Murmansk-13

Expletives and gesticulations coloured the anxious atmosphere, Tor let them vent, they had every right, they’d all been away from home for almost three years, Talus was the final stop off before a jump to Sol. They’d all awoken to thoughts of home and family, plans three years in the making or longer about to come to fruition. Now they were here.

“Where are we then, skip?” Boson Jovan Peralta asked the question sincerely in a lilting Filipino brogue, his lopsided face squinting out from behind Doctor Smith. He’d been a boson at sea before the big drive to convert one of the world’s largest seafaring pools into a spacefaring one took many Pinoy into the far galaxy. Naturally servile, utilitarian and cheap the Filipino ‘spacemen’ as they liked to be called, were the workhorses of many a deep space vessel.

Tor winced at the inevitable question, he imagined Mihailov did as well. “We’re not totally sure.”

The expletives grew louder, the gesticulations more animated. Heads turned to Mihailov who worked feverishly in the chartroom, the Navigation Officer was working from the track recordings obtained from the flight recorder. But they’d ended in hard, empty vacuum. Now he was correlating bunker usage figures, but consumption calculations weren’t the usual concern of a deck officer. Regardless, all his calculations kept ending in the same segment of unpopulated space.

Except, they weren’t in unpopulated space.

Tor waited for them to quiet. Nilsen put a hand on his shoulder and stepped forward. “Looking at the fuel consumption it appears we haven’t left Reticuluum.”

Now the crew were angry bordering on murderous. Eight months and they’d barely moved, at least by deep space standards. By Mihailov and Nilsen’s calculations they’d probably travelled eight hundred thousand miles on thrust and inertia alone.

They had every right to be pissed. Tor was pissed, but he couldn’t betray his own emotions to an already mutinous and indignant crew. Deep down he knew any anger directed at Falmendikov would soon colour him. After all, he was in command, it was he who ultimately bore responsibility for the voyage, particularly in the absence of the Chief Officer.

Tor scanned the faces of the crew, his gaze quickly averting searing eyes that weren’t engaged in some impassioned discussion with their neighbour. Doctor Smith tried to remain cool and impassive, she looked glassy-eyed ahead, avoided pouring any further petrol on the fire. Tor supposed he was thankful of that, though she’d provided no further insight into how Falmendikov had managed to override the Cryo program.

Finally his eyes rested on Peralta. He was uncommonly young looking for an old hand, although the drooping features on his right side gave him a permanently sad appearance. No one could be hurting as much as the Bosun, he was on his last trip and had double stinted with another vessel. His demeanour remained remarkably neutral though, he respected seniority more than any man Tor had ever flown with, but without the flawed obsequiousness many of his countrymen observed. As a result he was one of the few Filipino’s Tor knew was roundly respected throughout the fleet. He also abstained from the furious discussion around him. “Why are we here Captain?”

Peralta’s raised voice, but cordial question hushed the ranks. At first they turned to the Bosun, then Tor.

“We haven’t begun to investigate the motives of Chief Officer Nikolai, but I think it’s safe to assume two things.” Tor moved to the bridge control panel, his back to the crew. “First, he’s brought us here and second, he has done so for a reason. As for your earlier question, as to where here is.” Tor pressed a button, the windscreen’s iron alloy shield slowly lifted revealing a huge, monolithic gunmetal grey structure beyond pitted glass. Warning and directional lights were long since deactivated, portholes lay dark in the distance, little dead eyes peering back at their miniscule seeming ship.

Great ablated scars like silvery stretch marks, ran across the large central portion of the structure, at least one click from the docking ring their emergency clamps had affixed to. It was hard to get any kind of fix with so much metalwork cluttering the radar – multi-path returns blotted the screen in inscrutable patches of lurid green.

The dead space station twirled in a slow centrifuge against a glittering backdrop of juvenile stars, accreted within the hyperactive foundry of the Starburst galaxy. In the mid-ground, a great nebulae of cool ionized gases mottled the darkness in an oil slick of colours while nearby, at less than sixteen AU, a vast solar flare flicked like a devilish tongue from the surface of an ancient Red Supergiant. The star sloughed away energy and mass from its fragile helium shell, bathing the bridge of the DSMV Riyadh in its cold, florid, dying light.

Tor spent a moment contemplating the preposterous composition of fallible manmade metal and the unstoppable fire of space.