Murmansk-13

The violet light was starved of shadow or tone. It reached everywhere and stemmed from nowhere, penetrating into the expanse, its uniformity robbing the space of depth. When they reached the corridors terminus, they did so at a point Diego had seen when they first began. The small compartment housing the membranous airlock was still clearly visible at the farthest end, beyond a field of twinkling deck fibres over a mile distant.

“Where are we?” Diego asked as the arc sighed around him. The mechanical resonance he had come to understand as the white noise of space, of the Riyadh, was absent here. Replaced with something part-biological.

“Where we have to be, to be protected,” Katja replied as she ran her hand over the sigil. She shivered as the sigil changed colour – white to sepia – before fading into the shimmering sable of the material beneath.

The sutures retaining the huge doors popped, falling away limply, allowing the flaps to butterfly open. Parting with a sticky peel. Diego shivered too as Katja retook his hand.

“Katja, are you OK?” Diego asked, anchoring his feet and stilling her forward momentum, pulling at her. “You seem… different.”

“I am where I am meant to be,” she replied in a childlike voice, her expression blank. Gooseflesh prickled her skin. “I think the arc called me, wanted me. I feel…” she paused, as if her brain were searching for the correct terminology in a foreign language, then smiled. “Happy.”

Happy. The word had slipped hollow and intoxicated from her lips as fear picked at Diego’s mind. Pure unadulterated fear. There was no happiness here, just a bastion of death.

Nobody had even seen an Iban, at least not as far as Diego was aware. No biological specimens, extraterrestrial or otherwise, where ever publicised when the first arc was towed to Siberia and he doubted remains had been found here. The thought occurred to Diego that perhaps the Iban’s didn’t exist, that the arcs were some godhead construct – punishing the weak minded, the compellable. Thrown into space like flypaper, that beyond the threshold of the door lay the denouement. The creators killing jar.

Diego squared his frame, locked his joints. He could feel the compression pains pour back into each joint as lactic acid screamed through his muscles. “I’m not going any further Katja, this place. It feels wrong. Harmful.”

Katja screwed her face up, petulantly, for a moment Diego thought she would stamp her foot. “We have to go on, Diego. Otherwise you’ll die. We’ll both die. Don’t you understand that?”

“No. No, I don’t understand. How can I understand, how do you understand?” Diego could hear his voice heighten an octave , reaching a falsetto shriek. He tried to pull his hand away. “This place is alien.”

Katja stared at Diego as if she only just realized he was there. “I don’t fully understand, Diego. You’re right, we can’t. But the arc is telling me that it will protect us.”

“What if it doesn’t, what if really it wants is to hurt us, or kill us?” Diego could feel the fear etched in lines of his face, the terror welling in his eyes. Finally he whispered. “What if it is lying?”

Katja quailed as if struck, as if the mere thought spoke of the greatest betrayal possible. “It wouldn’t,” she replied quietly, shaking her head. Tears rimed her eyes. “If you could hear, what I can, you would never say that. It loves us.”

Loves us. Diego took a half step back from the crazy sounding girl, Katja took a half step over the threshold. He could see she was afraid, but not in the same elemental way as he. Her fear was internalized, almost domestic. The fear of losing a loved one, of a marriage ending. The very fear that had wracked the Fierro household. Diego had seen that scared desperation before, in his mothers eyes when her husband lost Patricia’s college funds. When everything began to fall apart.

“Where are you going to go, Diego?” The question was a plea, she peered over her shoulder.

Diego sighed and felt the nervous energy drain from his body leaving only bone weariness in its wake. “Nowhere, there is nowhere left.”

Whatever fate was beyond the door he would have to accept. It couldn’t be any worse than the fate he faced aboard Murmansk-13. He didn’t want to be alone, didn’t want to wander through the arcs living corridors on his own. It dawned on him that his crew were gone, his friends. All that was left was the alien craft and Katja.

She reached out her hand, pale flesh blackened by the arc light. Diego could see her arm shake, could feel his own tremble in union. As their hands joined once more, Katja smiled, nervously. The inebriated whimsy gone, her assuredness rocked. A small part of Diego felt sad for depriving her of the carefree certainty she’d possessed, it had lent her a lightness of spirit, no matter how artificial, she’d not possessed before. Not even with Tala.

Gently, Katja coaxed Diego through the doorway leading him like nervous first time lovers, into the unknowable.

Chapter 24