Murmansk-13

“You OK?” He asked, his voice compressed.

“Just memories,” Katja replied, composing herself, wiping away teardrops that beaded upwards with the sleeve of her jumpsuit. “This might sound crazy, but I’m convinced this station has a way of distorting the mind. It gets to you. I don’t know why. It effects people in different ways.”

Diego nodded. “We felt it on the Riyadh, after the debris hit us. There it was a sort of apathy. Acceptance.”

Katja felt a subtle pain well up in her abdomen. She doubled over, sensing a hardness deep within her. Queasiness washed over her as she dabbed the crotch of her jumpsuit, already hardened with old blood. Her hand met a viscous, unhealthy warmth.

“You’re bleeding,” Diego said, drifting closer.

Whatever wounds Ilya had tore open inside of her had opened once again. “I’m in trouble, Diego. Where are we going?”

Diego’s hands shifted uncomfortably, wary of offering any comfort. “I was hoping you could tell me. I just pulled you out of the Command Centre, I’m a foreigner on here.”

For the first time since she woke, Katja began taking stock of her surroundings, a necessary distraction as pain submitted to a sensation of emptiness. A cold void seemed to open amongst the most sensitive of her flesh. Her lower body grew numb in the lessened gravity. Diego had dragged, or floated her a long way from Central Command. They were in the outer ring now, evidenced by the sweeping curve of the twisting bulkheads that faded into the colour starved gloom. A single dark grey line traced the length of the corridor, painted at shoulder level. Motes of dust drifted serenely, at odds with the clamour of grating metal.

“Lifepods?” Katja asked, already knowing the answer.

“Every bay I’ve checked so far was empty,” Diego replied, looking around furtively, perhaps anticipating the arrival of the infected, bobbing like ragged flotsam in the microgravity.

“Have you seen any numbers on the bulkheads?”

Diego paused, thinking. “Yeah, I checked a lifepod bay at an entranceway numbered eleven.”

They’d fallen beside the corridor to quadrant four, bastion of the stations top secret research and development districts. Nobody had been afforded access to these districts without express permission and the necessary clearance. Katja had been a long way from either. She’d never left District Three, save for a day’s orientation in Central Command. If the lifepods had all been launched, then the evacuation had been much the same here as it was in quadrant one – though few of the infected wore the tattered remains of District Twelve. They’d probably escaped the disease, only to be blown into subatomic particles by their own countrymen. Watching, trapped in their little underpowered capsules as the Russian deep space fleet picked off the other pods until their own turn came, a tracer beam the last thing they would ever see.

The thought sent electrical shivers down her spine and materialized a crazy thought in her brainpan. A quiet pleading call, almost extraneous to her own thought patterns. The Iban arc had been docked at twelve. Without an EVA suit, stranded kilometres from Diego’s ship and no lifepods, what option was left? They couldn’t go back through Central Command and at least the arc was big – the thought of dying a prolonged death in a lifeboat that doubled as a casket did not gladden the heart, even if they could find a functional pod.

“I have an idea,” Katja said, a small smile curling her lips and a thrill of excitement edging her voice. “It’s a little… out there.”

Diego cocked a thick eyebrow as the station screeched beneath them. “What?”

☣☭☠

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been out, nor how long he’d hovered on the peripheries of awareness – floating in an ephemeral sea of hurt. Consciousness arrived in ebbing combers of hot, hazy pain that lapped against his brain like distant thunderclaps. Beneath exquisite agony his mind unspooled, simplifying as if running on some auto routine. He was going to die and he knew what had to be done to protect the rest. To atone.

Aidan lay supine on the deck, argent light limned his unmoving corpse. Nearby, Mikhail remained sprawled, flat out and inert. It seemed the strike across his temple had rendered him equally dead. Too bad the big man wouldn’t feel his loss so keenly.

Hernandez couldn’t say where the big man had gone, but it was apparent he’d vacated the bridge. In nerve shredding agony his perception crystallized, Hernandez could only sense stillness in his immediate environment. Then the screech of overstrained plates ground through the vessel, vibrating through rendered flesh and shattered bone. For a moment Hernandez receded back into comforting oblivion, felt his head sag.

He shook away the darkness. Not yet, he thought.