“He’s right,” said Tala, ultimately he would encumber their escape. “We have to move.”
“They saved us,” Katja appealed.
“Yeah, and I’m saving you now. My leg is all fucked up. I’m deadweight and you’re running out of time!”
Katja pouted, she was unaccustomed to not getting her own way. In this case Tala thought it was a mask for sorrow. She’d grown attached to the two men from District Four, they’d risked their own lives to set her free. Katja had grown up spoilt by her father, the Chief Officer trying to fill a hole his absence left with presents and gifts. But Jamal and Oleg had almost completed the work Nikolai Falmendikov had begun when he sought out Murmansk-13, the greatest gift of all.
The baton passed to Tala alone, now.
“You need a gun?” Tala offered Jamal the 9mm as Diego ushered the Captain from the cell. Shell shocked the Captain stared at the bright yellow carpet of lifeless bodies at his feet.
Jamal shook his head again. “You guys need the guns, those two won’t be the last of ’em.”
“I don’t think I trust any of the others with it,” Tala said smiling, hoping levity would dissolve the lump in her throat.
Jamal shucked his shoulders, a muffled chuckle. Then fell silent, his eyes were rheumy and alert, his expression was dolent. “Once you’re through the antechamber, there will be a door release for the entrance behind the desk. Don’t hang around, they’ll hear the hydraulics and think it’s the party coming back out. You’ve sprayed enough fucking bullets around to wipe out a decent sized posse in here,” he smiled half-heartedly. “Keep to the shadows and don’t shoot unless you have to. They may have goons posted at the airlock, but they don’t know you’re armed.”
“Jamal,” Tala paused. “I’m sorry…”
“Don’t be. Get the hell out of here, you and Katja and your crew. That’s the best thing you can do for me now,” he gestured toward the EVA suit Hernandez had abandoned in his escape. “You’ll need that.”
Tala smiled and nodded, swallowing hard. So did Jamal.
After collecting up the EVA suit, Tala rejoined the rest of them at the antechamber entrance, the electromagnetic fob activated the door release with a mechanical whir. Katja gazed back at Jamal as if slipping back into the catharsis that blighted her first hours reawakened on the station.
“Hey Katja. Take care of yourself,” Jamal said as the secondary door began to close.
“You too,” Katja replied meekly, realizing the futility of her reply. Then the door was shut, sealing the two men away. Katja turned from the gaze of Jamal knowing, like Tala, they’d seen the last of him.
Nielsen heard the staccato report of pistol fire. Four rapid shots followed soon after by a fifth. Then silence. Pettersson had not emptied the clip, perhaps he’d been overwhelmed. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind the Second Engineer was dead. Nielsen hoped the fifth had been for himself. Oscar had died to buy him time. He’d deserved to go out quick, painless.
Briefly his subconscious summoned images of the disease wracked Mihailov.
Little time passed before Nielsen heard the relentless press of infected bodies against the reactor chamber blast door – and the voracious keening that accompanied their presence. He’d been wrong, at least in part. There was no manual override for the reactor chamber door in Central Command, but they could isolate electrical power to the quadrant.
Nielsen had managed to circumvent their attempts to segregate reactor control to a remote location, but in doing so he’d been unable to prevent the power drain from the blast doors. Tired and frightened he watched the uncoordinated shamble of bodies begin to press through the heavy steel doors, sheer will and numbers overcoming their maladroit attempts to peel the plates apart.
There wasn’t much time left, but Nielsen knew he had overrode the reactor failsafes. It had been difficult work, exacerbated by tension and his incomprehension of Russian Cyrillic. But it was a drive Nielsen was familiar with, another facsimile of Iban technology, retro engineered and harnessed in humanities slipshod manner. Substituting the foreign and exotic biomechanical parts for fallible earthly synthetics.
Nielsen had always hoped he would have a chance to tinker with a true Iban engine. Knew now this was as close as he would ever get.
The control panels were designed to make an overload impossible, placing overrides after overrides so that reckless commands could not be received. The idiom of garbage in, garbage out seemed to apply to the Iban race, just as it did with humanity. If circumvented, the reactor would simply be neutralized with poisons and the central mass injected with ultracold neutrons, reducing the drives kinetic potential. It would black ball and become an inert mass like a dead star.
That wouldn’t serve, while the station would lose its gravity anchor and breach its geostationary orbit, a black ball reactor could be re-fired. Perhaps even before the total degradation of centrifugal gravity. To create a truly catastrophic failure, Nielsen had been forced to breach the circuitry allowing him to speed up the central mass far beyond its operating capabilities. He doubted such a feat would have been possible with an Iban original.
Now the coruscating indigo light intensified behind him as he watched the blast doors part centimetre by centimetre. Gravity in the outer ring was at 1.2G, the thrusters would be working overtime to maintain position even in the null point. As the speed of rotation increased, Murmansk-13 would cant into an ever more eccentric angle. With added gravitational mass on the outer ring, the centripetal force would begin to destabilize the stations centre of gravity. Soon the thrusters would begin to aggravate the situation further still, their programming overcompensating, placing further stress on the stations structure.
At 1.3G’s the reactor would reach critical mass. It would either shut down through overstress and catapult Murmansk-13 into the lightless void, or the station would disintegrate around him.
Nielsen knew he would experience neither. In circumventing the reactors failsafes he had retained the final most safeguard. The meltdown foam would flood the reactor chamber as the drive was submerged in the coolant swirling beneath the gantry, preventing or mitigating a fire or explosion. It would give his remaining crew a chance to escape, if they still drew breath. He, however, would be entombed in concrete hardened polyurethane foam.
Nervously Nielsen eyed the dial. 1.25G’s. Mummified limbs began flailing through the blast doors. Almost parted, the stench of decay commingled with the sweet essence of ethylene glycol emanating from the old coolant. He wished he still had his pistol, not that he would be able to take more than a few out before they were upon him, but he could have saved himself the pain.
That small mercy had been Pettersson’s though and there was no pushing through the throng of infected to retrieve the gun, the final round still chambered.
1.28G, soon. Nielsen backed away from the controls. He watched one of the wretched infected pushing its snarling, mummified face through the powerless blast doors. The flesh had peeled away from the skull leaving a sinuous network of parched muscle, it screeched as the gap widened the jaw hyper-extending. Dry eyeballs hung like fetid baubles, pulled back in their sockets and shrivelled; serving no apparent purpose. Nielsen could see countless more behind the creature, some spattered with Pettersson’s blood; dark, fresh claret coating shattered and yellowed teeth and strips of old jumpsuits wafting like cerements.