To prove this point, Dan punched the thing again, driving it backwards towards the door. It tried to retreat to the stairs, but he dug his fingers into it like talons. The thing thrashed and twisted in his grip as it tried to break free.
“If I ever see your ugly shapeless… whatever you are around here again, I will keep you. I will keep you, and I will never let you go. Is that understood?”
The thing vibrated hurriedly. Dan released his grip, and gave a push to help the presence on its way. “Go back to where you came from. Tell Kalaechai or whoever else sent you that I don’t know where she is, and even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
His voice echoed down the gloomy stairwell, and he realized he was talking to himself. The presence was gone.
“Probably,” he added, but not for the presence’s benefit.
He turned to Ollie, who stood in the corner of the landing, her back pressed in against the wall. The pendant around her neck pulsed rhythmically, casting lengthening shadows across the ceiling.
“Get inside. You’re making the place look untidy,” said Dan.
Ollie nodded quickly, then darted towards the door. She stopped just before she reached it. “Are you OK?” she asked.
“Fine,” said Dan. He started to plod down the steps. “Now get inside. I’m going to get my gun.”
Ollie watched him go. He had barely made it to the third step down before she spoke again. “Thank you.”
“You’re still there,” Dan grunted. “Go. Inside. Now.”
He found the gun a couple of floors down, and took a moment to check it over for damage. Looked OK. She was a sturdy girl, Mindy.
To be sure, he told her to switch to explosive rounds. The cylinder spun and illuminated, as expected, and he slid the weapon back into its holster.
Something moved in his ribcage as he made his way back up the stairs. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but he could feel the grinding vibrating all the way through to his teeth. It wasn’t his first injury, or even close to the worst, but something about it felt different. He couldn’t say why, but it worried him, and it kept worrying him all the way back up the stairs.
Ollie was sitting at the table when he returned. She jumped up quickly, her face flitting between relieved smiles and concerned frowns.
“Is it gone?” asked a voice from somewhere near floor level. Artur leaned out from behind a chair leg, glanced around anxiously, then immediately adopted a confident swagger. “Aye, and just as well, an’ all. Sure, I was about to hop on and batter the fecker to within an inch of its life. It’s as well ye turned up when ye did, or I would not have been responsible for me actions. Put it that way.”
“Glad to see you’re OK, Artur,” said Dan, closing the door.
“Sure, why wouldn’t I be? What, ye think I couldn’t handle a great bit eejit like that… that… whatever that was?”
Dan removed his hat and hung it on the empty hook. He kept his coat on. No point getting comfortable, he wouldn’t be staying long.
The door through to his own office was closed, and the whistling of the breeze provided a tuneless soundtrack as he crossed to the table and pointed to Ollie’s chair. “Sit,” he said.
Once she had, he leaned on the back of his own chair with both hands, bending forward to really give her a good look at his face. It hadn’t been a pretty sight in quite some time, and the repeated impacts with the stairs and floor had done nothing to improve it. To his mild annoyance, she didn’t so much as blink.
“Care to tell me what that was?” he asked.
“What what was?” Ollie asked.
Dan said nothing.
“Oh, the thing?”
“That’s right. The thing.”
“It’s something that had itself a lucky feckin’ escape, that’s what it is,” said Artur, scaling one of the table’s legs and pulling himself up onto the top. His paper outfit rustled as he fumbled his way upright.
Ollie wriggled on the wooden chair, like it had just become uncomfortably hot. “It was… I don’t know. I think it works for Kalay…”
“Kalaechai.”
“That. Yes. Him,” said Ollie. “I suppose… I suppose maybe he sent it to look for me?”
“Oh, you think so, huh?” Dan grunted. “You think maybe that’s why it kept slamming my face and torso into solid objects, while demanding to know where you were?”
“It would make sense.”
Dan closed his eyes and tutted.
“I think he was being sarcastic there, peaches,” said Artur.
“Oh,” said Ollie. She bit her lip, worried. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means of course that’s why it was here,” Dan barked. He straightened up, grimacing a little as his ribs ground together. “I should’ve let it take you.”
Ollie tried to nod and shake her head at the same time, and it became a sort of diagonal zig-zag of confusing head movements.
“But… you didn’t,” she said.
Dan exhaled slowly, and much of his anger seemed to leave his body with the breath. “No. No, I didn’t,” he said. “This time. If it comes back? We’ll see.”
“Ah, will he bollocks,” said Artur. The way Artur said the word, Dan was convinced ‘bollocks’ should be censored by the translator chip, but either it had never made the list, or Artur’s accent was too confusing for the chip to pick up on it. Whatever, he was able to use it freely and often. Which he did.
In fact, the censorship functionality seemed to have trouble with most of what Artur said, leaving him free to curse in pretty much any way he liked. Dan was quite jealous, if he were honest.
“He talks tough, don’t get me wrong, but he won’t just go selling ye out,” Artur continued.
Dan stared impassively down at the little guy.
“I mean maybe. Maybe he won’t just go selling ye out,” Artur corrected. “He’s a complicated man.”
Artur clapped his hands together, and nodded in the direction of the safe. “Now, I hope ye’ll both forgive me, but the night’s drawing in, and I can’t be held responsible for me actions, so I think I’ll retire for the evening.”
“No,” said Dan.
Artur’s brow furrowed, although you’d have to be looking quite close to notice. “Say what now?”
“I can’t lock you up. Not tonight. I need you.”
“Need me?” said Artur. “And what might ye be needing me for, exactly?”
Reaching into his coat pocket, Dan found the envelope Paradise had given him. He turned it over in his hands, considering the possible consequences of what he was about to propose.
Then, once he’d considered them, he tried very hard to forget them before they made him change his mind.
“I need you to break into a Tribunal station and access their systems,” Dan said. “It’s dangerous, obviously. I wouldn’t ask if there was any other way, but—”
Artur held up a hand and gestured for Dan to stop talking.
“You want me,” Artur began, gesturing to himself, “to break into a secure, state-of-the-feckin’-art Tribunal station filled with armed bastards and who knows what else, and hack their equally state-of-the-feckin’-art computer systems? Illegally. And me, what with it being night time, probably itching for a fight?”
Dan winced. When he put it like that…
“Pretty much,” he admitted.
Artur’s grin almost split his head in two. “Deadly!” he said, rubbing his hands together. “When do we start?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There were three Tribunal buildings within easy driving distance of the office. Two of them were bigger stations, with interrogation chambers, prison complexes, and vast numbers of officers coming and going constantly.
The third was a local outpost, only a couple of stories tall and minimally staffed. Or minimally staffed when compared to the other two, at least. There were still a couple of dozen officers working from the building, but most of them would be out on patrol. It wasn’t like the people of
Down Here were going to violently oppress themselves.
The only problem with this place was that it had been built within the last six months, and Dan had never set foot in it. The two bigger stations he knew well enough, but this one was an unknown quantity.
Still, one Tribunal station was much like any other in terms of the basic layout, and he could take an educated guess as to where everything was. Active cases could be accessed from any terminal, but historical records could only be pulled up from the archive room systems. The case references Paradise had provided were all tagged with the ‘-HU’ suffix.
Historic case.
Unsolved.
So that meant the Archive room, which was on the upper floor.
Artur paced from foot to foot on the dash of the Exodus, flexing his fingers and breathing in short, sharp sniffs and puffs. A belt of tape pulled his envelope suit tightly around his waist, making it marginally less cumbersome than it had been. A loop had been left hanging from the belt so he could tie on the mempod with the downloaded case files, leaving his hands free during his escape.
“So, you’re clear? You know what you’re doing?” said Dan.
“Sneak in. Find yer room.”
“Archives,” said Dan.
“Find yer archive room. Punch in the numbers, grab the thingy, and have it away on me toes before anyone gets wind of me being there.” He looked up at Dan and raised his eyebrows. “That about the in and out of it?”
“That’s about the in and out of it,” Dan confirmed. He indicated the unfolded square of paper beside Artur on the dash. “And you don’t want to take the codes?”
“Sure, it’s twice the size of me,” Artur snorted. “What am I supposed to do, feckin’ hang-glide from it?” He tapped the side of his head. “Anyway, no need. It’s all up here. Mind like a Durium trap, Deadman. Mind like a Durium trap. I’ll get yer files for ye. Just wait and see.”
“Good luck!” said Ollie.
“Cheers, peaches, but I don’t need luck!” Artur proclaimed. He put his fists on his hips, adopting a pose which would have been quite dramatic and impressive, had he been one hundred times larger than he actually was.
He held the stance for several increasingly awkward seconds, then indicated the door handle. “I do need someone to let me out, though. I’m not a feckin’ magician.”
“Oh! Yes! Sorry!” said Ollie. She yanked the handle and threw open her door. The Exodus was filled with the sound of blaring horns as a speeding mag-lev was forced to swerve sharply to avoid smashing the door clean off its hinges. “Whoops! Sorry!” Ollie called after it. She flashed Dan an apologetic smile. “Sorry.”
“Oh look, he’s doing the glare,” said Artur, sliding down the dash and landing on Ollie’s leg. “Look at him there, the big boss-eyed eejit. Don’t ye let him put the frighteners on ye, peaches. Don’t ye go standing for it, ye hear?”
“Just get a move on,” said Dan. “We’re up against the clock.”
“I’m going, I’m going.”
With a hop, a slide and a clamber, Artur reached the door sill. He paused to look back into the car. “Be back before ye can miss me,” he said, then he dropped down into the darkness.
Ollie leaned closer to the windshield to try to watch as he ran across the road, but Dan stretched his woman’s arm in front of her, nudging her backwards. “The door,” he grunted, pointing with a red-nailed finger.
“Huh? Oh!”
Ollie closed the door. Through the window, she saw a brief flutter of movement low down by the station fence. Several seconds later, the front door of the station slid open, apparently of its own free will. She found herself holding her breath, only relaxing when the door slid closed again.
“Is he in? Did he get in?” she asked.
Dan nodded, just once.
“Good. That’s… that’s good, right?” Ollie asked. “Yes. That’s good.”
She crossed her arms, uncrossed them, crossed them the other way, realized the second way wasn’t as good as the first way, then put her hands behind her head, instead. Dan’s mood darkened a little further with every movement.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“What?”
“The fidgeting. The moving around. What are you doing?”
“Oh,” said Ollie. Her eyes tick-tocked left and right, as if just noticing her arms for the first time. She unhooked the hands from the back of her head and placed them on her knees. “I was just getting comfortable.”
“Well, you shouldn’t,” said Dan.
Ollie’s eyebrows lowered a little. “Shouldn’t what?”
“Get too comfortable. Here, I mean.”
“In the car?”
Dan’s face flinched with irritation, but he didn’t take his eyes off the Tribunal station door. “With us. With me. Tomorrow, I’ll get you set up with some ID and you can be on your way.”
“Oh. Oh, OK,” said Ollie. She looked ahead through the windshield for a while, then back to Dan. “What’s ID?”
Dan took a look at her to try to judge if she was being serious, and concluded that she was.
“Forget it. I’ll explain tomorrow,” he told her. He checked the time on the Exodus’s clock. If everything went according to plan, it should take four or five minutes for Artur to make it upstairs to Archives, then the same again for him to access the files and output to a mempod.
Factor in another five to get back out, and the whole process should take fifteen minutes, tops, assuming Artur didn’t encounter – or, for that matter, cause – any problems along the way. Fifteen minutes, that was all.
He had no idea what he’d find in those case files, but considering he’d sold his soul to Paradise West for them, he hoped they were worth it. He’d find out in – he glanced at the clock – still fifteen minutes. Fonk, this was already dragging.
“Think he’s OK?” Ollie asked.
Dan kept his gaze fixed on the station. “Fine,” he said. “He knows what he’s doing.”
A number of powerful spotlights illuminated outside the station, and a high-pitched alarm began to bleep with some urgency.
“Is that supposed to be happening?” asked Ollie.
Dan sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “No.”
From inside the building came a chorus of shouting, and a muffled bang that might have been something exploding.
“What about—?”
“Again, no.”
Dan grimaced and threw open his door, his hand already reaching for his gun. “Stay here. Stay right in this spot. Do not – I repeat, do not – go wandering off.”
“Stay here. Got it,” said Ollie, gripping the edges of her seat and nodding with a child-like level of absolute sincerity. She leaned towards Dan’s open door. “Wait! Why? Where are you going?”
“On a suicide mission,” said Dan, slamming the door closed. “Again,” he added, then he adjusted his hat, snapped up his collar, and, with Mindy in hand, darted across the road in the direction of the station.
* * *
“Mindy, stun shot,” Dan hissed, charging towards the station’s front door. He hadn’t been lying to Ollie. Running into a Tribunal station that was on high alert was suicide. It was lucky, then, that he was already dead.
He remembered, as the door slid open, that he still hadn’t charged the weapon’s battery pack. Idiot. This could be even more difficult than he thought. Still, there was no turning back now.
Raising the gun, he ran inside, and was immediately forced back by a wall of heat. The station’s front desk was on fire. And not just a little bit on fire, either. The whole thing was ablaze, the flames spitting and crackling, and spewing columns of black smoke up towards the ceiling.
A window had been broken. At least half a Tribunal officer was sticking through it, his or her legs the only part still visible from this side. Another officer was upside-down in a recycling can, gurgling and choking in the partially broken-down slurry.
A chair was in pieces. A riot shiel
d lay on the floor, cracked down the middle. Someone – Dan didn’t need any detective skills to figure out who – had written “GET IT UP YE” in foot-high letters on one wall, in what may or may not have been some sort of squeezy cheese.
In the midst of all that carnage, his eyes wide and his beard bristling, stood Artur. When he spotted Dan, the little man brought his breathing under control, unclenched his tiny fists, and smoothed down the front of his envelope.
“Ye alright there, Deadman?” he said, squinting upwards.
Dan’s lips moved, like he was running through a number of possible responses. He finally settled on one. “What the Hell did you do?”
“Ye what?” asked Artur. He looked around. “Oh, ye mean this? Right. Well, I’ll come clean wit’ ye, Deadman. Just don’t go blowing yer top, or nothing’, alright? There’s been a bit of a hiccup. I may have got a tiny bit carried away with meself, and accidentally tried to murder a few people.”
Dan took in the destruction again. “You were in here less than a minute.”
“Was I really? Is that all?” asked Artur, putting his hands on his hips. “Well, I never. Fancy that. It's true what they say, like. Time does fly when ye're havin'—”
The floor exploded behind him as a blaster bolt slammed into it. Artur was tossed into the air, before sliding to a stop where Dan’s feet had been.
The feet, along with the rest of Dan, had moved, quickly, as more blaster shots screamed across the room. Half a dozen Tribunal officers rushed in through a couple of doors over on the far wall. They didn’t appear surprised by the state of the entrance hall, which suggested they’d already seen it via the security cams. If they’d watched Artur at work, then that would explain the full body armor they wore, too.
“Did ye see that, Deadman? Sure, one of those eejits tried to shoot me,” grumbled Artur, standing up. Dan had ducked for cover behind the flaming front desk, keeping enough distance to save his dead flesh from any further damage. His complexion was bad enough without adding third degree burns to the mix.
He did briefly contemplate shoving the woman’s arm into the fire and burning it off, but he’d probably need both hands if he was going to survive this, so decided against it, and focused on the swarm of armored shizznods now flooding the room.
Dial D for Deadman: A Space Team Universe Novel (Dan Deadman Space Detective Book 1) Page 11