Still, Tor eyed the stairwell wearily. His body had received little respite, but his legs seemed to possess a mind of their own. Sleep and rest had failed. Closing his eyes was no longer an option. Even in waking the silence of the ship was filled with the sepulchral moans indelibly imprinted in his mind. Now his body acted on autopilot, whether it was an act of self preservation or subconscious avoidance, Tor couldn’t discern.
He rubbed his hot, sleep starved eyes with the meat of his palms and paced forward.
Bones and muscles ground inside him as he padded up the Riyadh’s steps. His hand gripped the banister, hauling him forward as he’d hauled himself along the lifeline, Mihailov under his arm. Every other step, Tor swivelled his head. In the dimmed lights, shadows played within his peripheral vision, eidetic phantoms – memories of the infected in the stairwell of Murmansk-13.
Up had been bad.
The further Tor ascended, the deeper the gloom became, working spotlights growing scarcer in the sporadically used spaces of the ship. At the top a reinforced door separated the vessels conning station from the rest of the ship. Tor placed his ear against the cold steel, beyond he felt the heart of the vessel slow down as if it were an organism entering suspended animation. He opened the door.
The debris had struck the Riyadh on the starboard side, just aft of the vessels collision bulkhead, which of itself formed the dividing frame for the bridge and the rest of the vessel. In theory, the bulk of the crew could survive a bow docking failure in which the bridge was crushed with the rest of the vessel acting as a pressurized liferaft.
It had been a glancing blow, but severe enough to partially wrench the vessels emergency docking clamps askew of the docking ring. It also placed a pronounced kink in the clamping arms themselves and a colossal prang in the starboard shell plating. Fortunately the plating had held, save a few parted rivets and some torn aluminium which were easily patched before the vessel depressurized.
Tor noticed the curious realignment of the Riyadh during his escape from Murmansk-13, but in the terror and urgency of his line walk, he hadn’t completely registered it. Now, staring out at the new aspect of the station he came to realize how close his crew had came to complete disaster. How close he and Mihailov came to being stranded aboard Murmansk-13.
Forever.
Tala and Katja still were, he reminded himself.
The bridge was dark save for a distant binary pulsar occasionally scanning the windscreen with irregularly patterned pallid white light like a celestial lighthouse, silver lining the central console and radio station. All systems were placed on standby by the Chief Engineer, their CRT’s and LED’s dead. Even the chronometer was put to sleep.
Looking at the dead digital display of the chronometer, Tor felt time become even less substantial. If the ship had somehow been transported to Hell, he imagined the chronometer would show nothing but blackness. For eternity. The suspension of time caused chills to wrack Tor. For just a moment he forgot in space, time was a mere function.
On the deck, star charts, deck logs and space fairing publications littered the rubberized deck covering. In between, office stationary and navigational tools further cluttered the once orderly bridge. The disarranged objects cast angular shadows in the erratic binary starlight.
Tor began retrieving the items, memorizing their location during each light phase, then recovering them in the dark. It was a hypnotizing and mind clearing activity to focus upon. He was holding a pair of antique brass nautical dividers in his hand when he saw a second figure, shifting in the ambit of the bridge, the dark shape barely discernible from the shadows. This phantom was too vivid to be unreal.
“Is someone there?” Tor thrust the dividers out in front of him, his voice sounding brittle.
A shape shifted from the far side of the bridge. “It’s me Captain, Sammy.”
Tor kept the dividers pointed toward the shape. “What are you doing on the bridge Sammy?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” light poured through the windscreen, the diminutive Chief Steward stood staring wide eyed at the dividers pointed at his face. His usually neatly slicked hair spiralled and curled in mad directions, his pencil moustache was untrimmed. He wore no whites, just a vest and checked lounge pants. “I thought I’d try and straighten the old girl out.”
Reluctantly, Tor lowered the dividers as the bridge slipped back into darkness. “Why didn’t you tell me you were up here Sammy, you…” scared me. He let the sentence drift into the cool air.
“I’m sorry Captain, I was hoping you would go away.”
Tor laughed despite himself, when the light hit Sammy’s face again, he realized the old steward had been crying. “Carry on with what you were doing.”
Sammy wandered off, head bowed, without further explanation. Tor watched him picking up the items that were scattered during the impact. He walked stiffly and bent slowly, arthritic knees and a bad back would retire him at the end of this voyage, whether he wanted it or not. Tor knew little about the man, like most of the Filipinos he flew with, but he bore a superficial fondness for the Chief Steward. He was in his mid sixties and like Peralta began life a sailor. He’d probably spent the best part of thirty years at sea or in space, cryogenic flight coming far too late in his career to preserve a mock youth.
Tor kept the dividers at hand and sat in the Captain’s chair. The old seat shifted unexpectedly under his weight. The force of the impact had apparently loosened the long seized gimbals upon which the chair was mounted. Tor found his hands sinking into the worn upholstery, brass dividers skittering from his grip and into the darkness at his feet.
“I cannot sleep in my cabin,” Sammy began as if talking to nobody in particular. “Too many memories there. Since the bad things began, I find my memories playing tricks on me. This place feels wrong.”
Tor looked out the windshield, abaft them the supergiant lay, lighting the gunmetal grey space station with its weak red radiance. The ablated scars glowed like great suppurating wounds. “It is wrong,” he murmured.
“Why are you awake at this time?” Sammy asked.
“Same, I guess. I couldn’t sleep.” Instinctively, Tor reached for his concealed cigarettes, then remembered they were gone. All gone. “Listen, I’m sorry about Peralta. I know you two were friends. I… There was nothing we could do.”
In the corner of his eye he saw Sammy pause, his posture stiffen. “He was a good man,” he faltered. “A good friend.”
Tor heard the agony in Sammy’s reply and found no platitudes to spare. Instead he stared at the station, iridescent in the redshift, strange shadows danced glacially across the scoured metalwork. The shadow of the Riyadh was an elongated oblong with rounded edges that due to the disposition of the star, stretched across the lower portion of the central command capsule and dangled off the spoked wagon wheel silhouette of the docking ring.
“What happened over there, Captain?” Sammy’s nasally voice trembled with sadness and fear.
“There are people over there Sammy and… and, they’re very ill,” Tor winced at the station through the windscreen. “Something is very broken there.”
“But we will have to go back there, won’t we?”
Tor looked at Sammy, small and fearful, stood at the edges of darkness the binary starlight failed to penetrate and got up. Angry and scared he stalked away from the Steward and the crimson visage of Murmansk-13, only pausing at the doorway to answer. “If we want to survive. Yes.”