However, once Filipino’s started becoming officers and professional equals, Tor soon discovered it was simply willing cultural apartheid. The Pinoy no more wanted to spend their past times hard drinking with the Europeans than the European’s wanted to spend it with the Pinoy crooning to karaoke ballads.
Regardless, Tor wanted to mourn Peralta, tried to. Peralta had flown with him on several voyages and was more than once the man who shook his hand as he boarded for a trip and the last one to shake it as he signed off. Loyal and imperturbable, he’d been a hard worker ready for retirement, but when it boiled down to it, all Tor could offer for Peralta were qualities based on rank. For all the time he’d flown with him, he couldn’t offer one anecdote pertaining to his character; had no idea what lay ahead for the old bosun when he signed off for the final time – or what had proceeded. In many ways he found that sadder, that he couldn’t shed a tear for his dead crewman only tally him as another soul lost under his command on this disastrous trip.
In the flickering darkness of the corridor, Tor saw Tala’s eyes focus on his legs as she sucked air into her lungs. The right leg of his EVA suit was still crimson pink with Peralta’s blood, Tor having collapsed with his limb between his colleagues pumping heart and the morgue scupper. He supposed Tala was angry at him, at his lack of intervention, his lack of command or obvious cowardice. Tor supposed she wasn’t wrong to be angry with him.
Katja was also streaked with gore. Intermittently she scolded her captors for killing her father as they’d dragged her from the morgue and through the desolate laboratories. Katja’s long dormant mind apparently weaving a tapestry whereby her father hadn’t been reduced to a feral psychopath. She emitted a plaintive sob in the flickering darkness of floor fourteen but didn’t struggle.
“We should have fucking sedated her,” Mihailov said, his voice edgy as he cast about in the half shadows.
“We need to find escape suits,” replied Tor ignoring the Second Mate, watching his breath condensate in the dim.
“We need to get the fuck out of here,” replied Mihailov, the tap of his pacing feet irritating to the ear.
“Then we need escape suits.”
“Fuck!” Mihailov wheeled against the bulkhead and smashed his boot into the veneered plastic, cracking it with a dull boom. “Fuck!”
Tor winced at the noise as it echoed away into the stairwell beyond the swing doors. Katja screamed and flinched but remained otherwise prone on the board.
“Are you going to help us, Captain?” Tala’s disembodied question was filled with thinly veiled contempt.
Tor grimaced at the rebuke. Fighting a body wracked with agonies, he pushed himself to his feet and met Tala’s swollen-closed eyes in the flicker of an emergency light. The Filipina turned in the corridor and paced away, toward the crew cabins. Tor let his head cool against the bulkhead a moment before stiffly following her.
The infected were on the move and slowly closing on Jamal’s position. With his hands pressed gently into the thin metallic walls of the air duct, Jamal shifted his centre of gravity away from the base, careful not to crinkle the aluminium beneath him. Thin tendrils of air wept upward, through the ducts intermittent grates, the stations musk of burnt plastic and ozone increasingly traced with putrefied flesh. The stench grew stronger and now Jamal could hear their shambling footfalls and low, guttural wailing not far behind.
They’d been gaining on him for a quarter hour, perhaps less. Jamal had no means of counting time as he wended through the stations ducting, devoid of visual clues. He could move swiftly through the labyrinthine shafts and conduits, far quicker than the infected could typically move.
Unless they’d picked up a scent.
Jamal knew he was safe in the air ducts, two and a half meters above the deck, Jamal knew the infected couldn’t reach him. Several times in the past years, Jamal had held station as the walking remains of the crew frantically pawed the air between them, desperate to pluck him from safety and rend him apart. Several times he’d stared into their savage milky eyes and felt a chill sense of loss creep down his spine, every vestige of their humanity peeled away. In the back of his mind he remembered he needed to find some .25’s – he wouldn’t be reduced to that.
No, Jamal was safe, but if he continued to his objective he would act as a tow, like chum to a shark. Momentary indecision, Jamal listened, somewhere behind him the electric gearing on a door whirred. The motherfuckers are letting them through. If he was going, he’d have to go now, they couldn’t have gotten far in those heavy suits.
Determinedly, Jamal pushed off from the duct walls and loped on all fours, aluminium flexing and popping in his wake. Damn the noise, they could smell them now anyway. He had to put distance between himself and the infected, give himself time and formulate a plan. He couldn’t let them die, they were the only hope.
His vision narrowed. Beneath, the corridors were dimly lit. Shafts of argent neon barely pierced the gloom within the duct, but Jamal bounded on, knowingly headed toward a ten story plummet. Instinctively he slid to a halt, a weak updraft indicating he’d reached the descending shaft, a lightless void in the metal.
He hadn’t come far enough to chance another pause, with the noise and the perspiration of his effort, Jamal knew the infected would be on his position soon. He dried his hands as best as he could manage on the grime slicked hoodie he’d salvaged from a crew cabin months past and eased himself into the shaft of seemingly infinite blackness. He felt the frigid updraft squirm through the bottoms of his trouser legs and waft across his sweat glossed body, threatening to quake his already tired muscles and send him tumbling into the dark.
Spread-eagled, hands and booted feet pressed into the ducts sides, Jamal inched down the shaft. With his eyes shut to the darkness, Jamal focused on his breathing, always on his breathing and not on his muscles that burned and quivered under the burden of his weight.
Two and a half meters to each floor, it took him a minute to squirm down the shaft, almost falling into the recess of the eight floors ducting. He sat and let himself relax for a moment. Got to be quicker, man. As he paused, he listened, but heard nothing but the distant progress of the infected and the gentle passage of old air worrying aluminium.
Happenstance had brought Jamal to this shaft as he gingerly rolled from his perch and began a second decent. He’d brought Gennady news of his sighting – the craft – as soon as he returned to District Four. Empty handed from his run to the warehouse, the enclaves sentries had threatened to lynch him. Jamal protested the significance of his news and was brought to Gennady. Jamal was sure the sentries, Ilya and Boris, had hoped Gennady would dole out a beating to be administered by them, instead he listened fervently to Jamal’s tale of Mikhail and the mysterious vessel recounted in broken Russian. Intrigued, but no less sceptical, Gennady had appointed Jamal envoy of District Four and to establish communications by any means possible. To this end he’d been provided a thousand candle flashlight, a handheld heliostat and an escape suit, all relinquished from an escape pod via the District Four cache. Mercifully they also refilled his water bladder.
Jamal had wound down from Gennady’s eyrie, en route to the emergency airlock in the District Three docking ring tasked, if possible, with a request for the safe passage of the inhabitants of District Four. However, not long after entering District Three, Jamal had sensed a disturbance in the stations fine equilibrium.
It had been over a year since circumstances had required Jamal venture into District Three; on that occasion indentured to stockpile medical supplies for his districts denizens. But in his early nomadic wanderings he’d often stalked the corridors and canteens of the medical laboratories, they had bore the most recent hallmarks of residency. Even in his absence Jamal could perceive the changes around him, changes that indicated he was not alone. Indistinct sounds, snippets of words caught within the stations passage of recycled air. Other sounds as well, sounds indicative of human habitation that carried through the stations very structure so clear after so much absence.