Murmansk-13

“Comms, Grigory hail the station,” Anton had got up to look at the hubbub and then froze beside Vasily. “Anton?”

The fat engineer was looking at the thermal detector. “Oh shit.”

Vasily switched the inertial dampers off and tried to lift the personnel carriers nose, with cold rockets and a cooling EM drive he was a sitting duck. Autocannon fire skittered across the nose, clipping docking clamps. For a moment he paused in disbelief. “We’re under fire.”

“Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is Prison Transport Vessel 4-Yza. We’re under attack, request emergency assistance.” Young Grigory was admirably calm.

“Who’s firing on us?”

“I can’t see. Shot’s from the starboard beam. Small rounds.” Vasily tried to turn her to port, put the station between himself and the unseen aggressor. But the vessel lolled to her side slowly, showing her underbelly. A second volley of rounds clattered like large hailstones off her keel, reverse thrusters began misfiring.

“Thrusters are fucked.” 4-Yza began corkscrewing, instead of the slow, gentle parabola to the docking ring whilst she matched orbits, she began twirling like a sycamore seed. Vasily fought to bring her level so they could reassess the approach, but the personnel carrier had never been designed for finesse manoeuvres. “Play dead, kill everything!”

“Ten clicks to Murmansk-13,” Grigory looked at the Vasily. “It’s not going to work Captain, we’re in her orbit and exceeding her velocity.”

Vasily tried to use the ailerons to bank, control his spin, a useless affectation of his test pilot days and pointless in hard vacuum. He wondered where all the old flyboys were today, probably on deep space cruisers or cushy desk jobs, heavily decorated ceremonial attire, growing fat in Mother Russia.

As the personnel carrier rolled he thought he saw the corvette firing at them, black against the blackness of space, shark-like as it hunted. Was it attacking the station?

“Murmansk-13 Control: Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is Prison Transport Vessel 4-Yza. We’re out of control. Requesting emergency assistance. We’ve been fired upon.”

The distress message was met with a fuzz of static then a moment of silence. Vasily switched the inertial dampers back on, tried to abate her speed. Sharp insensible noise burst from the radio. “…sssss…sssss…ss thi… contr…. we hav… lems on bo…. tion on f…. loc…n…. full… tine situ…ion.”

“Five clicks.” Sweat glistened the baby faced co-pilot, he coiled his head set wire around his middle finger, the fingertip turned purple then white. “Please repeat Murmansk tower, you’re breaking up.”

Vasily watched the great silo districts of the station pirouette in his windscreen; she looked like a spider looming in the shadows and like a helpless fly they drifted towards her.

As the stations docking ring twirled by, Vasily saw something fundamentally alien jut out from the framework of Murmansk-13 beneath them. The object was huge and rectangular, devoid of any aerodynamic consideration. Random arrays of polyps seemed to blister from the dark, shimmering surface, coppery-black like haematite. Before Vasily could get a better look the docked vessel disappeared. Then all he could see was the machine-gun rapid passage of lit portholes, visible now as 4-Yza drifted closer to impact.

“4-Yza, abort dock, station on lockdown, full quarantine in place.” A faint voice, mechanical through a blizzard of white noise reported from control.

“We can’t dock, we can’t abort. We need assistance!”

“Station on full quarantine, unable to assistsssssssssssss.” The voice faded away.

Vasily snatched the handset away from Grigory, wrenching the coil around his finger. “There are lifepods launching from your station!”

“One klick.”

Vasily felt heat rise to his cheeks, his voice crackling. “We’re going to fucking crash into you!”

One of the guards had opened the cockpit door behind and was talking to Anton, the last thing Vasily Korobov heard was his engineer’s frantic directive. “Brace, brace, brace.”

☣☭☠

The twisting vista of stars disappeared into greyness. The guards sat, arms crossed, cradling their shoulders while the prisoners were afforded no such luxury. Anticipating imminent collision from the ashen faces of the Gulag agents, Jamal tried to relax his muscles, tried to free his mind. But the injustice burned through.

Other prisoners tensed, some tried to adopt the brace position as best they could. Jamal doubted it would matter. He could now make out rivets on the structure outside, dimly lit viewing ports and yellow Cyrillic. They were heading in at a shallow angle, but at far too great a velocity to dock or pull up. Jamal had observed enough docking procedures as he was slowly bounced through space to tell this was abnormal.