VI

The brig was a small room, ten-foot square, and furnished with a metal bench on opposing sides of the cell. In one corner there sat a squat metallic chair with an aluminium cover, a basic waste unit linked in to a chemical flushing system that smelled a little off, with a basin and a cracked mirror fixed to the wall beside it. The walls and floor of the room seemed to be made of a single sheet of untextured metal, providing no seams that could lead to a potential escape. A small camera hung suspended from the corner of the room, panning slowly from left to right, a blinking red light on its underside the only indication it was activated.

JT sat on one of the benches, staring glumly at his friend who lay on the bench opposite him, his chest slowly rising up and down with each laboured breath.

"What shit've you gotten me into now, you dumb bastard?"

Naki didn't answer. He didn't expect him to, not yet. One of the medics attached the platoon of marines stationed aboard The Eden had performed a cursory examination on him, announced he was just sleeping it off, and that he'd be fine. The same medic had suggested he was simply drunk, and the half-empty pouch of whiskey in his jacket pocket only went to support that theory.

JT knew Naki, and he figured that was about right.

"This is by far the worst thing you've ever done. Fuck knows what you've actually done, though…"

"You want to shut up in there?" a gruff voice called out from the other side of the sealed door. A grizzled face appeared at the small window, riddled with pale purple acne scars that covered his snarling face. "Should've got you sedated, too."

"Try it," JT muttered, looking at the curled up form of Evelyn beside him. Despite the size of the colony settler, there was only one brig, which meant that all three people had been thrown into the same room. As soon as Evelyn had seen Naki she'd become near hysterical, screaming and babbling incoherently. The medic had quickly administered a sedative to calm her down, and she'd quickly retreated into a foetal position and slipped into a restless sleep. JT sat beside her, running her fingers through her blonde hair in a bid to keep her calm. The fact of the matter was that the sedative was calming her down, and the intimate contact only served to calm himself and no one else. He carefully stood up and walked over to the sink, turning on the tap and wetting his hands before splashing his face and running his fingers through his dark hair. Gripping the sides of the basin, he glared into the mirror, at the pale face and dark sunken eyes that glared back at him: the skin beneath them was purple and inflamed, telling the tale that he'd been awake for longer than he should. He was overdue a shave, too, his jaw covered in a spattering of dark stubble. How long had he been awake? Maybe he should get some of that sedative, get some sleep before the Captain decided to haul them out the brig and interview them one at a time.

"Fuck me," murmured a deep voice behind him, and JT spun on his heel, staring at the form of Naki on the bed as he slowly hauled himself up into an upright position. He looked glumly at his wrists and the bindings that kept him restrained, then around his location with bleary eyes. "Jesus, what have you gotten me into now, JT?"

JT didn't answer, simply stormed across the room, grabbed him by the collar of his undershirt, and slammed him up against the wall. Snarling and bearing his teeth, he didn't treat his friend with kid gloves or waited to see how he was.

"What have you done now, Naki? What have you gotten us in to?"

"Us?" Naki murmured, pushing away JT and dropping back down to the bed, rubbing gently at his temples with his hands. "You mean…" he looked up, saw the prone form of Evelyn lying on the opposite side of the room. He nodded casually towards her. "What's she doing here?"

"What're any of us doing here, you drunken bastard?" JT screamed. His voice was loud enough to make Evelyn stir slightly, but not enough to bring her out of the drug-induced coma. "I want to know what the fuck happened, and I want to know now! Maybe between the two of us we can work out what the hell happened."

"I… I don't remember," Naki confessed, shaking his head and gently nursing it with both hands. "Something about a snake… security guards… blood… I don't know; it's all a blur."

"Because you were drunk," JT snapped. "You were drunk, and you were found in one of the women's locker rooms, surrounded by blood: and it wasn't yours. They're probably matching it against the ships records now, running a check for anyone reported as missing."

"The locker room," Naki agreed, shakily nodding his head. "That's right, that's where the snake was…"

"Enough with the fucking snake," JT spun on his heel and walked away from his befuddled friend. He had to put some distance between Naki before he lost his temper and tried to knock him out. He knew he'd fail; Naki was far stronger and more resilient in a fistfight than JT was, the numerous bar fights they always managed to somehow end up in a testament to this. "If there was a snake…" JT's voice tailed off as he slumped to the bench beside Evelyn. He grabbed Evelyn's hand and scowled. "Serpents… wait, can you remember any details about the snake? Anything at all?"

"Long tail, pointy teeth, how the fuck should I know? I'm not a god-damn botanist."

"Botanists study flowers," JT muttered absentmindedly, dismissively waving the thought away. "There was something in the infirmary, but it wasn't a snake, it was… I don't know, more like a human, or at least a humanoid creature. It killed a couple of people… Maybe an animal that's escaped?"

"Well, did you tell the captain this?"

"Does it look like I did? If I started telling him about more dead bodies in one of the infirmaries, we probably would have been shot on the bridge, and our bodies tossed out that damn faulty airlock."

"Fuckin' Captain Marx," Naki shook his head, rubbing at his chest, kneading his breastbone with his knuckles. "Well, Christ, what do we do now?"

"I don't know… Jesus, this is…" JT's head was spinning with the events that had unfurled around him. It was clear that at least two of the more ferocious animals had escaped from one of their holding cells, but until this was corroborated with ship records, the fact Naki had been found unconscious in a pool of blood and JT was wandering around with a hysterical doctor and a recently discharged firearm was damnable evidence against them.

"Well, we've got some things going for us. Security feed for a start, that's going to show what really happened in the locker room."

"Well, we've got some people working on that," the face of a Marine appeared at the small window in the door, different to the pock-scarred face that had been there before, though just as stern: cold blue eyes fixed JT with an icy glare, and the square, stubble-covered jaw of the man clenched and unclenched as he watched over the trio within the cell. "Matter of fact, we've got a number of people working on a few different things. Seems like all this shit with you three's only been the tip of the iceberg. Something you want to tell me? An uprising or something, maybe you're all working for pirates or something? Take use down from the inside?"

"You're joking," Naki snorted, shaking his head. He glared at the Marine, and gulped. "Christ, you're not joking, are you?"

"You tell me if I'm joking," the Marine snarled as the door to the brig was opened and he strolled in, accompanied by two other soldiers, one on either side of him and pointing their weapons at the two active men in the room. The speaker was clearly in charge, his minders and bodyguards remaining silent and stoic, fixing their gaze on JT and Naki. "Some poor bastard goes missing in the engineering decks, then turns up days later almost dead. I send him to med-lab to get checked over, and leave two of my men there to keep an eye on him: make sure that nothing happens to him, or that whoever tried to kill in him the first place doesn't try to return to finish the job. Now, I've got two marines missing, half a bloody body left in the med-lab, the doctor in charge a complete gibbering mess, and a delinquent pilot in possession of an illegal firearm that's been fired a number of times. In the mean time, his friend turns up in a locker room, drunk and surrounded by blood. No bodies."

He circled around behind his minders and sat down on one of the benches, looking glumly at his hands before running his fingers through the close-cropped mousey brown hair he sported. Sighing heavily, he crossed one calf over the other and reclined slightly, laying his head against the wall of the cell.

"And now, the damn Captain of the ship's missing, along with another forty or fifty crew from different areas around the shop. Now, I want you to tell me exactly what's going on, and how many of you there are working here. I'm only going to ask you one time."

"We're not pirates," JT protested, stepping forwards as he spoke. Both marines swung their weapons around and pointed them at his head, each with a perfect shot lined up on his head. He paused and stepped back, his hands raised to show he was no threat. "We're not marauders, we're not trying to take anyone down. We were on duty, me and Naki: I got a call from Evie, she sounded like she was in trouble, so I went to check on here…"

"Abandoning your post in the process," the Marine nodded his head. "Carry on."

"I went to check on her, found the med-lab a shambles, lights out, no Marines on duty, and a dead body that looked like it was in the middle of an autopsy. I found Evie in a cupboard, terrified, and she was talking about a serpent. I was attacked by a…"

"A snake?" suggested the Marine with a smirk.

"I don't know what," JT admitted, shrugging his shoulders. "It was dark; it could've been anything." The truth was that JT could remember the details of the creature very well, the animal was embedded in his mind, but he was just having a hard time believing everything, and an even harder time trying to describe it.

"And what about you, Redhorn?"

"As soon as I…" Naki began, stopping abruptly as a coughing fit wracked his body. He turned his head to one side and spat a wad of phlegm onto the floor before recovering, rubbing at his throat as he continued. "As soon as JT fucked off to screw the good doctor there," he said with a wicked grin directed at his friend, "I was on my own. I took a nip of my whiskey pouch, just the one, I swear, and tried to find something to keep myself entertained. A while ago, I'd managed to hack into security cameras. I flicked through a couple of scans before I came across a picture of this locker room."

"Drinking on duty," the Marine held up his hand and counted off the cases of negligence and misconduct. "Hacking into restricted security feeds for your own enjoyment and entertainment. What else you got?"

"I seen some women get attacked on the screen. Some kind of snake, I don't know what kind of snake, I'm not an expert. How many dangerous critters we got aboard this ship, anyway?"

The Marine shrugged his shoulders.

"Anyway, it started eating this woman, I called security, but they weren't interested. So I went to see if there was anything I could do."

"Abandoning your post," the Marine counted off the third act on his hand. "Very responsible. What then?"

"I… I can't remember," Naki shrugged apologetically. "Everything's a blur, a fuzzy memory. Next thing I remember for sure is waking up here."

The Marine sat in silence as he mulled this story over, looking slowly from one man to the other, then finally at the prone woman on the bench opposite him. "You know," he finally said. "It sounds like complete bullshit to me: but just enough bullshit to be believable. Maybe. Now…" he stopped speaking as one of the many pouches on his webbing beeped, and he opened it up, flipping open the small device and peering at the screen while adjusting the radio headset he wore.

"Stevens here. Yeah, I'm ready. I'm here with them now. Patch it through."

He fell silent as he watched his portable view screen while JT and Naki watched, waiting for his response. His face was devoid of any emotions as he watched the screen, but after a few minutes he tapped the screen and flipped the screen over in his hand, presenting the portable device to the two prisoners. "This look familiar?"

Both Naki and JT looked at the screen, and the vision of the pale yellow creature coiled around the thigh of a woman, it's head buried in the bloody wound it had tore into the fleshy buttocks of the corpse. Blood had sprayed across the lockers and floor around the creature and its meal, and flecks of the same crimson fluid spattered the pale flesh of the animal. While JT shook his head slowly, unfamiliar with the creature, Naki blanched and held his hand over his mouth as he felt the bile begin to rise. He nodded his head slowly, motioning to the screen.

"That's it. Little bastard."

"But it's not the creature from the med-lab?"

Again, JT shook his head.

"We're going to have to wake your friend up, check to see if this is what she saw."

"If we have to," JT nodded solemnly, gently lifting Evelyn and sitting her upright, brushing aside a few strands of her blonde and hooking them behind her ears. They were pointed slightly, contributing to her elfish good looks that JT had come to fall in love with as she'd grown older. She stirred slightly, murmuring to herself, her eyes flickering open slowly and blearily peering around the cell, at the five men watching her. Two of them she recognised, the other three were Marines she'd never seen before. She smiled dreamily at JT, frowned at Naki as if there were something she was supposed to remember, about him.

"Evie, are you okay? How're you feeling?"

"Sleepy," she moaned, wrapping her arms around JT and leaning her head against his shoulder. "Sleepy, Johnny, need to sleep."

"Ma'am," Stevens addressed her, bowing his head slightly. "Corporal Stevens, USMC. I need to ask you a few questions."

"Stevens," she nodded with a grin. "Dealer."

"That's right," Stevens nodded with a smile. "That's me. I guess you've heard about me."

"Just the guys that brought him in. The marines… Jules… said you were in charge."

"That's right. Can you remember what happened to him? I need to know… was it anything to do with this?"

He handed her the portable screen, and she reached out to accept it with shaking hands as she looked at the creature in the image. Her face twisted and contorted in horror as she threw the screen across the room, hurling the device against the wall.

"I guess that's a yes," Stevens nodded to the Marines either side of him. They left the room, leaving the door open as the corporal as he retrieved the screen, dusting it off and turning it off before slipping it back into his pouch. "Okay, I've got to file a report, but some men out there, especially on the hydroponics domes… are you okay?"

Stevens looked over at Naki, who had doubled over in a violent coughing fit, shaking his head and banging his chest with a clenched fist. JT leapt up and rushed to his friend's aid, thumping on his back with the palm of his hand and trying to help clear his windpipe. He dropped to his knees, his palms flat against the floor and his back arching as he convulsed and screamed in agony.

"Get a medic," JT shouted, rolling his friend on his back and trying to pin him down by the shoulders, trying to put a halt to his trashing movements.

"Don't hold him down, if he's having a fit you'll only damage him," Stevens commanded, making his way to the door and swinging his head around the frame. "Mayer, get over here, we need you."

JT watched helplessly as his friend rolled from side to side, fingers twisted and gnarled in a claw: he opened his mouth, and a horrific belching roar tumbled out, echoing and deafening in the confines of the room. He trashed around few a few more seconds, then fell silent, his eyes glazed over and staring vacantly at the ceiling.

"What the fuck was that?" demanded Stevens, looking over at Evelyn for some kind of response: she was in no position to give any answers, her feet pulled up onto the bench beside her, arms wrapped around her knees and pulled in tight, rocking back and forth slightly. The corporal shook his head, angrily looking at JT. "You're girlfriend's a real shit doctor, you know that? One medical emergency and she freaks out."

"What happened?" demanded another soldier as he appeared at the door, clutching a hard case filled with medical supplies. "What's going on?" Stevens shrugged by way of response, waving to the Indian lying on the ground. "He just dropped to the ground and had a fit."

"I see. Any history of epilepsy with your friend?"

The medic looked at Stevens, then JT: both men shrugged their shoulders. He dropped to his knees by the prone form, gently placing his fingers on Naki's neck, then wrist. He frowned, checking the neck again. "I can't find a strong pulse, but he's breathing well enough. I need to… Jesus!"

Naki erupted into another bout of fits, his back arching and arms flailing, his chest bouncing up and down as if being pulled by ropes from above. He screamed, another bellicose roar that echoed in the room, and a deafening crack sounded from deep within his chest: a fine trickle of blood appeared on his shirts, a thin line running almost a foot in length from naval to neckline. Naki fell silent, dropped limply to the ground, his ribs bouncing up and down as his breathing laboured. They continued to pulse as his head rolled lifelessly to one side, his tongue lolling out his mouth and eyes blank. Another crack sounded, and his chest bulged, ripped, then exploded outwards, spraying the room and its inhabitants with a misting of gore and fragments of shattered bone. JT and Stevens stared in horror at the opened torso that lay before them, at the exposed organs and the creature that nested in the middle of it.

Sitting amongst lungs and heart covered in bite and claw marks, the same snake that had been displayed on Stevens' screen peered around with an eyeless face, snarling and hissing with a mouth filled with tiny, needle-sharp teeth the colour of metal, dripping bloodied saliva. Its pale skin, a chitinous armour like the shell of an insect, was coated in a slick layer of blood, gleaming dimly in the light of the cell.

"Christ," Stevens murmured, slapping his thigh and drawing his pistol from his holster, pulling it free and levelling it off at the creature. Before he could squeeze of a shot, the serpent creature uncoiled its length from the shattered torso and bolted out the room, leaving behind a trail of gore that streaked out the door and out of sight.

"What the fuck was that?" the medic murmured, stepping away from the twitching corpse.

"Jesus," JT moaned, scrambling away from the corpse of his friend.

"I want a quarantine lockdown on this entire ship," Stevens snapped, barking his orders into his microphone pickup. "Get guards posted at all medical facilities across the ship, double security around the domes: send out an update to the Behemoth cruisers around us, and monitor chatter on the other ships for anything similar."

Stevens looked at JT, then motioned to him and Evelyn, urging them to get up and move towards the door and out the cell. "Your story seems to check out."