Murmansk-13

Tor turned back to look at Tala and saw his shadow stretched out like a Modigliani against the far bulkhead, cast in vermillion and black. They’d journeyed from the airlock in silence, conserving their oxygen, barely daring to breathe against the weakened structures of their visors. Tala gave a weak thumbs up in his wake but Tor only saw the hairline cracks that spidered across the golden tinting of her visor, warping his reflection in shattered fragments.

The high-tensile steel lifeline Peralta had affixed on their first sortie to Murmansk-13 vibrated and flexed like mooring lines set to part. Whip-crack undulations travelled its length in slow motion. That it was still anchored by its magnetic cam was a heartening sight. But it didn’t look like it would last much longer.

Dry mouthed and fear sickened, Tor turned his attention back to the great gash, torn into the side of the station, rendering its aluminium flesh. Shafts of florid starlight knifed into the space exposed subsection with steadying intensity. Against the disorientating, spinning backdrop of space, Tor could see the Riyadh still attached by her clamps – wobbling violently in the inertial wake.

Beyond, vast curlicues of hydrogen fire flicked from the Red Supergiant, vanishing beneath the exaggerated horizon, returning the vista to a brief period of celestial night. The dying star appeared to set in the south and rise in the north, although such Earthly compass points bore no relevance within hard vacuum. South was simply where Tor anchored his feet. He remembered the first walk across, the churning confusion as he drifted from the line. It was vital he retained a methodology for differentiating up from down.

“She still there, Captain?” Tala asked, almost sounding indifferent through the helmet speaker.

Tor replied with a thumbs up and nervously pawed his oxygen gauge. Thirty percent.

He beckoned Tala to follow as he walked out across the bridging portion of deck left intact, clomping the heavy magboots against the deck – focusing on the lifeline. Tor knew he couldn’t look out to where the Riyadh had been berthed so many months before. Aside from the disorientating wheel of stars that threatened to unhinge his internal compass, Tor feared he’d be tempting fate. In his mind’s eye he could picture the Riyadh being flicked off, stranding himself and Tala on the disintegrating station, their oxygen ebbing away.

“Captain?”

He was drifting, drifting again. Letting daydreams steal away the present. The first visit to the station had released the catches of his mind, peeled back the self centred, self assured exoskeleton of his reality like a pathologists ribspreader. Exposing and butchering the fortitude within. Tor had been forced to accept he was a weak man, a shadow in his own life. The barometers for his authority, his manhood, were false. All a terrible sham. The realization had almost broken him, plunged him into intermittent dreaming voids. The blurred borders between his conscience and subconscious a black land of hopelessness.

Staring through the eye of the noose, he’d never truly pulled through. But he’d found salvageable threads. He still had a crew to save and a son to protect. To end it all because of his own weaknesses would have been a terrible dereliction to both. His career, like his marriage, were both finished, but redemption for his failures – to Peralta and Mihailov, to Tala and Stewart, even Falmendikov. They were still reachable.

Then the episode in the corridor crushed everything left. His mind had fled, beyond the blurred borders of despair, beyond even his subconscious. Tor had floated in a pale grey nothingness, beyond the fears of Murmansk-13 and even beyond his duties to his crew. It felt descendant of death itself.

In that morass he endured the cells, rarely aware of his surroundings. An inalienable dreamlessness swaddled him for the most part, broken up by images like intermittent signals on a loop aerial TV. Pure memories, moments that cut through the unthinking malaise gentle and clean. He could sense his brainpan, feverishly working to cleanse the memories of the cancerous film injected by Murmansk-13. The birth of Olaf, that moment of unquestionable love between man and son and the tenuous bond it had formed between Tor and Lucia – before his repulsion at her maternal physique. Tor shook his head, such a pathetic man.