Instead he watched as Mikhail scaled one of the outer racks. His silhouette crawling up the skeletal framework. Most of the supplies on the lower shelves had been scoured clean or destroyed by the early frequent incursions of the infected crew. Nobody could say for sure how many the Station had housed when the evacuation was botched, or how recently it had been supplied, but non-perishables were at ten percent their original total. Rationing had been introduced in District Four for the greater good. They could hang on another ten months if District Seven followed suit.
Then what? Jamal wondered how long the little bands would hold together, how long before anarchy and fighting turned to cannibalism. Schisms were developing beneath Gennady, the stability he’d come to rely on was threatening to unravel. Ever since rationing was instituted, timid but contentious – and increasingly unhinged, Kirill was garnering support amongst those least satisfied in District Four and those cowed by his mule Ilya. Sewing the same atmosphere of fear and paranoia that had first split the community through nebulous propaganda. Jamal thought of the Rapa Nui, the people of the Easter Islands, impotently expending their resources, spiralling passively into violence and disaster. He’d found a book on anthropology while scouring the offices and had coldly read the passages on their demise. Perhaps Kirill was right to incite fear, but Jamal knew it was merely for his own gain. Kirill wanted to monopolize the station supplies, if he succeeded in a coup he would be sorely disappointed. Jamal had already explained that stores were dwindling, Kirill had simply branded him as a Gennady loyalist.
So be it.
Mikhail was now sat, cross-legged an outline embossed in red. Hands feverishly packing tins and packets into a large canvas backpack. A faint skittering of metal on metal floated up to Jamal and drifted away on a breeze of ozone scented wind. It occurred to him that a loud sound now and he could trap Mikhail on the upper shelves, the infected would not relent until he died.
Then however, the warehouse would become impassable, Mikhail could sustain himself for weeks on the dried food stuffs and emergency water supplies. Jamal would have to wait until either boredom or madness forced Mikhail to act. Only once Mikhail was either devoured, dead or out of reach would the infected mill elsewhere. By then he would surely have imperilled all the remaining survivors of District Four. Both the grateful and the ingrates.
Jamal wondered how many times Mikhail had watched him on the racks and came to the same conclusion. The thought raised gooseflesh on his skin.
Mikhail began his downclimb, backpack bulging out like a black widow’s abdomen, jostling against measured movements. Descent was the hardest part, the frames were aluminium, weight lightened by oval knotholes and otherwise smooth. The holes were big enough to jam a finger into and little more, there was no opportunity to properly test the weight of the backpack before mounting the frame as the shelves were just five feet high. Jamal had jury-rigged a waist belt to reduce the movement of his backpack, but the first few finger holes were always the most tentative.
Mikhail stepped lightly from the frame, his lithe form appearing small against the overstuffed backpack. Jamal watched him walk to the dwarfing viewport, bathing him in red spectral light that stole definition from his solitary figure. He pressed his hand against the glass in reverie.
Suddenly, Mikhail snapped his head to the side. Jamal held his breath, but Mikhail did not flee. He was looking at something, pushing his face into the glass. Peering. The subject of his interest held his attention for several minutes before he turned and began walking urgently, but quietly, in the direction of District Seven.
Jamal waited on the catwalk, his interest piqued. He daren’t risk running into Mikhail, any confrontation would at the very least render the whole excursion completely worthless. Instead, he listened for the tell tale scraping of a backpack being pushed into an air vent, the rustle of insulating substrate. After fifteen silent minutes he determined that Mikhail was better than he judged.
Jamal followed the gantry catwalk to where it terminated at an elevator. It was powered down and would be far too noisy anyhow. Beside it was a service ladder, yellow and black striped. Cotton mouthed he descended, his water supply for the trip had been expended earlier than he hoped and now his head pounded, exacerbating the import of each and every step and amplifying each dull clunk.
At the bottom spindly rack shadows spidered across the floor, obsidian black in the crimson starlight. At the base of the ladder Jamal stood in the loom of the shelves, stretching away. Light played through them like skyscraper skeletons.
Chary footsteps carried Jamal to the place he’d watched Mikhail stand not twenty minutes before, wraithlike fingerprints still imprinted the glass. The great red supergiant dominated the sky, sunspots sliding across a surface striated by bands of varying crimson like a palette of aging blood. The air was still here and the glass warm, streaked with cosmic dust. Jamal tried to recall the feeling of sunlight on a Californian summers day. Another life.
Peering as he’d watched Mikhail do, he traced the gentle curve of the docking ring as the station lazily rotated, out passed the pill shaped District Five and into black uninhabited space, beyond the span of the supergiant.
At first he saw nothing, just blackness, distant starlight blotted out. Then, letting his vision settle, he saw her, emerging like a magic eye image from star blind retinas. A vessel, a new vessel, not the wrecked prison carrier that had been flung from the station as it centrifuged months after the crash – spiralling debris and corpses. Nor was it the unusual leviathan he’d heard dubious legend of around District Twelve. This was a civilian craft, a deep space merchant vessel perhaps. It was small in perspective, Jamal could vaguely make out its aft section, rows of small cylindrical tanks glinting chrome silver and braced by dense, bright orange coloured space frames. Engineering lay at the stern, a featureless block leading into soot stained rocket cones.
It appeared docked or at least in geostationary operations, although Jamal couldn’t make out the forward section of the vessel or its superstructure from his vantage point. After years of abandonment, a new vessel was at Murmansk-13. Salvation perhaps? It certainly wasn’t replenishment, had it been delivering stores it would have docked at the end of the corridor he was stood beside.
Jamal’s excitement was tempered by his consideration that perhaps this was not an unprecedented event. In four years his and all his fellow prisoners existence had been one of abject blind isolation, of plastic covered aluminium bulkheads and windowless office vistas. What few viewing ports they were afforded access to in District Four overlooked the grey hourglass of the stations central command and the web of metal stanchions that kept the docking and district rings attached to it.
For all Jamal knew they’d been visited before, brief visits to stock the Unseen Hand. Jamal twisted and watched the security camera on the far wall. He’d broken it four times, Mikhail an equal number. Once more it had been fixed. The light above it no longer blinked, but Jamal had seen it pan the warehouse months ago, had waited for its creeping motion to die. Now the elongated tube was still, the lens focusing on shadows. Perhaps this was their watchers departing vessel, the experiment concluded.
He had to make it back, had to tell the others before it was too late, before another means of freedom was lost. It took twenty hours of clambering the mile and a half of air, wiring and service ducts to get back to District Four, just ten for Mikhail who’d be returning with similar news. Igor would have longer to formulate a plan. District Four needed supplies but a full backpack would cost him more time in the ducts. Returning empty handed would bring consternation, but also news – hope.