Murmansk-13

Hernandez lifted his hand to his radio control, then stopped. He pointed down to something on the starboard side. Aidan strained against his restraints to see. Karabiners dug into dull aching sore spots. Stewart stooped onto all fours to track the object, peering through the narrow bars of the railings. “Personnel in the EVA suit, identify yourself.”

Aidan held his breath against the somniferous haze of white noise leeching from his helmet intercom, he knew the suits were linked with a designated frequency for intra-squad comms. The mics could be silenced, but not the speakers.

“Maybe their suit speaker is fucked?” Hernandez knelt beside Stewart, following the crewmans slow progress. “Or their mic?”

“I don’t buy it,” said Stewart, his tone hardening. “Personnel on the lifeline, starboard side of the DSMV Riyadh. Identify yourself. Now.”

Another protracted silence ensued. “You want to go down there?” Asked Hernandez, finally.

“No, too risky, we don’t know what they’re up to and we haven’t got the kit to freefall.”

“They don’t look too experienced spacewalking,” said Hernandez. “Arms and legs all over the place, man.”

Aidan envisioned the progress of the unknown spacewalker by the infinitesimal movement of his colleagues helmets and their running commentary. Their convex visors grabbed distorted reflections in golden hue. From his vantage point Aidan couldn’t begin to decipher the events unfolding, only extrapolate that the shipboard situation was set to worsen.

A deafening pitched squeal lanced through the helmet intercom. Aidan screamed as the sound quaked his internal monologue, icing the contents of his skull in aural formaldehyde. Through crushed shut eyelids, tears beaded. Then the sound died, replaced with the hypnotizing static of before.

Opening his eyelids against sharp tinnitus, he saw Hernandez and Stewart lying prostrate on the deck of the dust caked monkey island, hands uselessly clamped to their helmets.

“Diego?” Stewart asked in a weakly ragged gasp. “What the fuck was that?”

“Oh, Christ.”

☣☭☠

He couldn’t find them, or he was too quiet, Diego wasn’t sure. For one thing he was glad to be kept busy as he modulated the narrow frequency band of the maintenance crews primary and secondary channels, trying valiantly to battle the incessant cosmic noise with radio squelch. He grabbed them in bites as if fishing a murky pond, but they kept getting away. Diego could not remember such an instance of capricious interference in his academy days.

Those were a long time ago, though.

Diego rubbed his eyes and snapped the manual closed. He could feel little rivulets of tepid sweat forming rims around the headphone cups. He pulled the set off but could not escape the constant hiss of white noise that accompanied him in the dark, still bridge of the Riyadh. The red giant was behind them and only the lambent blue of the closest B-class star provided illumination, the small bright dot peaking like a distant spotlight from behind the monolithic space station and a haze of ionic disruption.

He left the VHF set on autoscan and walked around the Riyadh’s radio station, trying to shake the nervous anxiety that pooled like lactic acid in his muscles. Something about the Evac suite airlock activation had unnerved him… further. Unconsciously he tapped his thumbnail against his teeth as he paced around the conning equipment and apprehensively peered out of the triple glazed windscreen.

Unflinching, he grabbed a pair of binoculars situated in the familiar mahogany box beside him. In the years since rising from spaceship galleys, he’d often been called to lookout when his vessels transited busy space lanes or when entering or leaving dock. The textured rubber coating of the binoculars had become a natural extension of his fingertips.

However, tracking vessels, lights and scanning for space debris had become his forte, rare was the occasion he was called to lookout for an EVA’ing colleague. Regardless, it didn’t take Diego long to find the offender, following the newly affixed lifeline to the stations docking ring. Making aggravatingly slow progress, the crewman scaled the side of the Riyadh’s docking clamp with the grace of a wing-clipped crane fly.

“What are you up to?” He whispered to himself.

Behind him, the elevator doors parted, blanching the bridge and startling Diego. Furtively he returned the binoculars to their box.

“Why are you not at the radio station?” Chief Officer Nilsen’s wiry silhouette stepped from the elevator.

“Sorry, Chief.” Diego scurried back to the leatherette chair behind the bank of radio equipment. The elevator doors closed with a quiet chink and the bridge faded back into wan blue. Diego cringed at the moistness of the headphone cups as he re-donned them.