Murmansk-13

All concerted effort was imbued in thrusting her burning thighs, he was trying to lift her legs, but couldn’t. Arty was weakening. She pumped her legs backwards again and again, trying to break his fragile grasp. Then it all stopped. She heard the clatter of a chair behind her, the screech of the metal table legs pushed backwards. The click of plastic against plastic.

When she managed to look up, levering herself up gingerly on numb palms, Arty was slumped like a puppet with cut strings, trousers around his ankles. His body wracked with spasms. One of her kicks had jammed the pen further into the skull, the tip of the Parker fountain pen just visible through the soup of gore where his eye once was. Both eyelids flinched, one obstructed by the writing implement, the other partially concealed a lobotomized gaze.

Katja fell back to the floor, she expected to cry, but there were no tears left. If she felt anything at all, it was a curious and detached sense of accomplishment. In the various circles of hell she’d been forced through since waking in the morgue, it had been others, Tala or Jamal or Oleg that saved her. Now she’d saved herself and in doing so eradicated one of the true killers of her father. The vengeance however was hollow. In a sense everybody who came into contact with Murmansk-13 were victims, the place was insidious, it infiltrated the mind and amplified weaknesses. Even Arty.

The door opened behind her. “Well fuck me,” said Dr. Smith, pointing her revolver at Katja’s head but looking at the brain damaged or dead Artyom. She cocked the revolver and Katja closed her eyes, she didn’t hear the bullet as it left a neat hole in Arty’s skull. When she opened them again, the barrel was directed at her face. “Get up.”

Katja struggled to right herself. The effects of the drug largely worn off; leaving a crash of dulled muscle response and generalized numbness. Of itself, she knew she could overcome these, but she was so tired, so very done. For a second, she just wished the doctor would pull the trigger and return her to the mindless oblivion of the morgue. “I can’t,” she replied, her voice a quiet rasp.

“Get up, or I will shoot you.” said Dr. Smith, calmly.

A tonsure-bald man entered the room, shorter than the doctor, slightly rotund in a grey cardigan. He put his hand on the doctors shoulder and spoke in an avuncular tone. “Leave her for the clean up team, Rebecca. No point getting her blood on your hands.”

☣☭☠

Tala absently dabbed her ear. The cartilage had been neatly perforated and partly cauterized by the bullet. Dried blood formed a tactile crescent around the edge of the wound. Subconsciously, she knew it must sting, could imagine the pernicious pain of the injury, but outwardly she didn’t feel it. Didn’t feel anything.

The cells around her were silent, everyone resigned to their individual fate. They were no longer crewmates and companions, just an assortment of condemned and broken beings awaiting the inevitable, trapped in their introverted shells of thoughts and memories, and dreams that never would be. Nobody spoke for an indeterminable time.

Perhaps death wouldn’t be so bad, thought Tala. Like going to sleep, a cessation of all the pain the waking world left. Maybe the bitter taste of failures and tragedies and regret would be washed away, purified by the endless darkness. If that were the case, she could release all the anger, all the sorrow of the night she killed her opponent. Maria de los Santos had been her name, but names gave people stories, so every waking moment Tala had to suppress it, suppress the image of Maria dying at her feet as the braying crowd cheered. The ending of Maria’s life had taken much of her own. Tala felt she could welcome death now, after all her body was so drained, so very weary she doubted there was any fight left.

Then Katja was marched back into the cells, Dr. Smith behind.

Of all the incarcerated, it was Captain Tor who noticed first, his sunken, glazed eyes peered through cavernous, dark-ringed sockets, focusing on the Plexiglas that separated the cellblock from the processing desk. Years of cryogenically stunted aging had been erased within a week. He’d shaven, but it only served to make his flesh appear sallow and slack, nascent jowls of loosened skin had formed, weakening his jaw line. He’d stolen his own release, relinquishing the gravitational pull of the noose to revisit the station. The gambit had failed, but perhaps Tor knew he had least to lose, he’d already surrendered himself.