Murmansk-13

Captain Third Grade Leonid Ossipov stared out of the Yumashev’s windscreen, somehow expecting to see the deep space merchant vessel Riyadh. He knew that was impossible of course, the Riyadh was still over eight hundred miles away as they slowly closed on a rendezvous approach. The merchant ship was maintaining an orbit seven hundred miles above the Venus sized planet Tsiolkovsky-6, designated by the Federal Space Agency. The creamy green, chlorine rich atmosphere of the planet almost filled the viewport of the Soviet destroyer as their radial thrusters canted them sideways, lowering their own orbit.

Behind him, the bridge was a hive of concentrated activity. Sombre. All hands had been called to stations several hours before and a pervading climate of tension was building. In many ways, deep space rendezvous was more hazardous than battle. Not that Ossipov could attest to any battle experience outside simulators and military exercises. He suspected it was much the same for the six men on the bridge beside him.

He had, however, been involved in orbital docking operations before. Had seen how badly they could go wrong. He tried to push the memories of the docking module uncoupling incident away – the men exposed to explosive decompression. At the time Ossipov had been a junior officer aboard a standby vessel, had been on duty when they were ordered to help collect the remains.

Maybe it would be easier to just slag this ship out of existence. They were after all operating in restricted Soviet territory. The secrecy surrounding the Murmansk-13 installation such that when the Yumashev was called to investigate unsanctioned activity around the station, the destroyers commanding Captain, Anatoli Korashev, was forced to request confidential star charts. To all intents and purposes Murmansk-13 was on a need to know basis that exceeded a commanding officers pay grade. Ossipov was one of only three men aboard the Yumashev that were even aware they were operating within such sensitive space.

Now Murmansk-13 was tumbling away, jettisoned. Her orbital stabilizing reactor had gone critical and dumped its core, the Yumashev arriving too late. Soviet command wanted the Riyadh and its compliment detained and questioned. Ossipov watched the space station on the radar, falling away and accelerating, shedding ever larger portions of its gigantic structure. The plan position indicator a scattered bloom of targets beginning at the stations point of origin and disappearing into a haze of radiation interference propagated by the systems dying star. Soon the bright blip would be completely masked.

Information regarding the station, its purpose and manning, had been scant. The Yumashev had been directed to patrol the station and remove any illicit vessels in the area. The whys were left to people much farther up the chain of command, millions of miles away in comfortable offices in Moscow. However, something was about to change, Leo could feel it.

An hour before, shortly after reporting the catastrophic loss of the station, Captain Korashev had fielded a hushed tightbeam conversation with Naval Headquarters. He’d taken his leave of the bridge to continue the briefing in his office, but not before giving clandestine instructions to the ships physicist, Tarasov. Leo suspected it had something to do with the sizeable object seen accelerating away from the stricken station reaching astonishing speeds.

Leo had assumed bridge command in the Captain’s absence, not much caring for the omission of information. Sourly he sat, still staring out the windscreen. Korashev had left no alternative orders, so they continued to vector in toward the Riyadh. Leo hoped he would receive full disclosure when the Captain returned. Not for the first time in his career he was forced to accept prohibitive protocol, the concentric rings of secrets upon secrets that often availed operations. Senior officers privilege he supposed; doling out information in controlled packets whilst maintaining overall authority and usefulness.

He had no real right to be angry, Leo had been brought onboard the Yumashev at the last moment to shadow Captain Korashev. Korashev was second class, awaiting the command of a battlecruiser and Leo was fast on his way to becoming the youngest second class captain in the deep space fleet. He was in effect, operating as a supernumerary outside the typical chain of command aboard a Soviet destroyer. Still, he couldn’t imagine himself playing politick once he obtained his second star.

Perhaps, he thought, it was a necessity once your captaincy stretched beyond a crew of eighty. There were, after all, three hundred mostly enlisted men aboard the Yumashev.