“Where’s the Doc?”
“I guess that was who was on the lifeline when that debris hit us,” Hernandez stopped and looked at Diego with a surprising absence of malice. “Nice catch with that one by the way, cabrón. A heads up would have been appreciated.”
Hernandez turned away with a smirk and resumed his pacing. Diego resisted the urge to defend himself with a flurry of inadequate excuses circling his mind like a Wheel of Fortune. He knew none would suffice, instead he recalled the person on the lifeline, struggling across the clamps before the Chief arrived on the bridge. Was it that distraction that had caused him to miss the debris? Or the Chief startling him? “Why did she go over there? Did she make it?”
“How the fuck would I know, man,” Hernandez spat, “and I’m damned if I care, that whore abandoned us. Fuck her.”
Diego pressed himself into the sofa and away from Hernandez’s aggression. It was only then as he sat there, slowly coming to terms with his surroundings and the sequence of events, that the conspicuous absence of Peralta and Tala occurred to him. The Captain’s party had returned, Hernandez had said so, hadn’t he? “Where’s Bose and Tala?”
Hernandez stopped dead. Even the pained cadet, on the brink of sleep and dosed up on codeine, managed to shoot Hernandez a blanched look. “They didn’t make it back, man.” Hernandez replied quietly.
Diego felt his lip wobble, he quickly pursed the beer bottle to his mouth and swigged. Warsteiner clotted at the lump in his throat. He coughed. “Didn’t make it back?”
“That’s what I said, yeah.”
Suddenly, the silence of the ship grew loud. Diego felt blood pounding through his head, the sharp fuzz of tinnitus returned as if the debris had struck anew, only now, Diego was absolved of responsibility. He forgot the inadequacies and grief that had consumed him in the wake of the impact. Now it was he who was aggrieved, the sense of loss was still burning, but it was no longer burning out of sympathy for himself. Diego realized he had not grieved for Stewart, but his hand in Stewart’s death. He tried to scold himself for his selfishness, but he couldn’t. Instead he thought of Tala.
“Diego,” Aidan spoke sleepily, “Tala isn’t dead. She’s still on the station. I overheard the Chief and the Sammy talking about it.”
“You sure?”
“He’s sure,” replied Hernandez, cutting his second line of speed.
Diego felt his grip tighten around the neck of his beer bottle, his mind rushing with jumbled thoughts. That same beer had grown hand warm like the crucifix from his cabin as Hernandez music drowned out the silence and gloom.
“We have to do something,” Diego shouted over the raw music, slamming his beer bottle down on the speed dusted cabin table, white powder whipping away in little spindrifts. Pilsner frothed out the top like a high school science project.
Panicked, Hernandez grabbed toilet paper from his bathroom and tried to contain the spill. “Watch my gear, pendejo!”
“No, fuck this,” Diego turned the music down. “We can’t just sit here drinking beer, getting smashed. Not if Tala is over there, we have to do something!”
“Oh fuck you, man. Just because you gotta boner for her.”
“No fuck you man. Fuck all your bullshit. What you going to do, just sit here and wait to die?” Diego rounded on Hernandez who was still trying to protect the small zip locked plastic bag on the cabin table. Truthfully, Diego wasn’t angry at Hernandez, but his knuckles whitened all the same. He needed an outlet for the flash flood of emotions threatening to overwhelm him.
“Hey man, back the hell off. She’s my… friend too, but last time I checked Diego, you weren’t Captain. Nowhere damn near it and neither am I.”
“Both of you fucking chill out.” Awkwardly, the cadet pushed himself upright on the bed and stared at Diego and Hernandez. “We’re all stuck in this together, going crazy isn’t going to help things.”
Diego slunk back to the couch, Hernandez relaxed his posture and finished mopping the frothing mixture of beer and amphetamines from the table top. Forlornly, he looked at the beer soaked tissue and newly clean tabletop. “He’s right, man.”
“Sorry, Hernandez,” mumbled Diego, although he knew someone had to act. The ships life support systems and supply would run short soon. And if things were so bad that Mihailov was critically ill and the Bosun was dead, how long did Tala have on the diseased station?
A knock on the door drew Diego back to the present. Hernandez, Diego and Aidan shot each other glances as if they’d been caught smoking in the school bathroom. Hernandez killed the music. The knock came again.
“Hernandez, you want to open up? I know you’re in there I need to tell you something.” It was Pettersson, the Second Engineer.
Unaccustomed to so much activity around his personal space, Hernandez froze. Instead Diego answered the door.
In the dim of the corridor, Oscar Pettersson stood like a poster child for the Aryan race. Rangy, chisel jawed and flaxen blonde hair, slicked tightly back above a neat fade. He seemed surprised to see Diego in the basement environs of Hernandez’s cabin. “Oh, hey Diego. Didn’t expect to see you here. Is Hernandez there?”
“We’re all here,” replied Diego, flatly. “What’s left of us. You want to speak with Hernandez on his own?”
“No, it actually saves me hunting around for everyone.” Pettersson paused, waiting for an invitation. “Can I come in?”
Diego stepped aside.
Hernandez was failing to look nonchalant in the middle of the cabin, covered in amphetamine dust, tissue coated with beer and speed still in his hand as Pettersson slipped into the room. Belatedly the Swede noticed the cadet supine on Hernandez’s beer moistened bunk.
“News?” Asked Diego, standing by the door.
“Sort of,” Pettersson replied, trying to address all three in the cabin simultaneously, “Chief Nilsen is calling a crew meeting this afternoon, fifteen hundred in the mess hall. He wants everyone present.” He eyed the numerous bottles of beer scattered about the room. “And as sober as possible.”
“Is the Chief assuming command of the Riyadh?” Asked Hernandez, slowly jamming the soaking wet tissue into his jeans.
“No,” replied Pettersson, brusquely.
“Is there a plan to rescue Tala?”
Pettersson turned to regard Diego, piercing blue eyes ruddy with sleeplessness, but his appearance otherwise unperturbed despite their situation. “Just come to the damn meeting. You can ask questions then.”
And with that, Pettersson made for the door, closing it behind him.
Hernandez and Diego looked at each other and listened to Pettersson’s curt footsteps disappear down the corridor. “Action?”
Hernandez lifted two fresh, air-cold beers from the stash and opened them using the edge of the table. He handed one to Diego, “Here’s hoping!” he raised the bottle in salute and hit play on the stereo.
Aidan and Diego groaned.
Nilsen pressed his ear to the door. It was like pressing flesh to ice. Beyond the closed Formica he heard nothing. Like the soul of the ship, the Captain’s cabin was silent. He had knocked twice, now his hand hovered above the handle, but Nilsen relented. He peered at his Casio; fourteen forty. Nilsen had spent the morning building up his courage to speak to Tor. Now his head was light and his breath smelt of aniseed and caraway.
He hadn’t imbibed much, only enough to warm his core. Nilsen was determined to maintain his wits and scared by the Herculean effort required to stopper the bottle. Instead he had fallen into an uneasy sleep on his recliner filled with disturbed half dreams and punctuated by the ever grasping cold, eventually he’d returned to bed. Hopelessness and lassitude grasped him for the first time since the impact. As he lay fully clothed in his bunk, Nilsen stared at the bottle of Linie Aquavit and thought about how easy it would be to submit to the frozen silence enshrouding his ship.