Murmansk-13

The words were angry and heated but so muffled they sounded lulling.

“Keep your voice down. I didn’t say he was killed, though if he was they’re probably more likely to comeback.”

Silence.

“Some of the men won’t leave you know. Some of them think we’re holding back resources, a coup is in the works. They were planning on moving soon… Now things have changed.”

“Who? Kirill?”

The words were growing quieter and further away. “And his huge lapdog.”

“How long?”

For a moment, Tala felt she was falling. Spinning through space, thrown by astral projection.

“I think sooner now, we have to move, but we may be forced to choose only the loyal.”

“I have done this to myself, hidden myself away. Damned if I wanted this post.”

Tala no longer knew if the darkness belonged to the waking realm or elsewhere. She yearned for it to be elsewhere.

Chapter 12

It was three in the morning, ships time. As a seafarer, Dag explained, you would often convert the local time to the time zone in which your friends and loved ones existed, going about their lives. You would mentally picture what activities they could be doing; having dinner, going to school. As a pastime, Dag said time conversion helped anchor a sailor to the life he’d left at home and provide normality to the working day.

That was fine on Earth. Earth was small, barely a blip on the cosmic radar.

Once beyond the atmosphere of Earth, time became purely functional. A metronome for the Circadian rhythm of man. Three in the morning meant nothing in space. Tor supposed it was three in the morning in Saudi Arabia. What did that mean? It certainly wouldn’t be the three in the morning parties and drinking that accompanied his return. Or holing up in some questionable gated brothel in the Salvador old town, fucking some girl with a beautiful figure and life ravaged face. No, three am in the desert – just darkness, sand and escaping heat.

And even that seemed imaginary when so very far away.

It was a three in the morning, three years removed from the world he’d left behind. Tor had earlier sifted through a small pile of news telex’s, lasered to the ship until communications failed. He’d let the silky tendrils of smoke caress his face from his final cigarette after picking himself up from the rug and removing his urine soaked underwear.

The company tried to keep its spacefarers in touch with Earth. Absently, Tor browsed the reports from UEFA ’92 in one of the final received messages before blackout. Tor had carefully followed the Norwegian national teams efforts to reach the tournament in Sweden prior to cryo, but drawn in a group with the Soviet Union and Italy, they’d been outgunned. Headlines, Tor decided, could wait for later. If America and the Soviet had dropped the nukes on each other, it had happened after July ’92.

Whatever began to affect the ships communications began then. The telex’s ceased on Friday, 3rd of July, 1992. As if Earth had ceased to exist on that date. Friends, family everything that underpinned Tor to reality was erased. Maybe it had, or maybe that was the day they’d been dragged into purgatory while still asleep in their cryobeds. It wasn’t so much Earth had gone, as they no longer co-existed on the same plain.

Apathy threatened to overwhelm Tor as he paced the silent corridors of the Riyadh, the suckering of his gripped booties the only sound penetrating the quiet. Tor remembered a time when the Saudi DSMV’s operated with a full complement of thirty two men. Even at three in the morning a party would be happening in some cabin, or the Filipino’s would be in their cups singing karaoke, dressed in unmanly coloured bathrobes. There was always company to find even in the smallest hours.

But not now, Tor stalked away from the crew accommodation. A sea of beige Formica veneers broken up by locked doors and unoccupied cabins. He heard no hushed conversations, no sounds of sleep or masturbation. Just dead silence. The few remaining men were shuttering themselves away, hiding from entropy and accepting their fate. Tor could feel it in his tired, heavy bones. All of them were slipping away.

Tor continued on without destination, descending a ladder into the medical bay. The lights had been lowered here to a soft yellow hue that bathed the sterile medical equipment with an alien warmth. Slowly he wended around the open cryobeds to a viewport and code locked door at the far side. In emergencies the ships ward doubled as quarantine. Tor checked the keypad and was surprised to see Nilsen hadn’t initiated quarantine measures.

Nilsen wasn’t there. Nilsen hasn’t seen what I’ve seen.

Peering through the viewport, Tor could see Mihailov. The Bulgarian slept atop a reclining hospital gurney, handrails drawn up around him. His EVA suit and undergarments had been removed and Nilsen had hooked Mihailov up to an EKG machine. Electrodes dotted his limbs and chest while wires snaked over his anaemic flesh.