Murmansk-13

Arty bounced up, causing the chair to totter backwards. Anger flushed his face, he sneered. “Those people you call friends have killed you, if they’d just left you be I could have gotten you off. We could have been together, you’d have been safe,” he banged the table with the palm of his hand, when he spoke again his words were resigned. “My heart sank Katja, sank when I saw you in the corridors. Not after all this time of hiding you, not when we were so close!” He slumped back into the chair.

“I don’t understand,” said Katja, spluttering flecks of water down herself.

“I hid you from Ildar, for four years, I told him the morgue was empty, that there were no longer candidates for experimentation,” Arty said, his voice eddying.

The names on the clipboard in the morgue. Katja felt warm bile chase the last recesses of water from her oesophagus. “The others…” they’d been friends, many she’d partied with the night before, like her, some were signing off.

We were never going to sign off. It was clear now. She tried to put faces to the names, but they remained boxed off in a portion of her brain Arty hadn’t awoken. Now they were just names of short term friends faded into inconsequence. “Experimentation?”

Arty ignored her question. His stare seemed to be beyond her now, beyond the station. “Tomorrow an unregistered frigate will arrive. Onboard will be the party Dr. Rebecca Smith represents. They will collect vials and specimens and then they will clean up. They won’t leave any witnesses without project clearance,” he sounded dry mouthed.

Katja felt weak and so very tired. Nausea washed over her and she could sense a renewed viscous wetness at her crotch where Ilya had torn her. “What have you done Arty?” She asked softly, then, retrieving the plastic cup from the table, she hurled it at him, screaming; “What have you done!”

Arty flinched as the crinkled cup crashed lightly into the plastic veneer behind him, he looked as dead as the infected. “It wasn’t my idea. It came from above, way above. Far beyond station level. They wanted a controlled outbreak, deep space, nice and quiet. Hence why all those destroyers were out there. It was comply or die, Katja.

“There was no power surge, those men were dead, the encephalopathy had basically spongiformed their brains to the stem. The Politburo wanted to understand the disease, they made it sound like it was a public service, after all – there was an Iban Generation Arc docked in Siberia and who knew when another would show up in Sol?

“After sixteen months and before we could provide even provisional findings, their scope became increasingly militaristic. They wanted to know if the disease could be harnessed or controlled,” Arty’s eyes lit up in a memory of triumph, breathing a momentary sparkle of life into his face. “It could! But only in certain circumstances. They can be directed to a certain extent, but the framework for control simply isn’t there.”

Arty shook his head. “It wasn’t good enough, instead of scuttling the station, Russia left me and Ildar here to die. I suppose we knew too much. They should have just nuked us into Big Red.

“For a year me and Ildar just survived, like everybody else left breathing on Murmansk-13, we continued our experiments because they kept us sane. For a while we tried to work on a cure or a vaccine, but the mechanisms for the disease is through brain death and the only cure for death we could find was…”

“Death,” Katja said, breathlessly and squeezed her eyes closed. She thought of her father, thought about him being attacked. Becoming one of them. She hoped that first death had been short and unknowing. Deep down she knew it wouldn’t have been. How much fear had he felt in those final moments, how long had he run? Had she been his final thought after months of relentless searching, to die so close. He’d no longer been Nikolai Falmendikov when she saw him, what remained of his brain would have been incapable of recalling memory, incapable of just about anything. It was a disease wearing her father’s husk, a disease that had been allowed to propagate because of the man before her.

“Yes, that’s when Rebecca’s consortium became involved.”

So many questions ran through her mind they became indistinct. A chorus of rushing blood drowned her ability to single one out, “How? Why?” Katja asked, trying to comprehend.

Arty just shrugged, then scrunched his face up, tired of her questions. “I’ve studied this disease for four years, Katja. It is truly remarkable, its ability to co-opt and subvert the various human systems to survive, to seek out hosts…”

“It killed my father, and now you’re going to sell it,” Katja said, the words stealing the wind from Arty’s sails. A dark shadow passed over his face.

“Your father was unfortunate, but we have suggested measures for the usage of this technology…”