“Steady there, darlin’,” Artur warned. “Ye don’t want to bury us both alive now, do ye?”
“Not us both, no,” Marnie spat. She shoved aside the shell of a TV, revealing the smooth butt of a blaster rifle sticking out through a gap in the trash.
“Ye found it!” Artur said. “Well done.”
“Shut up,” Marnie hissed. Grabbing the rifle, she gave it a tug. It didn’t budge, and her scales turned an angry shade of purple as she pulled and wrenched it more violently. The mountain visibly teetered and Artur slid down in a cascade of nuts and bolts.
“Careful. Ye’ll bring the whole thing down,” he warned, but Marnie ignored him.
“Come… out!” she hollered, giving the rifle a final heave. There was kerack as something snapped. She staggered back, half a rifle clutched in her hands, a look of triumph already fading on her face.
A blaster bolt screeched from the broken weapon and slammed into the foot of the salvage mountain. The whole place rumbled as part of the cliff face collapsed.
“Oh bollocks,” Artur muttered. He covered his head with his arms as several tons of junk fell on him from above.
Marnie, who had staggered clear, dropped the rifle, her face turning a pale sky blue. “Oh no,” she whispered. She clambered over the debris and frantically began to dig. “Artur? Artur, where are you?”
The only reply was the groan of the junk settling.
“No, no, no. Shizz, shizz, shizz,” Marnie hissed. She shoved aside some sort of spaceship canopy and part of a garage roof. “Artur? Speak to me, ‘chaun! Don’t you be dead. Don’t you dare be—”
She discarded a few car parts and an old shopping cart. And there, pinned beneath a rusted vault door, was Artur. His eyes were closed, his legs trapped, his upper body bent unnaturally.
Marnie wasn’t quick enough to catch the sob before it escaped from her throat. “Fonk! Artur! Artur, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll get help. You’re going to be OK.” She raised her voice. “You hear me? Please be OK!”
Artur blinked. “Holy shoite, there’s no need to shout,” he said. “I’m half-dead, not half fecking deaf.” He grinned at her. “Is that us even now?”
Marnie picked up a scorched and blackened piece of metal and covered him again.
“I’ll take that as a ‘no,’” he said, his voice muffled.
With a grunt, he pushed his way free from beneath the junk and dusted himself down. “That was close,” he said, looking up at an overhang of salvage still teetering above him. “Sure, I could’ve been…”
His voice trailed off. He cocked his head and squinted at the outcrop of scrap. Slowly, a smile emerged from somewhere inside his beard. “Well now,” he said. “What do we have here?”
TWENTY-ONE
DAN SWUNG out from around the corner, fist drawn back.
“Wait, stop, it’s us!” Marnie cried.
Dan lowered his arm. “About time.”
“Ye’re an ungrateful sack o’ shoite, ye know that, Deadman?” Artur said. The voice didn’t come from inside Marnie’s breastplate, but rather from a bulky canvas bag she dragged along beside her. A couple of buckled pipes poked out through the partially fastened opening.
“What’s that?” Dan asked. “Doesn’t look like a gun.”
Marnie released the bag’s strap and knelt beside it. “I had to take a few things or Bool would get suspicious.”
“Who’s Bool?” Dan asked.
“He’s my lover,” Marnie said.
Artur almost choked in the bag. “I fecking knew it!”
“He’s no one. Doesn’t matter,” said Marnie.
“I don’t care,” Dan told her. “Did you get a gun?”
“Get a gun? No,” said Artur. Marnie opened the bag, revealing the shizz-eating grin on Artur’s face, and something else. Something incredible. “We found the gun.”
“No fonking way,” Dan muttered. He reached into the bag and practically groaned with delight as his fingers slipped into the indents of a pleasingly familiar grip. “Mindy,” he said, raising the hand cannon and savoring her weight against his palm. At the sound of her name, the lights on Mindy’s chamber pulsed in readiness. “Am I glad to see you.”
DAN AND MARNIE stood on either side of the doorway leading into the stasis cell block. Despite quite a bit of protesting and pleading, Artur was in Dan’s breast pocket, rather than his preferred option of between Marnie’s breasts.
“How many?” Dan asked, as Marnie peeked around the corner.
“I make six,” she whispered. “Two at the door to her cell, four patrolling.” She looked across the gap at him. “What’s the plan?”
Artur snorted. “Heh. ‘Plan,’ she says.”
Stepping out of cover, Dan raised his gun. Two stun-shots pulsed from the barrel, hitting the two door guards squarely in the face. They spasmed as they fell, their trident weapons clattering to the floor.
All six of the guards were large and heavy, like eighteen regular Deeper Downians had been condensed three-a-piece into these hefty fonks.
They moved surprisingly swiftly for their size. Two of the other guards even had time to tighten their grips on their tridents before Dan shot them. They dropped immediately. The remaining two quickly met with the same fate.
“That was the plan,” Dan said, striding to the door of the cell the Deeper Downians had been stationed outside.
The door had the same slide hatch set-up as the door of his own cell. He clanked it aside and saw Ollie floating in the center of the room, her eyes rolled back in her head, her limbs spread like she was frozen midway through a star-jump.
“How do I open this?” Dan demanded. “There’s no handle.”
Marnie grabbed the arm of one of the stunned guards and slapped the webbed hand against the door. It bleeped, then slid into the wall beside it.
The inside of the cell danced like water reflecting on a swimming pool wall. Marnie grabbed Dan’s arm before he went charging in.
“You need to disable the stasis field first,” she told him. “Or you’ll get caught in it, too.”
“OK, so how do I do that?” Dan asked.
Marnie peered into the cell, her eyes darting across the floor and ceiling. “I don’t know.”
“Ye don’t know? Now ye fecking tell us!”
Dropping to her haunches, Marnie patted down the closest guard. “There should be a remote. It can only be switched off from the outside, so there has to be a remote.”
The lights on the ceiling became swirling red beams as the echo of an alarm tore through the complex.
“Shoite. Guess they know what we’re up to,” Artur announced. He hopped out of Dan’s pocket, slid down his front, then set about searching the second door guard.
Dan was about to start on another of the guards when a blaster bolt screamed past several feet above his head. A Deeper Downian stood in the doorway, a comically oversized blaster rifle balanced awkwardly against his hip.
“I thought you said you didn’t have guns!” Dan barked.
“We don’t!” Marnie said.
A second blast hit the wall a few arm-lengths off to Dan’s left, blackening the mossy stone.
“At least he can’t shoot for shoite,” Artur commented. Dan took the guy down with another stun shot, but a flurry of movement in the corridor at the man’s back suggested more were right behind him.
“Fonk,” Dan spat, as a squadron of anxious-looking Deeper Downians filed in, rifles clutched in their webbed hands. “Krato must’ve armed them. That son-of-a-bedge.”
Mindy kicked twice in Dan’s hand, dropping two more of the weapon wielders. They almost looked relieved as the rifles slipped from their grips and they sank to the floor.
One of the guards on the floor became a sudden blur of movement. His hand clamped around Dan’s bare ankle, his eyes wide awake and filled with rage.
“Shizz, he woke up fast,” Dan muttered. He fired off another stun shot, sending the guy back to sleep. Around them, the other f
ive fallen soldiers began to stir.
“Bollocks. This isn’t good,” Artur yelped.
“Found it!” Marnie declared, holding up a slender silver rod.
She tapped and slapped it as if it were some sort of percussion instrument. The swirling light in Ollie’s cell dimmed, and she hit the floor with an “Oof!”
“Uh… hello?” she called.
“We’re out here,” Dan said.
Ollie stumbled into the doorway, looking like she’d woken up with a hangover. She yelped and ducked as a blaster bolt screamed past her.
“Oh yeah, and we’re being shot at,” Artur said. “We probably should’ve mentioned.”
“Where’s Finn?”
“Not here,” Dan said, firing a volley of stun-shots into the growing crowd of Deeper Downians. “Marnie, how do we get to our sub?”
“You don’t,” Marnie said. “It’ll be scrap by now. I mean, it was practically scrap to start with. And who paints a submarine yellow, anyway?”
“So how do we get to the surface? How do we get out of here?” Dan demanded. He put a stun-bolt in the back of a rousing guard’s head before the man could wake up all the way, then sent a few more in the direction of the reluctant gunmen. “I’m going to be out of battery real soon at this rate.”
“There are subs. Proper subs, I mean. Ours,” Marnie said.
“Which direction?” Dan asked.
“Out the door, then we’ll have to—”
“I wasn’t asking how we got there, I asked which direction.”
Marnie frowned, then pointed at the wall behind him. “Uh, that way, I guess.”
“Mindy, explosive round,” Dan barked. He spun on a bare foot, raised the gun, and spat out a warning. “You might want to get down.”
The wall erupted at a squeeze of the trigger, filling the room with dust and smoke and a high-pitched ringing that might have just been in Dan’s ears.
There was a large hole where the wall had been. Through it, Dan saw a grassy plaza, not unlike the one Cobia had led them across earlier. Several dozen shocked-looking Deeper Downians stood frozen to the spot, not quite sure what the fonk was going on. One by one, they began to run – away from the hole, thankfully, rather than towards it – and Dan beckoned for the others to follow him through.
“Go. Lead the way,” he urged, shoving Marnie ahead.
For a moment, she looked like she might hit him with another of those heel-kicks, but then she was off and running, shouting at any stragglers on the plaza to get out of their way.
They jumped onto a moving walkway, but kept running, using it for a speed boost. A single blaster shot scorched the air above them.
“Those idiots! There are people here!” Marnie cried.
“Ye ask me, they’re starting to like their new guns a little too much,” Artur said.
“This way!” Marnie instructed, jumping onto a second path that had branched away from the first. It swept them towards another tall column like the one they’d been in earlier. Just like that one, the inside of this one was filled with hundreds of intersecting walkways both above and below their own.
“You’re going to have to trust me,” Marnie said.
Dan didn’t like the sound of that. Trust wasn’t his strong point. “Why?”
“You just are,” said Marnie, then she shoved Ollie off the walkway, grabbed Dan by the shirt, and threw herself over the edge.
They fell for what felt like a while and yet, simultaneously, no time at all. Artur managed to fit in a lot of swearing, and yet Dan had barely had time to raise Mindy and take aim at Marnie before they were swallowed by a cloud-like mist that seemed to push back against them, slowing their fall.
The water met them at quite a leisurely pace. Despite the height he’d fallen from, Dan barely dipped below the surface before bobbing back up again. Artur coughed and spluttered in his pocket while, somewhere through the fog, Ollie whooped with delight.
“That was fun!” she said.
“Speak for yerself,” Artur hollered back.
“This way.”
That was Marnie’s voice, somewhere just ahead of them. “Come with me. Hurry. We don’t have much time.”
“Time for what? Are ye going to shove us off something again?” Artur asked. He quickly held his breath as Dan began to front crawl, forcing Artur under the water.
Ollie flapped her way through the mist and arrived beside Marnie just about the same time that Dan did. Artur exhaled sharply as Dan straightened and his head was raised above the surface again.
“Bit o’ warning next time,” he grumbled, adding: “Ye great big bastard,” as an afterthought.
“Where now?” Dan asked.
“How the feck should I know?”
“Wasn’t asking you.”
“Oh. Right.”
“We wait here,” Marnie said. “Stay close together.”
Ollie looked around, but the fog made it impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction.
“I don’t get it. What are we waiting for?”
Bubbles burbled to the surface all around them.
“For this,” said Marnie, then the water became a whirlpool and they were all dragged down together beneath the rolling, foaming waves.
TWENTY-TWO
HANDS GRABBED at them through the murky water. Dan felt fingers wrap around an ankle and instinctively jerked his leg free. Marnie appeared through the gloom in front of him, her cheeks puffed out. She shook her head, pointed down, then let herself be pulled down into a gaping mouth-like opening that had appeared below them.
Fonk it. It wasn’t like he had a lot of options.
The hand caught him again. Dan surrendered to it but kept Mindy ready as he was pulled into the hatch. Ollie and Marnie were both in there, Ollie’s already purple-pink skin turning red with the effort of holding her breath.
A door slammed closed above their heads. There was a gurgle, then a hiss, as the water was ejected from what Dan now realized must be an airlock.
When the water cleared, five women stood around the group, their blue-green scales shiny and wet.
“OK,” Dan said. “So, who the fonk are you?”
“These are the mothers of the children they sent to the surface,” Marnie explained.
One of the woman stepped forward and caught Dan’s arm. Her eyes blazed with a hopeful intensity that would’ve taken a breathing man’s breath away. “Help us bring them home. Please.”
Dan could only hold the woman’s gaze for a moment or two. He looked around at the other women, their faces just as desperate and pleading. “Sure.” He shrugged. “Why not?”
Marnie slammed the door release button and an interior door slid aside. The inside of the main sub looked like some kind of military dropship, with a row of seats running down each side of the narrow interior, both rows facing the other. Various straps and harnesses were attached to the chairs, and Dan and Ollie were both carried along as Marnie and the other women hurried to strap themselves in.
“Get a move on!” instructed a female voice from inside a partially walled-off cockpit area. “They’re going to be onto us if we don’t hurry.”
Shoving Mindy back in his holster, Dan pulled the harness across his chest, almost squashing Artur in the process.
“Hey, watch what ye’re doing there!”
“Sorry.”
Dan removed Artur from his shirt pocket, fastened the harness, then looked around for somewhere safe to put him.
“Over here,” called Marnie. She sat directly across from Dan, her hands splayed like a Boomball player waiting for a pass.
“Hey, wait a fecking minute!” Artur protested, but then he was hurtling through the air, his arms and legs frantically flapping as he tried, with very little success, to fly.
Marnie caught him, fumbled, but managed not to drop him. Artur huffed and puffed in her hands.
“I have never felt so violated in all me life,” he protested, then Marnie shoved him down the gap at the
front of her breastplate and he immediately changed his tune. “Actually, it’s fine,” he said, his voice echoing out from her cleavage. “I totally support the previous course of action.”
“Everybody strapped in?” called the woman in front. From the way she said it, Dan knew she had to be another mom, and suspected she’d asked that same question many times before. He wondered if she’d ask if anyone needed the bathroom, too.
The Deeper Downians gave two short tugs on their harnesses. Ollie did the same, but Dan felt confident enough in his ability to fasten two clips together that he didn’t feel the need.
The sub didn’t move. Dan felt the women’s eyes on him. He sighed.
“Fine.”
He tugged the harness, albeit quite sarcastically.
“Happy?” he asked, then everyone was thrown sideways in their seats as the sub went from ‘stopped’ to ‘moving stupidly fast’ in one sudden eye-watering lurch.
There were no windows in this section of the sub, and Dan couldn’t see into the cockpit from his seat. From the way the sub banked and turned, though, he got the impression they were either maneuvering through somewhere, or dodging something. Possibly both.
“Are they onto us?” he asked.
“Not yet,” the pilot replied. “But they could be waiting for us on the other side of these turbines.”
“Turbines?”
Dan leaned forward in his chair and managed to see a corner of the sub’s windshield. A series of enormous spinning blades were chewing up the water just ahead. Dan leaned back again and tried to pretend he hadn’t seen it.
“Once we’re through – once we’re at the surface,” one of the mothers began. “What then?”
Dan frowned. “Huh?”
“What’s your plan?” Marnie asked.
“My plan?” Dan looked around at their expectant faces. “I thought you must have a plan.”
There was some concerned murmuring from the moms.
“What? No,” Marnie replied. “That’s why we broke you out. That was our plan.”
Dan closed his eyes and gently thumped the back of his head against his head rest a few times.
Dead in the Water_A Space Team Universe Novel Page 23