“You’ll be crushed!” He yelled, recognizing her blank, anxious expression as miscomprehension.
A guttural bellow was thrust from her throat involuntarily as the station plunged through the gravity well. The peaks and troughs growing increasingly severe. They’d just passed the entranceway to District Four, smeared with the bloodied footprints of the infected. Where the arrival of Katja had been the catalyst for usurpation by Kirill and the fall of the survivors corral. Where Oleg and Jamal’s home were lost. Where Gennady had died to save them all, holding back the infected to the last. They’d all played their part in Katja’s survival, and now Tala had to honour their sacrifice for it had not just been for Katja, but for them both.
Tor braced himself against the structural bracket, the lightweight metal pillar buckled at its base and top. The Captain’s eyes were alight with a keen awareness that seemed estranged to his previous catatonic state. Perhaps atavistic instincts prompted Tor to dispel the traumatized fugue he’d wallowed within, allowing him to shed the decades that had weighed upon him in the cells. Now he moved with feverish intensity, adrenal glands overriding fears that had so unmanned him before. Distantly, Tala wondered what version of the Captain would immerge once the hormones burnt away, something new and hardened like annealed steel, or something completely spent and used up.
“We haven’t got long!” He shouted, “but we’re nearly there!”
As if to counterpoint his statement, a huge bang rocked the corridor. The force was such that Tala could feel the entire ring bounce about the spoke like external stanchions. The air became brittle and she felt her ears pop. Somewhere the corridor had been holed, soon oxygen would be scarce. What few emergency lights remained flickering almost vanished behind a pall of misting atmosphere, their weak illumination diffused spectrally off vaporized gas.
Feeling herself lighten, she braced her legs against the bracket and readied to push off into the gloom, trying to time the moment to maximize their weightless or near weightless drift. In step with Tor, just as her stomach seemed to astral project, she leapt from the bracket. Beneath her floating form the bulkhead twisted away and up, slowly becoming a deckhead. The murky corridor wheeled around as Tor and Tala punched a hole through the rotating space, taking care to dodge the obscured brackets and beams as they whipped through the dissipating air.
As she regained mass, she curled herself into a ball, Tor did the same. Brushing against the smooth metallic surface of the bulkhead, they gambolled lightly. As gravity hardened they both sprung open. On all fours they scrambled as far as they could before their weight returned with debilitating effect. The airlock was visible now, emerging through the clotting fog, around it lay the remains of the EVA suits the crew of the Riyadh had abandoned when venturing deeper into the station.
“Dritt!” Tor’s voice sounded thin and reedy in the rarefied atmosphere as his exaggerated mass began to press him into the sickened fabric of Murmansk-13.
Loose, the helmets and life support packs had been lifted and hurled against the structure of the station and left scattered like rocks charting a long dried up river. While they were cheaper Chinese manufactured models, broadly forged from NASA technology, they were still precision engineered, life saving equipment. Equipment that now rolled and clattered uselessly in disrepair, a far cry from their hermetic storage wardrobes.
As her body lightened, Tala pushed from the bulkhead, scooping up the discarded helmets before they could be dashed against the stations structure once more. The first had a visible crack webbing the top of the visor, the second a significantly deranged coupling ring. She tossed the helmet with the broken coupling away, irreparable it twisted away into the bank of grey mist. A busted visor might hold out, but a warped coupling ring would not interlock – pressure and oxygen would whistle away as the occupant expired.
Beside her Tor was collecting the life support packs and stacking them against the airlocks pressure bulkhead. The metal was still concealed beneath a shingling of congealed bodily fluids and decay. The smell of ozone whipped about them as the escaping air wailed with gale force ferocity. Columns of vaporized gas formed miniature tornadoes around the curve of the corridor.
Communication was growing impossible in the increasingly hostile environment. Tala braced herself crossways on the deck, using her body as a sluice for the helmets skittering about. The cyclonic winds were creating a vacuum, trying to tear everything out of the station. It was as if Murmansk-13 was trying to purge itself of all the foreign objects that had harmed it and sent it tumbling through space.
Tor had become human strapping for his life support packs. The packs were more robust, often clattered against airlock doors or external plating during standard operations, but they’d be useless if ejected into space. Tala tried to hale him, waving her arm whilst trying to stop herself being pulled into the vacuum. Tor gazed over his shoulder to her, one of his eyeballs was bright red, the blood vessels blown out by the sudden drop in pressure. Frantically she pointed at the airlocks external controls.
“Open the fucking airlock!” Tala would never use an expletive when addressing a senior officer under normal circumstances, but circumstances had become anything but normal. She also knew he would never be able to hear her.
Slowly the Captain registered what she was trying to indicate. Loosening his death grip, Tor reached for the airlock door controls, his arm flailed like a tree branch in the ferocious wind. He pulled the lever and the door cycled open. Carefully he resituated his life support packs around the corner of the door, hoping it would provide leeway.
With the packs stowed Tor peered at Tala. She was trapped, if she let go of the bracket the helmets would be lost and with them any chance of escape, but she couldn’t move with the collection of helmets that gathered round her midriff like salmon trapped in a net. Gingerly, Tor began picking his way from bracket to bracket, trying to bridge the void to Tala as the air became lung achingly thin.
She watched the Captain grimace just out of arms reach as gravity crushed him down to his knees. Little tears of anguish rushed down his cheeks, barging through a patina of foam scum and carbon dioxide dust that had leant Tor a grey pallor. As his eyes reopened he grasped for Tala.
“The helmets,” she screamed, looking down to where the helmets bobbed in the reduced gravity. “The helmets first.”
Tor shook his head. “Two, I can take two. There isn’t much time.”
The helmets were mostly broken, fundamentally damaged in an irretrievable way. While she’d been unable to closely assess more than two, those she’d given a cursory glance were either non-functional or at best marginal. She handed Tor the one with the cracked visor and a second that she’d been unable to appraise. The Captain nodded and threaded a route back through the brackets, briefly pinioned to the deckhead before reaching the airlock.
Tala monitored the passage of time by the steady drain of breathable air, the gradual fading of atmospheric fog as the ring was purged of gas. She was gulping in oxygen deprived air with her mouth wide open, achieving the same level of oxygenation one experiences when their head is buried deep in a pillow. She was suffocating, and so was the Captain. Older and increasingly exhausted, she watched Tor place the helmets beside the life support packs and begin his return journey, legs and arms shaking as he braced himself along the route. The haggard mask he wore in the cells had slipped over his face once more.