Murmansk-13

Tor gave her a stoical thumbs up as he began connecting his life support pack, feeding the various tubes into their colour coded ports. Tala wondered if he would give anything other than a thumbs up, even if the couplings were all bent out and the life support pack fucked.

Tala plugged the communications jack in, the Captain’s voice washed over her in a reassuring fuzzy static. “How’s it looking, Tala? You got me?”

“I got you, sir. Helmet fits OK, just going to pressure up.”

“How are you for oxygen?”

Tala peered at the readout, the needle had slipped below halfway. “Maybe forty five percent.”

“You want to try another pack?”

Tala shrugged against the building pressure of her suit. In truth, she did want more than forty-five percent but how much longer could they wait? Every new delay increased the likelihood the station would shatter around them, or the Riyadh would be torn from the docking ring. She could try every pack and find the best had fifty percent, the five percent wouldn’t be worth it. “What you got, Captain?”

“Fortyish.”

That settled it. “Not much point then, sir.”

“You want me to wait to purge the lock while you pressure up?”

Tala could feel the skin of her suit harden around her, feel the pressure swaddle her torso like an overzealous hug. She resisted the urge to take great gulps of air as the suit tightened across her chest, concentrated her breathing. The needle shifted imperceptibly leftwards. “There isn’t another suit in here if this spring’s a leak anyway, punch it, Captain.” Tala was glad the squawking static of the helmet communications system would wash away her tone of nervous bravado.

Tor’s hand hovered over the airlock purge control. “Just over a week ago I was lamenting how I’d become a paper pusher with some fancy stripes on my shoulders.” His little chuckle was reconstituted into a quiet fizz through the helmet speakers. “I didn’t realise how fucking comfortable I’d become.”

He hit the purge button.

Chapter 23

The domes ribbed apex spun above her. It was like waking to find a giant spider twirling about an insubstantial thread of silk; preparing to land its itchy, angular legs upon her face. The illusion was compounded by paralysis, she couldn’t bat the arachnid apparition away, her body rendered rigid by the jarring shock of the fall.

She felt clumsy, unseen hands pull her away as she became as vast and heavy as an ocean. Blackness returned.

When Katja woke again it was dark; her vision blurred. The back of her cranium felt soft – yielding, like the cratered shell of a spoon-tapped egg. Numbness and pain vied for control within her brain, the various lobes theatres for sensory warfare. She doubled over as an unstoppable comber of nausea swept over her. Stomach muscles clenching with primitive ardour, unable to eject anything but scorching bile and stomach acid. The acrid fluids seeped into arid fissures that cracked her lips. She sobbed, her body trembling.

Righting herself, Katja realised she was being watched. A coffee skinned Latino man was sat across the corridor, his arm wrapped through a spaceframe bracket. He appraised her with cold, unfeeling eyes. The brown of his irises black in the dim. She remembered his name, Diego.

“I wasn’t sure you made it,” Diego stated, his voice lightly accented. “You hit your head hard when we landed.”

Little throbbing streamers of pain floated across the canvas of her retinas. “I can feel it,” she replied, then scanned the corridor around her. “Where is Tala? What happened?”

As she spoke the timbre of her voice warped, as if her vocal chords were being crushed. She watched Diego scowl, press himself into the structural frame as their bodies grew heavier and heavier. Several G’s loaded themselves on top of her ravaged physique. Loose flesh, the legacy of pounds shed by a steady process of cryogenic atrophy and a decade of yo-yoing dieting, slid down across her framework of bones – then up. For a moment she imagined herself sinking through the fragile shell of Murmansk-13, atomized through inexorable osmosis, the few sensible remaining particles cast to the stellar winds.

She burbled uncontrollably against her body weight, against the pressure; disorientated by the movement of the station. Katja could only remember Murmansk-13 as an impervious and vast metal conglomeration. An inert platform that was so implicitly stable, the fragile nature of its existence was cast to the subconscious. Katja grasped at the bracket beside her, fearful she would be dashed against the deckhead above, her already fragile skull split apart. Senseless that she was pinned at every orientation by her own magnified mass.