They both had layers and histories, pasts that would take years to untangle. And there were no years, not even days. That thought diluted the jealousy, turning it into an ache of sadness. A dull mourning of lost potential.
“Are you going to tell me where the other two are?” Katja could picture the spite filled Dr. Smith threatening Hernandez with her gun. In the pristine self enclosed darkness of her reverie she could detect a foreign trace in the doctors high-born accent, Katja could feel it threatening to awake something in her memory from a time still boxed off in the tangled cells of her brain. Frustrating and lost.
“I already told you, didn’t I?” Hernandez chewed out the question and spat it in the doctors face. To an observer of the discourse, the quaver in his voice would be lost beneath the veneer of bullishness, but Katja could hear his fear as she listened.
“Have it your way,” the doctor said, bored with her newest toy.
“You going to ice me?”
“Worse, move.”
Katja could hear the shuffle of the EVA suit as Dr. Smith forced him away from the bars and his crewmates. Katja turned and watched as the doctor forced Hernandez to backpedal, pistol directly in his face. Katja admired the man’s ability to maintain a dispassionate air.
“Hey!” Shouted Tala. “Put him in with us! He’s one of us.”
“He had his opportunity,” said Dr. Smith deftly removing a large, solid key attached at her hip with a karabiner using her single free hand. “If he had played nice,” Katja winced at the phrase, tears flashing across the surface of her eyes, “but he didn’t.”
“No,” said Tala breathlessly as Dr. Smith placed the key into the barrel of the lock.
“These guys bad?” Asked Hernandez glancing into his new abode and its current, sickly denizens.
Jamal lay shivering on the floor, his injured leg stretched out before him, blood weeping from the bandage. Katja had almost forgotten about Jamal and Oleg, both herself and Tala owed them their lives, but now they were toxic. She’d filed them away, into the same corner of her mind where the lost friends of Murmansk-13 already dwelled, safe and alive. Not daring to interrogate those memories for fear of the truth, that they were experimented on, the disease allowed to germinating inside their brain, wiping away the person they once were and co-opting their bodies to feed. Just as it now did inside Oleg.
They were already forsaken and Katja felt a bitter jag of shame in having sheltered herself against their inevitable decline. She couldn’t help them and she couldn’t bear to provide them comfort so she boxed them off behind an opaque, hardened bulkhead and concerned herself with her own petty regrets and jealousies.
Dr. Smith pushed Hernandez into the cell. “Bon appetit,” she said as the autolock doors snapped shut with a clank and a click. She replaced the key on its clip.
Hernandez shot her an enquiring look as if she were mad, then said “Hi guys.”
His levity failed to thaw the icy stare of hatred Jamal reserved for the doctor, the sheer effort to maintain hate seemed to weaken the once powerful man. From her vantage point ten feet away, Katja could see sweat moisten his skin, the muscles in his face twitching with fever or pain. When he spoke, his voice retained its intensity, but had been robbed of its vigour. “You’re scum, the people you represent are scum and you will kill everybody if you go through with this.”
Dr. Smith just stared back, reckless and careless, she held his gaze for half a minute. Watching the strong man suffer, before looking back to the cellblock entrance where Ildar stood. “We’ll flood engineering with the infected, we can’t let the other two damage the station. We need this junk heap to remain orbital for another few hours at least.”
“That’ll compromise the clean-up teams entrance,” Ildar said with a voice added depth with age his exasperation was apparent but nuanced, he was an architect of a project being taken from his hands and dismantled piece by piece. Katja sensed Artyom had been the driving force behind marketing their endeavour. “For four years we have not compromised Central Command, this is our base.”
“The clean-up teams will be using the service corridor just like us. At this late stage I have no interest in engaging a gun crazy engineer within an engineering compartment,” Doctor Smith’s words were prim and matronly, she stood over Ildar like a nurse caring for the elderly, condescension dripped through her tone. “Come now Ildar, we eradicate this one last little problem and soon you will be a very wealthy man. Heavens, you could even buy fashionable clothes.”
Ildar gave her a withering glance, his mouth twitched as if he was about to argue, then his shoulders slumped. Katja watched Diego step aside, gaze anywhere but where Tala reached through the bars, her hands working with lightning swiftness outside of Katja’s line of sight. The only evidence she was doing something, the minute movements of her sinuous shoulders through her jumpsuit. Then Ildar and Dr. Smith left, undeterred by whatever action Tala had carried out.
As the hydraulic cellblock antechamber closed, Tala stepped back nervously into the centre of the cell, waiting for the hissing hydraulic report of the station security entrance. Carefully she unclasped her hand. “She’s going to notice this is missing soon.”
Chapter 20
Murmansk-13 was a Russian station. Materials sourced, labour, even the selection of its fittings were the product of the Soviet and it told.
Like a model fortress, built with cardboard, Murmansk-13 had been designed to impress, to intimidate as it hung vast, sprawling and gunmetal grey in its gravitational null point. It was never designed to be tested, to be inventoried in its minutiae, because that made it fallible, and the only standard it was designed to meet was artifice.
Just like the marbled veneer table tops and plastic aspidistras gathering dust, the implied strength of the security cells was all smoke and mirrors. A pretence to a reality where Party profligacy extended to the superficial, where cannibalized parts, stucco and gaffer tape papered over the cracks. The cells had only ever been designed to serve drunkards who’d made too merry within the recreation district, or aggravated co-workers who’d came to blows after months of ratcheting tensions in close proximity. Anything more serious and the perpetrator would be shipped to the nearest support vessel in shackles and transferred to the first homeward bound frigate or destroyer. They’d never been designed to be tested for escape, because nobody was ever going to try and escape from them. The hydraulically locked antechambers were just another example of Soviet showmanship, they looked good, but you still had to enable the prisoners behind them to breathe.
“You learn shit, on the streets,” said Tala shrugging. The cell key felt heavy and ancient in her hands. An incongruous artefact in the well of space. She’d been surprised Dr. Smith hadn’t become aware of the absence of its weight at her hip, she soon would be.
Diego and Katja looked at the key with a sense of awe. “We need to use it fast,” said Katja, herself eyeing up the heft of the object.
Tala had barely been able to stifle a manic laugh. After enduring the rigmarole of the faltering hydraulic antechambers, to be faced with barred cells straight out of a western movie seemed absurd. Standard key and lock entry was an enduring, steadfast means of detaining a ne’er-do-well and also meant they only had to provide a single duct for air circulation. It was also highly unsound when the cells pinned a narrow corridor not two arms spans in width.
As Katja slept, Tala formulated a plan. It hinged on Dr. Smith returning to the cells with Ildar in tow like a trusted jowly hound dog. Tala sensed the former project lead was now attached to Dr. Smith with an invisible leash as they squabbled out the last few hours of an experiment he’d long lost dominion over.