Chapter 9
Katja’s sobbing grew quieter and remittent as they wended through the claustrophobic confines of the wiring conduit. Itchy fibres of superstratum clung to and raked the flesh while sharp edged cable ties rose from the sea of yellow insulation and pinched the skin. Tala wondered how much the girl must hate her for smashing her father’s brain in, although in honesty, she didn’t care. The Chief tore a hole in Jovan Peralta’s neck, left him gasping for air as his blood drained away. Tala watched the life leave the bosun’s eyes, watched them role back into his head, his eyelids frozen wide open in shock and his mouth half twisted in terror.
Peralta had been a good man, a warm man. Tala had only known him as an ageing bosun, but she’d known him as the friendliest bosun she’d ever worked under. The pressure of his station never made him quick tempered like most of the old jaded bosuns she’d flown with; he was relaxed, flying out the remnants of his final voyage carefree. He never treated her as anything but an equal instead of a useless girl or something to be owned.
He liked to sit in the dayroom till late ships time, recounting stories with the old steward Sammy and any rating who’d care to sit and listen – usually herself and Diego. Bawdy tales; ports of ill repute and space station brawls. Then he would sing some songs on the karaoke machine, his voice reedy and unsteady. Sinatra was his favourite, Somewhere Beyond the Sea. He’d been a sailor, before a spaceman, but the lyrics were no less poignant amongst the stars.
Peralta had spent over forty years of his life, on the waves or in the emptiness of space. Both were far, far from his family. Three grown up daughters whose childhoods he’d largely missed, probably still planning his retirement party somewhere in Iloilo, looking forward to spending the rest of their lives with him. Reward for a life of brutal toil.
Now Bose was dead and that party would never happen.
The thought heated her cheeks as Katja squirmed ahead her sobbing renewed. Fucking girl needs to get her shit together.
In the decaying service light, Tala could discern the wobbling outline of Katja’s ass, her gown completely decimated. Between them, Jamal was silent other than to instruct the girl which duct to take when the channels split. The black man smelt earthy, early on he’d told them that his enclave of survivors were a long way away via the service ducts. That had been innumerable, thirsty hours ago.
The ducts themselves were mostly padded at the base with a fire retardant foam, but the padding was old and already thin when it had been laid. Tala had traversed countless cabling conduits during her service aboard Saudi Shipping vessels and could see the comparative hallmarks of budget Soviet engineering. Where the padding was torn up, knees and hands were exposed to roughly fabricated aluminium that wearied the joints, threadbare patches caught clothing and ripped up clots of toxic blue foam. Tala marvelled at Jamal’s ability to survive in such sterile dilapidation.
Katja must be suffering Tala mused, her depressurized EVA suit provided thirteen layers of cushioning between her exhausted knees, Katja had scant scraps of an old and shredded surgical gown, Jamal’s oversized and ripped hoodie and atrophied musculature. Tala wondered if the fragile snivelling she heard up front was the product of the pains of body or mind.
The girl had fled into the dim recesses of the wiring conduit as soon as Jamal and Tala pulled her through the smashed grating. As the grasping hands and mashing jaws reached for her pale flesh, Katja deserted them, leaving Tala and Jamal to defend the opening, kicking back the steady flow of corpselike faces and shattering thin, corroded skulls. Eventually the heaving vanguard of infected plugged the opening like a rotten cork, their rearguard tearing at their kin, their caterwauling muffled behind a clog of putrescent flesh.
Jamal warned that they needed to move, needed to find Katja and fast. In their hunger the infected would rent the opening clear. It took little time to track the sobbing girl, her attenuated body incapable of carrying her far. Or so Tala had thought. Jamal had placed the delicate girl on point, Tala assumed to monitor her and to set a pace. Tala hoped Jamal’s quiet instructions provided her with a sense of purpose.
The first hours were spent putting distance between themselves and their clamouring pursuers. As the pernicious miasma of the infected faded and their insidious keening fell silent, Jamal told Katja to stop and by proxy, Tala stopped too. They would not find them now. He’d told them to rest and despite her company and her feelings of displacement, Tala fell into a fitful sleep full of half forgotten nightmares.
She’d awoken with her heart hammering and her bruised cheek etched with sharp superstratum, she pictured millions of tiny eviscerations over her swollen, purple flesh.
They’d been moving ever since and Tala was beginning to question the limits of her endurance, only a fighters pride made her bite her parched, cracked lip. She wondered what became of Captain Tor and Sec, had they made it back to the Riyadh? She hoped they had, but Tala had seen the growing anguish creep across the Captain’s bedraggled features. In her heart she knew the Captain was at pains to save them all, but she felt betrayed by his diffidence and cowardice in those efforts. She also felt anger welling within. For him to pass her services on so blithely to Jamal, as if she were his thrall.
Tala knew her train of thought was unfair. The flaccid EVA suit that suckered to her flesh and the painful swollen mass of her face indication that without an alternative suit, she would have died a painful death trying to reach the ship.
Spaced, they called it, Tala had been told hushed stories of unwitting Pinoy being peeled into the vast hard vacuum of space, usually recounted by a crewman dolefully in his cups who’d been there and tried valiantly to assist in some unlikely and heroic manner. They were often careless greenhorns on bulkers, standing in the wrong place at the wrong time when the hold was opened – in the frontier days before mag boots and stricter safety regulations. She’d once heard tale of a galley boy, just sixteen, who got sucked from a vessel due to a faulty garbage dispenser, his limbs severed in his expedited exit. But more often than not the stories revolved around some poor son of a bitch, down on his luck; perhaps ruined financially or having experienced a great personal tragedy far from home, who’d chosen the most merciless of all endings.
An empathetic chill accompanied each retelling. In part because Tala had known a man who’d spaced himself, although she never shared his story. Ricky Velasquez, the old steward, mid-trip on her first ever voyage. She’d boarded as a galley girl and had worked closely with Ricky before crew shortages saw her promoted to the deck. Like Peralta he was homely and unassuming, always quick with inoffensive jokes and unbridled emotional support. Ricky guided Tala through her first months in the lonely emptiness of space and she’d returned each evening after her promotion as he would listen, uncritically, to her complaints and concerns while he would talk about his family, his cabin adorned with their pictures. He was like an anchor to home, even though they came from opposing corners of the Philippines.
Then one night, after downing tools for the day, she found his cabin empty. She’d checked the galley and the dayroom, all the spaces the crew would congregate, before informing the bridge. It was only then they had found the airlock had been activated, the officer of the watch apparently alarm blind and oblivious. A note was later found in his cabin stapled to a laser telex, his wife of forty-eight years had been killed during Typhoon Nitang, his home destroyed and two of his grandchildren missing in Mainit.