Dead in the Water_A Space Team Universe Novel

by Barry J. Hutchison

  Dan’s eyes narrowed. “Why so helpful all of a sudden?”

  “Let’s call it… nostalgia,” said Polani. “You know, for old time’s sake.”

  Dan studied the commissioner’s face. “No. No, that’s not it. There’s something else.”

  “Kroysh. You always did know me too well,” he said. He sucked in his bottom lip and let it scrape across his teeth on the way back out. “I looked into it. The harbor, I mean. Like I said, there was a report on it. I saw what happened. If that thing comes back, a lot of people could die.”

  “Right,” Dan agreed.

  “Next time, they might even be someone important.”

  Dan sighed. “You were actually doing pretty well there for a second,” he said. “But you had to go and blow it.”

  “You know what I mean,” Polani said. He looked down at the floor, one hand holding the strap of his satchel.

  “There’s something else,” Dan realized. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Freeze,” said a male voice from over by the door, although with none of the urgency the word might suggest. “Nobody… move.”

  Polani’s whole body seemed to become rigid. He raised his hands to either side of his head, but otherwise complied.

  “Who is it?” he whispered.

  Dan leaned past him to where a saucer-eyed furry creature in a Tribunal Admin Corps uniform stood trembling, a blaster pistol clutched in both hands.

  “It’s a Parlooq,” Dan said, recognizing the officer as a member of Parloo’s native species. Even if he hadn’t seen him, he’d have known it was a Parlooq just from its slow, drawn-out way of speaking.

  “One of mine?”

  Dan nodded.

  “Damn it.” Polani hissed. “OK.”

  He turned, lowering his hands and cranking up his smile. “At ease, officer.”

  The Parlooq’s wide eyes widened further. “Comm… iss… ion… er…?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Pol… ani?”

  “Ha. Yes. That’s me,” Polani said. He waited several seconds for the Parlooq to begin lowering his gun, then strode over to him. “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here – don’t answer that, it’s a rhetorical question,” the commissioner said. Sadly, he said it too late.

  “I was… wondering…”

  “OK, well—”

  “…that… actually.”

  “OK, well, the thing is…” the commissioner began, putting an arm around the young officer’s shoulders. Dan saw Polani’s other hand slipping inside his satchel.

  “No, don’t!” Dan barked.

  The Parlooq gargled as the knife was buried in his neck. It wasn’t a particularly large blade, but then it didn’t have to be. Polani gave it a sharp sideways yank, tearing the officer’s throat, then stepped back to avoid the spray of blood.

  Released from the commissioner’s grip, the Parlooq slumped to the floor, air wheezing from the ragged wound that opened like a grinning mouth in his throat.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Dan said.

  “I did. You know I did,” Polani insisted. He wiped the blade of the knife on the officer’s uniform, then returned it to his bag. “Like I told you, I can’t afford any questions. That means no loose ends.”

  “You could’ve talked to him. You could’ve given him some excuse.”

  “Maybe. But I wasn’t willing to bet my life on it,” Polani said. He turned to Dan and pulled something else from his bag. Instinctively, Dan caught his hand and bent it back at the wrist. “Ow! Ow! What the fonk are you doing?” Polani hissed.

  Where Dan had expected to see a weapon he instead saw a data drive. It was a compact silver cylinder with a projection lens on one end and an audio input at the other.

  “What’s this?”

  “You said I had another reason for helping you,” said Polani, gritting his teeth against the pain. “You’re right. This is it.”

  “Again, what is it?”

  “Just take it. Just watch it,” Polani told him. He tried to pull his hand free, but Dan forced it further backward, dropping the commissioner to his knees. “Argh. Cut it out. We don’t have time for this! Just take it and let me tidy up.”

  Dan kept the pressure on for several enjoyable seconds, then released his grip and plucked the data drive from Polani’s trembling fingers. He slipped it in his pocket without even looking at it, and shot the dead Parlooq a pitying look. With a shove, he pushed the commissioner to the floor, and then led his faithful trolley of firearms toward the exit.

  “Ripley.”

  Dan kept walking. Polani muttered something less than complimentary below his breath.

  “Deadman.”

  Dan stopped and turned. “What?”

  “The data drive,” the commissioner said. He breathed in slowly, like he was steadying his nerve. “When you watch it… you’re going to want to be sitting down.”

  FIFTEEN

  AFTER CHECKING and double-checking that the trunk of the Exodus was locked and wasn’t going to unexpectedly spring open and reveal an arsenal of high-powered weaponry to passers-by, Dan slipped in through the back door of the apartment block and trudged up the stairs to the safe house.

  Artur and Ollie weren’t back yet. No sign of what’s his name, either. Dan glanced out of the window. The evening was drawing in, but he told himself there was no reason to get worried yet.

  The data drive felt heavy, like the information it held was somehow adding to its weight. He turned it over in his hands, fumbling it a little with his new fingers. There was always a certain amount of clumsiness that came with new appendages, although he was learning to adapt more quickly.

  Despite the occasional hiccup, Ollie was getting better, too. She had nowhere near his old friend Nedran’s levels of skill, but – on the other hand – she was alive and Nedran wasn’t, so it more than balanced out.

  Dan raised an imaginary glass in Nedran’s memory, then he closed the blinds, plunging the room into a half-assed sort of darkness.

  “Open,” he said into the end of the data drive, then he set it on the coffee table and watched as several holographic screens appeared around the room. Four of them showed video feeds, while a couple more displayed text and images. Their light danced across the walls, giving the room a strangely ethereal sort of feel.

  Dan checked out the screen closest to him. It looked like security camera footage taken from high up. Hundreds of people crisscrossed on a busy… what was it? Street? City square? There were no vehicles, so probably neither of those.

  He turned to one of the other video feeds. There was a time stamp on this one that told him the footage wasn’t live. Something about the date and time dredged up a half-forgotten memory, but he couldn’t quite place it.

  Not yet.

  This screen was just a reverse of the first, showing the same sea of people from a different angle, with nothing to tell him where it was.

  When he saw the third screen, he realized why the date and time seemed so familiar.

  Dan sat down.

  It was the mall. The mall on Eighteenth.

  And one-hundred-and-thirty-four people were about to die.

  Dan pointed to the screens in turn and arranged them in the air so all four video feeds were set out like the panes of a window in front of him. The two he’d looked at first – the general mass of people and the reverse angle on the same – were at the top. Below them, side by side, were the feeds from two other cameras. One showed part of the mall’s food court and part of a clothes store frontage. The fourth screen focused on a row of doors – three bathrooms, and another door leading out to the parking lot. There wasn’t much happening on this screen right now, so Dan gave the others his attention.

  The bottom left screen looked to be where the action started, although there was nothing specific to see yet. It was more the reactions of the people in the food court that had caught Dan’s attention. The sudden head turns. The looks of confusion, then concern, t
hen the explosion of movement as everyone got to their feet more or less as one and became a stampeding panicky herd. Something off screen had terrified them.

  “Pause all,” said Dan. He took a moment to examine the other screens for anything unusual, but so far, so normal. “Resume.”

  The crowd in the bottom left went back to tumbling over one another in their rush to get away. There was no sound on the feed, but Dan didn’t need it to imagine the screaming and hollering. The faces of the people in the video told him what he needed to know.

  A kid, no more than five or six, tripped and went down hard. Nobody came back for him. Nobody stopped.

  The stampeding crowd infiltrated the screen above. They’d been fleeing left in the bottom screen, but ran in from the right on the uppermost feed. Panic rippled through the crowd and spread like a fast-acting virus, quickly infecting the reverse angle image on the right. The whole mall was in a state of terrified upheaval, and Dan still had no idea…

  Wait.

  Hold up.

  “Pause all.”

  The screens froze.

  “Track back three seconds.”

  There was a blip as the images quickly rewound.

  “Play all, quarter speed.”

  Dan leaned in and studied the screen showing the food court. He watched a straggler at the edge of the screen running in slow motion, her head turned so she could look back over her shoulder. He saw her visibly brace herself, her body tensing as she screwed up her eyes.

  Even in slow motion, the elongated black shape that killed her moved almost too quickly to see. It speared her through the back, exploded through her chest in the next frame, then was gone again.

  It took Dan seven attempts at trying to pause on that specific image before he remembered he could advance frame by frame through the video. He zoomed in on the woman at the point of impact, but the image lost a lot of resolution and so didn’t make things much clearer. He could see she was a Parlooq, though, which explained her inability to get the fonk out of there in time.

  She was young, a little overweight, and dressed in the colorful server’s uniform of one of the food court stands. She was also impaled on a pointy black spike that could easily have been mistaken for a weapon of some kind. Dan knew better, though. He’d been impaled by one himself down in the sewers, and it was still pretty fresh in his memory.

  The toilet monster. The toilet monster had done this.

  He sat back, feeling quite pleased with himself for spotting such a relatively subtle clue amidst all the panic and chaos. If he hadn’t caught that fleeting glimpse of the thing on the lower left screen, he might never have figured out what happened.

  Hell, maybe he was a real detective, after all.

  “Play all,” he said. “Regular speed.”

  The video resumed. A truck-sized black monster immediately rolled onto the food court screen, thrashing and snapping its pointed limbs as if waving to the camera, and stabbing at anyone within reach.

  Fonk. So much for subtle clues.

  Dan watched, hypnotized, as the thing tore through the crowd, skewering, slicing and decapitating men, women and…

  He looked away. “Pause all.”

  The images froze. They hung there, suspended in thin air, daring him to keep watching. The thing was visible on the top two screens now, but too far from the camera on both for Dan to be able to make out much detail beyond ‘big, black and pointy.’

  He pulled one of the text displays toward him and skimmed through it. Witness statements, mostly just describing what he’d already seen, although a few provided a little more detail.

  There seemed to be some disagreement about where the monster had come from. Some – correctly – said it had appeared near the food court, but a few insisted it came from the opposite side of the mall’s central plaza.

  Dan wasn’t particularly surprised. People were idiots at the best of times, let alone when an angry ball of limbs had just cut someone in half lengthways right beside them. He could forgive them some lapses in memory.

  The apartment’s front door flew open and smacked against the wall. Dan jumped up, his hand instinctively grasping for a gun that wasn’t there. Finn staggered inside, bent double by the weight of the filing cabinet on his back. Artur perched on top of it, offering advice and criticism, although not in that order.

  “Put yer back into it, lad. Ye’re making a real meal of this, if ye don’t mind me saying. It’s light as a feather.”

  “It… really… isn’t,” Finn gasped.

  “Where would ye be wanting it, Deadman?” Artur asked. “And what’s with all the screens?”

  “It’s footage from the mall,” Dan explained.

  “The mall? Ye mean the massacre mall? With all the dead kiddies and whatnot?”

  Dan nodded.

  “Sure, what do ye want to go watching the likes of that for?” Artur asked.

  “The Tribunal gave it to me. It’s…” He glanced back at the screens. “It’s pretty eye opening.”

  “Uh, brah?” Finn groaned.

  “Huh? Oh. Put it anywhere.”

  Finn started to squat.

  “Not in the middle of the fonking floor,” Dan snapped. “Against the wall or in the corner.”

  “Oh. Sure. No… problem.”

  “‘No problem,’ he says,” Artur muttered. “That’s not what ye’ve been saying for the past forty fecking minutes.” He looked back at Dan as Finn shuffled toward the corner. “And ye should’ve heard him on the stairs. Moaning like an old woman, so he was. I don’t know how I coped.”

  Ollie entered, only her legs visible behind a teetering stack of battered cardboard boxes. The uppermost box wobbled unsteadily as she kicked the door closed behind her and staggered blindly into the room.

  “That’s more than we had,” Dan observed.

  “Huh?” Ollie turned sideways to look at him, which immediately made the top box fall off. A pile of colorful shorts and vests tumbled out and onto the floor.

  “That’s my stuff,” said Finn, putting his hands on his lower back and clicking his spine back into place.

  “One box? That’s it?”

  Finn nodded, but blushed a little. “I travel light.”

  Ollie dropped the other boxes on the floor, then collapsed into a chair. “Wow, that was a long walk,” she wheezed.

  “Ye think you had it bad? I had to listen to ye both complaining every step o’ the way,” Artur pointed out. “Ye ask me, I deserve some kind of award.”

  Finn regarded the screens in front of Dan. "Huh," he said. "I know that place. Where is that?"

  "It's a mall," Dan said. "Over on Eighteenth."

  "That's it," said Finn. "Yeah, brah, that's it. I’ve been there before."

  He pointed to the black shape on the top left screen. "And is that... what is that?"

  Ollie appeared at his side. "That's it, isn't it? That's the toilet monster."

  "It is," said Dan. "That's it. Looks like Krato was telling the truth. This wasn't done with weapons. This thing killed those people."

  Finn squinted at the screens. "Thing? Are you sure?"

  "I just watched it," Dan said. "I'm sure."

  "No, I mean..." Finn stepped closer to the screens. "I mean, you sure it's only one thing, brah?"

  Dan sighed. "Yes, kid. I'm sure. Look at it."

  He indicated the top two screens. "Camera one, camera two. They're at reverse angles."

  "OK... but the thing - the monster, or whatever - it's not the same in both pictures."

  Dan frowned. "What?"

  "It's at the back of the room in both pictures."

  "So?"

  "So, if it's a reverse angle, it should be far away in one, then closer in the other. I mean… right? Unless it was right in the middle, but it isn’t. It's at the far end in both of these."

  Dan snorted, but leaned in for a closer look.

  "He's right," said Ollie. "And look, in this one it's stabbing that man through the face, but in this
one it's cutting a woman's leg off."

  Dan's eyes flicked between the two images like they were panels in a Spot the Difference puzzle. Sure enough, the spiky black shape was behaving differently on both screens.

  The general theme - violence, maiming and agonizing death - was the same, but the actual specifics of it were different.

  "Sync all feeds," Dan said. Maybe there was just a time discrepancy, although the timestamp didn't seem to think so.

  The videos all flickered briefly, then returned showing the exact same images they had been a moment before.

  "It's a different monster," Dan muttered. He pushed back his hat and scraped his rough hand across the top of his forehead. "Damn it, there are two of them."

  "That's unfortunate," said Artur. "And, I mean, if there are two of them, I suppose ye can't rule out there being three of them. Or four."

  "No," Dan agreed.

  "Or five. Or six."

  "We get the point, Artur."

  “Or a hundred.”

  Dan slumped down into the chair. "You might not want to watch this," he warned Ollie. "I need to see what happens next."

  "Oh. Oh, OK," said Ollie. She glanced from him to the screen and back again. "Is it bad?"

  "It's bad," Dan confirmed.

  "I've probably seen worse," Ollie pointed out. "Where I come from, I used to see some pretty horrible things. I saw someone get turned inside-out, I saw someone be eaten by these sort of bird things with, like, faces. You know, people faces? Little people faces, all scrunched up and mean-looking. And then, this one time someone literally just burst open and—”

  “Shizz. OK, fine, you can feel free to watch,” said Dan. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Finn raised a hand. “Uh, do I have to watch, too?” he asked. “It’s just, I’m not big into, you know… whatever’s going to happen.”

  “I don’t care,” Dan said. He gestured vaguely into the hallway. “Go find somewhere to put your stuff.”

  Finn smiled with relief. “OK. Shout me if you need me.”

  “We won’t need you,” Dan assured him.

  He waited until Finn had picked up his box of clothes and left the room before turning to Ollie. “Seriously? Him?”