Chief Officer Nikolai Falmendikov wasn’t missing. That much was apparent. The search had been called off and the remaining compliment of the DSMV Riyadh had congregated on the bridge. Backs pressed to the far bulkhead, furtive eyes looked at the grim faced Captain and Chief Engineer. Pettersson and Doctor Smith had absolved themselves of responsibility and melted into the crowd. Mihailov and Stewart busied themselves, avoiding eye contact and ignoring hushed questions.
The lights, the fucking lights. It must have been then. A disquieted hush fell over the now fully illuminated bridge.
“I don’t know how much you’ve heard, or what is already making the rumour rounds,” Tor kept his voice neutral, made eye contact with each of his crew in turn, following the line they’d formed around the elevator. “Chief Officer Nikolai is not onboard and we’re not at Talus.”
The crew murmured their displeasure. Tor braced himself for his next revelation. “In fact, we don’t appear to be anywhere near Talus.”
Expletives and gesticulations coloured the anxious atmosphere, Tor let them vent, they had every right, they’d all been away from home for almost three years, Talus was the final stop off before a jump to Sol. They’d all awoken to thoughts of home and family, plans three years in the making or longer about to come to fruition. Now they were here.
“Where are we then, skip?” Boson Jovan Peralta asked the question sincerely in a lilting Filipino brogue, his lopsided face squinting out from behind Doctor Smith. He’d been a boson at sea before the big drive to convert one of the world’s largest seafaring pools into a spacefaring one took many Pinoy into the far galaxy. Naturally servile, utilitarian and cheap the Filipino ‘spacemen’ as they liked to be called, were the workhorses of many a deep space vessel.
Tor winced at the inevitable question, he imagined Mihailov did as well. “We’re not totally sure.”
The expletives grew louder, the gesticulations more animated. Heads turned to Mihailov who worked feverishly in the chartroom, the Navigation Officer was working from the track recordings obtained from the flight recorder. But they’d ended in hard, empty vacuum. Now he was correlating bunker usage figures, but consumption calculations weren’t the usual concern of a deck officer. Regardless, all his calculations kept ending in the same segment of unpopulated space.
Except, they weren’t in unpopulated space.
Tor waited for them to quiet. Nilsen put a hand on his shoulder and stepped forward. “Looking at the fuel consumption it appears we haven’t left Reticuluum.”
Now the crew were angry bordering on murderous. Eight months and they’d barely moved, at least by deep space standards. By Mihailov and Nilsen’s calculations they’d probably travelled eight hundred thousand miles on thrust and inertia alone.
They had every right to be pissed. Tor was pissed, but he couldn’t betray his own emotions to an already mutinous and indignant crew. Deep down he knew any anger directed at Falmendikov would soon colour him. After all, he was in command, it was he who ultimately bore responsibility for the voyage, particularly in the absence of the Chief Officer.
Tor scanned the faces of the crew, his gaze quickly averting searing eyes that weren’t engaged in some impassioned discussion with their neighbour. Doctor Smith tried to remain cool and impassive, she looked glassy-eyed ahead, avoided pouring any further petrol on the fire. Tor supposed he was thankful of that, though she’d provided no further insight into how Falmendikov had managed to override the Cryo program.
Finally his eyes rested on Peralta. He was uncommonly young looking for an old hand, although the drooping features on his right side gave him a permanently sad appearance. No one could be hurting as much as the Bosun, he was on his last trip and had double stinted with another vessel. His demeanour remained remarkably neutral though, he respected seniority more than any man Tor had ever flown with, but without the flawed obsequiousness many of his countrymen observed. As a result he was one of the few Filipino’s Tor knew was roundly respected throughout the fleet. He also abstained from the furious discussion around him. “Why are we here Captain?”
Peralta’s raised voice, but cordial question hushed the ranks. At first they turned to the Bosun, then Tor.
“We haven’t begun to investigate the motives of Chief Officer Nikolai, but I think it’s safe to assume two things.” Tor moved to the bridge control panel, his back to the crew. “First, he’s brought us here and second, he has done so for a reason. As for your earlier question, as to where here is.” Tor pressed a button, the windscreen’s iron alloy shield slowly lifted revealing a huge, monolithic gunmetal grey structure beyond pitted glass. Warning and directional lights were long since deactivated, portholes lay dark in the distance, little dead eyes peering back at their miniscule seeming ship.
Great ablated scars like silvery stretch marks, ran across the large central portion of the structure, at least one click from the docking ring their emergency clamps had affixed to. It was hard to get any kind of fix with so much metalwork cluttering the radar – multi-path returns blotted the screen in inscrutable patches of lurid green.
The dead space station twirled in a slow centrifuge against a glittering backdrop of juvenile stars, accreted within the hyperactive foundry of the Starburst galaxy. In the mid-ground, a great nebulae of cool ionized gases mottled the darkness in an oil slick of colours while nearby, at less than sixteen AU, a vast solar flare flicked like a devilish tongue from the surface of an ancient Red Supergiant. The star sloughed away energy and mass from its fragile helium shell, bathing the bridge of the DSMV Riyadh in its cold, florid, dying light.
Tor spent a moment contemplating the preposterous composition of fallible manmade metal and the unstoppable fire of space.
“What the hell is that?” Angela Tala Herrera’s affected American street accent tore the Captain from his reverie.
“We don’t know.” Tor turned to the crew, faces and jumpsuits a disturbing blood red. “We saw Cyrillic lettering on one of these outer structures and the outline of a hammer and sickle so we can assume it is Soviet.”
“It looks dead.”
“It’s not on any of the Star Charts.” Mihailov emerged from the chartroom, he looked drawn and exhausted, pencils behind both ears. He flexed weary fingers and rested against the door frame. “Need to know place, military or R and D.”
“Either way our presence doesn’t seem to have drawn a response as yet,” Jan Nilsen walked to the windscreen and pressed his thin, crooked nose against the glass. Each breath steaming his view. “Looks like he walked down and entered through that gash.”
“He’s in trouble though,” said Mihailov joining him. He pointed down to the ragged dark hole, burnt and deformed metal haloed the entrance, telltale dents and scars indicated some kind of impact in the docking ring structure. The high tensile steel lifeline Falmendikov had anchored from the Riyadh recoiled placidly in hard vacuum, severed.
“Hope his umbilical is okay,” replied Nilsen. The rest of the crew had massed around the Chief Engineer and Navigations Officer.
“Fuck his umbilical and fuck him.” Hernandez, the diminutive motorman pointed wildly at the lifeline, pushing through the crowd and jabbing his finger against the screen.
Tor knew the situation was on a knife edge. He’d briefed Mihailov, Stewart and Nilsen to preach calm but Hernandez was not a man accustomed to calm. The Mexican was known as a rabble-rouser with a litany of drug related suspensions on his record. On this voyage he’d already served a two-week unpaid suspension for some bar brawl on Snake’s Head. “Calm down, Hernandez.”