Where neat, orderly, orangey beige plastic brightened the banal space Diego called his own, Hernandez created a dark, inhospitable and vividly antireligious personal fortress. Diego supposed it provided ample deterrent for repeated inspection, Hernandez’s habitual drug usage was common knowledge throughout the company, yet he’d survived three voyages with the Saudi’s apparently unmolested.
Diego cringed as Hernandez switched on his ghetto blaster, acerbic guitar feedback bled from the speakers proceeded by lo-fi garage production punk. The noise shook Aidan from his near slumber, the beer bottle, already perilously angled in the cadets drowsy state, tipped violently at the jagged sound of powerviolence. The young Australian shot Hernandez a glance, but if Hernandez noticed he didn’t say anything. Instead, Hernandez pogo danced around the small cabin, windmilling his arms and banging his head with reckless abandon, oblivious to his company and the flat Pilsner now soaking into his bedding.
Diego paid him little heed. Distantly, he decided the aggressive paroxysms of Latino hardcore punk were preferable to the suffocating, melancholy silence of the vessel. The impenetrable dead air was beginning to swallow hope like a little black hole forming within the heart of the ship.
Two days had passed since James Stewart died. Diego had been their lookout and their radio man, their safety was his responsibility and he’d failed. Diego had become used to failure in his life, but he’d never cost a person their life. A feeling of deep nausea overwhelmed him each and every time he attempted to process the scenario. Replaying the impact in his mind over and over, his abiding memory before darkness was the fear Diego had felt for himself and himself alone.
Then he came to, overhead lights were blinking. Diego came to rest on the rubberized laminate of the bridge deck, the radio station chair having tipped over at some point. Diego wasn’t sure if he’d lost consciousness or the period of impact was marked by a brief and total blackout of the ships electronics.
There was an alarm sounding somewhere on the bridge – an electronically synthesised woman’s voice “Warning, hull breach. Warning, hull breach…” repeated over and over gaining clarity as his dull tinnitus subsided. The crash of metal on metal briefly deafened Diego.
Chief Engineer Jan Nilsen had been thrown clear across the bridge, but was already up. Diego felt a hand grasp his jumper neck, tightening the fabric around his throat and hauling him upward. Diego staggered to his feet, bewildered. Wild eyed, Nilsen screamed into his face the words a shocked jumble of English and Norwegian. Diego understood the pointing up and felt bile stinging his throat.
The concussion of the impact was still rocking Diego as he stumbled to the radio desk. The headset had been torn from the unit and thrown into the shifting shadows of the bridge, frayed copper wires were all that protruded from the jack. Diego switched to speaker and frantically tried to contact the team on the monkey island. He felt tears welling in his eyes as his futile efforts were met with dead air.
That was when Nilsen ordered Pettersson to kill the engines. That was when they were all plunged into silence.
Ten minutes would pass before Hernandez and Aidan emerged from the airlock. Diego was already helping Nilsen suit up when they lumbered sheepishly from the lock. Nilsen stared at them, each propping the other up, when Hernandez shook his head. “He’s gone, Chief.”
Diego felt his jaw tighten and he slipped into the growing darkness around the comms station. Surrounded by dead radio equipment and watching impotently.
The cadets suit was covered in tiny, glinting gold fibrewire particles, miniscule slices of metal debris jagging the external layers. He moved stiffly and didn’t remove his helmet, but his sun visor had been lifted and revealed a mask of pain. Hernandez limped, his magboots ripped in half and his face slicked with sweat. Neither asked what had happened to Diego. Diego prayed they hadn’t seen him being self indulgent in the shadows, consumed by his own shortcomings as Nilsen and Sammy helped them to the medical bay.
Nilsen returned to the bridge forty five minutes later, Diego was still sat in the darkness. Looking at the silent radio equipment, looking at the airlock, insensate and waiting. Stewart hadn’t returned, Nilsen was ashen faced. He informed Diego the hull breach had been patched by Pettersson, that the cadet had some badly wrenched neck muscles but that he and Hernandez would be OK, then Nilsen relieved him.
“Diego, don’t blame yourself,” Nilsen said as Diego departed the bridge.
Don’t blame yourself. In truth it hadn’t occurred to Diego to blame himself, up to that point the absence of Stewart hadn’t sunk in, just that he had, in some capacity, failed.
But Stewart was truly gone. Diego hadn’t much cared for the cocky Brit his superior in rank and junior in age, but his absence had been attributed to him.
Diego didn’t remember returning to his cabin, the low lit quiet of the ship was like a hazy dream. He’d stared at the crucifix his grandmother gave him as a boy, the sole adornment on the bulkheads of his cabin and found sleep remarkably easily.
Nobody rang his cabin at seven in the morning the next day and in sleep the hours slipped by. When he finally awoke it was cold, no duties had been doled out, no work to be done. It was if the crew were in a state of chrysalis. Diego took the crucifix down and felt the icy gold plating absorb the warmth of his hand.
In a loop, he played the scenario over again and again. Why hadn’t he seen the debris? Why had he lost comms with the party? Something, some failure that even in hindsight escaped him. He clutched the crucifix and tossed it onto his cabin desk. Diego spent the afternoon dry heaving and crying. Then Hernandez had knocked.
Diego braced himself, at the best of times Hernandez was volatile and this was not the best of times. Worse, Hernandez had every right to feel aggrieved, Diego was a trained radio officer, he’d had the radar and the comms at his disposal, he should have given forewarning. But he’d missed it and the people it truly cost were stood before him… or never would be again.
“Hey man, you look like you could use a drink,” Hernandez lifted an air cold bottle of Pilsner from behind his back, Aidan stood with his neck crooked to the side behind him. “Captain’s donated them to the crew and that looks like it’s me, you and the kid.”
Diego did need a drink and he needed company and he sensed Hernandez did too.
And that was how he and Aidan were drawn into Hernandez’s usually private sanctum.
Hernandez had already cut his first line when Diego cautiously stepped into the cabin, so decidedly at odds with his prudish dwelling. It was then that Diego learned of the return of Tor’s party.
“They brought Mihailov in, that’s when I had to bounce. His hand was fucking ice all I could see were tendons and shit that looked like frozen meat chunks and I’m pretty sure his skeleton, man,” Hernandez motored through the recollection. “Me and the kid here just left, they gave Aidan some painkillers and we bounced man, right out of the medical bay. No point staying there any longer, we didn’t need the help like he did. His suit man, just fucking covered in blood.”
“How is he now?” Diego asked.
Hernandez looked away, Aidan tried to bow his head but couldn’t, his neck was covered in livid purple and black bruises that contrasted heavily with his fair freckled complexion. Instead he stared at the beer label and spoke in monotone. “Sammy said he’s getting sicker, he said that people are ill over at that station. Captain told him.”
“Ill?”
Hernandez just shrugged and started pacing his cabin. “We ain’t got no doctor to look after him, either. Sammy and the Chief have turned Florence fucking Nightingale. I’m sure if sec were awake that would inspire his confidence.”