Aidan’s breathing slowed, his eyes began to grow lustreless and his lids heavy. His mouth moved but his voice was so very faint. “Addy,” he finally said. “We never kissed, I wish we had,” something rattled within his chest cavity and he coughed. A gout of claret splashed across his lips, Hernandez watched as Aidan tasted his own blood. “I hope she will remember me.”
“You’re speaking as if you’re already dead, you’ve gotta stay with me cabron,” Hernandez looked down at Aidan and forced a half smile. “You saved my ass out on that array, it’s hardly fair if you don’t let me repay the favour, man.”
Aidan returned the smile, but it was edged with pain. “I feel sleepy, Hernandez.”
There was a loud metallic crash and the whining sound of failing metal hung at the peripheries of the moment. Hernandez felt the Riyadh lurch beneath him, was aware of stationary items clattering about the bridge. He stared at Aidan as his eyes closed.
“Yo, you can’t go to sleep man,” Hernandez shook him, then pressed his forehead against Aidan’s. “Wake the fuck up!”
His chest had ceased rising and falling. Aidan was still.
Hernandez felt alien tears prick at the corners of his eyes as he placed his ear beside the cadets mouth. He shook him one last time. “Kid…”
Hernandez rubbed his eyes and felt the blood become harder, more viscous where it had seeped through his longjohns. He let the fury well up inside him. Let the moment build in the silence. When he spoke, his voice was icy calm. “Why did you shoot him?”
“He had a weapon. It was pointed at me,” Hernandez could feel the big man’s eyes bore into the back of his skull. “Really it was his fault.”
“He was just a kid,” Hernandez said, jaw locking.
“Ain’t my problem and I don’t answer to you.” He jabbed the rifle barrel into the back of Hernandez head. “Get the fuck up, I want out of here.”
Without thinking, Hernandez spun round, grabbing the barrel of the rifle as the big man pulled the trigger. He felt the round whistling through the metallic cylinder, passing millimetres from his hand. The round clipped the deck and rested across the bridge; indenting the elevator doors. Rising to his feet, Hernandez yanked the gun from the man’s ursine grasp, spinning and smashing the stock into the onrushing Mikhail with a crack. Mikhail clattered to the floor beside the halved rifle with a satisfying symmetry to his own capture.
Hernandez followed the arc of his swing, rounding on the big man in time to see the rivet gun levelled at his face. He pulled the trigger, but the makeshift weapon was hampered by a delayed action – it had never been designed for combat. Hernandez managing to duck the shot with the grace of a drunken street brawler, flat palming the rivet gun away as he brought his fist and the remnants of the rifle to bare in a rough uppercut.
The punch staggered the big man backward, but Hernandez knew he hadn’t got all of him. Off balance, the big man cuffed Hernandez shoulder lurching forward with a stiff head butt that crashed into Hernandez’s already crushed nose and broken cheek.
Hernandez yowled with pain as he stumbled back, his head thudding against the gimballed captains chair. White pinpricks flared across his eyes as darkness threatened to consume him. His head was a cotton-stuffed ball of hot agony as the big man loomed over him.
“Go on, fucking kill me, I should have let you do it on the station,” Hernandez yelled, the words deranged and slurred by his injuries. “How you going to fucking start her engines without any help, pendejo?”
The big man glanced at Mikhail, sprawled across the deck. Showered with fragments of the Chief Engineers rifle. Mikhail didn’t move and the big man was unmoved. “Way I see it, this is a pretty comfortable lifeboat. By sounds of it the ship will soon be departing the station whether it wants to or not and I figure your crew will have to show up.” He levelled the rivet gun at Hernandez face. “And if they don’t, then I’m still better off on here than I am on there.”
“Why fucking kidnap me in the first place?” Hernandez spat blood and mucus down his front.
“You had the opportunity to co-operate, but now I think you’ll be more trouble than your worth.” His finger whitened around the rivet gun trigger.
“You’re going to Hell, mamon,” Hernandez sneered. “And when you get there I’ll be fucking waiting.”
The big man smirked. Then pulled the trigger.
Tala was tossed hard against the service corridor bulkhead, gurning against her multiplied weight, against the shriek of failing metal. Wildly she clambered against the bare metallic surface as her mass fell sickeningly away. The station pirouetted and twisted with sharpening velocity, threatening to burst open like a great aluminium piñata. Murmansk-13 had stopped spinning, the centrifugal gravity that lent scant Earthen normalcy to the outer rings of the station ceased. Instead gravity fluctuated madly as she and Tor tried to wrestle their way back to the airlock.
One moment they would glide through the narrow span of the corridor, pushing from one structural bracket to the next. Then they would be crushed into the deck, or the bulkhead or the deckhead as the station reoriented itself. When the gravity peaked Tala and Tor had to be mindful of simple objects that had broken loose. Fire extinguishers and hoses, inert and weightless in zero G, would suddenly become massively heavy projectiles pinballing around them. The corridor was growing increasingly misty with carbon dioxide and globules of foam from extinguishers that had exploded on impact with the aluminium bulkheads, their detonation all that stopped them from blowing out the plating.
Serenely the shattered bodies of Sammy and Peralta had sailed passed, twisting bonelessly as they brushed a strengthening bracket. The skeletons within their limp bodies evidently pulverized by forces they could no longer resist. Tala wondered how long it would be before herself or the Captain were thrown into a structural beam or unceremoniously gashed open by some unsecured corridor furniture.
At least they’d lost the infected. When unburdened by their weight, Tala and Tor could push through the corridors with speed, zipping along as the infected floundered behind. Within a single, slow rotation of Murmansk-13 they’d safely negated any threat of pursuit.
Tala could only hope Katja and Diego were managing as well.
Once more silent tears of frustration beaded on Tala’s cheek, only to twist away and eddy in the still air before her. She hated the Captain for being right, for pulling her away. Better to die and steal one last glimpse of Katja than to be thrust into a future, however short, so abjectly different to the one she’d naively allowed herself to dream. To come so far, through so much and be so close to saving her, to have it all torn away, all the fleeting thoughts and fantasies that had carried her through the nightmare of the station seemed so unjust.
With each bracket and bulkhead she wordlessly traversed with the Captain, Tala told herself she would find Katja again. Wouldn’t entertain the notion that she hadn’t made it out of the Central Command atrium, couldn’t. She would feel her grow small in her arms once more. Somehow. That was for later. In the immediate, simple determination and need was enough to nourish her starved and wearied muscles, to push on and strive toward her ship. She could plan later, if the station didn’t collapse around her.
Murmansk-13 let out a plangent groan again. Tala felt her small, athletic body become a millstone as somewhere rivets blew out with dull bangs. Tor held her from pushing off, tempering her restless desire. He was talking to her, his lips moving but his voice lost against the death screech of metal. She hadn’t realized how intense the din had become, the tumbling racket throwing her senses inward.