Dead Inside_A Space Team Universe Novel

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “That is not your concern,” she said. “I simply need you to identify the… ‘culprit’, shall we say? Once you have provided me with that information, your role in proceedings will be complete, and I shall pay you the balance of our agreed compensation.”

  Dan drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “So, you’re going to kill her?”

  Kooriashian’s expression didn’t falter. “Once you have provided me with the information, your role in proceedings will be complete,” she reiterated.

  Ollie leaned on the back of Dan’s chair. “Sorry, lady. We don’t kill. Do we?”

  Dan made a weighing motion with his hands. “Well, I mean… Sometimes. If we have to.”

  “Quite a lot, actually,” came the muffled voice from the safe. “Seriously, when ye start countin’ them all, it fair adds up.”

  Ollie looked shocked. Dan thought about pointing out that she herself had killed someone right next door – hence the expensive repair work going on – but reckoned it probably wasn’t the time.

  “I am not asking you to kill anyone,” Kooriashian said. “I simply wish you to find out who my husband is having an affair with, then I shall… talk to them.”

  “Talk to them?” Dan asked.

  “Yes. I shall ask them to stay away from my husband, taking pains to explain that I will not take ‘no’ for an answer. I can be rather persuasive when I want to be.”

  “Has he done anything like this before?” Dan asked. “Cheated, I mean.”

  “Of course not!” Kooriashian replied, her voice taking on an incredulous tone that suggested the mere idea was utterly preposterous. “He makes toys, for goodness sake. Silly little robots that do silly little tricks. He spends his days scrabbling around with…” She waved a hand that suggested she had no idea what he spent his days scrabbling around, and no inclination to find out. “…gadgets and whatnot. It’s all quite pathetic. Frankly, this affair is the closest he’s come to impressing me in a long time. I didn’t know he had it in him.”

  There was a soft bleep and Kooriashian glanced at the back of her hand. A series of numbers were projected there, hovering just above her bone-china skin. As Dan watched, the numbers ticked down.

  Kooriashian stood up in a way that didn’t appear to involve any of her limbs bending. “I should go before I am missed. I need your answer now. Will you take the case, Mr Deadman?”

  Dan hesitated. Looking back later, he’d realize this was another moment where he could have made a different decision. A simple “No,” and everything might have been different.

  He stood up. “Fine. I’ll take the case,” he said.

  Kooriashian nodded, as if there had never been any doubt. “I shall transfer the funds in the morning, as well as an additional… shall we say thirty per cent for expenses?”

  “Should cover it.”

  “I’ll also transmit you a holomod of my husband, along with all the requisite details.”

  “What’s a holomod?” Ollie asked.

  Dan frowned. “Well, it’s a…” He shook his head and shrugged. “No idea. What’s a holomod?”

  “Holographic Model?” Kooriashian said, her immaculate eyebrows arching in surprise. “An interactive three-dimensional image? You do have a projector, yes?”

  Dan looked around his sparsely decorated office. Besides the small table and three chairs of varying degrees of ricketiness, there was only a dented filing cabinet and a pot plant that had been dead for so long it had probably been reincarnated somewhere else.

  “No,” he said, although he felt it didn’t really need saying. “Can you give me a photograph?”

  It was Kooriashian’s turn to look confused. “A… photograph? As in...”

  “As in the paper thing,” Dan said. “Or we can probably do a digital image, although I prefer print.”

  “A photograph?”

  “Yes,” Dan said. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  Kooriashian’s expression suggested that, yes, she personally had a problem with it, but her words said otherwise.

  “No. No, I suppose that can be arranged,” she conceded. “Although it will take me a few days to get it to you without arousing suspicion.”

  “We still get our money tomorrow, right?” Artur bellowed through the safe door.

  Kooriashian looked from the painting on the wall to Ollie, then swept her gaze around the room before settling on Dan. A drilling sound from next door made the filing cabinet vibrate. For a moment, it looked as if the woman was having second thoughts about the whole endeavor, but then she gave a single nod and swept gracefully towards the door.

  “You shall have it tomorrow,” she said.

  And with that, she was gone.

  Ollie watched the door for a while, in case Kooriashian returned. When it was clear the door wasn’t about to open again, she spoke.

  “Well, she seemed…”

  Ollie left it there, realizing she wasn’t sure what Kooriashian seemed. Not nice, certainly. Not horrible, exactly, but definitely not nice.

  “Yeah,” Dan agreed. “Yeah, she did.”

  The drilling became an uneven rattling and grinding, then stopped. There was some muttering from inside the inner office, before that door was opened just enough for a hard-hatted head to emerge.

  “This window,” said the builder. “Do you want it to be able to open?”

  “Ideally,” said Dan.

  The builder’s face crumpled. “Right. Right. Gotcha.”

  He retreated inside. “He wants it to open.”

  “Oh, for fonk’s sake,” said the younger man, before the door was closed and his rant became a stream of barely audible and heavily censored curse words.

  Ollie sat on the chair Kooriashian had been using and smiled awkwardly. “Bet you’re wishing you hadn’t broken the window in the first place,” she said.

  Dan regarded her impassively. “I didn’t. You did,” he reminded her.

  “Oh. Oh, yeah. Right,” Ollie said. She pulled a sort of ‘whoops’ face, then her smile returned. “Anyway, g’night!” she said, then her head thonked forwards onto the table and she immediately fell asleep.

  Dan watched her sleeping there, trying very hard not to get jealous. It had been a long time since he’d slept, assuming you didn’t count brief periods of unconsciousness brought on by head injuries. If you counted those, it had barely been forty-eight hours, but if you took the more traditional view of sleep – one that didn’t involve being bludgeoned atop the skull with blunt instruments – it had been months. He hadn’t slept since he’d somehow woken up from the biggest sleep of all, and staying awake all the time was really starting to lose its charm.

  Still, it wasn’t like he had nothing to fill his time.

  Reaching for the hook, Dan retrieved his hat and coat. The back of the coat had been punctured by several dozen of the flying shrapnel shards, and chances are there were still several pieces sticking out of his back. He could deal with those later, though. It wasn’t like he was going to a fashion show.

  Pulling the hat and coat on, he took Mindy from her holster and slotted her into the charging port. It made sense not to bring the gun with him. If he didn’t have it, he wouldn’t be tempted to use it.

  With a final glance at the sleeping Ollie, Dan stepped out of the office and pulled the door behind him with a click.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dan wandered through the Down Here streets, his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed on the route ahead. It would’ve been quicker with the car, but not necessarily by much. Shornack owned a sizeable chunk of this sector, which meant he could take his pick of places to stop by.

  He settled on a bar he knew had given the gangster problems back in the early days. Not major problems, of course – she simply had the owners publicly killed and their corpses devoured by gryocks – but enough that she’d installed some of her own people to run the place and funnel all the profits off-world to her.

  The place was locked up for the night, the windows
in darkness. Dan knew enough to wait out front, being sure to take his hands out of his pockets so anyone watching could see they were empty.

  A few minutes passed, then the door clunked and swung inwards a few inches. Nodding at a thumbnail-sized circle of glass set into the wall, Dan pushed on into the empty bar. He saw several chairs balanced upside-down on tables, then the door closed behind him, drawing a dark veil across the whole place.

  “Upstairs,” said a voice. It had a tinny edge and a soft echo that suggested it came from a speaker system.

  The darkness was deep enough to challenge even Dan’s night vision. He considered asking for some light, but thought better of it. Instead, he headed in what he guessed, from memory, was the right direction, and fumbled around until a draft hit his face at a downward angle.

  A pale orange light illuminated two stories above, cutting a dim shaft down through the gap in the stairwell. The bottom step groaned as it took Dan’s weight. Each subsequent step made a slightly different creaking sound as Dan ascended. If someone listened to the sounds often enough, they’d be able to tell what step someone was standing on merely from the noise it made. Useful.

  Two of Shornack’s goons were waiting on the third floor. Dan recognized one of them - a shark-like Symmorium mercenary with one cold black eye and one milky white one. It took Dan a moment to remember the name. Arka. That was it. He stood a full head taller than Dan, and his bulk suggested he clearly hadn’t been going hungry. Despite his size, Dan knew from experience that he was fast and agile, although not particularly bright.

  He didn’t recognize the other thing. It was mostly metal, but with a transparent container of liquid fixed where its head should have been. Suspended inside the liquid was an enormous pink brain. It was so big it was squished up against the container’s walls, like a kid pressing their face against a toy shop window.

  The metal body looked solid, if uninspired, with a sturdy chest plate, chunky arms, and hands that could probably punch through concrete.

  “Arka,” Dan said, nodding at the Symmorium. The shark-like thug curved up his scarred lips, revealing his most valuable assets. While other species often put themselves out there as guns for hire, only the Symmorium and a handful of others truly excelled as teeth-for-hire.

  Dan turned to the mechanoid. “You must be the brains of the outfit,” he said. “Name’s Deadman. Dan Deadman. I’m here about the debt.”

  “We know you-you are,” the mechanoid said, the voice stuttering from a rounded metal nodule at the bottom of the glass tank. “And why-why you are here-here.”

  Turning to Arka, Dan jabbed a thumb in the mechanoid’s direction. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “Nothing,” Arka growled. “He always speaks like that.”

  “Wow,” said Dan, sucking air in through his teeth. “That must get pretty fonking annoying.”

  Arka’s face remained non-committal, but he didn’t deny it. “The boss wants to see you,” he said.

  Dan nodded. “That’s why I’m here boys. How about you lead the way?”

  Arka’s mismatched eyes narrowed. “You don’t tell us what to do, goik.”

  “Goik? What’s a goik?” Dan asked.

  “You’re a goik, goik,” Arka spat.

  “Right,” said Dan. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, then turned to the mechanoid. “What’s a goik?”

  “Don’t ask him,” Arka began, but it was too late. Bubbles rose in the mechanoid’s brain tank.

  “Goik. Definition: Street slang-slang derived from the Norkienian word-word ‘Unaragoik’, meaning ‘painful anal fissure that does not respond well-well to medical treatment.’ Goik.”

  Dan wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. “Uh, thanks for that. Good to know.” He folded his hands in front of him, and stared meaningfully in Arka’s direction. “You kids and your fancy insults. It’s cute.”

  The Symmorium stared back, not giving an inch. Dan flicked his eyes very deliberately to one of the closed doors along the corridor behind the guards, then back to Arka. “You’re going to keep him waiting, then?” he asked. “Just so I know. I mean, I’m assuming he’s watching, so he knows I’m not the one causing the hold up, right? I’d hate him to think the delay was my fault.”

  Arka resolve faltered, just a little. His eyelids scraped across his mismatched eyes, and the tension cracked. His big hands roughly patted Dan down, then he turned and led the way along the corridor, the mechanoid remaining behind at the top of the stairs.

  From a distance, the door they were heading towards had looked pretty much like any other. Now Dan was closer, he could see the frame around it was much bigger than the others, suggesting it had been heavily reinforced.

  The door gave a solid thunk and swung open a crack as Arka approached. The hefty Symmorium had to put a lot of his weight and muscle mass into pushing it wide enough for him and Dan to step through. As Dan entered, he saw that what he’d thought was wood was actually a thin veneer on a foot-thick metal barricade that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a vault.

  “Mr Deadman. Well, color me surprised,” said a voice from over on Dan’s left.

  He turned in the direction of the sound and tried to hide his surprise. Most of Shornack’s higher ranking thugs were Igneons like she was – lumps of living rock whose granite fists and cliff-face jaws made them virtually unbeatable in a straight fight. This guy, though, was something else.

  He was maybe half Dan’s height, if you excluded the long, tapered quills sticking up from his head, the pointed tips of which reached to somewhere around Dan’s shoulder level. The spikes continued onto his back, too, and undulated softly like seaweed on an ocean current. He appeared to be completely naked, although he had no obvious genitals flapping around.

  There was something oddly adorable about his pudgy little face and stumpy limbs, and he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a children’s picture book about talking animals and their life-affirming adventures.

  Dan’s first instinct was to say something like, “What the fonk are you?” but he resisted it and went for something less likely to cause issues.

  “Are you the boss?”

  “Ha! ‘The boss.’ I don’t like to think of myself like that. Call me Dehog. We’re all equals here. We all have our job to do, our parts to play. Dehog. Please. Please, I insist.”

  “Fine. Dehog,” said Dan.

  Dehog’s chubby face brightened, showing off a mouth filled with triangular teeth that gave the Symmorium’s a run for their money in sharpness, if not in size. “Good. Great! Like I say, I don’t like to think of myself as ‘the boss’. I don’t find labels especially useful, you know? I don’t like to define myself and others based on some arbitrary title we may or may not have earned.”

  He was standing in front of a modest-looking desk that must have been twenty years old, and probably not great quality to begin with. On the wall behind it was a framed poster showing a sun rising above an ocean. Printed across the image were the words: ‘Don’t count the days. Make the days count.’ Someone – presumably Dehog – had underlined the last ‘count’ in pen. Twice.

  “You were on my to-do list, actually,” the not-boss said, some of his spines folding neatly out of the way as he tucked his hands in behind his back and strolled slowly across the office in Dan’s direction. “I find lists important. They help keep the mind focused. It’s like I always say – where focus goes, Arka?”

  “Energy flows,” said Arka, the words coming out like a reflex action.

  Dehog’s smile broadened. “Energy flows. And I believe that, I really do.”

  “Good for you,” said Dan, resisting the urge to point out the phrase didn’t actually mean anything, or even make a whole lot of sense.

  “Do you make lists, Mr Deadman?” Dehog asked, stopping in front of him.

  Dan shook his head. “Can’t say I do.”

  “You should try it. A mind that is stretched by new experiences can never go back to its
old dimensions. You know where I got that from?”

  “A fortune spizzcuit?” Dan guessed.

  Dehog pointed behind Dan to another motivational poster framed on the wall directly across from the desk. “From there, where I read it every day.”

  “Right,” said Dan, eager to move on. “So, anyway…”

  “I suggest you start making a to-do list, Mr Deadman,” Dehog continued. “And at the top – right there at the start – I suggest you put ‘Pay my debts on time.’”

  As he said that last part, Dehog’s face became far less adorable. Every one of his spines stood straight and erect. “And follow through. That’s important. A promise made is a debt unpaid. You know what I mean?”

  “Uh, yeah. Great,” said Dan. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “See that you do,” Dehog suggested. “Make lists, Mr Deadman. That’s my advice. You’ll thank me for it.”

  “Right.”

  Dehog waited.

  “Oh, you mean… now?” Dan shrugged. “Thanks for the advice.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Dehog. He about-turned and made for the desk. He had to stretch to retrieve a tatty old notebook from near the center. Licking a thumb, he began flicking through the pages.

  “So, I came to let you know that—” Dan began.

  Dehog held up a hand for silence, but didn’t look up from the pad. He flicked through a few more pages, then his spines did their undulating thing again. “Aha! Here we are.” He tapped the paper and raised his eyes to Dan. “Lists. What would I do without them? Where would I be? Lost. Lost and in a tizzy, that’s where.”

  He read in silence for a few moments, then gave a curt nod. “Here it is, black and white. Pay a visit to Dan Deadman.” Producing a pencil from somewhere, he made a mark on the page. “Tick!”

  Dehog shuddered with pleasure. “There’s nothing quite like that feeling. Turning a to-do into a to-done. You can’t beat it.” He hopped up so he was sitting on the desk, and carefully replaced the notepad. “Now, you tell me why you’re here, and we’ll see if we were going to visit you for the same reason.”