Murmansk-13

Katja tried to process the information, understand it. She tried to transfer the visceral imagery into something analytical, something cold and usable. Sanitize it. Instead her brain produced mugshots of her friends, eviscerated. Their masticated features pulped and shredded.

“Then they got up,” said Artyom.

Katja took a moment to register the words. “Who got up?”

“The guards, about a half hour after they’d bled out.”

“What do you mean, they got up?”

“I mean they got up. It was slow, but they picked themselves up, skin deathly white, and wandered out.”

Katja looked at her acquaintance and wondered if he’d lost his sanity. “That doesn’t make any sense, Arty.”

“I know.”

“Are you sure they were not just badly hurt?”

Artyom stood and moved back to the window, he gestured for Katja to look. Dread reluctant, Katja joined him at the window and followed his gaze. A giant black slick of blood the size of a family sedan coated the floor beside the containment door. The blood seemed to trace an arc – the imperceptible rotation of the station. “Two men.”

Katja refused to cogitate the notion. “Where is everybody else?”

“When it became apparent that we’d lost containment, station command called for full evacuation to district-12 and station-wide quarantine. One of the muster points got jumped by the recon team… I guess they panicked and evacuated the station headed for the standby vessels. As soon as one station jumped ship, everybody began abandoning ship.”

Katja could see Artyom’s unease as he fidgeted with a plastic pen lid, addressing the cathode console screen. Without another word he gestured with the lid to the screen. He’d apparently hacked into station ops radar, tiny green vector lines slowly arced away from the centre of the display. Four much larger vector lines circled in counter rotation. The little green vector lines disappeared.

“Four Deep Space Destroyers, they took out the standby vessels first, they were dead in the water. Now they’re picking off the lifeboats.”

“They’re firing on civilians?” Her voice was tiny, despite herself a huge yawn cracked her mouth, her mind was growing fuzzy with overload and incomprehension.

“The Soviet just dropped the concrete sarcophagus on us.”

Chapter 1

Two crisp blue ethereal lights seared his retinas. He was awake, or at least he thought so. He did not breathe and his heart did not beat and he was so very, very cold. The cold was a blueness that stole to the very core of his being and held him in a state of hibernation, it swaddled him in the frozen amniotic fluid of a dead womb. He felt drawn into himself, like a tiny operator of a much larger and dormant machine, unusable. His conscious barely registered anything beside his most primal functions and a distant sense that something was amiss, a realization buried so deep in his mind he couldn’t even begin to comprehend it.

Was he dreaming? Around him a shadow moved at great speed, or so he thought, flickering back and forth. He was struck by an inexplicable helplessness. Time passed and eventually the two, crisp lights were extinguished. He returned to his slumber.

☣☭☠

Torsten ‘Tor’ Gjerde gagged as the watertight lid of the cryobed suckered open. His body convulsed at the sudden exposure to air, gooseflesh prickled icy skin. He pulled the nose clip from his face and removed his breathing tube. He sat up and allowed his olfactory senses to be overwhelmed by the smell of auto-clean astringent and dry ice. He shivered, disorientated in his neoprene pants, legs dangling from the side of his bed. He rubbed at strangely parallel floaters that throbbed in the back of his eyes, turning from yellow to green.

“Good to see you’re awake, Captain.” A female voice, prim and British, unfamiliar to his groggy memory. The merest hint of something else, foreign and exotic was buried within her accent. She dried him down roughly with a terrycloth towel, then wrapped him in a thermal blanket as he sat as helpless as a babe. He tried to fuss her away, say something, but his utterances came out garbled and slurred.

“Give yourself a little while, in fifteen minutes you’ll be feeling fine.” The female rushed to administer to another waking crewman.

Tor sat and rustled in his thermal coating, dumbfounded. He was in a brightly lit and antiseptic white bay. Around him lay fifteen raised platforms with translucent blue pods atop. Some were closed and occupied, others lay open; their stupefied inhabitant sat glistening and dangly-legged like him.

He was the Master aboard the DSMV Riyadh, memory flooded back as he watched his crewmen gather their bearings. Pods opened at set intervals allowing the ship’s doctor to provide care and comfort. He reached for names to put to pallid faces as the cold leeched from his body. The room would be heated to just above body temperature. Protocol returned to him. He shivered once more.