Murmansk-13

Tor could feel the line trying to tow out and away. They floated toward the nose section of the Riyadh low and wide for the airlock. Overclocked and addled by oxygen starvation, Tor’s mind could fathom only a singular solution. Rearing up from the ships starboard flank, the meter long Pitot tube arrowed aft, blinking in and out of sight within the dancing shadows.

Clumsily, Tor released himself from the lifeline. Battling the nauseating sense of vertigo that wracked his perception, he clambered over the still form of Tala. The rubberized fingertips of his gauntlets, the only thing lending him purchase against the belt of her suit. Feeling his mass being slowly pulled from Tala, he reached for the lifeline with a flailing desperation. Thankful as his free gauntlet clasped around the steel, Tor knew the recoiling line had lost almost all its momentum and was threatening to float lose in the ships wake.

The Pitot tube was closing, less than ten meters. Maladroitly, Tor tried to form a loose lasso in the lifeline, cursing his corroding mind. It was if his neurotransmitters had been replaced with molasses as he curled the high tensile steel into a loose approximation of a loop. The greased steel slithered in his grasp as he tried to thread the bight of the lifeline around the aerodynamic nacelle casing, praying it would abate their momentum.

At the very last second, Tor groped behind him and got as much a grip on Tala’s pressurized EVA suit as possible. The loop hooked around the end of the tube, slipping almost instantly. Still, the interaction altered their trajectory. Tor and Tala were tossed against the side of the ships fuselage, clattering awkwardly into the plating as the lifeline sprung away and out of their grip.

Momentarily, Tor watched the line coil away dimly aware he and Tala were grinding along the skin of the Riyadh. Tor could feel his eyelids begin to droop, he was shutting down, eternal sleep beckoning them at last. Through slitted eyes, he could just make out the recessed emergency airlock handle, the red handle itself submerged in obsidian shadow.

Somewhere between the waking world and the dreamless void beyond, Tor reached for the handle. Tala still a weightless burden in his other hand. In the vacuum of space there was no satisfying thunk or hydraulic whoosh. One moment Tor and Tala were slipping through the emptiness of space, unbound, the next they were laying inside the Riyadh’s Evac Suite airlock as it began auto cycling.

Vaguely, Tor remembered catching one last glimpse of Murmansk-13 as it continued along its gravitational trajectory. It was already little more than a tumbling dot, glinting metallic and seemingly coruscating; shedding plating as it slowly vanished into the distance, gapping them at an astonishing rate.

Then Tor realised the valve on his breathing set was completely closed as the beacon flashed occulting yellow light across his visor. Each breath drew nothing, just agonal gasps like a fish pulled from its habitat, the action of trying to draw oxygen perpetuated out of habit by his brainstem. Tor could feel his chest rising and falling in rapid arresting movements. He’d come so far, but he would die if his helmet stayed on any longer. He could already feel a steady veil of darkness begin to close around his consciousness.

Tears beaded against almost sightless eyes staring up into the deckhead as he tried to work the clasp of his helmet. His stuttering mind recounted the Murmansk-13 airlock, when he’d been in the process of escaping with Mihailov. Then he’d almost died because he hadn’t managed to cinch the damn thing.

The helmet twisted off with a satisfying click. The airlock atmosphere was still highly rarefied, the deafening scream of the lock pressurizing threatened to burst his eardrums. It didn’t matter, thin as it was, there was oxygen.

You’d been with someone else. Tor tried to comprehend the message in his mind, he’d been with many people. Someone else, someone else. It was a chant, stirring him to move. In a stupor, Tor rolled to his side as his undernourished synapses began to reignite. Tala!

Panicked, Tor saw Tala now. She’d curled into a foetal ball, at least to the extent the EVA suits permitted – motionless and rumpled in a corner. Tor scrambled to her side frantic, with his helmet removed he couldn’t communicate and with her visor pulled down he couldn’t see anything but his own gaunt visage reflected back at him.

Gently he pulled her helmet away, her skin was ashen, her eyes closed. Her face was a mass of old injuries and bruises that had grown livid with cyanosis. Her split and bloated lip was blue. Ripping his gauntlet free, Tor felt her neck for a pulse. He couldn’t, his fingers were cold and numb, they shook. He couldn’t tell if it were her skin that was cold or his.