Dead in the Water_A Space Team Universe Novel

by Barry J. Hutchison

  He thought of Artur, although not for long because he didn’t want to give the little shizznod the satisfaction.

  He thought of Ollie and took a little comfort from the fact that maybe she didn’t need him now.

  He hoped she’d be happy. The kid deserved that, at least.

  Dan stopped swimming. What was the point? A few more seconds alive – or undead – weren’t worth much if they were spent thrashing around in panic or being eaten up by regret.

  He waited, hands raised. If this thing was going to swallow him, he was at least going to punch the shizz out of it on the way down.

  The pressure of the water changed as it pushed in on him from both sides. Those gigantic jaws were closing. This was it. There was no escape, no way out. He was dead in the water. Literally.

  The water around him was suddenly alive with a blinding white light. Even through his lifeless nerve endings, Dan felt a jolt of something like electricity as the big-toothed slug-fish was wrapped in a cocoon of crackling luminous bonds.

  It bucked around for a moment, but the fight soon left it. Those jaws, which had been about to devour Dan whole, flopped all the way open. Its globular eyes rolled back until only the whites were visible, then it drifted down into the darkness and was swallowed by the darkness of the ocean.

  Treading water, Dan turned, searching for the case of whatever the fonk had just happened. Was it the sub? Had Finn discovered another weapon they hadn’t been aware of? That would’ve been an incredible stroke of luck, which told Dan it almost certainly wouldn’t be the case.

  Still, something had done it. He just wished he knew who or what it—

  A cocoon of electrical energy wrapped around him.

  Son of a… Dan thought, and then the bonds tightened, his skin fizzled, and his head was filled with an explosion of all-consuming white light.

  EIGHTEEN

  DAN BECAME aware of a buzzing sound, but only dimly. It was loud, but far off. Or maybe close, but quiet. He didn’t care enough to try to work it out. One of those, anyway.

  There was something on his face. It partly covered one side, pressing down hard on his cheek, ear, and part of his forehead. It was rough, cold, and annoying. He tried to swat it away, but his arms were behind his back. Probably. They were somewhere, anyway.

  He became aware of a buzzing sound. Then he became aware of a sense of Déjà vu.

  His head hurt.

  No, that was an understatement, he thought.

  His head really hurt?

  Better, but still not even close.

  Fonk it.

  There was something on his face. Was that new? He tried to brush it off.

  No luck.

  It was dark. Too dark for even his enhanced night vision to make anything out. Unless…

  He opened his eyes. There was something large and gray very close to him. Too close for him to see anything but a vague, nondescript blur.

  Several seconds passed before he realized it was the floor.

  He flopped onto his back, waited for the world to stop spinning, then sat up. This, he concluded, was a mistake. His head, which had really hurt, now really, really hurt. He winced and tried to rub the pain away, but his hands were still… where? He looked for a shoulder then followed the arm until it vanished behind his back. He tried to pull the arm around to his front, but it pulled the other one with it and he concluded his hands must be shackled together.

  An embarrassingly high-pitched “Yeurwargh!” burst from his lips as assorted teeth-and-throat-based memories rose like bubbles in his steadily growing consciousness. He remembered – with zero fondness – being partly inside a shark-thing.

  He looked for the wounds in his legs, and discovered they had been coated with a poultice of dark slimy greens and crusty browns. The ends of some thick sutures poked out here and there, suggesting someone had sewn him back together.

  The vast majority of his pants were missing. What was left resembled a pair of cut-off shorts that revealed his legs in their full horrifying glory.

  He had no shoes or socks on. One of his feet was smaller than the other, but that had been the case for a few weeks now. If it weren’t for the stitching marks around the ankle, Dan wouldn’t even have been able to remember which foot was the original and which the replacement. After a while, you lost track of these things.

  He was in what was unmistakably a cell. The floor, walls and ceiling were all made of the same rough gray stone, mottled here and there with swashes of green. Despite his deadened senses, he could taste salt in the air. Of course, it could’ve been from his time in the ocean, but something about this place felt… fishy. In more ways than one.

  Getting to his feet wasn’t easy. It involved several aborted attempts, a face plant into the wall, and a lot of abuse hurled at nobody in particular. Finally, by pushing up with his feet and sort of ‘hopping’ up the wall with his forehead, he stood fully upright.

  Now what?

  “You are awake.”

  Dan spun away from the wall and searched the cell for whoever had spoken. This didn’t take more than a second or two, since the cell wasn’t very big.

  “Looks like it,” he said, his eyes darting to the corners of the room. It was octagonal-shaped, so there were quite a lot of corners for his eyes to dart to. They found nothing lurking in any of them.

  “Someone shall attend.”

  The voice seemed to come from directly in front of him. Dan lumbered forward, half-expecting to collide with some invisible man in the center of the cell. Instead, he tripped on his own feet, stumbled, and was filled with that sinking feeling that comes with knowing you’re about to smash your face against the floor, and the awareness that there’s fonk all you can do about it.

  Dan smashed his face against the floor. Technically, it was only his chin that took the full impact, but this wasn’t of any particular consolation.

  “You fell over,” the voice informed him.

  “Nn fnking shzz,” Dan rasped.

  After clicking his jaw back into position, he began the laborious process of getting to his feet again. Having already established a system, this time was easier. Still not exactly dignified, but easier.

  “Someone shall attend,” the voice repeated, and Dan grunted begrudgingly in reply.

  The cell door was made of a dull copper-colored metal, with a small rectangular hole that was shuttered from the other side. There was no handle on the inside, although that didn’t really come as any sort of surprise.

  Dan put a shoulder to the door, not so much trying to escape as gauging its weight. Heavy. Very heavy. He wouldn’t be kicking this fonker down anytime soon.

  He pulled on the shackles that held his hands together. They held his wrists twisted together, the hands back to back. The bonds themselves were thick and clamped him from his wrists to halfway up his forearm. Even if he pulled hard enough to pop his new hand off, he still wouldn’t be free.

  There was nothing to do but wait and worry.

  He wasn’t worried for himself. Wherever he was, he wasn’t being eaten alive by a sea monster, so his situation was a vast improvement on what it might have been.

  He worried about Ollie. He worried about Artur.

  Finn, not so much.

  Under normal circumstances – basically any circumstances when they weren’t thousands of feet under the water – he knew they could handle themselves. Trapped in a submarine that was being attacked by hungry shark monsters, though? That was more difficult. Ollie might be powerful, but that power would be the end of them all if she unleashed it inside the sub.

  Dan sighed. What had they even been doing down there? No one was paying him. No one would even thank him. He was an idiot for getting involved.

  Ninety-six adults and thirty-eight children died before his eyes again in a crowded mall. They stared at him – desperately, imploringly – as the things tore through them, and spilled all that they were onto the polished shopping center floor.

  “Fonk. OK, OK
,” Dan said, although to what or who he couldn’t quite say.

  The hatch in the door slid open and a rectangle of face was revealed. It was a mostly blue-green face that shone like scales, but with dark bruising around both eyes. A slimy poultice, like the one on Dan’s thighs, was spread across the man’s nose, presumably covering a wound that…

  Wait.

  “Hey. I know you,” Dan said. “We met at Krato’s.”

  “Met? Is that what you call it?” the man asked. His voice had a gargle to it, further emphasizing his fishiness. “You broke my nose.”

  “That was an accident,” Dan claimed.

  “You elbowed me in the face.”

  “No, I hit you on purpose, I just didn’t think I’d done it hard enough to break your nose,” Dan said. “You must have a weak face.”

  The man’s weak face scowled, but this made pain flash behind his eyes, so he quickly adjusted his expression into something less contorted.

  “You have been formally charged with the hostile invasion of our realm,” he continued. “You and your accomplices.”

  “Accomplices? Wait. What accomplices? Are they here? Are they OK?”

  “How do you plead?”

  It was Dan’s turn to scowl. “Plead? What are you talking about? My friends, do you have them?”

  “How do you plead to the charge of hostile invasion?”

  “Hostile invasion of what? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Liar!” spat the man on the other side of the door. “You are an invader from Up There. Your actions are a declaration of war.”

  Dan shook his head. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. I’m not from Up There.”

  “You are to us.”

  If he were honest, Dan would have to admit that his brain wasn’t yet functioning at full capacity. Being chased by sea monsters, zapped by an energy cocoon, then repeatedly battered against the cell floor had all taken their toll, and it took him a moment or two longer than usual for the man’s words to make any kind of sense.

  “Us? Hold on. Exactly where are we?” he asked.

  “Do not feign ignorance, land-dweller. You know.”

  “Indulge me,” said Dan. “Please.”

  “You are a prisoner of the greatest city below, on, or above the surface of this planet,” the man replied. Even through the hatch, Dan saw him swell with pride. “You are now the property of Deeper Down.”

  Dan snorted. “Ha! Sure.”

  The man stared back at him, his face impassive and swollen. Mostly swollen.

  “Funny,” Dan said.

  The man did not appear to be laughing.

  “Wait. You’re not serious?”

  Dan had heard of Deeper Down, of course. Most people had. But they’d heard of it in the same way they’d heard of Floomfo Forest, or the World of Gnarls, or Daddy Krosyh - the kindly-yet-creepy old man who visited the bedrooms of children on Kroyshuk Eve and methodically licked the dirt from their faces while they slept.

  It was bullshizz. All of it. Make-believe nonsense designed to amuse infants and imbeciles alike.

  There was no Floomfo Forest. There was no World of Gnarls. And Daddy Kroysh had been captured by the Magister and brought before the Intergalactic Court of Justice years ago.

  Deeper Down was a myth, just like they were – a bedtime story about a legendary lost city beneath the waves, filled with magic and technology and wonders the likes of which no one on the surface had ever seen. It was make-believe nonsense for infants and imbeciles, of which Dan was neither.

  “OK, is there somebody else I can talk to?” Dan asked. “I’d like to thank them for saving me, find my friends, then we’ll all get out of here and leave you in peace.”

  “It is too late for peace,” the man replied. “War is now inevitable.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “We did not wish to believe it at first. All we have ever sought is solitude. All we wished for was to remain hidden. Secluded. But recent events have shown us that we are not to be permitted this luxury. And so, war is coming. It will be terrible, it will be regretted, but it will be. And we shall endure. We shall survive. We shall be victorious.”

  Dan scraped his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Well, good luck with that,” he said. “Now, is there a supervisor or someone I can talk to? No offense, but you seem a little… I don’t want to say ‘batshizz crazy’ but… Ah, what the fonk? You seem a little batshizz crazy. I’d like to talk to someone else.”

  “Soon.”

  “No, not soon. Now,” Dan said. “Get me someone now.”

  “Soon,” the man repeated, then the hatch slammed closed and Dan wasted his most intimidating glare on a rectangle of dull red metal.

  “I’m working with the Tribunal!” Dan hollered. “That’s what you are, right? I’m working with you. Check with Polani. Go ahead, ask him.”

  Silence answered him. It wasn’t an expectant, breath-being-held sort of silence, but an empty no-fonker’s-there sort of silence, and Dan realized he was wasting his breath. Metaphorically speaking.

  “Damn it,” he spat, giving the door a kick. It didn’t so much as rattle.

  Deeper Down. It was impossible. Hell, he was more likely to be a prisoner in Grobin’s Grotto. At least a few people claimed to have seen that place. Granted, they had all recently consumed vast amounts of hallucinogenic drugs and weren’t the most reliable of witnesses, but at least they were witnesses.

  Nobody alive had claimed to have seen Deeper Down. The only accounts of the city came from centuries ago, and had been passed down via word of mouth ever since. Over the generations it had alternated between being a fantastical bedtime story and a dire warning for kids who misbehaved. Don’t clean your room and you might get snatched away and taken to Deeper Down. Don’t eat your vegetables and you could be forced to live among the fish people forever. It was a city-sized version of the Thumb Fairy legend, although Dan knew from experience that that scissor-wielding bedge was all too real.

  “Hey!” Dan shouted. “Artur? Ollie? Can you hear me?”

  If they could, they didn’t reply.

  Dan stepped into cover beside the door, ready to pounce if it should open. He had a plan. It involved kicking the living shit out of whoever stepped into the cell, then…

  Actually, that was currently as far as it went, but he felt like the first part was solid enough that he could probably just improvise the rest. It would almost certainly involve a lot of kicking people, though, unless he could somehow find a way to get his hands free.

  He heaved suddenly on the bonds, like he could somehow catch them off-guard. They held fast. There was no way he was getting his hands free.

  Still, maybe he could make them more useful than they currently were. Dropping to the floor, Dan rolled onto his side and brought his knees up as close to his chest as he could get them. The tendons were tight and his muscles had become more rigid as they’d decayed, but the lack of pain receptors meant he was able to ignore both these issues.

  He flopped around like a fish on dry land, jerking his bound wrists down over his ass-bone. This was more difficult than he’d hoped, and he spent almost a full five minutes hissing and spitting and cursing as he tried to tuck his bottom half through the gap in his arms.

  At last, with a final yelp of effort and a distinct tearing of cartilage, his buttocks passed the event horizon and the shackles scraped along the underside of his thighs.

  He’d reckoned that at this stage in proceedings, the battle would be all but won. This turned out, however, not to be the case, and getting the rest of his legs through his splayed arms quickly proved to be no small task.

  Dan flapped violently, kicking his feet and slamming his shoulder against the floor in frustration. “Fonking… fonking fonk-fonk!” he spat.

  He stopped thrashing, closed his eyes, and found some calm center.

  That done, he went back to thrashing and swearing for a while, until it was clear that neither was e
specially helping.

  He was, quite unarguably, in a much worse position than he had been before. If he could somehow stand up now, his wrists would be shackled halfway down the back of his thighs, and his forehead would be touching the floor. He could probably go back to his original situation, but then all this would’ve been for nothing.

  Dan as halfway through another frantic rage-flap when he heard the snigger. Like the other voice he’d heard, it seemed to come from out of the air itself. Unlike the other one, this one was familiar.

  “Holy shoite, Deadman,” it said. “Why are ye all folded up? Are ye trying to do what I think yer’re trying to do?”

  Dan sighed. “I’m trying to get out of these cuffs.”

  “Ah. No. That’s very much not what I thought ye were trying to do,” said Artur. “Hold tight, ye bag o’ spanners, we’ll have ye right out.”

  OLLIE THREW her arms around Dan and hugged him. Due to the handcuffs – as well as some deep-rooted emotional and psychological issues – he was unable to hug her back.

  “You’re alive!” she cried.

  “More or less,” Dan confirmed.

  When she pulled away, Finn moved in for a hug, too, but Dan’s scowl made him reconsider, and he managed to turn the move into a handshake, instead. Dan regarded the offered hand for a while and waited for the penny to drop.

  “Oh. Right. You’re tied up,” said Finn. He patted Dan on the shoulder and stepped back beside Ollie. The backs of their hands brushed together, and their fingers very gingerly interlocked.

  “We thought we’d lost ye,” said Artur from way down on the floor. “We thought maybe ye’d been eaten or something.”

  “They didn’t like the taste,” Dan said.

  They were still in his cell, but the door now stood wide open behind them. From what he could tell, none of them were any the worse for wear.

  “Where are we? And why am I the only one in cuffs?”

  “They cuffed us too, brah,” said Finn. “We were all tossed into a cell together.”