Murmansk-13

Yes, even that ailing visage of disappointment and loss, as if her father was looking at a ghost when he saw her, would be preferable to another moment on Murmansk-13.

“He will die. Your friend.”

Katja’s slurred words knifed through Tala’s lost thoughts. “What?”

“Your friend, the one who was bit,” Katja’s voice was cold and emotionless, as if she were a mere siphon for an unseen, childlike, speaker. “I saw a dead man, a friend, wake up. He was bit. There is no cure.”

“What do you know?” Tala wanted to scream, but she remembered the fear in Jamal’s eyes. It didn’t matter, Katja slumped across their shoulders, her conscience fled once more. Tala gave Jamal a supplicating look and shook the girl. “What does she mean?”

Jamal adjusted Katja’s weight to accommodate her total lack of sufficiency and Tala’s attempts to reawaken her, but otherwise he seemed elsewhere, his face grimly set. Dust rimed the sweat on his brow like hoarfrost. “I don’t know what she knows.”

Her stomach twisted again, Tala felt sick, her head dizzy with the enormity and impossibility of what she’d witnessed. “What are those things?”

Jamal turned to Tala, looking over the gently bobbing form of Katja’s head, his eyes lustreless and starved of hope. “I can’t be sure, but I know that some of the prisoners who were bitten became infected, like one of them. After that it’s not even that they’re not the same.” Jamal breathed heavily, backlit by one of the failing emergency lights, Tala’s world was reduced to Jamal’s profile and the great pools of condensation that punctuated each exhale. “They’re not even people anymore.”

“Are they dead?” Tala resented the feebleness of her voice.

“They look it,” Jamal began. “And smell it.”

Tala thought about Peralta, her mentor. Her friend. The Pinoy don’t survive alone, that’s why you never have one Filipino aboard a ship, we know how to look after each other, together we are always close to home. Peralta said that to her once, early after joining the Riyadh. “One of our crewmen died, the one Katja’s father attacked. The reason I had to… kill him.” She’d killed before, but never intentionally. “Do you think…”

“I hope and pray for his soul he stayed dead,” Jamal cut off Tala thickly, then sighed, wrestling with some unspoken thought. “Now is not the time to talk about it.”

Chapter 10

The shafts of florid light emitted by the red supergiant inhabited a portion of the visible light spectrum that ill prepared Tor for his return from the gloom of Murmansk-13. It had taken almost an hour to haul Mihailov back to the Riyadh, the ship a giant, growing shadow against the backdrop of the star. Now sat alone in the antiseptic glare of the Evac Suite, Tor found himself blinking away tears.

He couldn’t be sure it was the light.

Tor sat at the padded table and let the fading steam rising from the coffee cup moisten his face, the flesh still sensitive from space exposure.

Around him, the Evac Suite lay in disarray, the force of the impact had blown the seals on several hermetic wardrobes, numerous EVA suits sat crumpled behind their Perspex doors. Vaguely, Tor thought somebody should rectify the mess before the remaining functional suits were corroded by the atmosphere. That would have been Stewart’s job on the maintenance system.

Another man lost. It was becoming surreal. Tor shook his head slowly, working out the resolute bubbles that fizzed within his neck muscles. Concentrating on the pain of his swollen joints so to avoid the realization.

The ship – his ship, sounded dead. They were running on auxiliary batteries and the reassuring, ever present hum of the engines was now absent. Nilsen had decided on the measure after the impact, weary of running Syntin through jolted fuel lines. Nilsen intended to do a full inspection of the engine post impact before running her again. The Riyadh wouldn’t be moving anywhere any time soon and the silence was suffocating. Tor fought away the unreal sound of the infected that filled the void like virulent tinnitus.

On the deck, frozen crimson beads of blood slowly thawed in tiny pools, spreading as they warmed. Nilsen and Sammy had taken Mihailov to the medical bay. Sammy then diligently returned to hand his Captain a scarce cup of coffee. Tor gave Sammy his leave as the tendrils of steam began to dissipate. There was a certain banal criminality allowing one of the last cups of coffee to go to waste, but Tor didn’t want to experiment with hot fluids against his ailing strength. He’d never felt so fundamentally drained.

Around the blood, playing cards scattered the deck like heraldic mosaics. Faces and backs now lay inert having been tossed from the table when a chunk of the godforsaken station clipped the ship. Another tear moistened Tor’s motionless features.