Those thoughts fired a fear far greater than he’d felt before. He had to wake up.
Now he felt tired and his head muggy with early morning drinking. He’d found Pettersson stalking the corridors as if looking busy was the same as being busy. He’d already informed the crew about the meeting. That left Tor. Nilsen knocked again.
It dawned on Nilsen that perhaps Tor had managed to straighten his head out, that in fact he hadn’t succumb to the desperation of their situation. But a more pertinent alarm rung in his mind. That something was perhaps very wrong indeed.
Where the upper decks were cold, the medical bay and storage were positively brittle. Water vapour had crystallized, dusting the surfaces with a patina of fine ice that glinted in the faint emergency lighting. The gelid atmosphere seemed to crackle with febrile electricity. There was a distinct crispness with each step he took as he threaded between the empty, pill form cryobeds.
Nilsen peered into the ward and his heart skipped. The hospital bed was empty. Wires and electrodes, torn from the flesh, spidered the vacated sheets. Nilsen was preparing to enter the room when Mihailov hove into the viewport, naked. Nilsen caught his breath.
Mihailov stared blankly at Nilsen through the Plexiglas, tendrils of ice webbing the reinforced plastic. The black coagulate in Mihailov’s veins had liquefied, but his arm had died in the process, the skin was waxy and grey, translucent flesh revealed a flaccid vasculature and the necrotizing infection appeared to be spreading across his torso. Through the glass Nilsen could hear the rattling, hacking breaths of Mihailov as the Bulgarian regarded him with a look between absence and fear. His right eyeball was blackened as blood vessels ruptured throughout his body. Everywhere his flesh slackened, his muscles limp. Mihailov appeared to be rotting alive.
“Studeno mi e, studeno mi e,” Mihailov slurred, his head lolling around his neck.
Nilsen put his hand on the glass, instantly a voracious focus entered Mihailov’s widening eyes, the second mates lips curled back. Quickly, Nilsen withdrew his hand and initiated the quarantine lock on the ward keypad – 2105. The liquid crystal display altered from OCCUPIED to IN QUARANTINE.
“I’m sorry, Atanas.” Perhaps I should have let Tor operate on you.
Nilsen walked from the medical bay as the meeting time approached. He’d not found Tor and a large part of him was relieved. He could deal with the Captain later.
Behind him, Mihailov watched him go, his disintegrating brain struggling to process the alien wave of instincts and impulses driving his trapped body. He was just so cold, so hungry and he could feel the wiring of his mind slowly fizzle away inside his skull.
The remnants of the crew was a disheartening sight. Swaddled in old, torn, green emergency parkas stained by years of inadequate storage and as many layers of extra clothing they could find, the four men watched Nilsen enter the mess hall with bleary eyes. He couldn’t shake the image of hobo Michelin men.
Three seats had been placed at the front, Pettersson occupied one, he stood to greet Nilsen looking surprisingly hale, the other two sat vacant. Nilsen assumed one was for him, the other for Tor.
At the back, Sammy busied himself tidying the mess hall, tables and chairs had skittered across the room during the impact. Dented silver plated serving dishes and cutlery glinted in the low light, scattered across the deck. Sammy looked as if he’d not rested in days and probably hadn’t, abandoning his trademark whites for conspicuously informal attire. The steward sleepwalked in the background in a purple dressing gown that reached beyond the Saudi inc. parka, tickling his ankles. He cut a sorry figure – they all did.
“Sammy, take a seat please,” said Nilsen. “In fact, all of you come in closer, there’s no point concerning ourselves with rank anymore.” He could feel Pettersson shrink beside him, the Swede having probably set the seats in position to advertise his newfound seniority.
“I can see that,” said Hernandez, looking at the empty chair beside Nilsen. “Are we going to wait for the Captain?”
Nilsen let the chatter of chair legs scraping over linoleum subside before addressing the now circled group. Hernandez was the last to take his seat. “Guys, as I’m sure you are aware, our situation is critical. I would like nothing more than to be absolved of any responsibility for this clusterfuck of a voyage, but the bottom line is I can’t. The Captain is still in a state of shock and every day we spend consuming stores and draining our auxiliary generators is a day less we survive in a recoverable position.”
“So I guess we aren’t going to be getting any heating then?” Asked Diego through chattering teeth.
“The boiler needs the engine online, myself and Pettersson have ascertained that the fuel lines are sound,” Nilsen saw faces brighten, “but we’ve decided that we will not expend our limited fuel supply until we’re ready to leave.”
There was a palpable groan.
“If we don’t heat the vessel soon, we won’t need any cryo fluid,” Hernandez quipped.
“Heating is the least of our concerns,” replied Nilsen. “We’ve known since day one, we’d need to scavenge supplies from the station if we wanted to leave and even though the scouting mission was a disaster, our situation hasn’t changed. If anything it’s became worse.”
Heads bowed and faces blanched, memories of colleagues lost and near death experiences entranced the crewmen. Nilsen steeled himself to unveil his and Pettersson’s plan, when the mess hall door opened. Tor looked at the little gathering, he’d shaved and looked surprisingly well and rested. Nilsen held his breath, but Tor’s expression remained impassive. “Carry on, Chief.”
In silence, Nilsen and the crew watched Tor retrieve the empty chair from beyond the circle. Sheepishly, they shuffled outward, affording the Captain space to join the powwow. Discouraged, Nilsen suspected the crew were now perceiving the clandestine meeting as mutinous rather than essential.
Well damn it, what was done was done. Nilsen hoped Tor could forgive him in the long run but more urgent was his need to convince the crew that returning to Murmansk-13 was a necessity.
“You said our situation had become worse, Chief.” Sammy broke the silence. The eldest crewman left alive, he of all appeared least perturbed by the Captain’s unexpected entrance but most perturbed by the prospect of leaving the Riyadh.
Nilsen cleared his throat as Tor sat beside him. “I assume you were about to propose a plan, Chief?”
“Myself and Oscar have been studying some pictures Mihailov took aboard the space station,” Nilsen thought briefly of the second mate freezing and dying slowly in the bowels of their ship. “One of them was a schematic of the station, it wasn’t the most detailed shot, but we’ve made a map from what we could see and filled in the gaps with what makes sense.”
Beside him, Pettersson shuffled a number of copies of the crude, colour co-ordinated maps they’d created the previous evening and began distributing them around the circle.
“You guessed,” assessed Hernandez, rotating the laminated diagram from the right way up to upside down.
“Basically.”
“Why not ask the Captain, or Sec?” Hernandez averted the passive gaze of the Captain.
“There wasn’t time,” Nilsen ran bony fingers over his face, stubble had grown into a nascent beard. “Mihailov is ill, very ill. He needs help and so do we. I can’t just sit here and linger. Even with the crew diminished and rationing in place our stores will be expended within a month. Even if we bring the engine back online and start heating the vessel we will drain our fuel supply within six weeks and for what? Nobody is coming for us here. Here doesn’t fucking exist on the starcharts, there’s no reason any vessel will come here and without comms we can’t signal for help, all we have left are distress beacons and they have a limited effective range and lifespan. We need to get the Riyadh into a major shipping lane, near to other vessels and to do that we need to achieve escape velocity and get away from this planet and station and out of this system.”