Murmansk-13

They plunged through the gravity well for minutes, the great hulking mass of the station taking considerable time to rotate under incalculable forces. A puppet to some far greater gravitational object, the Red Supergiant, hauling Murmansk-13 in thrashing and fighting. Katja and Diego were insignificant lumps of meat to a far huger interplay of cosmic force. Nature reclaiming even the most ambitious edifice of man.

Katja groaned as her weight dropped away. Her diminished body, relieved of its own six hundred equivalent pound burden, suddenly became insubstantial, floaty. Rheumy eyed, she looked to Diego who began to drift wraithlike from the bulkhead. He was wriggling his lower jaw as if trying to free the tension of protesting muscles. When he spoke his voice was heavy and slurred.

“We got split up, “ he looked up, which was gradually becoming down. “When this started.” Diego pushed over to Katja, his movement awkward and graceless, he held his hand palm up as he approached. “Take my hand, it’s easier to move when the gravity is at its lowest.”

Katja gripped his palm. It was large and cold, the flesh soft against her own. “Tala?”

Diego didn’t speak for a while, as if concentrating on the navigation of their drift. “I love her too,” Diego said softly, shaking his head. “There’s something about her, isn’t there? She portrays herself as this hard, opaque thing. Yet has this uncanny ability to offer chinks of light through. You know what I mean?”

Katja could feel a shiver ripple through their palm flesh. It passed down her spine and settled heavy in her stomach. There was an unrequited pity and anger that encrusted his words, made them dense and difficult to absorb. She imagined Diego saw himself as a fundamentally good guy who couldn’t understand why he didn’t get the girls he liked. Vanilla and bitter. She concentrated on their forward momentum, uncomfortable in his company. She could feel a greasy film of commingled sweat where their skin twinned.

“I’m not sure what happened,” Diego said, continuing after a while, perhaps trying to quell the discomfort created. “I landed face first, next thing I heard was screaming and gunshots. Those goons chasing us getting fucked up. Those things got drawn by other gunfire. I think that was Tala. But I didn’t see her. I saw you were unconscious and I dragged you out before those monsters became less distracted.”

In the gloom, Katja could see the skin around Diego’s eyes was darkened, a livid purple bruise contoured across the bridge of his nose and two thin ribbons of dried blood columned down from his nostrils. He turned his attention back to the passageway as they floated above the twisting structural beams. It was like drifting down a bleak, grey kaleidoscope.

“Did you see Tala escape?” Katja asked, eventually. Tentatively.

Diego shook his head, his expression crestfallen. “It was her firing. I’m sure of it. She was trying to get to us. Well to you. But she couldn’t, it was impossible, there were too many of them,” he sighed. “She drew them away.”

Grief settled itself like a tumour behind her eyes. The interior of her flesh and organs seemed to calcify as what little light Murmansk-13 had offered guttered out once more.

“Thank you,” Katja begun, her voice leaden. She could feel her weight returning. “For saving me.”

Diego peered forward into the corridors flickering gloom, looking for somewhere to tough out the heightened G’s. Looking to look distracted. “I couldn’t just leave you. Tala is first and foremost… and I guess only ever will be, my friend,” he said, his tone shifting schizophrenically between pointed ambivalence and genuine concern.

They skidded clumsily to a halt on a smooth bulkhead turned sideways. Katja withdrew her hand a little too eagerly. Diego eyed her with caution, easing himself into a nook beside a support strut. Katja crab walked to a little isosceles triangle of rough metal – bracketing deck to bulkhead – and lay down, hoping to save her spine from the worst rigours of the G load.

Katja felt the weight drift on top of her like an avalanche in slow motion. She remembered when she’d been at her heaviest, almost three hundred pounds, bloated by her absent fathers guilty presents of sweets and chocolates, his inability to deny her wishes when he returned home. It had been a period of apathy and ennui, trapped in Gorky leading a comfortable, directionless life.