Katja knew she was too weak to fight off Arty alone, as he looked down to see what was preventing him from raping her, Katja wheeled her mobile arm up and clumsily grasped for the row of pens neatly stashed in his lab coat. Arty grunted as he realised Katja wasn’t completely disabled, a blood caked hand tried to grasp her arm, multicoloured pens scattered across the floor. Her arm fell limp, back to her side as he pinned her shoulder. “Play nice Katja.”
Katja was sick of playing nice, sick of Murmansk-13 and sick of being used. As Arty looked down again she felt the weight of his body lift from her shoulder. Katja brought the pen she had jammed into the side of her torso up, swinging it sideways at an angle that tore into the side of his eye, smashing his spectacles. She could feel the membrane of his eyeball shred, with a pop the eye collapsed into sinuous gunge. The pen slammed hard into the orbital socket. Arty screamed a feral scream and fell away.
For a moment, Katja just lay there, felt her chest rising and falling. The curious reawakening of sensation across her torso was debilitating and constricting. With feeling, came pain. All the while Arty screamed, manically.
“You fucking bitch, you scabby faced whore.” Katja couldn’t see Arty, coming at her on all fours but she could hear his shrill madness closing in, skittering limbs on the plastic lino. “My eye, what did you do?”
What you deserved, thought Katja, only there wasn’t time for thought. Her whole body was a writhing mass of raw nerve endings trying to send her into neural meltdown. She flopped onto her stomach, like falling onto a needle bed, she’d barely started crawling when a hand closed round her ankle.
Katja kicked out as Arty struggled to gain purchase where her jumpsuit had gathered around her calves. The jumpsuit may as well have been shackles as her feet flailed, bound by the material, Katja felt her finger nails crack and split where she grasped for traction, trying to pull away. Then she was sliding backwards, the loose flesh around her tummy pinching against the linoleum. “I was going to be gentle with you, but not now,” grunted Arty.
All concerted effort was imbued in thrusting her burning thighs, he was trying to lift her legs, but couldn’t. Arty was weakening. She pumped her legs backwards again and again, trying to break his fragile grasp. Then it all stopped. She heard the clatter of a chair behind her, the screech of the metal table legs pushed backwards. The click of plastic against plastic.
When she managed to look up, levering herself up gingerly on numb palms, Arty was slumped like a puppet with cut strings, trousers around his ankles. His body wracked with spasms. One of her kicks had jammed the pen further into the skull, the tip of the Parker fountain pen just visible through the soup of gore where his eye once was. Both eyelids flinched, one obstructed by the writing implement, the other partially concealed a lobotomized gaze.
Katja fell back to the floor, she expected to cry, but there were no tears left. If she felt anything at all, it was a curious and detached sense of accomplishment. In the various circles of hell she’d been forced through since waking in the morgue, it had been others, Tala or Jamal or Oleg that saved her. Now she’d saved herself and in doing so eradicated one of the true killers of her father. The vengeance however was hollow. In a sense everybody who came into contact with Murmansk-13 were victims, the place was insidious, it infiltrated the mind and amplified weaknesses. Even Arty.
The door opened behind her. “Well fuck me,” said Dr. Smith, pointing her revolver at Katja’s head but looking at the brain damaged or dead Artyom. She cocked the revolver and Katja closed her eyes, she didn’t hear the bullet as it left a neat hole in Arty’s skull. When she opened them again, the barrel was directed at her face. “Get up.”
Katja struggled to right herself. The effects of the drug largely worn off; leaving a crash of dulled muscle response and generalized numbness. Of itself, she knew she could overcome these, but she was so tired, so very done. For a second, she just wished the doctor would pull the trigger and return her to the mindless oblivion of the morgue. “I can’t,” she replied, her voice a quiet rasp.
“Get up, or I will shoot you.” said Dr. Smith, calmly.
A tonsure-bald man entered the room, shorter than the doctor, slightly rotund in a grey cardigan. He put his hand on the doctors shoulder and spoke in an avuncular tone. “Leave her for the clean up team, Rebecca. No point getting her blood on your hands.”
Tala absently dabbed her ear. The cartilage had been neatly perforated and partly cauterized by the bullet. Dried blood formed a tactile crescent around the edge of the wound. Subconsciously, she knew it must sting, could imagine the pernicious pain of the injury, but outwardly she didn’t feel it. Didn’t feel anything.
The cells around her were silent, everyone resigned to their individual fate. They were no longer crewmates and companions, just an assortment of condemned and broken beings awaiting the inevitable, trapped in their introverted shells of thoughts and memories, and dreams that never would be. Nobody spoke for an indeterminable time.
Perhaps death wouldn’t be so bad, thought Tala. Like going to sleep, a cessation of all the pain the waking world left. Maybe the bitter taste of failures and tragedies and regret would be washed away, purified by the endless darkness. If that were the case, she could release all the anger, all the sorrow of the night she killed her opponent. Maria de los Santos had been her name, but names gave people stories, so every waking moment Tala had to suppress it, suppress the image of Maria dying at her feet as the braying crowd cheered. The ending of Maria’s life had taken much of her own. Tala felt she could welcome death now, after all her body was so drained, so very weary she doubted there was any fight left.
Then Katja was marched back into the cells, Dr. Smith behind.
Of all the incarcerated, it was Captain Tor who noticed first, his sunken, glazed eyes peered through cavernous, dark-ringed sockets, focusing on the Plexiglas that separated the cellblock from the processing desk. Years of cryogenically stunted aging had been erased within a week. He’d shaven, but it only served to make his flesh appear sallow and slack, nascent jowls of loosened skin had formed, weakening his jaw line. He’d stolen his own release, relinquishing the gravitational pull of the noose to revisit the station. The gambit had failed, but perhaps Tor knew he had least to lose, he’d already surrendered himself.
Flecks of new blood spotted the lowest portions of Katja’s jumpsuit, the waistband hung slack, the elastic deformed and tore. Her face was passive, almost serene as Dr. Smith walked her back into the cellblock. She moved stiffly, certain joints and muscles no longer acting in concert. For a moment, Tala thought it was the result of some surgery to stop the bleeding, then Katja passed into light and Tala realized she’d mistaken medicated sedation for serenity. Haunted, bloodshot eyes stared out from a face paralyzed tranquil.
“Move back,” ordered Dr. Smith, reaching for an absurd ringlet of old fashioned keys. The keypad budget only stretching as far as the cellblock antechamber.
Everybody in the cell slid to the far end, pressing against the cold gray hardened veneers that hid reinforced bulkheads on three sides as the door clattered open. Dr. Smith pushed Katja into the cell and quickly reclosed the door behind her, for a brief moment, the doctor leered into the cell before a short man, turning to fat and bald save for the tonsured locks gestured for her to return to the antechamber. “We must address the others,” the man said.
Tala had barely been aware of the interaction behind Katja, their eyes had been locked since she was led in. Tala stood up, behind her Diego and Tor shuffled against the adjoining bulkhead, trying to provide privacy in the mutual space. “Katja,” she began, unsure where she was going. Katja stared at her, unspeaking. Her mouth and jaw twitched, but no words came out. Instead she stumbled into Tala’s arms, not crying, not making a sound. Katja was a deadweight against her bones and Tala eased them down to the deck, the girl nestling against her.