Murmansk-13

Every time Hernandez opened his eyes, he was overcome with a profound sense of vertigo. Snapshots of the surrounding corridors, retro reflective signage and neon strip lights, burnt into his retinas creating a nauseating strobe across the insides of his eyelids.

So he kept his eyes closed and let the pulsing retinal scars fade, pushed along by the smaller man.

Hernandez knew he was deeply impaired by a significant concussion, but not to the extent he couldn’t envisage means to overcome his captors. He just couldn’t rally his thoughts into a meaningful plan of action. The light bulbs of his mind arced, signals flickering haywire, then fell dark.

He’d tried to loosen the rags binding his hands. Had tried to roll his wrists with the fragile dexterity of someone familiar with handcuffs, but his injuries made his movements clumsy and obvious. The small one, Mikhail, had seen him as he followed behind. He’d chastised Hernandez with a blow across the back of his head.

That reignited the agony in his smashed cheek, tenfold.

Now in the dim and cold of the service corridor, Hernandez could peer through narrowed eyes. The pain in his cheek had returned to a constant, dull ache that blossomed with each footstep. An embryonic migraine pounded with each heartbeat behind the bridge of his nose and the inside of his cranium felt drained of its cerebrospinal fluid. Each breath was accompanied by a wet suckering sound that was chased by an elongated whistle as air forced its way through the flattened meat of his nose.

But at least his injuries were limited to his head.

Mikhail and the huge bald man wore EVA suits, fully articulated Chinese reproductions of NASA Apollo issue. The suits were a light grey, the joints a slightly darker grey. The lower arms bore the green crossed palms emblem of the Saudi Shipping Inc. The suits had come from the Riyadh and both were liberally stained with blood.

Mikhail fitted comfortably into his suit, they had after all been paired down to house Chinese spacefarers and the long haired Russian was short and lithe. The bald man, meanwhile, was hunched into his unit, the telescoping joints at their maximum extent to the point they bowed outward. Consequently, he walked with the gait of a constipated John Wayne suffering rickets.

Up ahead, Hernandez saw bodies. Three figures lying on the deck as the coruscating emergency lights cast mad distorting shadows around them. As they neared, Hernandez could see that only one lay supine, the body furthest away. Close beside it another body lay sprawled facedown, light glimmering, a puddle of dark fluid surrounding it.

The first body they reached was Sammy. He’d been sat up against a bulkhead, smeared bloodstains indicated he’d been dragged across the corridor. He was barely recognizable. His skull had been smashed into the deck, flattening the facial bones, deranging the features beneath a veil of livid bruising and gore. It took Hernandez a minute to reconstruct the face in his mind. He’d always thought Sammy had been a good looking older guy, a Filipino with Latino style, well turned out, neat.

Now he was pulped, dead. His arm half chewed away. Lifeless eyes stared out of the mangled wreckage of flesh. Sammy had foreseen this. He’d floated around the Riyadh after the scout party returned, trapped in the purgatory of his own premonitions.

Mikhail moved Hernandez along.

“Your men were like this when we got here,” the bald man stated.

“And you took their suits?” Hernandez wasn’t quite sure why he sounded incredulous or surprised.

The big man shrugged. “They don’t need them anymore, we do.”

Jovan Peralta rested supine, his lips had begun to pull back with decay. He’d been shot in the forehead, but there was only a fine dribble of old viscous blood from the wound. There was also a savage gash in his throat that appeared older. The injuries didn’t correlate unless he’d died twice, the poor bastard having returned as one of those abominations.

Hernandez wondered if they were still alive, any of them. He was thought of as volatile and unpredictable, had read so much in his last end of voyage appraisal. But now he couldn’t summon the volatility he needed; the rage to fight back. His crew was all but gone, Peralta’s half lidded, slack faced gaze was the embodiment of that loss. He didn’t want to see Tala like this. Or any of them. He could feel himself draining away, becoming the empty vessel that returned home, friendless and lost.

“Who’s the other guy?” Hernandez asked, not really caring.

The third figure lay prostrate in a pool of blood close to Peralta. He wore an escape EVA set. The body was still fresh, the blood had thickened but hadn’t dried. He’d been stabbed in the back of the neck, probably unawares and had struggled to the last. The wound was small and matched the blood caked shank Hernandez had been threatened with earlier.

The bald man stared at the corpse with eyes as dead as the bodies at his feet. “There were only two EVA suits.”