Murmansk-13

The klaxon sounded distant now. The labs and medical bay were afforded a large wide corridor that formed a general reception and waiting area, anti-septic white, some banal paintings made the walls blander. A second pair of double doors opened into a circular ward, a warren of laboratories ringing a single general medical ward currently appropriated for triage until the other Districts were shutdown.

Katja walked passed rows of keypad protected laboratories and frosted glass. Bleach tempered with a faint metallic tang wafted through the air. The sense of wrongness was amplified by the disorientating bend of the corridor, depth of sight stolen by a trick of the eye, the sameness of the walls. A single grey stripe, hip height on white. The whole thing felt like rounding a blind corner, unknowing.

She stopped, thought she heard something. One step, another, her own. Her booty suckered for the first time in weeks and she looked down. Blood, arterial spray, spattered up the walls to shin level, a great gout smeared in three shades on the floor. How had she not noticed that before?

Somewhere along the corridor she heard a rustling, then a whimpering, the latter sound her own. She slapped her hands over her mouth and whirled around, backpeddaling from the unsubstantial threat.

The curve terminated in an architecturally discordant corner, heel slipping into its nook. She felt the whoosh of a door open up behind her, an arm grabbed her shoulder and she felt herself being pulled forcibly backwards. Katja’s hands fell away from her mouth, flailing, a rabid weep parted her lips as the door clattered shut.

☣☭☠

The wormhole throat opened before them, a perceptible tear of black on black. Pinpricks of occulting starlight indicated an almost successful traversing. Vasily Korobov primed the inertial dampers and azimuthed his reverse thrusters. His co-pilot Grigory flittered through a laminated checklist. It was a manoeuvre he’d carried out countless times before, cost cutting crash stops on short jump sequences, bounce the envelope and save fuel in shortened approaches. A total fly-by-night operator move, little room for error and each minor fuck up a cheaper law suit than extraneous burning of Syntin. Or else the company went bust, Vasily had flown with both.

“What’s the channel here?”

“Thirteen, she’s ready to go.”

“Open comms as soon as we exit the hole, we’ll be right on top of her.”

“Don’t want to scare her now,” Grigory replied mirthlessly and donned the cumbersome communications headpiece. “Arrival checklist complete.”

“I’ll sign her up when we dock.”

Vasily went through his final idiosyncrasies, little flinches and twitches, some professional knob twirling and other affectations. Ten years ago, he’d have never dreamed he’d be flying missions in space, or more exactly how stunted his promising career had become. From ace Soviet test pilot and early deep space pioneer, marriage and alcoholism had busted him down to prison transport. He’d bounced from one time chartering company to the next, always under false papers and aliases, jumping as soon as his bosses caught on. Some had been less discerning, Vasily liked working for them best, they tended to be the less scrupulous businesses. Turning a blind eye to his revoked license meant turning a blind eye to safety and protocol. He’d been left at some spaceport or another with no ticket home and his keys to an auctioned off personnel carrier confiscated more than once.

It was what it was, flying was all he knew, the only difference these days was he was flying rust buckets with space cadet dropouts and his means to an end required a means to an end.

Vasily turned to Anton, flight engineer. “Kill the EM drive as soon as we’re through the throat, company is counting particles.”

Anton was old, a significant paunch was bisected by his control panel. A greying tonsure haloed a chubby face and conflicting black moustache. He moved slowly, an unburdened man. Vasily suspected Anton no longer maintained a valid Engineers ticket but he knew little of the man, he rarely communicated with anything other than body language and grunts.

“Exiting the throat in three, two,” Vasily reached for the thrusters lever. “One.”

He gunned the lever, full throttle and in one swift movement activated the inertial dampers, the otherworldly hum of the Exotic Matter drive fell away. Grigory reached for the communications button, then paused. “What’s that?”

Vasily followed the plane of Grigory’s fingertip, Murmansk-13 lay silhouetted against a backdrop of stars, large close stars, Class K’s and weak M’s, and the distant blue giants of the starburst galaxy. Spectral red and white mosaics on blue-black marble. Beneath the station, the chlorine rich planet Tsiolkovsky-6 hung like a cheap bauble and beyond that was the systems dying red supergiant. Vasily saw the subject of Grigory’s attention. “Are those lifepods?”