Murmansk-13

As her body lightened, Tala pushed from the bulkhead, scooping up the discarded helmets before they could be dashed against the stations structure once more. The first had a visible crack webbing the top of the visor, the second a significantly deranged coupling ring. She tossed the helmet with the broken coupling away, irreparable it twisted away into the bank of grey mist. A busted visor might hold out, but a warped coupling ring would not interlock – pressure and oxygen would whistle away as the occupant expired.

Beside her Tor was collecting the life support packs and stacking them against the airlocks pressure bulkhead. The metal was still concealed beneath a shingling of congealed bodily fluids and decay. The smell of ozone whipped about them as the escaping air wailed with gale force ferocity. Columns of vaporized gas formed miniature tornadoes around the curve of the corridor.

Communication was growing impossible in the increasingly hostile environment. Tala braced herself crossways on the deck, using her body as a sluice for the helmets skittering about. The cyclonic winds were creating a vacuum, trying to tear everything out of the station. It was as if Murmansk-13 was trying to purge itself of all the foreign objects that had harmed it and sent it tumbling through space.

Tor had become human strapping for his life support packs. The packs were more robust, often clattered against airlock doors or external plating during standard operations, but they’d be useless if ejected into space. Tala tried to hale him, waving her arm whilst trying to stop herself being pulled into the vacuum. Tor gazed over his shoulder to her, one of his eyeballs was bright red, the blood vessels blown out by the sudden drop in pressure. Frantically she pointed at the airlocks external controls.

“Open the fucking airlock!” Tala would never use an expletive when addressing a senior officer under normal circumstances, but circumstances had become anything but normal. She also knew he would never be able to hear her.

Slowly the Captain registered what she was trying to indicate. Loosening his death grip, Tor reached for the airlock door controls, his arm flailed like a tree branch in the ferocious wind. He pulled the lever and the door cycled open. Carefully he resituated his life support packs around the corner of the door, hoping it would provide leeway.

With the packs stowed Tor peered at Tala. She was trapped, if she let go of the bracket the helmets would be lost and with them any chance of escape, but she couldn’t move with the collection of helmets that gathered round her midriff like salmon trapped in a net. Gingerly, Tor began picking his way from bracket to bracket, trying to bridge the void to Tala as the air became lung achingly thin.

She watched the Captain grimace just out of arms reach as gravity crushed him down to his knees. Little tears of anguish rushed down his cheeks, barging through a patina of foam scum and carbon dioxide dust that had leant Tor a grey pallor. As his eyes reopened he grasped for Tala.

“The helmets,” she screamed, looking down to where the helmets bobbed in the reduced gravity. “The helmets first.”

Tor shook his head. “Two, I can take two. There isn’t much time.”

The helmets were mostly broken, fundamentally damaged in an irretrievable way. While she’d been unable to closely assess more than two, those she’d given a cursory glance were either non-functional or at best marginal. She handed Tor the one with the cracked visor and a second that she’d been unable to appraise. The Captain nodded and threaded a route back through the brackets, briefly pinioned to the deckhead before reaching the airlock.

Tala monitored the passage of time by the steady drain of breathable air, the gradual fading of atmospheric fog as the ring was purged of gas. She was gulping in oxygen deprived air with her mouth wide open, achieving the same level of oxygenation one experiences when their head is buried deep in a pillow. She was suffocating, and so was the Captain. Older and increasingly exhausted, she watched Tor place the helmets beside the life support packs and begin his return journey, legs and arms shaking as he braced himself along the route. The haggard mask he wore in the cells had slipped over his face once more.

The grasping winds died away as the pressure fell. Tala felt the skin on her face prickle and swell as the first tendrils of space exposure began to wind inexorably into her flesh. The sound of her frantic gasps ebbed away as air gave way to vacuum. Desperately she tried to fill her lungs against the pernicious, crushing nothingness that threatened to flatten them.

Tor grasped her hand, pulling her upright as ice began to rime her eyelashes. She remembered to grab one last helmet, a spare – hopefully a spare, before they blindly retraced the structural supports that led to the airlock. Both succumbing to the disorientating effects of tumbling gravity and hypoxia.