Katja struggled to breathe against the blast of dry electrical heat that roasted her street frozen skin. She shed her layers of furs and jumpers just as her lungs warmed to their normal capacity. The house smelt of burnt dust, cigarette ash and counterfeit flowery perfumes bought at the market.
“Kat is that you?” Her mother called from the dining room, her voice deep with age and a lifetime of smoking.
“Yes, ma. Who did you think it was?” Katja replied flippantly, hanging her overcoat up and tossing the rest of her clothes into her bedroom.
Katja had visited many friends houses who lived within the Soviet tenements in the city below. The interior of their old maisonette was much the same, a product of looting not long after the Bolsheviks seized control. Whoever reappointed the mansion after the paroxysm of revolution had done so with the stark pragmatism that would demark proletarian home life under the Communist regime. Sturdy but heartless plasterboard walls divided the dining/living space from the kitchen and the hallway off which the bedrooms and bathroom were situated.
Mother and Father had decorated in the mid seventies and the old carpets, furnishings and peeling wallpaper still just held onto the hues of once fashionable brown and orange that had surpassed the rest of the world by more than a decade.
Her mother sat at a large space age plastic table, reading the Pravda, fag hanging from her mouth. Behind her an electrical fire glowed orange, she peered up at Katja with hangdog eyes, socked in a fattened face. Katja couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t looked tired and much older than her years. She’d been pretty when she was young, a faded wedding photo atop the tiled fireplace bore testimony to the fact. Katja shuddered at the thought of sharing her genes. As she lost the weight of teenage apathy, her mother grew heavier. A scintilla of resentment would glimmer in her mother’s eyes when Katja dropped another dress size.
“Where’s Father?” Katja asked, hardly able to contain the excitement and trepidation, “I’ve got something I need to tell him.”
“It’s good to see you too, Kat,” her mother said thumbing in the direction of the balcony with a meaty, pale forearm. Net curtains flapped briskly in the steady breeze. Katja felt a renewed chill as she breached the miniature front where cold fresh air met hot still electrical heat.
Nikolai Falmendikov sat overlooking Gorky below, the lights were blinking on in the city as the sun shrank from the sky. The horizon was hemlined by clouds, shaped like marching soldiers, stealing the last vestiges of twilight in a golden corona. He sipped from a heavy tumbler filled with amber liquor, listening to the distant commotion of car horns and raised voices both of reverie and anger welling up the hillside. Katja braced her arms against her chest, wishing she’d not removed her jumpers. The cold didn’t seem to bother her father. “Father?”
Her father turned to her, bleary eyed. A warm smile crossed his lips. “Hello Katja,” he said, then studied her face with renewed focus, sensing her anxiety. “Are you OK?”
Katja slid the balcony door too, trying to block out the sounds of the radio in the room beyond. “I’ve been given my placement,” she blurted out over the noise of the city and the radio and the buffeting wind that billowed around the net curtain tickling her ankles, the heat of the dining room washed over her feet.
Her father placed his tumbler on the deck and looked at her, he was a stern faced man, his angular bone structure gave him a stony appearance that betrayed handsomeness. “Where did you decide to go?” He asked, the artificial light from the dining room casting dark and light across the topography of his skin.
Katja gulped, even if she wasn’t stood in the rapidly freezing nights air she would still have felt the shudder of anxiety ascend her spine. “I chose the deep space program,” she answered quietly.
Her father closed his eyes and let out an exasperated sigh. Deep space had been his dream, he’d joined the Soviet State owned Merchant Space Fleet as a cadet upon its inception, but like Katja had only ever achieved satisfactory grades, not exceptional. He’d passed out ninth of seventeen and been trapped on the solar coasters ever since, year long runs servicing the declining solar service stations as the scope of space colonization went interstellar. By most people’s standards he was a successful man. Except his own.
Katja had wanted to honour that dream, for him, for everything he’d done to make her life comfortable. She also wanted to escape a lifetime in Gorky and the ennui that settled like grey sediment over her psyche. This was the first year the deep space program had offered a place for a medical student and it was place, singular. The assignment would be aboard a retiring space station as a laboratory assistant, the name of the station and its location were otherwise unknown till a later date.
The placement would mean Katja would miss her classes graduation, unlike other assignments, this came sandwiched between two nine month burns in cryo, not a two hour airplane flight. But Katja was OK with that, the majority of her childhood clique had already slipped away into new lives and professions. She could shed what remained of her puppy fat and reinvent herself, her absence would at the least shake the persistent attentions of Danill, but most of all it would give her a fundamental understanding of the sacrifices her father had made for his family.
Her father did not speak for a long time, a look of pain and confusion spread slowly across his face, emotions moving like tectonic plates. This was his dream, she’d been wrong to seize it. Katja felt her heart sink with his expression. Her father warned her when she’d first mentioned that the program had become available; that the work would be hard and lonely. That she would grow bored, trapped and unable to go anywhere. She believed her father was just transferring his own justifications for accepting his career stagnation, his own mental validation for failure.
“Katja,” he began, his voice dripping with sadness.
Then the scene skipped. The passage of time blinking. Gorky below had fallen silent and black, the streetlights and Christmas lights extinguished. Even the stars guttered out. For a moment she was alone on the balcony in blackness. Then her father was back, his eyes sad and feral, his slack face slicked with blood. He paused to look at her, his neck broken and twisted. He was on his knees, beside him Katja’s mother lay sprawled on the cold wooden deck. Her face ashen and waxy in a cryptogenic argent glow. He regarded Katja for just a moment before burying his face into the ragged cavity chewed into her mother’s bloated stomach, attempting to wrench out unidentifiable viscera, the smashed bones in his neck grated with crepitus.
She’d brought him here. She’d killed him.
Katja woke with a sputtering cough, her chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow breaths, a wave of nausea forced a bolus of stomach acid into the back of her mouth. She swallowed it back down. Her jumpsuit was clammy against her moist skin and sticky where new blood spotted. She felt a strong grip attempt to envelop her and her sleep addled reaction was to push it away, fight it. THEY WERE COMING!
“Are you OK?” Tala pinned Katja with a tender strength as she tried to pull away. It took Katja another few seconds to remember where she was and who she was with. “Bad dream?” Tala asked, her face drawn with concern as she looked down upon her. Katja had sprawled across her lap and somehow fallen asleep.
Even within her dreams she hadn’t been able to escape the mind corroding touch of the station.