Tala awoke with a start. The conduit had grown cold and so had Katja. The girl lay asleep in her arms, her breathing was shallow and she trembled against the chill air. Behind them, Oleg and Jamal were leant against the conduit bulkhead, shoulders drawn up to their ears. They slept with their arms crossed and pressed against their chest.
Tala dabbed her lip, liquid crimson slicked her finger as she looked at it in the weak light. The salty metallic tang of blood filled her mouth, leeching from the numerous ulcers that dotted the inside of her lip. She hadn’t thought about the pain as she’d fell into Katja’s arms.
“Hey,” Tala shook Katja, the girls mouth opened, but she remained asleep. Tala’s head felt heavy, her body lethargic. After the ecstasy of their shared kiss she’d crashed. She’d been running on fumes for days, now her tank was empty. She shook Katja again.
Katja rolled over, her movements sluggish. Languidly she opened lustreless blue eyes and looked at Tala, for one terrifying second she appeared bereft of recognition before a small smile curled her lips. “Hey,” she said softly, then her face creased up in discomfort. “I’m cold and I hurt.”
“I know,” replied Tala as she lay back down, pressing herself against the soft yielding flesh of Katja. Vigorously she rubbed her hands up and down the girls torso, trying to imbue what little heat she had left to offer. Tala felt static crackle as the velour of her jumpsuit charged against Katja’s matching attire. In her arms Katja felt newly weak, weaker than when they’d fled from District Four.
“You never said why you want to survive,” Katja looked windward into the darkness of the conduit that lay ahead.
“I’m a survivor, it’s what I do,” Tala nuzzled the straggly blonde hair of the girl. “People think I’m tough, but I’ve had to be. I want to get back to my crew, back to my ship. They’re the only people left to miss me.”
“I’d miss you,” Katja replied, sleepily.
“You barely know me.”
“You’ve cared for me. Even when I was crazy. I could feel it.”
Tala drew the girl as close as she could to herself. “And that’s the other reason I’ve got left to survive. I have to get you to my ship, we have a hospital and a doctor. I’ve got to get you fixed up and back home.”
Katja had drifted back to sleep in her arms. Distantly, Tala wondered how long she would hold the girls interest back on Earth, home was very different places for them. She imagined Katja had friends and family long lost to her. What did she have? The detached sense of envy rankled Tala, she doubted there was a place for a poor Filipina street urchin in a world where Katja wasn’t being perused by desiccated former co-workers.
Tala tried to push the feelings away, crush them deep within but she felt her fists furl against the girls stomach. She was kidding herself if she wasn’t anything but a guardian for Katja, until they were safely back on Earth. A protector. Maybe that’s what Katja saw in Tala.
Perhaps that would be for the best, Tala had planned on ship hopping for a while, until she had enough money to move away, from her father, from Marcario Garcia. She could start a new life someplace else or become institutionalized, she didn’t know if she cared which one it was.
“You OK?” Jamal crept behind her but retained a safe distance. Tala turned to see him at the cusp of the shadows, the whites of his eyes gleaming against his dark skin and the lightless space beyond.
“I don’t know,” replied Tala, honestly. She let her hand relax.
“What about Katja?”
“She’s asleep,” Tala could feel the girls chest rising and falling gently within her arms, she levered herself up and looked at Katja. She was serene, her face pallid. “She needs a doctor.”
Jamal nodded sadly. “I’ll wake Oleg.” His bulk made manoeuvring in any direction but forward difficult within the narrow conduit and beneath the scuffle of fire retardant foam, the gentle sound of flexing aluminium could be heard. As Jamal turned he paused. “Tala, where are we going to go?”
“There’s only one place left,” replied Tala, never averting her eyes from the girl. “We’ll make for the airlock and await rescue. Either we make it back to the Riyadh or we space ourselves.”
They slipped past the darkened, recessed entranceway to District Six a rusting sign read Склад – Stores. Tor’s party would retrace their steps later, first he’d insisted on escorting the engineering group to one of the four corridors that fed into central command, the little improvised maps suggested it would be somewhere between Districts Six and Seven, the main arteries of the station effectively quartering the outer ring.
The infected were in District Four, at least most of them. Tor had traced their spastic-gaited and gore covered footfalls into the still open pneumatic doors of the administrative module. The liquid crystal still displayed the Cyrillic for quarantine, although Tor had learnt that the stations shutdown appeared completely optional and capricious.
Now the crew of the Riyadh left new tracks in the fine, undisturbed dust.
Somehow, after all he’d witnessed on his first foray aboard the station, Murmansk-13 felt dead, deader in fact than when he first traced Nikolai Falmendikov’s final living footsteps through the very same, almost featureless corridor. Those footprints were lost forever, swept away by the milling hoards like desert towns lost to the ever advancing dunes. The humanity that those footprints embodied was gone and it served to only amplify the loneliness that gnawed at Tor since he first awoke from cryo. He thought of the noose still hanging above his bed, of Falmendikov’s erased struggle.
Distance was difficult to judge, sparsely adorned grey walls with their painted darker grey stripe curved infinitely into creeping shadow and were broken only occasionally by the passing of one district after another or safety signs in faded fluorescent colours. Lights winked and the air recycling filters wheezed and fluttered unseen. Nilsen had estimated roughly a click between each district, putting the circumference of the station at around thirteen kilometres, far larger than any station Tor had ever set foot upon.
The group walked in silence, twice Tor shushed Hernandez, twice the Mexican had scowled at him, but obeyed. As long as they obeyed. Part of Tor wished an infected crewman would make an appearance, a lone one, badly decomposed and ineffectual as a threat. Something tangible to confirm his fears. All of the crew had seen the blood caked footprints and the airlock bulkhead woodchipped with putrefied bodily effluent, Tor hoped that leant some credence to his warnings, but a kernel of doubt flourished in his head, what if the infected was just some construct of his decaying mind? What if only he was seeing it? Were they all just playing nice like grandchildren visiting their doddering elders?
Ahead the corridor to Central Command appeared. A definite opening that broke the continuity of the otherwise endless curve. Light pooled from the space, suggesting the station had shifted into survival mode, abandoning the outer districts to the cold and gloom as it drew its remaining power to the core. Tor felt a shiver trace a path down his spine.
Tor imagined this had once been a bustling hub of human activity, station crew comingling with the various members of the other districts all busily scooting to and from the heart of Murmansk-13. For a brief second Tor could see the ghosts of those people, freed from their dead bodies, their ethereal beings remained trapped in a purgatory still inhabited by the desiccated shells that once housed them. The spirits were so very lost.
“Your squad should return to stores, begin loading up.” Nilsen whispered, the Chief had walked beside Tor in silence since they’d ventured from the airlock even as they passed the abandoned EVA suit of Nikolai Falmendikov and his severed umbilical.