In the corner of his eye, Tor saw the child sized black and red striped replica jersey of Vitoria, Olaf’s favourite football team, hung in the wardrobe. It was the small memento from home he always allowed space for when packing to join ship. Olaf had grown away from Brazil’s national pasttime in his teens, due in no small part to his unnatural deficit in talent for the game. Tor wondered if he’d been home he could have nurtured the boy into a soccer player.
As he stared through the eye of the noose and into oblivion, he doubted it. He stepped onto the footboard of his bed, slipped the noose around his head and remembered what a dreadful footballer he’d been as a boy growing up in Norway.
Jan Nilsen was normally a morning person but today, as his alarm stridently sounded for o-six hundred, he just wanted to keep his eyes closed. It had been a disturbed night and as he rubbed the yellowish mucus crust riming his eyelashes, he wondered how it had found time to accumulate and clog his lids.
The cold beyond his bed sheets was pernicious, bypassing flesh and lancing straight to the bone. Nilsen had awoken countless times in a tent in the snow mottled wilderness of inland Troms on a winters hunting excursion, but there was something direct and brutal about the cold in space. It sneaked passed the survival instinct leaving little trace to fight.
Nilsen quickly piled as many layers of clothes over his wiry body as their size would allow. The sinuous nature of his physique providing little natural protection. He recalled his rotund mother bemoaning his terminally emaciated condition. “You eat and you eat, but you never gain an ounce of fat. I wish I had your genes, the neighbours must think I starve you for my own greed!”
Suitably attired, he sat at the Perspex coffee table. Scattered across the transparent top was the Polaroid pictures Nilsen salvaged from inside Mihailov’s EVA suit. Bloody fingerprints were smeared across some of the corners and borders of the pictures, but miraculously, even in the low light, many retained a perceivable level of clarity. Nilsen squared the photographs up, keeping them neat and ordered.
Most of the pictures showed a deathly pale and comatose girl Nilsen understood to be Falmendikov’s daughter. Blue lips and acne scarred skin. The last photo depicted the girls twisted visage. A look of agonized terror, her flesh burning phosphorous white in the camera flash, ice blue eyes knifing through the backscatter. Nilsen quaked against the cold and turned the photograph face down.
Last night he and Second Engineer Pettersson had studied the photographs determined to make a plan of action. They were disappointed to find Mihailov had only managed to take a single, oversaturated picture of the station schematic. Making do, Nilsen and Pettersson made a simple copy of what could be discerned in the Polaroid and then made a list of essentials required to reach escape velocity.
They’d already decided that the chances of reaching populated space was slim, a starchart salvaged from the bridge was fastened to Nilsen’s pinboard and showed they were stranded in the boondocks of Reticuluum. But if they could reach a busy spacelane, they could activate their emergency beacons and hope that a passing vessel picked up the signal. Most modern deep space vessels would wake crew members from cryo upon receipt of a distress message.
Both he and Pettersson knew the chance of survival were diminishing rapidly, but with scrubbers and cryo fluid they could drift for months. They also knew they must act now, the Captains corroded mental state was yet to truly effect the crew, but Mihailov’s deteriorating health and the surmounting deaths would. Soon the remaining men would slip into a state of shock induced apathy. Already Diego, Hernandez and Aidan had shuttered themselves away and Sammy was acting almost as strange as Tor.
Keeping his mind occupied immunized Nilsen to the atmosphere of dwindling hope. Pettersson would soon round up the crew for briefing this afternoon, the Swede oddly unperturbed by circumstance, and their plan could be put into action. Nilsen felt the lightness in his stomach gnaw at him, while he feared the crew were already slipping into an inert stupor his greatest concern was Tor. His and Pettersson’s actions were tantamount to mutiny, surreptitiously they’d excised the ships Master from the chain of command.
It was a necessity, Nilsen reminded himself as he paced in a neat square around the perimeter of the coffee table. Tor was no longer firm of mind, had not so much as delegated control of the situation, or proposed a solution. Like the rest of the crew he’d become emasculated by fear.
Nilsen already knew that feeling, before the impact. But he’d found strength in the growing adversity and as such it fell upon him to rouse the crew. But first he would have to talk to Tor, either seek his friends support, or act against. Jan Nilsen wasn’t ready to abandon his life to spare his friend; he was due to be married for a second time next month, his two girls from his previous marriage would be flower girls. This, he was determined, would only be a delay in plans.
Nilsen stopped pacing and sank into the leatherette recliner. He resisted the urge to draw himself into a ball, to shield himself from the penetrative cold of space. Instead he poured a shot of aquavit into a still-sticky glass and glared at the syrupy ring left beneath, despoiling his Perspex table top.
Just one, he thought.
Chapter 15
Tala’s eyes rolled about in their sockets, her eyelids fluttered. The room she regained conscience in was dark. Dim light filtered beneath a crack in the door and shafted across the deck. She groaned, both her head and her nose pounded, a viscous syrup of blood and mucus was spattered from her nostrils and had dried to the skin around her lips. She was forced to breathe through her mouth. Tala tried to touch her face, assess the damage, but her arms were bound behind her back. Thick plastic cables ties bit into the flesh of her wrist, her hands were numb through loss of circulation. She tried to wiggle her fingers.
Tala made an exploratory effort to move, but found her ankles had also been bound by cable ties, which in turn were linked to the ties shackling her wrists. She was on her knees and immobile. She felt the glass splinters from Gennady’s cell burrow into the thin skin covering her knee cap. The metallic tang of her own blood coated her throat.
“You awake?”
The rasping question startled Tala. In the gloom she could make out a vague figure at the opposite side of the room, bound like her, on his knees. Wayward follicles of long hair caught the fragile light. “Andrei, is that you?”
“You remember!” The excitement in Andrei’s reply was testament to his resilience. A stark comfort in their present situation.
“Where are we?” Tala’s voice crackled, her mouth dry. As she played her tongue across the back of her teeth she found a couple loose. “What happened?”
“Kirill has seized control,” Andrei answered flatly.
Beyond the door the shaft of light was occasionally broken by the movement of men. The rattle of the iron bars barricading them inside the District was louder than the endless rhythm of the generator. The muffled moans of the besieging infected was incessant.
“Where is everyone else?”
“Other rooms,” Andrei appeared to shrug. “Pavel is dead. I think Gennady and Jamal are being held in the office.”
“Where’s Katja?”
“I…” Andrei’s voice broke and then he fell silent.
Tala felt bloody bile rise in her gullet. “Where is she?”
The outline of Andrei’s shoulders slumped, but he didn’t answer. In the neighbouring office Tala could hear a wet slapping sound and grunting almost indiscernible from the cadence of the District. Then she could hear the delicate, pained sobbing of Katja as the metronomic pounding increased in speed and intensity. Another grunt, Ilya.