VIII
Evelyn sat in the barracks of the Marines stationed aboard The Eden, a thick grey blanket made of coarse wool draped over her shoulders that irritated her neck where the material rubbed against her. She'd removed her bloodied labcoat and left it discarded by the overflowing garbage bin and held a small grey cup in her hands, the steaming black coffee having been laced with a generous quantity of synthetic brandy. She swilled the coffee around in the cup, staring into the black liquid, but hadn't attempted to drink it.
JT, however, was on his third coffee and brandy, and showed no sign of slowing down. He'd been offered the same blanket, and although he'd accepted it, he'd shrugged it off shortly after being given it. He muttered incoherently to himself, his brow furrowed as he tried to piece together everything that had happened.
Stevens had left them together to work through things on their own with one soldier looking after them, and now sat at one of the tac-ops consoles as he worked through hundreds of security cameras and feeds on the multitude of screens. The console itself was standard issue for a Marine platoon, ripped right out the guts of an APC and welded into place in the barracks, separated from the rest of the room by partitions made from steel plating. It wasn't soundproof, but it was enough to give the commanding officer enough privacy to review all the video footage he needed, or to make any tactical commands in any operations that may be underway on the ship. And currently, the mission in hand was trying to track down mutant snakes, the location of the captain and other missing members of the crew, and the Marines that were currently MIA.
Of course, Stevens wasn't the highest-ranking soldier in the platoon aboard The Eden. There were another three platoons spread through the ship, each with a Sergeant who reported to the one Lieutenant. He, in turn, communicated with the military vessels in the convoy, but at the moment Stevens' Sergeant was one of the missing men, and the Lieutenant was currently at a meeting aboard one of the military cruisers. He'd taken it upon himself to review what material he could, but nothing seemed to cast any more light on the situation. People could be seen leaving the frame of one camera, and where they should have appeared on the next of the fixed cameras, there was nothing: as if they were being abducted in the shadows, or just around the corner, out of view. The only solid pictures that gave anything to go on were the screen dumps of the serpent from the locker room and the feed from the prison cell that had recorded the bloody birth of the creature from Naki Redhorn's body. That scene had been bloody and disturbing, and had certainly shaken the two civilians outside. Stevens had been a Marine for a long time, however, and had seen a number of horrific things in his tour of duty. A wild animal chewing its way through a person wasn't the worst thing he'd seen, but it ranked up there in his top five.
"Anything?" one of the Marines stood by the door in the partitions, two cups of coffee in her hands. She lifted one as if to offer it to Stevens, and he nodded with a grin, waving her in. He knew the private by face, but not her name. He quickly scanned the breastplate of the woman's armour, but unlike most other soldiers in the squad, she hadn't gotten around to personalising her uniform. His puzzlement must have been clear on his face as she settled down into the seat next to him and handed over the coffee.
"Don't know my name, do you?"
"I outrank you," Stevens grinned. "I could get away with just calling you Private."
"Don't sweat it, I'm just new. Transferred over from Gaia in the last rotation, I was brought in from Gamma Outpost, this is my first tour."
"A greenhorn," Stevens nodded. "Explains your virginity."
"Excuse me?" the female Marine recoiled slightly, an embarrassed look on her face as her cheeks flushed red.
"Clamshells are untouched," Stevens said, pointing to her bare plates of armour, then motioning to his own colourfully detailed protective shells. "Haven't gotten around to marking anything on your plating. Like a name, or anything."
"Dawes," she said, looking at the vast array of screens set out before her. "Claudia Dawes. Comtech, first class."
"Comtech, huh? Maybe you want to give me a hand?"
Dawes didn't wait for a second invite. She pulled her helmet off, let it drop to the floor and let her hair fall out, a shock of red tied in a ponytail that fell to her shoulders. Ignoring the questioning glances that Stevens gave her, she rolled the seat forwards and started to work one of the consoles, hammering a string of commands into the keyboard and concentrating on a black screen that scrolled luminous green text from top to bottom.
"Gamma didn't have a barber," she said by way of explaining her hair. It was far from regulations as far as length was concerned, but that was something Stevens would have to deal with later on. He had a lot more pressing issues to deal with, like finding the missing crew. "Okay, I'm guessing you've done a sweep for personal date transmitters, magnetic implants, everything like that?"
"Civs don't have the PDTs, not on the ship. Cost saving, plus how the hell can you loose people in an enclosed environment?" Stevens snorted at the irony of his comment before carrying on. "As for the magnetic implants for the Marines, I'm getting nothing for them. They're either in a shielded environment, or not on board at all. And the last thing I want to do is send out Marines to sweep through all the shielded areas of the ship: there's too many areas to cover, and it's too dangerous. We don't know what they're facing, after all."
"So there's nothing to go off. Who're we missing, have you tried tapping in to the live feed from their helmet cams?"
"I don't know what the hell I'm doing," Stevens conceded, pushing away from the console. "I can't pull anything up for anyone."
"Give me a shot. Jules is one of the missing men, right?"
"One of the first," Stevens nodded, watching in awe as Dawes' fingers danced over the keyboard, one of the multitude of blank screens on the console burst to life to display a screen filled with static and white noise, the faintest of signals coming through from the missing Marine's helmet camera, wherever that was.
"Got something, but it's really weak. Shielded area, definitely, there's some major interference killing the signal. I'll boost the power to our receiver; see if we can pull something more from his gear."
More keys were tapped on the console and the static-distorted image cleared up slightly. The image was dark, almost black with the audio missing entirely. Dark blurs moved in the distance of the image, shapeless entities that seemed to flit in and out of the shadows. The architecture of the place was completely alien to Stevens, like nowhere he'd seen in the ship before. What muted light that did appear in the picture shone wetly on the misshapen structure of the room, like condensation. Dew on the trunks of a tree? Maybe one of the hydroponics domes? Stevens couldn't be sure, not without lightening the image or getting a stronger signal.
One of the dark shapes moved closer to the camera and it tried to pull the object into focus, though the murk of the environment still made it hard to make any details out. It was humanoid in shape, with long limbs and a distorted head. It took another step closer to the camera, features of the leering face pulling into focus even more. A grin that occupied most of its face, teeth like needles and gleaming wetly in the dull light, dripping with thick opaque mucus. It stormed past the helmet, the raised ridges of its limbs shining and glistening as it knocked the camera and skewed the vision as it tumbled to the floor, the screen blanking out to darkness before the signal dying altogether. Dawes tried tapping in the command to boost the signal even more, but nothing worked. She shook her head, sitting back from the screens as she hit the repeat button, setting the retrieved signal into a continuous loop.
"It's not much to go off," she admitted, her shoulders sagging.
"But it's better than nothing," Stevens smiled, casually placing his hand on her shoulder and squeezing it. "We get those civs in here, see if they can recognise anything from that video. Tomly!"
JT had already appeared at the doorway, having retrieved his blanket and draping it over his shoulders again after being refused more coffee by the Marine watching over him. He stepped into the secluded makeshift office without waiting for an invite, looking over the array of monitor screens that made up the console. He paid particular attention to the screen in front of Stevens as he tapped the screen with the tip of a pen, waving him closer.
"Take a look at this vid," the Corporal demanded, "See if there's anything you recognise: it's dark, but it's better than nothing."
JT watched the film, barely able to make anything out on the dark screen, until the creature that knocked the camera and finally killed the transmission came into view. JT excitedly pointed his finger at the screen, urging the picture to be frozen with the rictus grin in clear view.
"That's the fucker, right there. The thing in the medical lab, that's it. Some kinda humanoid thing, like a mutant gorilla."
"We got a gorilla and a bunch of killer snakes," Stevens shook his head. "Can the two possibly be related? What about the place, can you make anything out from the video about where it is?"
"Dark, maybe… I don't know, maybe one of the domes? Could be trees, maybe one of the jungle domes. Certainly where a gorilla would hang out."
"There's got to be a link between the two different animals, but I've checked through the manifests for the livestock, and can't find anything that matches what we're looking for. Maybe a radiation leak causing mutations? I don't know. We need more than a couple of grainy pictures to go off. The two things must be linked, somehow. Apes don't give birth to snakes…"
"And there's nothing shown on any of the other screens?"
"Keep scanning them," Stevens ordered Dawes, indicating the security panels. "Cycle through as many live feeds as you can. Snakes, monkeys, anything out the ordinary, shout out, patch the signal through to me," he patted the data tablet hanging from his belt.
He stormed out the office back into the main area of the barracks, motioning for the Marines lying on their beds as he headed over to the thick, heavily shielded doors that occupied one third of one of the walls. Stevens stabbed the keypad beside the door and stepped back as the locks cycled open and the shutters rolled back, revealing a sparsely populated weapons rack with more empty spaces than occupied ones. The marines around him rushed forwards and grabbed their designated weapons, the devices that they were most familiar with.
"We've not got much," Stevens announced, grabbing an F-48 riot gun, a bulky and box-like combat shotgun designed to fire canister rounds. He grabbed a box of the oversized buckshot loads, thirty millimetre rounds originally designed for use with the underslung grenade launchers of the pulse rifles that most of the other marines had opted for. He fed six of the rounds into the internal magazine, slipped the rest into a pouch attached to his webbing, then watched as the men around him started to load up their own weapons.
"What's going on?" JT asked, having returned to his seat beside Evelyn and watching as the soldiers went about their business of arming themselves. "Have you found something?"
"Just getting ready," Steven's said grimly.
"Right," JT said, nodding his head. "Can I get my gun back? I'd feel a lot safer!"
Stevens snorted by way of response. "I'd feel a lot safer if I didn't have a civvie running around with an unsanctioned firearm that could pop a hole in our hull. We don't have a great deal of weapons here, but those that we do have are loaded with soft-slugs, purpose-built for firing inside a star ship: they don't penetrate any armour. Likewise with this shotgun here, the load won't piece a bulkhead. That weapon of yours… seemed pretty old, and the rounds not ideal for setting in a pressurised enviro."
"Well, can I get one of those?" JT asked, motioning towards the weapons that the Marines were handing out and preparing. Stevens didn't bother responding.
"Okay, Marines," he finally called out as the last of the soldiers cycled rounds into their weapons. "We've not got much to go on: people are missing and there may be mutated animals involved. I want everyone on duty; the shift rota is on hiatus until this is sorted out. I want walk-throughs in pairs all across the ship, security details doubled. Soft slugs loaded up, safeties off, but stay frosty. I want Rames and Kaymer to head over to enviro-control, make sure all the ventilation shafts are sealed and secured: it looks like the animals are using these as their main source of transportation around the ship. And stay there on guard, make sure no one tries to tamper with the settings."
Two of the Marines nodded their understanding and ran from the barracks while Stevens continued to talk through the plans.
"We need to keep the civs in their quarters wherever possible. We still need to have this ship run, but put it on a skeleton crew wherever we can."
"I've got something," Dawes shouted from the secluded office area, and Stevens jumped, startled by the sudden announcement.
"Okay, buddy up and get out of here, keep in touch, I need two watching over the civs here. Make sure he doesn't get his hands on any hardware," Stevens ordered, jerking a finger towards JT, then stormed back into office, unaware the JT had decided to follow him.
"What have we got?"
"Communication from The Vengeance, looks like our Lieutenant is reporting in."
"About fucking time," Stevens muttered, throwing his weight down into the seat and strapping the headset on his head, facing the video screen and the scowling face of the bald man on screen. With beady eyes set back from an overhanging brow and podgy cheeks, he sneered when he saw Stevens, the corner of his mouth twitching and rising, showing the array of gunmetal-grey teeth in his cruel mouth, stained that colour by countless years of smoking black market cigarettes.
"Corporal," he spat, glowering and making an effort to lean to one side, then the other, as if by moving his head he could get a better view of the room: the camera was fixed, of course, and didn't provide anything extra. "I wanted to speak to Sergeant Targus, where is he?"
"Missing," Stevens said, not wanting to go any further into the issue: he'd been sending regular updates to Lieutenant Cray's data pad over the last seven hours, that should have kept him up to date with everything. If he'd bothered to read the reports. Cray was notoriously lazy, and if his Sergeant wasn't around to hold his hand, then he was normally well out the loop. "I've been sending updates…"
"Fuck the updates," Cray spat, sneering at the screen. "What do you mean, Targus is missing? Where is he?"
When someone's missing, people normally don't know where they are, Stevens thought, and had to bite his tongue from snapping at Cray, who had somehow worked his way up through the ranks to a Lieutenant, despite the fact his IQ barely met the minimum requirements for the Marines. Either Cray had bought his way into his current position, or he had 'convinced' someone he was right for the job, either through blackmail or brown-nosing.
"A number of crew have gone missing, sir, and Targus is one of them. They're off the map, not responding to any communications or reporting for their duty rota. We've been scanning through security footage to track their last known movements, but they just disappear. There's also been some…"
"Who else is missing besides Targus?"
"A lot of engineers, a couple of Marines, flight officers. Marx is missing, too."
"Marx?" Cray was livid, his face turning red as his blood pressure started to rise. "The captain's missing, and you don't feel it important to tell me?"
"It's all in the updates I've been piping over to you, I couldn't get directly through to you because you were in a meeting with the rest of the officers over there. But that's not even half the story."
"There's more?" Cray asked incredulously, shaking his head.
"There's glitches, errors, technical fuck-ups cropping up all over the damn ship, the thing may as well be falling apart. Aside from the missing crew, we also have casualties, sir. Two definite, with the potential of Christ know how many others."
"Casualties? Deaths? How the fuck did this happen? Too busy sitting on your ass playing cards with the rest of the men to do your job? Fuck sakes, what are you assholes paid for?"
"We think there may be a mutant animal or animals loose on the escape," Stevens shook his head. Cray was a dick as far as he was concerned, and it wasn't going to be long before he pushed him too far, and Stevens would have to cut loose on the officer. It had happened before – three years ago he'd been Sergeant Stevens, but his short temper twinned with incompetent officers had seen him moving back in the ranks.
"Have any of the hyperdonic domes reported any creatures missing?"
"No," Stevens shook his head grimly, fighting back his smile at the idiot in charge of him. "We've already checked with the hydroponics dome, they're not reporting anything out of the ordinary." Stevens made sure he put the emphasis on the correction of the word Cray had bumbled. It was a small victory in his eyes.
"Why animals, then?"
"Check your updates," Stevens growled through gritted teeth. "It's all in there: pictures, video footage, and my own report about how I watched asnake chew its way out of one of the crew's chest."
Cray looked down, clearly fiddling with his data pad off screen as he tried to cycle through the information he'd been sent.
"There's pages of this shit," he muttered under his breath, before finally finding the footage Steven was referring to. He started with the camera that Dawes had managed to pull. "Dark as shit on there, you can't make anything out… what is that… Well, Christ, that could have been anything!"
"Play the next file."
Cray did as he was instructed (Stevens was surprised that he even knew how to operate the pad without Targus by his side), and could hear the muted, tinny conversation Stevens had taken place in while in the holding cells: then the tearing of flesh and the screams. Cray seemed to blanche a little, lifting his hand to his mouth and pressing it against his lips. He muttered something incoherent under his breath, then looked directly at the screen.
"This… thing… is it possible this is why people are disappearing? That the two things are linked?"
"That thing that came out of Naki," Evelyn muttered as she stumbled into the office and stood by JT, staring vacantly at the video screen. "That… that was what came out of Jameson."
"And who the fuck is that?" sneered Cray, aware of the voice but unable to see anyone else from his restricted view.
"Doctor Monroe," Stevens shook his head, "It's all there in the updates."
"I don't have time for updates," Cray shouted, "Tell me what's going on there now, and don't send me an update about it."
"Everyone's paired off, patrolling the ship. Weapons handed out, soft slugs and canister rounds. Vents are getting sealed off as we speak, in case those animals are moving through them. I'm going to get crew "
"Seems like a reasonable plan, for now," Cray muttered, albeit grudgingly. "Once we know what we're dealing with, I'm sure I can come up with something better, though: something not so… amateur. We'll see how things go in the hands of a professional."
"Well, fuck you too," Stevens grinned with a mock salute: he loathed Cray just as much as the officer did Stevens, and the pair had clearly grated on one another too much. "Maybe if you could find it in yourself to check you updates every so often instead of waiting to speak to someone to summarise everything for your simple mind to comprehend, then you could have been on top of this hours ago. Sir."
Never forget the airs and graces: if you're gonna bite them on the ass, may as well be polite about it.
"Clearly you can't be trusted with this task," Cray spat, tossing aside his data pad and moving towards the control board to kill the communication link. "Looks like I have to cut this briefing short. The sooner I can get back over there and relieve you of command, the better. Once I get there, consider yourself dismissed, Private Stevens."
The screen cut to black, and this hiss and whine of static in his headset died as Stevens pushed back from the desk. A string of expletives seethed from Stevens' brain into his mouth, but died at his lips as he sighed inwardly. What was the point?
"What happened there?" JT asked, stepping forwards to examine the blank screen, as if he expected the leering face to reappear.
"Looks like a I just got a demotion," Stevens said bitterly. He stood up, grabbed his weapon, then left the office area, looking up and down the barracks: all the other soldiers had left on their assigned patrols. He looked over the people left in the room, the two civilians and the four Marines left, then sunk to the closest bed, shaking his head.
"Uptight son of a bitch," he finally managed to mutter.
"So what now, we just wait for something to happen?" JT asked, looking anxiously from Evelyn to Stevens, then back to Evelyn. Everyone was silent, waiting for someone to offer a suggestion, when the control panel in secluded office burst to life again with a garbled burst of static. Stevens snapped, jumping to his feet and storming back into the office, expecting to find Cray on the screen once more. Ready for another argument, he was pleasantly surprised to see the face of one of the Marines he'd sent out on patrol, though not as pleased when he saw the nervous look of terror on his face.
"Hello," he whispered hoarsely, peering into the camera mounted to the helmet of his buddy. Dawes tapped at the operations console and split the screen into two, showing the camera view of the talker himself. The pair on patrol stared at one another, and Stevens in turn stared at them. He couldn't name the pair, but they seemed to know him. "Is Dealer there?"
Stevens grinned. Another nameless face that he'd out-classed in poker at one point.
"I'm here," Stevens announced, grabbing his headset again. "What's wrong?"
"Um…" the speaker mumbled, licking his lips and wiping a fine sheen of sweat off his brow, then spun his head from left to right. The view from his camera lurched sickeningly to one side, then another, displaying a dark and silent corridor on both sides, the lights flickering wildly near the closest junction. "I can hear something scuttling around, in the walls or below the floor panels. Something's not right here: motion sensor's picking up a ton of movement all around."
"Our men? Other people on the ship?" Stevens suggested. "Do you want me to send out a ship-wide message, get everyone to stand still?"
"There's something different, something not… Jesus, did you hear that?"
Both cameras lurched to the side, focusing on the flicking junction in front of them. Though the microphone hadn't picked up the noise that had alerted the Marines, the camera could pick out the slightest flicker of movement in the dark distance: like mechanical pipes covered in glistening steam and a lazy coil of wiring wrapped around a hideously malformed shape that could almost be human. In one flickering burst of the light it was there, then the second, it was gone, leaving behind an empty junction. The microphone did pick up the sound of the pulse rifles the men held have a round cycled through them and lifted the muzzles into view: for a moment, Stevens felt like he was watching one of the old flat-screen video games that his father, a collector of twentieth century memorabilia, had in his prize collection of historical trash.
"Fuck me, did you see that?" asked the first.
"I think so," Stevens said, watching as Dawes rewound the footage on another screen and paused the image: it was grainy, and the thing in the darkness could have been anything.
"Madre de Dios," the second Marine whispered as the pair slowly advanced on the darkness. One of the cameras bobbed down to glance at the motion tracker he held, a glowing blue screen with a semi-circle on it, watching as a white arc pulsed out from the middle of the curve and picked out a mass of different sources of movement in front of the Marines.
"See? That's too dense for one of ours."
"Could still be civs," Stevens cautioned, then thumbed the button that would transmit to all the Marines across the ship. "Remember to check your targets, we're still in a civvie ship, there could be anyone out there."
A slew of affirmatives came back by response, but Stevens had already switched back to the comlink with the two Marines.
"Take it easy," he gently ordered as they reached the flickering junction. "Back up, stay out of the shadows. Got any flares?"
No verbal response came, but one of them hurled a flare into the darkness, a small stick no larger than a cigar, the end smouldering with a searing white magnesium flame and chasing away the darkness of the junction. There was nothing there, other than a pool of thick, viscous fluid that had pooled on the ground beneath an opened air vent on the ceiling. One of the cameras dropped down low, and a hand reached out to prop the gelatinous slime, testing the texture of the slime between thumb and forefinger.
"Coolant?" he suggested, bringing it closer to the camera, looking as though he was offering it to the viewers, but in actuality he was smelling it. He pushed it away with a dry, retching sound. "Fuck, that stinks. Like a fucking dead animal or something."
There was another sound, a soft and gentle hiss, and Stevens felt the muscles in his jaws clench as he thought for a brief moment that the hiss meant the killer snake was nearby, maybe in the vent above them. He didn't have to warn the soldiers, they were good at their job and knew what to expect.
Or they thought they did.
Still crouching on the floor, the Marine peered into the opened vent, but could see nothing. It looked big enough to house a snake, certainly. While they were trying to probe the darkness without any kind of operational flashlight – in their haste, they must have left them in their footlocker, and Stevens hoped that no other Marine had made the same mistake – there was another audible noise on the feed, the sound of metal clattering on metal at the far end of the corridor, and both men spun to face the new noise.
The creature had to be two meters tall, at the least, but it moved with a low, slouched gait. As dark as midnight itself, its carapace glistened in the artificial light as it moved, a hard chitinous shell covered in ridges, while its hands trailed along the ground as it moved, its six fingers on each hand flexing scraping against the floor panelling, steely talons that skipped and screeched like nails on a chalkboard. The head of the creature, an impossibly large tube-like skull balanced atop a thin neck, glared eyelessly at the Marines, swung rhythmically from side to side as it stalked forwards and displayed the ridges that ran the length of its head on either side. Lips as black as the rest of its body parted with a snarl, peeling back to reveal a mouth of razors: teeth almost opaque, dripping in the same translucent fluids that had been found on the floor, that were needle sharp. The maw parted, leaving a trail of ropey saliva spattering the floor behind it, and it hissed again, this time its tongue slowly pushing out from behind the curtain of drool, a piston tipped with a second set of needle-sharp teeth. Behind the animal, swinging lazily from side to side, was a segmented tail tipped with a wicked, curving spine of cartilage and bone that rattled as it snagged on any raised plating that ran the length of the corridor.
The Marines were slow to react, too slow by far, and the creature screamed again, this time a shrill and piercing call, a trumpeting call of a hunter alerting its pack members that their prey had been found. It rushed towards them, taloned hands and feet clattering across the metal as it broke into a charge.
The Marine opened up with their weapons, the ripping sound of the assault rifles chewing through ammo sounding deafeningly from the headset, then the muted echoes from the battle rolling into the barracks half a second later.
On screen, the soft slugs slapped the creature's armoured shell, none of them with enough force to penetrate the armoured skin, but certainly enough to make the creature stumble and falter in its attack. Lifting their aim slightly, the soft slugs traced a line of flattened lead up across its distended ribs and across its jaw before they finally found the softer interior of its mouth. The bullets did their damage there, pummelling the inside of the skull before cracking the back open and dropping the creature to the ground, a frothing volcano of glistening yellow blood arcing through the air before splashing the walls and floor, instantly hissing as the caustic fluids seared the metal.
What happened next was too quick to make out, the sudden blur of movements on the camera too much for anyone to make out exactly what happened: a blur of a black, six-fingered hand, a spatter of thick saliva on the lens. A hideously choked scream cut short by the sound of a bloody splatter, another by a deafening crack. One of the cameras flickered then shifted to static, the other dropped to the floor with a thud, then rolled to one side and flipped upside down, rocking back and forth on the dome of the helmet and showing the grisly remains of the Marine that had first contacted the barracks. Something had punched a ragged hole in his face, a sharp and irregular object that had the force to punch through the skull of the soldier and rip out a chunk of his brain. Dark red blood seeped from the mortal wound, pulsing out the hole for a few seconds until his heart stopped. Vacant, glazed eyes stared blankly into the camera.
From around the barracks, there were more gunshots echoing around the deck, followed by tortured screams and screams of a far more alien nature, the sounds of battle coming in from all over.
"Fuck," Stevens muttered, grabbing his riot gun and pumping a round into the breech. "Somebody get these civvies a gun, call back the guys on patrol and get Cray back on screen. We're going to need all the help we can get."
