Draft 2

Month 3: The Dead Zone Continued

Claude stood in the Science Lab, carefully running a microfiber cloth over the glass viewport of his bench-mounted centrifuge. The ship’s Structural Integrity Field was still recovering, but Claude remained unbothered by the vessel’s mechanical distress.

“A seventy-year-old metal carcass,” Claude muttered to himself as the Persephone vibrated, rattling the row of specimen vials in their racks. “Omni-Corp really should retire this obsolete relic.”

He finished wiping the glass casing and turned his attention to the primary console. On the left monitor, a live feed from the Med-Bay was displaying a highly inconvenient sequence. Although he had blocked the room’s outgoing communication lines the moment Janet discovered the toxin in her blood, the visual feed to his personal station remained active. He wanted to watch. There was no need to blind himself; the rest of the crew were too deeply consumed by their spiraling paranoias to check the security logs.

Through the lens of the overhead camera, he watched Helen move around the Med-Bay counter. On his screen, Janet’s vitals underwent a rapid transition. Her elevated blood pressure dropped, and her heart rate settled to a steady eighty-five beats per minute. The spore-induced panic response was subsiding.

Claude’s eyes narrowed. “That troublesome engineer could not have cured her; she must have used something that blocked the receptor pathways. A crude chemical buffer . . . the sedative. How remarkably tedious of you, Helen. You actually figured out the antagonist.”

He had hoped the psychoactive spores from the leaking stasis container would provide the perfect smokescreen, keeping the crew trapped in a fever of mutual suspicion until they reached Tartarus. But Helen’s stubborn, blue-collar competence was dismantling his masterpiece. If she systematically medicated the rest of the crew, his distraction would evaporate. John and Ingrid would regain their cognitive function and inspect the ship’s primary power grid to find the source of the SIF degradation. They would easily trace the unauthorized siphons directly to his cargo.

And then there was the cargo. His secondary display already showed the active vital signs of his lucrative asset. Claude knew that the Kaelen Behemoth had breached its stasis cylinder; he had spent the last hour calmly monitoring the telemetry as the creature paced the bio-dome. It was fully awake, no longer sedated, and temporarily confined behind the locked bulkheads of Cargo Bay 4.

“An unpredictable species.” Claude adjusted his glasses and smiled. “But plans must remain fluid. Adaptability is the hallmark of a true scientist.”

Claude did not intend to die on this ship, nor did he intend to lose his nine-figure payout from his black-market buyer. If Helen and the crew would not stay distracted, he would simply escalate the threat to a level they could not survive. He opened his terminal’s command interface, bypassing the Captain’s local security protocols, and accessed the crew quarters block.

He located the electronic lock for Cabin Six—Magnus Cantarini’s quarters.

“Let us see how you handle a rabid dog, Mitchell.”

With a single keystroke, Claude cleared the locking bolts. On his schematic, the indicator light on Magnus’s door shifted from red to green. The door slid open. Magnus was aggressive, heavily infected by the spores, and armed with whatever tools he had smuggled into his cabin. He would make a magnificent obstacle.

But Magnus was only a delay. Claude needed a permanent solution.

He accessed the primary environmental controls for Cargo Bay 4. He bypassed the Level-1 Quarantine failsafes he had established to hide his prize. He hovered his cursor over the primary bulkhead override, the command that controlled the reinforced doors leading from the bio-dome into the ship’s primary transit corridors.

“A pity. You really should have just stayed on your couch and wept, Helen. It would have been much less painful.”

He pressed the key. The titanium doors of Cargo Bay 4 slid back, retracting into the bulkheads.

The bipedal nightmare was free.

Claude sat back in his ergonomic chair, perfectly at ease. The Science Lab was a sealed sanctuary, protected by independent life-support loops, sterile air scrubbers, and reinforced structural plating. The monster could not reach him here, and neither could the paranoid deckhand.

Once the creature had neutralized Helen and the rest of the crew, Claude would simply execute a global temperature purge. He would drop the ship’s climate below zero, forcing the warm-blooded beast back into hibernation. Then, he would safely stroll out, slide the dormant creature back into its container, and let the autopilot guide them down to Tartarus.

He brought up the corridor camera feeds. On screen three, he watched Helen approach the crew quarters.

Claude smiled, reached into his lab coat pocket, and pulled out his nasal spray bottle. He inhaled sharply, depressed the pump once in each nostril, and watched his experiment play out on the screens.

Claude’s new evil plan.