Cautiously, Tala approached the body. It wasn’t Hernandez, so she supposed it was Igor. Blood slicked and spattered the area in which the District Seven leader fell. His corpse torn and decimated, his innards scooped from his torso and organs ripped from their housings. A look of surprised horror was pasted across his alabaster face, specks of blood dappled his skin, lips and open eyes.
Tala doubted the man would rise, the attack had been savage and relentless. Pent up voracity overcoming the need for transmission and multiplication. Regardless, she recovered the rivet gun that lay a short distance from Igor’s hand and absently fired a rivet at point blank range through his forehead. Then a second. Jellied coagulate filled the two neat holes. His expression remained the same.
The worst of the smell was emanating from the single ward behind her. Tala guessed that was where Mihailov had been detained – once they realized he was beyond salvation. The bulkheads and decks were smeared with gore, pinkish orange in the waxing light. Tala marvelled at the multiple ways the infection manifest itself. Of course, the outcome seemed largely the same – death, then resurrection in the least Christian sense. The person lost to feral desire, a trail of masticated bodies in their wake.
Hernandez blood trail, for she was sure it had been Hernandez’s, was lost beneath the wash of gore. She scanned the Medical Bay, but found neither terminus, nor continuation of the trail. Perturbed, she felt her hand tighten round the grip of the rivet gun, her finger cramping over the trigger. Aside from the whir of the air recirculation system and the gentle distant sounding application of orbital thrust, the bay was silent.
Tala felt dread exposed.
She began backing up, swivelling straight into the robust body of Hernandez. Tala yelped in surprise, her bare feet slipping in the puddle that had been Igor. She fell backwards, the rivet gun skittering from her grasp as she landed on her behind. Momentarily stupefied she stared at Hernandez. The motorman seemed to regard her with something nearing wide eyed recognition, his body jolting in epileptic paroxysms.
Tala could see bite marks, bloodied tooth imprints puncturing his arm. His face both pleading and slack. The shattered remnant of his lower jaw hung listlessly, held in situ by skin and tendons alone. Rust coloured stains coated his tattered longjohns. She watched as the whites of his eyes began blotting with blood, diffusing through the sclera like watercolours on canvas. He tried to say something, but it came out as an agonized, guttural noise.
He tried one last time. “Kill me.”
Tala reached for the rivet gun, but before she could round on Hernandez, he lunged forward. Diminutive but stout, Hernandez weighed down upon her, gnashing at her face as the final vestiges of life guttered from his eyes, his pupils dilated, his expression flattened. Watching the transformation chilled Tala more than her predicament. Desperately she tried to lift her arm, pinned to her side by the attacking corpse that had been her friend.
Squirming, Tala lay back, avoiding Hernandez’s exposed upper teeth that threatened to rake across her neck. Hernandez lunged again as Tala pushed up and rolled to her side, doing her utmost to duck and weave while pinned to the deck. She knew even the slightest puncturing wound to her flesh would be terminal. She remembered Oleg.
Better to be blown away by the Russians than face this fate.
Disadvantaged by the uselessness of his jaw, the corpse that had once been Hernandez couldn’t quite reach. It grunted with effort, the air that escaped from the widened maw was redolent of old blood and the nascent essence of decomposition.
Tala arched her back, forcing the dead assailant upward, allowing her to lever her legs beneath. Pushing up, she managed to lift Hernandez into the air, balanced on her steepled knees and palms. Hernandez wobbled maniacally in her grip, threatening to collapse her arms. Tala knew if she dropped Hernandez now, his teeth would sink into her face.
As her final reserves of energy began to short out, Tala tossed Hernandez to the side and rolled to where the rivet gun had rested. Twisting around on one knee, she saw Hernandez, thrashing to right himself. He turned his lifeless gaze on Tala one final time to see the rivet gun levelled at his face.
“I’m sorry, Hernandez,” Tala said as she squeezed the trigger. She continued to fire, rivet after rivet into her friends skull until the gun fell from her grasp, long emptied – her hand paralyzed by cramp.
Tala sank to the deck, absently massaging her convulsing fingers. The Medical Bay was silent now, Hernandez lay face down – the back of his cranium blown open, skull plates peeled apart like retched petals. For a moment she listened to the long dormant systems coming up to speed, the Riyadh coming back to life. Back to life…
Tears rimed her face, salty and stinging as they moistened the wounds on her lips, the cuts on her cheeks. She didn’t sob, the tears came freely and silently as she stared into nowhere in particular. She knew if the Soviets didn’t kill them, if any emotional spark could ignite, then the guilt would come. Absently she wondered where Katja was, if she’d escaped. Would it matter? Murmansk-13 had changed them, broken them all. Nothing usable was left, just inoperative fragments. How could anything ever be salvaged?
Tala stared into that sightless space within space, letting the unyielding passage of time freeze around her.
Captain Third Grade Leonid Ossipov stared out of the Yumashev’s windscreen, somehow expecting to see the deep space merchant vessel Riyadh. He knew that was impossible of course, the Riyadh was still over eight hundred miles away as they slowly closed on a rendezvous approach. The merchant ship was maintaining an orbit seven hundred miles above the Venus sized planet Tsiolkovsky-6, designated by the Federal Space Agency. The creamy green, chlorine rich atmosphere of the planet almost filled the viewport of the Soviet destroyer as their radial thrusters canted them sideways, lowering their own orbit.
Behind him, the bridge was a hive of concentrated activity. Sombre. All hands had been called to stations several hours before and a pervading climate of tension was building. In many ways, deep space rendezvous was more hazardous than battle. Not that Ossipov could attest to any battle experience outside simulators and military exercises. He suspected it was much the same for the six men on the bridge beside him.
He had, however, been involved in orbital docking operations before. Had seen how badly they could go wrong. He tried to push the memories of the docking module uncoupling incident away – the men exposed to explosive decompression. At the time Ossipov had been a junior officer aboard a standby vessel, had been on duty when they were ordered to help collect the remains.
Maybe it would be easier to just slag this ship out of existence. They were after all operating in restricted Soviet territory. The secrecy surrounding the Murmansk-13 installation such that when the Yumashev was called to investigate unsanctioned activity around the station, the destroyers commanding Captain, Anatoli Korashev, was forced to request confidential star charts. To all intents and purposes Murmansk-13 was on a need to know basis that exceeded a commanding officers pay grade. Ossipov was one of only three men aboard the Yumashev that were even aware they were operating within such sensitive space.
Now Murmansk-13 was tumbling away, jettisoned. Her orbital stabilizing reactor had gone critical and dumped its core, the Yumashev arriving too late. Soviet command wanted the Riyadh and its compliment detained and questioned. Ossipov watched the space station on the radar, falling away and accelerating, shedding ever larger portions of its gigantic structure. The plan position indicator a scattered bloom of targets beginning at the stations point of origin and disappearing into a haze of radiation interference propagated by the systems dying star. Soon the bright blip would be completely masked.