Murmansk-13

Tor watched the air pressure exhaust into space from the tiny viewport, beyond the silhouetted figures of his recon party. Little ice crystals began webbing the bottom corners of the glass. He tried to prepare himself as the airlock became a vacuum chamber, the weightlessness reached his stomach first and he fought down burning gulps of regurgitated aquavit.

“Everybody connected?” Peralta asked as the crew floated from the deck, bobbing like ducks on a pond.

Tor pushed against Mihailov’s life support backpack, recalling training from a lifetime ago. The others followed, wires tautened and slacked, they formed a discordant Newton’s Cradle in the dancing yellow light.

A green light indicated it was now clear to open the external door. Peralta peered into the viewport. “Clear.”

Tor swallowed hard as Peralta punched the external door control and Mihalov gathered his now weightless spool of steel guide rope, the end bolted to the airlocks padeye. Red starlight cast deep shadows against the bulkhead as the door released the party into the hard vacuum of space.

As Peralta pushed out of the airlock, securing his magnetic boots to the external plating of the Riyadh, Tor was overcome with awe. He no longer thought about his breathing nor the other troubles that burdened him.

He floated from the airlock and looked around, his head swivelling within his helmet. To his right the great supergiant bathed them in soft inconsistent heat and carmine light, he could imagine it crackling like a camp fire. Before him the great space station loomed, grey and dark. Somehow its scale seemed to multiply now his body had become dismembered from his ship. Arbitrary towers and aerial arrays jutted like metal tendrils from the great monolith, a cold Siberian city formed in azimuth. Beyond the station lay the consistency of stars, forever present and as distant now as when he watched them glimmer with grass beneath his feet. Beneath the station the Venus sized planet continued orbiting its decaying host star, its sickly coloured chlorine rich atmosphere roiling only a few thousand kilometres below.

Space became corporeal having so long been an environment viewed from a windscreen, no more experienced than a travel TV documentary. The silence was penetrative.

“Captain?” The trance was broken by the urgent synthetic voice of Peralta. “Captain?”

Tor looked back at the party, distracted, he’d floated away from the Riyadh. With Peralta fixed to the ships plating, Tala and Mihailov dangled helplessly, twirling languidly about their buddy lines. Tor was supposed to be anchoring the team to the vessel while Peralta fixed magnetic cams for Tala to play the lifeline through.

The group were just a boot failure away from being pulled from the Riyadh. Terrified, Tor flailed trying to generate movement with zero resistance until the bosun tugged on the line joining himself and Tala. As Tor gently tumbled back to the Riyadh he assumed the bosun sported an annoyed mien behind his gold plated visor. Tor appeared an ungainly figure in Peralta’s mirror shade.

Once more Tor found himself disorientated as his magnetic boots planted him below and to the side of the bosun. Looking up at Peralta who patiently waited for him, Tor felt as if he was scaling a vertical overhang with each magnetic step. Foot down, then down again to release. He stumbled a number of times releasing one foot when he should have been planting the other. A growing sense of uselessness and misplaced authority was his only reward upon meeting Peralta’s parallel.

With the group finally making progress, Tor reached for his oxygen gauge. He’d expended a sixth of his supply, half an hour, he’d need an hour and a half to return assuming the station was still pressurized. They still had no idea to what extent the docking ring had decompressed following Falmendikov’s arrival and the impact that gouged it. Panic replaced wonderment.

“How much further would you say Bose?” Tor asked, deciding conversation was a better distraction than rationing oxygen.

“Ten metres to the docking clamps. Another ten from there to the access point.” Peralta released another cam from his bandolier and let it snap metallically to the side of the ship. Tala played the lifeline through the cam loop. Tor peered around the party, he was ten meters behind the bosun. Thirty meters had never looked so far. The edges of Falmendikov’s point of ingress formed ragged metal teeth, brooding darkness lay beyond.

“Hey, Sec. I thought you were Bulgarian. You speak Russian?” Tala had been unusually quiet up to that point.

“I don’t speak it, but I can read it.” The large wooden spool unwound around his arm, his EVA suit protected by thick strips of gaffer tape.

“Oh man, I was hoping you spoke it.”

“Why?”

“Because someone needs to tell that asshole Chief Mate what a prick he is.”