Richard-Steven Williams
MURMANSK-13
Prologue
The violent shaking of the cabin jolted Jamal from his catatonia. The fuzz of the reverse thrusters was dimly audible beneath the rattle of steel shackles on steel treadplate. Jamal could feel his body being slowly pressed into the thin rubber padding of the bench, numb buttocks and tense back muscles contacting with near body temperature metal.
The thrusters were firing oddly, unsynchronized, almost spastic jolts like flame outs. Jamal looked around as sixty five impervious Slavs gritted their teeth. Beside him, Igor sweated; beads formed little rivulets across a weathered forehead. He never lowered his eyes though, even when the guards hurriedly lashed themselves to their jump seats at the front of the cabin – knowing something was badly amiss.
We’re about to crash. We’re about to crash and all I have to brace me is shackles and handcuffs.
Jamal wished he could greet the thought with the stoic veneer his fellow prisoners were mustering, but knew he would not. All of them shouldn’t be here, or at least so they protested, but he really shouldn’t be here.
What did it matter? What value spending the last few moments of your life in bitterness, except when it was all that was left. Jamal had left his family home; ailing widowed mother, two sisters and his brother in Compton, Los Angeles three years ago. Left a fucking hero. And never came back.
Never would now.
These chains are going to rip your hands off, there will be nothing to stop your face smashing into the bench in front, teeth will meet metal, a shattered bloody mess of exposed nerve endings and shredded gums. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll just hit my temple, stove my cranium in and lights out.
One of the guards leaned into the cockpit precipitating a hurried exchange in Russian; panicked voices drifted into the cabin. Jamal didn’t understand, he’d never learnt the language, always hoped he’d never need to. As soon as I start learning the language, I’ve given up. He never actually thought he’d be trooped off to the Celestial Gulags, not an American. He’d been given plenty of false hope to bolster his stubborn disregard for the language. Lawyers, flown in from the States, had made his life comfortable in detention; single cell, translators available, unlimited phone calls to the embassy and from there home. It was all a matter of time said the small Jewish man with an affected Brooklyn accent.
Then Moms died, it was an inevitability, he’d seen it coming, in some small dark nook of his mind he’d hoped – had all else fail – it’d be his ticket to freedom. They wouldn’t hold him from her funeral, not on some flimsy pretext, a political powerplay as his lawyer called it.
He’d woke, his body covered in gooseflesh one night, a roar of voices and memories flooded his head, tears involuntarily stung his cheeks. She’d gone, his Moms and he’d sensed it from half a world away.
Visits from his lawyer quickly receded after he spent the day of his mother’s funeral in a detention cell outside of Moscow. There were difficulties, inconsistencies. The Russians were sticking to their guns, they weren’t going to be strong-armed by America.
“After all Jamal, you did break the law.”
That was the last thing his lawyer said to him, after the mock-trial as Jamal sat, shackled in the visitors room of the holding centre in Krasnodar. It didn’t seem to matter that he hadn’t, maybe if they told him enough times he’d broke the law he’d simply start to believe it and shut up. Exonerate the nation from their responsibility.
They needn’t have bothered, he simply gave up after that, he remembered placing his cheek against the cold Formica table and crying. Tears pooled on impenetrable plastic.
The tears were back now, bitter tears stinging heated cheeks. He’d never cried as an adult, now he’d cried three times in three months, maybe four. He’d lost count how long he’d been in transit, or left to rot in the holding centre.
“I’m fucking innocent.” He had to hear the words, had to vocalize them. He swung his arms as if to throw a punch, the sharp steel edges of the cuffs tore skin. The scratching pain in his wrists bore some form of release.
Igor looked at Jamal, looked down on him, both physically and metaphorically. You’re weak and hysterical, like a woman was the big man’s appraisal. Jamal tried to steel his emotions in the sneering gaze of the giant, ogreish Slav, but his jaw betrayed him, his body convulsed as if to sob, then collapsed limp. He felt his enervated muscles scream.
Jamal allowed the increasing G to push him into the bench, the misfiring thrusters the only sound he was aware of. No muffled prayers, no sobbing, no human indication that oblivion approached. With what little movement deceleration allowed him, Jamal turned to the stars and enjoyed the odd sense of purity of his final moments. Shared condemnation in a cabin bereft of dreams, bereft of a future.
The strident sound of the stations klaxon tore Katya from a forgotten dream. Her heart thundered in her chest as she grasped at cigarette smelling bed sheets. Where was she? A wave of nausea proceeded foggy memories of the night before – snippets of her leaving party, parched mouth and furred tongue.
What was that sound? The wailing klaxon filled her cabin, double berth but hers alone. Claustrophobia tugged at her senses, seven shorts wails, followed by one prolonged. General alarm, no command over the PA. She had to muster at her emergency point.
She rolled out of her bunk, catching her foot on the incongruous mock mahogany bedside table that lay at the wrong end. Katja hopped, tried to will away the familiar pain but merely promulgated the throbbing headache that was only worsening under the sounds of crisis. Her brain seemed velcroed to the inside of her cranium.
The severity of the situation caught up with her sleep and drink addled conscience, snapping her to some form lucidity. She stood in day old panties and an alcohol stained tank top. Got to get on some clothes.
“Shit, shit.” Fag buts were strewn over her lab gear, professional, but what did she care, she was going home today. She hoped.
She tugged on her station issue gray velour jumpsuit, Murmansk-13 insignia on the upper arms, an abstract of the Starburst constellation with the station silhouetted against the nearby red supergiant. She limped to her cabin door and pulled on grippy soled slipper boots, also station issue. Tentatively she peered into the habitation corridor.
District Three was dormant save for the incessant klaxon, deafeningly ignorable. Emergency strip lights lit an empty space, a plastic veneered corridor devoid of charm gently curved into the dim distance. Katja felt a first pang of fear, a sick emptiness in her stomach. This wasn’t like the frequent false alarms and drills, there was a wrongness here.
Where the hell was everybody else?
She lifted her feet, doubtful she’d reach a jog but quickly burst into a sprint. Adrenaline brought sobriety and clarity. She padded down the corridor, aware her booties no longer made that suckering sound they had when new.
Habitation appeared deserted, she reached the lifts but recalled her basic station familiarization to avoid the use of lifts in cases of emergency. It had been a day spent with her fellow newbies being shown around District Three by the district safety officer, a young jobsworth barely three years her senior who relished his authority.
She burst through the doors to the stairwell, ringing with the call of the klaxon, and headed up. After all, up was out. How annoying that the idioms of the safety officer were of practical use.