Murmansk-13

So far everything appeared normal, windscreen shields were down to protect them from micro meteoroid strike. Many early deep spacers had died, completely unaware in their rudimentary cryobeds, after a pea sized piece of space junk or rock pierced their windscreens and pressure bulkheads failed. Later vessels had inbuilt fail safes that would keep the crewman in cryo for as long as it took for assistance to be rendered. In deep space that usually meant freezing to death or hypoxia after the ships cryo fluid ran dry. Tor always considered waking from cryo another death avoided. This had been his seventh time on a sleeping voyage and his second longest.

Tor opened the bridges cooler, predictably empty, a faint smell of old UHT milk, long removed. The coffee table above was poorly stocked, powdered milk and creamer, cheap instant coffee granules. An unwelcome offering for renewed awareness. They should wake the galley a day earlier, he thought, that would be his grand suggestion at the Master’s Conference.

Pretty weak, but he didn’t much care.

The Captain’s seat was set back and to the starboard side of the helmsman’s position which lay dead centreline. Gimballed for comfort, the mechanism had long since seized up and chunks of yellow upholstery burst from seams in the greying cover. He took a seat and pulled out a packet of Prince Golden Taste cigarettes he’d stashed in one of the torn seams, more upholstery tumbled to the deck. Rattling the packet before opening, he counted three left and the lighter he’d stowed within.

Tor squinted at the chronometer as he lit up, momentary flame-light cast eldritch shadows in the dim. October 12th 1992, they should have docked at Talus Station two weeks ago, that was a significant delay but not uncommonly large. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss, a nagging sensation that things were not quite in place. He brushed the feeling aside, the product of a skipping mind as synapses thawed.

October 12th 1992, he’d missed Olaf’s birthday. Another. Soon his son would be a man and birthdays would become meaningless dates, shop bought birthday cards fulfilling a calendar obligation. He’d missed his wife’s too. Slowly, inextricably, Lucia was catching up to him in age. After sixty-three months spent in cryo and the reduction imposed on metabolic rate, Tor’s forty-three years could effectively be counted thirty-eight, or so he liked to think. Lucia, however, would be older.

He tried to shake the sense of loneliness away. They always liked the presents he brought home and he supposed that meant something. Money and lifestyle had taken him into deep space. He’d joined as a cadet in 1980 as the industry blossomed after the Iban arc discovery. The race to deep space had broken the prestige of the cosmonaut and turned it into a workaday profession. People from all walks of life were now aspiring space farers.

While the cachet quantitively faded, the fiscal reward remained high. He’d been away nine of the last twelve years and he’d quickly learned to live with solitude. Suicide was uncommonly high for all those blue collar cosmonauts, the frontiersmen were dying or retiring out as the industry streamlined and professionalized. Tor was the last of his alumni still ‘at-space.’

The last not growing fat behind a desk. Or dead.

Tendrils of cigarette smoke laced upward. The armrest of the chair dug uncomfortably under his ribs. He tried to adjust his position, but found himself being gently, but relentlessly, pressed into the arm. His body, the chartroom lamp, they were being pulled to port as if the Riyadh was pivoting – spinning. Then he noticed the quiet, the familiar cadence of the engines were white noise to a man who’d lost so many years on spacecraft. Now he realized there was only silence, silence and the faint click of electronic bulbs.

Tor pushed himself out of his chair just as the elevator opened, dispensing piercing white light onto the bridge. Jan Nilsen and his second engineer Oscar Pettersson stood ashen faced in the elevator light. “Tor, there’s a problem in the Medical Bay. You better come quick.”

☣☭☠

“What do you mean he’s gone? Doctor…?”

“I mean he isn’t here.”

“How did you not notice that before? Doctor…?”

“I was attending to the rest of you.”

“You were awake a whole fucking day before the rest of us. Doctor…?”

“I assumed it was an empty cryobed.”

Tor stood in the doorway of the Medical Bay, Pettersson and Nilsen behind him. The whole crew were now up and in their jumpsuits and doing their best to avoid looking like they were eavesdropping on the flustered Doctor and the Captain still dressed in only a thermal blanket. Tor took a long drag on his cigarette, trying to calm the onrush of anxiety and inventory the consequences of the Chief Officers absence. Nobody had turned turtle on a voyage Tor Gjerde had captained, but that was the first conclusion he was drawing.