Something about the word ‘endanger’ seemed to grasp at his conscience like a bur. A brief glimmer of cognizance and recognition lit up his eyes. For a moment, Captain Tor was pulled from whatever mental escape he’d sought to the very real escape before him.
Tala turned her focus to Diego. “Keep him close, if he starts to make a lot of noise or falls back we leave him.” Like he left me before.
Katja snarled at the instruction, her skin incandescent in the dark, but she remained silent, knowing enemies lay within an arguments earshot. Perhaps Katja wondered if that had been Tala’s attitude when she’d been struggling to pull it together; in those first days out of the morgue.
In a sudden rush of guilt, Tala realized it had been. She’d been ready to abandon Katja to her fate. Were she facing armed hostiles, maybe she would have done. In that moment she knew she couldn’t abandon the Captain, even if it meant risking death.
“I’ll take point,” Tala said, knowing that it would be so, regardless. “Stay close.” She paused, waiting to see if the Captain would remain still. He wavered in the dark, but looked ready to move. Silently, she padded out to the video screen again, this time her group in tow.
Once more, Tala peered into the atrium. The group hadn’t moved. Maybe they were debriefing, or simply talking, she chose not to give it much thought and dropped to her haunches, letting the strapped gun settle in the crook of her back. She turned and indicated for the others to do the same. The Captain struggled against his pressurized suit into a slouch. Tala wondered how withered he’d become, his body pressed thin under all those layers of synthetic material. Her gaze lingered on Tor for just a moment before she scuttled out from behind the video screen, darting behind the first console.
Nervously she looked back as the others followed. Diego had pulled the Captain down onto all fours and did the same himself. Tala had to concede, it was a good idea. Protected from the friction of the coarse, once orange carpet by their oxygen padded EVA suits, they appeared to float over the surface like balloons. The added benefit was they weren’t conveying themselves using their clattery mag boots.
Katja came last, Hernandez EVA suit drapped over her arm. She moved lithely in her blood spattered jumpsuit, but quickly realised she wouldn’t be able to fall in behind the console. The girl froze and dropped to all fours like Diego and the Captain before her, only she was exposed and lit up by the video screen behind.
Panic setting in, Tala grabbed the Captain and darted to the next console without looking. Silently she twirled to Diego and Katja, her palm held out in a stopping gesture. She raised two fingers on both hands and mimicked a hopping motion. They could only remain concealed in pairs, the consoles simply not big enough to hide them altogether.
Furtively, Tala glanced back toward where she’d last seen Smith and the soldier. The threesome remained in situ. Ildar slightly aside, he looked like a boyfriend watching his partner flirt with another man, to his side were stacked two columns of coolers. Most likely the vials Katja had spoken of, ready for handoff.
Tala glanced back to Diego. She pointed to herself and Tor, then the next console. She then pointed at Diego and Katja and indicated the console she was currently crouched behind. Diego nodded his understanding and limbered up, clipping his gun to a karabiner hanging unused at his waist. The Colt refused to be shouldered against the smooth material of his suit.
Waiting for his readiness, Tala peered one last time at the group less than twenty meters away then glanced to Tor. The Captain gave a little nod of partially lucid agreement. Breathing deep, Tala scurried to the next console with the Captain close behind. She watched as Diego and Katja moved one up.
Ten minutes passed as the group slowly edged their way down the row of consoles. Halfway down Tala began to hear the hushed tones of conversation, the words deconstructed beneath the feint white noise of the video screen speakers and the hammering of her heart. With each hop Tala became increasingly fearful that reinforcements would show up or the fate of the duo that had entered the cells would be sought. Surely they would soon be missed.
Reaching the penultimate console before the break to the stairs, Tala could feel her thoughts race. They’d passed the perpendicular sightline of Smith’s group and she beckoned Diego and Katja to join them, herself and the Captain shuffling behind the pine computer desk. As the group reunited she could see Diego pale, looking at the no-man’s land stretching out before them.
“We’ll be seen,” he whispered.
Tala nodded her agreement. “I know,” she let the submachine gun fall into her hands. “One of us will have to draw fire.”
“Why can’t we wait?” Katja asked, hopefully. She pinned herself to the console side, refusing to look, her movements stiff with dread.
“They won’t have come aboard with three men,” Tala spoke softly. “We wait, more will arrive.”
Tala looked at Diego, his skin had turned a sickly hue and his hands shook violently. He was a radio officer turned AB and a poor one at that. Gentle spirited with the weight of his collapsing family upon him; to most he was a sap. He would be killed laying down fire against a trained soldier, and Tala had little doubt that was what they were pitted against.
What an odd couple they would make, Tala thought blithely having often wondered why such a prosaic academy wannabe from a dysfunctional Catholic family desired her affection.
Perhaps that was the very nucleus of it. While she was hard and Diego was soft they were both the products of broken families. While his feelings for her would remain forever unrequited, Tala couldn’t let him die, he was her friend. Not only would his death haunt her in the unlikely event of her own survival, but thinking pragmatically it would also be in vein. She doubted he would be able to give them the cover they needed for long enough to reach the door.
She reached across and flipped the safety off Diego’s weapon. “I’ll lay down cover, but be ready to defend yourself. Let Tor and Katja lead.”
Diego nodded like a gravity sick cadet. Katja stared at her with wide, watery eyes shaking her head, the gesture invisible to the rest of the group. Tala mouthed ‘yes’ then ‘sorry.’ It had to be her, otherwise Katja wouldn’t escape and she would have failed.
“One more,” Tala said. She wasn’t sure why, they could all see what lay ahead but it helped disembody herself from the moment, from the draining emotional burden trying to lead her crew and Katja to safety.
As she prepared to launch herself into the shadowy void between consoles Tala peered over the desk one last time. She watched the soldier casually raise his sidearm. Ildar barely had chance to register his surprise as the bullet ripped through his forehead and out the back of his skull in a cloud of pink ejecta and bone fragments, the soldier never breaking from conversation.
Dr. Smith watched the light vanish from the elderly mans eyes in the millisecond before his neuromuscular system shut down and his knees buckled. Ildar slumped to the deck on his face, blood soaking into the hideous carpeting.
The soldier’s head snapped to their position and Tala turned to see Katja clasping her hand over her mouth. Despite all she’d seen, despite all that Ildar had been responsible for, hearing the man murdered and the fear elicited moved her to tears. Tala had not heard her whimper over the crack of gunfire but the soldier had. He stood with his pistol braced at arms length, scanning the horizon of desks in combat stance. Behind him, Dr. Smith drew her silenced sidearm.
In that moment Tala felt nothing for Ildar. At best he’d been a naive genius used as a Soviet puppet, at worst a workaday laboratory scientist on the ground floor of a breakout that had turned him megalomaniac. He’d allied himself with the wrong people. People who’d wrestled control of his studies, made it into a product and incurred the interest of unscrupulous companies. Perhaps at the last he’d realised his folly, but ultimately he’d paid the price. The wealth of feeling she had for the man could only be mimicked by the absence of emotion in the Captain’s face.