Murmansk-13

At first he saw nothing, just blackness, distant starlight blotted out. Then, letting his vision settle, he saw her, emerging like a magic eye image from star blind retinas. A vessel, a new vessel, not the wrecked prison carrier that had been flung from the station as it centrifuged months after the crash – spiralling debris and corpses. Nor was it the unusual leviathan he’d heard dubious legend of around District Twelve. This was a civilian craft, a deep space merchant vessel perhaps. It was small in perspective, Jamal could vaguely make out its aft section, rows of small cylindrical tanks glinting chrome silver and braced by dense, bright orange coloured space frames. Engineering lay at the stern, a featureless block leading into soot stained rocket cones.

It appeared docked or at least in geostationary operations, although Jamal couldn’t make out the forward section of the vessel or its superstructure from his vantage point. After years of abandonment, a new vessel was at Murmansk-13. Salvation perhaps? It certainly wasn’t replenishment, had it been delivering stores it would have docked at the end of the corridor he was stood beside.

Jamal’s excitement was tempered by his consideration that perhaps this was not an unprecedented event. In four years his and all his fellow prisoners existence had been one of abject blind isolation, of plastic covered aluminium bulkheads and windowless office vistas. What few viewing ports they were afforded access to in District Four overlooked the grey hourglass of the stations central command and the web of metal stanchions that kept the docking and district rings attached to it.

For all Jamal knew they’d been visited before, brief visits to stock the Unseen Hand. Jamal twisted and watched the security camera on the far wall. He’d broken it four times, Mikhail an equal number. Once more it had been fixed. The light above it no longer blinked, but Jamal had seen it pan the warehouse months ago, had waited for its creeping motion to die. Now the elongated tube was still, the lens focusing on shadows. Perhaps this was their watchers departing vessel, the experiment concluded.

He had to make it back, had to tell the others before it was too late, before another means of freedom was lost. It took twenty hours of clambering the mile and a half of air, wiring and service ducts to get back to District Four, just ten for Mikhail who’d be returning with similar news. Igor would have longer to formulate a plan. District Four needed supplies but a full backpack would cost him more time in the ducts. Returning empty handed would bring consternation, but also news – hope.

Jamal tried to calculate how long it would take the sixteen men of District Four to get to the ship, it was closer to them, but the corridors were a no go, a thoroughfare for the infected. Sixteen men would be a lot of noise. He could go alone, stowaway, but he owed Gennady, he owed all of them or at least most of them. They could have allowed their prejudices to turn him loose, instead they valued him. It was the same relationship as he’d tolerated at high school with his coach, he was a commodity to be protected and vaunted, serious injury made him disposable. It wasn’t family, wasn’t even close, but it was a bond, a bond that without he would probably be dead. Or worse.

He thought of his family, Moms was dead, his Dad had been a gangbanger, an early member of the Crips and equally dead, he’d died a teenager and Jamal had never met him. He wouldn’t be surprised if his brother had gone down that street too. What was left was millions and millions of miles away. Sisters and headstones.

Vertigo stirred him as he looked up at the racks, a dull pummelling of bulkheads put his senses on edge. The infected were near. Supplies could wait, he couldn’t delay relaying the news. Jamal lifted the compacted, light canvas backpack and hoisted it onto a shelf beyond reaching height, brass clasps tinkled in the darkness. He could come back for it if necessary, but not before exercising this chance.

Smoothly, Jamal transitioned back into the shadows and steeled himself for the twenty hour return journey wishing he’d at least found some sachets of emergency water.

Chapter 3

Tor looked at the headshot attached to Nikolai Falmendikov’s personnel file. The face staring back possessed a new Soviet authoritarian exterior, ashen cheeks and dark ringed grey eyes. A neatly trimmed, greying moustache embellished tightly closed lips. The picture could almost be in greyscale were it not for the Red Banner background. A hammer and sickle watermarked the picture.