Words, meaningless in their construct babbled from Tor’s lips as Sammy’s jaw hyper extended, his head snapping back as he lunged forward. Tor screamed into the floor.
Chapter 18
Tala eased the withered and discoloured note from the gore smeared airlock. The cursive writing was almost illegible, blotchy against the degraded paper, but she could make out enough to understand where her little group were to rendezvous. Tala smiled as she plucked the Philippines fridge ornament from the bulkhead, moist paper clinging to its magnetic side.
“Is it from your ship?” Asked Jamal, peering over her shoulder.
“Yes, the Captain has been here,” Tala turned to look at Katja, still hunkered inside the conduit. “They came back for us.” Katja returned her smile, albeit cautiously.
“So where are they?” Jamal replied, leaning into her eye line.
Tala interrogated the note, squinting at the fuzziest words. “He said at the junction between District Seven and Central Command,” Tala looked up from the note, Jamal appeared stricken, his lips parted in anguish. “What’s wrong? Do you know it?”
Jamal nodded, wordlessly at first, then said. “There is something I haven’t told you. I don’t know why, I didn’t think it would be important. At least, I hoped…” Jamal turned to Oleg who stood guard beside their conduit. His face betrayed a darkening knowledge of whatever Jamal was alluding to.
“Jamal?” Tala asked, her brows knotting with concern.
“District Four wasn’t the only band of survivors aboard Murmansk-13,” Jamal began, then paused to look behind him as if expecting the bogeyman to be stood there. “In the months after our transport crashed, two distinct groups coalesced.
“The first you’ve met, Gennady’s group. We were the moderates, the wrongly accused, the petty criminals and dissidents.”
“And Ilya and Kirill,” Tala interrupted.
Jamal grimaced, “Ilya was an outlier, he never belonged. He was one of the last to come into the District Four fold and I think that was because he was too much of a threat to Igor. Kirill was a puppet, the Unseen Hand got to him, told him if he sold us up the river he’d be granted freedom and a return to Earth. I guess he was willing to believe anything after four years.
“Even in these two groups there are factions and agendas, but the numbers are too small. There’s only three options in the group, you can toe the line, try to influence the leader or…”
“Or?”
Jamal smiled mischievously. “Or you walk out the door and you die, alone. You kill yourself, maybe by becoming infected, or blasting yourself out of an airlock or doing something more traditional, like slash your wrists or hang yourself. You become so consumed with your own agenda or sorrow or loss of hope or fucking madness that you do that.”
“And who is Igor, this man you think was threatened by Ilya?” Tala asked flinching at the memory of Ricky Velasquez.
“A man I saved, my bench mate on the transport, although I’d never met the guy until they shipped us out to deep space,” Jamal shook his head. “He’d be dead if it wasn’t for me, and I wish I’d fucking let him die too.”
Oleg spoke up trying to fill in the blanks as Jamal paced to the opposite side of the corridor. “He is a bad man, a rapist. He became leader of District Seven survivors. Murderers and sex offenders, all of them. They were from penitentiary, not Gulag.”
“How does a group like that function?” Asked Katja, her voice small, her head peering from beyond the removed grating of the wiring conduit.
Oleg shrugged, unable or unwilling to answer.
“Like any impromptu prison gang,” said Jamal thickly from the shadows of the corridor bulkhead. “It doesn’t take a strong man to kill someone, or rape someone, in fact most times it means you’re a weak, weak person. But if you get a strong man, with a force of character that also happens to be a sadistic psychopath, then you have your Gennady for the bad guys, your Igor.”
Where the conversation fell away, the wind filled the void. Cold gusts of air rippled the inner aluminium plating of the corridor, whistling through the drilled spaceframe brackets. Emergency strip lights flickered and popped spastically the visible length of the passageway until disappearing into the gloom of the curve.
“Why does any of this matter?” Asked Tala, finally.
“Because your Captain is expecting us to rendezvous on Igor’s doorstep,” answered Jamal, pushing himself away from the bulkhead and walking back into the centre of the corridor.
“And?” Replied Tala, defiantly.
“And they also know you are here.”
They squirmed through the tight conduit at the behest of Jamal, inching incrementally back the several kilometres to the junction. His revelation regarding the competing group of survivors didn’t change anything, the only hope for rescue was to follow the instructions laid out in the Captains note and pray they led them to deliverance and not the hands of the infected or Igor.
After all Tala had witnessed aboard Murmansk-13 it seemed insane to fear other human beings that managed to survive for so long in such hostile environs. But then the reality of their situation sunk in, the infected were many and horrifying, human husks with what made them human rotted away. But they were also dumb, they operated on pure instinct in such a manner as to cause damage to themselves and to others in their condition. A band of convicts deemed dangerous enough to ship into deep space, hell bent on escape posed a far more threatening prospect. And then there was the Unseen Hand she’d heard Oleg and Jamal reference, a further unknown with a far less predictable agenda, surely aware that their habitat was slowly degrading around them.
Jamal mentioned that the station had not been supplied since they’d arrived. By that time the infection was still in an early stage. That made it four years since the station was serviced, supplied and properly maintained – unless the Unseen Hand possessed mechanics, engineers and electricians amongst their ranks. The stale oxygen, reduced gravity and constant smell of burnt electronics and plastic cycling through the scrubbers suggested that that was either not the case, or the spread of infection had become too advanced to manage the station.
If, and to Tala it was a big if, the Unseen Hand was a real entity, their base of operations would break apart around them sooner rather than later.
The sound of voices dragged Tala from her reverie like a blow to the head, voices and the distinct guttural moan of the infected. Tala turned to look at Katja, but her expression was oddly vague. In front Jamal and Oleg sped up. The noise was still far away and distorted by echo, words and inhuman keens ebbed down the corridor like an incoming tide. Somebody was in trouble, a sob rippled the cadence of the waves.
Oleg and Jamal bounded away down the corridor on all fours, both big men were gifted with a lightness of limb, their increased speed barely registered an increase in noise, Tala struggled to keep up, not as keenly adapted to the conduits despite her years as a ships hand.
As they neared the scene of the commotion. The voices, or more precisely one voice, gained clarity through the noise like a magic eye. It was Captain Tor, his ululating north Norwegian accent, unmistakable, even in distress. The Captain was in trouble.
Within seconds, Tala was on Oleg and Jamal’s heels, almost literally. Oleg’s booted foot clipping her chin. She crashed into the large Belorussian when Jamal halted in front of them, snapping her neck to the side painfully. Oleg barely flinched at the impact and peered through the very same grating Jamal stopped at. Tala strained against her jarred neck and her two solid companions to see what was happening. A long way down the corridor Tala could hear Katja struggling to keep up, in her panic Tala had forgotten about the girls injuries and now Katja lay somewhere in the gloom behind. For a brief second she was trapped between two closing walls of panic.