Murmansk-13

The Iban arc responded to her touch like a yearning lover. Murmansk-13, gravity and Diego fell away as Katja ran her fingers across the plates, working slowly and inextricably toward the centre. Teasing, the arc wanted to be teased, forced Katja to tease it. The pulse became a throb as Katja traced the edge of a plate to the centre, moistening. Excitement coursed through her, ecstasy. Now the throb was inside of her, within her cold and warm simultaneously. Tremulous and building, enmeshing. A murmur parted her lips as she worked her index finger into the port, quivering flesh parting beneath her touch coyly. Resistant but not resisting. Her middle finger followed as climax neared – surging.

She could feel gentle filaments, reaching into her mind, defragmenting the data stored within. Reorganizing for symbiosis. She felt the chemical makeup of her brain change subtly as the arc began bootstrapping her neurotransmitters. Achieving impossible union, bliss.

Pure pleasure washed through Katja as the airlock irised open. Nerves and receptors vibrating in mini aftershocks. The veil of inhibition lifted faster than her brain could gather. Flooded synapses rendered her cognitive faculties mute and recalibrating. Dumb and aquiver, she stared mouth agape, hunched over the circular orifice.

“Wow, what the hell was that?” Diego said, his voice tight.

He’d watched the whole thing. Katja felt her cheeks flush. She couldn’t answer for a moment, her mouth awash with saliva. “I… I… don’t… know,” she replied eventually.

“Whatever it was, I think it liked you.”

An uncontrollable giddy smile parted her lips, hidden from Diego. They were going to be alright. She was going to be alright. Katja knew that now. Tala might be gone and her father, but something else had stepped up to protect her. Love her. She knew the thoughts weren’t wholly her own, but she didn’t care. The not-her thoughts were inside her, wanted her, wanted to swaddle her…

Katja shook her head and found she’d dribbled down her chin. Actinic luminescence beckoned them, her, into the heart of the arc. She couldn’t shake the drift of her mind. “There are emergency breach charges on either side of the lock,” she listened to her own voice, flat and distant. “They have a twenty second time delay, we can use them to leave.”

“Shit, I didn’t think,” Diego said, peering round the compartment.

Katja wasn’t listening. She’d already entered the arc, the thoughts growing louder in her head.

☣☭☠

Diego set the charges, one either side of the airlock, shucking off the now useless gauntlets of his depressurized EVA suit. He sensed he wouldn’t be needing them where he was about to go. The countdown was synchronised once both were primed. Twenty lit up in dot matrix, bright red. Nineteen. Better hurry.

Violet light rayed through the open airlock, wavering at the edges of the visual spectrum. Katja stood a little way through the port, small. A black light silhouette. She turned to face Diego, her teeth and eyes lambent within a colourless face.

“Are you coming?” Her voice had taken on a whimsical quality, at peace but distant. As if she was speaking through a filter. Diego pinched the crucifix necklace between his fingers, nervously, tried to shake away the thoughts he was about to enter a godless Faraday cage. He’d accepted there was nowhere else to go.

Ten… nine. Diego counted down in his head, if the crushing force of gravity settled on him now there would be no escape. Reluctantly he bridged the gap, passing from a hostile construct of man, to something unknowable. As he squeezed himself through the airlock, Diego tried to consolidate his belief that unknowable was not worse.

The thought didn’t warm his soul.

Diego tumbled to the deck as the membranous airlock shuttered closed behind him. Beneath him the ground felt loamy, pliant. Katja helped him up as the charges detonated with a dull thunk, parting the docking mounts and hopefully setting the arc free.

“That’s better, isn’t it,” Katja said, arms around the adjustable cuirass section of his suit. She let her arms fall, goofy smile still splayed across her face.

Diego wished there was a viewport, something to confirm separation and to look finally upon the celestial firmament as Murmask-13 twisted away. Instead, cloying actinic light played across shimmering obsidian black bulkheads that phosphoresced softly. Diego touched the surface – solid and febrile like haematite, half expecting it to ripple beneath his fingertips. Disappointed his touch bore no consequence to the iridescent undercurrent within.

“At least the atmosphere is breathable,” he sighed, taking a half-step back from Katja. The glowing sclera and dark irises of her eyes bored intensely into him.