Murmansk-13

Wearily the crew filed past the Captain back to the elevator, Jan Nilsen gripped his shoulder on his way out. James Stewart looked furtively behind him as the elevator door closed carrying the majority of the ships crew from the bridge. Stewart was young, a first trip officer from Liverpool. His broad Scouse accent gave him a cheeky aura that belied his competence. He’d served as a cadet under Tor on his last voyage, Tor had liked him enough to recommended him to the company upon completion of his officers training. Despite his experience, Stewart had never been backwards in voicing any concern and Tor respected that over new officers that would fly into the nearest star on the whim of a senior officer. His discomfort unsettled Tor.

With the crew out of earshot, he turned from the radio station where he’d been busily twiddling the various instruments knobs and lowered his headset around his neck. Intense eyes fixed almost conspiratorially on Tor. “Captain, I don’t think we’ll be getting comms back. I have no idea how long we’ve been here but it’s dead on every frequency, every band. Every damn instrument. Hi-beam, laser. Captain, I think the array is fried. I’m not sure if it’s the station or the star system, but it’s not just interference.”

Tor took a deep gulp, trying to fight the rising bile that burnt the back of his throat. “Can you fix it?”

“I’m a radio operator, skip, not a radio technician,” Stewart answered, twiddling the headset lead in his fingers. He’d left something unsaid.

“What else?”

“I didn’t want to say anything in front of the rest of the crew,” Stewart gulped and pointed to an innocuous box shaped instrument with an extinguished light and a short spool of printouts. “It’s the company’s positioning transponder.”

“It’s off.”

Stewart shook his head slowly and tore off the spool of paper, handing it to Tor. “It’s not off. It has been relaying the same fucking position since July 3rd. The company have as much idea where we are as we do.”

Tor rubbed his face and stared at the repeated position posted daily in the intervening months. He noted the absence of even static through Stewart’s headset. The Radio Officer averted his gaze and began flicking through a manual in four different languages the size of a telephone directory. A cold sweat beaded on the Tor’s forehead, a sudden panicked moment of terrible isolation.

“I’ll be in my office,” Tor said quietly, retiring to the elevator. As the doors closed he took one final look at the vast lifeless station they clung to, unable to shake the image that they were a parasite on a vast, dead host.

Chapter 2

Jamal hung in the darkness, his legs pressed deftly into the flexible aluminium panels of the air duct. The last dozen feet arced downward into District Six – Stores. In reality, it was one of hundreds of central air ducts that fed into the labyrinthine warehouse, but this had become his familiar route.

He listened and cringed as the thin panels he wedged himself in flexed. A dull metallic thunk. His legs burned, getting too old for this. Jamal shifted his weight and let the panel reclaim its form with a reflexive pop. Renewed silence, he dried the beading sweat from his palms and planted his hands at the base of the vent. Long ago he learned that, as awkward as it was, a headfirst exit from the vent was favourable – it afforded no surprises.

A gentle breeze flowed passed the duct exit, the vastness of the station and its slowly failing systems seemed to lend it an ethereal climate all its own. Artificial, but no less subject to entropy. After four years it had become Jamal’s world and slowly that world was failing.

Another one, another life.

The grating had long since been removed by Jamal’s own hand, the noise had meant it was a full day’s journey for a singular task. One of his early solitary foraging missions – before the prisoners learned that safety was only found in caste community. Now he peered out into the unlit warehouse, his eyes accustomed to the permanent artificial twilight that consumed most of Murmansk-13.

No keening, no unconcealed footsteps.

He slithered from the air vent, palms planting quietly on the gantry handrail. The catwalk appeared to float above the warehouse, suspended as it was by tensile steel cables lost in the shadows of the dome above. Jamal could feel the gentle play of the catwalk under his feet as he noiselessly dropped to the treadplate and crab-walked to his vantage point overlooking the warehouse.

District Six had been designed to be the storage, warehousing and supplies hub of Murmansk-13. A vast space the size of Three Rivers Stadium, the catwalk was suspended a hundred feet above towering racks at least thirty feet in height. They formed tight rows with space for warehousing machinery to fork various stores down from the loftiest shelves.