II
Michael Collins sat at the desk of the senior engineer office, frowning at the report he currently held in his hands while nervously chewing on his lip. He could feel the sweat beading on his forehead and trickling down the nape of his neck. He nervously dabbed his balding forehead with the back of his sleeve and warily eyes the Marine that sat opposite him. Wearing full battle dress of a khaki overall with toughened armour plates over his calves, torso and shoulders, Corporal Richard Stevens sat holding a copy of the same report in one hand and a thinly-rolled cigarette in his other. His helmet sat on the table beside him, a battered packet of cigarettes tucked into a red piece of cloth wrapped around it. Two cards were fastened to the helmet on either side of the cigarette packet, a joker and a king of hearts, though the picture had been doctored and a white line added over the heart, indicating that he was the self'-proclaimed king of broken hearts.
"It says here that Jameson went into the lower engineering levels two days ago," he said, summarising the lengthy report without even reading it: his eyes remained fixed on the nervous engineer.
"Subjective ship time," Collins interjected. Stevens chose to ignore him.
"Sent to investigate a fault that one of the night staff on the bridge showed up as an error in the automated logs, an air lock malfunction?"
"That's right. I think it was JT on duty, him and that Indian he tends to hang around with."
"Tomly and Redhorn," Stevens muttered, nodding his head in agreement. "I read their reports, too. The thing I don't fully understand, is that you sent a relatively new engineer into the depths of the ship, which is like a maze, on his own?"
"That's right," Collins muttered, looking at the desk he sat at. His mouth was parched, and he would have given anything for the young Marine to leave the office so he could unlock the draw and pour himself a glass of vodka. Drinking on duty was a cardinal sin aboard the ship, and he didn't want to get in any more hot water than he already was, but a splash of chilled vodka would certainly help him unwind. Hell, maybe even a stint in the brig would let him do that, but it wouldn't look good on his career sheet.
"And he hasn't been seen since?"
"We thought that he'd just gone back to his quarters once the shift finished. You know what they're like down here in Engineering, the union rules down here, we have to go through so many channels and layers of red tape just to give them a five minute early finish; I'm sure you guys know about the union, right?"
"We're on duty every hour of every day. We don't have a union," Stevens said coldly, his eyes half-closed as he glared at him.
" Of course. Anyway, once he didn't turn up…"
"You filed your report, and the rest's history," Stevens said, kicking his feet up onto the metal desk and leaning back in the seat. Collins looked uneasily at the battered greaves the marine wore on his calves, trying to mentally count the tally marks that covered the clamshells. He had a white 'L' painted on the right greave, and the letter 'R' painted on the left. Collins had to fight back the sneer he could feel creeping across his lips at the man's inane sense of humour; the Marine was probably considered the wittiest soldier in the barracks. "Tell me again why only one person was sent down into the… what do you guys call it – the inferno?"
"It was late night," Collins said, shaking his head. "We operate on a skeleton crew then, minimal staff coverage while the rest of the ship sleeps."
"Not the rest: marines are on duty every hour of every day," Stevens said, repeating himself. Collins smiled weakly. "Why on his own? Why didn't someone else accompany him? My understanding of shift rotas aboard ships like the Eden is that they always work in pairs. What happened with Jameson?"
"Someone reported sick, we hadn't got around to finding a replacement. We couldn't wait to find someone, the report from the bridge indicated that there was a potential atmosphere leak. We needed…"
"I'm hearing excuses, but no specific reason. If Jameson's lying underneath some pipe somewhere, or at the bottom of an exposed air shaft, it'll be your ass on the line, and you'll have to deal with the consequences."
Collins opened his mouth to protest, but Stevens raised his hand to silence him. "I hope you don't have a still set up down there in the depths of the engineering levels. If we find him lying drunk on the ground, I'll hold you responsible as shift supervisor, and make sure you spend the rest of your time on this ship cleaning out the sceptic tanks..."
Stevens stopped talking as he lifted his hand up to the radio headset he wore, cocking his head as he listened to the voice that spoke over the link. Collins could hear it without being attached to the link.
"They've found your boy," he finally announced, crumpling up the paper and tossing it onto the floor. "One of the search teams found him in the lower levels, crawling around on his hands and knees trying to make himself vomit. He sounds delirious, rambling about being attacked or assaulted. It's possible that one of the animals has escaped from one of the domes."
Stevens stood up and grabbed his helmet, placing it on his head and flicking the cigarette into his mouth, rolling it around his lips before clenching it in his teeth. "It's also possible your boy has an illegal still down there and spent the last two days mashed off his face. I'll keep a couple of men on the level we found him, try to find out what exactly happened. I'll also make sure a couple of men drop by to search the offices and quarters of all engineers. In the meantime, Jameson won't be in for a while until I get one of the doctors to check him out. As you were, citizen."
Stevens turned and strolled out the office, his hand resting against the butt of his sidearm as he marched away down the corridor, his head bobbing up and down as he spoke into his microphone. Collins grimaced as he caught a glimpse of the protective plate that protected the base of his spine and upper region of his buttocks: capital lettering that read 'fantastic' and another card pasted to the armour, this one an ace of spades.
"Fantastic ace?" grunted Collins to no one in particular as he pulled open his draw and grabbed the bottle of murky liquid he had hidden. He'd have to dispose of it, and the still he and some of the other engineers had set up around one of the engine coolant units. "Ace hole, more like it."
0
Doctor Evelyn Monroe sat at her desk in the ship's surgery, her delicate features bathed in the pale glow of a muted desk lamp as she hammered a keypad set into the desk, updating the record of the patients she had seen that day. The writings she worked on floated above the keyboard, and she rubbed her temples as she paused mid-sentence, trying to work out what to enter next into the system.
The door to the surgery hissed open and she spun around, the words of her report still lingering in her vision as the contact lenses she wore projected the image of the words over the scene before her.
Two Marines, each wearing their olive green armour and carrying weapons slung over their shoulders, guided a weary looking man into the infirmary. The man, naked from the waist up, had a red mark around the circumference of his neck, and eight pinpricks of blood around his face. His lips were pale, and he had a distant look in his eyes, as if he didn't know where he was. Evelyn switched off the console on her desk and grabbed a set of medical instruments, placing some in the pockets of her long white coat, some in her belt and others on one of the vacant wheeled gurneys. She didn't need to indicate to the soldiers as they lifted the man, placed him on the trolley and stepped back.
"What have we got?" she asked, grabbing the gurney by the handrails on one side and pushing it into one of the eight examination cubicles that lined the room.
"Jameson, an engineer been missing for a couple of days," announced one of the Marines as he followed her into the examination chamber. "We found him crawling around on his hands and knees in one of the lower levels, says he can't remember much but he claims he was attacked by an animal or a person. He thinks. Dealer thinks he's drunk."
"You said he was talking, what happened to him?"
"Must've went back under," suggested one of the Marines with a half-hearted shrug of his shoulders.
"And they don't tell you to keep an eye out for shock or anything like that?"
"They teach us to do what we're told, Doctor."
"Fine, fine," muttered Evelyn. She paused, then looked inquisitively at the more vocal Marine. "Who's Dealer?" with a frown, she wired the gurney up to a control panel and tapped a series of commands into keypad. The words that still floated in her vision faded away, and were replaced by a three-dimensional graphic representation of the skeletal structure of the man.
"Corporal Stevens, he plays a mean hand of cards," the second Marine responded, pulling a cigarette out from one of the pouches around his waist and flipping it into his open mouth. "He's in charge of the investigation."
Evelyn looked up from the body of the man, the scan of his skeleton still in her field of vision as she peered at the soldier, in particular the cigarette he was about to ignite. "Put that out, soldier. This is a sterile environment, and you know you can't smoke aboard this ship, anyway."
"I wasn't going to light it," protested the Marine, his lighter gripped in his hand as the flame hovering inches from his smoke.
"Do you need to stay here?"
"Dealer…. uh, Corporal Stevens says he needs a report on him, toxicology, blood sugar levels, the works. You're to give us the information we need, and we'll pass it on."
"Stay out of my way," she sighed, tapping notes into her hand-held computer screen. "It might take some time. You gentlemen want to take a seat?"
The two men grunted a wordless response, and one of them retired to the door, while the first stayed to watch. Evelyn tried her best to ignore him and worked around the delirious man, administering a mild sedative while continuously making notes.
"Is he okay?" the Marine finally asked.
"Skeleton seems okay," Evelyn finally announced, tapping the control pad beside the bed and watching as the views projected in her lenses cycled through the different layers of the patient: bone, skin, muscle, organs, and the circulatory system. "There's a small crack in his skull, like he fell against something hard, metallic. His teeth look they've been repositioned, forced open, his bridgework is all push in and rearranged. I don't know… if he was attacked, maybe he was hit in the face, a blunt, shaped object maybe like a wrench or a hammer. From the markings on his neck, it looks like he was strangled, the striations suggest maybe a cable or tubing or something, but these markings on his dermal layer suggests something like fingers have been wrapped around his head, like this," she said, placing the her wrists together and pointing her fingers towards the Marine, wiggling them in a loose impersonation of spider legs. She stopped and lowered her hands and returned to working the controls of the medical scanner. "Hold on, what's this?"
The soldier by the door, who had looked bored and unresponsive up to that point, perked up, taking a step into the room and motioning for the doctor to carry on. She didn't look up, didn't see him approach, but she continued anyway.
"The X-ray scans of his thorax looks like he's got a large blood clot in his chest, right here between his lungs. Like a fist…"
"Is that linked in to the attack?"
"Maybe it's not a clot," she said to herself, ignoring the Marine. "A tumour? Some kind of foreign body… I might have to operate."
"Doctor," the Marine snapped, eyeing Evelyn with a stone-cold stare. "In your professional opinion, was this man attacked?"
"By something, yes. I can't say what, maybe something's escaped from one of the domes."
"We have men searching the level we found him on now. If something's down there, they'll find it."
"Well they'd better be careful," Evelyn muttered as she retrieved a tray of sterilised surgical instruments from one of the storage cupboard and set them down beside the man. She grabbed an auto-injector and pressed the needle tip of the device against the skin of the prone man, flushing his system with a sedative and anaesthetic. "Whoever of whatever did this to this man may still be lurking down there."
"We're Marines, ma'am," the Marine said with a smug toothy grin, flashing teeth yellowed by tobacco and coffee. "We can handle ourselves."
"I'm sure you can," Evelyn muttered, adjusting the control panels in front of her before collecting a tray of sterilised instruments. "Just keep out my way while I look at his injuries, In fact, just keep out the room, I need the place to be sterile and your filthy uniform and weapon isn't going to help me keep my medical licence. You may not need any damn licence to kill someone, but I need one to save someone."
"Corporal Steven told us to…"
Evelyn sighed, feeling her stress levels rise as she tried to deal with the comatose patient. She folded her arms across her chest and furrowed her brow. "When I've got something to report, I'll submit my report directly to him."
"But…"
"I'll let him know, uh," Evelyn squinted to peer through the holograms that still floated before her vision and read the nametag embroidered on the lapel of his jump suit. "Jules. I'll let him know that Private Jules was a perfect example of Marine chivalry and dedicated to his job. How does that sound?"
"Okay," sighed the Marine, shaking his head. "Okay, but we'll wait outside. You know, in case whoever did this comes back to finish the job. If I did this to someone, I'd come back and finish the job to make sure they didn't point the finger."
"Wonderful," Evelyn murmured, making a note of the patient's vitals.
