Murmansk-13

After a while a look of sentience returned, but the effort to untangle her memories left her visibly tired, her shoulders slumped and she let out a long exhalation. “I’m sorry. I have a lot to take in.”

“Don’t be sorry, none of us can really appreciate what you have been through,” said Tor, he’d taken a seat atop the adjacent autopsy slab. While Peralta tended to Katja he tried to grasp moments of sleep. Against burning eyelids he could not will himself to doze. He wanted to get them all back to the safety of the Riyadh, but he doubted Katja would be strong enough. His muscles screamed with exhaustion two days out from a standard eight month cryonic sleep, Katja had been out for four years under comparatively primitive conditions.

As unnerved as Murmansk-13 made him, they couldn’t leave. Not yet.

“Katja, what is this place? What happened here?” Tor asked gently, propping himself upright.

Katja, so young faced, sighed and closed her eyes. “This is Murmansk-13. It was originally built as a mining supplies and chandlery outpost for the Soviet Deep Space Mining and Colonization Program, about seven years after the first Iban generation arc was discovered by Salyut 6. The central command pod was originally all that was here.

“Due to its rapid star formation, the NGC-1313 galaxy was earmarked for Exotic Matter prospecting. Unfortunately, the US beat Russia to the punch and set up a larger EM mining and refinery plant at Reticuluum One at the cusp of the EM drive boom. Effectively deadheading Russia’s monopoly on EM drive technology.

“Instead of abandoning the station and to avoid embarrassment the Soviet repurposed it into a multi-faceted deep space R&D centre, building the outer ring and monorail to house various research departments. Even I don’t really know what happened in some of them and inter district relations were kept to a minimal from what I understand.

“Anyhow, by the time I arrived the station had largely ground to a halt having never really taken off. The Deep Space program as a whole was dangerously underfunded. Many of the station districts were unstaffed or running on a skeleton crew and there was some talk that foreign investors were interested in the face of the failing Soviet. We’d been preparing to abandon the station, until…”

Katja shuddered and pulled her knees to her chest, gathering the sackcloth around her. Tears welled in her eyes as her voice died. What little blood that appeared present behind her china white skin, drained away. She teetered on the edge of hysteria as her breathing grew heavy and agonal.

Peralta threw an arm around her as Katja rocked in a paroxysm of fear, her cherubic features twisted. Tor watched paralyzed, unsure if Katja still lay within the waking world. Katja’s mouth fell open as if to scream, but only a quiet mewl drew forth. “I… I have seen. Seen so many bad things.”

The bosun shushed Katja, stanching her cold, gasped words that lanced into Tor. Whatever wrongness lay here, he did not want to encounter it. The pervasive miasma that had surrounded Tor since he’d awoke amid cryosleep, now rushed through him tenfold.

“Captain.” Mihailov said through gritted teeth.

“I know. I know. We need to move.”

☣☭☠

Tor wished he’d found relief in his decision, instead he found himself glancing repeatedly at his suits time readout. They’d been aboard Murmansk-13 for fourteen hours, thirty-seven minutes. At least eleven hours of which had been inside the stations morgue. While he no longer struggled with indecision, his nascent plans stumbled in practicality.

It had taken half an hour for Katja to calm down, eventually slipping into a deep sleep Tor hoped was dreamless. She’d slept for four hours, time in which Tor and Mihailov argued about splitting up. The Bulgarian proposed he and Tala alone would scavenge the accommodation block for emergency escape suits, allowing Tor and Peralta to maintain their vigil over the girl. Tor advocated staying together and safety in numbers. If something happened to either party, how would they know. Mihailov acceded, but refused to stand in the morgue any longer, he kept watch at the entranceway and Tor kept watch on him.

Now Peralta and Tala were trying to help Katja regain her feet. Four years abandoned in a cold chamber had atrophied Katja’s musculature. Her body fat and skin hung infirm through her scrubs as she gingerly lowered herself from the autopsy table. Peralta beneath her right shoulder, Tala beneath her left. Immediately her legs buckled at the knees, the two Filipinos taking her body weight.

“My legs feel numb and fuzzy,” Katja said plaintively, a tear streaking her cheek. “I can’t feel my feet.”

“Just take your time,” Tor replied, trying to quell his rising unease.

“But we don’t have time do we?” Katja whined, trying to straighten her pallid legs, mottled dark blue where blood had pooled forming livid bruises. “I can see it in your face and I heard you arguing while I was asleep.”