Murmansk-13

This was not the life’s trajectory Tor had projected as a horny bakers delivery boy. He drained the beer bottle and placed it next to the downturned photograph.

Lightheaded, Tor lifted himself up and stumbled across the uneven footing of the mattress, carefully avoiding his ring of urine. He’d changed his underwear and drained his bladder, determined not to be discovered reeking of piss.

In the corner of his eye, Tor saw the child sized black and red striped replica jersey of Vitoria, Olaf’s favourite football team, hung in the wardrobe. It was the small memento from home he always allowed space for when packing to join ship. Olaf had grown away from Brazil’s national pasttime in his teens, due in no small part to his unnatural deficit in talent for the game. Tor wondered if he’d been home he could have nurtured the boy into a soccer player.

As he stared through the eye of the noose and into oblivion, he doubted it. He stepped onto the footboard of his bed, slipped the noose around his head and remembered what a dreadful footballer he’d been as a boy growing up in Norway.

☣☭☠

Jan Nilsen was normally a morning person but today, as his alarm stridently sounded for o-six hundred, he just wanted to keep his eyes closed. It had been a disturbed night and as he rubbed the yellowish mucus crust riming his eyelashes, he wondered how it had found time to accumulate and clog his lids.

The cold beyond his bed sheets was pernicious, bypassing flesh and lancing straight to the bone. Nilsen had awoken countless times in a tent in the snow mottled wilderness of inland Troms on a winters hunting excursion, but there was something direct and brutal about the cold in space. It sneaked passed the survival instinct leaving little trace to fight.

Nilsen quickly piled as many layers of clothes over his wiry body as their size would allow. The sinuous nature of his physique providing little natural protection. He recalled his rotund mother bemoaning his terminally emaciated condition. “You eat and you eat, but you never gain an ounce of fat. I wish I had your genes, the neighbours must think I starve you for my own greed!”

Suitably attired, he sat at the Perspex coffee table. Scattered across the transparent top was the Polaroid pictures Nilsen salvaged from inside Mihailov’s EVA suit. Bloody fingerprints were smeared across some of the corners and borders of the pictures, but miraculously, even in the low light, many retained a perceivable level of clarity. Nilsen squared the photographs up, keeping them neat and ordered.

Most of the pictures showed a deathly pale and comatose girl Nilsen understood to be Falmendikov’s daughter. Blue lips and acne scarred skin. The last photo depicted the girls twisted visage. A look of agonized terror, her flesh burning phosphorous white in the camera flash, ice blue eyes knifing through the backscatter. Nilsen quaked against the cold and turned the photograph face down.

Last night he and Second Engineer Pettersson had studied the photographs determined to make a plan of action. They were disappointed to find Mihailov had only managed to take a single, oversaturated picture of the station schematic. Making do, Nilsen and Pettersson made a simple copy of what could be discerned in the Polaroid and then made a list of essentials required to reach escape velocity.

They’d already decided that the chances of reaching populated space was slim, a starchart salvaged from the bridge was fastened to Nilsen’s pinboard and showed they were stranded in the boondocks of Reticuluum. But if they could reach a busy spacelane, they could activate their emergency beacons and hope that a passing vessel picked up the signal. Most modern deep space vessels would wake crew members from cryo upon receipt of a distress message.