Murmansk-13

Tor began retrieving the items, memorizing their location during each light phase, then recovering them in the dark. It was a hypnotizing and mind clearing activity to focus upon. He was holding a pair of antique brass nautical dividers in his hand when he saw a second figure, shifting in the ambit of the bridge, the dark shape barely discernible from the shadows. This phantom was too vivid to be unreal.

“Is someone there?” Tor thrust the dividers out in front of him, his voice sounding brittle.

A shape shifted from the far side of the bridge. “It’s me Captain, Sammy.”

Tor kept the dividers pointed toward the shape. “What are you doing on the bridge Sammy?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” light poured through the windscreen, the diminutive Chief Steward stood staring wide eyed at the dividers pointed at his face. His usually neatly slicked hair spiralled and curled in mad directions, his pencil moustache was untrimmed. He wore no whites, just a vest and checked lounge pants. “I thought I’d try and straighten the old girl out.”

Reluctantly, Tor lowered the dividers as the bridge slipped back into darkness. “Why didn’t you tell me you were up here Sammy, you…” scared me. He let the sentence drift into the cool air.

“I’m sorry Captain, I was hoping you would go away.”

Tor laughed despite himself, when the light hit Sammy’s face again, he realized the old steward had been crying. “Carry on with what you were doing.”

Sammy wandered off, head bowed, without further explanation. Tor watched him picking up the items that were scattered during the impact. He walked stiffly and bent slowly, arthritic knees and a bad back would retire him at the end of this voyage, whether he wanted it or not. Tor knew little about the man, like most of the Filipinos he flew with, but he bore a superficial fondness for the Chief Steward. He was in his mid sixties and like Peralta began life a sailor. He’d probably spent the best part of thirty years at sea or in space, cryogenic flight coming far too late in his career to preserve a mock youth.

Tor kept the dividers at hand and sat in the Captain’s chair. The old seat shifted unexpectedly under his weight. The force of the impact had apparently loosened the long seized gimbals upon which the chair was mounted. Tor found his hands sinking into the worn upholstery, brass dividers skittering from his grip and into the darkness at his feet.

“I cannot sleep in my cabin,” Sammy began as if talking to nobody in particular. “Too many memories there. Since the bad things began, I find my memories playing tricks on me. This place feels wrong.”

Tor looked out the windshield, abaft them the supergiant lay, lighting the gunmetal grey space station with its weak red radiance. The ablated scars glowed like great suppurating wounds. “It is wrong,” he murmured.

“Why are you awake at this time?” Sammy asked.

“Same, I guess. I couldn’t sleep.” Instinctively, Tor reached for his concealed cigarettes, then remembered they were gone. All gone. “Listen, I’m sorry about Peralta. I know you two were friends. I… There was nothing we could do.”

In the corner of his eye he saw Sammy pause, his posture stiffen. “He was a good man,” he faltered. “A good friend.”

Tor heard the agony in Sammy’s reply and found no platitudes to spare. Instead he stared at the station, iridescent in the redshift, strange shadows danced glacially across the scoured metalwork. The shadow of the Riyadh was an elongated oblong with rounded edges that due to the disposition of the star, stretched across the lower portion of the central command capsule and dangled off the spoked wagon wheel silhouette of the docking ring.

“What happened over there, Captain?” Sammy’s nasally voice trembled with sadness and fear.

“There are people over there Sammy and… and, they’re very ill,” Tor winced at the station through the windscreen. “Something is very broken there.”

“But we will have to go back there, won’t we?”

Tor looked at Sammy, small and fearful, stood at the edges of darkness the binary starlight failed to penetrate and got up. Angry and scared he stalked away from the Steward and the crimson visage of Murmansk-13, only pausing at the doorway to answer. “If we want to survive. Yes.”

☣☭☠

Colder and colder. Heat leeched from the Riyadh like heat leeched from a corpse. Tor drew his terrycloth bathrobe close to his prickling skin and walked aimlessly about the life starved corridors of the Riyadh. Moribund in silence. Watching the skirting mounted lights illuminate his boots in a soft yellow hue.

His breath fogged with each exhale, light tendrils of condensate caught the dimmed lights of his ship. He remembered the seemingly endless walk in the service corridors of Murmansk-13, following the long trodden footsteps of Nikolai Falmendikov. Deceased.