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

by Barry J. Hutchison

  Stun shots would do nothing against the armor. Same with the brown noise. Only explosive rounds would be able to punch through it, but did he really want to start killing Tribunal officers?

  Well, yes. Yes, he did want to, but was it sensible? Of course not. Not unless he wanted to be on the run for the rest of his afterlife.

  Artur screamed. At first, Dan thought he’d been shot, but then it rose into a sort of battle cry as the little man went hurtling across the floor, zigging and zagging through a hail of scorching blaster fire.

  “Feckin’ shoot at me, would ye?” he hollered.

  There was another scream. This one wasn’t Artur, and was somewhat muffled by body armor.

  “Aargh! Help! G-get it off!”

  “It?” Artur roared. “I’ll it ye.”

  “Shizz,” Dan cursed. “Mindy, explosive rounds.”

  The cylinder spun and rolled. Only three blue lights illuminated when it locked into place. Dan touched the front sight against his forehead, mumbled something angry, then pulled his hat down firmly on his head and rolled out of cover.

  Artur was nowhere to be seen, but the way one of the Tribunal men was thrashing around and punching himself suggested the little guy had found a way inside the armor.

  “Oh, now, these look interesting,” came Artur’s voice, faintly.

  “No, wait, no, don’t!” the officer squealed, then he howled and went down hard, his gun falling as he grabbed with both hands for his groin.

  Dan raised his gun, but hesitated. Ten or more officers now. Three shots. Three kill shots. Did he really want to do this?

  The hesitation cost him dearly. Exposed and in the open, he caught the attention of four of the officers. Blaster fire sprayed towards him. He tried to dive back into cover, but the right side of his chest erupted, then something wet and sizzling hit the wall behind him.

  It knocked him off-balance, mid-jump, and he sprawled backwards towards the door, the smell of burning flesh swirling up his nostrils.

  He felt his anger flare as he crashed onto his back. He raised the gun to the officers, then raised it some more and fired twice. Twin explosions shattered the ceiling above the group. Aside from the guy still rolling on the floor, clutching his groin, they all looked up, just as a whole lot of masonry came down.

  The sound was incredible, like the roaring of some great ancient beast. It only lasted a second or so, before being replaced by a number of other sounds. Groans, mostly, and the occasional cry for help that sounded far off in the distance.

  A single blue light blinked on and off on Dan’s gun. One shot left. Reduced power. The debris of the roof collapse had blocked both doors that would have led upstairs to the Archive room. Not that there would have been time to access it, anyway. Sirens wailed, close enough for him to hear them over the sound of the station alarm, and getting closer by the second.

  Sliding Mindy back into her holster, Dan hurried over to the rubble, crouched, and peered through the gaps into the dusty darkness. “Artur?” he said. “Artur, can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you just fine,” said Artur. He was standing beside Dan, his beard white with dust. “Although, me ears are still ringing from the feckin’ roof falling down. This place is structurally unsafe. Sure, I’ve a good mind to sue.”

  “Come on. We have to go,” said Dan, about-turning towards the exit.

  “But what about yer numbers?” asked Artur, trotting along and doing his best to keep up. “Don’t ye want yer files, or whatever?”

  “I do. I did,” said Dan, giving the inferno that was the front desk a wide berth. “But there’s no time. We’ll have to try another station.”

  “Deadly!” said Artur, his face lighting up with barely-contained glee. “I can’t wait.”

  “Yeah, next time, you’re not coming,” Dan told him. He paused for the door to slide open, then marched outside into the much cooler night air.

  “What? Why not?” asked Artur, sounding hurt.

  Dan stopped. “Why not? Seriously?” he said.

  There was an ear-splitting crash as another section of roof collapsed.

  “OK, I’ll give ye, it could have gone a bit more smoothly,” Artur conceded. “And I maybe didn’t follow yer instructions exactly to the letter, but c’mon, Deadman, gimme another chance.”

  Dan said nothing. The sirens were closer now. He stomped back out onto the street, dodged a few mag-levs, and quickly made for the Exodus. Artur trotted along behind him, his much-smaller legs struggling to keep up.

  “Get in,” Dan said, wrenching open the driver’s door.

  “I can’t help but feel ye’re in some way holding me responsible for what went down in there,” said Artur, clambering onto the seat, up the wheel, and onto the dash.

  “I am,” agreed Dan, getting in. He pulled the door closed with a thunk, quietening the wailing sirens.

  “That’s not very fair, is it?”

  “It’s completely fair,” said Dan. He fired up the car’s engine. It stopped trying to fight him after three attempts, and rumbled into life. “It was completely your fault.”

  Glancing in his mirror, Dan waited for a gap in the traffic, and started to pull away.

  “Hold on!” Artur shouted, and the Exodus jerked as Dan slammed on the brakes. “Are ye maybe forgetting something, Deadman?”

  Artur nodded in the direction of the passenger seat.

  The empty passenger seat.

  Dan threw up his hands. “Oh for… Now where is she?”

  “Hi!” said Ollie, appearing so suddenly at the driver’s side window that even Dan jumped in fright. Smiling broadly, she reached for the handle, before realizing she was on the wrong side. “Wait, that’s not mine,” she said, then she ran towards the back of the car.

  A moment later, the passenger door opened and she flopped onto the seat. “Hi again!”

  She pulled the door closed just as the first flash of red lights appeared through the traffic ahead. Dan eased the Exodus out into a gap, and made sure to keep within the speed limit as he drove off. Behind them, more Tribunal cars screeched to a halt outside the station, which was now billowing smoke through a hole in its roof.

  “Where the Hell were you?” Dan demanded.

  “I was—”

  “I told you not to move.”

  “I know, but—”

  “You what? Got bored? Felt like stretching your legs?”

  He crunched the stick down a gear and took a sharp turn a little too fast. The tires screeched, and several horns blasted angrily at him.

  “Careful, now,” said Artur, gripping onto an air vent for safety.

  “If I tell you not to move, you do not move,” Dan growled. “I mean, is that really so hard to understand? Am I really asking too much?”

  Ollie’s smile was now curving the other way. “I just thought—”

  “Ha!” Dan snorted. “You ‘just thought’. Well, first time for everything, I guess.”

  “Hey, go easy now, Deadman,” Artur said. “What’s the poor girl ever done to ye?”

  The tires screeched again as Dan took another corner. “What’s she done? Let’s see. Thanks to her, my office is in pieces, and has a hole where the window should be. I was tossed down several flights of stairs and almost had my head smashed open by some shapeless floating mass, and one of the big-name Malwhere Lords is probably carving my name into his own flesh even as we fonking speak. And not in a good way. Oh, and she almost just got us caught by the Tribunal. And all that’s in less than a day!”

  Ollie looked down at her hands, which were resting in her lap. She didn’t speak.

  “And don’t even get me started on the questions. ‘What’s that for?’ ‘Is that supposed to do that?’ ‘Why don’t you do it this way?’ I mean… wow.” Dan gripped the wheel and shook his head. “The sooner I get you out of my hair, the better.”

  Ollie turned and peered at his hat. Part of his bald head was visible beneath the rim of his hat. She opened her mouth.

/>   “It’s a figure of speech,” Dan snapped.

  Ollie closed her mouth again, and went back to looking at her hands in awkward silence.

  After a moment, something clonked onto the dash. Dan’s eyes flitted to it. He regarded the thing in silence, for a moment.

  “What’s that?” he asked, despite knowing full well what it was.

  It was a mempod.

  An encrypted Tribunal storage device.

  Just sitting there, on the dash.

  “I thought, with all the shooting going on, maybe you wouldn’t be able to get to the room you wanted to get to,” Ollie said. She shrugged. “You left the paper with the numbers behind, and I’d heard you explain to Artur what to do, so I climbed in the window.”

  Dan felt Artur’s eyes on him. Without looking, he knew the little man would be grinning.

  “So… what are you saying?”

  “I got your files for you.”

  Dan turned to look at her. A horn screamed, and he snapped his head to the front again, steering the Exodus back into the correct lane. “You got the files? All of them?”

  Ollie nodded, but said nothing. Her smile still hadn’t returned.

  From his spot on the dash, Artur inhaled slowly through his teeth. “Ooh. Ye’ve made yerself look a right stook now, Deadman,” he said. “There’s ye layin’ boots into poor peaches here, and all the while she’s gone and done ye a solid. That’s low, Deadman. If ye’ve even a bit o’ shame about ye, ye should be feeling pretty feckin’ scundered right about now, I reckon.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Dan. He grabbed the mempod from the dash and shoved it in his pocket, then shot Ollie the briefest of sideways glances. “Good job.”

  “There now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” said Artur, right before the car skidded into a sharp right turn and he was flung against the windshield. “Oof! Watch it, ye bollocks.”

  He thudded down onto the dash, then began to slide. Ollie caught him and held him steady as the Exodus finished the maneuver and powered, tires smoking, onto another street.

  “Cheers, peaches,” Artur said, winking at her. His smile fell away as he looked up at Dan. “What’s the big idea with driving like a madman?” he demanded. “I was nearly through the feckin’ window.”

  “Sorry. Almost missed the turning.”

  Artur peered ahead at the narrow, dirty street whizzing by. “This isn’t the way home.”

  “We’re not going home. We’re going to Ned’s.”

  “Nedran?” Artur groaned. “That gobshoite? What do we want to go there for?”

  “Know anyone else with a mempod reader?”

  Artur sniffed. “Ye know full well I don’t.”

  “Well, then. We’re going to Ned’s.”

  Artur sniffed again, even louder, this time. “Fine. Then I guess we’re going to Ned’s,” he agreed. “But if that bedge of a wife starts on me again, I’ll not be held responsible for me actions. Understood?”

  Dan nodded. “Understood,” he said, then he pushed his foot to the floor and the Exodus rumbled into the night.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Nedran yawned as he beckoned them into his workshop, indicating for them to stay as quiet as possible.

  “Do you have any idea what time it is?” he muttered. He almost closed the door on Artur, before spotting him. “And what’s he doing here? Shouldn’t he be locked up?”

  “If ye must know, I was helping out on an important mission,” Artur said, striding through the door.

  “That’s a generous way to describe your involvement,” said Dan. He waited until the door was closed, then held out the mempod. “I need you to access this.”

  Ned blinked through half-asleep eyes and peered at the pebble like device in Dan’s hand. “What’s on it?”

  “Don’t know,” said Dan. “Paradise West gave me case file references and—”

  “Paradise West?” said Ned.

  “Yeah. She gave me case file references, and the only—”

  “As in… As in Paradise West? You asked Paradise West for help? Are you out of your mind?”

  “Probably,” Dan conceded. He gave the mempod a little waggle, snapping Ned’s attention back to it. The older man hesitated, but then took it and held it up to the light.

  “It’s a new model. Not sure it’ll work.”

  “You’ll make it work,” Dan said. “You always do.”

  “Hmf,” said Nedran. He nodded to Dan’s chest. “You’ve got a hole in you. We should fix that.”

  “Later,” said Dan. “Get me those files.”

  Ned shook his head and rolled his eyes, but knew there was no point arguing. “Fine. Give me twenty minutes. If you want to patch yourself up, go ahead. You know where everything is.”

  “Before ye go, have ye any beer?” asked Artur.

  Ned stopped and looked back. “Sorry?”

  “Beer. Ye know. Alcohol. Have ye maybe got some stashed about the place somewhere? In case of emergencies, or what have ye?”

  “No,” said Nedran. “No beer.”

  “Aw, right. Gotcha. Shame.”

  Ned hesitated. “Right,” he said, then he yawned again, and headed through a gloss-painted door into what Dan knew to be a very small, very cluttered study.

  “Twenty minutes,” Dan said. “OK, then.”

  He tried to look down at the wound in his chest, but it was too high up for him to bring it properly into focus. His fingertips traced the edge, trying to work out how bad it was. Bad enough, but repairable. Most things were. So far, at least.

  While Artur set off to explore the workshop, Dan flipped the lids off a few storage boxes until he found a pack of needles and some surgical thread. The hole in his chest was too big to just stitch closed, but if he cut a chunk of flesh from Ned’s stock of body parts, he could plug it up. The viewing angle meant it wouldn’t be easy, and wouldn’t be neat, but it was better than leaving a hole all the way through from his front to his back.

  He had removed his coat, and was working on his shirt when he caught Ollie watching him. “You might want to look away,” he warned her. “It won’t be a pretty sight.”

  “I’m OK,” said Ollie, smiling back at him.

  “I wasn’t asking,” said Dan. He waited until she took the hint and turned around, before removing the rest of his shirt and dropping it onto the operating table beside him.

  “Does this sort of thing happen a lot?” Ollie asked. She stood with her back to him, looking ahead to the far end of the workshop. “Getting hurt, I mean?”

  “It didn’t hurt,” Dan said. “It’s mostly just my head that ever actually hurts. Mostly.”

  He opened the chest-like metal box where Nedran stored the body parts he’d harvested. “And yes. Often enough.”

  Rummaging around, Dan was delighted to find a selection of recently acquired male left arms stacked along one side of the box. He didn’t have time now, but as soon as he’d found Nona, he’d be back for one.

  He kept hunting until he found a leg with a suitably large calf muscle, and took it over to the table. The leg was fresher than he was, and the join would be pretty noticeable, but then it wasn’t like he made a habit of going topless in public.

  Making a circle with his fingers, Dan measured up the hole in his chest, widened his fingers slightly, to be on the safe side, then marked out the resulting sort of oblong shape on the calf muscle using a pen he eventually found in one of his coat pockets. The ink ran out halfway through, but he reckoned the slightly wonky letter C he’d drawn on the leg’s skin gave him enough of an idea to be going on with.

  He found a scalpel in another of the boxes. Since neatness was much less of an issue than time, he set the beam to wide and started to slice. The fat beneath the skin sizzled as the glowing sliver of heat carved through it.

  “What you doing?” asked Ollie, appearing over his shoulder. Dan’s hand jerked, and the swooping curve of the circle became a sharp, jagged edge.

  “Fonk! Don’t do that,�
�� he snapped.

  “Sorry,” said Ollie. “Is that your leg?”

  Dan glanced down at his feet. Both his feet. “Does it look like my leg?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen your legs before.”

  “No, but…”

  Dan shook his head, deciding the conversation wasn’t worth the trouble. He returned to carving up the calf muscle.

  “No, it isn’t my leg. Nedran has… associates who help him secure spare parts for me. Arms. Legs. That kind of thing.”

  “Heads?” Ollie asked.

  Dan bit his bottom lip. “No,” he said, doing a remarkably good job of keeping his voice level. “No, this is my head.”

  “Oh. OK,” said Ollie. She watched him until he’d finished cutting the fist-sized chunk of flesh out of the leg. “What are you going to do with that?”

  Dan jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the exit wound on his back. “I’m going to fill that. Or try to.”

  “Oh. Right. Gotcha,” said Ollie. “Want me to help?”

  “No,” said Dan.

  “I watched Nedran put your arm on. I think I could do it,” she insisted.

  “I said no,” Dan grunted. “Now, do you mind…?”

  He watched her from the corner of his eye until she backed away. “OK, well, just shout if you need me.”

  “I won’t,” said Dan.

  “OK, but if you do.”

  “I won’t,” Dan said again. “I am perfectly capable of sewing a piece of calf muscle into my own chest.”

  “OK,” Ollie said, very quietly. “But if you do.”

  Dan grunted and fished in the box for a needle and thread. “Seriously. I’ve got it. I don’t need your help.”

  * * *

  “Just a few more. Neeeearly done.”

  Ollie hooked the needle through Dan’s flesh, wriggled it into the chunk of leg meat, and pulled it through. Dan had relented and allowed her to help just a minute or two into proceedings, when, unable to see what he was doing properly, he’d accidentally sewn his chin to his chest.

  Since she’d taken over, Ollie had narrated every stitch in a voice clearly designed to have a calming effect, but which had very quickly started to have the exact opposite. If Dan heard, “You’re doing very well,” one more time, he wouldn’t be held accountable for his actions.