Aidan lay for a long time and felt the beautiful ache of his neck. He felt his chest rise and fall as the severed lump of station began charting a course away into space trailing pieces of the Riyadh that couldn’t keep up. A radiation warning sign with a portion of railing still attached twirled in unbalanced centrifuge, disappearing beneath the titanium horizon of his ship which appeared to be largely intact.
He traced two large gouges in his visor caused by great unseen metallic claws. Mere millimetres in the almost infinite vastness of space had spared his suits integrity. Gingerly he tried to turn his head and sit up, battling the aftermath of the junks passage. His wrenched neck muscles resisted, stiffly, in fact his whole right side was wracked with the agony of countless impacts. No small wonder looking at the drifts of metal detritus that had built up along the right side of his body.
Stupefied, Aidan surveyed the scoured and shattered remnants of the monkey island, littered with unrecognizable glinting shrapnel. The railings had been uprooted, great bolts pulled free from the vessels titanium plating which had buckled into jagged peaks, in other places clipped metal stakes were all that remained. The aerials, transmitters, receivers and radar scanners were all gone, cast into space or deadheaded to less than a half metre. Crazy cat-o’-nine-tails of gold plated wiring and multicoloured plastic flailed in the wake of the space junk like palm fronds in an ebbing hurricane.
Hernandez and Stewart were gone. The magnetic cam was partially torn from the deck, the loop to which their tethers secured had parted and twisted. A smashed karabiner lay a short distance away, collected by a peak of titanium plate. A few threads of high tensile steel fused around it. The airless vacuum of space was filled with little reflective viscous blobs, crimson in colour that coalesced with the jets of coolant, water and other fluids that had constituted the junks comet tail.
Aidan checked his suits pressure gauge, convinced its integrity had been compromised by the field of serrated debris he was now shackled too. There was a tiny leak, pressure was leeching slowly, the dial moving imperceptibly leftward. Not a problem if Aidan could free himself and operate the airlock in a timely manner, the latter an operation he’d never performed before.
He tried to slow his breathing, the reduced gravity doing little to dampen his shakes befuddling Aidan’s hands as he unconsciously worked the karabiners. He was slipping into shock as adrenaline fled from his system, his eyelids grew heavy and his thoughts unfocused.
Aidan contemplated lying down, his body robbed of its strength. A ravenous emptiness filled his core that only sleep or food could fill. He’d survived the impact, but the ambivalence that had coloured his life was leading him to somewhere far away. He thought of Addy, that late summers afternoon day when they stole into the backyard of her families restaurant. The fading sunlight slanting in golden bars through the thin canopy of trees. The goodbye, a hug and… so close. He tried to remember what her voice sounded like, how her hair smelt.
“Don’t you fucking die on me cabrón!” The static laced words cut through Aidan’s memories like a squall. He opened his eyes, unaware he’d sagged, ragdoll, forward. Hernandez was swimming through the remains of the Riyadh, freefalling and trying to find something solid to push off. “I’m going to need you to catch me.”
Aidan tried to form a cogent sentence as Hernandez tip toed across a sideways orientated stairwell of carnage. Instead, only slurred and senseless syllables escaped his lips and Hernandez made little headway.
Hernandez stopped, his suit limp. “OK, listen to me. You got me?” He sounded breathy and exhausted. “I’m going to be coming your way, ready?”
Aidan nodded, although he imagined the motion was meaningless to Hernandez.
“Please be fucking ready, man.”
A large solar panel drifted from beneath Aidan’s visual horizon, rising inexorably behind Hernandez coiled form. The Mexican hunched his knees to his chest and then sprang like a flea against the panel. The two objects began spinning in opposing directions from one another.
Hernandez hadn’t got all of the panel, his jump was off and he was drifting to the extent of Aidan’s reach. Aidan pulled against the karabiners, keening into the mic, stretching with every reserve of strength. Aidan angled his shoulders, extending his span. That limited him to his right hand. He braced himself. Aidan watched his own figure grow in the mirror shade of Hernandez’s visor amid a plain of devastation.
Hernandez grasped Aidan’s arm just below the suits wrist couplings. Aidan felt Hernandez Chromel gauntlets slip against the rubber exterior of his suit. Dogged, clumsy fingers grasped the inner seal at Aidan’s wrist, threatening to pull his gauntlet and Hernandez into endless hard vacuum. Aidan spun and clasped Hernandez arm with his left, stealing his wayward inertia. His agonized neck shot daggers of pain down the right side of his body. He could hear himself scream.
Hernandez stamped a mag boot down on the Riyadh, securing himself to the ship. His left boots magnetic coupling had been ripped away so he knelt beside Aidan, his ragged breaths the only sound. “You OK, man?” Hernandez asked after a long while.
Aidan found words clotted in his throat, enervated tears running freely down his cheeks. For the first time since he left Addy, he didn’t find solace in solitude, even if Hernandez was his only company. As he calmed and marshalled his thoughts Aidan managed to ask, “Stewart?”
“He didn’t make it. Fuck.” Hernandez lowered his helmet and scanned the immediate scene. “That’s his boot coupling over there.”
Hernandez pointed to a magnetic sole, peeled partially from the deck in situ where Aidan had last seen the Brit. A spray of tiny internal boot parts formed a semi circle away from it. The sight left Aidan detached.
“You did good, man.” Hernandez clasped his hand on Aidan’s shoulder and squeezed. The camaraderie coming at the price of his agitated neck muscles.
Aidan patted at the tool belt he’d been entrusted with. “I think I lost your tools.”
Hernandez laughed a little too manically as he removed the tethers shackling Aidan to the deck. “Let’s get back inside, man.”
Chapter 7
The morgue was quiet once again, Katja slept fitfully, swaddled in fading mint green scrubs and scraps of musty sackcloth found in an otherwise emptied cupboard, her chest rising and falling steadily. She lay on one of the cold autopsy slabs like an ensorcelled princess, the only sound was Peralta, soothingly cooing to her in a display of latent paternalism. The old bosun held the girls hand and recited some muttered cantrip in Tagalog.
Tor, heavy lidded, packed away the museum-piece portable defibrillator cart Mihailov had used to jump start the girls heart, all science fiction wires and dials encased in wood vinyl. Small mercy that the Riyadh had been blessed with more than one Cyrillic reader.
Now, Mihailov paced around the morgues entranceway, peering occasionally into the corridor. Dark circles had formed under his eyes and he appeared to be running on anxiety alone. Furtively his hand would play across the gaffer tape scabbard holding the rifle to his back. Tala, by contrast, was dozing, slumped in a corner and washed in sickly green light.