Murmansk-13

Methodically, Hernandez began pulling himself from the bridge. In his torment, he could feel his body meld with the cool linoleum of the deck and the metalwork that slid beneath. The rivet had destroyed his lower jaw, blown a chunk of it away. His tongue lolled unsupported out the side of his ruined face. It was a miracle he’d not bled out already.

Shocked impulses fired spastic messages to his brain, the severed nerve endings made it difficult to think. Despite his bluster, the big man had obviously tried to start the ships thrusters and pull her away, but he hadn’t know how – killed, or thought he killed anyone who did.

Hernandez assumed he was in the engine compartment now, imagined his growing irritation, banging helplessly around trying to convey himself to freedom. Hernandez knew the gentle resonance shimmering through the body of the Riyadh indicated that fuel was passing through her thruster lines, cycling like blood. A simple switch of a button would transfer thruster control to two azimuth joysticks on the bridge. Nielsen had left her ready to go, sensing the very wrongness Captain Tor had been unable to fully vocalize. Justifiably, Hernandez now thought.

A summary scan of the bridge suggested the big man had taken the weapons with him. If he figured out how to pull away from the station he would rip away the clamp and with it the fo’c’sle section. The ship would depressurize. Hernandez didn’t care that he would be killed, he cared that such an action would rob his crew of salvation. What remained of them.

Hernandez bum-shuffled toward the bridge door, leaving a telltale trail of blood spots along his track. He tried to rub away the trail with his leg, smearing the little crimson dots into crazy lines. He knew the damage was catastrophic, could feel the difficult rasps of his breath gush out the side of his cheek with a sickening movement of torn flesh. Every couple of metres he would have to stop to choke out a bolus of blood from his throat. His ichor would spill from the shattered half of his jaw, down his longjohns. Darkness seemed to close round the peripheries of his vision. Cloy and pull at the loosening threads of his consciousness. It took everything to stave them off.

As he reached the bridge door Hernandez paused. He watched the stars wheel crazily across the permanent night sky of space. For so long, Hernandez had only been himself amongst those little pinpricks of light. It had been a beautiful, lonely place to exist. A place in which he would ruminate on the decisions of his life, always coming to the same conclusions: They had been mostly bad. But he always told himself, if he could live it again, he would still never give up the stars. There was much he could have improved upon in his life, but had he settled for Earth – a normal life – he would have stolen something from his being, both fundamental and majestic.

There was no more time for regrets. No more time for the stars. If Hernandez was ever going to cry it would be now. Instead, he found his eyes were dry and hard. He slipped through the door as quietly as he could muster, closing away the celestial firmament as the Red Supergiant filled the windscreen.

The stairs were the worst part. He was exposed, if the big man returned now he wouldn’t just leave him for dead. He would kill him. The equilibrium of numbness his shock driven body had reached as he’d slid across the linoleum was rudely shaken by the harsh motion of the stairs, each step a fresh pop to the face.

Briefly, Hernandez tried to stand, only to find his legs had grown as limp as cooked noodles. As he set himself upright, he found his body became obscenely top heavy and bowed forward. The stairs beneath him curled away, helter-skelter, a vivid sensation of vertigo threatened to topple him. Hernandez resolved to return to the seated position. Wishing he had time to make slow considered movements.

His gasps reverberated in the trunk of the stairwell. The acoustics replayed a bass rendition of his dying breaths. Shallow echoes, punctuated with sharp inhales as he dropped another step. Blood was positively gushing from his wounds as rudimentary clots jarred free. Sammy would have been apoplectic Hernandez thought gaily, watching his blood splash across the tread coating of the steps – settling into little micro pools within the textured rubber.