III

"Graveyard shift again," murmured JT, glaring at the dimmed monitor before him and nursing a plastic disposable cup filled with the tar-like tepid coffee. He still wasn't a captain, and he still despised the late shift.

"Graveyard shift's ideal for the deadbeats, right?" grunted Naki, his feet up on the control desk and rolling them from side to side on the balls of his feet, tapping the toes of each boot together. He peeled back a sheet from the notebook he carried, crumpled it up and tossed it through the air. He watched with a simple grin as the projectile sailed through the air and bounced off the rim of the metal bucket he'd brought with him to his shift. It toppled to the floor and lay amongst the pile of other paper balls lying on the deck plate. "It wouldn't be so bad if they paid us more, unsociable hours and all, but shit…"

"I know," JT nodded. "We get paid the same as the people who work nine to five. Where's the fuckin' justice in that?"

"Amen," Naki grinned, crumpling his own coffee cup into a misshapen disc and launching it across the room. It sailed across the room, skimmed over the bucket, and crashed into the wall, spilling a few droplets of dark brown liquid on the bulkhead. "Boring as shit, but if we try to bring something to keep us entertained, we get pulled up on a disciplinary and get some of our pay docked."

"Well, hacking into the security cams in one of the women's locker rooms is a little different to bringing a book along to a shift."

"But it's so damn boring," Naki repeated, pulling himself up and strolling around the room, idly flicking random switches and buttons as he strutted around the bridge. "The last thing that happened that was vaguely interesting was that glitch with the airlock the other day."

"You heard what happened with that, right?" JT asked, leaning forward and looking into the dark contents of his cup as if trying to read the future in a crystal ball. "With the engineer going missing."

"I heard he camped out in the belly of the ship and got pissed out of his face on an illegal still he set up," Naki grumbled. "Lucky bastard."

"Yeah? Well I heard he got attacked."

"Attacked," scoffed the Indian. "Who the fuck's going to hide in the engineer deck they call 'the inferno', and attack someone?"

"Not 'who', but 'what'," JT shook his head. "They think one of the animals escaped from the domes."

"Fuck me," groaned Naki, throwing himself into another seat. In one shift, he normally sat in every seat on the bridge for at least ten minutes, and tonight was going to be no exception. "That's all we need, some frigging rat running around the air shafts. And it's not rats and mice we're carrying: there's some nasty shit in those hydro domes. Monkeys, wild cats, fucking sharks…"

"I hardly think a shark's going to break out of the water tanks and stalk the engineering crew," JT rolled his eyes.

"Stranger shit's happened," Naki warned, wagging his finger. "Mark my words."

"Anyway, they say the marks on the poor bastard looked like someone had tried to have a right go at him. Strangled, they say."

"They?" Naki raised an eyebrow. "You mean she, as in Doctor Monroe. Still trying to fuck around with her?"

"She's a friend," JT assured him. "I used to hang around with her brother before he was shipped out to Styx on some Marine mission, I promised I'd look after her, and he never came back, died on the mission: I owe it to him. Anyway, yes, Evelyn said he looked like he'd been strangled, maybe with a piece of wiring. Lucky the bastard wasn't garrotted."

"And you don't feel guilty that it was us that picked up the fault and sent them out him to get beaten up?"

"No, because we just picked out the fault, the engineering chief sent him out on his own, and from what I hear, the Corporal's going ape shit on that poor bastard. He's convinced it was his fault."

"That's the shit that happens here," Naki smiled, fishing around in his pockets and dumping the contents of them on the desk. He sifted through the fluff and dirt, picking out a sealed tube of tobacco and a roll of thin white paper and started to roll himself some cigarettes. "You're trapped in a metal box for, what, how long, months; maybe a year? You're bound to loose it at one point or another; it's just a case of who freaks out first. In this case it was the psycho stalking the engineering decks, followed closely by the crackpot Marine who spends too much time getting high on gun cleaner."

"Some would say you cracked a long time ago," grinned JT, helping himself to one of the freshly rolled cigarettes and tucking it behind his ear.

"Well, when you and your Grampa spend every Sunday afternoon shacked up in a sweat lodge with a pound of hallucinogenic drugs for seven years, something's bound to stop working up here," Naki grunted, tapping the side of his head with a finger. "But the drugs stopped me from going crazy. Now I'm just lazy as shit. One thirty systems check, what's the status?"

"Everything's the same," JT muttered. "Power, atmo, pressure. Nothing new, it's all okay. We got word back from The Babylon and Gaia; their systems are fine. Whatever malfunctioned with our airlock's a one-off; it hasn't been repeated over there. What about your boards?"

"Everything's fine: we've got reports of missing primates from one of the hydroponics domes coming in, some family that of monkeys that haven't been seen for a couple of days, we'll let the animal handlers worry about that... You see, that makes sense: monkeys go missing, and around the same time some poor bastard is found beaten down by an escaped animal. Problem solved, get me the Captain, I should have his job. There's a com light flashing, too, an incoming transmission from one of the medical bays. Other than that, it's all normal."

"Transmission from where? Open the channel!"

"Ay, sir," saluted Naki, running his fingers over the board and activating the communication systems, putting on a fake voice. "This is the graveyard shift with Tomly and Redhorn, taking requests and dedications for all our listeners. What's your name and where are you calling from?"

Static hissed over the speakers hidden in the console JT sat at, a steady rhythmic whisper of silence punctuated by the slightest of a shuddering breath.

"Hello?" JT said, leaning towards the microphone on the desk. "Is there someone there?"

"T… Tomly?" a horse voice, quiet and subdued, almost afraid to be heard. "John, is that you?"

"Evelyn?" he asked, leaning further forwards in the seat and tapping at the controls to see if he could increase the signal and isolate her voice from the fizzing background noise. "Evie, is that you?"

"Johnny… Christ, I need you!"

"Fuck, JT," Naki bellowed, slapping the console before him with the palm of a wide hand and shaking his head, a grin plastered on his face. "You always screw your friends' sisters? I've got a sister back on Earth, have you fucked her?"

JT scowled at his friend, making short, sharp gestures with his hands to indicate he should be quiet. "Evie, it's me, what's wrong?"

"Help me," she whispered pitifully. "Christ… please…"

A clatter sounded in the background, the sound of a metal tray dropping to the floor and instruments scattering across the deck, followed by a screech, then the transmission abruptly cut off. JT jumped to his feet and pulled on the red leather jacket draped over the back of his chair, then grabbed his cap and pulled it on over his head as he stormed towards the door.

"Where you going?"

"Medical," JT snapped, pausing at the door and hammering a code into the keypad by the door. It cycled open slowly, allowing him access to the corridor outside. "Jameson's still down there, doped up to the eyeballs. If the psycho that beat the shit out him's gone to finish the job off, she could be in trouble, I have to get to her."

"Call the Marines, that's what the bastards get paid for. We fly, they shoot and risk their lives. I wouldn't expect them to fly this ship, why should they expect us to be brave?"

"Because sometimes you have to take the initiative," muttered JT as he stepped out into the corridor and hammered the button behind him to seal the door.

"Fine" Naki responded as he slipped a plastic pouch out from the inside of his jacket and took a sip of the dark yellow liquid that sloshed around inside the small bag. Smacking his lips as the cooled, and illegal, whiskey trickled down his throat, he lay back in the seat he occupied and looked over the few controls he decided to monitor while he decided whether he should contact the Marines.

"Fuck it," he finally decided, replacing the malleable hip flask back into his inside pocket and patting it reassuringly. In the eternity he'd spent watching over the ship, the only exciting thing that had ever happened had been the airlock malfunction, and what were the chances, really, of that happening again?

"Chase that skirt all you want," he sighed, grabbing a datapad and idly flicking through the real-time updates that were coming in from around the ship. There seemed to be a lot of minor failures and errors cropping up around the ship, little system faults and bugs that needed to be fixed, but by no means were dangerous or threatening to the wellbeing of the ship or its crew. He reluctantly tapped through a series of menus, sorting through the reports and passing them on to the areas on board that would deal with the fixes.

Though the job was by no means taxing, Naki quickly lost interest in it and found himself logging into the security systems under an alias to see if any of the sub-programs he'd input to hack the security cameras in the locker rooms were still active. He grinned wickedly to himself as one of the small monitors beside his chair sparked to life and depicted a small room lined on each side by metallic doors, each with a small keypad embedded into the front. A woman strolled into view, a young redhead with her hair tied back in a tight ponytail and a thick white towel wrapped around her body. She seemed preoccupied as she paced up and down the locker room, talking impatiently into a small headset still wrapped around her head: she was obviously one of the higher ranking officers on board who felt they could never be more than five minutes away from their work. He couldn't hear any of the sound, nor could he muster up any three dimensional images: voyeurism had its limits if he didn't want to be caught by the systems.

In mid conversation, the woman seemed to lose her temper and flung both her hands out while spreading her fingers in a gesture Naki used himself, normally while uttering the words "what the fuck?" and from the annoyed expression on the woman's face, he could tell that she was in the same frame of mind. She tore off her radio and threw it unceremoniously into her locker, let her towel drop to the ground, and started to head towards the door at the back of the room, that lead to the showers. Naki smiled to himself as he watched the naked, supple form of the woman move, found himself grinning even more as she spun on her heels and her breasts bounced from side to side. She seemed to be staring straight at Naki, and he found himself recoiling from the monitor, before remembering that it wasn't a two-way transmission, and something else close to the camera had obviously startled her: maybe one of the escaped monkeys had found its way into the changing rooms.

Naki smiled as he was briefly reminded of an old tri-dee video he'd seen once that had involved a naked woman and monkey, but knew that there was no way he was going to get a live sample of bestiality right now. Still, he was interested to see what would happen next: would the woman retrieve her towel first, before attempting to catch the monkey, or would she just try to scare it away? So many possibilities, though all he thought didn't match with what actually happened.

A pale shape slithered in front of the camera, a sickly yellow-orange, glistening hide that slipped in front of the lens and sickly reflected the artificial lights of the room, a shape that seemed to taper off into a thin tail as it dropped from what must have been a ventilation shaft near the camera onto the ground: the woman followed it with her head and tried to back away from it, stumbling over her towel and finding herself wrapped up in it, spinning around and falling to the ground, her head bouncing sickeningly off the lockers as she lost her balance and crashed to the floor. Naki watched as something slithered across the floor, some kind of mutant snake being the best way he could describe it, and latched on to the exposed buttocks of the woman, chewing on the fatty tissue with small, sharp teeth. He felt sick, but found himself unable to tear his gaze away from the feasting animal, slapping blindly at the controls around him and trying to find the controls to open a communication channel. The system chirped to life and a rough voice broke the stunned silence that had fallen over the bridge.

"Security," the man grunted. He sounded just as board and reticent as Naki had been before hacking the security system.

"Yeah, hey, uh…" Naki started to speak, but tailed off as the truth behind what he was about to say dawned on him. If he was going to report this in, he was going to have to do it tactfully: if he just announced he'd seen it on the security cameras, questions would be raised; why was a part-time pilot and technician reporting on events he'd seen on a restricted feed? A pilot-cum-technician who had been reduced to the graveyard shift for just the same type of illicit behaviour only a couple of months before? As distressing and disturbing as it all was, he couldn't let himself fall any further from grace. His Grampa may have been a crack addict, but he came out with some gems in his years, and one of them was that you always had to look out for number one.

"Look, buddy, what's wrong? You're wasting my time."

"I… uh… There's been a couple of sightings around deck 4, section 8S, some people claiming they're seeing something like a snake loose in the corridors and around the gym area. Have you heard anything strange?"

"Nothing's been reported to Security. They normally report things like that to us direct, not the bridge."

"Yeah, I know, but…"

"Look, you sit up there and don't press anything, we'll worry about the little beasties escaping from the domes, you worry about doing your job and keep pointing us straight ahead."

"Listen, asshole," shouted Naki as he finally snapped, "There's some kind of fucking snake eating some women in one of the locker rooms. Why don't you do your job and get off your asses and find that woman?"

There was no response from the other side, indicating that the line had gone dead. Naki glared sullenly at the screen, and the snake that had now chewed through most of the flesh of the woman's buttock and now seemed to be worming its way into the inner cavity of her torso.

"Hell with this shit," he grunted, standing up and lurching for the doorway before punching in the code to release him from the bridge. "Sometimes you just gotta take the fuckin' initiative."