Only solid grades in biology and chemistry and a burgeoning interest in medicine had snapped Katja out of her personal indifference. They would never take a morbidly obese girl into the Gorky Medical Institute so she’d resolved to do something about it.
It was tough, at one time her metabolism had a predisposition to convert calories to fat. Perhaps they’d been excuses that her mind still failed to process as such. Instead of taking the bus she began walking to school, choosing healthier foods and no longer letting her mother prepare her lunches. She would run on empty for days, studying feverishly as her body consumed itself under deep belly growls. Katja suspected she would never be thin, but fit – perhaps.
Her weight was almost halved when she was accepted into the medical institute. It was a source of pride and triumph. One her mother resented through glowering eyes. Katja remembered arriving home one day to find her closet mostly emptied of what her mother called her: Thin girl clothes. What remained were the frumpy, dire dresses and furs from her most voluminous times, several sizes too big for her. ‘You don’t need them anymore Kat, you’ll soon put the weight back on. Believe me, I did. So I took them down the market.’
The message was implicit, and in the whole not incorrect. It sowed seeds that Murmansk-13 was quick to pervert.
Within a week of arrival on the station she’d given in to the air of hedonistic, nihilistic abandon of her fellow techs. Her once shattered confidence spiked as if shot with adrenaline. Katja was soon throwing herself into the nightly contraband fuelled parties with inexplicable fervour. Never wholly sure whether she, or any of the others, were truly enjoying themselves or simply being swept along by some wild undertow.
She began smoking, not just socially, but heavily. Thirty a day, so much so her index finger began to take on a hue of nicotine orange. The skin around her top lip started to pucker and tighten.
Endless late nights began to tell when she looked in the mirror, lurid purple hangdog bags bloated beneath dulled eyes. Her once vivid bright blue orbs took on a lifeless sheen, socked deep within waxen, scabrous flesh. Her face grew pudgy as her appetite swelled. Her baby face took on a ravaged mask. The station was rapidly transforming Katja into her mother in a way even Gorky couldn’t.
Now Katja pictured her mother as several G’s pressed down on her emaciated body. Smiling at the changes Murmansk-13 had wrought to her daughter or disappointed by its failure. The seeds she’d tried to sow had withered with the outbreak of infection. The rot and ruin that beset the station afterwards had turned the dials right back on Katja. Like her co-workers, she became lessened and eaten up, her body whittled away to toneless flesh and bone.
In its final death throes Murmask-13 was determined to invoke the ponderous, aged physique of her mother on Katja as if to appease the matriarch. Forcing her shrunken body into the stations diseased structure with vengeful might. You will become your mother, you cannot fight it. You will die, heavy and ugly. And unloved.
Tears sprang from her eyes as the load lifted – as the stations pestilent grip was wrestled away by the dying star, reeling it inextricably in. She’d never imagined the sickly red supergiant as a force of good, until now. She choked back a sob as Diego drifted beside her. He watched her as a dog would watch a card trick.
“You OK?” He asked, his voice compressed.
“Just memories,” Katja replied, composing herself, wiping away teardrops that beaded upwards with the sleeve of her jumpsuit. “This might sound crazy, but I’m convinced this station has a way of distorting the mind. It gets to you. I don’t know why. It effects people in different ways.”
Diego nodded. “We felt it on the Riyadh, after the debris hit us. There it was a sort of apathy. Acceptance.”
Katja felt a subtle pain well up in her abdomen. She doubled over, sensing a hardness deep within her. Queasiness washed over her as she dabbed the crotch of her jumpsuit, already hardened with old blood. Her hand met a viscous, unhealthy warmth.
“You’re bleeding,” Diego said, drifting closer.
Whatever wounds Ilya had tore open inside of her had opened once again. “I’m in trouble, Diego. Where are we going?”
Diego’s hands shifted uncomfortably, wary of offering any comfort. “I was hoping you could tell me. I just pulled you out of the Command Centre, I’m a foreigner on here.”
For the first time since she woke, Katja began taking stock of her surroundings, a necessary distraction as pain submitted to a sensation of emptiness. A cold void seemed to open amongst the most sensitive of her flesh. Her lower body grew numb in the lessened gravity. Diego had dragged, or floated her a long way from Central Command. They were in the outer ring now, evidenced by the sweeping curve of the twisting bulkheads that faded into the colour starved gloom. A single dark grey line traced the length of the corridor, painted at shoulder level. Motes of dust drifted serenely, at odds with the clamour of grating metal.
“Lifepods?” Katja asked, already knowing the answer.
“Every bay I’ve checked so far was empty,” Diego replied, looking around furtively, perhaps anticipating the arrival of the infected, bobbing like ragged flotsam in the microgravity.
“Have you seen any numbers on the bulkheads?”
Diego paused, thinking. “Yeah, I checked a lifepod bay at an entranceway numbered eleven.”
They’d fallen beside the corridor to quadrant four, bastion of the stations top secret research and development districts. Nobody had been afforded access to these districts without express permission and the necessary clearance. Katja had been a long way from either. She’d never left District Three, save for a day’s orientation in Central Command. If the lifepods had all been launched, then the evacuation had been much the same here as it was in quadrant one – though few of the infected wore the tattered remains of District Twelve. They’d probably escaped the disease, only to be blown into subatomic particles by their own countrymen. Watching, trapped in their little underpowered capsules as the Russian deep space fleet picked off the other pods until their own turn came, a tracer beam the last thing they would ever see.
The thought sent electrical shivers down her spine and materialized a crazy thought in her brainpan. A quiet pleading call, almost extraneous to her own thought patterns. The Iban arc had been docked at twelve. Without an EVA suit, stranded kilometres from Diego’s ship and no lifepods, what option was left? They couldn’t go back through Central Command and at least the arc was big – the thought of dying a prolonged death in a lifeboat that doubled as a casket did not gladden the heart, even if they could find a functional pod.
“I have an idea,” Katja said, a small smile curling her lips and a thrill of excitement edging her voice. “It’s a little… out there.”
Diego cocked a thick eyebrow as the station screeched beneath them. “What?”
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been out, nor how long he’d hovered on the peripheries of awareness – floating in an ephemeral sea of hurt. Consciousness arrived in ebbing combers of hot, hazy pain that lapped against his brain like distant thunderclaps. Beneath exquisite agony his mind unspooled, simplifying as if running on some auto routine. He was going to die and he knew what had to be done to protect the rest. To atone.
Aidan lay supine on the deck, argent light limned his unmoving corpse. Nearby, Mikhail remained sprawled, flat out and inert. It seemed the strike across his temple had rendered him equally dead. Too bad the big man wouldn’t feel his loss so keenly.