Murmansk-13

With each bracket and bulkhead she wordlessly traversed with the Captain, Tala told herself she would find Katja again. Wouldn’t entertain the notion that she hadn’t made it out of the Central Command atrium, couldn’t. She would feel her grow small in her arms once more. Somehow. That was for later. In the immediate, simple determination and need was enough to nourish her starved and wearied muscles, to push on and strive toward her ship. She could plan later, if the station didn’t collapse around her.

Murmansk-13 let out a plangent groan again. Tala felt her small, athletic body become a millstone as somewhere rivets blew out with dull bangs. Tor held her from pushing off, tempering her restless desire. He was talking to her, his lips moving but his voice lost against the death screech of metal. She hadn’t realized how intense the din had become, the tumbling racket throwing her senses inward.

“You’ll be crushed!” He yelled, recognizing her blank, anxious expression as miscomprehension.

A guttural bellow was thrust from her throat involuntarily as the station plunged through the gravity well. The peaks and troughs growing increasingly severe. They’d just passed the entranceway to District Four, smeared with the bloodied footprints of the infected. Where the arrival of Katja had been the catalyst for usurpation by Kirill and the fall of the survivors corral. Where Oleg and Jamal’s home were lost. Where Gennady had died to save them all, holding back the infected to the last. They’d all played their part in Katja’s survival, and now Tala had to honour their sacrifice for it had not just been for Katja, but for them both.

Tor braced himself against the structural bracket, the lightweight metal pillar buckled at its base and top. The Captain’s eyes were alight with a keen awareness that seemed estranged to his previous catatonic state. Perhaps atavistic instincts prompted Tor to dispel the traumatized fugue he’d wallowed within, allowing him to shed the decades that had weighed upon him in the cells. Now he moved with feverish intensity, adrenal glands overriding fears that had so unmanned him before. Distantly, Tala wondered what version of the Captain would immerge once the hormones burnt away, something new and hardened like annealed steel, or something completely spent and used up.

“We haven’t got long!” He shouted, “but we’re nearly there!”

As if to counterpoint his statement, a huge bang rocked the corridor. The force was such that Tala could feel the entire ring bounce about the spoke like external stanchions. The air became brittle and she felt her ears pop. Somewhere the corridor had been holed, soon oxygen would be scarce. What few emergency lights remained flickering almost vanished behind a pall of misting atmosphere, their weak illumination diffused spectrally off vaporized gas.

Feeling herself lighten, she braced her legs against the bracket and readied to push off into the gloom, trying to time the moment to maximize their weightless or near weightless drift. In step with Tor, just as her stomach seemed to astral project, she leapt from the bracket. Beneath her floating form the bulkhead twisted away and up, slowly becoming a deckhead. The murky corridor wheeled around as Tor and Tala punched a hole through the rotating space, taking care to dodge the obscured brackets and beams as they whipped through the dissipating air.

As she regained mass, she curled herself into a ball, Tor did the same. Brushing against the smooth metallic surface of the bulkhead, they gambolled lightly. As gravity hardened they both sprung open. On all fours they scrambled as far as they could before their weight returned with debilitating effect. The airlock was visible now, emerging through the clotting fog, around it lay the remains of the EVA suits the crew of the Riyadh had abandoned when venturing deeper into the station.

“Dritt!” Tor’s voice sounded thin and reedy in the rarefied atmosphere as his exaggerated mass began to press him into the sickened fabric of Murmansk-13.

Loose, the helmets and life support packs had been lifted and hurled against the structure of the station and left scattered like rocks charting a long dried up river. While they were cheaper Chinese manufactured models, broadly forged from NASA technology, they were still precision engineered, life saving equipment. Equipment that now rolled and clattered uselessly in disrepair, a far cry from their hermetic storage wardrobes.