Like District Three, the stairwell was gelid and dimly lit by flickering emergency lights. Coruscating illumination captured flittering dust granules that seemed to coalesce where the passage of air was strongest.
“Track us by smell?” Tala repeated, picking up the thread. “You make them sound like animals.”
“You’ve seen them for yourself,” Jamal began indifferently, helping Katja onto the first step. “They are animals.” He gave a quiet mirthless laugh, “And we’re the prey.”
Tala felt her body shiver as her mag boot clattered onto the aluminium step, the sound rippling up and away. “How many of those… things, are there?”
“I don’t know,” Jamal said, his expression withering. “I haven’t carried out a census.” He, screwing his face up, apparently dissatisfied with his glibness. “Sorry. There’s a lot. They pack hunt. What we saw back there, that’s the most I’ve ever seen in one place, at one time. I guess you pissed them off, but was that all of them? I dunno.
“I’ve seen them split into several packs before. When they ain’t got a scent they sort of mill around alone, like sentries. I haven’t seen much of any kind of social hierarchy. When there’s food, it’s every corpse for himself.”
“You know a lot about them.”
“I landed here in ’88,” Jamal’s voice struggled against the increasing deadweight of Katja. “What year is it now?”
“1992,” Tala replied, sombre. “October.”
“Figured,” Jamal fell silent, processing the information, his jaw churned with a fleeting resentment that creased his smooth face. “Well after four years, you’ve either figured out how to survive or you’ve become one of them.”
Tala readjusted Katja’s positioning on her shoulder. “Become one of them?”
“We call them the infected for a reason. It’s some sort of transmissible virus. I don’t know.”
“Like a cold? I mean can you catch it from the air?” Tala could feel her skin cool beneath the air chilled layers of her EVA suit. They stopped stock still as a popping emergency light, somewhere within the trunk, silenced their thoughts.
“Not unless you get your colds from folk biting you,” Jamal continued quieter, smiling sardonically. “No, I don’t really know the mechanics of it, only that if you’re bit, you’re fucked. Ain’t no way back.”
Tala tensed again, her mind erupting. “Sec? You let the Captain take him back to the ship!”
Jamal let Tala’s ire subside before replying. “We ain’t got medicine and doctors here, girl. I figured he had a chance if we got him back to your ship.”
“Our ship is fucked, Jamal. Fucked. We’re out of supplies, out of air and out of cryo. And, oh yeah. No comms,” Tala quietened as Jamal’s eyes grew huge, afeard more by the beacon of her intensifying volume than the words themselves. “Why the hell do you think we came on board?”
“I didn’t… I don’t, I don’t know,” Jamal said, deflated, his deep voice trailed away. “I just hoped, prayed you guys could get us off this place.”
“I’m sorry.” Tala thought to continue, but let the apology drift away on recycled air. Unspeaking, she bore up Katja, easing the strain on Jamal.
Silently they continued up the steps, their pace slowed by the deteriorating condition of Katja. The girls face had slackened and she appeared to have slipped back into catatonia, her eyelids flickering against some unseen impetus. Tala had been aboard Murmansk-13 less than two days and her body was worn down, her emotions pulled taut like a drumhead. She couldn’t comprehend existing on the arcane station for four years. While Katja had benefited from her effective cryogenic coma, Jamal lived it. Tala prayed she would find something akin to civilization in the eyrie of District Four, lest the mere thought of Jamal’s ordeal would burst the gossamer thin skin of her sanity.
Those naive steps through the service corridor, following a now dead man’s trail, seemed an aeon ago. She longed to be with her countrymen, warbling to karaoke or pounding weights. She would even rather be home, in Vigan, amid the aged cobbled streets and colourful Spanish colonial architecture, bathing in the dry season sun. Homeless in her hometown aside from a roll mat in her local gym and the awkward incidental meetings with her disapproving father.
Yes, even that ailing visage of disappointment and loss, as if her father was looking at a ghost when he saw her, would be preferable to another moment on Murmansk-13.
“He will die. Your friend.”
Katja’s slurred words knifed through Tala’s lost thoughts. “What?”
“Your friend, the one who was bit,” Katja’s voice was cold and emotionless, as if she were a mere siphon for an unseen, childlike, speaker. “I saw a dead man, a friend, wake up. He was bit. There is no cure.”
“What do you know?” Tala wanted to scream, but she remembered the fear in Jamal’s eyes. It didn’t matter, Katja slumped across their shoulders, her conscience fled once more. Tala gave Jamal a supplicating look and shook the girl. “What does she mean?”
Jamal adjusted Katja’s weight to accommodate her total lack of sufficiency and Tala’s attempts to reawaken her, but otherwise he seemed elsewhere, his face grimly set. Dust rimed the sweat on his brow like hoarfrost. “I don’t know what she knows.”
Her stomach twisted again, Tala felt sick, her head dizzy with the enormity and impossibility of what she’d witnessed. “What are those things?”
Jamal turned to Tala, looking over the gently bobbing form of Katja’s head, his eyes lustreless and starved of hope. “I can’t be sure, but I know that some of the prisoners who were bitten became infected, like one of them. After that it’s not even that they’re not the same.” Jamal breathed heavily, backlit by one of the failing emergency lights, Tala’s world was reduced to Jamal’s profile and the great pools of condensation that punctuated each exhale. “They’re not even people anymore.”
“Are they dead?” Tala resented the feebleness of her voice.
“They look it,” Jamal began. “And smell it.”
Tala thought about Peralta, her mentor. Her friend. The Pinoy don’t survive alone, that’s why you never have one Filipino aboard a ship, we know how to look after each other, together we are always close to home. Peralta said that to her once, early after joining the Riyadh. “One of our crewmen died, the one Katja’s father attacked. The reason I had to… kill him.” She’d killed before, but never intentionally. “Do you think…”
“I hope and pray for his soul he stayed dead,” Jamal cut off Tala thickly, then sighed, wrestling with some unspoken thought. “Now is not the time to talk about it.”
Chapter 10
The shafts of florid light emitted by the red supergiant inhabited a portion of the visible light spectrum that ill prepared Tor for his return from the gloom of Murmansk-13. It had taken almost an hour to haul Mihailov back to the Riyadh, the ship a giant, growing shadow against the backdrop of the star. Now sat alone in the antiseptic glare of the Evac Suite, Tor found himself blinking away tears.
He couldn’t be sure it was the light.
Tor sat at the padded table and let the fading steam rising from the coffee cup moisten his face, the flesh still sensitive from space exposure.
Around him, the Evac Suite lay in disarray, the force of the impact had blown the seals on several hermetic wardrobes, numerous EVA suits sat crumpled behind their Perspex doors. Vaguely, Tor thought somebody should rectify the mess before the remaining functional suits were corroded by the atmosphere. That would have been Stewart’s job on the maintenance system.
Another man lost. It was becoming surreal. Tor shook his head slowly, working out the resolute bubbles that fizzed within his neck muscles. Concentrating on the pain of his swollen joints so to avoid the realization.