Hernandez glanced at the time readout, built into the EVA suit at the wrist. He’d been carefully monitoring it for a while, “Chief, it’s almost been eight hours.”
“So?” Nilsen didn’t turn to look around, he continued down the gantry way that bisected the reactor compartment, toward huge steel doors designed for blast containment.
“So, Tala… sir.” Hernandez tried to control the edginess that was tempering his voice, it would take less than thirty minutes to retrace his steps back to the service corridor, to the junction where Tala had been told to meet the crew, another half hour back. Both groups agreed they would send a representative to wait for her. Hernandez wasn’t prepared to welch on a friend. He wouldn’t.
“Shit,” Nilsen replied, looking at his own watch. The hover dollie was parked just beyond the threshold of the reactor chamber where the three engineers gathered, letting the eerie indigo light and heartbeat like thrum disappear behind reinforced steel plates. Nervously, Nilsen reached around for the hunting rifle that had been taped across his back, Hernandez had noticed the Chief Engineer do it several times since they’d first alighted upon the station; it was a tick, a need for reassurance. It did little to comfort Hernandez. “You know your way back?”
“It’s a pretty straight run, Chief,” Hernandez replied.
“You want my rifle?” Nilsen asked guardedly, picking at the edges of gaffer tape that formed the scabbard. He’d seen Hernandez coveting the piece. It would certainly calm the jitters.
“Would you give it me if I wanted it?” Hernandez cocked a wonky smile, knowing the answer before he even asked the question. Nilsen stared at him with an expression bereft of levity.
“Don’t wait too long for her,” began Nilsen the bony, jagged lines of his face etched by shadow, his voice strained. “The rest of the crew need you too.”
Whenever Hernandez struck out alone, there was always a sense of exhilaration. Of freedom of entering the unknown without support. It had become an affectation of his stunted life, cut-up by long stints in the hard vacuum of deep space.
On the rare occasions he found himself home in Chiapas, Hernandez existed as an empty vessel waiting to be filled until he left once more for the stars. He modelled himself a city boy, ingraining himself in urban culture while adhering to the peripheries. He was a Maya Lowrider, a punk, a face in the crowd. He frequented numerous circles, but counted few friends. It wasn’t that Hernandez didn’t like people to get close, he just didn’t want to leave a blueprint of that version of himself when he shipped out. Each contract meant that vessel modelled in his leave would be drained and wiped clean.
It had to be that way. When Hernandez first ventured into deep space engineering as an electrician trainee, he’d tried to keep his personal connections alive. He would diligently send laser telex to his family and letters to the harem of girlfriends he liked to believe he kept, letters seemed romantic to a seventeen year old.
But as his first voyage stretched on he could no longer focus his energy on the endeavour, to keep the straining lines of connection from parting altogether. Hernandez found he cared less and less. Travelling away for years at a time, even if much of that time was spent in cryo, left an unerring sense of disconnect, regardless of the effort. An endless revaluation of the importance of the people in your life until the only person left was yourself. Then you drank and found other vices to while away your downtime. Trying to forget the distances.
When he’d returned from his first trip there had been a party held by his family, few of his former friends showed up and Hernandez knew why. They’d forgotten about him. For four months, he’d roamed the streets of Tuxtla with his pockets full but feeling out of place, like a ghost of his former self watching rather than participating while the people who were once his closest friends forged on with lives of their own. Occasionally they would invite him to bars, but find they had nothing to talk about, awkward silence would draw on only proving that the plains on which they existed had skewed and slipped apart. Hernandez became an anachronism of himself, estranged from his former existence.
Subsequently, he distanced himself from himself. His closest associates became a transient drift of dealers and people he sought to outdo within the Lowrider community. The rest were acquaintances he would share a beer with, or perhaps a line while trying to avoid the pillars of his last reinvention. Hernandez became sentimental and volatile as his use of speed and ketamine went from habitual to spiralling. He had money for the powder, and he no longer cared where he woke up. Days just skipped by on Earth.
A lot of his new clique had a tendency to wind up dead or missing or laying low under new personae. Death was not uncommon on the Tuxtla streets for people starved of ambition and an apathetic attitude to violence – or whose enterprise put them in direct conflict with the cartels and organized street gangs. Every time he paid off, Hernandez returned home to a diminished list of contacts. He’d try to remember their faces, but rarely found he could.
In a way it helped him hit the reset. Nobody really knew him, because he never really existed as a single entity, just a blank slate to anybody who hadn’t shipped with him.
So when he did strike out, into the forests beyond the limits of the city he did so alone, to escape. To be something, somebody else in a place where his thoughts were no longer drowned out by the noise of his disposable existence. It was never a case of finding himself, but finding a clarity that was engrained within the exhilaration of being lost. The small thrill of fear and comfort of being surrounded by a landscape foreign yet familiar, hidden and astray beneath a canopy of trees whose lives and deaths were measured in decades and centuries, not months and years. Humans were fragile and fallible, their timelines inconsequential. The forests were the only connection Hernandez had left to Earth, the only place where he could be himself; lost and home.
The fear he felt retracing his steps alone through Murmansk-13 was fundamentally different. This fear was vague and implied, it ate away at the psyche like it drained the Riyadh of her soul. Hernandez felt a sudden desire to reconnect to those he’d shed from his life, that support network he’d cast away. For the first time in his life, Hernandez could not tune out the complete absence of being he’d created to protect himself. He was truly alone and truly scared.
Nobody had really known what they were scared of as they had suited up in the evac suite, the Captain unable to vocalize his fears in any sensible manner. But his face, the harrowed empty eyes, were enough to know that Murmansk-13 was a fundamentally wrong place, a place that had driven him to the precipice.
That station is ridden with disease and death and there death walks. Murmansk-13 was manmade and yet wildly alien as Hernandez thought of the forests back home, then his mind switched to Mihailov. He tried to shut out the memories.
Whether it was psychosomatic or not. Hernandez planted each foot lightly as he ascended the treadplate staircase back to the atrium. Without companionship, his fear amplified, there was no thrill, no clarity within the swaddling dread. Just silence and noise, each mag booted step or clatter of lustreless tools augmented by the silence it fed. A silence Hernandez was convinced lay inhabited, either by people or something else. He removed his belt of electricians tools and laid it quietly on the landing. He pushed open the heavy fire door.
The huge atrium for Central Command sat noiseless and still, the puck shaped foyer a symphony of dust covered cream appointments and ominous black shaded glass bulkheads. Silver effect plastic sconces uplit the space in moodily subdued hues lending a cheap ceremonial gravitas. On the faux marble deck a huge mission insignia was emblazoned in front of the curved main desk and a bank of dead eyed CRT’s. Murmansk-13 shown in full silhouette against the Red Supergiant and a backdrop of the starburst constellation. The image was coloured with drab poster paints and encircled by yellow Cyrillic offering an oddly depthless character. The insignia lacked the usual motifs associated with the Soviet Deep Space program, no hammer and sickle, no sense of official state recognition. The insignia were for those that worked here and perhaps those seeking legitimacy.