Murmansk-13

They’d been moving ever since and Tala was beginning to question the limits of her endurance, only a fighters pride made her bite her parched, cracked lip. She wondered what became of Captain Tor and Sec, had they made it back to the Riyadh? She hoped they had, but Tala had seen the growing anguish creep across the Captain’s bedraggled features. In her heart she knew the Captain was at pains to save them all, but she felt betrayed by his diffidence and cowardice in those efforts. She also felt anger welling within. For him to pass her services on so blithely to Jamal, as if she were his thrall.

Tala knew her train of thought was unfair. The flaccid EVA suit that suckered to her flesh and the painful swollen mass of her face indication that without an alternative suit, she would have died a painful death trying to reach the ship.

Spaced, they called it, Tala had been told hushed stories of unwitting Pinoy being peeled into the vast hard vacuum of space, usually recounted by a crewman dolefully in his cups who’d been there and tried valiantly to assist in some unlikely and heroic manner. They were often careless greenhorns on bulkers, standing in the wrong place at the wrong time when the hold was opened – in the frontier days before mag boots and stricter safety regulations. She’d once heard tale of a galley boy, just sixteen, who got sucked from a vessel due to a faulty garbage dispenser, his limbs severed in his expedited exit. But more often than not the stories revolved around some poor son of a bitch, down on his luck; perhaps ruined financially or having experienced a great personal tragedy far from home, who’d chosen the most merciless of all endings.

An empathetic chill accompanied each retelling. In part because Tala had known a man who’d spaced himself, although she never shared his story. Ricky Velasquez, the old steward, mid-trip on her first ever voyage. She’d boarded as a galley girl and had worked closely with Ricky before crew shortages saw her promoted to the deck. Like Peralta he was homely and unassuming, always quick with inoffensive jokes and unbridled emotional support. Ricky guided Tala through her first months in the lonely emptiness of space and she’d returned each evening after her promotion as he would listen, uncritically, to her complaints and concerns while he would talk about his family, his cabin adorned with their pictures. He was like an anchor to home, even though they came from opposing corners of the Philippines.

Then one night, after downing tools for the day, she found his cabin empty. She’d checked the galley and the dayroom, all the spaces the crew would congregate, before informing the bridge. It was only then they had found the airlock had been activated, the officer of the watch apparently alarm blind and oblivious. A note was later found in his cabin stapled to a laser telex, his wife of forty-eight years had been killed during Typhoon Nitang, his home destroyed and two of his grandchildren missing in Mainit.

Ricky Velasquez had requested to be put in cryosleep as he couldn’t stand the thirteen month wait to return home, the Captain was unable to oblige due to a shortage of fluid. Tala was shocked to find that had been four months prior, the Captain even tried to obtain cryo replenishment on Velasquez’ behalf at Centaurus.

Centaurus had been where Tala, just sixteen at the time, signed on.

All those pictures in his cabin, the conversations about his family spoken as if they were alive, Tala only ever knew Velasquez to be a haunted soul and the memory chilled her. She didn’t want to experience that pure sense of panic that heralded her entrance to Murmansk-13 again. Like a balloon ready to burst, yet devoid of air, before she’d blacked out. The pain secondary to the sense of helplessness and the thought that this had been what friendly, round faced Ricky had experienced in his final waking moments.

To have followed Captain Tor, would have been to follow Ricky into the night. The Captain was right to leave her, yet she no more wanted to face the infected again as she did the vacuum of space and now she was trapped on this foreign station, with foreign people.

A whistling draft brought Tala’s thoughts back to the present, tickling her sweat moistened brow. The pace before her slowed as the downdraft essence of arching electronics percolated through the odorous bodies of Jamal and Katja. The padding sound of hands and knees ceased altogether.

“We need to go up here,” Jamal spoke sympathetically, his words directed forwards.

“No,” replied Katja in a small tremulous voice, on the precipice of tears. “I can’t.”

In the dark confines of the service conduit, Tala tried to squirm beside Jamal, his broad shoulders obstructing the lightless view of what Tala reasoned to be a cabling or air shaft. Jamal shifted his powerful thighs, pushing Tala back.

“I can’t,” repeated Katja, she slumped against the conduits bulkhead.