Katja quailed as if struck, as if the mere thought spoke of the greatest betrayal possible. “It wouldn’t,” she replied quietly, shaking her head. Tears rimed her eyes. “If you could hear, what I can, you would never say that. It loves us.”
Loves us. Diego took a half step back from the crazy sounding girl, Katja took a half step over the threshold. He could see she was afraid, but not in the same elemental way as he. Her fear was internalized, almost domestic. The fear of losing a loved one, of a marriage ending. The very fear that had wracked the Fierro household. Diego had seen that scared desperation before, in his mothers eyes when her husband lost Patricia’s college funds. When everything began to fall apart.
“Where are you going to go, Diego?” The question was a plea, she peered over her shoulder.
Diego sighed and felt the nervous energy drain from his body leaving only bone weariness in its wake. “Nowhere, there is nowhere left.”
Whatever fate was beyond the door he would have to accept. It couldn’t be any worse than the fate he faced aboard Murmansk-13. He didn’t want to be alone, didn’t want to wander through the arcs living corridors on his own. It dawned on him that his crew were gone, his friends. All that was left was the alien craft and Katja.
She reached out her hand, pale flesh blackened by the arc light. Diego could see her arm shake, could feel his own tremble in union. As their hands joined once more, Katja smiled, nervously. The inebriated whimsy gone, her assuredness rocked. A small part of Diego felt sad for depriving her of the carefree certainty she’d possessed, it had lent her a lightness of spirit, no matter how artificial, she’d not possessed before. Not even with Tala.
Gently, Katja coaxed Diego through the doorway leading him like nervous first time lovers, into the unknowable.
Chapter 24
Tor turned back to look at Tala and saw his shadow stretched out like a Modigliani against the far bulkhead, cast in vermillion and black. They’d journeyed from the airlock in silence, conserving their oxygen, barely daring to breathe against the weakened structures of their visors. Tala gave a weak thumbs up in his wake but Tor only saw the hairline cracks that spidered across the golden tinting of her visor, warping his reflection in shattered fragments.
The high-tensile steel lifeline Peralta had affixed on their first sortie to Murmansk-13 vibrated and flexed like mooring lines set to part. Whip-crack undulations travelled its length in slow motion. That it was still anchored by its magnetic cam was a heartening sight. But it didn’t look like it would last much longer.
Dry mouthed and fear sickened, Tor turned his attention back to the great gash, torn into the side of the station, rendering its aluminium flesh. Shafts of florid starlight knifed into the space exposed subsection with steadying intensity. Against the disorientating, spinning backdrop of space, Tor could see the Riyadh still attached by her clamps – wobbling violently in the inertial wake.
Beyond, vast curlicues of hydrogen fire flicked from the Red Supergiant, vanishing beneath the exaggerated horizon, returning the vista to a brief period of celestial night. The dying star appeared to set in the south and rise in the north, although such Earthly compass points bore no relevance within hard vacuum. South was simply where Tor anchored his feet. He remembered the first walk across, the churning confusion as he drifted from the line. It was vital he retained a methodology for differentiating up from down.
“She still there, Captain?” Tala asked, almost sounding indifferent through the helmet speaker.
Tor replied with a thumbs up and nervously pawed his oxygen gauge. Thirty percent.
He beckoned Tala to follow as he walked out across the bridging portion of deck left intact, clomping the heavy magboots against the deck – focusing on the lifeline. Tor knew he couldn’t look out to where the Riyadh had been berthed so many months before. Aside from the disorientating wheel of stars that threatened to unhinge his internal compass, Tor feared he’d be tempting fate. In his mind’s eye he could picture the Riyadh being flicked off, stranding himself and Tala on the disintegrating station, their oxygen ebbing away.
“Captain?”
He was drifting, drifting again. Letting daydreams steal away the present. The first visit to the station had released the catches of his mind, peeled back the self centred, self assured exoskeleton of his reality like a pathologists ribspreader. Exposing and butchering the fortitude within. Tor had been forced to accept he was a weak man, a shadow in his own life. The barometers for his authority, his manhood, were false. All a terrible sham. The realization had almost broken him, plunged him into intermittent dreaming voids. The blurred borders between his conscience and subconscious a black land of hopelessness.
Staring through the eye of the noose, he’d never truly pulled through. But he’d found salvageable threads. He still had a crew to save and a son to protect. To end it all because of his own weaknesses would have been a terrible dereliction to both. His career, like his marriage, were both finished, but redemption for his failures – to Peralta and Mihailov, to Tala and Stewart, even Falmendikov. They were still reachable.
Then the episode in the corridor crushed everything left. His mind had fled, beyond the blurred borders of despair, beyond even his subconscious. Tor had floated in a pale grey nothingness, beyond the fears of Murmansk-13 and even beyond his duties to his crew. It felt descendant of death itself.
In that morass he endured the cells, rarely aware of his surroundings. An inalienable dreamlessness swaddled him for the most part, broken up by images like intermittent signals on a loop aerial TV. Pure memories, moments that cut through the unthinking malaise gentle and clean. He could sense his brainpan, feverishly working to cleanse the memories of the cancerous film injected by Murmansk-13. The birth of Olaf, that moment of unquestionable love between man and son and the tenuous bond it had formed between Tor and Lucia – before his repulsion at her maternal physique. Tor shook his head, such a pathetic man.
Odd then that now, as his lucidity returned in a state of emergency override, his thoughts turned to his wife. Lucia knew of his infidelity, although she pretended not to. Tor had played along, bullied her to stay in shape, knowing in any other version of the world a woman like her would never be with a man like him. She’d remained trapped and loveless because of his wealth and some small part of his mind allowed him to rationalize his betrayals because of this. Olaf had been doted upon with love by both, but without the functioning umbrella of united parentage owed to a child. His love had been meted out in individual parcels or under strained tension, the dynamic even more askew than the average child of divorce.
Ultimately it had been Lucia that bore and raised his son and now Tor felt an ineffable affection toward her he’d not felt in a long time, perhaps ever.
“Captain!”
Tala’s voice buzzed through the speaker, a wash of static feedback. His magboot reached into the twisting, velveteen emptiness of space. In his reverie Tor had drifted from the structurally weak deck, already pulled open by the impact that had gouged the hole. He could feel his internal compass spinning in disorientated paroxysms as his lucidity returned with a quickening nausea. His anchored foot bounced up and down on a portion of deck, the supporting frame of which was torn away to the celestial winds. Tor felt himself tilt sideways as his gauntleted hands reached agonizingly for the lifeline. Rubberized fingertips glancing against the tightly corded steel of the wire.