Jamal took a deep breath and braced himself, hooking a hand into the prison issue jumpsuit of Igor for no explicable reason or sentiment. The huge prisoner pulled the cockpit door release and was immediately blown out through the front of the personnel carrier, his body shredded by the twisted and serrated remnants of the cockpit, a few other prisoners slammed into the collision bulkhead as the fuselage rapidly depressurized. Jamal fought to maintain his hold on Igor’s suit as his body was pulled toward the door. Air vaporized to mist as pressure fell to zero and the artificial gravity failed.
The already damaged fuselage shrieked under the rapid loss of pressure and seemed to pull away from the docking rim, threatening to be thrown by the centrifugal motion of the station. Jamal felt his skin prickle as the temperature dropped, frost contrasted with his dark flesh. Blood began to boil in his veins and he knew he would be dead within a minute if he didn’t act. With Igor weightless, he grabbed his bench neighbour and pushed for the cockpit door like a swimmer pushing off the edge of a pool, a trail of floating blood droplets eddied in his wake.
Others quickly followed.
Katja thrashed at her assailant, images shimmered through unshed tears. She felt her wrists grabbed mid pummel. Fully arrested, her stomach fluttered with fear. Teardrops tumbled down her cheeks, she was in a dark room, lit only by little pinpricks of coloured light and the lambent green of dimmed monitors.
The shadow before her was saying something, appealing. Blood rushed through her head. She pulled viciously at the shadowed figure grasping her wrists. At her second attempt, it freed her, she turned to the door.
“Stop. Katja.” She recognized the voice, it was Artyom and he was scared. “Don’t go back out there.”
She turned and fell into his arms in pure relief, gladdened to have finally found somebody. “What’s happening, Arty?”
“We lost containment,” his voice muffled in her shoulder. “The recon party are out.”
“All of them?”
“All of them,” Artyom kept his replies calm and gently released Katya from their embrace. He held her at arm’s length, hands on her shoulders. “At 12.16 am station time there was a power surge, for whatever reason it took thirty-two seconds for the districts auxiliary backup to kick in. By then they’d breached the doors.”
“Oh God.” Katya stepped out of Artyom’s reach and realized she was stood in quarantine control. Beside her a great wall of ballistic glass looked down on an empty ward. Wheeled beds lay askew covered in stained linen, each bore a human outline made up of pressure points where necrotizing flesh had wept into the material. The room was lit a sickly blue intended to pacify the infected.
“It was if they sensed it, the opportunity,” Artyom now stared into the quarantine ward, he spoke dreamily. “As soon as we lost power, they went for the doors.”
“But how, how is that possible? Their encephalopathy was so advanced, neurodegeneration so complete.” She tasted old alcohol on her breath, stomach acid burnt the back of her throat. “They should have been dead, not wandering around.”
“Should of, but aren’t.” Blue light uplit Artyom, colouring his skin a deathly pallor and casting great black shadows in his eye sockets. Horn rimmed Windsor glasses seemed to frame the empty looking cavities of his skull.
Katya tried to steady her racing mind. She reached for the water cooler. It shimmered an eerie blue green as bubbles raced upward. The flimsy paper cup shook violently in her hand, tepid, stale tasting water spilt onto the darkness of the floor. “Can we turn a light on?”
“I wouldn’t.” Artyom turned to Katja, a featureless shadow with tousled hair, then sat vacantly at the control console. The quiet hum of electronics in the background.
Katja felt her enervated legs almost buckle, she pulled the second wheeled office chair beside Artyom. “I saw blood in the corridor,” Artyom turned and looked at her, but remained silent. “Where are they now?”
“I… I don’t know,” he replied in a breaking pitch. “They got out, at first… At first we thought we could contain them. We tried to evacuate the ward, bring some guns in but they were on top of us too fast.
“I saw friends… I heard their screams and I ran. I didn’t think I could help them. I hid in here. For a while I heard scraping on the door, I didn’t want to check who was there. They didn’t say anything.”
Artyom cried and Katja draped an insensate arm on his shoulder. He lifted his spectacles and jerkily dried his face with his lab coat, carefully replacing the glasses on the bridge of his nose in an attempt to normalize his distress. “The two guards who were the first at the door when the system went down, they only had tasers. I saw them being attacked, it was ferocious, savage. They just tore and ripped at them, with their hands, fists. Teeth. I watched them bleed out on the floor, horrid ragged wounds in their necks and faces. One of them had no nose, no ears.”
Katja tried to process the information, understand it. She tried to transfer the visceral imagery into something analytical, something cold and usable. Sanitize it. Instead her brain produced mugshots of her friends, eviscerated. Their masticated features pulped and shredded.
“Then they got up,” said Artyom.
Katja took a moment to register the words. “Who got up?”
“The guards, about a half hour after they’d bled out.”
“What do you mean, they got up?”
“I mean they got up. It was slow, but they picked themselves up, skin deathly white, and wandered out.”
Katja looked at her acquaintance and wondered if he’d lost his sanity. “That doesn’t make any sense, Arty.”
“I know.”
“Are you sure they were not just badly hurt?”
Artyom stood and moved back to the window, he gestured for Katja to look. Dread reluctant, Katja joined him at the window and followed his gaze. A giant black slick of blood the size of a family sedan coated the floor beside the containment door. The blood seemed to trace an arc – the imperceptible rotation of the station. “Two men.”
Katja refused to cogitate the notion. “Where is everybody else?”
“When it became apparent that we’d lost containment, station command called for full evacuation to district-12 and station-wide quarantine. One of the muster points got jumped by the recon team… I guess they panicked and evacuated the station headed for the standby vessels. As soon as one station jumped ship, everybody began abandoning ship.”
Katja could see Artyom’s unease as he fidgeted with a plastic pen lid, addressing the cathode console screen. Without another word he gestured with the lid to the screen. He’d apparently hacked into station ops radar, tiny green vector lines slowly arced away from the centre of the display. Four much larger vector lines circled in counter rotation. The little green vector lines disappeared.
“Four Deep Space Destroyers, they took out the standby vessels first, they were dead in the water. Now they’re picking off the lifeboats.”
“They’re firing on civilians?” Her voice was tiny, despite herself a huge yawn cracked her mouth, her mind was growing fuzzy with overload and incomprehension.
“The Soviet just dropped the concrete sarcophagus on us.”
Chapter 1
Two crisp blue ethereal lights seared his retinas. He was awake, or at least he thought so. He did not breathe and his heart did not beat and he was so very, very cold. The cold was a blueness that stole to the very core of his being and held him in a state of hibernation, it swaddled him in the frozen amniotic fluid of a dead womb. He felt drawn into himself, like a tiny operator of a much larger and dormant machine, unusable. His conscious barely registered anything beside his most primal functions and a distant sense that something was amiss, a realization buried so deep in his mind he couldn’t even begin to comprehend it.