“Murmansk-13 Controclass="underline" Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is Prison Transport Vessel 4-Yza. We’re out of control. Requesting emergency assistance. We’ve been fired upon.”
The distress message was met with a fuzz of static then a moment of silence. Vasily switched the inertial dampers back on, tried to abate her speed. Sharp insensible noise burst from the radio. “…sssss… sssss… ss thi… contr…. we hav… lems on bo…. tion on f…. loc… n…. full… tine situ… ion.”
“Five clicks.” Sweat glistened the baby faced co-pilot, he coiled his head set wire around his middle finger, the fingertip turned purple then white. “Please repeat Murmansk tower, you’re breaking up.”
Vasily watched the great silo districts of the station pirouette in his windscreen; she looked like a spider looming in the shadows and like a helpless fly they drifted towards her.
As the stations docking ring twirled by, Vasily saw something fundamentally alien jut out from the framework of Murmansk-13 beneath them. The object was huge and rectangular, devoid of any aerodynamic consideration. Random arrays of polyps seemed to blister from the dark, shimmering surface, coppery-black like haematite. Before Vasily could get a better look the docked vessel disappeared. Then all he could see was the machine-gun rapid passage of lit portholes, visible now as 4-Yza drifted closer to impact.
“4-Yza, abort dock, station on lockdown, full quarantine in place.” A faint voice, mechanical through a blizzard of white noise reported from control.
“We can’t dock, we can’t abort. We need assistance!”
“Station on full quarantine, unable to assistsssssssssssss.” The voice faded away.
Vasily snatched the handset away from Grigory, wrenching the coil around his finger. “There are lifepods launching from your station!”
“One klick.”
Vasily felt heat rise to his cheeks, his voice crackling. “We’re going to fucking crash into you!”
One of the guards had opened the cockpit door behind and was talking to Anton, the last thing Vasily Korobov heard was his engineer’s frantic directive. “Brace, brace, brace.”
The twisting vista of stars disappeared into greyness. The guards sat, arms crossed, cradling their shoulders while the prisoners were afforded no such luxury. Anticipating imminent collision from the ashen faces of the Gulag agents, Jamal tried to relax his muscles, tried to free his mind. But the injustice burned through.
Other prisoners tensed, some tried to adopt the brace position as best they could. Jamal doubted it would matter. He could now make out rivets on the structure outside, dimly lit viewing ports and yellow Cyrillic. They were heading in at a shallow angle, but at far too great a velocity to dock or pull up. Jamal had observed enough docking procedures as he was slowly bounced through space to tell this was abnormal.
Much as the Gulag archipelago had penetrated deeper and deeper into the wilderness of Siberia sixty years before, so had the Celestial Gulag into the vast blackness of space. Jamal imagined those early prisoners of the Soviet, occupying their minds with the terrifyingly mundane activities of a journey that separated them from once normal lives – much as Jamal had; studying standard procedures for docking a deep space prison transporter.
Jamal could feel a pull, his buttocks sliding on the bench as the personnel carrier slewed to port, trying to minimize impact. Jamal slowed his breathing, fixed his vision to one point; a yellow fire extinguisher with a white label covered in Russian Cyrillic in red and images of stickmen too small to fully discern. He felt a screech, ablative heat shields being pulled off, bolts sheering. Handcuffs dug into dark flesh, he clenched his fists, willed his hands to become smaller, or the stainless steel to part.
The pilot had done an admirable job skirting his wings from the docking rim on first impact, the wing tip disengaging like a fencer. However, there was simply too much metalwork to avoid. Jamal was jolted hard to port as the starboard wing tangled with the spoke-like stanchions attaching the docking rim to the superstructure. The vessel veered hard to starboard, smashing into the rim – then cart wheeling, port wing first into a lower part of the rim structure.
Inside the cabin it played out in slow motion, dim lighting blackened altogether. Jamal managed to keep his eye on the retro reflective instructions of the extinguisher as he was first thrust in one direction, bodily pressed into his neighbouring inmates, then thrust in the opposite direction. He felt joints hyperextend to their limit, bones and tendons threatening to snap, limbs pulled in unnatural directions as if controlled by a demented puppeteer. Guards items, radios, notepads, tasers and ball point pens shot from their bodies like buckshot, smashing teeth and opening ragged gashes. At some point the fire extinguisher parted from its original bracket and found a new one in the guards skull beneath it, crushing everything above the lower jaw.
Jamal lost consciousness for a moment, when he awoke guttering strip lights illuminated banks of groaning, dead or injured men and gore spattered bulkheads. In the grim shadows of the benches he counted at least three dismembered hands in the foot space, covered in deep lacerations, and two boots he couldn’t discern whether they were full or not. Calm, stoic and hardened men shook the grogginess of the impact away and began addressing injuries whilst others began to wail or sob.
One prisoner in the silhouette of the light lifted an arm, hand removed, flesh pulled away to reveal his radius and ulna. Blood fountained from the stump. “Epat Kopat Epat Kopat!” He cried before falling silent.
Jamal took a deep breath and looked down at his extremities, the heel of both hands sported deep gashes that covered his palm in sticky warm blood, red wheals and scratches ran up and down his wrists and lower arms. He was surprised to find his handcuffs had released in the impact; he didn’t know if this was by design, but it had clearly not spared all the prisoners their body parts. Jamal hadn’t yet registered the pain of his injuries, at some point his head had taken a blow by a hurtling object and he raised a bleeding hand to feel an egg sized welt beneath coarse, closely cropped hair.
He pushed himself up in the bench, beside him Igor lay unconscious but similarly freed, he’d slipped into the footwell that was slowly filling with dark, metallic smelling effluent. At the front, the only cognizant guard checked on his colleague and searched the flickering gloom for his taser, aware the third man was obviously dead and that he was sorely outnumbered.
Beneath the yells of pain and expletives Jamal could hear a hissing sound. The fuselage was punctured, that it wasn’t more profoundly damaged was a miracle, however he could sense the depletion of oxygen from the atmosphere. He was struggling to comprehend his surroundings and couldn’t figure out why. Functioning was becoming harder whether a product of the rarefied atmosphere or the impact to his head.
At the front he heard raised voices, the guard was telling one of the prisoners who’d stood up to sit back down, or at least that’s what Jamal interpreted. On the starboard side one of the prisoners was attempting to breach the airlock, struggling with the override mechanism. From Jamal’s perspective the airlock led directly into the hard vacuum of space.
The prisoner at the front now bumrushed the guard despite missing digits from both hands. The big man dwarfed the guard, pushing bleeding hands into an imploring face. His grey Gulag uniform coloured claret as the enraged skinhead smashed his face into the cockpit door release. The guard fell limply to the floor as the vitriolic prisoner gestured for his cohorts to follow him.