape someone, in fact most times it means you’re a weak, weak person. But if you get a strong man, with a force of character that also happens to be a sadistic psychopath, then you have your Gennady for the bad guys, your Igor.”

Where the conversation fell away, the wind filled the void. Cold gusts of air rippled the inner aluminium plating of the corridor, whistling through the drilled spaceframe brackets. Emergency strip lights flickered and popped spastically the visible length of the passageway until disappearing into the gloom of the curve.

“Why does any of this matter?” Asked Tala, finally.

“Because your Captain is expecting us to rendezvous on Igor’s doorstep,” answered Jamal, pushing himself away from the bulkhead and walking back into the centre of the corridor.

“And?” Replied Tala, defiantly.

“And they also know you are here.”

☣☭☠

They squirmed through the tight conduit at the behest of Jamal, inching incrementally back the several kilometres to the junction. His revelation regarding the competing group of survivors didn’t change anything, the only hope for rescue was to follow the instructions laid out in the Captains note and pray they led them to deliverance and not the hands of the infected or Igor.

After all Tala had witnessed aboard Murmansk-13 it seemed insane to fear other human beings that managed to survive for so long in such hostile environs. But then the reality of their situation sunk in, the infected were many and horrifying, human husks with what made them human rotted away. But they were also dumb, they operated on pure instinct in such a manner as to cause damage to themselves and to others in their condition. A band of convicts deemed dangerous enough to ship into deep space, hell bent on escape posed a far more threatening prospect. And then there was the Unseen Hand she’d heard Oleg and Jamal reference, a further unknown with a far less predictable agenda, surely aware that their habitat was slowly degrading around them.