Murmansk-13

If his mind had been elsewhere, he never showed it, pulling a near unbroken forty-two hour shift during loading at Reticuluum One. A US matter factory in the heart of Soviet Deep Space, a thorn in the corroding Soviet Deep Space Colonisation Program and the counterpoint to the Soviet owned FTL drive technology.

Falmendikov had carried out his pre-arrival conference, loading plans and structural stability calculations with no indication of distraction. A pro that Tor could find no fault in except the black hole that formed a placeholder for his personality.

Tor stared at the mosaic of emergency flowcharts and company posters that dotted the space around his office porthole. A multicoloured frame for the dark empty space beyond. Oil slick colours shimmered in the blackness, early warning of an ionic storm. There was a light knuckled rap on his door.

“You OK Tor?” Jan Nilsen’s wiry frame occupied his office doorway. Tor placed Falmendikov’s file atop the mountain of paperwork and resumed his pacing behind his desk.

“I’d offer you a seat, but I’ve poured Coke on it.”

“Sounds like a party,” Nilsen remarked before retrieving Falmendikov’s file. Idly, he poured over it. “Not slept?”

“Maybe for twenty seconds.” Tor retrieved the Cola stained cigarette from the chair and felt its flaccid remnants disintegrate between his fingers. “Shit.”

“I guess he had some ghosts after all, eh?” Nilsen flipped through the pages of the personnel file, not really observing anything in particular. He seemed agitated, his anxiety was contagious. Nonchalantly, he dropped the file back on the desk.

“We’d already surmised that, just wished he’d kept his personal business personal.” Tor wiped the chair off with the saturated memo and three-point-shot the remnants into the paper basket. Missing.

“Any word from the company?” Nilsen pulled a small green tin of snus from his shirt pocket, rolling the tin between his thin fingers.

“Comms are down, Stewart is working on it.” Tor could feel Nilsen’s deep set piercing blue eyes appraise his mien.

“But?”

“He doesn’t think they’re repairable,” Tor answered resignedly. “He thinks the array is fried.”

“Figures.” Nilsen furtively opened his snus tin, took a single white portion from it and resealed the tin. He jammed the little sachet of wet tobacco beneath his top lip with his left hand, then ran the right hand from blond stubbled scalp to greying stubbled jaw line.

“Solar flare activity and the brewing ionic storm outside?” Tor gestured to the porthole.

“Something worse,” Nilsen leaned across the desk casting shadows about his gaunt features. “Much worse.”

“How bad?” Tor gulped, blood rushed in his head.

“We haven’t got enough Syntin to thrust anywhere, manoeuvring fuel or otherwise and if our comms are down, we definitely can’t get within a realistic rescue range.” Nilsen sounded like he was chewing gum. “We could reroute what’s left to the manoeuvring thrusters. Establish an orbit around that planet, but not much else.”

“What about the EM drive?”

“Cold and seized. Whatever retarded our comms has also sullied our exotic propellant.”

“And the cargo?”

“It’s unrefined, we couldn’t use it even if it wasn’t…” Nilsen gave an apologetic shrug, “fucked like our propellant.”

“Fuck.” Tor slammed his fist on the desk, the paper mountain collapsed, cascading around his knuckles. He could feel himself reaching for his shirt pocket button, trying to free his final cigarette. He relented, pushing himself up and away from the still-damp office chair that skittered backward, slamming into the sideboard. Something told him he would need the cigarette later.

“That’s not our biggest concern now, Tor.” Nilsen rolled his lips, repositioning the sachet of tobacco. It was an anxious tell, Tor had seen it before when playing poker with him; when he was bluffing a weak hand on an overcommitted pot.

Tor stopped pacing before he began and stared at his Chief Engineer. They’d been friends for over a decade and were two of an increasingly shrinking pool of Norwegian space farers in the Saudi Shipping roster; the slow imperceptible shift to cheaper third world labour was depleting their ilk. Tor had begun his junior, Nilsen having entered an already certified civil engineer. However, unlike many whose careers Tor overtook, Nilsen never showed the intransigence to his authority other overlooked, promotion aged officers had as the number of stripes on his epaulettes increased.

Part of him wondered if the symbiosis he found with Nilsen had been because the engineer found Tor a malleable presence in the Masters office. He let Nilsen mould him, just as he knew the other, younger more diligent officers would have provided an arrogant, inflexible barrier for progress, for the purchasing of spares and maintenance parts. Bean counters eager to please the boardroom bottomline. The Riyadh ran well because of Nilsen’s diligence and Tor’s profligacy with company funds.