Hernandez couldn’t say where the big man had gone, but it was apparent he’d vacated the bridge. In nerve shredding agony his perception crystallized, Hernandez could only sense stillness in his immediate environment. Then the screech of overstrained plates ground through the vessel, vibrating through rendered flesh and shattered bone. For a moment Hernandez receded back into comforting oblivion, felt his head sag.
He shook away the darkness. Not yet, he thought.
Methodically, Hernandez began pulling himself from the bridge. In his torment, he could feel his body meld with the cool linoleum of the deck and the metalwork that slid beneath. The rivet had destroyed his lower jaw, blown a chunk of it away. His tongue lolled unsupported out the side of his ruined face. It was a miracle he’d not bled out already.
Shocked impulses fired spastic messages to his brain, the severed nerve endings made it difficult to think. Despite his bluster, the big man had obviously tried to start the ships thrusters and pull her away, but he hadn’t know how – killed, or thought he killed anyone who did.
Hernandez assumed he was in the engine compartment now, imagined his growing irritation, banging helplessly around trying to convey himself to freedom. Hernandez knew the gentle resonance shimmering through the body of the Riyadh indicated that fuel was passing through her thruster lines, cycling like blood. A simple switch of a button would transfer thruster control to two azimuth joysticks on the bridge. Nielsen had left her ready to go, sensing the very wrongness Captain Tor had been unable to fully vocalize. Justifiably, Hernandez now thought.
A summary scan of the bridge suggested the big man had taken the weapons with him. If he figured out how to pull away from the station he would rip away the clamp and with it the fo’c’sle section. The ship would depressurize. Hernandez didn’t care that he would be killed, he cared that such an action would rob his crew of salvation. What remained of them.
Hernandez bum-shuffled toward the bridge door, leaving a telltale trail of blood spots along his track. He tried to rub away the trail with his leg, smearing the little crimson dots into crazy lines. He knew the damage was catastrophic, could feel the difficult rasps of his breath gush out the side of his cheek with a sickening movement of torn flesh. Every couple of metres he would have to stop to choke out a bolus of blood from his throat. His ichor would spill from the shattered half of his jaw, down his longjohns. Darkness seemed to close round the peripheries of his vision. Cloy and pull at the loosening threads of his consciousness. It took everything to stave them off.
As he reached the bridge door Hernandez paused. He watched the stars wheel crazily across the permanent night sky of space. For so long, Hernandez had only been himself amongst those little pinpricks of light. It had been a beautiful, lonely place to exist. A place in which he would ruminate on the decisions of his life, always coming to the same conclusions: They had been mostly bad. But he always told himself, if he could live it again, he would still never give up the stars. There was much he could have improved upon in his life, but had he settled for Earth – a normal life – he would have stolen something from his being, both fundamental and majestic.
There was no more time for regrets. No more time for the stars. If Hernandez was ever going to cry it would be now. Instead, he found his eyes were dry and hard. He slipped through the door as quietly as he could muster, closing away the celestial firmament as the Red Supergiant filled the windscreen.
The stairs were the worst part. He was exposed, if the big man returned now he wouldn’t just leave him for dead. He would kill him. The equilibrium of numbness his shock driven body had reached as he’d slid across the linoleum was rudely shaken by the harsh motion of the stairs, each step a fresh pop to the face.
Briefly, Hernandez tried to stand, only to find his legs had grown as limp as cooked noodles. As he set himself upright, he found his body became obscenely top heavy and bowed forward. The stairs beneath him curled away, helter-skelter, a vivid sensation of vertigo threatened to topple him. Hernandez resolved to return to the seated position. Wishing he had time to make slow considered movements.
His gasps reverberated in the trunk of the stairwell. The acoustics replayed a bass rendition of his dying breaths. Shallow echoes, punctuated with sharp inhales as he dropped another step. Blood was positively gushing from his wounds as rudimentary clots jarred free. Sammy would have been apoplectic Hernandez thought gaily, watching his blood splash across the tread coating of the steps – settling into little micro pools within the textured rubber.
The arterial corridor at the bottom was quiet and dank. The Riyadh seemed to drain of life in sympathy with Hernandez her emergency lights pale and flickering. The backup generator had entered fuel conservation mode, non-essentials would slip from background to standby modes and essential power drains would be divvied up into those that had variable power settings and those that didn’t. It hurt Hernandez to see his girl in such a state of disrepair. He’d doted on the Riyadh and she was suffering, her own lifeblood siphoning away. Another victim of the sickness that radiated from inside out Murmansk-13.
And still a seed of that sickness wandered the corridors of his ship.
Hernandez eyed the pressure bulkhead and the heavy door set within it sternward. Beyond lay the narrow tube that linked the forward superstructure with the aft machinery spaces. The corridor threaded between sixteen glistening, chromium steel cargo tanks designed to stow and preserve Exotic Matter. Like the lightweight spaceframes that cradled the tanks, the corridor was designed to flex under stress.
Every waking day, several times a day in fact, Hernandez routinely walked the one hundred and eighty one steps (counted under an amphetamine fuelled miasma) that separated the accommodation structure and the engine room. Each journey was mired by the same irrational image of the ship inexplicably snapping in half, or parting under a meteor strike, casting him into the hard vacuum of space.
He’d accepted life in space was fragile, but Hernandez always believed the agent of his demise would be wholesome and natural. Now he suspected the brittle tube and the heavy door at its terminus was all that segregated himself from the big man.
Hernandez pulled his eyes from the door and focused on the stairwell that led to the lower deck.
A merciful necrotic numbness overcame Hernandez as he traversed the final stairwell, knowing he would never go back up. The Medical Bay was dark and the chemical tang of astringent and old cryogenic fluid clung to the frigid air. Beyond the rows of disused cryopods was the ward viewport. A single figure stood behind the Perspex, lit up by blue strip lights that sapped the space of life.
Mihailov stared at the sad remnants of Hernandez, jaw in a hyper extended gape, head cocked to the side. Lazily he pawed at the viewport, leaving thin finger streaks through the film of filth that rimed the Perspex. The orangey-pink fluid partly obfuscated Mihailov, rendering the viewport translucent in patches.
As Hernandez shuffled closer he could see condensation run down the Perspex, carving narrow runnels through the putrescence. The Medical Bay was deathly cold and yet the quarantine ward beyond seemed to cook. Whatever virulence had initially taken hold had given way to a rapid chemical reaction. Hernandez got the grim impression Mihailov was fermenting inside the ward. Boiling away.
Hernandez met Mihailov’s eyes. Dead, bereft of recognition. Only voracious hunger was transmitted in the glare. “What the fuck did this station do to us, cabron?”