She felt clumsy, unseen hands pull her away as she became as vast and heavy as an ocean. Blackness returned.
When Katja woke again it was dark; her vision blurred. The back of her cranium felt soft – yielding, like the cratered shell of a spoon-tapped egg. Numbness and pain vied for control within her brain, the various lobes theatres for sensory warfare. She doubled over as an unstoppable comber of nausea swept over her. Stomach muscles clenching with primitive ardour, unable to eject anything but scorching bile and stomach acid. The acrid fluids seeped into arid fissures that cracked her lips. She sobbed, her body trembling.
Righting herself, Katja realised she was being watched. A coffee skinned Latino man was sat across the corridor, his arm wrapped through a spaceframe bracket. He appraised her with cold, unfeeling eyes. The brown of his irises black in the dim. She remembered his name, Diego.
“I wasn’t sure you made it,” Diego stated, his voice lightly accented. “You hit your head hard when we landed.”
Little throbbing streamers of pain floated across the canvas of her retinas. “I can feel it,” she replied, then scanned the corridor around her. “Where is Tala? What happened?”
As she spoke the timbre of her voice warped, as if her vocal chords were being crushed. She watched Diego scowl, press himself into the structural frame as their bodies grew heavier and heavier. Several G’s loaded themselves on top of her ravaged physique. Loose flesh, the legacy of pounds shed by a steady process of cryogenic atrophy and a decade of yo-yoing dieting, slid down across her framework of bones – then up. For a moment she imagined herself sinking through the fragile shell of Murmansk-13, atomized through inexorable osmosis, the few sensible remaining particles cast to the stellar winds.
She burbled uncontrollably against her body weight, against the pressure; disorientated by the movement of the station. Katja could only remember Murmansk-13 as an impervious and vast metal conglomeration. An inert platform that was so implicitly stable, the fragile nature of its existence was cast to the subconscious. Katja grasped at the bracket beside her, fearful she would be dashed against the deckhead above, her already fragile skull split apart. Senseless that she was pinned at every orientation by her own magnified mass.
They plunged through the gravity well for minutes, the great hulking mass of the station taking considerable time to rotate under incalculable forces. A puppet to some far greater gravitational object, the Red Supergiant, hauling Murmansk-13 in thrashing and fighting. Katja and Diego were insignificant lumps of meat to a far huger interplay of cosmic force. Nature reclaiming even the most ambitious edifice of man.
Katja groaned as her weight dropped away. Her diminished body, relieved of its own six hundred equivalent pound burden, suddenly became insubstantial, floaty. Rheumy eyed, she looked to Diego who began to drift wraithlike from the bulkhead. He was wriggling his lower jaw as if trying to free the tension of protesting muscles. When he spoke his voice was heavy and slurred.
“We got split up, “ he looked up, which was gradually becoming down. “When this started.” Diego pushed over to Katja, his movement awkward and graceless, he held his hand palm up as he approached. “Take my hand, it’s easier to move when the gravity is at its lowest.”
Katja gripped his palm. It was large and cold, the flesh soft against her own. “Tala?”
Diego didn’t speak for a while, as if concentrating on the navigation of their drift. “I love her too,” Diego said softly, shaking his head. “There’s something about her, isn’t there? She portrays herself as this hard, opaque thing. Yet has this uncanny ability to offer chinks of light through. You know what I mean?”
Katja could feel a shiver ripple through their palm flesh. It passed down her spine and settled heavy in her stomach. There was an unrequited pity and anger that encrusted his words, made them dense and difficult to absorb. She imagined Diego saw himself as a fundamentally good guy who couldn’t understand why he didn’t get the girls he liked. Vanilla and bitter. She concentrated on their forward momentum, uncomfortable in his company. She could feel a greasy film of commingled sweat where their skin twinned.
“I’m not sure what happened,” Diego said, continuing after a while, perhaps trying to quell the discomfort created. “I landed face first, next thing I heard was screaming and gunshots. Those goons chasing us getting fucked up. Those things got drawn by other gunfire. I think that was Tala. But I didn’t see her. I saw you were unconscious and I dragged you out before those monsters became less distracted.”
In the gloom, Katja could see the skin around Diego’s eyes was darkened, a livid purple bruise contoured across the bridge of his nose and two thin ribbons of dried blood columned down from his nostrils. He turned his attention back to the passageway as they floated above the twisting structural beams. It was like drifting down a bleak, grey kaleidoscope.
“Did you see Tala escape?” Katja asked, eventually. Tentatively.
Diego shook his head, his expression crestfallen. “It was her firing. I’m sure of it. She was trying to get to us. Well to you. But she couldn’t, it was impossible, there were too many of them,” he sighed. “She drew them away.”
Grief settled itself like a tumour behind her eyes. The interior of her flesh and organs seemed to calcify as what little light Murmansk-13 had offered guttered out once more.
“Thank you,” Katja begun, her voice leaden. She could feel her weight returning. “For saving me.”
Diego peered forward into the corridors flickering gloom, looking for somewhere to tough out the heightened G’s. Looking to look distracted. “I couldn’t just leave you. Tala is first and foremost… and I guess only ever will be, my friend,” he said, his tone shifting schizophrenically between pointed ambivalence and genuine concern.
They skidded clumsily to a halt on a smooth bulkhead turned sideways. Katja withdrew her hand a little too eagerly. Diego eyed her with caution, easing himself into a nook beside a support strut. Katja crab walked to a little isosceles triangle of rough metal – bracketing deck to bulkhead – and lay down, hoping to save her spine from the worst rigours of the G load.
Katja felt the weight drift on top of her like an avalanche in slow motion. She remembered when she’d been at her heaviest, almost three hundred pounds, bloated by her absent fathers guilty presents of sweets and chocolates, his inability to deny her wishes when he returned home. It had been a period of apathy and ennui, trapped in Gorky leading a comfortable, directionless life.
She’d long since quit ballet and dance. Having always been large boned, the onset of teenage acne had made her feel ugly and inadequate. No, not feel, she was ugly and aesthetically inadequate. During performances she was always a background dancer, hidden. When the other background ballerinas cycled forward for their moment, she’d remain choreographed out of sight. It didn’t matter that she was able to do what the other lithe, fair skinned girls could do. Even when she could do it better – plié on point faultlessly while girls half her size struggled. So she quit.
As the few physical passions were robbed of their joy and exorcised from her life, Katja slowly morphed into her mother. Relatives and family friends would visit after a period of years, unable to recognize the little girl who’d ballooned to eclipse even her mother’s girth, her skin mottled by reddish pink scabs and furious pustules. Katja imagined her mother relished her embarrassment and the complete decimation of her confidence. She would buy Katja fattening foodstuffs to ease her social rejection and salve the loneliness, enabling her to gorge away the shame. Her mother was pretty once, in a way Katja could never be – would never be allowed to be.