Dead Inside: A Space Team Universe Novel (Dan Deadman Space Detective Book 2)

  DAN DEADMAN, SPACE DETECTIVE

  “DEAD INSIDE”

  By

  Barry J. Hutchison

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ALSO BY BARRY J. HUTCHISON

  Copyright © 2017 by Barry J. Hutchison

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published worldwide by Zertex Books.

  www.barryjhutchison.com

  Also by Barry J. Hutchison

  SPACE TEAM SERIES

  Space Team

  Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle

  Space Team: The Search for Splurt

  Space Team: Song of the Space Siren

  Space Team: The Guns of Nana Joan

  Space Team: Return of the Dead Guy

  Space Team: Planet of the Japes

  Space Team: The Holiday Special

  DAN DEADMAN SPACE DETECTIVE SERIES

  “Dial D for Deadman”

  OTHER STUFF

  The Bug

  For Fiona.

  CHAPTER ONE

  An ancient, battered, barely-hanging-together Jonta Exodus screeched sideways across all four lanes of a city street, its tires churning out plumes of white smoke. A dead man was in the driver’s seat, although the casual observer would be forgiven for not realizing this, what with the way he was wrenching the wheel, gritting his teeth, and muttering angrily below his non-existent breath. His name was Dan Deadman, and while he was technically deceased, he wasn’t about to let a little thing like that stop him.

  A much smaller man clung to the dash, his fingers gripping the edges of an air vent, his legs sliding across the plastic behind him every time the car swerved to avoid oncoming traffic. He had blue skin, a bushy green beard, and was barely six inches tall. Unlike the driver, he was very much alive – although the night was still young, and he wasn’t certain how long that situation was likely to last.

  “Holy fecking shoite, Deadman! Are ye tryin’ to finish me off?” he demanded.

  “Sorry, Artur,” grunted the driver. His hands tightened on the car’s scuffed steering wheel as a set of high-beam lights sliced through the darkness towards them and a horn blared out a warning.

  “Truck! Big fecking truck!”

  “I see it,” Deadman said.

  “I should hope so! Are ye going to do somethin’ about it, or what?”

  Dan’s eyes narrowed in the glare as the Exodus and the truck raced towards each other. The horn blared again, a deep resonating tone that made the old car rattle and shake.

  “Turn the fecking wheel, ye big mad bastard!” Artur hollered.

  “Wait… Wait…” Dan muttered.

  “Wait for what? For me face to get smashed out through me arsehole? No thanks. Just get us out of the fecking—”

  Dan swung the car towards a side street, cutting across in front of the truck. Light flooded the car. The horn blared again, and Dan floored the gas, lurching the Exodus out of the truck’s path with inches to spare.

  Artur let out a string of expletives as he lost his grip and thwapped against the driver’s side window, the momentum of the turn holding him spread-eagled in an X shape against the glass. Dan grabbed him before he could fall, then tossed him backwards over his shoulder into the rear passenger seat.

  “Well that was dignified,” Artur complained, scrabbling into a sitting position on the cracked leather upholstery.

  “Hold onto something.”

  “Yer fine. I don’t need to, I’ve got me balance now. I’m right as—”

  Dan braked suddenly as a sleek hovering vehicle pulled out ahead of them, launching Artur off his seat. He hit the windshield at an angle that was not dissimilar to the last one, then flopped back down onto the dash.

  “Ye did that on purpose, ye scrotum-faced bastard!”

  Dan slammed a hand against the center of the wheel, but the car’s horn - like most of its paintwork, the front fender, and its ability to reverse – was damaged beyond any hope of repair.

  “Get out of the damn way!” he roared, rocking violently in his seat as if this would somehow force the vehicle in front to pull over. When it didn’t, he yanked the wheel to the left, swung out in front of an oncoming air sled, and frantically pulled back in again.

  “Ye’re gonna lose them, Deadman!” Artur warned.

  “Ah… fonk it,” Dan grunted. He hit the gas and the Exodus lurched forwards. The front of it met the back of the hover car with a crunch of folding metal and a tinkle of breaking glass. The floating vehicle swerved towards the sidewalk and the Exodus roared past, steam hissing from somewhere beneath the hood.

  A dozen or so warning icons were illuminated on the dash. But then, Dan couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t been lit up, so he continued, as usual, to ignore them.

  “There they go!” cried Artur when, at the far end of the street, a black two-man buggy thundered through a stop light, blue flames pulsing from its rear thrusters. Dan caught a fleeting glimpse of a logo emblazoned on the side before the buggy whizzed past the junction and out of sight.

  “Well bugger me, ye really did know a shortcut,” Artur said. “I owe ye an apology, Deadman.”

  “Thank you,” said Dan, crunching down a gear and forcing the engine to give him everything it had.

  “I said I owe ye an apology. I didn’t say I was giving ye one,” Artur pointed out.

  “Fair enough,” Dan grunted. He jerked the wheel and Artur tumbled around inside the car as it skidded around the corner, smoke and flames belching from the exhaust.

  “There you are,” Dan said through gritted teeth. The blue glow of the buggy’s thrusters was a few hundred feet ahead, fading as the vehicle slowed. They were heading east towards one of Down Here’s least reputable industrial districts. Considering the kind of reputations the rest of them had, this was really saying something, and explained the lack of traffic flowing in either direction.

  Artur spat out a string of barely comprehensible insults from down in the passenger footwell. He had landed upside down, and the long floral dress he was wearing had flopped down over his head. It took him several seconds to extricate himself and return to his spot on the dash.

  “You know you’ve got guy’s clothes now, right?” Dan asked, not taking his eyes off the car ahead.

  “I’m aware of that, yes,” Artur said, and that was the end of that discussion.

  He squinted ahead through the windshield. The glow of the buggy’s thrusters was barely noticeable now, and the black paintwork was blending the vehicle with the night’s darkness.

  “How come they’ve slowed down?” he asked.

  “Not sure,” Dan admitted. “Ran out of thruster fuel, maybe. That stuff burns up fast.”<
br />
  “Or maybe they reckon they’ve lost us,” Artur said. He grinned. “The eejits probably don’t even know we’re here.”

  A spot of orange flashed at the back of the buggy. A second later, the road ahead of the Exodus erupted, spraying chunks of fiery rock into the air. Dan twisted the wheel, dodging the flaming pothole just as another explosion went off a few feet behind them.

  “They know we’re here,” Dan said. A third explosion obliterated a chunk of road beside them, shattering a window and briefly rocking the Exodus onto two wheels.

  “Oh, ye think so?!” Artur yelped, once the car had regained full traction. “What are ye waitin’ for? Shoot them before they get us.”

  “Can’t,” said Dan, swerving to avoid another street eruption. “Might hit the kid.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like it’s a real kid, is it?” Artur pointed out.

  “You want to be the one to tell its mother that?”

  Artur stared blankly ahead, then shuddered from head to toe. “No. No, maybe best not.”

  “Sensible,” Dan grunted, then he swung the Exodus onto an exit ramp and out of the line of fire.

  Artur kept watching the buggy until the Exodus dipped below the level of the main road and the vehicle went out of sight. “Great. So now what do we do?” He thought for a moment. “I mean, I suppose we could find a pub. Ye know, drown our sorrows. Sure, we did our best, right? And that’s what counts.”

  Dan ignored him and jabbed a button on the dash. It didn’t budge, so he jabbed it again until it eventually relented. A light illuminated. Unlike the others, this one was supposed to be glowing.

  “Ollie, you there?”

  There was a long, pregnant pause from the dash before a female voice crackled from behind a plastic grille. “Hello?”

  “Ollie. It’s me.”

  Another pause.

  “Who?”

  Dan rolled his eyes and tightened his grip on the wheel. “It’s me. It’s Dan.”

  “Ye alright there, peaches?” Artur called, leaning closer to the communicator. “Ye missing me?”

  “Oh! Hello!” said Ollie. “How did you get in there?”

  Dan and Artur exchanged glances. “In where?” Dan asked.

  “The little box with the buttons.”

  “She thinks we’re in the phone! Like actually inside the fecking phone!” Artur whispered. “Is that not the most adorable thing ye’ve ever heard?”

  Dan chose not to answer that question. “Long story,” he told Ollie. “Explain later. I need you to help with something.”

  “Getting you out?” Ollie guessed. There was a rustling sound from the other end. “Maybe if I hit it against the wall…”

  “What? No! No,” Dan said, trying very hard to hold onto what little patience he had. He thought back to the side of the buggy and the glimpse he’d caught of the logo. “There’s a business directory on the filing cabinet. I need you to look for an address.”

  Artur shifted awkwardly on the dash. “Wait. Business directory? Big book, soft pages?”

  Dan shot him a sideways look. “That’s it.”

  “Right. Yeah. It’s not on the filing cabinet. It’s in the bathroom,” Artur said. He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Well, some of it is.”

  “The bathroom? Why is it in the…?” Dan’s eyes widened. “Aw, no. Tell me you didn’t.”

  “Like I say. Soft pages,” Artur explained. “But before ye go mental, I’ve barely used two letters worth. Most of it’s still perfectly legible. Just, ye know, wash yer hands afterwards,” he said, raising his voice to the communicator again. He met Dan’s withering stare and frowned. “What? Hygiene’s important.”

  Dan muttered something too quietly for Artur to hear, then shook his head. “It’s in the bathroom,” he said. “Go get it. I need you to look something up, assuming Artur hasn’t flushed it.” He glanced up at the underside of the road running directly above them. Despite the explosions, he couldn’t hear any Tribunal sirens approaching. They knew better than to get involved in this part of town.

  “I just hope we’re not too late.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Twenty minutes later, the Exodus rattled to a stop outside a set of locked gates set into a high chain-link fence. Artur peered out at the grimy sign attached to it. “Scrap ‘n’ Shizz,” he read. “Classy. Ye sure that’s what the buggy said on it?”

  “Pretty sure,” said Dan.

  “What would a scrappy want with a baby… thing?”

  “Probably kidnapped to order,” Dan said. “Malwhere stuff changes hands for a lot of money.”

  Artur hopped down onto the passenger seat. “I can go take a look around, see if I can spot anything suspicious, or what have ye. We don’t want to go charging in and getting ourselves—”

  Dan pushed down on the gas pedal. After a moment of resistance from the chain, the Exodus’s grille threw the gates wide.

  “Oh. Wait. No. Apparently that is what we want to go doing,” Artur said. He smoothed down the front of his dress. “Well, if you go getting me blown to bits, Deadman, I will come back as a fecking ghost and I will haunt yer every waking moment. And not like in a wooo, I’m a sheet with eyeholes kind of a way. In a genuinely terrifying and emotionally upsetting kind of way that will damage ye on all kinds of levels. Now, that’s not me threatening ye or nothing, I’m just putting that out there on the record so we both know where we stand.”

  “Artur.”

  “What?”

  “Shut up,” said Dan.

  The Exodus cruised through the open gates and into a maze of scrap metal. The track between the stacks was easily wide enough for two cars to pass, but the height of the scrap piles still managed to make it feel oppressively narrow.

  Away from the streets, the Exodus’s lack of headlights was problematic. The blue glow of the vast city engines high overhead painted a watery patina across the junk, but if it wasn’t for the fact that Dan was better equipped than most to see in the dark, he’d have been driving blind.

  “I’m starting to think this might not be the place,” Artur said. “On account of it being totally fecking deserted.”

  “It’s the same logo,” Dan pointed out.

  “Sure, but so what?” Artur asked. “Ye’ve got a card in yer pocket that says, ‘Deadman Investigations’ but that don’t mean ye’re sittin’ there back at the office with yer feet up, does it?”

  He shook his head and crossed his arms. “Ye have to face facts, Deadman. They’re not here. Ye lost them. Or they lost you. Either way, we’re screwed.”

  Something heavy hit the car from above, filling it with the sound of thunder and crumpling a near-perfectly circular outline in the roof.

  “Well that ain’t going to beat out easily,” Dan muttered, then he grabbed for his seat as the Exodus lurched sharply upwards, its wheels jerking free of the ground.

  “Would ye look at that now?” said Artur, gazing out at the stacks of junk passing the Exodus. “We’re flying!”

  Dan wound the window down and leaned his head out. He sighed as he looked up, then pulled his head back inside the car. “Not flying. We’re being lifted.”

  “By what? A fecking giant?” Artur snorted, then became suddenly serious. “It isn’t, is it?”

  “No. A crane,” Dan said. He pointed to the imprint in the roof. “Big magnet.”

  “Ah yeah. That does make more sense, right enough,” Artur conceded. “Bit of a relief, if I’m honest wit’ ye.”

  “Find a way to get the car down,” Dan said, reaching into his coat with his right hand, while grabbing for the door handle with his left.

  “What? How am I meant to do that? And what are you going to be doin’?”

  Dan opened the door and a breeze whistled through the car. “I’m getting the kid back,” he said, then he leaned sideways through the door and plunged thirty feet to the ground below.

  He landed with a thwump that managed to sound both painfully solid and upsettingly squishy
at the same time. The impact made a number of things inside him go crick, but the main parts of him were all pointing the same way they’d been before he’d jumped, so he was calling it a win.

  The Exodus swayed overhead, rising higher and higher as the crane winched it up like a disappointing sideshow prize. If Dan squinted, he could just make out the shape of a tiny man in a dress clambering out through the window, before disappearing as he continued upwards onto the roof.

  Something in Dan’s right knee bulged in a way it really probably shouldn’t. He took a moment to force it back into place, then brought his gun up alongside his head. It was, as far as he knew, a one-of-a-kind hand cannon with a muzzle the size of a tin can, a series of lights running around the barrel, and a unique range of firing modes.

  “Mindy, stun shot,” he said. The cylinder spun, then locked in place with a satisfying thunk. Dan flexed his fingers, adjusting their grip on the handle. He’d lost the arm recently – twice, in fact – but Ollie had proven to be surprisingly adept at stitching on a new one. It wasn’t quite perfect, but it was the right gender, roughly the same length as the other one, and facing the correct way, which was pretty much all he could hope for these days.

  Dan shrugged his shoulders and twisted his neck, clicking a couple of other joints back into position. He peered around at the scrap stacks, then along the track in both directions. “OK, you shizznods, where are you?”

  The scream that followed, he decided, was his best lead. It came from up ahead somewhere, a high-pitched inhuman squeal of pain or terror, or some heady mixture of both. The sound bounced and echoed around the stacks, making it hard to pinpoint the distance, but the direction was all Dan really needed.

  He had never really been one for running, even while alive. Especially while alive, in fact. All that puffing and panting had seemed so undignified. The breathing part was no longer an issue, but his original limbs were, for the most part, long gone, and the replacements had been sourced from a number of quite varied donor corpses. His left leg was slightly longer than his right, the foot a fraction wider and turned inwards a couple of degrees. It didn’t make running impossible, just ungainly.