Dead Inside_A Space Team Universe Novel

by Barry J. Hutchison

  Ollie looked around. “The floor.”

  “What about it?” Dan asked, looking down.

  “Nothing,” said Ollie. “You asked what I could see. I can see the floor. And the walls. And the sitting thing.”

  “The sofa,” Dan said. “No, that’s not what I…”

  The sofa. The floor. Shizz.

  There were indents in the carpet. Four of them, forming the corners of a rectangular patch of pristine flooring that was had been trodden on far less regularly than the rest.

  “Someone moved the sofa,” Dan said.

  “Should I write that down?”

  “Write that down,” Dan confirmed. “Someone moved the sofa. Why?”

  Ollie waited until she’d finished writing, then looked up again. “It does look quite nice there,” she said. “Maybe that’s why they moved it.”

  Dan examined the piece of furniture, running his hand down the back of the fabric, then tilting the whole thing backwards so he could look underneath. Nothing.

  He lifted the cushions. Other than some loose credits, a lot of fluff and half a spizzcuit that had shriveled with age, there wasn’t anything to report.

  Turning back, Dan looked at the bodies again. The father’s arm and the child’s foot both crossed into the untrodden patch of carpet where the sofa had been. If it had been capable, Dan reckoned he would have felt his heartbeat speed up.

  “They needed room.”

  “Who, them?” Ollie asked, pointing to the bodies with her pen.

  “No, whoever killed them. That’s what’s been bothering me. The position they’re in – the bodies – it’s not natural. It’s staged. They’ve been laid out this way on…”

  He stopped. “Wait. What’s that?” he asked, nodding towards the pen in Ollie’s hand.

  “It’s a writing thing,” she said. “You told me to write everything down.”

  Dan took the datapad from her. The screen had been covered with cryptic markings he didn’t recognize, the symbols becoming increasingly tiny and tightly-packed as Ollie ran out of space.

  “I didn’t mean write on the screen,” he told her. He tapped a button on the side and the display illuminated. As he drew in the air above it, the text appeared. “Like that.”

  He spotted a small icon tucked away up the top of the display. As he pointed at it, the screen changed to show a view of his and Ollie’s feet from above. “Camera,” he said. He passed the device back to Ollie. “Take some pictures.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of everything,” Dan said, looking around. He pointed to the bodies. “Starting with them.”

  “OK,” said Ollie, studying the screen. “So how do I…?”

  A flash went off in Dan’s face, almost blinding him. “Shizz. Not me. Them.”

  Ollie laughed with sheer delight. “Your face is on this!” she yelped, then her moment of joy passed. “Oh. It’s gone.”

  The light flashed again, making Dan recoil.

  “It’s back!”

  “Cut it out,” Dan told her.

  “Wait. It’s gone again.”

  Dan placed a hand on top of the datapad and aimed it at the corpses. “Them. Not me.”

  “Gotcha,” said Ollie. She began snapping pictures. Far too many pictures, Dan thought. She took at least twenty to thirty photographs of the bodies from the same position before shifting a couple of paces to the right and starting again. Still, at least she had stopped focusing on him.

  “Three or four from each angle, then move on,” Dan instructed. “We don’t have long.”

  “Why? Are they going to come back to life?” Ollie asked.

  Dan snorted. “Doesn’t work that way. People don’t just come back to life.”

  Ollie looked up from the datapad and frowned. Dan anticipated the question before she could even open her mouth.

  “That’s different. What happened to me was… a one-off,” he said. “These two aren’t going to wake up any time soon. At least, for their sakes, I hope not.”

  He gestured with a thumb towards the door. “But the Tribunal are going to be here any minute, and we don’t want to be around when they turn up.”

  Ollie glanced at the door, then resumed camera duties with a little more haste than before. “Will they find out who did this?” she asked.

  “Who? The Tribunal?”

  Ollie nodded as she click-click-clicked with the camera.

  “No, they won’t find out who did it. They won’t even investigate. They’ll send a clean-up wagon to take the bodies away for burning. Maybe board the place up, if they’re feeling energetic,” Dan explained. “The Tribunal doesn’t care who did this.”

  “But you do,” said Ollie. “Right?”

  “I’m… interested,” Dan said. “Professionally.”

  Ollie stopped clicking and looked up. “Oh. So, you don’t care?”

  Dan snorted, sneered and scowled at the same time. He was about to say something withering and dismissive – something that kept his cool, impassive demeanor intact. But that was when his eyes crept down to the bodies again, all on their own.

  Thirteen.

  The kid was thirteen.

  Someone had taken his insides, then spread him out on the floor.

  Although possibly not in that order. Dan hadn’t really figured that part out yet.

  “Maybe,” was all he decided to say on the matter. He gestured around the room. “Now hurry up and get those pictures before…”

  Flashing red and blue lights licked across the walls and ceiling as a clean-up wagon glided to a halt outside. “Damn it,” he muttered, grabbing Ollie by the back of her shirt. “Time’s up, kid. We gotta go.”

  He dragged her through into the kitchen just as the front door opened. “Ugh,” said one of the Tribunal grunts as he entered the room. “This place fonking stinks. Smells like they’ve been dead for months.”

  And that was the last Dan heard before he quietly unlocked the back door and, shoving Ollie ahead of him, slipped out into the night.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The office was quiet when Dan and Ollie finally made it back. Cabs tended not to stop for corpses in raincoats, and without the Exodus getting around the city was slow at best, borderline lethal at worst.

  “Nice window,” Ollie remarked, gazing up at the recently-repaired hole in the wall. She rapped her knuckles on it, then prodded the glass, as if testing for freshness. She nodded, evidently satisfied by her findings. “Yep. Really nice.”

  She knocked on it again, as if to demonstrate.

  “Please stop doing that,” Dan said.

  To his surprise, it looked OK. He’d expected to find the workmen still trying to figure out which way up it went, or discover that they’d mistakenly put a door in the frame instead of a pane of glass, but no. It looked like a job well done.

  “You should be more careful with this one,” Ollie said.

  “Again, you’re the one who broke it. Not me,” Dan pointed out. He wiped a layer of dust off his new desk. Or new to him, at least. Someone in one of the other offices downstairs had tossed it into the little yard out back, and he’d rescued it before it was taken away. Better it serving its intended purpose in his office than rotting in one of the trash pits south of the city.

  Sure, one of the legs was a little wonky, the top drawer was missing, and someone had carved a gargantuan cartoon penis into the writing surface, but on the other hand it was free, and free trumped most things.

  “Sit down,” Dan said, gesturing to what was currently the room’s only chair.

  “I’m good,” Ollie said. “Thanks, anyway.”

  Dan sighed. “Sit down. We need to talk.”

  “We are talking,” Ollie said. She pointed to her lips. “See?”

  “Not talk in general, talk about something… Look, just sit down, will you?”

  Ollie shrugged, but sat down. “There. Like that?”

  “That’s fine,” Dan said, barely looking. He walked around to the other side of h
is desk, a finger idly tracing across the scuffed top. It was only when it occurred to him that he was following the outline of a massive ejaculating penis that he stopped.

  He leaned forwards, both clenched fists on the desk, the corner lamp casting long shadows across the crags of his face. It wasn’t that he was trying to intimidate Ollie, exactly, but he wanted her full attention. If that meant playing bad cop for a while, then so be it.

  “You killed that robot guy,” he told her.

  Ollie shifted in the chair. “Which robot guy?”

  “The robot guy,” said Dan. “The only robot guy we saw tonight. The one you exploded.”

  “Oh. Him. Right,” said Ollie. “Are we sure I did that?”

  Dan frowned. “Well, I assume so. He was touching you when he blew up.”

  “I thought he did that himself,” Ollie said.

  “You thought he exploded himself? Why would he explode himself?”

  Ollie pulled a ‘beats me’ sort of face. “For a laugh?”

  Dan’s glare went on for quite a long time. “No. He didn’t blow himself up ‘for a laugh’.”

  “Then why did he blow himself up?”

  “I don’t know,” Dan admitted. “Maybe he just… Wait. No. What am I talking about? He didn’t blow him up. You blew him up. Like you blew up the last guy. Right here.” He pointed down.

  “On the desk?” Ollie asked.

  “No, not… Here in the office. Shornack’s guy. You blew him up,” Dan reminded her. “I thought it was your necklace or pendant or whatever, but I guess I was wrong. You did it. You exploded them both.”

  The chair creaked as Ollie shifted around on it again. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Irrelevant,” Dan said. He rolled his tongue around in his mouth a few times, sizing Ollie up. He knew she’d been raised in some terrifying Hell-dimension by one of the more powerful and fearsome Malwhere Lords. Despite her upbringing, she seemed to be a pretty good kid. There, though, his knowledge of her started to run out. She was good at climbing, somewhat naïve, and often irritating. Beyond that, Dan pretty much drew a blank.

  “What else can you do?” he asked her.

  Ollie considered the question, then patted her head and rubbed her stomach at the same time. Or she gave it her best shot, at least.

  Dan’s face remained completely impassive throughout.

  “Impressive,” he said, once she’d finished. “But not really what I meant.”

  He began to pace the room. “When he was looking for you – your father or… whoever. He couldn’t see you. Was that the pendant, or was that you?”

  “The necklace, I think,” Ollie said.

  “You think. But you don’t know?”

  Ollie shook her head. “But I think so.”

  Dan stopped pacing. “Are you a danger? To me? To others?”

  “What? No!” said Ollie, sounding offended. “Of course not. I wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “Tell that to the robot guy.”

  Ollie clasped her hands loosely in her lap and fiddled with her fingers. “That’s different.”

  Dan gazed out through the new window at the city beyond. Even this late, a billion pinpricks of light blazed in windows and doorways, and swept through the congested late-night streets. Above it all, the Up There engines painted their blue haze across the night sky.

  “Maybe,” Dan said, shrugging.

  “Can I ask you a question now?” Ollie asked.

  “No.”

  She asked it anyway.

  “Why did they let you go? The Tribunal, I mean. You keep telling me how mean and horrible they are, but they can’t be that bad. They let you go.”

  “They did,” Dan said.

  “Yeah. So… why?”

  Dan half sat on the edge of the desk. “For old time’s sake,” he said. “Or, you know, that’s what they wanted me to think. Truth is, they wanted me to do something for them. They didn’t say as much, but that’s why they really did it. That’s why they let me go.”

  “Oh,” said Ollie. She blinked. “And are you going to do whatever it is they want you to do?”

  Dan reached into his coat pocket and retrieved the datapad. He held it up for her to see. “Already have.”

  Ollie looked confused. “I thought you said the Tribunal didn’t care about that.”

  “It doesn’t. It’s complicated.” He squeezed the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, then ran the hand back across his bald head. The dry skin made a soft rasping sort of sound. “And it’s late. You should get some rest. Tomorrow, we’ll get you set up with ID. I know a guy.”

  “A friend of yours?” Ollie asked.

  “I don’t have friends,” Dan replied.

  “Except me and Artur,” Ollie said.

  Dan’s brown dipped in irritation. “We’re not friends,” he told her.

  “Yes, we are.”

  “You’re… people I know.” He got back to the matter in hand before she could say anything more. “Anyway, this guy I know, they call him the Worm.”

  “Why do they call him that?” Ollie asked.

  “A lot of reasons. He lives underground, and he’s got a lot of books.”

  “Oh.”

  “Also, he’s a big worm,” Dan continued. “That’s probably the main one.”

  He gestured around at the office. “You can sleep in here tonight. I’ll be out front. I’ll make a few calls, try to get the Worm to fast track us in case the Tribunal comes calling. You try not to break anything or blow anyone up.”

  “There’s no-one else here,” Ollie pointed out.

  Dan shrugged. “Even so.” He opened the door to leave. “Good night.”

  “Are you going to look into it?”

  Dan paused in the doorway. “Into what?”

  “The dead people. In the house. That’s why you got me to take pictures, isn’t it? You’re going to look into it.”

  Dan looked past her to the window again, and saw his misshaped reflection looking back. “I already have a case,” he said. “A real case, with a real payday. That’s my priority. Until someone starts paying me to investigate mutilated corpses…” He shrugged, which said it all.

  Ollie’s eyes widened. “But if you don’t look into it, who will?” she asked.

  “Beats me, kid,” Dan said. “Beats me.”

  He stepped through and closed the door before she could say anything else. To his annoyance, he found himself standing there for several seconds, gripping the handle, waiting – hoping? – for her to carry on. To both his relief and disappointment, she didn’t. The only sounds that emerged were a soft thud like a head might make when flopping onto a desk, then a soft, rhythmic snoring like a person might make when falling asleep face-down on said desk.

  Dan made a noise. He wasn’t quite sure why, or even what sort of noise it was. It was kind of a ‘Huh,’ or a ‘Hm,’ that rose up the back of his throat and emerged through his nose. He had no idea what it meant, but he made it again anyway before turning away.

  The message indicator light was blinking on his comm-unit. He tapped the button and began removing his coat as the robotic voice informed him there was one new message.

  A voice like the first rumble of an avalanche rolled out from the unit. Dan paused midway through hanging his coat on the rack and listened to the start of the message.

  “Mr Deadman,” thundered the voice. It was perfectly level and controlled, but the natural boom and the way certain words were emphasized gave it an air of precisely calculated menace. It took only a syllable and a half for him to identify the owner of the voice. Shornack. She was calling him personally. That wasn’t good.

  “I appear to be missing some associates,” the gangster said. “Again. I thought that you might know something about that. I’d appreciate it if you would contact me at your earliest convenience to discuss this matter. And by ‘your earliest convenience’ I mean right away. Just in case there was any confusion as to—”

  Dan clicked the ‘d
elete’ button and the blinking light went dark.

  “Can ye keep the feckin’ noise down out there?” barked Artur’s voice from inside the wall safe. “Or I’ll come out there and smack the mouth right off yer face.”

  “Sorry,” Dan said. He listened for a response, but if one came he didn’t hear it.

  Dan took a seat at the table, then set the datapad in front of him, face up. After a moment, he turned it the other way, so the screen was hidden from sight.

  He’d figured out the real reason Noops had sent him to the address during the walk back. It was obvious, really. He should’ve seen it from the start and just tossed the card as soon as he was out of the Lock-n-Talk. He shouldn’t have gone to the address and started poking his nose in. It wasn’t a case. It never had been. He wasn’t going to get involved.

  Dan leaned back in the chair and noticed the datapad’s screen was facing upwards again. Had he done that?

  He picked it up, then snorted out a fairly mirthless laugh. Ollie had taken over three hundred photographs of the room. Or so the numbers next to the little icon claimed, at least.

  “That is a lot of pictures,” Dan said.

  He put the datapad on the table.

  He turned it face down.

  He drummed his hands quite loudly on the arms of the chair.

  “I’m feckin’ warning ye, ye scrotum-faced sack o’ shoite!” Artur hollered.

  He stopped drumming.

  It wasn’t a case. It wasn’t.

  He shouldn’t get involved. He wouldn’t.

  And yet the glass had been outside, and the sofa had been moved, and the kid had been just thirteen years old.

  The datapad was in his hands. Three hundred photographs were open on screen.

  “OK,” he said, keeping his voice low so as not to incur Artur’s wrath. “Maybe just a quick look.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Worm’s place was three miles up town in an area that was bordering on respectable. Down Here respectable, that is. This was an entirely different level of respectable to anywhere Up There, and largely just meant there was slightly less graffiti, fewer things on fire, and you had to work a bit harder to get yourself stabbed in the throat.