Dead in the Water_A Space Team Universe Novel Read online

  He saw Dan’s jaw tightening and held both hands out in front of him. “But that’s not me anymore! I’m trying to do good now. I’m trying to make up for it. To make a difference. What happened at the mall? I know nothing about that. Nothing. I swear to you. I swear.”

  His eyes flitted to the gun and he swallowed. “But if you have to shoot me, go ahead and shoot me. Just leave those kids alone. Their only crime is being ill.”

  Dan ground his teeth together, chewing this over.

  “Nope, still not buying it,” he decided, then he tightened his grip on the hand cannon and—

  “Hey, brah!”

  Finn’s voice drifted across from the opposite rooftop. Dan kept the gun trained on Krato, but looked up.

  “That’s the Krato guy, right?”

  “It is,” Dan shouted back.

  “Thought so. When I saw him, it all started to, like, come back. I remembered what the dude hired me to do!”

  Dan felt a spark of hope. “You did?”

  “Yeah, brah!”

  Dan waited.

  “Well? What was it?” he called over, quietly hoping the answer would be, ‘Transport a lot of guns to a shopping mall.’

  “Some, like, clinical trial thing,” came the answer. “Like a drug test. He paid us a hundred each.”

  “Yes! That’s right! I did!” Krato babbled. “Listen to him, he knows who I am!”

  “Pretty generous if you ask me, brah.”

  Dan’s spark of hope flickered, then went out. He brought the gun down to his side. “Fonk,” he muttered.

  He puffed out his cheeks, then looked down into Artur’s eyes just as the little man winced.

  “Well. This is a bit awkward, ain’t it?” Artur said.

  Dan cleared his throat, holstered his gun, then tapped the brim of his hat. “Uh, sorry for the inconvenience,” he said. “It seems we—”

  “I,” Artur corrected. “The word ye’re lookin’ for is ‘I.’”

  “It seems I may have made a mistake,” Dan said.

  Krato looked between them. “You mean… you’re not going to kill me?”

  “No. Not going to kill you,” Dan said. He shifted awkwardly, cleared his throat again, then picked Artur up. “Apologies again for the inconvenience,” he said, then he turned and headed for the door leading down from the roof.

  Halfway there, he stopped and turned back.

  “Wait, did you say you used to rent an office downtown?”

  Krato blinked slowly, like he couldn’t quite process what was going on. “Huh? Oh, yes. Yes, we did.”

  Dan nodded. “Don’t suppose you’d happen to know if it’s still on the market?”

  ELEVEN

  THEY FOUND Ollie collapsed in the Loopy Lou’s depressingly gray staff room, twitching occasionally as the costume shocked her. Finn hurried to her side and removed the headpiece, letting a wave of warm air roll up out of the neck. Her purple-pink face was now all the way red, and shiny all over with sweat. She gasped as the cooler air rushed in, like a drowning swimmer breaking the surface for the last time.

  “You OK? Why are you still in the suit?” Finn asked.

  “Um. Hi!” Ollie said, giving a little wave of her big furry hand. “You told me I couldn’t take it off.”

  “When the kids were here,” said Finn. “They’re gone.”

  Ollie’s eyes widened. “Oh! I didn’t… I thought… I just didn’t want you to get into trouble.”

  Finn smiled and brushed back his tousled blond locks. “You didn’t? Aw! That’s so sweet of you.”

  “Oh, for fonk’s sake,” Dan muttered.

  “Were they into it? The kids, I mean?” Finn asked.

  “So much!” Ollie cheeped. “I mean, at first I thought they were kind of scared and, you know, kind of horrified? But then they just sat there smiling at me the whole time. Like totally silent and just smiling.”

  “I’d have shoite meself if that happened,” Artur said. “Creepy little bastards.”

  Dan grunted. “Just ditch the suit and let’s get out of here.”

  Finn looked Ollie up and down. “Want me to help?”

  “She can get it,” Dan told him.

  “It’s just, the catch at the back can be—”

  Dan caught Finn by the back of the neck and steered him toward the door. Artur scowled at Finn from inside Dan’s top pocket. “Ye heard what the man said. She can get it.”

  “We’ll go wait out front. Come out when you’re ready,” Dan told Ollie.

  “OK. See you soon!” said Ollie, trying to reach the fastener on the back of the suit with very little success. “I’ll just be… This won’t take…”

  She fell over, rolled on her ‘comically’ large padded belly, then flopped sideways out of sight behind a coffee table.

  “I’m fine. I’m OK,” she called. “I’ve totally got this, guys.”

  Her head raised from behind the coffee table. “Guys?”

  But the guys were gone.

  OLLIE SLID into the front seat of the Exodus and, after three attempts, closed the door. Dan sat in the driver’s seat, his hands impatiently gripping the wheel. Artur was slouched in his usual indent in the dash, turned so he could keep a close eye on the annoyingly handsome fecker in the back.

  “Hey! You’re here,” said Ollie, turning in her chair. Finn beamed back at her, showing off some very nice teeth.

  “Yeah! I asked Dan if I could—”

  Dan cleared his throat and fixed his rear-view mirror with a cold stare.

  “Sorry. I asked Mr Deadman if I could bum a ride back to the Stagnates with you guys.”

  Ollie appeared equal parts delighted and surprised. “And he said ‘yes?’” she asked, turning to Dan.

  “Couldn’t think of an excuse fast enough,” Dan admitted, then he turned over the ignition and eventually teased the engine into a spluttering and wheezing form of life.

  “Your car doesn’t sound too healthy,” Finn pointed out.

  “I know.”

  “I could take a look for you, if you like? I mean, I’m not officially trained or whatever, but I know a thing or two about engines, brah.”

  “It’s fine. It’s under control. I like it like this,” Dan said, guiding the Exodus out into traffic. “And don’t call me ‘brah.’”

  “Sorry, dude.”

  Dan rolled his eyes, but said nothing.

  Ollie faced front and crossed her arms. “So, back to that underground place?” she asked, and her voice conveyed her feelings about the prospect of returning to the Stagnates.

  “Afraid so,” said Dan.

  A horn blared as he cut in front of a mag-lev truck. Artur extended the middle fingers of both hands in the truck’s direction.

  “Get it up ye! Are ye feckin’ blind?” he roared, then he lowered his voice to a low mutter. “Ye know that was totally your fault, right?”

  Dan chose not to pass comment on the matter and merged the car onto a slipway leading up onto the main route downtown.

  “Uh, I don’t think this is the quickest way to the Stagnates,” Finn told him.

  “I’m aware of that,” Dan said, fighting the suddenly all-too-tempting urge to reverse into a wall. “We have to quickly swing by somewhere else first.”

  Ollie frowned across at him. “Where?”

  Dan didn’t take his eyes off the road ahead with its stop-start streams of traffic. “I think I might have found us a new office.”

  DAN AND OLLIE stood in the office suite’s main reception area, quietly taking it all in. Finn had been instructed to wait in the car, and while Dan had asked Artur to keep an eye on him, Artur had announced he could, “bugger that for a game of soldiers,’ and had tagged along with Dan and Ollie, instead.

  A largely apathetic letting agent leaned against the doorframe, flicking idly through a stack of printed pages he had fastened to his clipboard.

  “So, as you can see, it needs some work.”

  “That’s a feckin’ understatement,”
Artur said.

  “The last tenants got involved in, I don’t know, some sort of altercation,” the agent explained.

  “Is that why there’s no wall?” asked Ollie, gesturing to a big, mostly empty space where one of the building’s outer walls should definitely have been.

  The agent flicked through his notes. “Yes. Yes, that’s right. Also, the ceiling is at risk of collapse and the plumbing has all been completely destroyed.”

  Dan nodded. “Right, but—”

  “And the entire floor is structurally unsound.”

  Dan and Ollie both looked down. The floorboards groaned beneath them.

  “But you’d fix that, right?” asked Dan. “If we took the place, I mean.”

  “Repairs are the tenant’s responsibility,” the agent was quick to point out. “So you’d have to deal with it yourself.”

  “What?” Artur spluttered. “Why don’t we build ye a feckin’ extension at the same time? Sure, we could maybe add another story on top with a roof garden and a landin’ pad. How would that suit ye?”

  “That would be fine,” the agent confirmed.

  “Well tough shoite. ‘Tenant’s responsibility,’ he says. Do we look like we sailed up the street in a handkerchief?”

  “Do you look like what?”

  “Shut the feck up and answer the question,” Artur said. “No, we don’t,” he continued, answering it for him before he had the chance. “If ye think we’ll be footing the bill for making this shoitehole habitable, ye’ve another thing coming.”

  The agent shrugged and flipped his pad closed. “Fine. That’s not a problem. Sorry you wasted our time,” he said, taking care to emphasize the “our” part.

  “Hey, wait a minute, hold on,” said Dan. He huffed out a sigh and looked around the place. “We do need somewhere to go. So… what’s the estimate? For the repairs, I mean. What’s it likely to cost?”

  The agent flipped open his pad again. “Around two-hundred-and-seventy-thousand credits.”

  Dan choked on nothing but air. “How much? What the fonk are you building it out of? Ultrium?”

  “I don’t know what that is, sir,” said the agent. “So, no. That’s just a standard finish.”

  “It’s daylight feckin’ robbery is what it is!” Artur argued. “I swear, Deadman, if ye give this thieving bastard so much as a single credit, I’ll… I’ll… Well, I don’t know what I’ll do, but no one will enjoy it, that’s for sure.”

  “I have a couple of questions,” Dan said. He ran a finger along a buckled window frame in one of the room’s three remaining walls. “What actually happened here? This must’ve been some ‘altercation.’”

  The agent shrugged. “That’s all I know. Some business competitor pulled up outside and shot the place to pieces, or something.”

  Dan nodded slowly. “That would make sense,” he said. “Except this window is bent outwards.”

  The agent regarded it with forced interest. “So?”

  “So someone shooting from the outside wouldn’t have done that,” Dan explained.

  “Presumably they shot back.”

  “Must’ve been one big gun,” said Dan. He jabbed a thumb in the direction of the missing wall. “Looks like that fell out the way, too. Which makes me wonder, what exactly were they trading in here? Guns? Could it have been guns?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t give you that information, sir,” the agent said. “Client confidentiality.”

  Dan hoisted him off his feet with one hand. With the other, he pushed back his hat so the agent got a full, uninterrupted up-close view of his face.

  “Drugs!” the man gargled. “They were a drugs company! But above board. I mean… I think. They had all the paperwork, that’s all I know!”

  Dan tutted. That wasn’t the answer he’d been hoping for, but he didn’t think the agent had any reason to lie.

  “P-please don’t hurt me!”

  Dan let the man drop. He landed on his feet, but his legs gave way, collapsing him to the floor. Bending, Dan plucked the clipboard from the agent’s hand, pulled the pages out, then shoved them, folded, into his inside coat pocket.

  “Sorry,” he said, returning the now empty clipboard. “It’s a little outside our budget.”

  “And ye’re an arsehole,” Artur added.

  “Yeah,” agreed Dan. “That, too.”

  “Nice to meet you, though,” said Ollie, then she scuttled after Dan as he strode out through the missing wall and into the little car park beyond.

  Dan marched quickly towards the Exodus, forcing Ollie to jog to keep up. “So, we’re not taking the office?”

  “What office?” asked Dan. “It doesn’t have a wall.”

  “No, I know,” said Ollie. She groaned. “I just really don’t want to go back down into the thingummy.”

  “The Stagnates.”

  “Them. Yes. I don’t want to go back down there.”

  “No one does, kid,” Dan told her.

  Pulling open the driver’s door, he slumped into the front seat of the Exodus, then deposited Artur into the indent in the dash. He started trying to goad the engine awake before Ollie had made it around to the passenger side.

  “It’s just… after what happened to Banbara,” Ollie said, seamlessly picking up the thread of the conversation again. “And what if it’s still around somewhere? The monster thing?”

  Finn leaned forward from the back seat. “Wait, didn’t you say you were going to kill that thing, brah?”

  “Don’t call me brah,” Dan said. “And yes, that’s what I said, but it was harder than expected. We flushed it out to sea.”

  “Oh,” said Finn, slouching back. He let this sink in for a moment. “So, it’s still alive? Even after what it did to those people? To Bonbo?”

  Dan met his eye in the rear-view mirror. “Hey, you want to go take it on? Be my guest.”

  Finn straightened. “Yeah, well… maybe I will.”

  Dan snorted. “Right.”

  “I’ll come,” said Ollie.

  Finn’s smile returned. “Cool!”

  “Wait, what? No,” said Dan. “It was a joke. You can’t take it on.”

  “Why not?” asked Ollie.

  “Uh, because it murders people and leaves them as just skin, it’s probably way out somewhere in the ocean by now, and – oh – it’s a giant unkillable monster,” Dan said. “And those are just off the top of my head.”

  “Nothing’s unkillable, Deadman,” Artur pointed out.

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “And I can get my hands on a boat,” Finn added.

  “Fine. You go ahead,” Dan said. He stabbed a finger in Ollie’s direction. “But you’re not going.”

  “Why not? That’s not fair!” Ollie protested.

  “Yeah, well sometimes life isn’t fair,” Dan muttered. “It’s too dangerous.”

  Artur raised a hand. “Uh, point of information. Ye are remembering that she’s got, like, magic powers or whatever?”

  “That’s what I’m worried about,” Dan said. “All that power, and she doesn’t have the first clue how to use it.”

  Artur shrugged. “Fair enough. Then show her.”

  Dan frowned. “What?”

  “Show her. Teach her what to do. Sure, it’s either that or she winds up accidentally killing us all, and half the city with us.”

  Dan hesitated. For a moment, it almost looked like he was going to go for it, but then he shook his head. “How am I supposed to teach her? What do I know?”

  “Ye know a damn sight more than most about all that mumbo jumbo bollocks,” Artur said. “I’m sure ye could give the girl a few pointers, at least. Steer her in the right direction.”

  Ollie’s head had been tick-tocking between Dan and Artur as they’d discussed her. It stopped on Dan now, and she looked worried as she waited for him to give his verdict.

  “I suppose we could head south past the outskirts. Well away from people,” he conceded.

  “We could at
that,” Artur said. “I like yer thinking, Deadman. Ye might have a face on ye like a burst hemorrhoid, but ye’ve still got it going on upstairs where it counts.”

  Dan grunted and steered the Exodus out of the car park. “We’ll drop the kid off back at the Stagnates first,” he said, but Artur had other ideas.

  “Not at all! I think we should bring yer man with us. Sure, I think it’d be good for him to see our Ollie here in all her full glory, don’t ye agree? Her full terrifying glory.”

  Dan clocked the expression on Artur’s face, and caught the little man’s wink.

  “Yeah,” he said, a smile tugging at the corners of his dry, cracked lips. “That might not be such a bad idea, after all.”

  IT TOOK an hour for them to reach the southernmost city limits, then they drove on over the dirt and debris for half that again to make sure nobody would accidentally chance upon them. Ideally, they’d have gone further, but the ground had gone from ‘uneven plain’ to ‘no fonking way are we getting past this,’ and Dan had decided they’d gone far enough.

  After stopping the car, Dan and Ollie had picked their way through the scrub until they’d reached a suitably-sized flatter area a short distance away. Finn had moved to follow, but Artur had suggested – quite firmly – that they should both hang back and leave the other two to it.

  They had taken up positions on the hood of the Exodus – Finn sitting cross-legged, Artur standing on the top of the grille to give himself a better view. Planting themselves there had been Artur’s idea, and Finn was worried that Dan might not be best pleased.

  “Quit worrying,” Artur told him. “Sure, he might look mean – and, ye know, completely horrifying – but he’s a big softie at heart.”

  “He is?”

  “Oh aye. Soft as a baby’s shoite,” Artur beamed. The smile eroded, just a fraction. “I mean, unless ye mess with his friends, like. Ye know. Like me. Or young Ollie there even more so. Then it’s a different story. He don’t like that.” Artur sucked air in through his teeth. “He don’t like that one little bit.”

  “Uh… OK,” Finn said.

  “Ye understand what I’m sayin’ there, boyo?” Artur asked, squinting up at him. “Both Deadman and I… well, we’ve grown awfully fond of our Oledol, so we have. He’ll never admit that to ye, but it’s true. She’s a lovely girl. Too good for the likes o’ this city, that’s for sure.”