The grasping winds died away as the pressure fell. Tala felt the skin on her face prickle and swell as the first tendrils of space exposure began to wind inexorably into her flesh. The sound of her frantic gasps ebbed away as air gave way to vacuum. Desperately she tried to fill her lungs against the pernicious, crushing nothingness that threatened to flatten them.
Tor grasped her hand, pulling her upright as ice began to rime her eyelashes. She remembered to grab one last helmet, a spare – hopefully a spare, before they blindly retraced the structural supports that led to the airlock. Both succumbing to the disorientating effects of tumbling gravity and hypoxia.
Sightlessly, Tor searched for the controls to cycle the airlock. He’d had the presence to seal the lock against the drain of atmospheric pressure. In theory they stood mere inches from beautiful oxygen.
Tala could feel the cold world begin to blacken around her. She’d always wondered if the blind could sense the empty darkness of death, now she knew it was very different – that death was a blackness so pure it swallowed description. The airlock seemed to take forever to cycle; as the door parted with a whoosh, Tor and Tala tumbled into the oxygen filled plenum. The door auto cycled against the vacuum as it was designed to do, trying to salvage a normalized atmosphere before purging.
They lay there for minutes. Tears congealing over defrosted eyes, chests heaving and lungs swelling with rarefied air. They didn’t speak for a long time, the inflamed joints in their jaws aching, refusing to break the purity of the moment. They both knew they could only rest for so long, Murmansk-13 was still tumbling through space, threatening to shed its outer layers like onion skins. For all they knew, the Riyadh could have already been catapulted away leaving them stranded. The longer they waited to convalesce, the more likely their ship would no longer be clamped to the docking ring.
Dismal, they began picking themselves up. Their bodies protesting against each movement, muscles tightly corded throughout, threaded with bubbles of deoxygenated blood. Tinder dry tendons became shatter glass fragile. Tala felt aged, withered. She was sure her body rustled like autumnal leaves. She pictured herself, succumbed to the alien infection.
“You OK?” Tor asked, his voice strained thick.
Tala nodded, too quickly. “As OK as I can be, Captain.” She shuffled over to the little pile of helmets they’d managed to collect, the rest cast to the decompressing blowout.
For whatever reason the gravitational instability experienced in the corridor was lessened within the cramped confides of the airlock. Now the sensation was akin to a rough day at sea, still stomach churning, but without the total loss of mass and self. Tala tried to concentrate on her assessment, lifted the first helmet and could see her hands shake violently. She willed them to be still, focused her whole energy on staying the involuntary movement.
“It’s hard vacuum either side of us now,” Tor said, joining her. Casually he lifted a life support pack and ran his eye over the uneven, brutalized surface. “How are the helmets looking?”
Tala gave herself a moment to answer, recollect herself. She knew one of the helmets was marginal. The one she held in her hands was useless, destroyed – another dented coupling. Unspeaking she allowed herself to wonder how many of the other helmets were functional, in the end their survival had distilled to grab-bag luck. She picked the last one up.
“Tala?” The Captain asked, his voice calm, almost at peace. Tala knew if it came down to it, Captain Tor would give her the only helmet. All the misplaced anger she’d held toward him flowed away as her tearing eyes scanned the brass coupling. He’d done what he had to do – when he’d abandoned her – to save Mihailov, and he’d come back for her. Of all the crew, only he’d known the horrors he was preparing to face by returning, yet he’d faced them all the same. And now only he and Tala remained. She suspected his guilt would be great and in time so would hers.
Tala placed the last helmet down. “Two helmets, one marginal, the other…”
Tor nodded and squinted his eyes as if picking something from a fast food restaurant menu while the teller waited impatiently. “I see.”
“You want to rock, paper, scissors for it?” Tala’s voice wobbled, stealing the forced levity from the question.
Tor shook his head and smiled warmly. He placed a paternal hand on her shoulder and took the helmet with the most severe crack from her hands. A dark fault line webbed through the gold tint visor, threatening to press through the various glued layers of plastic. “We need to go soon.”
A foreboding reluctance overcame Tala as she donned the first helmet, letting the brass couplings cinch. As she traced the fine splintered lines that crawled across the top and bottom of the visor, she recalled the suffocating terror induced when her EVA suit depressurized. Had that been a warning? An omen? Ice surged through her bloodstream as if introduced intravenously. She pictured her head swelling as blood and bodily fluids percolated beneath flesh stretched taut. Then overstretched, her skin tearing as she turned inside out. She remembered Ricky Velasquez. Had he regretted spacing himself in those final moments?
She stood, shaking away the crazed lassitude, let the fluid refill around her popping knees and the tears dry around hardening eyes. It couldn’t end all here, not while Katja was lost.
Tor gave her a stoical thumbs up as he began connecting his life support pack, feeding the various tubes into their colour coded ports. Tala wondered if he would give anything other than a thumbs up, even if the couplings were all bent out and the life support pack fucked.
Tala plugged the communications jack in, the Captain’s voice washed over her in a reassuring fuzzy static. “How’s it looking, Tala? You got me?”
“I got you, sir. Helmet fits OK, just going to pressure up.”
“How are you for oxygen?”
Tala peered at the readout, the needle had slipped below halfway. “Maybe forty five percent.”
“You want to try another pack?”
Tala shrugged against the building pressure of her suit. In truth, she did want more than forty-five percent but how much longer could they wait? Every new delay increased the likelihood the station would shatter around them, or the Riyadh would be torn from the docking ring. She could try every pack and find the best had fifty percent, the five percent wouldn’t be worth it. “What you got, Captain?”
“Fortyish.”
That settled it. “Not much point then, sir.”
“You want me to wait to purge the lock while you pressure up?”
Tala could feel the skin of her suit harden around her, feel the pressure swaddle her torso like an overzealous hug. She resisted the urge to take great gulps of air as the suit tightened across her chest, concentrated her breathing. The needle shifted imperceptibly leftwards. “There isn’t another suit in here if this spring’s a leak anyway, punch it, Captain.” Tala was glad the squawking static of the helmet communications system would wash away her tone of nervous bravado.
Tor’s hand hovered over the airlock purge control. “Just over a week ago I was lamenting how I’d become a paper pusher with some fancy stripes on my shoulders.” His little chuckle was reconstituted into a quiet fizz through the helmet speakers. “I didn’t realise how fucking comfortable I’d become.”
He hit the purge button.
Chapter 23
The domes ribbed apex spun above her. It was like waking to find a giant spider twirling about an insubstantial thread of silk; preparing to land its itchy, angular legs upon her face. The illusion was compounded by paralysis, she couldn’t bat the arachnid apparition away, her body rendered rigid by the jarring shock of the fall.