Dial D for Deadman: A Space Team Universe Novel (Dan Deadman Space Detective Book 1)

by Barry J. Hutchison

  Dan shrugged. “Oh well. I tried.” He held his gun up, ready.

  Erron let out a high-pitched hiss of a giggle. “A blaster? You think you can stop it with a blaster?”

  “Hmm? Oh, no,” said Dan, absent-mindedly. “The gun isn’t for that thing.”

  With a grunt of effort, he tossed Erron into the thrashing mass of tentacles. One of the thinner tendrils snapped out, snagging the flailing figure around one leg. Erron swung, then hung there, upside-down, his robe falling upwards to reveal his skinny legs and ill-fitting underwear.

  “N-no! Stop! What are you d-doing?” he cried.

  “Blood opened this thing. Blood’s what’s going to close it,” Dan said, then he raised Mindy and squeezed her trigger until she bucked and roared in his hand.

  Erron exploded, in much the same way as the door had, only with substantially more in the way of splash back. A gallon or two of blood, bile and knobbly bits fell into the hole, and Dan took a couple of hasty steps backwards to avoid the mist-like crimson spray that wafted his way.

  The owner of the tentacles shrieked, the sound ejecting upwards out of the portal and rebounding off the high warehouse ceiling. There was a sound like garden shears snapping shut, and the hole became just a red circle smeared onto the concrete floor. All the tentacles that had been on this side of the portal hit the ground in a series of damp splats, oily black liquid oozing from the glowing ends of each severed stump.

  “Huh, what do you know?” said Dan, sliding Mindy back into her under-arm holster. “That actually worked.”

  He turned towards the young woman. “Now, then,” he began, then he stopped when he saw she was lying on the floor, either knocked-out or fainted. Possibly dead, although that was less likely.

  Dan exhaled through his nose. Habit again, more than anything. “Well,” he said. He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Isn’t that just great?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  A battered old Jonta Exodus cruised through the darkened city, its four fat tires rumbling over the uneven tarmac.

  The streets were reasonably busy, even at this hour, and the Exodus stood out like a sore thumb among the lanes of sleeker, more modern vehicles that swished soundlessly past above the ground. Dan gunned the engine. It gave a throaty roar as he switched lanes and left the warehouse district behind.

  While most people had upgraded to magnetic-levitation vehicles over the past decade or so, there were still a few of the old four-wheelers doing the rounds. Many of these older cars could be considered classics. The Jonta Exodus, however, was not one of them.

  The seats were uncomfortable, the engine was noisy, and the whole thing rattled violently when accelerating or decelerating. And, to a marginally lesser extent, while maintaining a constant speed.

  The steering wheel was exactly the wrong size. The bodywork seemed to attract scratches out of thin air. The brakes decided for themselves when – and if – they were going to function, and often changed their mind mid-way through the braking process without warning.

  Still, there was something honest about it. It didn’t zip frivolously through the air a few feet above the ground, but stuck steadfastly to the street, instead. He liked that. It was literally the only thing he liked about the thing, and as reasons went it didn’t really make much sense, but he liked it, all the same.

  Also, it had been cheap. That had been an important factor in his purchasing decision, also.

  The Exodus merged into a lane of faster-moving traffic, forcing a smoothly-curved pod-like cab behind to brake suddenly. Dan glanced in his rear view mirror and caught a glimpse of the driver making quite a rude hand gesture. Dan touched his brakes, forcing the cab driver to slam on his own again, which almost certainly tossed his passengers around in the back seats.

  “No tip for you, shizznod,” Dan mumbled.

  At first glance, the sleek lines of the cab and the other mag-levs looked expensive. They were all second-hand bottom-of-the-range models, though, and while they were all out of Dan’s budget, they were within reasonable reach of most folks. They had to be. Anyone with money generally escaped to Up There, the network of artificial island cities hovering above the clouds. Down Here was the poor, slightly dim-witted relation. Of the sixty million people living in the planet’s only surface-based city, you’d be hard-pressed to find more than a handful doing so by choice.

  Dan had just begun a right turn that would take him towards midtown when the car was filled with screaming.

  “Shizz,” Dan spat, momentarily steering the Exodus into oncoming traffic. Horns blared. Lights flashed. The car’s tires howled as Dan twisted the wrong-sized wheel, jerking the Exodus back into its own lane. The sudden turn became a skid. The car’s front wheels clunked against the curb, and the back end spun out in a cloud of burning rubber.

  The screams from the back seat grew louder as the Exodus slammed into an overflowing trash can, spraying garbage in all directions. The car finally stopped with a crunch, and a screech of crumpling metal, nine tenths of it now on the sidewalk.

  The horn blasted all by itself, then every one of the dashboard lights illuminated briefly, before the engine shuddered and died.

  A moment later, the passenger airbag deployed with a half-hearted fart-like fanfare noise.

  Dan gripped the steering wheel so hard his fingers left indents in the rubber. Only then did he turn and look at the young woman in the back seat. “You done?” he said, then he puffed out his cheeks as she let rip with another round of screams. “Guess not.”

  He tapped his fingers on the wheel, waiting for her screaming to stop. Outside, a few passers-by tightened their coats around themselves and hurried on, sensibly opting not to get involved. Getting involved Down Here was never advised, rarely worthwhile, and often suicidal.

  Had they been up town – the closest Down Here had to an affluent area – he’d have heard sirens by now. The Tribunal didn’t often venture this far south, though, unless in large numbers. And driving tanks.

  The woman appeared to exhaust her repertoire of screams, and stopped. She started shouting, instead.

  “Where am I? Who are you? And… And… Where am I?”

  “Finally,” Dan said, exhaling the word as a sigh. He turned in his chair again. “You’re in my car. Which, thanks to you, is on the sidewalk. My name’s Dan Deadman. You’ve been involved in—”

  “What? What are you saying? I can’t… What are you saying?”

  Dan hesitated. “Is your chip on the fritz. Hello? Testing. Testing. You understand me?”

  The woman’s eyes went to Dan’s mouth, as if lip-reading would somehow help. “Are those… Are those words? I don’t… What are…? I don’t understand.”

  Dan pointed behind his ear. “Chip. Translator chip. Is it broken?” he asked, saying the last part slowly and in a louder voice, although he wasn’t entirely sure why. “Bro-ken?” he added, for good measure.

  The woman clawed at the window beside her, completely ignoring the large, highly visible handle midway down the door trim.

  “Let me out! Let me out! HELP! HELP!”

  Dan shook his head, just a little, and reached into his coat. “Mindy. Stun round.”

  The gun’s cylinder illuminated, spun, clicked. The woman had started to scream again, and was so busy trying to escape that she didn’t notice him taking aim.

  A flash of yellow lit up the inside of the car, and silence fell.

  “Thank fonk for that,” said Dan, as his unwilling passenger slumped sideways until her forehead was resting on the seat beside her. He studied her in the mirror for a few long moments. “Now, what am I going to do with you?”

  * * *

  She woke up suddenly, going from unconscious to eyes-wide-open in the time it took to eject a scream from the back of her throat.

  The first thing she noticed was that she was no longer in the vehicle, and was lying on a bed in some kind of garage or workshop, instead. The second thing she noticed was the dull pain behind her ear.
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  The third thing she noticed was the thin, white-haired figure in the blood-stained apron. He stood over her, wringing his hands and dancing anxiously on the spot. He had ruddy orange skin that glistened with moisture, and eyes that went from white bit to black bit, with no color in between.

  “Shh. Stop screaming! Shh! Please!” he pleaded.

  She screamed louder. The man glanced to his left and pulled a worried face. “Dan. My wife!”

  A hand clamped over the woman’s mouth. It was rough and cold, and the stench of it assaulted her nostrils.

  “OK, sweetheart, enough with the hysterics. Time to calm down,” Dan intoned.

  A light flared on the woman’s neck. It started as a pinpoint of purple, then bloomed immediately to fill the whole room. The other guy was unaffected, but Dan was launched backwards as if he’d been hit by a moving car. The woman didn’t realize this right away, on account of his hand remaining over her mouth.

  Dan slammed backwards into a rack of what might have been power tools, but might equally have been instruments of industrial torture. The shelving buckled under his weight, and the din of crumpling metal and falling equipment echoed around the workshop.

  A moment later, the hand – and the arm still attached to it – fell from the woman’s mouth and landed on the floor with a much quieter thud.

  Silence fell. Quite a confused silence.

  Judging by her face, the woman hadn’t been expecting anything that had happened in the last few seconds. Dan hadn’t, either, if he were being honest. The screaming, yes. The being partially blown to pieces and propelled across the room by an invisible force, no.

  “Nedran?” called a gruff voice from somewhere through the wall. “What’s all the noise? What are you doing down there?”

  The white-haired man wiped his hands on his apron. His mouth trembled as he tried to shape his voice into something convincing. “Nothing, dear. Just dropped a few things, that’s all.”

  “You better not have broken anything. I ain’t paying for no replacements,” the voice called down.

  “Nothing broken,” Nedran said, forcing a laugh. “Everything’s fine. Just me being clumsy.”

  There was silence for a while, before the voice came again.

  “Keep the screaming down. I’m trying to watch my shows.”

  Nedran just nodded in reply, and seemed to relax a little. He shot the young woman a wary look, then turned to Dan in time to see him extricate himself from the tangle of shelving and tools. This involved quite a lot of muttering, a substantial amount of which was made up of swearing.

  When he was on his feet, Dan looked down at his left arm. Or, more accurately, his left sleeve. He had removed his long overcoat while the woman slept, and now what was left of his shirt sleeve flopped limply down by his side. It was missing from just below the elbow, the edges ragged and slightly scorched.

  Dan studied the blackened material in silence for a few moments, then shifted his gaze to the thousands of freckle-like bloodspots and knife blade-sized tear that decorated the front.

  “Well, you did it,” he said, sighing. “You killed my new shirt.”

  “I didn’t mean… I don’t…” the woman said, her mouth flapping open and closed. She seemed to tense up for a moment, then rolled sideways off the hospital-like bed she’d been lying on, and snatched up the closest weapon she could find.

  “Stay back!” she warned, waggling Dan’s severed arm in front of her in what was presumably supposed to be a threatening way. In reality, it looked like the hand was giving the room’s other occupants a friendly wave.

  “Look, we’re not going to hurt you,” said Dan. “You can understand me now, right?”

  The woman hesitated, then nodded, just briefly. The hand continued to wave. She pointed it at Nedran when he shifted nervously on the spot. “Don’t move!”

  “Or what, you’ll slap us to death?” Dan asked. “Look, I had to shoot you to stop you screaming. I thought your translation chip was broken, so I brought you to Nedran to fix it. Turns out, you didn’t have one.”

  “Wait, you shot her?” said Nedran. “You didn’t tell me you shot her.”

  Dan waved his one remaining hand, dismissively. “I didn’t shoot shoot her. It was a stun shot.”

  “Still. Is it any wonder she doesn’t trust you?”

  Dan shrugged. His hat had been knocked off when he’d hit the shelving. He stooped and retrieved it from the rough concrete floor. “If it wasn’t for me, she’d have been dragged into the Malwhere,” he said, giving the hat a dust, then depositing it back on his head. “What more does she want?”

  “Not to be shot, presumably,” said Nedran. He turned to the woman and offered something that was passingly familiar with a smile. “I’m sorry, my dear. It seems you’ve had quite a difficult night.”

  She swung the arm between them, almost as if it were a loaded gun, saying nothing.

  “What’s your name?” Nedran asked.

  “What does it matter?” Dan grunted. “You gave her a chip, she’s awake, she can get going.” He gave the woman a very deliberate look. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

  Nedran shot him an accusatory glance, then turned his attention back to the woman. “I’m Nedran. Nedran Wonfroun.”

  He frowned, just briefly, then glanced down, suddenly remembering his blood-stained apron. “This isn’t what it looks like,” he said, hastily pulling the strap up over his head. He tossed the apron onto a pile of other, similarly-stained garments. “I help people. I’m a… doctor. A kind of doctor, anyway.”

  Dan sighed and began to march towards the woman. “OK, sweetheart, give me my arm,” he said.

  “No, stay back!” she yelped, and a pinprick of light flared on her neck again. It was coming from some sort of necklace, Dan realized.

  He stopped, and the pendant’s glow didn’t get any brighter. He took a step back, and it faded away completely, leaving only the darkened metal symbol hanging at the bottom of her throat. The woman swung the arm between the two men a few more times, then lowered it.

  “Oledol,” she said.

  Dan frowned. “Huh?”

  “My name. It’s… It’s Oledol.”

  “Oh. Good for you,” said Dan. “Now give me the fonking arm.”

  Oledol blinked. “Huh?”

  Dan pointed to the dismembered limb in her hands. “The arm. Give it to me.”

  “No, that other word. What was it?”

  Dan’s scarred brow furrowed. “What, ‘fonking’?”

  “What is that?” Oledol asked. She pointed the arm at him, threateningly, once again mistaking it for some sort of projectile weapon. She wasn’t the only one. Nedran raised his hands, before a withering look from Dan made him lower them again. “Tell me!” Oledol demanded, then her face softened. “I mean… please?”

  Dan looked her up and down. “So, what? You’ve never had a chip? How can you never have had a chip?”

  Oledol’s face said she had no idea what he was talking about.

  “A Zertex translation chip,” said Dan, tapping himself behind the ear. “So you can understand people? Other languages, whatever?”

  Her expression didn’t change.

  Dan sighed. “OK. Ned put a translation chip in your head. It takes my language and his language and turns them into your language.”

  Oledol shifted on the balls of her feet. A hand – one of her own, not the one she was currently wielding like a blaster – reached up, and a finger traced the ache behind her ear. “So what’s—?”

  “Fonking,” said Dan. “Zertex doesn’t like us using bad language.” He made air quotes around the last two words, although, the arm situation meant he only made half of them. “So they censor us. Fonk, shizz, bedge, sloop. I’m sure you get the idea.”

  From her expression, it wasn’t clear if Oledol did, in fact, get the idea, but she didn’t question it any further.

  “Now,” said Dan. “Give me my arm back.”

  He held out his one
remaining hand. Oledol’s eyes shifted down to the stumpy limb clutched in her own shaking grip. Her expression contorted in horror, as if only just realizing what she was holding. She gave a little yelp and tossed the arm towards Dan. He snatched it from the air, then held it out to Nedran.

  The older man took it, turned it over a few times, sniffed the end, then shook his head. “Too damaged,” he announced.

  “Son of a…” Dan began, then the rest of the sentence ended in a drawn-out sigh as he drew Oledol a disapproving glare.

  “What?” she said. “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “Of course it was your fault,” Dan snapped. “You think I blew myself across the room?”

  Oledol looked from the hospital bed to the tangled wreckage of the storage rack. “Didn’t you?”

  “No! How would I? Why would I?”

  “Well, how would I do it?” Oledol asked, her voice rising.

  Dan started to cross his arms over his chest, then realized it looked stupid with just one. “You tell me. What were you doing in that warehouse?”

  Oledol’s eyes darted left and right, as if looking for something she was sure had been there a moment ago. “I don’t… Warehouse? I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “Convenient,” said Dan. He shrugged. “OK, I’ll bite. Then, what do you remember?”

  The eyes darted faster, looking up and down now, too, searching for something. “I don’t… I can’t…” Oledol’s eyes stopped moving, and widened, instead. “Nothing,” she said, her voice coming as a whisper of panic. “I don’t remember anything.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The man with the whispering voice sang to himself as he busied around outside the cage. She could hear him out there, beyond the wire mesh and the dirty blue tarp sheet. If she had stared hard enough at the tarpaulin, she might even have seen his shadow moving around.

  She didn’t look, just in case. She had only been here a few hours, but she already knew only to look when he told her to.

  His song was strange and tuneless. It wasn’t a real song. It was one he’d made up. It told of what he was going to do to her – of what he would enjoy doing to her. She didn’t understand much of it - she was too scared, too young, too innocent.