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Compared to seagoing vessels, uses for rope were few and far between aboard space fairing vessels, but Tor found a four meter coil of Manila rope entombed beneath the various old tools and knickknacks of the bosuns store. He’d taken the rope, careful to avoid detection, back to his cabin and fifteen minutes previous fashioned a textbook seven loop hangknot.

It was the type of knot that served a singular purpose, yet every spacefarer knew how to tie.

The noose hung over the footboard and was secured via a complex run of cinch points running the breadth of his cabin, anchored by the heavy bed leg and looped finally over a hollow steel bar Tor had drilled into his wardrobe and en suite bulkhead. He wasn’t convinced it would hold, but it would have to do.

Anything to kill the images that gnawed his mind, to stop the shadow phantoms that clung to every corner as darkness bled into the Riyadh. The ceaseless voracious coronach that sang within his brainpan. Murmansk-13’s hooks dug deeper into his ship and into the soft matter of his mind; malignant and metastasizing.

Tor clamped his hands over his ears and watched loose fibres drift from the coarse hemp fabric. Tor tried to distract himself, wondering what other purpose the rope could ever have served and how it had come to be onboard the Riyadh short of providence. Looking at the noose brought a modicum of clarity to his fragmented thoughts, quieting the creatures in his head. He swigged his last tepid beer, it was five fifty in the morning; a point at which it is not quite morning and not quite night and where in space there is no dawn and no dusk, just a dark lifeless void bereft of designation.

Tor lowered the picture of Lucia and Olaf to the dresser top. They didn’t need to see this. Lucia would move on quickly, she was no longer young but with Tor gone, there would be no one to pursue a lawsuit against except the Saudi’s. She’d inherit his meagre wealth and attract a vigorous Lothario. She probably already had.

He hoped Olaf would miss him, but his son had grown up in his absence. What Tor truly regretted was missing so much of his childhood, the golden years for a father and son which Tor spent in a frozen coma or pencil pushing amongst the stars. Or whoring with Columbian hookers at Snake’s Head. Had it all been for his family? Was that what every failed sailor thought in his final minutes?