Dead in the Water_A Space Team Universe Novel

by Barry J. Hutchison

  The only constants were the river of murky gray water, and the soft green glow of the lichen that patterned the walls and ceiling like a fungal infection.

  Sewer Slugs put in a number of cameo appearances, too. They were a hangover from one of the city’s previous attempts at waste disposal - foot-long gelatinous brown blobs with whirlpool-like mouths designed to suck up any liquid they came into contact with. They could have a pretty good go at most solids, too, and released their own waste products as a clear odorless gas.

  They would’ve been the perfect way of dealing with the city’s growing sewage problem had it not been for the speed at which they bred. A month after they’d been introduced, the entire sewerage network had become clogged with them.

  A week later, they had filled the Stagnates. It took just a couple of days for the streets of Down Here to be heaving with the fonking things.

  Their mass-extermination had taken months. No matter how many of the things the city killed, more appeared to take their place. It wasn’t until a smorgasbord of genetically engineered Sewer Slug diseases was introduced into their population that the tide began to turn.

  The intention had been to wipe them out completely, but a few proved immune to whatever was thrown at them. Beyond the occasional ‘acid flush’ every day or two to keep numbers down, no one really bothered with them these days.

  Except Ollie.

  “What is that?!” she yelped, pointing to one of the fat squirming blobs. It wriggled in the water just ahead of them, its shiny back rising out of the murk like the world’s least desirable desert island.

  “I already told you. It’s a Sewer Slug,” said Dan. “They’re harmless, long as you don’t get too close.”

  Ollie lowered her hand. “Oh. Is that another one of them? It looks different.”

  “It doesn’t look different. It looks identical to the five others we’ve seen.”

  Ollie fell into step behind Dan, giving the slug a wide berth. It farted and squelched in the water as they passed.

  They walked on for a while, the only sound the sloshing of the sewage around them.

  “Have we found a new office yet?” Ollie asked. She gasped. “Wait. It’s not down here, is it?”

  “No,” Dan said.

  “To which part?”

  “Both parts. No, I haven’t found a new office, and no, it won’t be down here.”

  Ollie nodded. “That’s good. The second part, I mean.” She looked around them. They were in a particularly old section of the network now, and the bricks were crumbling and rotten. It was darker here, too. A large patch of the wall was stained completely black and free of the glowing moss. “This reminds me of home. Except, you know, less torture.”

  “Right,” said Dan. He knew Ollie’s origins, of course. She’d been stolen from her own universe and taken to one of the countless Hell-like pocket dimensions collectively known as the Malwhere. They’d never really spoken about what had happened to her growing up there, or what horrors she’d had to endure.

  And he wasn’t about to start now.

  “This is a waste of time,” he admitted.

  Ollie frowned. “What? Why?”

  “There are thousands of miles of pipes down here. We could take a whole army down with us and still never find whatever’s down here. If it even is still down here. There’s no saying where it’s moved on to.”

  “We can’t stop!” Ollie urged.

  Dan stopped.

  “Can’t stop, I said. Can’t.”

  “Sorry, kid. This was a bad idea,” he told her. “If we were going to find anything, we’d have found it by now. That thing could be a hundred miles from here in the opposite direction. We should go back.”

  “But… Banbara,” Ollie said.

  “I know. I want to find it just as much as you do, but we need to think it through. It’s not like it’s going to just appear out of…”

  The black stain shifted on the wall at Ollie’s back. It was a big stain. Huge, in fact. Dan slowly raised his eyes, watching as it peeled from the ancient brickwork, revealing more of the luminous lichen below.

  Spiked tentacles unfurled themselves from its shapeless body. They moved constantly, undulating like underwater weeds on the tide. It had no facial features that Dan could see, yet he got the impression that it was staring right at them, and that it didn’t look happy.

  It was several times larger than he’d been expecting, although its constant movements and the way the light danced across its shiny exoskeleton made its exact size hard to estimate.

  “Appear out of what?” Ollie asked, completely unaware of the thing unfolding itself behind her.

  Dan swallowed. “Give me your hand,” he told her.

  Ollie hesitated, but only for a moment. “Which one?” she asked.

  “Either one.”

  It took her a moment, but Ollie chose a hand – the right one – and held it out to Dan. He wrapped his fingers around her wrist and began walking back the way they’d come.

  “Where are we going?” Ollie asked. “We can’t go back.”

  “I need you to listen carefully,” Dan said. “First, keep your voice down. Second, no sudden movements unless I tell you. Third…”

  A spiked tentacle stabbed him through the shoulder from behind.

  “Aw, fonk it,” he grunted. “Run!”

  He stumbled on, dragging Ollie as he pulled himself free of the spike with a stomach-churning schlurp. Ollie looked back over her shoulder as they ran.

  “Is that it? Is that the…? Ooh, it’s big. Why’s it so big?”

  “Because I’m having one of those weeks, that’s why,” Dan said.

  He stopped at a junction leading into another part of the sewer system and shoved her into it. “Wait there,” he barked, unhooking the pocket-watch device from his waistcoat.

  The shadow-thing had expanded to fill almost the entire diameter of the tunnel now. This was both good news and bad. Bad, because the fonking thing was ludicrously big, and ludicrously big monsters were rarely on anyone’s wish-list. Good, because it meant he had a target he couldn’t possibly miss.

  Holding the end of the pocket watch device’s chain, he began to spin it, whirling it around and around at his side like a bolas. As it twirled, lights flickered across the surface, blurring as Dan twirled it faster and faster until they formed a continuous circle of light in the air beside him.

  “What are you doing?” Ollie whispered, her eyes twirling in tight circles as she followed the light.

  “Sending this thing back to the Malwhere,” Dan said. “Stay back there. When this hits, things are going to get crazy.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Here goes!”

  Dan let fly with the spinning device. It whistled past his ear, ricocheted off the roof, then landed with a plop in the water behind him.

  “Shizz. Out of practice,” he muttered, relieved that Artur hadn’t been around to see that. Retreating to where he could just make out the glow of the gadget through the sewage, he fished it out and tried again.

  “OK, this time,” he announced, building up speed again. The shadow-thing seemed to draw back, as if sensing what was about to happen. Dan could almost sense its panic. It was perhaps the single most enjoyable moment of the past seventy-two hours. “Go back to Hell, you piece of shizz.”

  This time, the gadget flew straight and true. It rocketed off on an upward trajectory and had only just started to curve downwards when it found its target. Dan held his hands out in front of his face, half-shielding his eyes as he waited for the fireworks.

  The circle of metal thudded against the monster. Dan followed the device as it bounced off and vanished into the sewage below.

  Silence followed.

  “Are things getting crazy yet?” Ollie whispered.

  “It’s not from the Malwhere,” Dan said. He clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth. “We may have a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?” Ollie asked, then she jumped back in fri
ght as one of the black shape’s tendrils whammed Dan into the wall, cracking the already crumbling brickwork. The limb snaked beneath him as he fell, then flicked him upwards. Dan hissed as he smashed into the curved ceiling, then grimaced as he plopped face-first into the water below.

  “Oh. That kind of problem,” Ollie said.

  Stepping out from the side tunnel, she raised her hands in front of her, taking aim at the enormous dark shape.

  “OK. I can do this. I can do this,” she told herself.

  “Wait, no, don’t!” Dan spluttered, but the warning came too late.

  Blue fire flickered at Ollie’s fingertips. The sewer gas, which had been waiting for its moment to shine, ignited. Ollie screamed as she was blasted backward off her feet and joined Dan in the murky water.

  “Close your mouth,” Dan warned, then he pulled her all the way under as the air burned and crackled above them. She squirmed and wriggled, but Dan held her down while the fire raged.

  It took just a few seconds for the gas to burn itself out, then Dan was up on his feet and heaving the gasping and gagging Ollie onto hers. The explosion had driven the shadow-thing back a little, but not nearly enough for Dan’s liking.

  He had no weapons, and they daren’t risk Ollie triggering another explosion. There was only one option available.

  “Let’s get the fonk out of here,” Dan urged, shoving Ollie back in the direction they’d first come.

  Dripping from head to toe with raw, unprocessed effluent, Ollie didn’t feel any urge to argue. She speed-waddled ahead of him, Dan’s hand on her back to steady her and hurry her on.

  The shadow-thing had been hurt. That was good. If it could be hurt, it could be killed, but it wouldn’t be here and it wouldn’t be now.

  It was pulling itself together too quickly. They’d walked for maybe half an hour. They could run it in twenty minutes, but that assumed they didn’t meet any problems and that the other thing couldn’t run faster.

  “Keep your eyes peeled for an exit,” Dan told her, scanning the shadowy ceiling above. He was sure they’d passed a few other ladders during their search, but for the death of him couldn’t remember where.

  Glancing back, Dan saw that the shape was on the move. It tore along the tunnel behind them, its spiked limbs flapping on the walls, floor and ceiling as it pulled itself along. It wasn’t moving with any great speed, so it was closing slowly, but closing all the same.

  “Shizz. Come on, kid, we’ve got to move faster.”

  Ollie winced as she forced her legs to stop waddling and start running instead. They splashed around a bend and the old brickwork became a slick metal tube rising in a slight incline. Ollie’s feet immediately slid out from under her, but Dan managed to keep her from hitting the deck.

  “I got you, kid,” he said, then his own feet went and they both plunged face-first into the foul water, then slid the foot or so back onto the brick section.

  “That’s not going to work,” Dan realized, heaving the spluttering and wheezing Ollie back onto her feet.

  He looked around, searching for an alternative route. On the wall beside them was a semi-circle of slightly different colored bricks, suggesting an old tunnel had run off at a right-angle from this one in the dim and distant past, but was now closed off.

  Fonk it. Worth a try.

  Running at the wall, Dan threw his weight behind his shoulder and charged. The impact bounced him back a few steps, but did little, if anything, to the wall. Roaring, he tried again. Again. Again. He slammed himself onto the same spot over and over.

  Something went crick. At first, Dan assumed he’d broken a bone, but then he saw it – a vague indent in the wall where the bricks had started to loosen.

  He charged it again, spurred on by this glimmer of hope. The thing was still closing. It would be on them in thirty seconds, maybe less.

  “It’s coming!” Ollie said.

  “I know it’s coming! Why do you think I’m—”

  An alarm sounded.

  It was quite a relaxed sounding alarm – just a series of unconcerned-sounding chirps, really – but it made Dan hesitate.

  “What’s that?” Ollie whispered, then she yelped as a Sewer Slug slid down the slope behind her and began squirming in the direction of the approaching shadow-thing.

  Dan watched as six or seven more of the slugs arrived at the bottom of the slope and followed the first.

  From somewhere in the distance, there came the sound of thunder.

  “Aw… fonk!” he spat, then he threw himself at the wall even more frantically and furiously than before. There was another cracking sound which definitely came from inside him this time. He ignored it and pushed back from the wall, giving himself space for a run up. A dozen more Sewer Slugs slid down the slope beside him. He dodged them as he ran, aiming his full weight at that single indent he’d created in the wall.

  “Dan, hurry!” Ollie cried, and there was something inhuman in her panicky squeal. An invisible force hit Dan from behind, launching him towards the wall in a blistering blur of speed. Luckily for those parts of his skeleton that were still intact, the same force hit the wall just as he did, punching a hole through it.

  Dan landed in a foot-deep layer of greasy black goo, rolled twice, then slid on for several seconds. Insects rose up in clouds around him, buzzing and whistling angrily.

  “Ollie, get in here!” he barked, struggling out of the sludge. The walls of the tunnel were trembling as the roar of thunder grew louder.

  Not actually thunder, of course. Not water, either.

  Acid. Slug-killing acid. Thousands of gallons of the fonking stuff.

  Ollie clambered through the hole in the wall, then frantically flapped her arms as her feet slid in opposite directions. “Wheurk!” she yelped, fighting to keep her balance as clouds of bugs took to the air around her. “What is this stuff?”

  “Same as out there. This stuff’s just been here longer,” Dan said, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her on through the sludge.

  They slid and staggered through the swarming insects, dust shaking from the ceiling as the roar of the acid flush swept down the main pipe. Dan caught a glimpse of movement back by the hole in the wall – the shifting of some immense black shape – and then a torrent of green-tinted liquid crashed into it. Big and powerful as the thing was, there was no way it could stand its ground against the force of all that acid.

  It tried, though. Its tendrils gripped the broken brickwork and managed to hold on for a good few seconds before the weight became too much for the wall to withstand. The bricks broke. The shadow-thing spluttered. And then there was no sound but the thunder of the acid flush, the buzzing of flies, and the faint rasping of Ollie’s breath.

  “Is it… is it dead?” she asked, as the sound of thunder began to fade.

  Dan shook his head. “Unlikely. The acid’s strong enough to dissolve Sewer Slugs, but not a whole lot else. It’ll be flushed out to sea.”

  “So… it’s gone? Everyone’s safe?”

  Dan swatted away a particularly large and irritating bug. “More or less.”

  “What do you mean?” Ollie asked.

  “Well, if you’re sitting on the toilet, you’re probably more safe than you were. If you live near the docks, probably less.”

  Ollie gasped. This made her inhale a fly, and she spent several seconds coughing it back out.

  “You mean it might climb out of the water?!”

  Dan shrugged. “It might. There’s no way of knowing. Unless it does, I mean. Then we’ll know about it.”

  The acid flush had died away to a trickle now, so Dan started plodding back in the direction of the broken wall. Now that they weren’t being chased by a murderous shadow creature, maybe they could find a way back up the slippery incline.

  “We have to do something,” Ollie said. “Or tell someone.”

  “What we need is to get you clean before you catch every disease in the city,” Dan said. He looked her up and down. “I hate to say i
t, kid, but you smell even worse than I do.”

  Ollie frowned. “How? You’re covered in the same stuff, and you already smelled bad.”

  “I guess so,” Dan conceded. “But it’s part of my charm. You don’t carry it off like I do.”

  He leaned out through the gap in the wall, checked that the coast was clear, then stepped through. The knee-deep slurry of shizz had been replaced with a thin trickle of acid. It was, he reckoned, a fair trade.

  “Now come on,” he urged, beckoning her through. “If we’re lucky, we might get back before anyone flushes…”

  ARTUR STOOD with his hands on his hips, looking up at first Dan, then Ollie. Two expanding puddles of lightly-smoking bodily fluids had merged to become one larger one around them, and Artur retreated a couple of steps to avoid getting any on his shoes.

  Ollie’s hair was plastered to her face. At least, Artur guessed it was her face, but the mask of blackish-brown goo made it difficult to make out any actual features.

  Dan hadn’t had a lot going for him visually before they’d gone down the manhole, yet he managed to look considerably worse coming out.

  The brim of his hat was weighed down by… Actually, Artur didn’t care to know precisely what it was weighed down with, but it was weighed down with something. It sagged down around Dan’s ears as if it were suffering from depression, and yellow-brown liquid dripped from it like tears.

  “So,” he asked them, making no effort to hide the smirk on his face. “How did it go? Did ye have fun?”

  “Does it look like we had fun?” Dan asked.

  Artur looked them over again and puffed out his cheeks. “Some people are into that sort of thing, I hear,” he said. “And who are we to judge? So, I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Not fun,” Ollie said, shivering. “Definitely not fun.”

  “Did ye kill the big monster thing, at least?” Artur asked. “Or did ye both just go take a shoite bath for an hour for no real reason?”

  “It’s gone,” Dan said.

  “Gone gone or just gone?” Artur asked.