Dead in the Water_A Space Team Universe Novel Read online

  Bones compacted in his legs and spine. Muscles tore. The remains of his last meal ejected themselves through both nostrils, then his face met the road surface and he lay there as a crumpled, motionless heap on the ground.

  Across the road, the guard had been backing towards the door, but he hesitated now with his gun drawn. There was a look of absolute bewilderment on his face as he raised his eyes to the rooftop, then down at the lifeless figure on the street.

  “Uh, hold the door,” he instructed whoever was on the receiving end of his microphone. “The guy just jumped. Off the roof, yeah.”

  He listened for a moment. “Well, he sure fonking looks that way. I’m going to go check it out. Stand by.”

  Keeping his gun ready, the guard approached the unmoving mound. He was large and heavy-set – real nightclub doorman material – and moved with all the grace of a beached sea cow.

  A small knot of people had begun forming around Dan, but they quickly dispersed when the guard waved his gun in their general direction. “Go on, get out of here. I’ll take care of this,” he instructed. Because they knew who he worked for, everyone was quick to oblige.

  Sticking out a foot, he gave Dan a tentative prod.

  Nothing.

  He kicked him harder, but still got no reaction.

  “Yeah, he’s paste,” the guard said, turning away. “Must’ve just been a jumper. Cancel the lockdown and call a cleaning crew or something to get this shizz off the street.”

  A slowdown round hit him in the back, grinding him into five percent movement speed.

  By the time he’d figured out something was wrong, Dan had got to his feet, dusted himself down, taken the guy’s earpiece, then smashed him in the face with the butt of his gun.

  The nose exploded in breathtaking slow motion, globules of blood floating away from it as if they were in zero gravity. Dan watched the blood wobble off through the air while he clicked his bones back into place and retrieved his hat.

  “Ye’re a fecking maniac!” Artur yelped from his coat pocket. “I mean… Ye almost squished me!”

  “But I didn’t,” Dan pointed out, turning his back on the guard and limping in the direction of the building’s front door. His right leg needed some serious adjustments, but now wasn’t the time. Someone would figure out the guard was gone, soon, and the lockdown would start again. He had to be inside before that happened.

  As he slipped the earpiece into his ear, he caught the tail end of someone’s sentence. “…Down are up here. He wants to know everything’s clear. Confirm.”

  Dan hobbled across the pedestrianized street, closing on the door. “Confirm,” he said, doing his best to replicate the guard’s dulcet tones.

  “Who the fonk is this?” the voice in the earpiece demanded.

  The shutters on the upper windows snapped closed. A metal barricade began to drop down over the building’s front door, but another slowdown round reduced its rate of descent to a leisurely creep, allowing Dan to duck beneath it and into the hallway beyond.

  A spray of blaster fire screamed toward him. He dodged, but heard the sizzle as one of the bolts took a chunk out of his thigh.

  “Mindy, stun shot,” he instructed. He squeezed the trigger a fraction of a second before the round chamber had finished spinning, and the gun’s lights illuminated in red to indicate a jam.

  “Shizz,” Dan grunted. He fished into his coat pocket. “Art, you’re up,” he said, tossing Artur overarm toward the gorilla-like gunman at the other end of the hall.

  Artur roared as he flew through the air between the blaster bolts, his blouse and crisp white slacks flapping around him.

  He landed on the guy’s face, then simultaneously bit his nose, kicked a tooth out, and forced three fingers into one of his eyeballs. The gorilla dropped the gun and grabbed at the multiple pain points on his face, but Artur quickly scrambled up onto his head, took hold of some strands of hair, then flipped down the back of the guy’s head.

  Tugging with a surprising amount of force, he yanked the gorilla’s head back so sharply the guy was pulled off his feet. The head clonked against the floor. Artur waited a moment to make sure the gunman was unconscious, then wiped his hands on his thighs.

  “Greasy-haired bastard,” he observed, then he raised his arms above his head, and Dan picked him up on the way to the stairs.

  Mindy’s chamber clicked and the lights around the weapon’s barrel turned blue. “Looks like we won’t have to kill everyone,” Dan said, slipping Artur back into his pocket.

  “We won’t have to,” said Artur. “But, sure, wouldn’t it be more fun if we did?”

  A heavily built figure with two robotic arms appeared at the top of the first staircase. He had some sort of grenade in one hand, the trigger mechanism still fully depressed. Dan shot him between the eyes and the weight of his limbs toppled him forward down the steps. He slid to a stop at Dan’s feet, twitching a little and foaming gently at the mouth, the grenade still clutched in his hand.

  With some difficulty, Dan prized the explosive from the cocoon of metal fingers, keeping the trigger held in. He flicked the lock switch on top of the device, then gave it a cursory examination. He was hoping it would be some highly-illegal or experimental explosive that would confirm Krato was still in the arms trade. Annoyingly, it was just a Disorientator – a confusion grenade readily available at any Down Here gun store – and so it proved nothing.

  Still, it might come in handy, so he slipped it into one of his pockets, stepped over Robo-arms, and continued up the stairs.

  There were light scatterings of guards on the next two floors. Dan disposed of them without too much difficulty, and only a minor stab wound to the thigh. He kept the knife. Again, it might come in handy.

  The fourth floor was a different matter. Dan heard the humming of blaster rifles from the bottom of the steps, and the conspicuous silence that came from a lot of people all holding their breath.

  So, Krato was on this floor. Either that, or this was just a cover and he was actually on one of the floors above. Either way, Dan would have to get through the miniature army of henchmen first.

  He flicked the switch, released the trigger, then tossed the grenade. The silence became a panicky thunder of footsteps and shouts, then a blinding flash illuminated the rectangle of ceiling that Dan could see.

  “Three, two, one…” Artur counted. Just as he reached zero, several rifles began firing erratically.

  Dan took a moment to adjust his collar and reposition his hat while he waited for the shooting to stop.

  “Ye think Peaches is having a better or worse time than us?” Artur asked him.

  Dan considered this. Upstairs, someone screamed.

  “Worse,” Dan said. “Definitely worse.”

  “Agreed. Poor cow,” said Artur. He gestured up the stairs to where the blaster fire had fallen silent. “Shall we?”

  Dan trudged up the stairs into a scene of chaos and carnage. As expected, there had been several people waiting up there. About eight, he thought, if he extrapolated numbers from the remains.

  A good few of them had been shot repeatedly at point blank range with high-powered fully-automatic blaster rifles, and their charred remains now decorated the scorched and blackened corridor walls.

  Three had avoided being shot. One of them was attempting to run away but was fleeing directly into a wall, and so going nowhere. Another spun in tight circles, his eyes wide and staring at nothing. The third seemed intent on doing a handstand but was having difficulty finding his center of balance. He also didn’t seem to know where his hands were, which wasn’t making things any easier.

  None of them acknowledged Dan as he proceeded down the corridor to a grand set of double doors at the far end.

  “So, we find out if he did yer shopping mall thing, then we shoot him either way on account of him being a scumbag?” Artur asked. “Is that the plan?”

  “Pretty much,” Dan confirmed.

  “I mean, it’s only fair. Sure, l
ook at all these people he had trying to shoot us. That’s just impolite.”

  Reaching the end of the corridor, Dan kicked the doors where they met in the middle. The damage he’d sustained in the fall from the roof stole some of the usual force away, and it took several attempts before the lock splintered and the doors flew open.

  “Don’t hurt them! Don’t hurt the kids!”

  Dan paused, Mindy raised in front of him. A red-skinned figure with a sharp suit and a ludicrous quasi-beard that grew like an extension from the end of his chin stood at the far end of a quietly opulent room. Krato, Dan assumed. He fit the description at least.

  Six wide-eyed child-sized figures were huddled behind him, tears cutting tracks down their faces. They were of a species Dan couldn’t identify, but there was definitely something aquatic about them, he thought. Their blue-green skin glistened like scales in the overhead lights, and there were semi-transparent webs between each of their long, slender fingers.

  Music played from a speaker on Krato’s desk. It was a soft and sleepy sort of tune that made Dan think of warm pajamas and hot milk. A lullaby. Why the fonk was an arms dealer playing a lullaby?

  “What the fonk is this?” Dan muttered.

  “I’ll give you whatever you want,” Krato said. “Just don’t hurt the children.”

  “Deadman, yer left,” Artur barked.

  Dan brought an elbow up, crunching it into the face of another blue-green figure. This one was bigger than the others, and presumably an adult. He was dressed in a gold-colored armored bodice and a pair of shiny silver trunks that left very little to the imagination.

  “Ooh, those must chafe like a bastard,” Artur remarked.

  Dan pointed the gun at the man’s face, although the way he was sobbing and clutching his broken nose suggested he wasn’t about to try anything.

  “Get over there,” Dan instructed, ushering him toward Krato and the rest of the group.

  Krato beckoned the man over, then guided him into the group of children. “Seriously, there’s a safe. I have money,” Krato pleaded. “Just let them go.”

  Dan adjusted his grip on the gun, buying himself a second or two to consider his answer. He’d been expecting one of two things when he kicked open the door. Either it was going to be a trap, or Krato would already have left. He knew it would be unlikely that the arms dealer would just hang around while all that shooting was going on.

  The kids, though. He hadn’t been expecting the kids.

  “You’re Krato, right?” Dan grunted.

  “Yes. Yes, I am. I’m Krato. You’ve heard of me. Then you know I’m telling the truth. I can pay you a lot of money just to walk away.”

  “I don’t want your money,” Dan said. “I’m here for you.”

  Krato’s pointed eyebrows arched. “Me?” he said, then he nodded quickly. “OK. OK, yes, that’s fine. Take me. Do what you want. Just don’t hurt the kids.”

  “I’ll level wit’ ye, Deadman. This is not what I was expecting,” Artur whispered.

  “What are they? Hostages?” Dan demanded. “You going to use them for target practice?”

  Krato shook his head. “What? No! They’re just kids. They’re just here for a visit. They have nothing to do with… whatever this is about. OK? Just kids.”

  “Like the kids in that mall, you mean?”

  “Mall?” Krato’s expression became mostly blank. “I don’t… what mall?”

  “On Eighteenth,” Dan said. “One-hundred-and-thirty-four people killed.”

  Krato’s face paled. “Oh… N-no. That was you?”

  “It was you!” Dan spat.

  “Are ye sure about this, Deadman?” Artur whispered.

  “Me?! What are you talking about? I’m a businessman not a… a… terrorist.”

  Dan advanced a pace. The children and their bloody-nosed adult supervisor all shrunk back. Krato raised his arms at his sides, like he could somehow shield them all.

  “No, but you supply weapons to terrorists, don’t you?” Dan said. “And I hear you supplied whatever was used to kill those people.”

  “Then you heard wrong!”

  Dan’s grip tightened on his gun. Krato raised his hands in a calming gesture.

  “OK, OK. Let’s talk about this. Take me wherever you want. I’ll go with you, no complaints.” He gestured back to the children behind him, all sobs and snot now. “Just let them go. They have nothing to do with anything.”

  “Might be for the best,” Artur suggested. “Sure, ye don’t want to be blowing him to pieces in front of the skiddlers now, do ye?”

  “Fine,” Dan grunted. He beckoned Krato over, then forcibly shoved him toward the door. He turned to the kids. “You can go,” he said, then he remembered the carnage in the hallway outside. “But, uh, I’d probably close your eyes until you get down a floor or two.”

  “Just be careful on the stairs,” Artur suggested. “We take no responsibility for any accidents or mishaps ye may or may not have.”

  Dan jabbed the gun into Krato’s back and urged him on.

  “Oh gods. What happened?” he gasped, eyes flitting around the carnage. “Did you do this?”

  “They did it to themselves,” Dan said.

  “Although, technically, we did give them a nudge in the right direction,” added Artur.

  Krato stepped over a twitching severed arm and made for the steps leading down. Dan caught him by the shoulder and steered him in a different direction. “Uh-uh. We’re going up.”

  “Up? Why, what’s up?” Krato asked.

  “The roof,” said Dan. “We’re going to the roof.”

  “N-NO, please! Please! Don’t let go, don’t let go!”

  Dan adjusted his grip on Krato’s ankle and gave a non-committal grunt. “Then I suggest you stop wriggling.”

  Krato continued to flap for a few seconds, before letting himself go limp. His red skin had initially gone completely pale when Dan had shoved him over the roof’s edge, but was now darkening again as all the blood ran to his head.

  “Please, don’t kill me,” he whimpered. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Ninety-six adults. Thirty-eight children,” Dan growled.

  “It wasn’t me! I don’t know what you’re talking about! I had nothing to do with that!”

  “My sources say otherwise,” Dan replied.

  “Then they’re wrong!” Krato sobbed. “I had nothing to do with any mall!”

  Dan shook the man’s leg, making him squeal and whimper.

  “You provided the weapons. You deal in guns.”

  “What? No!” Krato spluttered. “I’m not an arms dealer, I’m a drug dealer! Legal drugs, I mean! Pharmaceuticals!”

  “You’re lying,” Dan spat.

  Artur, who had been sitting on the ledge and flicking through Krato’s wallet, looked up. “Uh, I hate to say it, Deadman, but I don’t think he’s talking’ shoite.”

  He held up Krato’s ID card. This required two arms. “Says here he’s the boss of some big drugs company. ‘Karma-Pharma.’”

  “That’s it!” Krato yelped. “That’s it!”

  Artur dug out a Karma-Pharma business card and read it. “If ye believe this, they’re a drugs company ‘with a conscience,’” he said.

  “We’re developing a cure for acute Ingospasmonsis,” Krato said.

  “What the fonk is Ingospasmonsis?”

  “It’s a genetic condition. Those children downstairs, that’s why they’re here. They’re our first patients!” His voice cracked into a throaty croak. “We’re trying to save them. They’re here for their treatment.”

  Dan looked down at Artur, who shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”

  “You’re an arms dealer,” Dan growled.

  Krato shook his head. “OK, listen. One of my old companies did deal in weaponry,” he began, then he screamed as Dan dropped him a foot before tightening his grip again. “Legal, government contract planetary defense stuff! When Krone started moving his task forces into the sector, th
e bottom fell out of the market. I sold all my shares months ago and plowed the money into Karma. It’s the truth, I swear.” His words descended into a mess of sobs and wails. “I swear.”

  “Call me a sentimental old wanker, but I kind of believe him,” Artur said.

  “Why the guards?” Dan demanded.

  Artur peeked over the edge. “I think he may have passed out.”

  Dan scowled. “Seriously?” He jiggled Krato around a little, but got no response.

  “Either that or he’s just decided now’s the perfect time to get some shut-eye.” Artur shrugged. “Or he might be dead, I suppose.”

  Dan heaved the motionless figure back up over the edge and dropped him onto the rooftop. Artur licked his own hand until it was good and wet, then shoved it in Krato’s ear, startling him awake.

  “Wha—?” Krato’s dark eyes darted around as he remembered where he was and what was happening.

  “Why the guards?” Dan asked. “If you’re curing kids of whatever it was you said, why the armed guards?”

  “Because we’re offering free medication. Free treatment,” Krato said. He rubbed the hip of the leg Dan had been holding and winced with the pain it brought. “Do you know how many drugs companies operate Down Here? Not to mention those Up There. They don’t like us. They don’t like what we’re doing. We need to protect ourselves. We used to rent an office downtown, but it wasn’t safe, so we moved up here.”

  “That does make sense,” Artur said. “Ye reckon, Deadman? That does make sense.”

  Dan gave another non-committal sort of grunt. “I’m not buying it,” he said, raising Mindy until she was pointed between Krato’s eyes.

  “No, look, stop!” Krato protested. “You want the truth? OK, OK, the truth!” He took a deep breath. “Am I an angel? No. I’ve been successful in business for twenty years. You know how difficult that is Down Here? You know how much it costs to bribe the Tribunal? You know how many minor but terrible things you have to do on a daily basis? The lines you have to cross?”