Murmansk-13

Another shot rang out, forcing Tala to duck beneath the console, the bullet struck the housed computer monitor at an acute angle and glanced away with a puff of wood fibres. This time, terrified, Katja bolted for the stairwell barely keeping low enough to avoid fire.

“Shit! Run,” Tala yelled, then brought her Colt up to the desk, raking rounds across the console desks and around the monitors that jutted like miniature wooden drumlins over a monochrome office landscape. Behind her she could feel the breeze of her cohorts as they darted for the stairs. Dr. Smith and the soldier dived for cover on opposing sides of the corridor divide.

Aware her ammunition was limited, Tala couldn’t afford to duck and spray. She held her position and slipped the rifle into manual, squeezing out single rounds whenever the Doctor or soldier lifted their head like whack-a-moles.

Her advantage was short-lived. The soldier blind fired his SMG Colt from behind a console having switched to his primary weapon. Slugs skittering around Tala’s position, low velocity rounds impacted into fibreboard desks with an absorbed thud, or cracked into the veneered bulkheads behind her.

Forced into cover, Tala could hear the muted zip of silenced pistol fire as the Doctor took pot shots at her friends from behind the soldier. They were clanking up the aluminium stairs when Diego rounded on the Doctor’s cover. He depressed the trigger and kept it depressed, loosing three rounds, the gun was in burst mode. Tala watched Diego stare at it dumbfounded, expecting more rounds as the Doctor loosed another shot. The round clipped the submachine gun, throwing it from Diego’s grasp, the slug then ricocheted into his arm. Diego stumbled against the bulkhead.

His EVA suit shrieked as he gawked wide eyed at the venting hole. Whether injured, his shock was probably from the irreparable damage caused to his suit. Tor and Katja pulled him away before the Doctor had another chance to strike a stationary target.

Her friends now exposed, Tala knew she had to lay down fire. She rose just in time to see the soldier anticipate her inevitable response. She felt a round sear her cheek as she loosed an enfilade on his position. The soldier dipped down behind his cover and Tala was unsure if she’d hit him. There was no time to wonder, discarding her weapon into the shadows behind she zigzagged toward the stairwell in pursuit of her group. Recalling days playing airsoft in the forests outside Vigan, only the giddy exhilaration replaced with heart pounding terror.

As she reached the first step she marvelled at the scarcity of fire she’d drawn. At the very least she must have wounded the soldier, although the Doctor’s shots still whizzed past at close proximity. She didn’t bother to turn to look, it would do her no good. She bounded up the steps, stealth no longer a concern. The gunfire stopped for a moment, behind she heard the plastic and metallic click of a revolver magazine being ejected. Then a peculiar silence.

Indeed, everything seemed to fall as still as night for a moment, even as two more hazmat wearing soldiers burst onto the walkway from the personnel corridor less than five meters before Katja. The subconscious resonance of the station fell mute, the mechanical thrums absence all the more apparent due to its abrupt cessation.

The moment lasted barely a nanosecond, but seemed to stretch on as Tala watched the newly arrived soldiers round on Katja and the others. The tension broke as Dr. Smith screamed. “Ubey ikh! Kill them!”

The foremost soldier raised his submachine gun as Tala cried out powerless, the sound silent to her own ears. Suddenly the station bucked, the shudder wracking Central Command like a huge metallic sigh. All on the walkway were flung against the thin wire railings, the lead soldier plunged sprawling to the deck below overbalanced by his oxygen cylinder. A newly loaded silenced round whistled past Tala as the Doctor fired wildly into the shooting gallery the walkway had become.

Another jolt, fiercer this time, flung them all against the outer bulkhead as the walkway strained and listed against its tensile steel tethers. Somewhere in Central Command a klaxon began to sound, loose items and stationary fell to the floor. Tala turned and saw the contents of the toppled coolers disgorged around Ildar’s corpse. Vials moved like driftwood in the pools of blood.

Regaining her balance, Dr. Smith unleashed a manic banshee wail and fired indiscriminately into the crowd, walking and firing as she closed the distance. Slugs pierced plastic veneers around Tala and her friends, ducking helplessly. The final shot smashed through the faceplate of the soldier as he readied to fire.