Dead Inside_A Space Team Universe Novel

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “Yeah, well, she thinks you’re a cheatin’ scumbag,” Artur said. “So, there’s that.”

  “I’d destroy all of this, here and now, if she asked me to,” Tressingham said, straightening his back and clearing his throat. “I’d activate the self-destruct and end it all. She comes first. She’s always come first.”

  Dan put his hands on his hips and looked around the place. “I don’t think she’ll want you to do that,” he said. “If it’s going to make you richer, I’m sure she’ll get behind it. But tell her the truth.”

  “But that advice only applies to this particular situation right here,” Artur pointed out. “Ye don’t want to go telling her the truth all the time, that way’s a slippery slope. Take it from one who knows.”

  Tressingham looked as if he was weighing his options up, but then nodded. “I’ll tell her. You’re right, of course. I should never have tried to keep it a secret.”

  He bit his lip, turning the helmet device over and over in his hands. “And what about Up There? You won’t report me, will you? I can’t have them finding out until I’m finished. Not when I’m so close.”

  Dan shrugged. “You want to spend your days playing with little robots, that’s no business of mine,” he said. “I was hired to find out if you were having an affair, and I don’t believe you are.”

  “I’m not! Honestly, I’m not.”

  “Like I said, I don’t believe you are,” Dan continued. “No need to protest your innocence. Just…” He gestured around them. “… do me a favor, and don’t let this get out of hand. You might think no-one cares enough about the people Down Here to worry about this sort of thing, but that’s not quite true.”

  “It’s mostly true, though,” Artur added.

  “It is mostly true,” Dan conceded. “But I care. Why? I don’t know. But I care. And I’ll be keeping an eye on you and your tiny robots.”

  “I thought they were too small to see,” Ollie interjected.

  “Metaphorically speaking,” Dan said, gritting his teeth. “I meant… Forget it. Doesn’t matter.” He touched the brim of his hat and gave Tressingham a nod. “Tell your wife what you’ve been doing.”

  “And tell her that the balance of payment is now due,” Artur added. He pointed to the doll still lying, legs raised, on the table beside him. “Also, would ye happen to have a face for this one lying around somewhere?”

  “Uh… no. No, sorry.”

  “Not to worry,” Artur said, indicating for Dan to put the doll in his pocket. “Sure, ye don’t look at the fireplace when ye’re poking the fire, am I right?”

  Tressingham shot Dan a quizzical look. “Trust me,” Dan said. “You don’t want to know.”

  * * *

  The gate slid closed behind Dan and Ollie. Tressingham waved at them from the inner guard station, then scampered off towards the warehouse.

  “Well, that’s that, then,” said Artur, his head and shoulders poking up out of Dan’s one remaining coat pocket. “All’s well that ends well. Mission accomplished. Job well done, case closed, and all that bollocks. Ye did grand there, Deadman, a fine bit of detectiving all round. First, we save the galaxy from yer monster woman thing, and then we save a marriage from an even worse monster – unfounded suspicion.”

  “I wouldn’t say it was unfounded,” Ollie said. “He’d been acting pretty suspiciously.”

  “Was he having an affair?”

  “Well…”

  “Was he having an affair?”

  “No, but…”

  “There ye are, then. Unfounded,” Artur said. He stretched and yawned. “Yep, it’s been a productive old day, alright. Now, ye were saying something earlier about us all heading to the pub, am I right?”

  “Office first, then pub,” Dan said.

  “Ye drive a hard bargain, so ye do, but fair enough,” Artur said. “Sure, after the day we’ve been having, we’ll probably find a pot o’ gold sitting on the doorstep.”

  “Yeah. I doubt that,” Dan said.

  “Who knows?” Artur replied, rolling in Dan’s pocket as he and Ollie set off walking. “It feels like one of those rare days where – with the exception of falling into a child’s shoite – everything’s just going to go right.”

  * * *

  Dan realized something was wrong just before the baton cracked across the side of his head, turning half the room into a column of white light, and half the floor into quicksand.

  He stumbled across the office, hand slapping the front of his coat as he tried to find a route to the gun holstered inside.

  Something jammed against his throat and electricity surged through his head, turning his brain into a twitching mush of incoherence. He swung with a wild punch that rattled harmlessly off a blast proof visor, then cried out in shock as another baton-strike smashed against the back of his skull, sending him crashing into the filing cabinet.

  “What the feck?” cried Artur, pulling himself out of Dan’s pocket. Six Tribunal Enforcers rushed in to join the two who had been lying in wait – four from the inner office, two others thundering in through the outer office door. “So, it’s a fight, yer after, is it?” Artur asked, rolling up the sleeves of his blouse.

  The top drawer screeched as Dan tore it free and swung it in a wide head-height arc. One of the Enforcers went down hard, but the momentum of the swing threw Dan even further off-balance, and two of the other grunts slammed into his legs and upper body, bringing him to the ground.

  “Hey! Leave him alone!” Ollie cried. She made a move to grab for one of the Enforcers, a faint outline of blue light flickering around her fingertips.

  “W-wait!” Dan spat, the word slurring out of his mouth. “Don’t.”

  Ollie hesitated. Artur didn’t. He raced at one of the men, roaring and holding aloft a stub of a pencil he’d found in Dan’s pocket as if it were a spear.

  Dan pulled himself together enough to lunge and swat Artur aside, then hissed when a boot stamped down on his back, pinning him to the floor.

  “Stay down, citizen,” the Enforcer currently standing on Dan’s back barked. “We are the Tribunal. You have been tried and found guilty of the murder of Enforcer Gorandon Noop.”

  “I swear, ye big bollocks, leave him alone,” Artur warned, but Dan motioned for him to calm down.

  “Don’t,” he grunted, shifting his gaze from Artur to Ollie’s feet, which was pretty much the only part of her he could see from his current position. “Just… Don’t.”

  “The sentence is death,” the Tribunal grunt intoned. Dan gave Artur the briefest of nods, then braced himself for the gunshot.

  It never came.

  The boot was removed from Dan’s back. Two pairs of hands grabbed him roughly by the arms. “But first, the boss wants to see you,” another of the Enforcers said.

  Dan caught just the briefest glimpse of Ollie’s terrified expression, before something hammered him on the head for a third time, and the world rolled upwards into darkness.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Time passed.

  Dan heard voices somewhere. Far away. Or maybe very close.

  One of those, anyway.

  He said something, although he didn’t know what or why. It was important. Or it might have been incoherent gibberish.

  Again, one of those.

  It had taken him an hour or two to go from ‘fully unconscious’ to ‘marginally awake’. He hovered at that sort of ten per cent awake stage for a while, not aware of much apart from the pain in his head and the numbness in his everything else.

  He panicked for a moment that he might be dead. Then he remembered that he definitely was dead, which calmed him down again.

  The remaining ninety per cent of the waking up process happened suddenly, and all at once. He snapped his head up and lunged for the figure sitting directly across from him, only to find his arms and legs were fastened to the uncomfortable metal chair he sat on, and the Enforcer sitting opposite was therefore well out of reach.

  “You’re awa
ke,” the man said

  Three individual pain points in Dan’s skull all voiced their disapproval at his sudden burst of movement, and he sunk deeper into the completely rigid chair. He wanted to squeeze the bridge of his nose, gingerly rub his temples, and generally spend a few minutes feeling sorry for himself, but the expression on the Enforcer’s face told him both sympathy and patience were in short supply.

  “I’m awake,” Dan confirmed. His voice sounded even rougher than normal, and he wondered how long he’d been out for. He slowly turned to take in his surroundings, being careful not to anger the gods of head pain by making any sudden moves.

  The room was small, with four gray brick walls, one gray metal door, and several hundred different torture devices in an assortment of colors. These were spread out on stainless steel worktops that were fixed to each wall, and which made the place feel like an industrial kitchen or workshop.

  Dan recognized several of the tools. Although he wasn’t exactly proud of the fact, he had used them himself in the past. He knew from experience which of them were the most effective at extracting information from a witness (the tooth poppers and eye rubs) and which were mostly there for the torturer’s own amusement (the nail plucks, the flay blades, and anything involving the genitals).

  He also knew that they were very rarely actually put to use. The mere fact they were there on display and ready to be used was more often than not all that was required of them.

  So, a bog-standard Tribunal interrogation chamber, then. No real surprise there.

  With the room dealt with, Dan took stock of himself. His hat and coat were gone. Mindy, too. His boots had been removed, his head felt like it had been split into three different parts, all of which were currently on fire, and whoever had shackled him to the chair had made an annoyingly good job of it.

  That done, he turned his attention to the Tribunal grunt. Dan didn’t recognize him, although there were tens of thousands of cops in the city, so there was nothing unusual there. His uniform was the standard black leather and shiny metal combo, with an insignia on his chest suggesting he was reasonably high ranking in whichever one of the organization’s three hundred plus divisions he was a part of.

  Dan had no idea if the guy sitting across from him had been one of those who’d stormed his office. He had removed his helmet, revealing a pock-marked face with flamboyant nostrils and oversized lips. When he sneered – which seemed to be his default facial setting – Dan saw a covering of yellow scum on his wide, evenly-sized teeth.

  He had large hands, with six fingers on each, and wore leather gauntlets that creaked as he balled and unballed the fingers into fists.

  “Can you stop that?” Dan asked. “It’s fonking annoying.”

  The grunt clenched his fists even more tightly, then stretched the fingers as wide as they would go.

  “No,” he said, then one of the fists slammed upwards into Dan’s chin, knocking his head against the chair’s high back.

  “Fine. Then can you stop doing that?” Dan asked. He spat a wad of black blood onto the floor between them. “It’s even more annoying than the creaking thing.”

  The other fist took its turn, catching Dan with a left hook that snapped his head around until his chin almost rested on his shoulder.

  “I mean it,” Dan said. “Don’t. Only warning.”

  The first fist flew towards him again, then jerked to a stop just a few inches away. Dan didn’t flinch. The grunt’s sneer became a mocking grin as he extended his index finger and pointed it in Dan’s face. “Or what? Eh? Or what?” he demanded.

  Dan bit his finger off.

  The thickness of the leather made this something of a challenge, but it was one Dan rose to admirably. The glove itself remained mostly intact, but the digit within was severed completely. The grunt rolled sideways out of his chair, screaming as blood rapidly filled the glove and began to ooze out at the wrist.

  “Or that,” Dan said.

  An alarm sounded. A door behind him opened and several footsteps rushed in, then something heavy hit him on top of his head. Dan barely had time to wink at the now eleven-fingered grunt before the darkness returned and welcomed him back to its bosom.

  * * *

  When Dan awoke next time, the chair across from him was empty. The floor was shiny, as if it had been recently mopped, and the three individual pains in his head had all joined forces to become one single lump of agony.

  Otherwise, things were pretty much as they’d been last time. Same room. Same chair. Same torture paraphernalia.

  What Dan couldn’t figure out was why he was still alive. Or as alive as he had been earlier that day, at least. If the Tribunal decided you were guilty, you were guilty, and that was that. No trial. No appeal. Just a kill-shot to the head if you were lucky, or a lifetime in the Hollows if you weren’t.

  A murder conviction – especially one where the victim was a serving Tribunal officer – was an immediate brains on the wall sentence. That had been standard protocol for as long as Dan could remember, and so he was surprised that his own brains were still residing inside his head.

  Of course, it was possible they were just dragging the sentencing out by gradually cracking his head open in order to manually extract his brain by hand, but it seemed unlikely. No, he was being kept alive for a reason. The grunt back at the office had said something about it, but unconsciousness had been coming up fast at that point, and everything beyond that second head strike was all a bit hazy.

  “Hello again.”

  The voice came from behind Dan, where he knew the door to be. Something about the way the sound echoed in the room told him the door was closed, meaning whoever had spoken had been standing there waiting for him to wake up.

  It didn’t sound like the guy whose finger he’d bitten off, but the voice did sound familiar. Someone he’d known back in the old days? No, he’d heard it more recently than that. One of the cops who had stormed the office, then? Yeah, that was probably it.

  It was only when the figure lurched into view like he’d only just acquired legs and hadn’t bothered with the instruction manual that Dan realized where he’d heard the voice before.

  Aranok the Inhabitant twisted the young officer’s face in a way it was clearly never designed to twist. Dan watched as a split appeared on the man’s tightly stretched top lip, and a drizzle of blood trickled down his chin.

  “Surprised?” Aranok asked.

  Dan shrugged. “Meh. Not really. Disappointed? Yes. But surprised? No. You things have a habit of coming back.”

  “Do we?” the demon asked. “I wouldn’t know.”

  Aranok folded at the middle and slumped heavily into the chair across from Dan. The officer he had taken control of looked barely old enough to have completed basic training, but his insignia announced him as a division captain. Probably the son of someone important, Dan reckoned, although he might just be from a species that aged well.

  He sat scowling at Dan for a long time, and Dan would swear he could see the thing staring out from behind the young cop’s eyes. The expression the grunt wore was far removed from anything human. The fact he wasn’t screaming in pain suggested Aranok didn’t feel any. Or not while inhabiting a host, anyway. It was a theory Dan hoped to put to the test.

  “Was this just a social call, or are you here for a reason?”

  “Power. I seek power,” Aranok replied.

  “Yeah, you said that already. Good luck with that. I hear if you take a whizz on the underground rails it really charges you up. You should give that a try.”

  “You smell of power.”

  “I’m told I smell of a lot of things,” Dan said, shrugging. “Power very rarely makes the list.”

  Aranok lunged forwards, his fingers splaying as his hands slapped down on Dan’s head. He brought his face close to Dan’s parchment-thin scalp and sniffed long and deeply.

  Dan thrust himself upwards in the chair, trying to drive the top of his skull into the end of the demon’s nose, but t
he hands on his head held him down, and he could do nothing but sit and wait as Aranok snorted and snuffled over his head and down his neck.

  At last, the Inhabitant slumped back into his seat. “Not you. The power does not belong to you. It belongs to someone close to you.”

  “Buddy, that’s the closest anyone has got to me in a long time,” Dan said, glancing upwards towards the top of his head. “I don’t know who or what you’re talking about.”

  Aranok’s leather uniform creaked as he leaned forwards in the chair. “You lie. Tell me who it is, and I shall make your ending swift. Fail to tell me…”

  He turned his head to look very deliberately at the torture tools. “The choice is yours.”

  Dan furrowed his brow. “Hmm. How long do I have to decide?”

  “Decide now. Answer now.”

  “Wow. Not long, then,” Dan said. He sighed. “I mean, I don’t want to be tortured. Who does, right? So, there’s that. But then, on the other hand, I really like the idea of shizzing all over your plans for the afternoon, so… It’s difficult.”

  He shrugged again. “I guess what I’m really trying to say is, ‘go fonk yourself’.”

  Aranok’s borrowed face slackened. A string of bloody saliva stretched out from his bottom lip, slowly extending all the way down to the floor.

  “As you wish,” the demon said. He turned towards the torture implements again.

  “I’d start with the toes and work upwards,” Dan suggested. “Research shows that’s effective, without ever becoming too repetitive. Because if you’re going to kill me, we don’t want it to be with boredom, right?”

  “I do not require such trinkets,” Aranok said, dismissing the tools with a clumsy wave of his hand. “Nor do I need instruction.”

  His right eye twitched. At first, Dan thought it was another of the demon’s involuntary motions, but then something in his brain exploded and the cell became a swirling vortex of fire and pain and screaming.