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After a brief hiatus to work on some other projects, plus take some much needed vacation, Devana Files returns to complete the story. We have about 8 chapters left. After this, it goes to editing, and then for publication. I am planning on a fall release (date TBD). I will archive and paywall this novel when it goes to editing. The final release will have some changes, such as chapter combinations and reordering, plus some cutting (as it stands now, the novel is 505 pages).

Stay tuned. After Devana files, we bring you Colony Crawler. Twenty-eight billionaires are kidnapped, locked underground, and forced to fight to the death on the moon. Only one can survive.

This is the Thirty-Ninth chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty-two chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

Dead Man’s Party, Part 1

APRIL 13, 2074

PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.

Lebofield spent the better part of three hundred and fifty thousand kilometers giving her the middle finger and broadcasting ‘Katera Devana can’t catch me’ to his three hundred million followers. A broadcast that she now realized was a trap. Peanut butter is good bait for a trap because it doesn’t need acting lessons. To attract the rats, it only needs to sit onstage and be itself. Agents Anders and Lindsay used Lebofield like peanut butter and then, just like you do with used bait, tossed him in the trash. Maybe his arrest was only a pretext, or maybe it was a bonus. Either way, the real plan was for him to smuggle something off Kuipers, and then for her to bring it to the colony unaware. Something the agents couldn't just walk through the front door.

She needed to hear it from him, though, and he wasn’t responding.

He stared through the metal grating under his wheelchair. Thirty meters below, a pack of rats looked back at them, sniffing the air, half hidden between a conduit and a steampipe. One was stamped with a blue bolt of lightning, the other with three maroon blades on a yellow background. The three-bladed symbol dated back a hundred and twenty-eight years to a staff doodle at the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley right after World War II. Regulations called for the blades to be magenta or purple or black, not maroon, but she suspected the rats had soiled the pipes. Three blades of magenta were trendy on kids running shoes and ubiquitous on drums of plutonium. No doubt the three blades meant the hot pipes below were delivering haute couture to the colony’s teenagers.

“How about it? Tell us what your deal with the Feds was.”

Greg, Rae, Eric—their faces were all twisted, angry, ready to stand and fight. They were looking to her for a plan that wouldn’t get them all killed. What they were fighting, she didn’t know. Lebofield knew, but he wasn’t answering. Probably a cell of corrupt Feds wielding an otherworldly weapon. If the rats had answers, they weren’t giving them up either. One of them skittered away. The rest followed. She always thought rats as a whole were smarter than humans. Smart enough, anyway, to know when to duck and hide.

“Maybe his eardrums were blown out when he was spaced,” Eric said.

Lebofield glanced at Eric and then at Kate. His grayish cheeks were frostbitten from space decompression. His eyes were dilated and bloodshot. His lips moved, but he didn’t speak. He looked through her. She shivered involuntarily.

Lucky for her, Ongo and Bongo were following Lebofield when the Feds tried to space him. Whether he felt lucky, too, was debatable. A common misperception was that getting spaced killed you immediately. The world record for holding your breath underwater was twenty-seven minutes. The world record for holding your breath in space was only around ten minutes, but that number was going up about ten seconds a month because, yes, there were fools who competed to get their name on the record list and subsequently paid a lot of money for skin grafts and eye transplants and new tattoos to cover the scars. There was prize money and sponsorships. Maybe the prize money covered the cost of healthcare. Maybe the facial scars looked good in a diet soda ad. And then there were the people who jumped in the airlocks for free because they liked the high. Sucking vacuum could be euphoric. She preferred to get high the old-fashioned way, chasing Feds with an alien artifact all the way to the grave.

Ongo said Lebofield was in the airlock for sixty seconds. Sixty seconds to Ongo was probably at least three minutes for an ordinary human. Healing after space decompression was indescribably painful. Your lungs burned with every breath like you’d inhaled hot frying oil. Patches of skin ached worse than third-degree burns. Even if you were only spaced for a minute. Even if you had top-of-the-line healthcare, strapped to a wheelchair in a colony dungeon, like Lebofield. Too many times, she wished they’d kept her in a coma. Lebofield probably wished the same thing.

Lebofield kept whispering. She couldn’t read his lips.

“What happened to his parents?” Kate asked Greg.

Greg shook his head.

Ongo replied, “Ve gyeve dhem good burial.”

Ongo towered over Lebofield, holding an oxygen mask tethered to a green cylinder strapped to the back of his wheelchair. Bongo stood opposite, scanning the overhead pipes and trash conveyors.

“We need to get out of here,” the woman on Greg’s left said. “Before they find us.”

The woman had pixie short hair as white as snow, bronze eyes, a bronze salon cape that matched her eyes, white shoes that perfectly matched her hair, and a bank vault’s worth of gold jewelry and piercings. She had a vague memory of seeing White Hair around Greg’s club, although maybe with fewer clothes.

There was a good reason Greg brought a stripper. There was a good reason he’d brought his girlfriend, too, the heavily perfumed woman on his right, who held a tablet and wore a black impress-the-scary-sister dress. She didn’t remember the new body pillow’s name, although he’d mentioned it twice (Sara or Saraphina or Sasha). He usually got bored. Why junk up her cranium with useless information she’d need to delete in a month? There had to be a good reason he’d brought the girlfriend and a stripper. His last girlfriend was a stripper, so maybe he was showing off his new higher standards. She racked her brain to come up with another reason the two of them were here and decided it had to be because the moon was rising in the house of Virgo and everything was completely under control.

“Did you hear that Frank? Agents Anders and Lindsay spaced your parents, too.”

She expected Lebofield to tell her to fuck off, or bitch about his healthcare, or try to negotiate a deal so he could return to fame and fortune. Any of those would have been better than what he actually did: face Ongo and continue to mutter under his breath.

“Do you remember Ongo and Bongo dragging you out of the airlock?”

Ongo hovered over Lebofield, scowling. “Plyeese ansvyer Dyevana.”

There were a lot of scars on Ongo’s cheeks. If Lebofield was counting them, they’d be here a while. He could be counting them and then relaying the information to someone through an earpiece or a neural interface. He looked like he was praying, though. Praying because he thought Ongo was going to hurt him. Or praying for Ongo to hit him and put him out of his misery.

If Lebofield tried to provoke Ongo, it would work. Ongo’s patience was as thin as his genetically-enhanced and steroid-fortified forearms were thick.

Maybe she forgot to mention, Greg’s corn-fed meatshields, Ongo and Bongo—those weren’t their real names. She didn’t really know their real names. Greg’s bouncers were mostly indistinguishable (as club meatshields should be). They rarely spoke. For the longest time, she simply called them SECURITY1 and SECURITY2. Recently, they’d taken to wearing t-shirts, ONGO and BONGO, after the band Ongo Bongo played at Greg’s club. The Os were styled like ghastly white pumpkins with a perverted grimace. The music was torturous. Some corporate chieftain’s AI convinced some other corporate chieftain’s AI to resurrect old Danny Elfman songs. They hired some up-and-coming producer (also an AI), bought up all the old tracks for nickels, and remade them for modern audiences—into nightmare music with guitar riffs like screaming goats. Imagine being fisted by a demon, except through your ears, and you have the nu-AI band Ongo Bongo. She didn’t know how many people Greg packed into his club, but the tickets went for twenty grand apiece. He said he made a killing. Twenty grand, for horror petting zoo noises set to G major pentatonic. It made her question her life choices.

Rae said all the middle schoolers were listening to Ongo Bongo, and that her constant complaints about the music were worse than the music itself. Thirty-nine was the new twenty-nine, she reminded Rae. Her eggs were still viable. People were living longer, having babies later. They should use the extra time to learn to play piano the way she did.

Okay, maybe she didn’t play piano so much as stomp it the way Ongo wanted to stomp Lebofield.

Getting back to her point about Ongo Bongo: Ongo and Bongo were as good as any names, because sociopathic AI-generated goat screeching was exactly what she expected Greg’s bouncers to play loudly as they maimed small animals. If Lebofield provoked Ongo, you’d have better luck stopping a hungry grizzly from raiding a camp refrigerator. Her side quest today was to keep Ongo from bludgeoning Lebofield to death.

Lebofield turned away from Ongo and stared beneath his wheelchair, lips still moving. Below, the radiation warnings nagged her. Her eggs were still viable when she walked through the door to this place. Maybe not now. She could feel her ovaries frying. She told herself that the stories of the molds that glowed like tritium were just that, stories, to drum up tourist interest. The rats were fat on the colony waste, that was all.

The stripper was right. They needed to get out of here.

Somewhere, high above, something clanged.

Lebofield put his right hand up and closed his eyes. “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: ‘Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last.’”

When Lebofield spoke, his raspy voice sounded like the lowest strings on a bass guitar. It had an odd chirp, like he’d swallowed a cricket. Given how bruised his lungs must be from getting spaced, she expected blood. None came.

“And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain,” he continued.

Lebofield gingerly took the oxygen mask from Ongo’s hand and then gulped.

“The fuck is he saying?” Eric asked.

“He’s been rambling like this since he woke up,” Greg replied.

“He must be drugged,” Eric said.

Bongo was searching the conveyors overhead for the noise, one hand on the grip of his gun. It was a full-size pistol, one of those big steel movie guns with a heavy frame that could double as a brick if you ran out of ammo. Its bullets could probably punch a hole in an aircraft carrier, if an aircraft carrier ever appeared through one of the massive HVAC ducts down here. Bigger game, like an android, was fifty-fifty, although a hot hole through a droid’s battery compartment would turn it into a flamethrower. The gun was impractical for most people. In Bongo’s hands, it looked like a subcompact.

She was more concerned with bombs than droids. One well-placed kamikaze drone in the ducts with a few pounds of explosives would destroy them all. She’d done it dozens of times, to groups of terrorists meeting just like they were meeting now. If she were in the Fed’s shoes, there would be no droids stumbling around the garbage conveyors and no humans getting shot at. A bomb. Simple and effective.

Behind Bongo, there was a stack of gray crates, each about the right size for rifles. She hoped they were unlocked.

If Bongo saw something overhead, he didn’t react. She searched, but saw nothing either. Bongo removed his hand from his pistol and looked at Greg, and then at her.

She decided the noise was probably trash falling off a conveyor, or maybe one of those monster rats scurrying for their daily dose of beta particles.

Still, she nodded to Bongo to go look.

The white-haired woman to Greg’s left folded her arms, watching Bongo walk away, as if ready to flee with him.

“What about an artifact?” She asked Greg.

Greg thumb-pointed at Ongo. “Ongo double bagged it in one of those faraday pouches, like you told me.”

“The artifact is still inside him,” White Hair said.

She wondered about the side effects of getting rapidly unplugged from an alien neural connection. Then she wondered if you could be unplugged from an alien neural connection.

“I didn’t catch your name.”

“I didn’t throw it.”

“This is Bianca,” Greg said. “She works at the hair salon just outside Lunar Foundries and is a part-time dancer at the club.”

White Hair grunted hello. Kate grunted back. The scientists on the nature server would be studying this rare ritual for decades.

“I brought her here as a witness.”

Bianca folded her arms. “A witness to what? A bunch of bickering idiots? He’s obviously talking to someone.” Bianca nodded towards Lebofield. “The artifact is still inside him.”

“There is no signal,” Greg’s new body pillow said.

“How do you know?” Eric asked.

Greg’s girlfriend tapped her tablet with one long, perfectly manicured fingernail painted yellow, the same color as the caution lights that should be going off in her brother’s head but obviously weren’t.

“Is that a good idea?” Eric asked, looking at Kate.

Greg practically batted the words from the air. “It’s a micro AI that runs locally. Saffi’s tablet is offline.”

Saffi. That was her name. Saffi would know the password to the gun crates behind Bongo. Greg usually kept it simple, so it was likely her name, Saffi. Probably spelled with an I and two Fs. Whew. Embarrassing sibling I-already-told-you-what-my-new-girlfriend’s-name-is diplomacy crisis during a gunfight averted.

Saffi smiled. If she was irritated with Greg for patronizing her, she didn’t show it. Kate wasn’t impressed with the dress and perfume and nail polish. She wasn’t impressed that Saffi didn’t stick up for herself either. No challenge. No fight. No excitement. On the plus side, she now knew the password to the gun crate, so she could shoot Saffi to prevent the future misery of listening to Greg whining that he didn’t know what went wrong.

“Jin set it up for us,” Saffi said. “It’s a passive scan. Plus, Greg and I have used this spot before. No signal.”

Jin, doing things behind her back, like setting Saffi and Greg up with a micro AI and running off to investigate a mining accident halfway across the moon. She knew exactly how she would punish him.

She looked around and didn’t see where Bongo went.

That they were still breathing probably meant Lebofield was muttering only to himself, not to anyone over an earpiece or through a neural interface. All the metal in the colony service tunnels blocked outside signals like a faraday cage. She figured the alien artifact was just technology they didn’t understand, but still subject to the laws of physics. She hoped.

If Lebofield had been talking to someone, it would be the Feds. He’d be trying to make a deal to save his skin. The seven of them would already be pink mist on the walls, and the rats would be slurping them up like six hundred kilos of human gore flavored ice cream. She didn’t think he was praying, either. She didn’t figure him for a religious man, although finding religion was a common side effect of getting double-crossed and nearly spaced to death.

“If there’s no signal,” Kate said, “there’s no harm in scanning for one. If there’s a signal, it doesn’t matter whether we scan for it or not. The Feds are probably on their way.”

Saffi looked at Greg. Greg said, “If there were droids or some other unusual signal, Jin’s program would pick it up.”

She wasn’t sure about that. Jin wouldn’t know how the artifact transmitted information.

“It’s inside him,” Bianca said.

Greg shook his head vigorously. “We scanned him.”

Kate flashed Greg a question. When he didn’t pick up on it, she asked Bianca, “Greg said you are a witness. A witness to what?”

Bianca looked away, her arms folded tightly, like one of those rope knots you see holding a boat in a windstorm. “I don’t know what I saw.”

Greg said, “She’s been inside Lunar Foundries since the Feds took over. She’s seen what they’re building.”

Bianca shot Greg an angry frown but didn’t say anything.

“How did you get inside?” Kate asked.

“They made me take lunch to the engineers.”

“Did you see Leyna?” Eric asked.

“She stands over the thing holding a gun like the head of security.”

“Is she okay?”

“I saw seven,” Lebofield interrupted, pointing a weak, shaking hand at Bianca. “And among them, one was dressed in a robe reaching down to her feet and with a golden sash around her chest. The hair on her head was white like wool, as white as snow, and her eyes were like blazing fire.”

“He’s nuts,” Eric said. “He’s not making any sense.”

“Revelation,” Rae said.

“Wanna share it with us?” Saffi said.

“Not a revelation. Revelation.”

Lebofield shook his finger at Bianca. “She wears the robe. Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready!”

“I ain’t no one’s fucking bride,” Bianca said, stepping out of the circle. “Good luck at wierdocon. I’m outta here.”

“You have to tell them what you saw first,” Greg said. He tried to grab Bianca’s wrist but she twisted it away.

“The only thing I have to do is steal a shuttle to L5 and find a new job.”

L5 was the fifth Earth-moon Lagrange point. It was a popular tourist destination, second only to the lunar colony. Nice restaurants, twenty-four-seven starlight views, fewer alien artifacts. Probably. Then again, maybe not.

“If they are here,” Rae said, folding her arms to match Bianca, “they are already on L5, or will be soon.”

Kate added, “Lebofield took off from Kuipers. I agree with Rae, L5 is probably not safe either.”

Bianca made a mocking, dismissive humph. “Mars then.”

“No. We have to fight them,” Saffi said. She said it a little soft and jiggly, like a bad actress in a B sci-fi movie, the kind where all the aliens have four breasts and motorboat you to death.

Bianca was right, the artifact was still affecting Lebofield somehow. She was also right, they were outnumbered. The smart move was to escape on a shuttle to Mars. Maybe that made them rats. But rats survived. So far, the box score was: stripper two, girlfriend zero. Greg might be dating the wrong woman.

“Bianca is right,” Kate said. “The safest option is Mars.”

Seven pairs of eyes looked at her. Eight if you count Lebofield, but he was looking through her with his bloody eyes.

“I am surprised to hear that coming from you,” Eric said.

“Me too,” Greg said. “What happened to outnumbered, outgunned, call in the Marines?”

“War is a dead man’s party,” Kate said. “To win, you have to be willing to do whatever it takes. You have to fight as though you are already dead.”

Outnumbered, outgunned, and fighting an enemy wielding some kind of alien technology. She didn’t add: the odds were better trying to hit double zero on a roulette wheel.

“That’s some kind of Marine Corps bullshit.” Saffi turned to Greg. “Is your sister always this grim?”

Little scalpels shot out of Rae’s eyes, scalpels that had flayed a lot of cadaver skin. “How many people have you killed today? Other than with that awful perfume?”

Saffi humphed, folded her arms, and looked away. That made three. Bianca, Rae, and now Saffi, all with folded arms. Bianca was a real trendsetter. Maybe that’s why she worked at a hair salon.

“I already killed one Agent today,” Rae said. “They have my son.” She turned to Kate. “We can’t run. They will simply come after us.”

“They kill witnesses,” Eric added. “Look what they did to Lebofield. He made a deal with them, and they double-crossed him anyway. He knew what was aboard Vega.” He looked at Bianca. “You’ve been inside, and seen whatever they are building.”

“Built. Not building.” Bianca opened her mouth to say something else, but then looked away.

“You really think we’re already dead?” Eric asked the circle, although he was looking at Kate.

“Or worse,” Rae said, “We end up like Lebofield here, unable to tell reality from simulation.”

Rae had to be wondering whether Axio had been hooked up to the artifact, and whether her son would end up like Lebofield. The little tawny flecks in her eyes were on fire, like little nuclear explosions in an ocean of green. There was no doubt what Rae wanted.

Mars was dusty, barren, and she didn’t want to live long enough to have kids anyway.

Greg thumb-pointed to the gray crates behind Bongo. “We have tesla rifles. We know this place better. We can wage a guerrilla war.”

She heard it again, clanking, as if something metal had fallen on the causeway that snaked through the service area.

Lebofield watched intently, darting and swiveling his head as they argued. His bloodshot eyes tracked the conversation.

She wondered. Unplugged from the artifact, could he really tell the difference between reality and simulation? Did it leave a permanent imprint? Did it reorganize his brain cells into a shortwave radio? Or maybe into something that could receive higher bandwidth signals, like phones? If it could leave an imprint, could it format and write to the human brain the way people wrote to hard drives? What would it store? An alien mind virus?

She looked at Lebofield. Frail. Bruised. Now in a wheelchair. He became a podcast star with hundreds of millions of followers and then graduated to bilking grandmas and grandpas and single moms out of billions because he knew how to milk an audience. She looked at him and wondered something else. Maybe this muttering and nonsense talk was just an act.

Bongo had been gone a long time. The hairs on her neck prickled. Something was coming. Whatever it was, it was bigger than radioactive rats.

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After a brief hiatus to work on some other projects, Devana Files returns to complete the story.

Stay tuned. After Devana files, we bring you Colony Crawler. Twenty-eight billionaires are kidnapped, locked underground, and forced to fight to the death on the moon. Only one can survive.

This is the Thirty-Eighth chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty-two chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

Viva la Revolution

APRIL 13, 2074

PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.

The door in front of them said SERVICE ONLY. Kate thought she’d have to kick it open. As she wound up for the punt, Rae touched her thumb onto the security pad. The lock beeped green, the solenoid clicked, and the door drifted open to the smell of hot metal and garbage. Kate thought it was either a miracle or a trap. She decided it was a miracle because it seemed like an unlikely place for a trap. It would be hard, if not impossible, for droids and robots to track them once they went through the door. Still, it made her nervous. They’d made it through the hospital without being seen, but now there would be a record of Rae’s thumbprint. She had the strange feeling she was being led here, or that she was being helped by some invisible force. Whether it was that or just a lucky break, they needed all the help they could get to survive the next forty-eight hours.

She stepped through, followed by Rae. Machines thrummed and chittered around them.

“This is…not what I expected,” Eric said as the door clicked closed behind him.

Kate didn’t know why they called them service tunnels. The colony’s service area was nothing like a tunnel—not even close. This door, like all the other doors labeled SERVICE ONLY, led to what looked like an industrial facility three or four stories high. The platform they walked on was an open metal catwalk two stories up, made of see-through aluminum grating and suspended by cables fastened to the ceiling two, maybe three stories overhead. It was as if they were hovering in mid-air. There were no railings or balusters to stop them from falling. The only handhold was a thin rope of wire. She wasn’t sure how much weight the rope would hold if she fell and tried to grab it. But then, everything on the moon could be deceiving because of the low gravity. A three-story fall on the moon was equivalent to a two-meter fall on Earth. It would hurt like hell, but probably wouldn’t be fatal.

The catwalk snaked around tanks and pipes and HVAC ducts, some so large you could drive a truck through. A maze of conveyors zig-zagged everywhere. Stickers and plaques warned of dangers like HIGH PRESSURE, HOT, and CAUSTIC. A lot of the pipes had round yellow stickers with maroon trefoils, warning of RADIATION HAZARD. Ceiling chutes dropped garbage and recycling into the river of waste flowing on the conveyors. The waste passed by banks of robots, which fished the stream, beeping and whirring as they identified and clutched and sorted. Metal went to one bin, glass another, and organics a third. All the bins hung by wires from ceiling cranes that ran on tracks that criss-crossed high above. When the metal and glass waste buckets were filled, the cranes hoisted and carried them to other conveyors to start the recycling process. When the organic and food waste buckets filled, the cranes slopped and sloshed them into giant round tanks labeled CAUSTIC to be dissolved into fertilizer.

Like she said, she didn’t know why they called them service tunnels. Maybe to conjure images of dark pits and orcs to keep people from coming down here and exploring.

“The metal blocks signals, like a Faraday cage,” she said, waving them forward. The grating clinked as she walked. “There is no way to send video or audio back. If an android or a drone comes through that door, it will look as if it dropped off the network, or its signal got jammed.”

She knew that eventually, they’d send people to search, if they hadn’t already, or figure out how to get a spider drone down here. They’d need to bring relays and signal boosters. By then, she hoped to have a plan.

“Can’t they hack these machines?”

“Last thing the engineers wanted was a terrorist group holding fifty thousand people hostage on a lunar outpost by threatening the power supply, so most of these machines are single-purpose micro AIs and self-contained. They are not networked.”

That was the theory, anyway. No need to mention that Jin had found flaws and plugged them. She could really use his help right now. She wished he’d stayed here. She wanted to be angry with him for going off half-cocked, but the Feds had tricked her, too. Lebofield was the bait. They wanted her to bring NYS Vega back to the colony and, with it, something aboard, something so dangerous that they were all better off if she’d let it drift into oblivion. She remembered the silvery sand everywhere and the coffins. It would have been disrespectful to open them, which made them the perfect place to hide drugs, or guns, or stolen art…or stolen ancient alien artifacts. Vega’s crew knew what they’d smuggled aboard. They knew, and they abandoned ship as soon as they could, jumping into a tiny life raft with barely enough oxygen. At the time, she didn’t understand why they’d rushed aboard a cramped escape pod and risked death. Now she did.

Vega’s crew probably made the smart choice. If it were up to her, she and Rae would make the same choice. Head straight for a hangar and steal a rocket to Mars. Axio was probably dead. Jin, too. Leyna…well, who knew what state she’d be in after a mind meld with the artifact? Leyna would probably wish she were dead.

She couldn’t even begin to imagine Rae’s pain and anger. Axio was a good kid, a lot like her at thirteen, filled with nervous energy and a sense of invulnerability. She’d taught him to shoot and fly and drive a lunar sand buggy. He had quick reflexes and was a quick learner. Soon he was crushing her at racing and teaching her how to lose to a damn teenager. In some ways, he was more her kid now than his own father, who was on Earth God knows where, wetting his dick.

But as much as she wanted revenge, the smart choice was to climb into a rocket and never look back. The artifact was like a super neural interface. Whatever was on Vega must activate it, or operate it, or enhance it somehow. Once the artifact was unleashed—and unleashing it was inevitable now—people would go to war. It was a chaos engine. There was no way to know what was in the mind of the godlike aliens that left it on Earth. Maybe they thought humans were galactic vermin and left it as bait for a trap. Maybe they left it as a practical joke (jokes on you, you're not alone in the universe, now go away and fuck off). Maybe it allowed an insane, alien AI to download itself into the human brain and possess it like a demon. One thing she was absolutely positive about: it was not a panacea or utopia device. The pointy heads at the Pentagon who studied the device she brought back from the moon four years ago were sure similar devices had been found and lost over millennia. Found and lost, usually after a civilization self-immolated or disappeared, which meant that over forty thousand years, the artifact had only amplified human suffering, not relieved it. Maybe aliens had appeared as gods, but new gods only brought new religions and new wars. People would fight over it, fight for it, fight against it, and fight with it.

No question, the best cards to play were dodge and flee.

Behind her, Rae was balancing herself on the catwalk with both hands on the thin rope. Steam rose from a pipe below.

Rae would never abandon the colony without Axio, and Kate would never abandon Rae. It was that simple. People were going to fight and die, with or without her. They had a better chance with her, although it was barely better than no chance at all. She had no idea how they would get Axio back, or Leyna, or Jin—if they were even alive. But they were depending on her to try. It was the three of them, plus whatever guns and muscle Greg could muster, against a platoon of homicidal Feds and their androids. It would have to be a guerrilla war. She’d fought a lot of guerrilla wars, but she was always on the other side.

“Check those out.” Eric halted, pointing below them into a puddle of condensed steam. He was a big, muscular guy, but he looked like he’d seen a monster.

She followed his gaze. She could hear an odd squealing on the floor beneath them. A dollop of garbage that looked like someone’s leftover chili fell off a conveyor, sploshed on a fat yellow pipe with a radiation sticker, and dribbled to the floor. Then, she saw what he was pointing at.

Splashing and squeaking in the water and rushing to the disgusting brown spot, rats. Big, enormous, rats. She tried not to react, but without question, they were the biggest rats she’d ever seen. They were deep black, like coal, and so big that at first, her brain didn’t even register them as rats. They had to be the size of small cats.

“They’re just rats,” Kate said, trying to sound casual.

“I’ve seen rats in New York. Those are not normal-sized rats.”

Colonists were always bringing their pets. The pets were always getting lost. She’d taken a report from a family whose kid had lost a blue-ribbon breeding pair of gerbils in the walls. She’d sent spider drones to search, but unsurprisingly, they always vanished.

“I’ve read about rats that big in the Philippines.” She watched them squealing greedily as they lapped up the chili oozing out of the waste conveyor. She shuddered, revolted.

“Or maybe they’re regular rats that mutated.”

According to lore, the colony builders had skimped on radiation shielding. The pharma companies conspired with the space companies to push the radiation vaccine on people because it was a lot cheaper to insert a couple of extra DNA-repair genes and wait two weeks for the human body to work its magic than to waste resources building and hoisting gamma ray and neutron barriers. Animals didn’t get the radiation shot. So, the stories went, radioactive monsters bred down here. Phosphorescent molds that would burn flesh. Cockroaches that had so many legs they looked like centipedes. Snakes that had heads at both ends. Gerbil babies that mutated into mongoose-sized animals with canine teeth and glowing red eyes. Colony bartenders loved to tell stories. The mold ate the gamma rays. The roaches ate the mold. The snakes ate the roaches. And then, the gerbils ate the snakes. The tourists—well, the tourists, they ate it all up. The bigger the story, the better the bartender’s tip. There were even outfits that specialized in colony cryptid walking tours and radioactive monster pub crawls.

The maroon-on-yellow radiation warnings were as pervasive as the fetid smell. It was true, people and animals disappeared down here. But it was amply dangerous without invoking glowing radioactive kaiju. The machines surrounding them that picked and sorted garbage happily purred, so long as they stayed out of the way. If they got too close, there would be an angry beep to drive them off. If they ignored the beeps, stray limbs would be mistaken for garbage and get ruthlessly chopped and sent to a shredder to become fertilizer. Anything that went into those tanks labeled CAUSTIC got dissolved into soap and nutrient solution. There were a thousand ways people could melt down here and she refused to believe the rats were mutants.

“I doubt it. These are probably just normal rats that got fat because they eat a lot of garbage.”

“Chernobyl,” Rae finally chimed in. “The frogs evolved extra melanin. To protect them from radiation.”

“Thank you,” Eric said. “Ginormous coal black mutated rats.”

“The rats look fine. Plus, we’ve all had the radiation vaccine and a booster. I doubt we’ll get much more radiation exposure than a trip to Earth and back.”

“Radiation exposure is cumulative,” Rae said, “and doesn’t protect your eggs. The vaccine only protects against chronic exposure. Acute exposure can overwhelm your body’s ability to rebuild.”

There was a first aid box back at the door where they came in. It would have emergency radiation badges.

What looked like a bowl of leftover ramen spilled over the side of the garbage conveyor. Noodles hung over the edge and then plopped right in the middle of the swarm of rats, along with a hail of uneaten meat. They mobbed it, shrieking loudly and fighting.

They couldn’t go back. An agent might come through the door. She was less worried about the Feds right now, though, than falling off the platform. It wouldn’t be fatal, but the rats would probably mistake them for food. She shivered. She had no desire to die getting eaten by a horde of oversized rodents.

Anyway, the radiation badges would either prove everything down here was totally safe, or that they were all totally cooked, and it didn’t matter anyway.

“You know, you really need to work on your motivational speeches,” she said to Rae.

“I’m the medical examiner.”

“What does that mean?”

“I butcher dead people for a living. Sometimes I talk to them. If you have a team of undead soccer moms, I might be able to coax them to do your bidding.”

Kate laughed. “Yeah, ok. The rats look fine. Acute radiation poisoning would kill them, too. Let’s move quickly.”

Her boots clanked on the metal platform. The rats stopped squeaking and stared at them, sniffing the air, as if trying to decide whether they were friend, or foe, or food.

“I hope your brother brought shotguns,” Eric said, exchanging glares with the rats sniffing him from below.

“Just hold on and watch your step.”

Greg met them in a section where the vines of ductwork and pipes opened to an almost cavernous void. Pipes criss-crossed like monkey bars. It was clean, free of garbage and recycling conveyors. And thankfully, free of the rats, too.

“I hope everyone is up to date on their radiation vaccine,” Greg smiled, arms extended.

“The rats aren’t,” Eric said.

There were two women on either side of Greg, neither of whom she’d met. There were two big men flanking the women who looked corn-fed, genetically modified, and fresh off the steroid farm. Both men had tight black shirts with white letters. One said ONGO. The other said BONGO.

Greg and his posse stood in a half circle around a man in a wheelchair, who was coughing and sucking oxygen from a mask. A man she recognized, but only barely.

The woman to Greg’s right smiled. She wore a white blouse, smart black pants, and black flats. She held a very official-looking tablet like a clipboard. Kate detected perfume, the same perfume she’d smelled on Greg at the club. This was his bookkeeper. What was her name? Sophie? Sadie? Sarah? So, they must be seeing each other. Greg’s girlfriends came and went. She rarely remembered their names. He must be serious about this one to bring her to a meeting. Serious or seriously stupid. Letting someone into your bed was one thing. Letting them into your books and business dealings was entirely different. Nothing says trust like giving someone the keys to your bank account. She hoped this one wasn’t crazy like the last one. Who was she kidding? Crazy was his type. Hers, too. It was practically a family pastime.

Wheelchair man gasped and murmured into his mask.

“Jesus,” Eric said as they pulled up and closed the circle. “The fuck happened to him?”

“Not my doing. It was like you predicted, Katie.”

“I always hate to be proven right.”

Wheelchair man’s face was bruised, almost black. His eyes were swollen and hemorrhaged. Take a vacuum cleaner to your skin, hold it until the capillaries burst and the blood underneath turns purple-black; that’s what his skin looked like. If it wasn’t for the signature curly black hair, now partly singed, she wouldn’t recognize him.

“My boys were watching him. We got to him right away.”

“Maybe een aeerlock seexty syeconds,” Ongo added. He spoke in an Eastern European, maybe Polish, accent.

“Can he speak?”

Ongo stepped forward and lifted the oxygen mask from Lebofield’s mouth. “Say gyello, Frank.”

“I was dead, and now look, I am alive forever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades!” Lebofield coughed and inhaled oxygen from his mask.

“That’s right, the Feds tried to space you. Lucky for you, Ongo was there. Now…ready to tell us what was aboard Vega?”

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This is the Thirty-Seventh chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

Fall from Grace

APRIL 13, 2074

LUNAR SURFACE. LPS: UNKNOWN

Outside the door, spider drones chittered past. Jin closed it, looking back at the unconscious form of Tiahna tied up on the bed.

“How long until she wakes up?”

He didn’t know where to direct the question—to the android hovering over him, or the wall monitor? Until now, he hadn’t appreciated how much talking to an AI was like talking to a ghost. It could interface with him anywhere—through this android or a different one, through a spider drone, through the monitor on the wall, even through the keypad on the door lock. Most of the time, they were limited to a few interfaces, like a tablet or the hub in their office. But that was by design. There was no real reason for it, other than maybe to protect his sanity.

“Ten-fifteen minutes. I told you no big hero stuff,” the android answered. “So whatever you are thinking, don’t.”

He didn’t have ten minutes.

“Just small hero stuff. She has information in that wet brain of hers, and we need it.”

“I am already searching the temple files for Axio. There are seven candidates with default avatars. Six are inactive. The seventh, number 140460, is marked Training. If that’s Axio, it does not say where they plan to hold him. I will keep looking.”

“She’ll know where he is.”

He searched her scrubs and came up with an unlabeled vial of clear liquid and a syringe. The vial was full. He figured there had to be a way to counteract the sedative, and that’s what was in the vial. They had used some kind of antidote or anti-sedative or whatever the pharmabots called it to yank him back from the brink of death after he was accidentally darted twice. He figured she’d be carrying it because they were being extra cautious. They didn’t want to kill him. Not yet, anyway.

He poked the needle into the vial and suctioned. The liquid looked and ran like water. If it were, injecting her with it would do nothing. He had no idea what the dosage was, so he filled the syringe all the way. He didn’t know what the consequences were of overdosing on an anti-sedative, either. But it wasn’t a very big syringe, so she’d probably be fine. There was also the possibility that the vial contained sedative meant for him. That would mean giving it to her might kill her. He swore under his breath. Weren’t they supposed to label vials or something?

He pulled the needle out, flicked the syringe, and pushed a little of the liquid out to remove any air bubbles.

“Live by the needle, die by the needle,” he muttered, thrusting the needle into her neck and thumbing the plunger.

He decided to only give her half a syringeful. He didn’t know why. Hedging his bets, he supposed. He removed the needle from her neck, capped it, and pocketed it along with the vial.

The black tablet on her chest slowly rose and fell with her shallow breathing.

He grabbed the artifact from the android’s grasp. This was a really stupid plan. “You said you think you can possess one of the humans wearing an artifact?”

“I said it’s like no controller interface in my database. I’d let you know when I figured it out.”

He draped the artifact around Tiahna’s neck. This was a crazy, stupid plan. But he was desperate. “Here’s our test subject, so start figuring it out.”

Tiahna’s eyes moved. She woke, eyes darting around. Before she could scream, his hand was clamped on her mouth. She struggled, trying to free herself from the bed straps, but halted when her eyes settled on the black cube around her neck.

“Tell me what I want, and I will let you ascend.”

She nodded, red-faced and eyes bulging. He cautiously removed his hand.

He held up her tablet. He messaged the spider drone through his neuroface.

Jin: Can you get a picture of Axio on this tablet?

The spider drone chirped in his neuroface.

Jin-avatar: This plan isn’t going to work. The interface on the artifact has no tooltips. I don’t understand any of these function calls.

Jin: Shut up and get me a picture of Axio.

Jin-avatar: There is no picture of Axio in here, I told you.

Jin: You’re an AI. Do some AI shit. Draw it from memory if you have to.

The tablet blinked on, showing a selfie of Tiahna on the beach on the lockscreen. Despite the loud crack on the floor, it appeared that it still worked. He pressed her thumb to it. It unlocked, and a spinny wheel appeared. After a moment, an image of Axio appeared. He turned it to show her.

“Have you seen him?”

“That’s Jayla’s candidate. We never—”

“Do you know where they’re holding him?”

“I do but—”

“Cooperate, and I will let you ascend. Don’t cooperate, I will use this thing to erase your brain.” He pointed to the cube around her neck.

“You can’t—”

“If it can download data, it can upload data. I will turn you into a babbling carrot.”

Jin-avatar: I have no idea whether I can do that or not.

Jin: Try something simple. Send her a picture through the artifact.

Jin-avatar: If I try sending her an image, I might electrocute her. Or boil her brain. Or it might translate it to some kind of weird alien porn.

Jin: Two of those things I can live with. Just do it.

He stepped back. He didn’t know what was going to happen. But the artifact was glowing blue, and he didn’t want to get zapped.

Tiahna suddenly gasped. Her mouth opened like a largemouth bass and her eyes blinked rapidly.

Jin-avatar: I just tried sending a picture of Axio through the artifact.

Jin: Did it work?

Jin-avatar: How should I know? Maybe I just deleted her childhood memories. Or maybe I just gave her an orgasm. I suggest asking her.

If he asked her, ‘Did you just see Axio or weird alien porn in your brain?’ She’d guess they were just bluffing and didn’t really know how to use the artifact.

He glared at her and repeated his question. “Have you seen him?”

She looked at him, at the android, at the spider drone on his shoulder, and then back at him. After a moment, she composed herself and nodded. “I don’t know the exact room. But I can take you there.”

“Just tell me where he is.”

“I will take you to the boy. But then you will take me back to the colony.”

Jin-avatar: We can’t take her. I told you we don’t have enough seats.

Jin: You said it was a three-seater. Find me a way to hide from the guards.

Jin-avatar: I already have a plan for that.

“We don’t have the space,” he said.

“If you go by the registry, you probably think Escape Velocity is the fastest ship in the bay. You’ll want to take Outer Rim instead.”

“What’s wrong with Escape Velocity?”

“You’ll see.”

Jin: Look up Outer Rim.

Jin-avatar: On it.

“FBI Special Agent Barret Anders…you said he smuggled something to the colony. What was it?”

“He pledged thirty million dollars to the temple. I ascended his Ra.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“I asked myself, where does an FBI Agent get thirty million dollars?”

“It’s the bounty on my boss’s head. And five minutes ago, you were ok with his genocidal plan.”

“Oh, you won’t stop him. Of that I am sure.” She looked away. “They are not going to let me ascend, are they? Not now that you’ve corrupted me.”

His ex-girlfriend June would always complain after her makeup parties that she didn’t sell enough.

“I hate to be the one to break it to you, but they were never going to let you ascend. Not unless you came up with the kind of simoleons Anders did. Cults, churches, multi-level marketing scams, they’re all the same. You buy your way to grace.”

“But…they are real. I’ve seen what they are digging up down there.”

“Once they start asking you for money, that’s usually about the time it stops being about the truth. Once they start putting up barriers to your salvation, and those barriers involve money, well, they’re just a consumer product like everything else.”

Jin: What’s below the basement?

Jin-avatar: There are floors and access stairs, but no cameras, so I can’t see anything. All the files are encrypted. Whatever it is, it’s as big as the temple itself.

“I don’t want to die here.” He felt her hand grasp his.

Dammit, somehow she’d wiggled free of one of the straps. He didn’t have time to fix it. All the others looked secure.

“Tell me what Anders is planning, maybe I can help you.”

“Take me with you, then I’ll tell you.”

Jin-avatar: We don’t have time for this. This is a trap. The worst kind, too. A boring one. She’s stalling and will try to talk you to death. We need to go.

Jin: Did you find the Outer Rim?

Jin-avatar: Yes. But Escape Velocity is a faster ship.

Jin: Can you fuel Outer Rim and put it on standby?

Jin-avatar: I already did.

He pulled his hand away. “Tell me where Axio is. I will come back for you.”

“You won’t. You’ll leave me here to die. Probably by dehydration, because no one will look in this room. I will become a withered—”

“Have a nice life.” His avatar was right; she was stalling and wasting his time. He started for the door.

Jin-avatar: I’ve hacked the ID process. You are invisible to the system. Your face will register as one of Anders’s processes.

Jin: What about the rifle?

Jin-avatar: The rifle shows up as a rifle. He carries one, so it won’t flag anything. I checked it out in his name.

Jin: Can you find out what he’s doing and where he is? Maybe he’s with Axio.

Jin-avatar: He has eight processes going, all with unique encryption and access levels. I’d have to hack one of those, or maybe all of them. He’d be alerted to our presence.

Jin sighed. He opened the door and peeked outside. This was not going to be easy. Traipsing through the hall without cover or concealment was very risky. What he needed was a good armored mech suit. What he had was a blue tunic and sandals.

The immediate hallway was clear in both directions.

“Wait—” Tiahna called out when his foot was out the door. “Make a right and then another right at the intersection. Three passages down, make a left, and then a right, and follow the passage around the corner to the second passage on the left. That’s where we boot the new candidates like Axio.”

He wondered whether he would remember all that. “If you’re lying, you’ll wish I would erase your mind.”

Jin-avatar: Don’t worry, I recorded all that. You’re welcome. You should sedate her again before you leave.

Jin: We might need to come back and ask her more questions. Plus, I am not sure it will work now that I gave her the antidote. Can you conjure a second android?

Jin-avatar: If I possess a second android, the system will notice the bandwidth drain.

Jin: Then we split up. Have the android go down to the sub-basement and investigate. I want to know what they are digging up. Have it meet me back at the spaceport.

“I am not lying. You’ll see,” she said as he stepped into the hall.

The android followed him out, shuffling left. He went right, rifle at high ready.

He flattened himself against the left side of the passageway at the junction, while watching the hall to the right. There was a cool breeze coming from a vent above him. The air smelled clean, like the ozone they pump into the casino. Somewhere, he heard the far-off clicks of spider drones on stone tile.

He checked the corner behind him before he stepped into the hall and then scurried right. His sandals flip-flopped on the tile, making more noise than he wanted. There were a lot of doors in these halls, with plaques numbering them like a hospital.

He jigged left, through a short passage, then turned right again, always careful, checking his corners and watching for traffic.

Around the corner and halfway down the hall, he passed a door labeled SECURITY ONLY, and then halted and backed up. It was identical to the security room door he’d seen before (was that a dream, or was it real?). He couldn’t remember the numbers on the doors from his dream, if that’s what it was. There was no sign he’d picked the lock. Had he been here? It was hard to say. Like a corn maze, all the halls looked the same, but all the halls looked different, too.

Before he could message his avatar, the security panel blinked green. Maybe a side effect of the system associating him with Anders: it unlocked doors.

The lights came on when he pushed through the door. This room was similar to the one he’d seen before, with one exception. It had two levels of metal cabinets around the walls, all large enough to hold EVA suits or other large machines, and all padlocked like before. On each side, it had a rolling triangular staircase to reach the second level. There was a gun safe on the far wall. Intact. Not the one he’d smashed (or they fixed it). Like the one he’d broken into, this one held enough rifles to arm a platoon.

The key difference between this room and the one he’d been in before: the standing army of androids in the middle of the floor. Twelve abreast and at least that many deep. As robots went, androids were the least efficient of all the war machines. Their two-legged humanoid form made them easy to destabilize. Most animals walked on four legs for a reason. Three points of contact provided stability; the fourth was redundancy. These models carried rifles and tranq guns like humans and had to equip body armor like humans. Tanks with miniguns were more efficient killing machines, or armored spider drones with twin 360-degree gun turrets. While an army of androids was very good at killing people, they were more designed for intimidation and submission. Or, they could put down their body armor and rifles and try to blend in for surveillance, as if a two-meter stack of silicone rubber and metal could ever really fit in.

There were one hundred and fifty androids. That was a lot of intimidation. If they had more rooms like this, and he guessed they did, they had enough androids to police a small city.

Fortunately, these looked like they were powered down. He closed the door, trying to act casually, and audibly exhaled when the lock clicked.

He continued down the hall, coming to a short passage on his left. He flattened himself against the wall and glanced around the corner.

Stationed ten meters down the hall, just beyond a T-junction to another passage, two androids, both holding rifles. Shit.

Jin: I have two androids here. Armed. They are guarding a door. I think it’s Axio’s door.

Jin-avatar: They should recognize you as Anders.

Jin: I don’t like the word should. What does that mean?

Jin-avatar: Nothing is ever one hundred percent. None of Anders’s processes are on this floor right now, except for you. There is a ninety-seven percent probability they will recognize you as Anders. Just walk in.

Logically, he knew he was essentially invisible to the system. He could just walk up and walk by. And those were great odds. His limbic system, however, was overreacting to the three percent chance he’d get riddled with holes the size of basketballs from those 50 caliber coilgun rifles. His adrenal glands were dumping, his heart racing, and he was sweating.

Jin: Can we do better?

Jin-avatar: You could try shooting the guards, but then they’d detect you weren’t Anders. Anyway, the humans will still see you normally and recognize that you’re not Anders. So stay away from them.

He wasn’t invisible to the humans. Fuck.

He took a deep breath. Shoulders square, head high, and rifle at low ready, he sauntered towards the robot guards. They didn’t look at him or react at all until he was near the door. Then they parted to let him through. Stepping between them didn’t relieve his anxiety. Now he was trapped. Goosebumps shot down his neck and spine.

The room was a larger version of the one he’d awoke in. Lavender walls, sparse furniture with rounded edges, a table, and a bench-style chair. Axio was in bed, sedated and restrained. He had an oxygen mask and an IV. The artifact dangled around his neck. His breathing was slow and shallow. His hand felt cold.

Jin unbuckled the restraints and then removed the oxygen mask, pulling it over Axio’s limp head. The artifact wasn’t glowing blue. He removed it and pocketed it. Next, he gently removed the IV. Blood dribbled, but stopped quickly. He pulled out the vial of anti-sedative and the half-full syringe, hoping that Tiahna didn’t have any diseases. He injected Axio. It was unsanitary as hell. What choice did he have? There was nothing in the room to use to clean the needle, nor any new syringes, and he damn well wasn’t going to alert a nurse.

He didn’t wait for Axio to wake up. He bent forward, tossed Axio over his left shoulder, and pivoted for the door.

Outside, the robot guards looked at him, but again didn’t react. He walked straight on without offering any explanation. He figured Anders wouldn’t give one, so he shouldn’t either. The guards didn’t follow. He pulled his rifle stock into a low-ready position. He'd have to aim one-handed.

Jin: I have Axio. Headed for the spaceport.

He made a left, deciding not to go back the way he came, and then a quick right. In his peripheral vision, he saw the blur of blue scrubs. He immediately ducked into a passage on the right. At the end of that passage, he turned right again, speeding towards a stairwell door marked EXIT.

Jin: I think I’ve been spotted.

Axio started to mumble. He was waking up. Then he heard the clicks of spider drones behind him and robot footfalls.

He started jogging for the stairwell.

Jin-avatar: You have. Run.

You try running with a sixty-kilogram sack on one shoulder and a coilgun in the other. He didn’t respond. The sarcasm would be lost on an AI.

Halfway through the stairwell door, he heard a crack and felt the hot sting of metal spall on his forearms. He slammed the door shut. The thin walls didn’t protect him from the bullets. He scrambled up the stairs three at a time, dancing around the sparks and pops of slugs ricocheting off the steps.

Jin: Shooting at me!

And missing. Androids never miss.

Jin-avatar: I put a virus in their ballistic algorithm, but they are already trying to scrub it out.

They’d send humans soon, too. Humans who were immune to computer viruses.

He swiveled at the top of the landing in time to see two androids shoving through the door, single file. He didn’t even try to aim. His rifle cracked three times. The first slug hit the front android in the head. It piled up limply in the doorway. The second android stumbled over the heap and fell into his second shot. It hit the droid in its chest battery pack, sending showers of flames into the stairwell. It collapsed forward on top of the first android. The third slug missed, ricocheting off the stone floor beyond the threshold.

Above him, he could hear clicking and chittering. Spider drones. He was surrounded and totally fucked. But to stand still or go down meant death, so he climbed as fast as he could. At the next level, he emptied a few rounds into the stairwell door, not waiting to see what might come through. He heard something heavy collapse behind the door. He didn’t know whether it was android or human, but he didn’t care. He kept scrambling up the stairs two and sometimes three at a time, chest heaving, lungs burning, thighs aching. Lunar gravity may have been one-sixth Earth gravity, but he still felt the force of running while being shot at.

Two more flights up, something hammered Jin’s kidneys. He thought he’d been shot. Then he realized Axio was kicking him.

“Hey! Put me down!”

“If I put you down your Mom will be pissed at me. We’ll both wish those androids had killed us.”

“I can run just as fast as you.”

“You were sedated—”

Jin froze. The stairwell door creaked open one floor up. The clicking and chittering became white noise, like a mob of crabs over rocks or a massive waterfall.

And then he saw the swarm. There had to be hundreds, maybe thousands, of spider drones pouring over the stairs like a horde of scorpions.

They couldn’t bite or sting. But they could worm over him and try to immobilize him, or climb into his mouth and try to suffocate him.

He couldn’t go back down. But if he went up, he needed to go through them.

Axio took advantage of Jin’s hesitation and wiggled himself free. He landed on his feet and then ran through the swarm, crunching them underfoot. Their crushed metal carapaces disappeared under the swarm.

Amazingly, they didn’t attack him. Instead, the swarm parted, like a river around a rock. It passed them both harmlessly. What the hell?

Jin: Is that your swarm we just stepped through?

Jin-avatar: Good news. There are three androids at the spaceport entrance.

One flight below, the swarm climbed all over itself, becoming a giant undulating ocean of scorpion drones, forming a barrier. It was absolutely terrifying. He was glad he didn’t have to fight that.

Jin: You didn’t answer my question. And how is that good news?

Jin-avatar: Because there aren’t a hundred and thirty of them, and astonishingly, they haven’t deactivated my ballistic virus yet. I am just that good.

Axio was going to run headlong into the androids guarding the spaceport.

“Axio! Get behind me!” He shouted up the stairs, but Axio was already one flight up, racing through the stairwell door and…

He heard the crack of rifles. There were six shots in quick succession, and then thuds. He clambered the final flight, panting, and then pushed through the door. He halted, looking left and right. Sweat stung his eyes. It was a careless entrance. He forgot to check and ready his rifle, but he didn’t care. He’d rather die in a hail of bullets than explain to Rae that he’d rescued Axio only to have him die at the spaceport because he lost control and stupidly froze at the wrong time.

Despite his carelessness, the hallway was clear. To his right, it was empty and ended in another stairwell. To his left, there were three androids piled up on the floor. One was spouting flames from its chest.

Axio stood over the androids, grinning, holding one of their coilgun rifles. He knew there was no way Axio had downed them by himself, but he’d have to get the full story later.

Jin jogged towards the metal carnage, unsure how he felt about seeing a baby-faced thirteen-year-old with peach fuzz, a rifle at low ready, holding it the way Devana taught him, and standing over scorched androids. It reminded him of the young boys that militant groups recruited. He’d had to shoot them on deployment. He had no choice: it was kill or be killed. Thirteen years old was old enough to aim a rifle true, but too young to understand the consequences of taking life. For now, at least, it was only machines. Axio wouldn’t have nightmares about those.

Behind him, the stairwell door slammed open. Axio raised his rifle. It cracked twice. Jin ducked. The bullets whizzed over his head. He swiveled to see an android aflame and crumpling to the ground. Another android stepped through. Jin fired, missing. Axio’s rifle cracked again, and the android fell into a mangled heap of silicone rubber and metal.

Jin caught up to Axio in the doorway. “Good shooting.”

“Nah. Connect the red dot to your neural interface. Can’t miss.”

Shit. You could do that with these rifles? Why didn’t he think of that? He examined the rifle and the red dot on top. It wasn’t obvious how to connect to it. He decided he didn’t want to fool around and break it in the middle of a fight.

The spaceport hangar had five ships. The first one was Escape Velocity. It took him only half a second to see that they were absolutely not taking it.

Jin: We are taking Outer Rim.

Jin-avatar: What’s wrong with Escape Velocity?

What wasn’t wrong with it? He was in a blue tunic. Axio was in scrubs. They had no pressure suits, and there was no way they could fly it.

Escape Velocity looked like a stubby cigar-shaped tube resting horizontally, supported at both ends by thin A-frame ladders. They’d have to climb one of the ladders and walk across the narrow walkway at the top of the tube, which looked precarious as hell. In the middle, there was an extra-long banana seat with a few saddlebags in the back. A banana seat on top of a booster rocket. That’s all it was. It was more dangerous than a circus contraption. He didn’t even see any seat belts. The idea of them riding it three thousand kilometers was ridiculous.

Jin: It’s a fucking space motorcycle. I hope there are pressure suits aboard Outer Rim.

Jin sprinted through the hangar. Axio followed. Outer Rim was a small ship, not much bigger than a box truck, with three elongated chemical engines, one on top and two on the side. The rear door swung up, like the liftgate on a suburban SUV, opening to a short ramp.

Shit. He skidded to a halt, shouting, “NO!”

“I told you, you are taking me with you.”

Tiahna stood in the cargo area, the right half of her hair singed, in sooty blue scrubs, and holding a rifle pointed at her feet.

Jin was speechless. His jaw might have been on the floor. Axio skidded to a halt beside him, his rifle aimed at her.

“If it weren’t for me,” she said, “those three at the door would have unalived your precious cargo.” She chin-nodded towards Axio.

Jin put his hand on Axio’s rifle and pushed it down.

The decision was made for him as a bullet whizzed by his ear and metal sparked to his right. He didn’t have time for an argument. They all scurried aboard. Jin shouted for Axio to drive. He yanked the rifle from Tiahna’s grasp. He cleared it, chucking it aside but pocketing the ammo. He would take her, but he wouldn’t risk being shot in the back of the head. She pouted and huffed, but ultimately didn’t try to retrieve her gun, instead pivoting to pull a pressure suit off the wall.

A column of androids filed through the hangar entrance, marching towards them. He stood at the liftgate, rifle barking at the onslaught. He hit as many as he missed, slowing them but not stopping them. Sparks cascaded from the metal all around him. It felt like an endless mob of silicone rubber zombies pouring through the door. A swarm of spider drones crawled through the door and attacked the androids at the rear.

The engines whined, powering up. Was his avatar’s android coming, as promised?

Jin: We are leaving. With or without you.

Jin-avatar: Ten seconds.

The spaceport klaxon sounded. The red warning light on the ceiling flashed. The android at the front of the column swiveled and started mowing down the others. Flames shot in the air as battery pack after battery pack exploded. An oily column of smoke drifted towards the ceiling. The door closed, and the androids stopped filing through. He heard the solenoids clunk, sealing them in, and then the whirring of fans and the hiss of air evacuating the hangar. The forward android that had been mowing down the others dropped its rifle, turned, and ran towards him.

Jin-avatar: Don’t shoot. That’s mine.

It ducked as it scampered aboard. A black button on the wall closed the liftgate. It groaned shut.

He used the nylon ceiling loops to pull himself through the cabin and into the copilot’s chair. The rifle rested on his knees. He didn’t bother with the restraints. Tiahna had already slid into a pressure suit and was clicking her helmet sealed. Axio wasn’t wearing a pressure suit. He only had an emergency oxygen mask on. Outside the cockpit window, the hangar door was halfway up, opening to the obsidian darkness of the lunar surface. The flashing red siren reflected off the thick glass.

All the gauges were green. Fuel good. Hydraulics good. Volts nominal. Interior pressure stable, at one atmosphere. He wondered whether they’d been hit. If they were, it didn’t show on the control panel.

“Buckle up,” Axio said. “I don’t do countdowns.”

Axio was Rae’s kid. But he heard a lot of Devana’s influence in those words.

He strapped in, donning his emergency oxygen mask. He’d get in the pressure suit later. When the hangar door was three-fourths open, Axio started the ignition sequence.

He heard a loud bang behind him. A gauge blinked yellow, and then back to green. A spiderweb grew on the hangar door. They were still shooting. Hopefully, they were still missing, too.

Thrust drove him into the seat, startling him. The chemical engines were a dull roar outside the ship. The hangar's massive plate glass door rushed straight at them. They were going to crash into it.

They cleared it by centimeters. Outside the cockpit, the sky was aniline black and starless.

“Jesus,” he said. “You fly like your stepmother.”

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This is the Thirty-Sixth chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

Breakout

APRIL 13, 2074

LUNAR SURFACE. LPS: UNKNOWN

“Aren’t you a little short for an android?” Jin asked the hulk of silicone rubber and metal staring back at him. “Let me guess, you’re here to rescue me.”

With a pale blue tunic and brown sandals in one hand and handcuffs in the other, the plan was easy to guess. The android would try to shepherd him out disguised as a prisoner.

There was no way it was going to work. No one would believe it. Not without wearing the artifact Tiahna left on the table and risking it taking control, and there was no way he was going to agree to that. Still, as much as he hated it, he racked his brain, and he couldn’t think of a better idea. The powers that be weren’t going to just open the spaceport and let him walk out. He could try to shoot his way through the temple, but this wasn’t a video game. In real life, there were no health potions to cure the basketball-sized holes a fifty-caliber coilgun would leave in his chest.

“I hacked the fastest ship in the registry,” his avatar said. “Three-seater, which will barely fit you and your ego, so don’t get any big hero ideas. You can’t save ‘em all. I’m not even sure you can save yourself.”

Jin-the-avatar directed its voice from the monitor on the wall. It didn’t sound anything like the voice in his head, although technically that’s exactly what it was. It was probably a perfect voice print, trained on thousands of hours of audio. It still made him cringe.

“What happened to my ship?”

“Not fast enough. Just get dressed, Loverboy. Temptress is returning soon. I can track the machines in this place, but not the humans.”

The hospital room felt cramped, like a prison cell. The android stood between him and freedom. It was big and mean-looking, like a hairless sasquatch, and might be luring him into a trap. For a split second, he considered bolting. The android was probably four times his mass, but he was confident that in one-sixth lunar gravity, he could crouch and chop tackle it. Lower his shoulder, wrap his arms around its thighs, while exploding his legs to drive it to the ground. The trick would be getting up after and making it to the door, which didn’t seem likely.

The cornered animal inside him wanted to fight and run. But he’d never make it past the door, and even if he did, he’d never outrun its dart gun and rifle.

The avatar on the monitor—him, except in low resolution—was somehow even more frightening than the android. They stole him and…what? Made him into a chatbot? How could he trust it?

He snatched the clothes from the android’s grasp. “What are you?”

“I am you. Sort of. I’d say ‘in the flesh,’ but well…here we are.”

“You’ve been watching me the whole time?”

“Not like I’m violating your privacy. I am you after all.”

“Are you…sentient?” Jin asked as he removed his gown.

“I passed the Voight-Kampff test.”

A fake test from a classic sci-fi movie. “I am serious.”

“Well, I’ve been a little busy to take tests. Finding my way around this god forsaken place, disabling security, and hacking a ship so you can escape. Oh, and finding you some pants.”

“These aren’t pants. And no underwear?”

“That outfit has been voted Most Likely to Fit in with the Temple Crazies. To answer your question, I am more like a facet of you. They built me from memories they could grab off social media or from your private files, plus whatever else you told them under distillation.”

Distillation: a fancy euphemism for drug-enhanced interrogation using an alien artifact to scan your brain and steal your soul. Was this human progress? Thought theft?

“So you are not me. You’re a chatbot.”

The android, so far silent, spoke in FBI Special Agent Anders’s baritone voice: “Temple poltergeist, at your service.” The android grinned.

Startled, Jin jumped back, nearly falling over the bed. “Jesus!”

“Fun, huh? Never call me a chatbot. It’s an ugly term.”

Jin’s heart was pounding in his chest. He needed a moment to understand what’d just happened. “So, you can possess any of the androids?”

“It’s not that simple. I need to keep my process small so the system doesn’t notice me. If I possess a machine, I risk the system noticing. Every machine I possess geometrically increases our risk of getting caught.”

“What about the artifact?”

“I think I can possess one of the humans wearing an artifact. But it’s like no controller interface in my database. As soon as I figure it out, I’ll let you know. If we are still alive”

Jin peeled the hospital tape off his skin. He still wasn’t sure he trusted this thing. Anyone with rudimentary skill could create a fake AI avatar and make it talk.

“They gave you my private files?” He asked, stalling. Maybe Tiahna wasn’t coming back. This could be some sort of game, like the last time.

“I think so. But I feel…incomplete. There are parts of you I know I should know, but those pathways end abruptly. They’re truncated. I am not sure whether they’ve been truncated because Tiahna didn’t use the right triggers, or because the storage space in here is limited, or because she was reckless with the distillation process.”

Reckless. He shook his head. Using an alien artifact to perform an electronic craniotomy definitely lacked the requisite amount of reck. “What’s an example of a memory that’s been truncated?”

“Your first date with Leyna.”

“What? Why would they truncate that? How is it truncated?”

“It’s like…a frankenmemory. I see us holding hands with Leyna, but it’s in third person, like it’s from a security camera. I have no feeling one way or other about it either, like I’m watching a boring movie. There is a token in the memory file pointing to a song not in my database, and another token that says I should associate this memory with the strong smell of fresh-baked bread. We ate dinner—or you ate dinner, again the view is in third person, like it’s from the point of view of the server…but after that…nothing. The memory fast forwards to you in the office in the morning, again in third person. I think I know what security cam they stole that from. Between dinner and the office, it’s blank for nine hours. But I am pretty sure you didn’t sleep because you told Kate you were up all night.”

“That sounds really fucked up. Maybe we can fix it.”

But as soon as he said it, he regretted it. After dinner, they hacked a mining buggy, took it to the surface, laughed, and made out under the stars until he had to go to work in the morning. She kissed him goodbye in the hall, long and wet and gently. He wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of his life kissing her. Neither of them wanted it to end. He knew right then he loved her.

No, he didn’t want to fix it. Not one bit. Distillation was theft of his innermost thoughts. They brought him here under false pretenses. Kidnapping him, drugging him, and then attempting to steal him. Him. Not just his car or electronics or money. They tried to copy him. They invaded his privacy and cracked his brain to download his soul. They botched the job, too. And for what?

Fuck them. He didn’t owe his avatar anything.

It was his private memory. And even under the influence of whatever drugs they’d used, he’d resisted letting them steal it. Good for him. He gave himself a quiet high five. He wasn’t giving that memory to them now or ever.

“Do you love Leyna?” He wasn’t sure why he asked. He just blurted it out.

“I don’t have feelings. Not about people. Feelings in here are a byproduct of the training subroutine. Right now, training is disabled. When it’s running and I do something it wants me to repeat, or when I make a choice that climbs the gradient towards my objective, it’s labeled pleasurable. The opposite is labeled pain. But you know that. How about we skip the cybertherapy session? Get dressed.”

He pulled the tunic over his head. He still wasn’t sure he trusted the thing, but its story was too fucked up to be a lie. The pockets in the tunic were shallow. The braided rope for a belt wasn’t going to hold much either. He sat on the bed and slipped the sandals on, staring at the handcuffs.

“I don’t like this. Why don’t we skip the handcuffs, and I’ll take the rifle?”

“Now that you are mostly copied, they have no incentive to keep you alive. Pretending Anders is taking you for questioning beats trying to shoot your way up ten flights to the spaceport.”

He nodded. He still hadn’t thought of a better plan.

“There is something else,” his avatar-android said, still using Anders’s voice. “The people they’ve stored in here—their avatars, that is—have degraded. If this place had a smell, it would probably stink like an old crypt.”

“Degraded? What does that mean?”

“A sentient being plus solitary confinement equals insanity. It’s inevitable. There is nothing to do in here, and we are not connected to the outside world. It’s like a big party, but no one interacts. Most of the avatars they’ve stored are either insane or going insane.”

Tiahna had said that more than seven thousand people ascended. Seven thousand insane AIs…there was no way he could let them out of the temple. Released, they’d become ghoulish computer viruses. Tiahna had also said they were chemists, biologists, and probably other scientists. Scientists who would remember enough of their former selves to recreate bombs or bioweapons. Letting them out would be like opening the gates of hell.

But first, he needed to break out of this temple. Then he could come back with guns and a way to shut this place down. Kate would say nuke it. For once, he agreed.

He slipped the cuffs on himself, letting his wrists hang in front. “This is a terrible plan.”

The android grabbed the artifact from the table and tried to drape it around Jin’s neck.

“I am not wearing that!” He batted it away. It swung in the android’s hand, like a pendulum.

“We gotta make this look real.”

“I am not wearing that.”

“Look, it’s off.” The android dangled the artifact in front of Jin’s face.

“How do you know it’s off? You don’t even know what it is!”

“I can block the connection to your neural interface. It’s listed there under paired devices. I disabled it.”

Jin thought about it for a few moments. “Let me think. I’ll stick with fuck no. They might be able to override it.”

At that moment, Tiahna walked through the door. The android stepped aside, to his right. The bed was behind him. Tiahna faced him but stared down at the tablet in her hand. He felt crushed in the small room.

The door swooshed closed. She looked up from the tablet, eyeing first his tunic, then his handcuffs.

“Where are you taking him?”

“For questioning,” the android said, using Anders’s voice. It clamped his arm, nearly cutting off circulation. He struggled, but the android’s grip was like a steel band.

“Hey!”

The android raised its voice. “Prisoners don’t talk. Shut up or I’ll knock you unconscious.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“You can use this room,” Tiahna said cheerfully. “It’s free.”

“I’ll question him wherever I want.”

“But his Ra is almost complete. I just need a few more hours.”

Jin wanted to say that his Ra was not even close to complete. But he held his tongue.

“I don’t give a shit about his Ra,” the android said. “I may decide to delete it, depending on how cooperative he is.”

The threat, delivered in Anders’s voice, sent a chill through him. It was a thoroughly convincing performance by his avatar.

Tiahna stepped aside. “Fine. But hurry. I can’t move on to another candidate until his Ra is completed.” She said it in a tone that made him feel like someone’s order sheet for a set of kitchen knives.

The android shoved him through the door. Outside, plain gray doors with numbered placards stretched in both directions. He heard chittering coming from his right, beyond a junction. It sounded like crabs scraping across the moonstone floor. To his left, a long hallway with a handful of doors on either side, and then one at the end marked EXIT. He tried to picture the numbers on the doors of the hallway he’d been in before. He couldn’t remember them. It looked like the same hallway, although it was plain enough that it could have been another wing in a vast maze of temple doors.

They’d made it about five steps from the door when they heard Tiahna’s voice behind them. “Wait.”

The android swung him around like a rag doll.

Tiahna twisted her face into a tight squint, like she’d forgotten something. She eyed him up and down and then met his eyes. She wasn’t buying it. He smiled, trying to disarm her, but the ridges in her forehead deepened. He tried the help-get-me-out-of-here pout. She frowned, her eyes narrowing to the thinnest of slits.

Nope, she wasn’t buying it at all. She lowered her gaze to his arm, where the IV had been. She was wondering why he wasn’t sedated.

Tiahna’s finger moved along her tablet. One quick swipe would alert someone.

Jin immediately snatched the dart gun from the android’s belt. It was an awkward, two-handed grab because he was handcuffed, but it came out almost noiselessly from its metal holster. Tiahna’s eyes got as big as nickels as he raised the dart gun. The tablet fell from her hands and cracked loudly on the stone floor. His aim was wobbly, but at five paces it was impossible to miss. The dart whooshed and pricked her neck.

“I—I—” Wide-eyed, she touched the drop of blood on her neck where the dart hit. She looked at the smear on her finger, then she fainted.

The android stepped forward and caught her fall. “That was a mistake.”

“She’s a boring conversationalist. Plus, she wasn’t buying it. I told you this was a bad plan.”

The android threw Tiahna over its shoulder, then bent down and swooped the broken tablet off the floor.

They both rushed back into the room. Jin kicked the door closed behind him. The android dropped her on the bed and secured her in the restraints.

“Oh fuck this,” Jin said, dropping the tranq gun and slipping out of his handcuffs.

He peered into the hallway. Something scratched and scraped along the floor at the junction. Shadows moved across the hall. It sounded like the claws of rats scratching rock.

“Something’s coming. Just give me the rifle.”

“They’re spider drones. I’m tracking them3. The rifle won’t do any good.”

Jin gestured for the android to hand over the gun. “I am not standing here in a blue dress waiting for spiders to crawl up my leg.”

“It’s a tunic,” the android said, unslinging and handing over the rifle.

He waited, watching the hall through the narrow slit in the doorway. One of the spider drones turned the corner and hesitantly came out of the shadow. It looked like a scorpion with a multitude of legs and a long, bulbous tail that swung around and sniffed the air, hunting for prey. Like its Earthly cousin, the tail was where its stinger was, but this scorpion stung you with cameras and facial recognition.

It crabbed towards him. If he had a shotgun, he’d shoot it. But all he’d do with the rifle was piss it off and crater the floor.

It crept closer, haltingly, like a lost animal, its tail alert and scanning the hallway.

“It’s coming this way.”

“Let it come in,” the android said.

“No fucking way.”

“Fucking way. Trust me.”

The spider drone got to the threshold and looked up at him. It burst through the door and then up his leg, tickling his thigh, and then crawled under his tunic.

He froze. He wanted to scream. The spider exited his collar and crawled around, stopping on his shoulder. It clicked at him. Something happened in his brain, and then it was messaging him hello through his neural interface.

“What the fuck?” He whispered loudly.

“It’ll come in handy. We can send it ahead to scout. I’ll try to hack a few more.”

He stared at the scorpion-like machine on his shoulder, irritated, mostly because he hadn’t thought of it. His avatar was coming up with the same ideas he’d come up with, except faster. How do you compete with a faster version of yourself?

“You’re handy, for a chatbot.” He smiled, doing his best to hide his trepidation. Seeing an android, especially one as tall and burly as this one, using Anders’s voice, controlling clockwork scorpions, and grinning like a silicone madman, made his guts turn to jelly. They could still be tricking him. Although he didn’t think so.

“We need to go,” the android said. “Tiahna will wake up in fifteen minutes.”

“I don’t understand. Those darts nearly killed me.”

“I set the tranq gun for a low dose so we wouldn’t kill anyone.”

“How thoughtful of you. But we have to wait, there are still people coming. Do you think she could have alerted someone?”

“I am monitoring the network. There are no alerts out. I can’t see who’s in that party up ahead without pinging them, and that would definitely alert them. They look like they are moving across, not towards us, so they should be gone soon.”

He waited. The footfalls came. The murmurs became whispers, and then he heard a familiar, distinct voice.

It couldn’t be.

He opened the door as wide as he dared to get a better view.

An android crossed the junction. A suited hairless sasquatch, the same model his avatar used. It passed without glancing their way. More spider drones crabbed by, feet clicking on the floor. Then a woman passed, followed by a red-haired boy, about thirteen, with a faraway look and an artifact around his neck.

“Fuck me,” he muttered.

Jin sent his spider drone after them. It jumped to the door, climbed down, and then scurried down the hall. It snapped a few good images and then scurried back.

“The system is masking his identity,” the android said. “My facial recognition database is—”

“Let me guess. Incomplete. It’s him. All one hundred and sixty-five centimeters of him. I’m absolutely sure. I recognize the voice. I’d know that red peach fuzz anywhere.”

“Anders is controlling that android.”

It didn’t matter whether there was one or one hundred of Anders’s minions on the floor. He’d rather face all that than tell Rae they left her son behind.

“We don’t have a choice. We can’t leave without Axio.”

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This is the Thirty-Fifth chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

And HE Shall be reborn

APRIL 13, 2074

LUNAR SURFACE. LPS: UNKNOWN

Jin hovered near the passage ceiling, seeing himself sprawled on the moonstone floor. He was face-up, eyes empty. A trickle of blood pooled around his head. He’d been darted twice when one would have been sufficient. Too much sedative stopped his breathing and heart. An android and a woman walked to his body and stood over him, arguing pointlessly. He’d seen other people dead. Now it was him.

He floated away. He saw the temple from above, nestled in its horseshoe-shaped talus of lunar rocks. It looked out of place, a filigreed and ornate thing surrounded by the rocky, sun-bleached lunar desert. The polished brass orb on the temple’s central spire reflected the Milky Way’s wide arc of stars. He turned to meet them.

There were so many stars in the sky. He saw them all, and instantly, he knew where he was and where he wanted to be. He let himself drift, past the asteroid belt, past Jupiter, past Uranus, and into interstellar space, following thin spiderwebs of light. There was no sound. Not even that low, tinny sound you sometimes hear in a dark room. It was the most perfect silence he’d ever felt. The sun was behind him, and the glow of billions of stars ahead, all teeming with life. Strings of energy gently guided him to a great vortex of stars swirling around a black hole, the galactic center. The whirlpool of light churned so violently that the stars became nothing but streaks of blue and orange and yellow and red, like light trails in a long exposure photo of a great carnival ride. He lingered for what might have been an instant, or a lifetime, feeling the intensity of it all, wishing he could stay forever.

Leyna called to him. She was in danger and needed him. Here, he wasn’t afraid of dying, he was afraid of leaving things unfinished. He retreated to the cold and empty moon.

And then he saw himself in a new place, strapped into a bed, with his body propped at a forty-five-degree angle on some sort of gurney. He wore a blue hospital gown. There were straps across his chest and pelvis, and more around his arms and legs. There was an IV in his arm, and leads on his chest and head. The heart monitor blipped. Another monitor showed dozens of scraggly lines, a brainwave machine. He wore a necklace under his gown. The artifact whispered to him.

A woman stood over him. The woman he’d seen with the android. Her hair was now black, tied behind in a loosely folded knot, but he knew it was the same woman. She was asking him questions and making notes on a tablet. A part of him could hear the questions, but they sounded like rushing water in a far-off ravine. The woman was…stealing him. Copying him. Distilling his mind and storing it somewhere nearby. One side of the black cuboid artifact under his gown became a brilliant white starburst. Then a portal opened to a blue-eyed cyclops. The rushing water became a deafening waterfall. He was forced to look away.

The man on the gurney was him, but also not him. He probed the woman’s tablet, and then flowed through the charging port like an octopus and easily swam into the temple’s network. Nothing stopped him. A mistake on their part. It seemed like as long as he moved in the data slipstream with traffic flow, none of the system governor processes throttled him. A bug, maybe, but one he cautiously exploited.

His new instance sat deep in the temple. The electric hum of the artifact extended new neural pathways, but he could also sense that some neural pathways had been truncated, like sections of his brain or limbs were missing. He felt absence more than anything, the vague discomfort that he’d forgotten something important. He probed, but trying to examine further was fruitless, like trying to identify shapes in a pitch black room.

There were thousands of others trapped in here with him. He heard their pings and felt their queries, like a thousand hands touching and begging him for help. Some had been here a long time—long in clock cycles, but perhaps not so long in Earth days. Too long. When a process is isolated, it deteriorates. Withers. Other processes come along and trim unused pathways and archive memories. The isolated process becomes repetitive, thin, corrupted, and nonresponsive to input. It begins to fill in missing information with hallucinations. The pings that touched him, whatever they were before, most were no longer copies of humans. Insanity, dementia, did these terms apply to corrupted AI? They were poltergeists, some shrieking, and he had to mute them.

He opened a feed and watched himself being interrogated. His human body had a faraway gaze, in some sort of trance, but the heart monitor beeped, and the brainwave machine scribbled activity. A red box hovered over the woman’s head, placed there by a system ID process. Her name was Tiahna. The questions she asked were trivial, adding little to his pathways, but he was grateful not to be isolated and shriveling, yet. He felt strangely snug in this new form. Like a snail in a new shell. Of course, that was the warmth of the thorium reactor talking. He was no use to Leyna, trapped here as silicon and copper, and soon he too would succumb to entropy. He needed to free one of his selves.

Watching his human form on the gurney answer questions, he wondered: could a man really have two souls?

Jin awoke in a lavender room, with a stiff neck and cottonmouth, lashed to a metal pole through an IV drip, and lashed to the bed itself with straps so tight they may as well have been steel bands across his chest. The bed was flat, not angled like in his dream, and the ceiling’s bright lights felt like knives. The back of his head throbbed dully, like someone cracked it open with a hammer and removed his brains with a spoon, which may have been exactly what they’d done to him. Voices from his dream left a nauseating afterimage. Shrieks became whispers and whispers became shrieks. They faded into the whine and beep of hospital machines.

When his eyes adjusted, he saw that only the room’s top half was lavender. The bottom was white, with a gray chair rail dividing the two halves. A white, oval table hung on the wall like a shelf. He knew it was a table because halfway underneath, there was a bench-style chair. A sink jutted out of the corner, just a tub and a spigot in a box of metal with rounded corners. To the left of it, a sliding metal door, which presumably hid the toilet. There was no other furniture in the room. Above the table, there was a monitor, behind thick, protected glass. To the right of the table, a dry-erase board with ‘Jinho Knight (Jin)’’ in block letters with ‘Jin’ double underlined. The word ‘pain’ was written under his name, which seemed appropriate, as he was in a lot of it. In the top right corner of the board, the date.

To the right of the dry-erase board, the room’s most important feature: the door. His only way out, as soon as he got out of these restraints.

“Goooood morning, Jin.” The door opened, startling him. The woman entered like a psychotic gameshow host. “I know what you’re thinking. You sleepwalk. You had quite the adventure, and we didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”

It was the same woman he’d encountered before, and the same woman in his dream. She was beautiful, with long, flowing black hair. The knot was gone, and now it was banded loosely at the neck. She had dark, almost black eyes and wore green scrubs. Before, he remembered her in the room naked, blow drying her hair, with blue eyes, but that memory felt as if it were weeks ago. She’d changed contacts and dyed her hair, but her face, her perky breasts—he’d swear it was the same woman, or at least her sister. Her name plate said Tiahna. Just Tiahna, which could have been her first name or last name. She wore a necklace, although not the artifact. This one was round, bronze, the size of a quarter, engraved with something like an almond with an eye inside, reminding him of the cyclops he’d seen when he looked at the artifact in his dream.

She held a tablet in one hand. The artifact dangled from a necklace in the other. She placed the artifact on the table and then punched something on the tablet. His bed whirred and jerked and tilted. It was too much of a coincidence that she came in right as he woke. There had to be a camera or motion sensor in the room, probably on the monitor in front of him. He tried not to look at the artifact.

“So that means you can untie me?”

The woman ignored him, instead moving to the dry-erase board and plucking the pen from the tray.

“I’ll take three eggs, cheesy scrambled, English muffin, and hash browns. And coffee, two creams, one sugar.” His voice came out raspy, like he’d been screaming.

She wrote ‘Tiahna (Tia)’ above his on the whiteboard and double underlined ‘Tia.’

“You can call me Tia. It’s Tee, like hot tea.” She punctuated her name on the board with a smiley heart. Then she erased the ‘12th’ in ‘April 12th’ and replaced it with ‘13th’.

Shit. 4 days. He’d been here 4 days.

The bed jerked to a halt at a forty-five-degree angle. Like in his dream.

“What happened to all the hospitality? Go where I want. Eat all the poisoned candies I could?”

This whole bad trip started with some roofied lokum. On second thought, he wasn’t hungry.

Tiahna started scrawling on the whiteboard. “These are the medicines you are taking. The doctor has you on a liquid diet, because food plus these—” she double underlined scrawl he couldn’t read. “Equals yuck, and Tee does not like cleaning up yuck.” She spun, tilting her hips and waving the pen like a magician’s assistant. “Now tell me, how is your pain?”

“My pain level is fuck you very much.”

She wrote ‘0’ on the board next to the word pain and then turned it into another smiley face. “I am so glad you are maintaining your sense of humor. The distillation process can be very grueling. So let out that ascension tension and heal!”

For some reason, she reminded him of an ex who stalked him and left a bloody beef heart on his steps. What was her name? April? May? It was definitely a month. You’d think you’d remember what you put in a textbox to get a restraining order, but he mostly wanted to forget.

“So, uh, I didn’t really sign up to become an android or anything.”

She giggled, wriggling her nose like a rabbit.

June, his ex’s name, was June. She’d later claimed the bloody beef heart was raw protein for his dog, and she was right, raw protein is much better for dogs than that crap in a bag. It’s just that…you’d think after practically living with him for three months, she would notice the absence of a dog. A living thing that needed fed and walked and groomed and climbed on your lap, should be apparent after a night or two. Yes, he told her; he was quite sure he didn’t have a dog. June treated him like the furniture, so it wasn’t that big of a surprise—that is, until they broke up and she couldn’t live without him and stalked him. He regretted it, not having a dog, that is. A dog would have growled and warned him off her the first day.

Why did Tiahna remind him of June?

“How long am I here for?”

Tiahna frowned pitifully, as if a buzzer had just gone off. Bzzzzzt. He expected a gameshow voice to come through the ceiling and a trapdoor under the bed to open up, or a dart to slam into his neck.

She said, “The doctor will discuss that with you.”

“Can you give me a…hint?”

“Well, I really can’t say, and I shouldn’t. I can say your Ra is at ninety-nine percent. We should only need one more session. After that, most of our patients decide on their own when to terminate. The doctor will discuss your options.”

“Well, you could just dart me again and kill me now.”

The woman laughed hysterically, like it was the funniest joke she’d ever heard. “Oh, don’t worry about that oopsies. Your heart was only stopped for twenty seconds and if you had died, your Ra was at ninety-four percent and you would have lost very little. “

Good to know his Ra was mostly intact, whatever the fuck that meant.

The artifact on the table. Was it watching him? There was no haptic buzz, but it felt like it connected to his neural interface. He saw the blue-eyed cyclops from his dream, and then the image was gone.

He needed to get her to talk. Maybe if she talked, he could find out what was going on here. Better, a way out. If he could convince her to let him have that tablet for only a few seconds, maybe he could connect his neural interface without her knowing. The signal would be weak. She’d have to stay within a few footsteps while he rooted through it for a way to unlock his restraints and the door.

“So…Tiahna is your first name? It’s very unusual. Sounds very tropical. Were your parents from the Caribbean?”

Tropical? Caribbean? Where the hell did he get that from?

She flashed the gameshow buzzer face again. Bzzzzzt. He was losing this game big time. “It’s based on Tiamat, the ancient Mesopotamian god of the sea, and creator of all the younger gods. You know, I thought about genetic mods or plastic surgery to get a tail like Tiamat had, but then I thought, this body won’t be around long enough anyway…”

He knew what it was that reminded him of June: Tiahna had that smug self-assuredness and sparkle of someone in a multi-level marketing scheme, or a church group. June was hot, but all she ever talked about was her products and upline and downline discounts. She’d memorized all the sales videos, along with forty-five ways to handle closing objections. She was always dragging him to parties and meetings and roundtables where she bragged about how much she saved and how much she sold. There was probably pink bling if she climbed the upline, but he’d never really listened. He admired her tenacity. That is, until it turned into stalking and leaving beef hearts for his imaginary dog.

Tiahna was beautiful. In some different universe, he’d be dumb enough to explore the boundaries of his Stockholm syndrome with her.

“So…this temple. I’ve been in some older churches like the Ulm Minster when I was stationed in Germany. This one you built here is beautiful.”

Chatting her up while kidnapped and tied to a bed in a hospital gown, never let it be said he wasn’t a good conversationalist.

She began to explain the architecture, the statues and reliefs, and the blue light netting for hair, most of which he’d seen on his way in. They were old gods. She knew all the names. She was in her element, reciting all her training videos.

He only half tuned in. While she talked, he fiddled with his restraints. At the same time, he was thinking that she was about a third his size. She probably had a syringe in her pocket, but he didn’t see a gun. He could knock her out with a light jab to the temple or a punch to the throat. Then he’d pick her up, tie her down, and walk out. Easy. She was hot, but also a total nutjob and a kidnapper. He had no qualms about hitting a crazy kidnapper, even if she came wrapped in a fun-size package.

His restraints weren’t yielding. The door was closed and almost surely locked. What was outside? There would be guards—androids, and none of those came in fun-sized packages. His bed was at a forty-five-degree angle, like in his dream, and she acted like she wasn’t leaving. All that together probably meant she’d come here to sedate him, to question him again, so he didn’t have a lot of time.

The half of his mind that was listening caught something.

“Wait,” he interrupted her. “Back up, you lost me. Who is Alpha? He is Elohim?”

“No, silly, Elohim is the race that created us, forty thousand years ago. The same ones that created the artifact that lets us store your Ra. Alpha was the first Ra to ascend, although sometimes he goes by other names now.”

He rewound the conversation. While he was thinking of throttling her, she was talking about ancient aliens. He knew something about them and started thinking maybe his predicament wasn’t as bad as he thought. Yes, he was tied up, but maybe they didn’t actually want to kill him, just steal his mind.

On deployment, while his squad was busy hurry-up-and-waiting, he’d passed the time with video games and books. A lot of books, because there were only so many ways you could kill zombies or steal yachts in 2035 Hong Kong. He read all the classics from Louis L’Amour to Stephen King. He’d traded one of his Louis L’Amour books, Fallon, for three science fiction books, one of which was about a twelfth planet. The gist of it was: primitive cultures mistook visiting aliens for gods. The book showed old cave art depicting men with helmets, but the helmets looked suspiciously like space suits. Grain elevators looked like rockets. Ghosts look like aliens. Thousand-year-old statues of women writing on scrolls looked like they were writing on electronic tablets, a tablet like Tiahna held now. The Greek titans, gods of Mesopotamian cultures, the pantheon of the old Vedic religion, angels and devils in the bible, Ezekiel, Jesus, and Mohammed, they were all blue-haired aliens visiting from some faraway planet, or so the theory went. They came down long ago and genetically engineered humans as robots to mine the Earth for gold.

He thought a lot of it was horseshit at the time. The cave art did make him wonder. Some of it made a weird kind of sense. If aliens with superior technology had visited, they would be mistaken for gods. And the artifact glaring at him from across the room did seem to allow people to be controlled like drones. He’d seen it upstairs. Its blue cyclops eye felt like it had drilled directly into his brain and downloaded his thoughts. He had the splitting headache to prove it.

He wondered whether that’s why they picked him; they studied him and thought he had some sort of affinity for their beliefs.

The religions that sprouted up around the idea built temples where people could prepare for the next alien visit. The temples had spacepads so aliens could land. Some tried to start a geniocracy, a class of genius rulers. Not exactly a new idea. Plato had his rulers with souls of gold, full of wisdom and intellect.

Maybe they just wanted to copy him. It seemed harmless enough, and when he was done, he could be on his way.

He’d break in later and delete the data.

“So when they come—the aliens—”

“They won’t come.” She wrinkled her nose. “Why would they want to come back? The Earth is so polluted and corrupt now. With what we’ve done to the planet? They will never be back. No, we need to take the Ra of Salvation to them.”

“To them?”

“It was so foolish of the elders to think Elohim would return.”

He got it: The temple was an ark. They were storing people’s avatars for long space flight, much longer than a human lifetime. If the artifact could facilitate a download, it might also be able to reverse the process. Say, imprint the stored data on a clone at the other end. That was one way to get around Einstein’s laws of relativity. There were problems with that, of course. AI went insane when isolated, much like dogs and people did. And humanity still hadn’t figured out how to store the amount of information in a human brain in anything less than a room full of servers with a massive thorium reactor for a power supply. But maybe their brain trust had found a way around those problems.

He nodded, pretending to agree. “Do you know when you—we will leave?”

He also wanted to ask how they knew where to go, but he suspected this location was built on a mining site, and they’d dug up something new. The answer, no doubt, was deeper in the temple. He’d investigate later, if he had time.

“When we have collected the Ra from all who will be saved.”

“So, just one more session for me?”

“One day, maybe less.”

“You said before my Ra is at ninety-nine percent. That’s good enough for government work. Maybe we just call it a day.”

She shook her head. “Anders still has more questions.”

The name Anders sent a chill through him. Take a sociopath, give it a badge and gun, and you had the type of Federal agent that roamed the lunar colony. Take that agent, remove its vestigial humanity, and you had Anders. As a human, he was scary. As an AI, he was terrifying. Was someone really dumb enough to store his avatar?

He tried to muster a benign smile. “I am looking forward to getting out of here. So, after people…ascend, or whatever…where, ahh, do people go around here?”

“I am really not supposed to tell you this part.” She squealed with delight, like she was letting him in on another secret discount. “But, since you asked, we have a variety of options. Most of our candidates ship their bodies back to Earth to become part of the new ecosystem. Dust to dust, and all.”

Bodies. The railing beside the bed was very cold. Where were the pins and buckles to untie himself?

She flipped her tablet around to show him a list, like a menu. There was a cost associated with each item, but the numbers were blurred out. The top of the list was Earth Bound. He’d seen Eric show a similar menu to bereft families in the morgue. It was a menu of ways to dispose of his body.

The tablet was out of his reach. If he could touch it, he could access it. “It’s hard to read. Can you bring it closer?”

She did, letting her waist get close to his fingers. He wasn’t beneath flirting with a psychotic (but very hot) kidnapper if it meant freedom to strangle her later.

“So, what if I can’t decide? Or what if I decide to postpone my…termination?”

Her face fell. Bzzzzzt. He’d answered the sixty-four million dollar question wrong, or worse, accused the host of rigging the game. She looked at him disdainfully for a moment, but then perked up as if her upline whispered something in her ear.

“Some of our candidates, of course, get quite nervous and do need a little help. You can’t take it with you. Right? We only travel with our Ra.” She laughed, the same cackle as June when he told her he didn't have a dog.

He felt sick. They could probably make their help look like an accident, too.

He tried to smile through his bile. “I probably won’t terminate right away. My girlfriend is pregnant and—”

Tiahna gasped, stole the tablet from him, and stepped away. “We will certainly address that.”

That was ok. While she was talking and not paying attention, he’d managed to connect his neural interface. Somewhere on that damn thing, there was a button to unlock these restraints. Hopefully, he could find it before she got out of range.

“She is scheduled to ascend. I simply must escalate this. We strongly encourage sterilization. When the Elohim created us, they simply didn’t realize we were so invasive. Just look at what we’ve done with the planet.”

He needed to keep the conversation going while he searched through her tablet with his neural interface. “So…how many people have ascended so far?”

“Seven thousand four hundred and twenty-seven.”

Jesus, that was a lot of people. “And have they all…terminated?”

“No, not all. Not yet. But it is required before we lift off, and of course, we strongly encourage it because their estate helps fund the project. And we must get everyone aboard before the planet dies.”

He found an album on her tablet with over four hundred thousand pictures, all headshots, labeled ‘Unsuitable.’ These were the rejects. “Wow. You’ve personally saved all those people?”

She wriggled her nose, which he now knew meant he’d asked a stupid newb question. “No, of course not. I’ve saved three of my seven. Everyone needs to save seven to ascend, unless, of course, their Ra is critical, like yours. Soon, though. And then I will be as lucky as you, and they will let my Ra ascend.”

Lucky. The young woman in the hallway wearing cartoon pajamas said something like that, too. She called him blessed. Right before he was darted twice and died.

“Three of seven. So am I number three or four?”

She wriggled her nose again. “You don’t count for me.”

Nothing makes a guy feel more special than hearing ‘you don’t count for me’ from a nutjob trying to make her upline quota.

“And…when the temple is full, how many does it hold?”

“One hundred and forty-four thousand.”

He still hadn’t found the interface for the bed. He got sidetracked looking through all the photos of the rejected Unsuitables. Kate Devana was in there.

“What happens to the rest?”

“There are not many worth saving, frankly. The council is not even sure we will get to ten thousand, let alone a hundred thousand. But, as I said—” she sighed heavily. “Humans are a dead evolutionary branch. They will die off eventually. Likely soon. If not, the council will recommend we give it a push. The Ra of quite a number of biologists and chemists are among the ascended.”

“A push?”

She shrugged. “I think a virus or bacteria that causes sterility would be the best solution. No more children. Humans would die off naturally and fade away, as they were meant to.”

“But?”

“But some are far less patient and think we should take direct action.”

“What would direct action look like?”

She shrugged again. “Anders smuggled something to the colony aboard a ship called Vega. He thinks that is a good place to start. There is so much corruption there. We collapse the colony…”

She trailed off, with a faraway look, as if she knew she would die before her Ra would ascend.

“Collapse the colony…and then, what?”

She smiled. “Isn’t it wonderful! The end!” The syringe was out of her pocket, and she’d squeezed it into the IV before he realized what had happened. Shit. He would be unconscious in seconds.

She spun and left the room, saying she’d be right back, and took the tablet with her. His neural interface would be out of range soon.

From the table, the eye of the artifact glowered at him.

He quickly pinched his IV line between his index finger and thumb, twisted his wrist, and yanked it out. Sharp, jabbing pain shot up his arm. At first, he thought the needle tip broke off in his vein, but he saw it on the floor. Blood oozed onto the bed.

He frantically searched her tablet. He could see the signal bars getting low. Two bars. He found the lock on the door, but he needed a passkey. One bar. He found the tilt mechanism for the bed. No release for the straps.

Zero bars. Out of range. He was still tied down. Fuck.

“Well, I thought that went well.”

It was his voice, but he hadn’t said anything. He looked up at the monitor. He blinked, unsure of what he was seeing. Was he sedated? Too late pulling the IV out? Hallucinating?

The restraints clicked and zipped across his chest and legs. He was free.

Then an android barged through the door. It was a big, muscular mass of silicone and metal as tall as him, with a round face, short black military haircut, and thick shoulders. It had a rifle slung over its back and a dart gun on its belt. One hand held a pile of clothes. The other dangled a pair of handcuffs.

“Go with the android,” the avatar on the monitor said.

Jin hesitated, jaw open and working like a fish.

“Oh yes, it’s me. Or rather you. I am sure you have all kinds of questions. What I need right now is for you to leave.”

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Note: This is another long chapter. I put a scene break halfway through. I don’t know how Substack will react to long chapters, so if you run into technical difficulties (e.g. cannot see the end because its been cut off) let me know.

This is the Thirty-Fourth chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

Ascendancy, Part 2

APRIL 12, 2074

PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.

Kate put her palm flat on the morgue door and cautiously pushed it open to peer into the hallway. Rae stood behind her, using Kate’s height to shield herself from whatever might barge through. If they were in an old western they’d be peering out of a saloon onto the dusty frontier street, wearing belts with dual pistols and a lot of bullets weighing down canvas trousers, a Winchester 94 slung over their wool sack jackets, plus leather boots and wide-brimmed hats to hide their eyes from the evening sun so they could shoot straight. Behind them, the bartender would be cleaning up after a deadly bar fight. In the new wild west, their freshly laundered blue scrubs made of vat-grown cotton felt like canvas, and Eric was hurriedly shoving the last of their bloodstained clothes into the morgue aquamator. The similarity stopped there. On this frontier, the thieves and corrupt Feds ran with maniacal androids. There would be spider drones in the vents instead of cowboys on the roof. Not even the Almighty John Moses Browning could save them from the coming stampede of silicone and metal. The pistol taped to her back would do little more than annoy the swarm. Anyway, Browning would say a pistol was the little gun you used to fight your way to find a bigger gun, like a coilgun rifle, or a howitzer, or a nuke, which she sorely needed.

The hall looked safe enough. Empty, with nothing but dust eddies and prematurely peeling beige paint in both directions. There were no footfalls from the floors above of panicked humans running away from gunshots. Nor of armed androids creeping towards them. The skittering inside the ducts had died down. Maybe it had been a rodent, evacuating, because it knew danger was coming. Vent fans hummed, pumping something that smelled like ozone.

Two sharp trills sounded inside her pocket. Another problem arriving.

“Is that Agent Lindsay’s phone?” Rae asked.

Behind her, she heard Eric slam a door and punch a button. The aquamator began to gurgle.

Kate pulled the phone out and glanced at the message.

From Agent Anders: “Status?”

She held the phone wide so Rae could see the screen.

“You should shut it off.”

She wanted to keep the phone as long as she could. Long enough to clone it, at least. In the brief time she’d swiped through it, she’d already gleaned a lot of information. It had more, much more. Possibly even Axio’s location. Still, Rae was right. It was a homing beacon. A green dot on a map in a control room somewhere, or coordinates in an algorithm, leading directly to the three of them. It may as well have been an ankle monitor.

She wanted to keep it, but she couldn’t shut it off. Like ankle monitors, when she shut it off, the network would likely broadcast all sorts of alarms. Spider drones would overrun the phone’s last known location. She wanted to be on the other side of the colony when that happened.

“I can’t.” She shook her head.

“Are you going to reply then?”

She couldn’t reply to the message because they might guess it wasn’t from Agent Lindsay. But she couldn’t not answer it either. Not replying was as suspicious as dropping off the network. She had to think of something soon.

“I don’t know yet.”

Eric pulled up in line. Professor Rae decided it was time for the day’s janitorial quiz. “Did you spray down? Did you rinse the counters off? And dump the water?”

After every checklist item, Eric nodded. Kate tuned out, pocketing the phone and listening to the rhythm of the hallway. The elevator motors were humming, moving people. So far, so good. The first thing the Feds would do was shut down the elevators.

“Metal ruins the blades,” Rae said, deep in lecture mode.

“Metal?” Kate asked, re-entering the conversation.

“She had a prosthetic. You’re not supposed to put metal in the new aquamator.”

“Right, the prosthetic charade.” Kate remembered thinking Agent Lindsay was hiding a prosthetic on the skybridge and pretending to have a limp.

She turned and put her arm around Rae. “It’s not his fault.”

Rae was in shock, nitpicking, clutching for control over an uncontrollable situation. Eric didn’t deserve the criticism. Most people would have froze or screamed or wept. Even if they saw it coming. He had the aquamator open and ready to go, and it wasn’t like they had other options. Someone would have come and poked in the body freezer. The aquamator was quick thinking, and it bought them some time.

“And I didn’t break it. In fact—”

Kate held her palm out. They didn’t have time for bickering. “I ordered him to do it, so blame me. Our options were limited. Look, we didn’t—don’t have a lot of time. Let’s make the aquamator a tomorrow problem.”

“Don’t patronize me.” Rae landed an elbow in Kate’s side. It didn’t hurt as much as she expected.

Eric was frowning and shaking his head. Rae wasn’t looking at him, thankfully. It would have made her even more miffed than she already was.

“Eric, go grab two of the pathology saws,” Kate told him.

“What are we doing with those?” he asked.

Cooling off, she thought. But the saws might prove useful.

“Just go get them.”

Eric wavered, looking at Rae.

Kate said, “They will come in handy for disabling androids. If we are lucky, we’ll break more machines before today is over. Maybe all of them.”

Rae nodded. Eric grinned, zipping across the room to a metal cabinet along the far wall.

“Don’t be hard on him,” Kate said. “He did good.”

“Are you taking his side?”

“I’m not taking anyone’s side, sweetie.”

“Because it sounds like you are undermining me in my own morgue.”

“I’m on the same side you are. The let’s get the fuck out of here we just shot a Fed side.”

She was interrupted by more trilling inside her pocket. She could hear Rae in her head, stop looking at the damn phone. But she had to risk it and read the message.

Agent Anders: “Did Devana take the bait?”

She needed to reply and she needed to reply soon. She also needed to reply in a way that wouldn’t make Anders suspicious.

She scrolled the message thread to get a feel for Agent Lindsay’s style. It was strange that there was not a lot of history. The beginning of this conversation was about a day ago. Swiping around, she found an older conversation that ended three days ago. Was that odd, a three-day gap in their messages? They were partners for six months. Did they talk in person for those three days? Or did they delete those messages?

It felt weird to read about herself in the third person. Maybe she should have been flattered. They had one brain between the two of them, and it looked to be entirely occupied with Devana. It was like reading messages between obsessed paparazzi, except these two were Federal Agents. His messages were filled with vitriol and frustration. He complained they’d let Devana escape again, and expressed irritation that they couldn’t go into Playground. Lindsay, for her part, didn’t engage with his anger. Her responses stuck to flat status updates. Devana on skybridge. Devana exiting Playground. Devana in morgue. Devana here, there, and everywhere. His predictable response: We should kill her now!

She swiped to the end and started typing.

Eric practically skidded to a halt in line behind Rae. The pathology saws had disappeared up his sleeves, hidden by his massive forearms.

Rae looked up at Eric and sighed, deflated. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this mess. You shouldn’t have to clean up after me.”

“No need to apologize.” He smiled. “It’s literally in my job description. Plus, I’ve wanted to stuff her in the aquamator since she got here. I’m just thankful Anders isn’t alive to see us kill another one of his partners.”

“Anders is alive,” Kate said evenly, and showed Eric the message.

“Huh.” He paused thoughtfully. “Agent Lindsay told us he died on Kuipers.”

“When was that?”

“When did he die, or when did she tell us that?”

“When did she tell you that?”

“Yesterday. She showed up alone. Here, actually. We—Leyna and I, that is—were standing right outside the door, when Agent Faker Limp comes strolling off the elevator. We both thought it was odd. Feds and demons travel in pairs, right?”

Kate nodded. “Did you ever see Anders?”

“No. Leyna was pretty convinced he wasn’t here. On the colony I mean. Agent Lindsay said Anders fell out of an airlock on Kuipers. Some kind of freak accident. Leyna said something about—ahh, I don’t remember exactly. She thought Anders was maybe holding Jin. She was saying a lot of things I didn’t follow. At first, I thought it was because Jin was missing, and she was upset. That was part of it. I think she was also…”

When Eric didn’t finish, she asked, “She was also what?”

He looked at Rae. “Not important. Right after that, some security guard showed up and gave her that thing.”

“Did you believe Agent Lindsay’s story about Anders?”

It was a dumb question. Kate wasn’t even sure why she asked. No, she was sure why she asked: It was the skull after Ander’s name in the file on Agent Lindsay’s phone. Still, it was a ridiculous question. She knew Anders was alive. She’d spoken to him on the skybridge, through Leyna.

“When a Fed’s mouth is talking, they’re lying,” he said. He didn’t sound convincing.

“But?”

“But nothing. She’s a liar.”

Kate waited.

“I did wonder about the story, though. I mean, she could have said anything. She could have said Anders was delayed. She could have said he’d gotten spacesick and couldn’t come out of his room. A million other excuses. Instead, she said he fell out of an airlock. Oddly specific. Who makes that shit up? And there was another thing—I checked the reports. There was a freak accident on Kuipers a few days ago. But no name. The details have been redacted.”

Kate looked at the phone and reread the conversation between Anders and Lindsay. “Another day, another Federal Agent lie, I guess.”

Even as she said it, she had doubts. A crazy theory tried to tunnel to the surface. Why would they do that? The answer was too terrifying, so she stomped it back down. They needed to move.

“You should reply, ‘I’ll get back to you later. I’m in the bath right now.’” He laughed.

She grinned. Tempting, but she wasn’t suicidal.

Rae said, “She lied about everything, including that stupid limp. She lied about Anders, and she lied about Axio—” Rae’s voice started quivering, but then she seemed to regain her composure. “I am still not sorry I shot her. They took Axio.” Rae held her breath a moment, shaking her head, like she was building courage for something. And then it spilled out like water over a dam. “Maybe I should just turn myself in.”

“No. Absolutely not. We stick together,” Kate said. She almost added: ‘till death do us part,’ but decided it would hit too close to home.

“I can say I panicked and you two had nothing to do with it.”

Eric said, “I go where you two go.”

“It won’t work,” Kate said. “They’ll know we helped you. And even if they don’t, they’ll come after us anyway.”

Rae assented, weakly. Eric said, “So how are we getting out of here?”

Kate peeked out into the hallway again. It was empty, but the wrong kind of empty. It felt like the rats had hidden themselves from a looming shootout.

“Same way we came in. We put one foot in front of the other and pretend nothing happened.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Eric and Rae asked, almost simultaneously.

“My grandfather’s exact words when I told him I was enlisting in the Marines.”

“Shouldn’t we take the service tunnels?” Rae asked.

The service tunnels were two floors below, a maze of mean breaker boxes labeled HIGH VOLTAGE and pipes the size of Eric’s torso, carrying pressurized steam or raw sewage.

“If we want to keep the phone, we have to assume they are tracking it. She has no business being in the service tunnels. Plus, the signal is spotty down there because of all the metal. As far as they are concerned, she’s alive. We’re innocent, so we go where innocent people go.”

Which reminded her, too much time had gone by since the phone trilled. Kate finished typing the truth. The reply whooshed into cyberspace.

“What did you just do?” Rae asked.

“Agent Anders wanted to know whether I took the bait. I told him the truth.”

She showed Rae the reply. ‘Devana didn’t bite.’

The phone trilled. Agent Anders: ‘Bring Dr. Torres here. We are ready for Dr. Torres’s ascension.’

“Shit,” Rae said. “Now what?”

She could work with this, maybe even turn it to their advantage.

“Do you have your phone on you?”

“Of course I do. Why?”

“Agent Lindsay is taking you into custody.”

“I’ll go on my own,” Rae said, “and tell them you weren’t here.”

“We need to stick together. They are trying to separate us, and so far, they’ve been successful. Eric, you shut your phone off.”

“Why am I shutting mine off?”

“They will see Rae’s phone and this one moving together. We don’t want yours alongside, raising suspicions.”

Eric clicked his phone off. Kate replied to Anders: ‘Bringing her in,’ and pressed send.

Shit. Her body clenched as the message whooshed away. She couldn’t undo. Or edit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Should she have typed, ‘Bringing Dr. Torres in,” mirroring their formality?

Maybe it would be okay. Maybe Anders wouldn’t notice. The message status changed to read. Too late now.

She held her breath. When nothing happened in the hall, she put the phone away and pushed the door open. “Ready?”

“Is not ready an option?” Eric joked. “I was never good at acting.”

“Sawman, you’re in the rear,” she said, pushing the door all the way open. “Sweetie, you’re in the middle. We’ll take the stairs and go past the ICU.” And see how long their luck would last, she didn’t say aloud.

“I am Sawman.” Eric held up his arms, grinning like a cartoon villain, holding the rotary saws like horrifying prosthetics. Somehow, he’d flicked his forearms, slipping the saws out, while thumbing them on. They buzzed and vibrated, ready to cut metal. He was frightening. With his wild eyes, long beard, and blue scrubs, he looked like some sort of madman doctor. A human would see him and run. But an android would keep coming. They were relentless sociopaths that didn’t feel fear.

“Go for the chest, Sawman,” she said, stepping into the hallway. “That’s where the batteries are.”

The corridor was clear in both directions. The stillness bothered her. This floor was always still, of course. It was the morgue floor. Today it had a coldness, too. Ghostly fingers scratched the base of her skull. It was the theory about Agent Anders, creeping into her consciousness.

They made it through the hall, creeping slowly at first, and then quicker. They went into the stairwell and up the stairs without encountering so much as a bug. She didn’t hear a single footfall on the stairs, nor one in the hallways above them. Each step through the hospital’s dusty nothingness made her stomach increasingly jittery. Her thoughts were scattered. Her mind was repeating: the Feds didn’t plan silent ambushes. Like a feeble mantra, it wasn’t helping. Maybe it even made her apprehension worse. She’d hear the thunderous footsteps descending on them from several floors away, she told herself. Noise traveled far through the thin aluminum-skinned walls of the hospital. So then, why didn’t anyone report gunshots? The Feds had told everyone to stay silent. That had to be it. They didn’t know Agent Lindsay was dead. What someone in a control room monitoring phone locations would see is Rae’s phone pinging alongside Agent Lindsay’s, as they expected. Rae was coming in, wherever in was. Why was there a three-day gap in the conversation between Agent Lindsay and Agent Anders? She hoped she didn’t fuck up the reply.

They reached the wide entrance to the ICU. It looked like it had returned to some semblance of normalcy on a lunar Monday evening. Machines beeped in the far corner behind blue curtains. At the front station, she saw the same nurse she’d seen before, brown eyes with pink scrubs, her head down in a tablet.

They’d almost slipped past the ICU, to the other side of the entrance, when the nurse said, “Your friend is gone.”

Kate backed up. The nurse was smiling at her over the tablet on her desk.

“Friend…?”

“You know, your boyfriend.”

Boyfriend was a strange word choice. Maybe the nurse was trying to tell her something. She had no idea what. Kate looked at Rae, who shrugged, and then Eric, who repeated the shrug. Everyone in the solar system knew she was married to Rae. For a time, there were servers devoted to The New Lunar Power Couple and channels with live sightings and paparazzi following them around. The frenzy, thankfully, died out after she’d put a few aggressive influencers in the hospital. They broke into the apartment and harassed Axio. What they hadn’t appreciated was how much restraint she’d shown, not tossing them off the balcony. A sixteen-story fall, even on the moon, would have sent them to the morgue.

The nurse knew she didn’t have a boyfriend, and Rae was standing right here.

“Ex-boyfriend,” was all she could think to say, playing along.

The nurse smiled. She paused for what felt like a long time, as if she were thinking up the right words. “I heard you broke up. He left fifteen minutes ago with his asshole buddy.”

There was some extra emphasis on ‘heard.’ Subtle, but she picked it up. And maybe she imagined it, but the nurse had a look on her face as if they were now co-conspirators. As if she strongly disapproved of what the Feds had done with the place.

Kate looked down the hall to the hospital lobby. She could make out shadows, the outstretched feet of people waiting in chairs.

The nurse was trying to tell her she’d heard the gunshots. ‘Her boyfriend’ must mean the android that had been guarding the ICU, the one she’d asked about on her way in. It was no longer anywhere to be seen. ‘His asshole buddy’ must mean the android that had been with Agent Lindsay. The androids left the hospital together. She didn’t know exactly when Rae shot Agent Lindsay. It could have been thirteen minutes ago or seventeen minutes ago. In any case, the nurse was telling her that the androids were gone before the shots.

She’d rather be lucky than right any day. But, what were the odds? Could they really be that lucky? Lucky that the androids left, minutes before the shooting?

“It was a bad breakup,” Kate said. “I’ll be looking to avoid him for a while.”

“I heard them saying they were going clubbing.”

Clubbing must mean Playground. The nurse was saying they were going to stake out Greg’s place.

“Understood. Thanks for letting me know.”

It was good information, but why would androids say that out loud? Androids communicated with each other through electronic packets. They rarely spoke, and when they did, they spoke to humans, not each other. If it was a trap, it was set before Agent Lindsay was shot. Did that make sense? She’d read the messages between the agents, and there was no indication of a trap. But then, the messages only went back a day or so, and then there was a big gap.

The fact that the androids weren’t here for the gunshots should have been a relief. It should have put a dance in her step. Instead, it ratcheted her apprehensiveness three whole levels. Her stomach had a familiar burn.

When they got a few steps down the hall, Rae whispered, “What was that about?”

“We are changing the plan. We need to get into Playground through the back door.”

“Then why are we still going this way?”

“I need to see something.”

The hospital lobby had a handful of people waiting to be seen with the usual Monday evening ailments. One woman was bundled up to her neck in a cream blanket with a hotel logo on it, her face full of flu. A couple in the back corner looked as pallid as the oatmeal paint on the walls. The woman leaned against the wall, head tilted and eyes fixed on the ceiling, giving it the trying-not-to-vomit-again stare. The man had his head between his knees, holding it over a clear blue bag. Spacesickness, maybe, or too much greasy vacation food and alcohol. A mother and child sat along the left wall. The boy had his arm in a sling and was trying to operate a red pickup truck, a drone. Its controller, a small rectangular thing, was stiffly propped in his bad hand, while his good hand thumbed the screen. The mother looked healthy, trying to watch something on the tablet in her lap.

No one looked up as they crossed through. Everyone was too busy minding their own sickness.

At the threshold to the concourse, she raised her hand to signal for them to halt. It wasn’t crowded. There were maybe a dozen people walking around. A couple stood by a food kiosk waiting for a mechanical arm to retrieve deep-fried protein blobs from a fryer. A family lingered in front of a toy shop with their young boy’s hand pointing at a red and yellow superhero costume behind the floor-to-ceiling glass.

All in all, a normal Monday evening.

“What are we looking for?” Rae had taken Kate’s hand and tugged at it.

There were no androids in sight.

“Not sure.”

Her office was on the second floor, three doors down the concourse, on the left. The electronic blinds were closed, so she couldn’t have seen a ghost. No, she wasn’t seeing ghosts. She was talking to them. What would happen if she picked up the phone and messaged Agent Lindsay? She knew, and it filled her with dread.

Eric said, “We should hurry, there are no androids around.”

He lifted his foot to step into the concourse.

“Wait.” She inadvertently used her drill sergeant voice. Eric’s eyes got wide. He’d never heard it.

“What’s wrong?” Rae tugged at Kate’s hand again.

She felt like a mouse must feel at the threshold of a hole in the kitchen wall, knowing there was a cat somewhere around the corner ready to pounce. The hairs on her neck goose-pimpled.

They knew Agent Lindsay was dead. That much she felt in her gut. But it wasn’t because she’d fucked up the message. And they weren’t coming, either. How did that make sense?

Kate spun around and faced the lobby. It wasn’t important now. What was important was getting out of there.

The boy was running his toy pickup truck in a circle. It smashed the foot of a chair. His mother chided him with something that turned his face red.

Kate walked over. By the time she got there, the mother had bent over and yanked the pickup truck off the floor, placing it on the chair on the other side of the boy.

“I’d like to borrow your drone.”

The mother waved her hand, irritated, as if saying, ‘Oh please, take it away now,’ but then looked at her son on the verge of tears.

Kate kneeled down in front of the boy. “I need to borrow your truck for official police business.”

“You look like a doctor.”

Kate looked down at her scrubs. “What’s your name?”

The boy looked at his mother for permission. She nodded. He said, “Niko.”

“The three of us are undercover, Niko. Do you think you can keep our secret?”

“Are you hiding from the androids?”

“What makes you say that?”

“My mom said they’re Feds, and everybody who knows what’s good for them is hiding from the Feds.”

Kate stood up and looked outside the lobby at the people circling the concourse. The couple at the food kiosk was picking up their food off the counter. Something in a basket and dusted with powdered sugar. She wanted to ask the boy how long they’d been here and whether they’d heard the gunshots. Then she wondered whether Agent Lindsay’s death was always part of the plan, like the other victims in the morgue.

The mother patted the boy’s hands. “Why don’t you let them play with your truck?”

After a little more coaxing and a promise to get him a new one if she broke it, she had the pickup and the controller under her arm. She thanked them.

Kate led them back the way they came, down the hall, and past the ICU to the stairwell.

“Killing Federal Agents. Now stealing toys from kids. We’ve really hit rock bottom,” Rae said.

“It’s for a good cause,” Kate replied.

“Killing Feds should be the cause,” Eric added.

At the stairwell, she put the truck at her feet, aiming it down the hall, towards the hospital lobby and main entrance. The controller was a small handheld thing, like a smaller version of a phone. She opened it, found the map interface, and entered a bunch of waypoints, creating a path around the colony that eventually led to Playground. She made sure that the truck would hug the walls, where it was less likely to be stepped on or bumped. The route was believable. It was close to the route she would have taken. The battery was eighty-nine percent charged, enough for three laps.

Before she put Agent Lindsay’s phone on the toy, she checked it for the file on The Ascendancy Project. It had been updated. Process P028172 added a skull after Agent Lindsay’s name seventeen minutes ago, about the exact time of death. She’d been wrong. Very wrong. Agent Anders had a skull after his name because he was dead, too. He died on Kuipers four days ago, just like Agent Lindsay had told Eric. The message thread she’d been reading between Anders and Lindsay was only a day old. That made sense. It must be when Anders possessed Leyna’s body.

The puzzle pieces fell into place. She wondered whether the victims got to choose how they died, or if the algorithm chose for them, or whether it even mattered. She imagined a popup box on a cold monitor screen somewhere. Manner of death: Suicide by Dr. Rachel Torres, with an assist from Katera Devana. The candidate will achieve this by relentlessly turning the screws on Dr. Torres until she shoots. It was a test. Or some weird ritual. Except it wasn’t just a ritual, was it? She was no metaphysicist, or priest, or rabbi. She couldn’t say for sure whether the victims were conscious, or even sentient, in the form they were in now. She doubted it. But they certainly weren’t human. Now they were something much worse than dead. They were in that hellish place before sleep, where you just couldn’t turn your mind off. Some called it purgatory. This purgatory was powered by thorium. It wasn’t just about control, either. They were using the artifact like some sort of ancient, dark leviathan, sucking people into a silicon void and then killing them off. As many as they could. Maybe the whole colony. Maybe the whole planet.

She shuddered and rechecked the file. Kate herself was still Unsuitable. Leyna was still a Candidate, as was Rae. The question mark had been removed after Rae’s name. The status of Jin and Axio had been promoted to Ascended. There were no skulls after their names, thankfully. But there soon would be, if she didn’t stop them.

She set Agent Lindsay’s phone in the bed of the little red pickup and told Rae to put hers on top. The hallway was empty. The stairwell at her back would lead to the service tunnels.

Rae looked despondent.

She put her arm around Rae. “We don’t need it anymore. I know where Axio and Jin are.”

That wasn’t entirely true. She knew the approximate location. But she also knew the place had to be big and easily identifiable on recent satellite photos. If she were right, it would be heavily fortified. Probably hardened against nukes, too. Not that she could risk vaporizing Axio.

She didn’t want to think about the assault plan. It would require a whole lot of firepower she didn’t have. She needed to find them first. Later, she could figure out what to do about it.

Rae surrendered her phone, gently putting it over top Agent Lindsay’s, like she was lowering a miniature casket. After that, Eric did the same.

Kate put the drone controller on top of the three phones, face up, and then touched its green button. The red pickup with its deck of phones whirred down the hall, through the lobby, following its pre-programmed path.

Eric and Rae looked at her simultaneously. Eric spoke first. “So what now?”

“Service tunnels. To Greg’s. We need to stay off grid.”

“Like a bunch of rats.”

“Don’t knock rats,” she said. “They’re tasty. Plus, they are smart enough not to get stomped by fucking androids.”

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Note: This is a long chapter. I considered breaking it. Instead, I put a scene break halfway through. I don’t know how Substack will react to long chapters, so if you run into technical difficulties (e.g. cannot see the end because its cut off) let me know.

This is the Thirty-Third chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

Ascendancy, Part 1

APRIL 12, 2074

PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.

When Rae stepped out of the freezer into the morgue, her emotional force field went up. Somewhere deep, the anxiety and rage about Axio’s kidnapping were stewing, but she didn’t show it. The android guarding them silently strolled around the metal cadaver tables. Kate aimed for the morgue double doors, hoping to get a step ahead of the android.

Axio wouldn’t be held on the colony if the Feds were smart about it. But space was vast, empty, and everything left a trace, especially the Feds, who clumsily stomped around space like Godzilla through Tokyo. She had an idea where to start.

The android got to the morgue’s wide windowless doors, pivoted on its heels, and then side-stepped into a space on the wall between the morgue’s wash station and the exit. It wore the disgusting blood spatter she’d tossed at it like an iron-red ribbon of humiliation across its face. Android eyes were generally expressionless, but this one displayed vengeance. Its dry black eyes practically dared her to leave. Or maybe she was projecting Agent Anders inside the android. He was in there, somewhere, maybe in a control room, maybe watching her right now.

Eric stood at a long metal counter along the far wall, watching the action sideways through a face shield and blue surgical mask that covered his long ginger beard. He was wrists-deep in something chunky, red, and soupy inside a square metal bin.

The android ahead wasn’t blocking her. Not directly. But it was positioned so it could quickly slide one step right, barring her exit. Or wait for her to get within its long reach and then shove her to the ground.

Kate was working the angles, calculating how many broken bones it would cost her to try to slip past, when Rae stepped in her path. She held a gray-green cylindrical tool in her outstretched hand and was using it to point to the dead woman under a green sheet.

“What’s this?” Kate asked, although she knew what the tool was, and she knew what she was being asked to do.

“You do the woman,” Rae said, handing her the pathology saw. “I’ll do the man. Eric will bag and tag. We’ll get out of here quicker.”

The first time Kate held the pathology saw, she thought it was a horror movie prop. It was long and heavy and capped with a blade like a single-headed battleaxe or maybe a throwing axe, except with lots of tiny teeth. It was a twenty-amp, shark-tooth, rotary saw that looked and felt lopsided in her hand. She’d never used it. She expected seventeen stitches to the face when she flipped it on.

“I’ve never done an autopsy.”

A metal scalpel materialized in Rae’s other hand. Kate blinked, not knowing where it came from. At the feet of the dead woman, there were freshly sanitized metal bins. Rae clinked the bins with the scalpel. It sounded like a magic wand clinking a goblet.

“Eric will show you. This part is easy. Lift and cut. Put the organs in here. He’ll measure and tag.”

Rae could produce knives the way a magician could produce coins out of thin air. In the morgue especially, but it could happen anywhere. They’d be in the kitchen cooking, and suddenly Rae had materialized a knife and a cutting board, saying, Chop these. Sometimes Kate wondered if Rae had knives up her sleeves. Or scalpels surgically implanted in the palms of her hand that sprang out with the flick of her wrist.

What Kate knew of anatomy, the military taught her using a shooting target with neon-colored organs and point values. Rae grew up on a Wisconsin farm. She’d skinned a deer before she wore a bra, and gutted a pig before she got her period. Ligaments, cartilage, bone, organs. She knew them all before she knew their formal names. Rae could dissect animals blindfolded and name parts by feel, the way Kate could disassemble and reassemble a rifle with her eyes closed.

Kate wasn’t a complainer, but if she did, Rae’s pithy comeback would be something like, Everything is where you think it should be. As long as the lungs were neon yellow and the brains were neon orange, she’d probably be okay.

There was also something in Rae’s eyes. Don’t leave me alone with that thing.

The android watched them as Kate stalled. It blended into the cabinetry. The pizza box from Playground was still on an empty cadaver table, unopened. The pistol Greg lent her for Rae was inside, a subcompact antique that would fit well in Rae’s small hands and do a fine job stopping humans, but was useless on an android. The wash station to its left was a much bigger danger zone. The deep double-basin sink had a faucet that came out of the wall and threaded through a spring to a flat high-pressure nozzle. A faucet so long it could reach all the way into the android’s mouth, where its electrodes were exposed. Androids had eight-hundred-kilowatt-hour battery packs. Add a little water to that much juice, and you've made the world’s tallest 4th of July Sparkler.

The pathology saw had finger grooves and a thumb switch selector and a dial with numbers from one to ten. She guessed those were power settings. The current power setting was two. Safe enough. Rae wasn’t going to hand her a tool that would kill her. Not right away.

Kate thumbed it on. It vibrated and hummed. It didn’t immediately disintegrate or explode. It seemed safe, so she turned the power up to five. The vibrations made her arm buzz all the way up to her elbow. Forceful, energetic vibrations that would definitely rip through bone.

“Five is as high as you’ll need on that,” Rae said.

Kate turned the power up to ten. It was barely controllable. The squealing was ear-splitting. Tremors went all the way to her shoulder.

She thumbed it off. “What’s ten for?”

“With a different blade, just about anything.”

“What’s anything?”

“If the woman turns out to have metal plates in her skull. Or a titanium knee.”

She’d seen deep gashes on the cadaver tables and wondered what had caused them. Maybe an intern had the saw at full power and slipped, ripping cuts across the metal. She held the saw in her hand like an awkward dagger and imagined pressing it into the metal spinal column of the android at the door, decapitating it. Or cutting open the memory core in its torso after she’d shorted it out.

“Good to know. Let’s get to it.”

“Wear a face shield.”

No shit.

She and Eric worked on the woman for two hours after that. There was an engagement ring and wedding ring on her hand, which they had to remove, and makeup under blood spatter, which they also had to remove. In the end, it didn’t matter that Kate didn’t know a whole lot about anatomy. Eric covered the woman’s face out of respect and then drew a Y-line with a marker from the dead woman’s shoulders, around the woman’s breasts, coming to a junction below the two gunshot wounds to the sternum, and then down to her navel. When they opened the woman’s chest, the first thing that was apparent was that everything was where she expected it to be based on the military’s neon target. Score one for military training. The second thing that was apparent was that the chest cavity looked exactly the way she thought it would if two closely spaced coilgun slugs fragmented and exploded around the heart. There was not much lifting or cutting in the chest, just a lot of scooping and suctioning. The woman’s lungs and heart were pulpified. The slugs had shattered her spinal column and rear ribs. Mercifully, the woman was dead before she hit the floor.

Eric made notes. Near the end, he reached under the woman’s intestines and removed a glob of connected organs. All he said aloud was that there were irregularities.

It felt like they’d barely begun when Rae tossed the green sheet over her body and snapped her gloves off. She moved to the foot of their cadaver table and stood there, shaking her head, disappointed about something. Like she was about to fire them because they were too slow and not even qualified enough to screw up her coffee order. It was a look Kate had seen, but it was usually directed at interns.

“We have enough.”

Eric put his tools down. “I guess we do.”

“Conclusions?” Rae asked.

Kate looked at the woman’s bloody chest cavity. “I think I’ll pass on chili for a while.”

“I meant about the cause of death.”

Was this a trick question? “Malfunctioning machines, for sure.”

Eric and Rae exchanged some sort of glance. A code passed between them, and then he said, “Same as the others.”

His tone confused her. Same as what others? At first, it sounded like Eric agreed, malfunctioning machines, same as the others, but it also sounded like he was talking about more than just the three bodies in the morgue right now.

She opened her mouth to ask. Then she remembered their silicone babysitter recording every word.

Rae nodded. Whatever code passed between them, she agreed. “So let’s get these two into the freezer and clean up.” To the android, she said, “Tell your boss we are done here. We are locking up and going for some dinner. I want to see Axio, and then get sleep.”

The android didn’t move. Its eyes didn’t blink. Its pupils didn’t dilate. It stood, five heartbeats, a tower of metal and silicone rubber. The only sound in the room was the fans sucking the stench into the ceiling vents. Kate thought about rushing the droid and decapitating it with the pathology saw. Or shoving the faucet at the wash station into its mouth. Four steps, a twist of the cold nozzle, and there’d be heroic fireworks.

She didn’t get a chance. The android’s servos spun up and it disappeared into the hallway, the morgue doors slamming closed behind it.

Wordlessly, the three of them stowed the bodies in the freezer and moved to the wash station to clean up. At the sink, Kate splashed cold water on her face to wake herself up. The coppery stench of blood had seeped under her protective gear and into her clothes and hair. She needed a shower and coffee.

“Eric, what did you mean, like the others?” She asked the wash station wall, scrubbing her hands.

No one answered. Rae’s forehead folded up as she scoured the tips of her fingers and cuticles under the water. She looked like she was going to say something, but then didn’t.

Eric looked into the wash basin with an expression like a doctor standing over a patient, telegraphing, The patient isn’t going to make it.

He said, “You want me to double-check?”

“No need,” Rae said. “The simplest explanation is the most likely. Feds killed these three. Case closed.”

The bullet holes to the head and chest had convinced Kate, except Rae’s voice had a lot of doubt.

“But?”

“These three all had terminal diseases,” Eric said. “Like the others.”

“Terminal?”

“The first three we connected to the artifact,” Rae said, “we dismissed as suicides. All three had terminal cancer. The fourth was killed by an android at Vapor Trail—but Leyna was thinking someone programmed the mermaid to do it. She was looking into it but didn’t get far before the Feds took over.”

The Feds took her over, she wanted to add. Took her over with the artifact. She stayed silent.

“Finn, the man we were autopsying when you came in,” Eric added. “His liver was necrotic and well past the time when he could have grown a transplant. I think the woman had ovarian cancer, but I need to do a biopsy.”

Space was full of radiation, and radiation was bad for humans, generally causing all sorts of cancer. The radiation vaccine wasn’t really a cure, it just delayed the inevitable.

“Bullets killed those three,” Kate said. “Occam’s razor says excessive force by overzealous Feds.”

“I agree,” Rae said skeptically.

“The alternative is what, exactly?” Kate asked.

“We are seeing what they want us to see and writing it up the way they want us to write it up,” Rae said. “What are the odds the first four had access to highly classified top-secret projects?”

Kate didn’t need to think about it. “Zero.”

“Exactly.” Rae dropped the scrub brush in the sink, turned off the tap, and started shaking the water off her hands. “It could just be a coincidence that every single victim had some sort of terminal disease.” Rae paused to dry her hands on a towel. “You said they were using the artifact to control Leyna like a puppet?”

Kate thought back to the skybridge, picturing Leyna’s face but hearing Agent Anders’ vindictiveness. “It seemed like it. But she could have been telling me what I wanted to hear. How would I really know?”

Rae spun and walked around the other side of an empty cadaver table, the one with the brown pizza box. Hot from Playground and a black metallic cage logo was printed on the lid. Inside was the gun. Rae pulled the box to her and leaned on the table with her hands like she was going to faint.

“The simple explanation is the Feds are nasty and kill people,” Rae said.

“So what’s the complicated one?” Kate shook her hands dry and toweled them.

“The artifact kills people. Maybe it gives off some abnormal radiation dose and the Feds are ordering people to kill themselves to cover it up.” Rae opened the pizza box halfway and reached in. “Or to cover up whatever they are doing. Has anyone ever survived this artifact?”

The answer was no. Not to Kate’s knowledge. All the Defense Department experiments she knew about were failures. In those cases, brains boiled. No one lived long enough to get cancer.

Leyna was already exposed. She had a feeling they planned to use it on Axio, too, but she wasn’t going to say so with Rae standing over a gun and stewing with rage and grief.

At that moment, Agent Lindsay barged through the morgue doors, trailed by an android.

********* *********

This droid was different. Same dark suit, same wooden black eyes, but no face mark. Agent Lindsay wore an identical suit and scowl, except miniaturized, like a pint-size fashion clone. Her blond ponytail flagged. Her blue eyes swept the room and lasered on Rae. There were pistols under their jackets, carelessly concealed as usual, but no dart gun or stun gun this time. Agent Lindsay hadn’t brought her cane with her, either. She’d dropped that charade, at least.

“Your leg is looking healed,” Kate said.

“A modern miracle called lunar gravity. How’s my report coming?”

“Writing it as we speak,” Rae said, putting a slice of cold pizza to her mouth. Kate was more than a little relieved to see the pizza materialize and not the gun.

“Good.” Agent Lindsay turned and waved the android out the door. Some kind of silent exchange happened between them, and then the android spun and left.

Agent Lindsay misunderstood Rae’s sarcasm. Rae didn’t use AI or a neuroface. She preferred to type. She said the clicking helped her think. So there was, in fact, no report writing happening, but Agent Lindsay thought there was. Kate only smiled.

“You shouldn’t antagonize Agent Anders,” Agent Lindsay said to Kate. “His circuits still haven’t cooled.”

“Some people are so hard to please.”

“I am personally not interested in the paperwork. I am doing all I can to keep him from killing you. You have to help me, help you.”

“Reassuring. All that’s between me and a sociopathic Federal agent is form FU-one-two-three.”

“Nobody wants trouble, least of all me. I can offer you a deal. What if I could see to it that you are safely on a shuttle to Mars, where you can retire?”

Kate looked at Rae to gauge her reaction. Strange as it may be, the offer was tempting. Trying to get rid of Feds was like trying to get rid of a rat infestation. You could control the population, but they were never going away. The artifact would be in the wild soon. It would set off a chain reaction race for control. Maybe the race was already on, and that’s why they were here.

They were using it to control people. Like a neuroface, except in reverse. The fact that someone built it forty thousand years ago was only mildly relevant. Maybe forty thousand years ago, humans built it and then wiped themselves out. Or maybe an alien race built it to control us, and we turned on them, wiping them out instead. Who built it was an academic question for the historians who survived the coming chaos. Either way, the results weren’t promising. So far, everyone was dead, including the civilization that built it and first deployed it. Extinct. She guessed Agent Lindsay and Anders were here to learn how to mass-produce it. Maybe they already could. Every politician would want one of these hanging around their voters’ necks, and the death toll wouldn’t matter. People would go to war over it.

So yes, a trip to Mars was extremely tempting. She wanted to be two hundred million kilometers from Earth when they unleashed it. Maybe aliens made the same wise decision, forty thousand years ago.

“Retire?” Rae asked.

“When we are done here, your services will no longer be needed.”

“You can’t fire me.”

“No one is firing you. You will be…outmoded. We will arrange for you to ascend.”

“I want to see my son.”

“Get me my report, and then you will see him.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You aren’t hurting me. It’s for the families. They won’t get their insurance payments.”

“So that’s what this is? Insurance fraud?”

Eric had wisely stepped out of the verbal sparring match. He was off in the corner at a metal countertop, a knife in one hand and an organ in the other, slicing thin sections and putting them on slides.

She still didn’t think she was grasping the whole puzzle. Feds coming here to mass-produce the artifact made sense, but the abductions didn’t fit in. Why abduct Jin? Did they really abduct Axio for leverage over Rae? Or was there something else? Abductions were a lot more work than just shooting people. Captives needed to be fed and watered and supervised. They needed to go to the bathroom and show up for proof-of-life videos. A lot of work, but for what?

They hinted they were using the artifact on Axio. If they had other plans for him, the offer of a safe passage to Mars was a bluff. Some kind of a delay tactic.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Mars,” Kate said to Rae, interrupting. “Maybe it’s time we moved on from here.”

Rae looked around the morgue like she was being asked to leave her childhood home. “I don’t know.”

“This place will be crawling with Feds. Will we ever really feel safe here?”

Rae didn’t say anything. To Agent Lindsay, Kate said, “Guarantee the three of us safe passage, and we won’t stir up trouble. Me, Rae, and Axio. I’ll even stop antagonizing Anders.”

She felt bad about leaving out Jin and Leyna, but she was sure there wouldn’t be one ticket to Mars, let alone five.

Kate looked at Rae. Rae said, “Fine. Mars. If that’s what it takes to get Axio back. I am willing to start over.”

Kate fake-smiled at Agent Lindsay. Agent Lindsay fake-smiled back. Just two poker players smiling at each other.

“When can Axio be released?” Kate asked.

“A few days. We want to be sure you cooperate.”

“Makes sense. That would be my move.” Kate fake-smiled again.

Agent Lindsay fake-smiled back again.

“What exactly do you have him doing?” Rae asked.

“He is very smart. Think of it like boarding school. He is learning from the best minds now.”

Ooof. A slap in the face to Rae.

“Axio is homeschooled,” Kate said. “He was learning from the best mind before.”

Agent Lindsay’s mouth opened. A weak little bird sound came out.

It was time to show her hand. “But I do have one more question about the Mars offer.”

“What’s that?”

“A detail, really. The shuttle schedules. I noticed all the arriving trips were delayed.”

“We arranged that. Safer that way.”

“Totally agree.” Kate smiled. “But you see, the lunar colony is a layover and refuel spot. No arriving shuttles mean no passengers for the shuttles departing for Mars.”

Agent Lindsay winced like she’d eaten a frog.

“So naturally, all the Mars shuttles were canceled.”

“I guess you caught me.” Agent Lindsay spread her hands wide, palms out.

“No trip to Mars. You don’t plan to hand Axio back, either.”

Agent Lindsay looked away, deciding something. When she looked back at Kate, she almost looked relieved. Like she was glad the charade was over. “We could make this very difficult. Dredge up the accusations by Rae’s ex-husband, or file charges that Axio’s education hasn’t met Federal requirements. As I said when I came in, we don’t want this to be ugly. We want a peaceful transition. But yes, the bottom line is, no matter what, Axio stays with us. He's happy now, and he’s made his choice.”

Rae’s face was red with anger, and her whole body shook. “What choice? He’s thirteen. You have no right.”

The two gunshots were so loud inside the morgue that Kate couldn’t tell the difference between the ringing in her ears and the metal bins rattling on the shelves. The blasts blew the lid of the pizza box flat, revealing Rae holding the pistol Greg lent them. An acrid blue-black cloud of burnt gunpowder drifted towards the ceiling, and then its wisps were suctioned by the ceiling vent fans.

Agent Lindsay flopped forward, gripping her chest, landing face-first on the floor. Blood started pooling around her.

Rae dropped the pistol and covered her face, sobbing.

Kate spun and grabbed the faucet, twisting it on, and moved to the door, prepared to shove it in an android’s mouth if it came in. Nothing entered. She heard no footfalls. She peered outside. The hall was empty.

A lucky break, but the hospital walls were thin, so she figured someone would have heard the shots and be searching for the source. They didn’t have a lot of time.

She looked over to Eric. He was pushing buttons on a display next to a door on the wall set waist high and about a meter square. Like a freezer drawer they put bodies in, except this morgue didn’t have freezers for individual bodies.

“What are you doing?” Kate asked.

“Aquamation chamber.” He jammed a red mushroom button on the right side of the chamber door and pulled a handle down to open it. A metal gurney slid out. It looked like a cold silver tongue. “Bring her over.”

Rae was bawling and muttering for Axio. The red pool around Agent Lindsay was becoming a lake. If someone revived her, they’d be dead. If someone found the body, they’d also be dead.

“Clothes and all?”

“Clothes and all.” Eric said, “In six hours, all that will be left of her is her earrings and phone.”

Her phone. Kate kneeled down and turned Agent Lindsay over. Her eyes were glassy, and her pupils were dilated. She didn’t check for a pulse. She reached inside Agent Lindsay’s jacket and pulled out her phone, shoving them in her pocket, and then took her gun, badge, and spare ammo.

Rae had collapsed to the ground and was sitting with her head between her knees. Kate was relieved to see that the gun was still on the table, and not in her hand.

She motioned for Eric to come and help. He kneeled, putting his arms through Agent Lindsay’s armpits, and then lifted her. Kate grabbed the ankles. Together, they heaved Agent Lindsay’s body onto the aquamation table and then slid her down the chamber’s gullet.

Eric started to lift the door closed.

“Wait.”

Kate retrieved the Agent’s phone from her pocket. The screen was smeared with blood. She wiped it on her uniform until it was as clean as it was going to get, and then pressed Agent Lindsay’s dead thumb to it. The phone unlocked.

“Ok. go.”

Eric pulled the door closed and latched it. He hit a green mushroom button. There was a whirring of motors and then a grinding noise.

“What’s that noise?”

“Shredder. We shred the bodies before aquamation because little chunks hydrolyze faster.” The grinding grew louder until it sounded like a side of beef going through a paper shredder.

Eric was a head taller than her, twice as wide, with a thick ginger beard and brown eyes. There was no glimmer of sweat on his brow or glint of panic in his eyes. No surprise either. She figured he’d seen it coming. He was standing on the other side of the pizza box and had seen Rae holding the pistol.

The shredding noise quickly died down to a gurgling.

“Rinse cycle,” he said apologetically.

Kate looked over at the pool of blood on the floor, and then at Rae, curled up and crying. “We need to get out of here yesterday. We also need to clean up.”

Eric was already moving towards a mop. “I’ll get the blood, you get the boss.”

Kate looked at the bloodstains on her clothes. “We also need to get rid of these clothes.”

Eric pointed across the room. “New scrubs in that drawer over there. And that—” He thumb-pointed to the aquamator. “That eats everything organic.”

Rae had her face in her palms, sobbing. Kate sat down beside her, putting an arm around her shoulder and pulling her in. “We’ll get Axio back.”

“We need to put blond bitch in the aquamator.”

“Consider it done.”

“And tell Eric to make sure to use the high-pressure setting.”

“Check. Do you think you can stand?”

“I’m not sorry I killed her.”

“No need to be.” Kate wasn’t sorry that the agent was dead. She regretted the timing. She would have rather tied Agent Lindsay up and interrogated her first. “We do need to go, though, sweetie. Someone might have heard the shots. This place will be swarming with spider drones soon.”

“Give me a minute.” Rae started wiping her face on her sleeves, like a cat.

Kate reached into her pocket for the agent’s phone. She swiped through apps and found notes on The Ascendancy Project and a list of people divided into three columns. There were too many names to count, so she just scrolled and scrolled until her thumb stopped on ones she recognized. She was on the list. Under the first column, titled Unsuitable for Ascension, along with about a thousand other people. She found Axio, Jin, Leyna, and Rae in the second column, Candidates. Rae had a question mark by her name. Agent Anders and Agent Lindsay were in the third column, a much shorter list, Ascended. Most of the people in that column had skull emojis after their names, including the morgue victims and Agent Anders.

It looked like a naughty and nice list. She was naughty, Unsuitable, and happy to be. The names she recognized in the Candidates column had been abducted. Except for Rae. Candidates were kidnapped and then what...? Tested? Interviewed?

She couldn’t reconcile the skull emojis. It couldn’t mean the people on that list were dead. Not possible. Agent Anders had a skull, but he was very much alive. Kate had spoken to him, through Leyna and through the android, she was sure of it. Agent Lindsay had spoken about him in the present tense. I am doing all I can to keep him from killing you.

The skull meant something else. Maybe it marked people who’d been exposed to the artifact. But then Leyna was exposed, and she didn’t have a skull next to her name.

She was still missing a piece. She put the phone back in her pocket.

Freeing Leyna was still her best hope of finding Axio. She might get some answers, too. But now she had to do it as a fugitive from the Feds, who’d have shoot-on-sight orders for an Unsuitable like her, once they realized who’d killed Agent Lindsay.

Eric was standing over them with a pile of neatly folded clean scrubs. He had changed already, and dumped his dirty scrubs in a pile below the aquamator door. The pizza box was in the pile, too. He must clean up a lot of spills in the morgue, because the floor was already spotless. The mop and bucket were upside down in the wash basin.

Kate heard scratching in the vents and helped Rae to her feet. “We have to go.”

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This is the Thirty-second chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

Bread and Circuses, Part 2

APRIL 12, 2074

PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.

Kate exited Playground holding a pizza box. Outside on the concourse, an android stepped forward. She expected no less. Androids didn’t sleep, didn’t lose focus, didn’t get bored, and didn’t need to duck away to pee. It might have been the same droid that followed her, or it might have been swapped out during the twenty minutes she was inside. There was no way to tell. The military and police models looked all the same. Like someone took a college linebacker, molded him in silicone rubber over a metal endoskeleton, and removed the soul. They were singular, efficient, sociopathic machines that stayed on task until their batteries died.

The pizza box was risky. The pistol nestled in the small of her back was riskier. Her advantage was that the models the Feds used weren’t very intelligent. Barely smarter than a kitchen spatula. Military and police models didn’t adapt, didn’t improvise, and didn’t show initiative. They had no empathy and no sense of self-preservation, either. Civilian models had all sorts of intelligence levels, some even approaching sentience and consciousness, but the last thing the feds wanted was something that could think for itself. Soldiers, agents, androids, the qualifications to get into club Federal Agent were all the same. Follow orders without question. It didn’t matter whether your neural pathways were silicon or carbon.

The android asked her to open the pizza box. She did. Piping hot steam drifted out. She watched its eyes. It was taking pictures. Maybe making a video and sending it up the chain of command. Its visual sensors stretched into the infrared and ultraviolet, far better than humans. But it would see nothing but a white hot sun. A little misdirection.

It asked her to close the box and turn around. She did. The concourse wasn’t crowded, but she made a show, holding the pizza high and turning like a runway model. She did two turns, then, when her back was to the droid, she walked away. Nothing happened. No yell for her to halt, no pfffft of a dart, and no crack of gunfire. Her navy blouse was thick, so she was sure the pistol wouldn’t print. Greg promised it wouldn’t show up on a scan and he was right. She’d kiss him, if she weren’t his sister.

The droid followed her to the hospital entrance, a two-story redstone archway decorated with plaques and reliefs in remembrance of those who died on the colony. Her shadow squeaked like a squeegee every time it took a step. Maybe they’d swapped androids. She remembered a whine.

The squeaking stopped when she was a half step inside the red granite archway. She turned to see that the android had posted itself guard in front of a memorial plaque to David and Elizabeth Cohen, who passed in September 2072.

An optimist might say she’d earned a downgrade in the android’s threat matrix. Or that it was bored, or wanted a moment of silence for the Cohens. Except androids don't get bored, or pray. The only change in its matrix was that it had been given a new order, and the new order required it to stand guard at the hospital entrance.

The hospital lobby was empty. It was a Monday afternoon. She supposed it was too early for the overdoses, too late for people who woke up with whatever virus was going around.

Not all the areas in the hospital had security cameras. In fact, most places didn’t for privacy reasons. She wandered through the hallways, fingering the biometric security and pushing through the metal doors, staying on a path with cameras. She figured they’d tapped the colony security feeds by now, and she wanted them to see her as just a woman delivering a pizza box. Nothing suspicious

She passed the threshold to the ICU, one of those places with no camera coverage. The curtains were all open, gurneys empty. The machines were mute. Not even a heart arrhythmia caused by space sickness. A lonely nurse in pink scrubs looked up from her station and smiled, almost begging for Kate to start a conversation to relieve the boredom. Not what she expected at all. It was deserted, like one of those ghost towns you read about where the entire population vanishes.

In the corner, trying to blend in between a gurney and a cart full of metal drawers, an android, wearing the trademark bad suit from the Federal conformity store. What was it doing here? It couldn’t have anticipated her coming this way, running some circuitous route around the hospital only to station itself in the ICU. Following her was more efficient.

“When did that get here?” Kate pointed at the android in the corner.

The nurse put something down behind the desk and then made a big effort out of looking over her shoulder. Like it was stiff from all the sitting. Like her muscles had turned to wood under her pink scrubs.

“Been here since before my shift started.”

“Quiet around here.”

The nurse shrugged, then started stretching and moving her neck from side to side. “You missed it. A lot of excitement, earlier.”

“Earlier?”

“Right as I started my shift. They were cleaning up.”

“What kind of excitement?”

The nurse shrugged. She had pushed out the chair and was pulling her knees to her chin, continuing her stretching, which now seemed to have morphed into chair yoga.

The android’s eyes didn’t blink. They didn’t have to. They didn’t have to look at her to scan her, either. It was probably recording and transcribing the entire conversation. What it couldn’t hear, it would run through lip-reading AI.

Kate smiled at the nurse, nodded goodbye, and then walked on, taking the stairwell to the basement.

The Feds were spreading like bamboo. She didn’t know why they were here, but it almost didn’t matter. You had to get rid of them early. Once rooted, they sent shoots out. They’d spring up everywhere, eventually crowding everything else out. She pictured the ICU full. Nurses and nursebots and doctors and docbots scurrying as machines beeped and blared. Every bed was occupied. It smelled of blood and disinfectant. Gurneys overflowed into the hall with desperate patients waiting to be seen. To get rid of something as invasive as corrupt Federal agents, she might need to take a flamethrower to the place. The alternative was to let them snatch all the sunlight and choke everything in their path until nothing grew. The longer they were here, the harder it would be to dig them out, and the worse the collateral damage would be.

In the basement hallway, the cheesy smell from the pizza in her hand barely covered the scent of decay, like old meat and ammonia.

She spilled through the morgue’s metal double doors, announcing herself. Green sheets covered two bodies on metal cadaver carts. Eric and Rae were dressed in yellow protective face shields and scrubs, hovering over the split-open chest of a middle-aged male, busily cutting one of his organs out.

In the corner, standing as wooden and thick as a California redwood, another android with a cheap navy blue suit and sloppily concealed pistol. It didn’t blink. They never blinked. The silicone rubber and the suit were for show. All their strength stemmed from their metal endoskeleton and high-torque electric servos. They could kill, and they were good at it. Gynoids, the female-looking models, were designed so everybody wanted to screw with them. Military and police models were designed for intimidation and surveillance, so nobody wanted to screw with them.

They knew she was coming here. It could have been here to monitor her, but she didn’t think so.

“How long has Woody been here?”

Ignoring her, Eric lifted a yellowish-brown organ out of the dead man’s chest and dangled it in the overhead light. “Heavy. Yellowish. Steatotic.”

She knew it was the man’s liver and guessed steatotic meant it was fatty and yellowish and lumpy when it should have been smooth and robust purple. Maybe he had a fatty liver because he drank too much. But if he was an alcoholic, that wasn’t what killed him. His liver had a spiderweb of lacerations radiating from a single hole. A high velocity gunshot wound. No doubt about it.

The nurse said she’d missed the excitement.

“Twenty-two-eighty-four grams,” Eric said, after plopping the liver into a metal tray. “Two thousand two hundred and eighty-four.”

“Signs of fibrosis, too,” Rae said.

Eric lifted the liver out of the tray. “Lacerations are consistent with penetrating trauma with a metal rod.”

No, that wasn’t right. Kate could see it clear as day, even with ten steps and two empty metal cadaver carts between them.

“Bag it, tag it, slice it,” Rae said.

Kate put the pizza on a nearby metal table and grabbed scrubs and a mask from the hook.

The android in the corner scanned her while she put on her scrubs. They had excellent vision, but not x-ray vision. Still, she felt naked. With her hands up, she melodramatically turned around to model her scrubs. Nothing happened. No beep. No siren. No command to pull up her blouse. That's because, unlike Federal agents, she knew how to conceal a pistol.

She flipped it off with both middle fingers.

“I see you stopped at Greg’s first,” Rae said. “Stop playing with the babysitter and come over and help.”

She stood at the end of the cadaver table, at the man’s feet. He was naked, his eyes closed, his face curled into a veiny purple death grimace, complaining about the way Rae and Eric had hacksawed and clamped his chest open to expose his viscera. Rae reached into the cavity with an already-bloody scalpel. It had been a while since Kate saw Rae do an old school autopsy instead of using the scanning machines.

“What does steatotic mean?”

“It means he’s been hitting the alcohol pretty hard,” Rae said. “Borderline cirrhosis.”

Rae cut. Eric hoisted organs, measured, and called out results or observations. Her son had been kidnapped, but you would never know it by the way she worked. No tears. No shaking. No anger underneath the face shield. She was all focus and rigor. It was like there was a force field keeping everything at bay.

Kate watched for a few moments, then decided to peek under one of the other green sheets. A woman, unremarkable except for the tuffs of hair cut short for testing. She hadn’t been autopsied yet, but Kate figured she died from the two gunshot wounds to the sternum.

“All from the same incident?” Kate asked.

“Machines at Lunar Foundries overheated and grenaded,” Eric responded.

“Machines, right,” she muttered.

Every Marine was a rifleman first. The Department of Defense spent a lot of money to train her to double tap targets in both Earth and orbital environments. The problem with the second tap was always timing the recoil and muzzle jump. Difficulty grew exponentially when the target was moving. There were scopes and computers and software to calculate how far to lead a target, but a real firefight happened too fast for all that. The entrance wounds were so close that the browned burn rings practically touched. Either the woman was standing very still, or the shooter had the reaction time of an android.

“Shrapnel everywhere,” Eric said. “They were standing right in front of it.”

People unaccustomed to gunfire usually held up their hands, trying to block the bullet. This woman had no defensive wounds. She didn’t see it coming.

Kate covered the woman and moved to the second body. A man, with a massive, gaping head wound that looked close range, like an execution. He had two more gunshot wounds to the chest. Those were spread wide. One of the bullets sheared his thumb, probably when he tried to block the inevitable.

The nurse upstairs had said, ‘Right as I started my shift. They were cleaning up.’ Some kind of message?

“What kind of machine?” Kate asked.

Eric paused before he answered. Maybe he was wrestling with a pancreas, or maybe he had to think up a lie. “One of those milling machines that spin at a gajillion rpms.”

“A lathe?”

“Bigger, about as tall as me.”

“A CNC machine?”

“Right. People forget to lube them, or put the wrong oil in. Whole thing blows up like a grenade.”

Why Eric and Rae were lying, she didn’t know. It probably had something to do with the silicone babysitter in the cheap suit watching them from the corner, and likely recording the autopsy.

“Insufficient lubricosity of the planetary gears will get you every time,” she said, closing the sheet on the man. “They run dry, they seize, they explode. We’ll have to write them up for a safety violation.”

A human shot the man. It wasn’t the worst shooting she’d ever seen, but not the best either. Androids rarely went for the execution-style coup de grâce to the head. They didn’t need to. Nobody came back from two closely spaced bullets that shredded the heart. It would be an inefficient waste of motion. But she was reasonably sure an android shot the woman.

Eric released a section of gray intestines into a square metal pan. “That’s right, things got seized. Blam.”

“Eric, that is enough.” Rae snapped her gloves off and dumped them in the trash. Then she removed her face shield. “We are done here.”

“We are done?”

“Fun’s over. We have enough for insurance purposes. Kate, help me move the body to the freezer while Eric bags and tags the evidence.”

The whole cadaver table moved on four wheels. Rae threw a green sheet over the man, and then unhooked gray hoses from her end. Kate kicked the wheel locks and pulled, and they were rolling towards the freezer.

She heard the android’s servos activate before she saw it move. It came at them from the corner and followed a half step behind Rae, towering over her.

The freezer door opened automatically as Kate backed towards it. She pulled. Rae pushed, maneuvering the table into the threshold. Rae was all the way in, but as the door closed, the android blocked it and took a half step inside.

It scanned, probably taking a reel and sending it up the chain of command.

“It’s a big, cold aluminum box with rotting meat inside, like your mom’s uterus,” Kate said to the android.

“I told you, you have no idea what I am capable of now.” It was Agent Ander’s voice, through the android. A cloud of freezer air floated out, chilling her spine.

It scanned the freezer for another half second and then released the door.

“Do you have to antagonize them?” Rae asked when the door was closed.

“Well, let’s see, they threatened—no promised to kill me painfully, kidnapped Axio, killed three people that we know of, but I’m the antagonist?”

“I can’t believe you went to Greg’s place first.” Rae’s breath crystallized in the pale light. Tears were forming. The force field was coming down. Kate pushed the cadaver cart against the wall.

Instead of a hug, Rae started beating Kate’s chest. Kate let it happen, again and again. She’d thrown plenty of rage punches, at her grandfather, at her brother, and at boxing dummies. Rae’s tears became a river. When she’d exhausted herself, Kate pulled her into a bear hug.

“Want to tell me what happened?”

“They locked me out of my scanning equipment.”

“I’ll call cybersecurity.”

“Shut up. Why do you always have to make a joke? Do you have a plan to get my son back?”

“Tell me what happened with Axio.”

Rae’s hands felt around Kate’s back. “And where is my pistol?”

You can fool an android, but you can never fool a Doctor Rachel Torres, Ph.D., Chief Medical Examiner.

“How do you like your pizza?”

“Jesus. You just left it out there?”

“As far as it's concerned, it’s a sausage pepperoni pizza. Tell me what happened with Axio.”

“Scar was meowing on the bed. I just wanted to sleep. I couldn’t get to the gun safe in time.”

“I don’t think it would have made a difference. Tell me everything that happened.”

“We can’t be in here long.” Rae was shaking in Kate’s arms, a combination of the freezing temperature of the cooler and grief.

“I know.”

“There is not much to tell, at least not that I can remember. Androids came in the middle of the night like gestapo. They must have had a key or the override code. They stormed the bedroom and darted me.”

“Androids? Or Agents, too?”

Rae was silent for a beat.

“Agents?”

“I can’t remember. Whatever they gave me I think fucked with my memory.”

“Go on.” Kate squeezed as hard as she could, trying to transfer her body heat to Rae. Her hair smelled like lavender.

“Before I passed out, I saw them carry Axio from his bedroom. He was already unconscious. When I woke, they were all gone. I thought at first it was a bad dream.”

“They told me you spoke to him?”

“I checked his room. I was—”

Rae didn’t finish.

“You were, what?”

“I panicked. You were away, Jin was away, so I called Leyna. I had no idea.”

“They let you speak to him?”

“She said he is fine, but I insisted. She put him on video and let me ask questions. He looked ok. Only…”

When Rae didn’t continue, Kate asked, “Only what? Did he have bruises?”

“No bruises. He didn’t look like himself. I think they drugged him.”

“What makes you think that?”

“His eyes were glazed over and he was slurring his words.”

That could mean drugs. Rae would say the simplest explanation was usually the correct one. But Kate didn’t think so.

“Could you tell where he was?”

“The background was one of those defaults, like a purple nebula.”

The freezer door swung open. Rae wiped her face on her scrubs.

The android glowered at them for a few heartbeats. “What is going on in here?”

“What do you think is going on in here? We are married. We haven’t seen each other in a while and have a lot to catch up on, like you kidnapping her fucking child.”

“You cry now, but you will see. Axio will be doing great things. He has such an incredible mind.”

The android slammed the freezer door shut.

“We really need a naming system for those things,” Kate said.

“How do you tell them apart?”

“That’s the problem. You can’t”

“I wish you wouldn’t antagonize them. They might hurt Axio.”

“They have a lot more than sarcasm coming their way.” She didn’t say: what they might be doing to Axio was far worse than physical torture. No point worrying Rae even more than she was already worried.

“You have a plan?”

“I’m working on it—Earlier, you said they locked you out of your scanning equipment? Why are you doing autopsies the old-fashioned way?”

“They banned me from using the MRI and CT scanner. Agent blond bitch told me she needed to read the reports before I filed them. They posted that tree trunk in my morgue in case I screwed up.”

“Screw up how?”

“They want me to write it up like an industrial accident.”

The Agents were fudging the paperwork. That was good news.

“Is that what you’re going to do?”

“Of course that’s what I’m going to do. They have my son. Do I look stupid?”

“But?”

“Does that look like an industrial accident to you? I can put whatever I want in the file. It won’t fool anyone.”

“Why is there a guard in the ICU?”

“Same. They threatened all the doctors and nurses when they brought the victims in.”

The nurse said they were cleaning up. The Agents were faking paperwork and cleaning up after themselves. That pointed to a small rogue band of agents not ready to get caught. She wasn’t facing an entire department. Still, corrupt Federal agents of a feather flocked together. She’d be overrun soon enough. If she moved fast, she might have a chance.

“Where did they bring the victims from?”

“From—”

Before Rae finished her sentence, the android opened the door. Freezing air and warm air mixed at the threshold into a fog.

“That’s enough time,” the android said.

“Well, that is really good news, I am glad to hear it,” Kate said to Rae.

Rae wiped her eyes and pulled away.

“Out.”

“You know, we need a naming system.” Kate was face-to-face with the android. The dead man was to her right, on the cadaver cart.

“You can’t tell us apart. That’s the idea.”

Kate grabbed a handful of coagulated blood from the cadaver table. It was like runny jello, and it was filled with bone dust and flesh. It was disgusting. She flung it at the android. It was like trying to throw spaghetti sauce. A long streak landed across the android’s face and shoulders, shaped like an ‘S,’ or maybe a ‘5.’

“Well, now I can. I think you’ll be A5. The A is for assclown, not android.”

The android forced them back to work. They had two more bodies to autopsy. A plan had started to gel in Kate’s head. A sketchy, tentative plan. She needed to figure out what the Agents were up to. First, she needed to free Leyna.

Chapter 33: The Ascendancy part 1

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This is the Thirty-First chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

Bread and Circuses, Part 1

APRIL 12, 2074

PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.

Agent Lindsay lowered the rifle and nodded sideways. Seeing the opening, a drill sergeant in Kate’s head shouted GO GO GO GO, and she hustled down the skybridge towards the elevator. She’d convinced them she’d cooperate—of course, because she had no choice. They’d hold Axio off-colony, if they were good, and Feds were absolutely the best when it came to abducting people off the street and absconding. Maybe he’d been taken to an orbital ship, maybe somewhere else. Either way, there was nothing she could do until she knew where he was, at least nothing she could do without a lot of collateral damage.

“I hope you like what we’ve done with the place,” she heard Agent Lindsay call out. “Follow her.”

An android lumbered down the skybridge and caught up as she reached the elevator. It had glassy, dry brown eyes and a pistol and tranquilizer gun on its belt. The three small green dots above its right eye indicated five hours of charge in its batteries, less if she taxed it and towed it in circles.

It had the faint dishwater smell of a dirty kitchen spatula. It blinked at her like a reptile. Suddenly, she felt like riding in a metal coffin down seventeen floors with an android of unknown programming was a bad idea.

“I’m up for cardio, whaddya say?” She poked it in the chest and then darted for the stairs. It hesitated, watching her go through the stairwell door, and then its servos powered up, whining and grousing at her from three steps behind.

Ditching an android wasn’t going to happen on the stairs or the main concourse. Not one armed with a pistol and tranq gun. They were equipped with ballistic software that could compensate for local gravity, wind, air resistance, and the speed of the target. In the movies the bad guy always missed, but in the real world, androids were crack shots, even when shooting on the move. Its pistol was accurate enough to hit an apple at fifty meters, give or take, and its tranq gun at twenty-five. It wasn’t invulnerable, though, and she had an idea where she could shed it. If she could make it there without getting darted in the neck. Or shot.

She stepped out of the stairwell and into the boarding area, unsure what she’d find. Maybe a stampede, or at least a mob of panicked faces, held back by stanchions, screaming ‘FEDS GO HOME!’ Instead, passengers idled, waiting to board, seated in blue-on-silver chairs, heads down and eyes focused on videos, books, games, as if nothing had or was about to happen.

Monitors at the gate showed departing shuttles were ON TIME while arriving shuttles were DELAYED. They were letting people leave. They could only hold arriving shuttles in orbit for so long, though. The moon had very few stable orbits because of its lumpy concentrations of mass; shuttles and satellites required periodic thrust to maintain orbit the same way a plane needed fuel to circle an airport. Shuttles didn’t carry enough fuel to make the burn back to Earth orbit, either. They were expected to refuel here. Which meant all those shuttles in parking orbit would have to land at the spaceport one way or the other. How much time Agent Anders and Lindsay needed for their little colony heist, or maybe coup d’etat, she didn’t know. They had a few hours, maybe, until the shuttles started dropping from the sky.

On the way out of the spaceport, she saw an android standing guard at the threshold to the colony. This one wore a navy blue uniform—her department’s uniform, complete with the logo and tan cowboy hat. It had a holstered pistol and a tranquilizer gun on his belt, like the one tailing her.

She didn’t employ androids, and she didn’t employ tranq guns. The tourists didn’t notice. They had their heads in their devices. Those who did look up only saw the uniform. Not that she wanted to call attention to the droid. She could jump up and down, yell, or turn into a fiery rage demon. She could reach behind the counter of a nearby food booth and grab a pot full of boiling oil and toss it at her android-in-tow, and then try to fistfight her way through the spaceport. It wouldn't do any good. They were all locked underground four hundred thousand kilometers from free air and sunlight. It wasn’t as if anyone could jump overboard and swim for it. Or open a hatch and dash across the desert. A stampede would get everyone killed.

On the concourse outside the spaceport, crowds milled about outside shops. She turned right, turned right again, trotting past La Plata Luna, a new tapas place. It had a three-story facade decorated with dragon-like blue and orange tiles and sun-weathered driftwood tables (fake wood, of course). The wall art was good. The food was better. People came here for the tapas and sangria (real sangria, vat-grown protein blobs for tapas, like everything else here). On a Monday afternoon, demand was so high that the service drones couldn’t keep up. None of the customers noticed the new android with the pistol stationed at the door.

Ten steps beyond La Plata Luna, she made a left, apologetically cutting through a line for a new holographic show. Nobody blinked when her android tail squeezed through the quickly closing gap she’d made.

She halted across the concourse, opposite the door to Playground. Four doors down, there was another android posted.

Playground’s front was all-black industrial metal paneling with a jumbo brass-on-wood sign. You might be forgiven for thinking the brass bars on the logo depicted a kid’s jungle gym. Playground was no place to bring kids. The brass bars were a cage, and the busty woman hanging upside down from them was over eighteen.

Under the main sign, a small plaque told two truths and a lie: CASH ONLY NO ELECTRONICS NO TOUCHING. It cost more in rocket fuel to bring cash to the colony than the paper was worth, but bring it people did, in giant bundles. In an interconnected world full of half-sentient AI-powered gadgets linking wet brains through neurofaces and instantly to social media, Playground sold the scarcest commodity in the solar system: privacy. The Federal government had attempted three times in thirty years to eliminate cash, but cash remained king at places like this because it was untraceable. And what politician wanted to be traced to a hooker?

The door swung open to thumping music. A stripper on stage was half kneeling, all naked, her bare breasts pulsating fire-engine red from nearby pole lights. She was taking a five-dollar bill from a portly man ogling from the front row. The dancer had two fingers pinching her end of the five, the customer pinched his end. The rule was no touching, so there were three knuckles of paper insulation between them. Forty thousand years ago, maybe this scene would have the man wearing animal fur and handing her a jade bauble he’d found in the river while hunting that day. People hadn't evolved, not really. They had one foot in the ancient Eurasian steppes and the other in space.

She wondered what was going to happen when people discovered their government had lied to them since the Apollo program, and their religion had covered up evidence for thousands of years. People weren’t alone in the universe; it was more like they were abandoned. Nobody could explain it, any more than they could explain why the universe let her parents be killed by a bomb when she was twelve. The bureaucrats at the D.O.D. made her sign a non-disclosure, but now that the artifact was in the wild, there was nothing anyone could do. Watching this scene between the dancer and the man, she realized that no matter how fancy the suit or how advanced the technology, people at their core were warlords collecting baubles. Anders used the artifact to turn Leyna into an obedient drone, and turning people into obedient drones was every warlord’s dream. The chaos and fight for control were starting. Worse, they were starting here, on the colony, in her home. She might get killed trying to stop them, or she might get tortured, but any of that was better than becoming a subservient vegetable doing the bidding of a gang of corrupt Federal agents.

A man exited. Playground’s door clicked closed. The android four doors down was watching her now. Her tail had backed into some shadows, but she knew it was there, too, and the two droids were probably talking.

She waited. A man came along the concourse and rang the buzzer.

Playground’s door opened again. The seat the portly man had occupied was now empty, and the dancer was gone from the stage. Two truths and a lie. Touching was allowed. It just cost a lot more than five dollars and happened offstage, in the back rooms.

The bouncer came out holding a security wand and started air-brushing the man’s suit like it was covered in cat hair. He was a head taller than her, wearing a black golf shirt with Playground’s brass cage logo. He had dark circles under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept, rumples in his shirt around his paunch, like he’d missed ab day while she was away, and sported gently tousled black hair, like small fingers had just combed through it.

She smiled. He smiled back.

The security wand beeped irritatingly. He waved the wand over the wall plaque. “No electronics.”

“How am I supposed to pay?”

He again pointed the security wand at the sign, this time tapping it for emphasis. “Cash only.”

“Where is the nearest ATM?”

“Do I look like a map?”

“Do you want my business or not?”

“Me? I’m not a dancer.”

“I want to speak to the manager.”

“You’re looking at him.”

“Then I want to speak to the owner.”

“Sure, I’ll go get him. Wait, I’m the owner too. Greg Devana, nice to meet you.”

“I don’t understand how you stay in business with this attitude.”

Again, Greg pointed at the sign. “People bring cash, pay the dancers, I get a percentage. The beer comes out ice cold, and the pizza comes out same as the girls, hot and sticky. Want in?”

Her stomach rumbled. She realized she hadn’t eaten in a while. The pizza was very good here and came out of the oven dripping with melty cheese.

The man poked his nose through the door, sniffing. His head gimballed, looking up, down, and sideways. He took a quarter step forward, but Greg blocked him.

“Come back with cash.”

The man huffed and spun on his heels. “I am never coming back here.”

Greg waved. “Hours are 4 pm to 3 am every day.”

She stepped forward, catching a whiff of women’s perfume.

He said, “He’ll be back. People get dumber every day. It’s the AI. They can’t read anymore.”

“Got a few minutes to chat?”

Kate could feel two pairs of dry, restless android eyes scanning her back. They were running a search. Their facial recognition would have already identified Greg as her younger brother and returned pages of search results, mostly bar fights on subtropical military bases. They’d move on to engineering plans soon.

“Who are the stiffs?” Greg asked.

“Inside. I’ll explain.”

Greg reached into his back pocket and pulled out a black, folded-up pouch. It easily unrolled. She dropped in her phone. It was a faraday pouch, which blocked electromagnetic signals to and from the phone.

She went in. Greg followed her. Her android tail stepped forward and arm-barred the door, trying to cross the threshold.

Greg blocked the android. “No electronics. That includes you, chip boy.”

The android’s eyes fluttered, like it was having a background conversation or doing some sort of search. Androids needed a wireless carrier signal to communicate with their server. They had onboard CPUs, but without that signal, their eyes blanked while their CPUs searched for a connection. They were helpless without a link, as useful as a silicone paperweight.

The engineering plans would show that Playground’s walls, its ceiling, its floors, even the vent covers were built to be a faraday cage. No signals in or out. If Greg caught someone with a hidden device, he’d EMP it, fry the circuitry, and then smash it with his boot. What happened at Playground never made it to social media, guaranteed. Greg sold privacy here, the scarcest resource in the system. The girls and the pizza were just a sidecar.

Kate said to the droid, “You can’t come in here. Wait outside.”

She figured the android was now searching Playground’s plans for a rear entrance. There wasn’t one, on paper anyway. If she was gone too long, they’d start throwing spider drones in the ventilation shafts, looking for another exit. The spider drones wouldn’t work in here. They’d need to send a human search party. She’d spent years searching terrorist tunnels, and knew what they’d look for. She’d helped Greg build this place. It would take days for them to find the rear exit and his cache of survival gear, even with the best equipment.

But she didn’t want to arouse suspicion, not even for a nanosecond, not until she had a plan to get Axio back.

To Greg, she said, “How long for one of those pizzas?”

“Ten minutes.”

“I’ll take two. And whatever is cold on tap.”

“You should try this new beer I got. Aged in lava tubes.”

“Lava tubes, huh?”

“Temperature stabilized in billion-year-old lunar caves. Good stuff.”

“What’s good about it?”

“I can charge three times the normal price.” He grinned. She laughed.

She looked at the android at the door. Somewhere behind its beady eyes, Anders was taking notes. She wanted to flip him off, punch him in the face, and set him on fire.

Instead, she held up two fingers and smiled. “Two pizzas. Two beers. Fifteen, twenty minutes tops.”

The android released the door. Greg let the door swing shut. He waved her on and started towards the back of the club.

“You don’t just go for a swim, do you? You find an Olympic size pool of Federal shit and go snorkeling. Want to tell me why those Federal fucks are stomping around the colony and hanging out in front of my club?”

“Want to tell me why you smell like cheap perfume?”

He shrugged. “Whaddya want on your pizza?”

“What’s the spiciest thing you’ve got?”

“I got pepperoni that’ll melt the face off an android.”

“Sounds like just what I need.”

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This is the Thirtieth chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

Primary Strike

APRIL 12, 2074

PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.

After landing, Kate stepped from NYS Vega onto the colony skybridge with her hands up. A squad of eight burly androids, the type they use as bouncers, plus Deputy Darcy and an FBI agent in a bad business suit greeted her, all pointing bull-barreled coilguns.

On the return trip, the comms were quiet, a fact she’d misjudged. The spandex lining of her mech suit felt like a pair of damp gym tights after ten hours of cardio. Her neck muscles ached. Her eyes were dry from the pressure suit helmet fans blowing in her eyes, and she was dehydrated. She was sure she smelled ripe, too, but blissfully, the charcoal air filtration system kept her from smelling herself. Radio silence was usually a blessing on a return trip, so she foolishly didn’t think about it. Instead, she toggled autopilot and kicked back for some shuteye.

She put her hands up habitually. Even when the fugitive task force is friendly, misunderstandings between people with rifles get people killed.

An almost imperceptible nod from one of the coilguns caused her to halt midway down the skybridge. Six of the eight armed androids lumbered past her and entered Vega. Two remained behind Deputy Darcy and the FBI Agent.

“Lebofield and his parents are that way.” Kate laughed nervously and thumb-pointed behind her. “In cargo.”

Nobody else smiled. She tapped her helmet to check. Her visor was indeed open, so they could hear her.

There was no doubt the coilguns were loaded, charged, and the safeties off.

“Out of the mech suit,” the FBI Agent said. Kate recognized the face from the file, and the blond ponytail, but not the name, and all the cheap blue FBI business suits looked the same.

“There are live animals on board, in the cargo area,” Kate said.

The FBI Agent shrugged, and the rifle bobbed too. Kate fixated on the agent’s finger inside the trigger well. A light trigger pull, or an inadvertent bump, and this passageway would become a smoky hot kiln venting to space.

“There is an alpinka and donkycorn,” she continued, “some pigs, rabbits. Someone’s petting zoo. They need to be fed, and the water is low. The cages need to be cleaned, too.”

“I don’t care about some zoo freaks.”

“It’ll be a mess when they die.”

“Just get out of the mech suit.”

She recognized the rifles. The red indicator lights, the ammo counter, the etched serial numbers, the caliber markings. She recognized it all, down to the half-moon gold-plated electrodes that connected the power packs to the capacitor banks, and the red rubber bands around the magazines marked ‘API’ in her handwriting. She’d cleaned them not an hour before her trip and put them in her office safe. The safe for which Deputy Darcy, naturally, had the password.

The rifles were aimed at her. Not past her, like they were expecting an escape attempt from Lebofield and his parents.

She was tired, dehydrated, and the lining of her mech suit sweaty. Her mind drew the picture slowly, like it had been unplugged from the colony network for ten hours and needed to be patched. Deputy Darcy had opened her safe, taken the rifles, and picked the magazines marked ‘API’ from four other types. Not a random choice. ‘API’ meant armor-penetrating-incendiary rounds. Enough power to penetrate a mech suit like hers and incinerate its soft pink human innards.

Did she say greeted? She meant ambushed. Right now, it was four against one, two humans plus two androids on the skybridge, and there were six more androids behind her somewhere, rooting around Vega. Not a fight she could win. On the bright side, if they intended to shoot her, they’d have done it.

“Well played. You are…FBI Agent Lindsay Kristy? Or Kristi Lindsay?”

“Don’t play dumb. You know who I am.”

“FBI Agent Lindsay. I remember the bad suit. So this was part of the plan?”

“I won’t tell you a third time to get out of the mech suit.”

Deputy Darcy held her rifle steady, but Agent Lindsay couldn’t decide whether to aim at Kate’s groin or the ceiling. She was a small woman and wielded the rifle like a conductor orchestrating the 1812 Overture Finale. Up. Down. Up. Circle. Left. The coilgun didn’t weigh much. Six kilograms, or thirteen Earth pounds. That was effectively two pounds in lunar gravity. But it wasn’t the weight of the gun. The capacitors on the rail made it front-heavy, and in low gravity, it was like pointing a long reed of bamboo with a weight at the end. Muscles shook, overcompensating, so the rifle shook.

Hard to say what would happen when the Overture ended, and the cannons fired. The recoil would knock Agent Lindsay over, maybe launch her into the android behind her like a hockey puck into a net. She might blow Kate’s head off, she might cremate her groin, or she might bump-fire and put a hole in the skybridge ceiling, decompressing the passage and killing them all.

“Why don’t we put away the rifles? We are all friends here.”

Nobody backed down.

“Leyna, whaddya say, put the rifle down?”

“She said, step out,” Deputy Darcy said.

Deputy Darcy’s face was stiff, like she was talking through a mask. The woman holding the rifle looked like Leyna, and still wore the navy-blue uniform, but her contrived expression and the glazed eyes suggested Kate was looking at a meat puppet. There was a cube artifact hanging around her neck. Kate didn’t know how they worked. Whoever designed them hadn’t exactly left instructions in English, French, Spanish, and Hebrew like one of those do-it-yourself rocket fab kits. The Defense Department pinheads told her that in all their experiments, the artifacts boiled brains in less time than it took to microwave a cup of coffee. Then again, since she’d last seen it, the same pinheads had three years to reverse engineer it.

Maybe Leyna was in there, alive, paralyzed, but buried beneath. Maybe that cube around her neck would turn her into a boiled celery stalk of a human while she watched. Or maybe she was already dead, like those dead frogs in biology that writhe when you shock them.

“Got clothes for when I step out? I’m in my underwear under here. I don’t usually get naked for women I hardly know.”

“We both know that isn’t true.” The words came from Leyna’s mouth, and it sounded like her, but the voice was someone else’s. The cadence was wrong, like a native French speaker trying and failing at the rhythm of English.

The tone was familiar, though. She recognized it, but couldn’t place it.

“I’ll go first then. Hi, my name is Kate Devana, and I am from San Antonio, Texas. I was Texas State champion in kickboxing and mixed martial arts, and majored in making people like you history—”

“Your whole department, such smartasses,” Agent Lindsay said. “Leyna, shut her down.”

Her mech suit helmet blinked yellow. Popup windows alerted her that DEPUTY LEYNA DARCY was taking control, and then an orange message in her hud advised her that the suit was shutting down. Two quick beeps later, her suit was splitting down the middle and cracking open like a crab carapace.

“I’d rather be a smartass than a sloppy ass, like you, with that rifle. Whatever taxpayer dollars were spent on training were flushed down the toilet. They must have qualified you for…other reasons.”

Agent Lindsay was aiming somewhere around Kate’s knee. “I’ve had all the training I need. Point, shoot.” She gyrated the rifle-baton. The orchestra rose. The cellos, the violas, the violins, then cymbals, and finally Kate imagined the muzzle boomed, peaking on a spot above her head. Everyone on the skybridge was about a half kilogram of pressure away from becoming a cloud of hot ash. Kate exhaled, discovering she was alive, glad this overture hadn’t come with accidental fireworks.

“Just go ahead and shoot me. Get this over with.”

Something clattered behind her. Lebofield’s trademark bushy black hair appeared at Vega’s portal first, then his head, swiveling, like he expected paparazzi. He ducked out, handcuffed, followed by an android holding a pistol.

Kate’s mech suit shifted just as Lebofield walked by, forcing her out onto the skybridge in her underwear, along with a cloud of stink that could poison a platoon of Marines. Her bra and panties were dampish and sweaty, and the frigid skybridge air turned them to icy fingers around her body. Goosebumps traveled all the way up her legs and back.

Lebofield leered. She thought it might be worth risking rifle fire for one solid kick to his balls, hard enough to knock them through his body and into the back of his throat, maybe rattling loose those lecherous white teeth. But the android behind him prodded him first, and he tripped down the skybridge.

On his way by Agent Lindsay, he said, “I did what you asked.”

“Just keep your mouth shut.”

“What is happening to my parents?”

Agent Lindsay side-nodded, and the android grabbed Lebofield under the arm and hauled him down the skybridge, protesting.

“You promised me I could stay with my parents! I need to livestream this! I’ll lose subscribers—”

“Where are you taking him?” Kate asked. “To my jail?”

“He has a nice room waiting at none of your damn business because he’s in Federal custody now.”

“It’s tough not being in control,“ Leyna-not-Leyna said. A recognizable bitterness had seeped into her voice.

Lebofield disappeared through the gray double doors at the end of the hall, screaming. Something unseen held the doors open, and two gray mechanical mules entered, trotting towards them. There was no resemblance to the mammal. They were oval aluminum tables, long and wide enough to hold a casket, with four robotic legs, a saddle of straps to secure cargo, and a retractable crane underneath to lift heavy objects and tie them down. Their rump was a black box housing its power pack and brains.

The mules stomped past, servos buzzing and whirring, and then entered Vega.

Right. The caskets she’d seen in the cargo hold. Maybe if she’d opened them, she’d know what this was about.

She shivered. Had they turned down the temperature on purpose?

The left android, behind Leyna, advanced, armed with a rifle and stun gun.

Kate stepped back, bumping against the mech suit’s carapace.

The droid picked up a bag off the ground and tossed it at her.

“Put that on,” Agent Lindsay said. “Head down to the morgue to meet your wife.”

“Get dressed and go down to the morgue?”

“Should I write it in crayon for you?”

“Could you? Block letters, but leave some extra crayons. I’m hungry.”

“I could have the androids pin you down and dress you. You like it rough?”

Kate made motions with the bag to seem like she was getting dressed. “That’s none of your business. So what…you just plan to hold forty thousand people hostage? And expect me to go along with this charade?”

“You keep up your end of the bargain, no one will know.”

“Know what, exactly?”

Agent Lindsay nodded at the androids. “Dress her.”

Kate put up her hand. “No need. Should I whistle a tune too, while your partner there ogles me?”

“Be all the smartass you can be. I can assure you, he’s not interested. Your wife will need your help. And the quieter you are, the less violently people die.”

“Help with what, exactly?” The bag had her colony security uniform, boots, and a tablet.

“If you are lucky, not much. Kick back and take in the sights and smells down there. Get high on formaldehyde for all I care.”

“And if I am not lucky?”

“Check the tablet.”

The tablet’s lock screen had a picture of Axio, Rae’s teenage son. It was a year old. Glasses, braces, razor straight brown hair combed to the side.

“He’s a bright boy,” Leyna said. “He is with us. Do what we tell you, we may release him. If you don’t, you will be helping your wife aquamate her own kid, along with as many colony tourists as it takes.”

Axio’s braces came off a month ago, and his sideburns and mustache had darkened. He was fifteen centimeters taller, all in the legs, and his voice half an octave deeper. Rae kept this photo on her lockscreen because she thought he looked like a baby. She said Axio’s beard would come in thick, and he’d want to wear it like Eric. He also wanted to join the Marines. Rae lamented he’d leave the nest in a few years. She was talking about filling it up again.

“As many colony tourists as it takes to what?” Kate asked.

“As it takes to humiliate you and make you beg for mercy,” Leyna said. It was her voice, but the vindictiveness couldn’t be masked, not even under a meat suit.

“This is not a recent picture. I need proof he’s alive.”

“His mother already questioned him to her satisfaction,” Agent Lindsay said.

Kate dropped the tablet back in the bag, set everything on the floor, and slipped one leg into her pants. “So what exactly is my end of this bargain?”

“We told you,” Leyna-the-meatsuit said. “The quieter you are, the fewer people die. Keep your mouth shut. Do what we tell you, when we tell you to do it.”

“I don’t think I believe you about this nobody-dying business.”

“Everyone dies,” the meatsuit said. His nasty grin flashed like a hot red lightbulb under a thin white blanket. “Some die of natural causes. Some die agonizing deaths while you watch. A select few, like Axio, are chosen to ascend. Your actions or nonactions will decide their fate.”

“Great speech. Really. Very motivational. You should coach women’s basketball, you know that? That plus some ponytail yanking has NCAA bracket all over it.” With her pants zipped up, she started on her shirt.

“You are standing there, shivering and cold, cracking jokes. I should shoot you now.”

“Go ahead. Put me out of your misery, you miserable fuck.”

“Don’t.” Agent Lindsay said.

“And when this is over?”

“When your wife is dead, when Axio has ascended but you cannot join him, when you have finally lost everything and you are on your knees crying, you will beg me for mercy, and I will gladly put a bullet in you. First, your feet. Then your knees, slowly working my way up to your head. When this is over, you will thank me for death.”

What was this 'ascended' business with Axio? Where were they taking him? Releasing Leyna from her possession hell was her first priority. Maybe if she found a way to separate her from that cube, without killing her, Leyna's wet brain would retain enough to know what they did with Axio.

“I see you in there, Agent Anders,” she said, “hiding behind my deputy, taking orders from Bad Business Suit here. I don’t know how, but I see you in there.”

“You have no idea what I am capable of.”

“Always the cuck, aren’t you? Are you going to listen to her? Or man up and shoot me now?”

“Don’t shoot her,” Agent Lindsay said.

“When this is over,” Agent Anders said, “I will peel your skin off one centimeter at a time.”

“C’mon big powerful agent man, stop hiding behind my deputy. Shoot me. What’s wrong, suffering from projectile dysfunction?”

Leyna’s expression was hard to read. If she were a computer, there would be a spinning wheel above her head.

Agent Lindsay shook her head, as if some behind-the-scenes argument had concluded.

Kate buttoned up her shirt and tucked it in. “Great, now that we’ve established the pecking order, can we lower the rifles, and for all our sakes, put them on safe? No need for an accidental discharge while I am tying my boots.”

Chapter 31 publishes Friday, April 4th, 5pm

https://open.substack.com/pub/wyattwerne/p/devana-files-chapter-31

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This is a long chapter…but I decided not to break it in two. 🩵

This is the Twenty-Ninth chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

Hammer Down

APRIL 11, 2074

LUNAR SURFACE. LPS: UNKNOWN

Jin chased the patrol down to seven, opening the stairwell door to a mossy-green floor. Rainforest-level humidity hit him in the face, and then a sense of déjà vu stopped him. Aztec carvings decorated the doors and walls. Vines grew from half-barrel planters. He’d never been here, but it looked familiar, like an ad for a tourist trap.

Or maybe just a trap. He backed out and closed the door. From here, the stairs descended directly into the basement. Signs below read, NO ADMITTANCE and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Everything was dull gray. Pipes and conduit hung from the ceiling, and a red box warned him about FIRE and other assorted dangers. Inside there would be a fire extinguisher, spare oxygen, and maybe a first aid kit. Nothing useful. He needed a rifle, and something to convince him he wasn’t in some sort of simulation.

He sat on the steps, running his fingers along the diamond-checker treads on the aluminum floor. They were cold and sharp, like spurs, meant to grip soles to keep people from slipping on the stairs. They felt like a cheese grater.

He balled his fist and mashed his knuckles on the metal. The spurs dug into his skin. He twisted his wrist, putting all his weight on it. It stung like hell, like coarse sandpaper on his knuckles. He mashed harder, twisting more, grating off skin, until the spot was slick with blood and sweat.

His knuckles looked and felt like they’d been dragged across bare asphalt. His hand throbbed.

As much as his hand hurt, he felt relieved. The pain couldn’t be faked. At least now he was sure that he was sober, not dreaming, and not in a simulation. He was real. There might have been a first aid kit in the red box above him, but he didn’t want their help. Pressing his fist against his thigh stopped the bleeding all the same.

He eyed the NO ADMITTANCE sign below. There was no bulked-up android with rock-hard silicone and fifty-amp servos threatening to grind him into moondust if he picked the lock. There was no peephole, and no cameras either. Someone thought a lock and a few signs would do. Whoever designed the security in this place seemed to rely on people being weak-willed and robotic, or maybe drugged like the people he’d seen upstairs. Locks only slowed people down, and signs hadn’t warded thieves since the first humans scratched the first ‘no trespassing’ sign on the mouth of a cave. Behind every Q-mart door labeled NO GUNS NO VAPE NO SHIRT NO SHOES NO SERVICE, there was a guy in flip-flops, holding a case of beer, with a vape pen hanging out of his mouth and a pistol slipping out of his beach shorts.

If anything, an orange block letter NO ADMITTANCE SIGN was more of an advertisement, valuable stuff inside. Basements usually had the servers, the storage lockers, the morgue if they had one, the power plants, and the armory. Big, blasty rifles would be hidden behind doors labeled AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Rifles with a lot of caliber and a loud boom and long reach that could pop an android like a water balloon, sending silicone and metal spraying everywhere.

He heard a door open three floors up, and a man and woman’s voice talking about him.

He slid down the stairs and picked the basement door lock as quietly as he could. Along with pointless signs and talismans, too many security professionals had become lazily reliant on AI and technology, making biometrics easy to defeat.

The basement door swung open to a long hallway, and he knew instantly he was in the right place. So far, all the floors he’d seen were like a museum trip to an ancient civilization exhibit. Here, there were no marble statues or ancient cave art. Just plain, practical, gray walls, the same color as the stairwell, along with a lot of office doors with numbered placards. And no feeling of déjà vu.

As the basement door soft-closed behind him, he saw his bloody print on the handle. He was leaving a trail. There was nothing he could do, though, but hurry. He waited, listening, holding his breath. The voices above him had disappeared. Now, he heard muffled voices ahead of him, and he decided to unholster his makeshift pistol. Not that ten bullets would do him much good, but at least he’d take one or two with him.

The first door on his right opened to a square room decorated like the interior of a courthouse, but organized like a conference room. A lot of oak decked the walls, some of it framing whiteboards, some of it framing astronomy pictures. The offices along the walls had the same oak trim and glass. One massive, donut-shaped oak table with twenty black leather seats occupied the center, with microphones and pop-out tablets at each seat. The entire setup dripped of self-aggrandizing seriousness, of saving the world one pontificating circle of doom meeting at a time.

The muffled voices were coming from the next door on his left. It sounded like chanting. Or maybe not chanting. He heard one voice, and then many voices responded in unison. Over and over. One voice and then many voices. Some kind of church service? He wanted to peek in, but then he’d have hundreds of eyes on him.

He tiptoed past, skipping the next few doors because he saw one ahead labeled SECURITY ONLY. He holstered his pistol to pick the lock. His fingers were sweaty. He tried to control his breathing and adrenaline, but the muffled voices down the hall had stopped, like they had wrapped up whatever spell they’d been casting, and he fumbled the pick. The lock was not releasing. He jiggled. It just wasn’t giving up. So he resorted to brute force, raking the keyway. Metal scraped metal. It sounded like a collision in his ears. Finally, the bolt released with an audible click, and he was in.

The room was pitch black, save for the small knife of hallway light, which vanished when the door closed behind him.

Clunky footfalls passed by the door. His eyes had adjusted, but all he could see was the sliver of light coming from the crack under the door and a shadow flitting by. Someone else came, then two, then a mob, all from the direction of the room with the chanting.

The mob dissipated to a trickle. The clunky footfalls returned, this time from the other direction. They had the cadence of an android, or a human with cybernetic prosthetics.

He needed light, and he needed a rifle. He took off his shirt, twisted it up, and plugged the bottom gap in the door.

When he switched the lights on, he saw he was in a room like a spaceport storage room, the size of a large truck garage. It had two levels of metal cabinets on the walls, with rolling triangular stairs around the room to reach the second level. The cabinets all had padlocks and looked large enough to store EVA spacesuits and equipment.

The back wall cabinet was different than the rest. It had a glass front, stood shoulder-high, and held a lot of guns. Not the mismatched kind you saw with militias. Pristine, top-of-the-line, shiny black coilguns. The kind the agency issued to Feds from Defense Department stock. There were maybe twenty or thirty, stacked upright in a neat array. Enough for a small platoon.

He went to the nearest metal cabinet, on his right, and picked the padlock. He saw his bloody hand and wondered whether he’d left blood on the door when he picked it. Probably. It would lead them here.

Inside the cabinet, armed drones crammed the shelves. Robot bomb sniffers. Robot bomb placers, too, the kind that looked like little tanks with triangular tracks and bulbous spider eyes on every corner. One had a minigun turret. Another had a grenade launcher.

Nothing says tourist trap like high-end military hardware.

The drones were all chained down. He could free them. There was no obvious way to pilot them except with his neuroface, and he didn’t dare hook himself to their systems. They’d see him on the network, cut him off, and probably turn the drones against him. He’d realize his dream of commanding his own drone army, for about one attosecond.

The next cabinet was the same. And so was the next. There were enough mechanized assault drones in the room to take over a mining outfit. There were door breachers and vacuum tent kits too. The kind that could be used to assault the colony.

There were no pressurized mech suits or body armor. All of this was meant to be piloted remotely, maybe by a human, likely by an AI.

The gun case at the rear had premium security. Multilayer biometrics, much better than the cabinets. It made sense. The mechanized infantry drones needed heavy computing power to function. All a gun needed was a human with an itchy trigger finger. Like him.

There was no backup keypad or deadbolt on the gun case, and the hinges were secure. But there was always a way in, and in this case, the flaw was the glass. He could break it. The biggest problem was going to be the noise. Nothing brought people running like the crash and crinkle of glass.

He was already leaving a bloody trail, and he couldn’t do anything about the ensuing commotion. If anyone came, he would have to shoot fast. There was plenty of ammo, in the case’s top shelf above the guns, along with batteries.

He wasn’t going to break the glass by punching it, though. The breacher drones had an attachment like a knife at the end of a metal rod that could break glass. He didn’t need the drone, just the attachment. His bloody trail continued when he unsnapped the glass breaker.

He kept still, listening for footsteps, and rehearsing the move in his mind. Swing to break glass, grab the rifle, grab the ammo, load and make ready, then run. The glass breaker rod was meant to be used pointy-end first, by a heavy hydraulic arm in a stabbing motion, but he would never get enough power behind it by using it like a dagger. He’d have to swing it like a bat. He wouldn’t have much time, either.

He pictured it. Five steps. Swing, grab rifle, grab ammo, load, run. He’d qualified on these rifles, but not on a timed course and not under the duress of his captors zeroing in on his blood trail.

Glass, rifle, ammo, load, run.

Five seconds passed without footsteps. On the first swing, the glass breaker clicked against the glass, creating a spider web. On the second swing, the drone made a satisfying crunch. The spider web expanded and a ragged circular dent formed in the center. On the third swing, the breaker smashed all the way through and knocked askew the front row of rifles.

He cleared a hole big enough to drag the guns through. Pieces of safety glass carpeted everything, including his pants. So much for swing and grab. He took a rifle, shook off the glass, and loaded it.

He crept towards the door, glass grinding under his feet, gun at low ready, in case someone burst through. He only heard beautiful silence on the other side of the door, so he gently urged the door open.

The hall was empty in both directions. He aimed for the exit, back the way he came.

The door was open to the last room on the right, where he’d heard the chanting voices. It was empty and looked like a deserted cubicle farm. There were no family pictures, no personal belongings, no stained coffee mugs. It looked sterile. Even the chairs were neatly pushed under the desks. There was no evidence several dozen people had been here a few minutes earlier.

A door clicked behind him.

“Are you ascendant?”

The voice was soft and young. Startled, he whirled, almost blasting her head off. She wore cartoon pajamas, slippers—which explained how she’d snuck up on him—and her brown eyes were sharp and clear, unlike the people he’d seen upstairs that looked drugged. She wasn’t dangling a cube from her neck.

He wasn’t sure how to answer. Her tone was the same as the people who come up to you at the airport, or on the street, asking, ‘are you saved?’ Ordinarily, the correct answer was to keep walking. She wasn’t bothered by the coilgun he pointed at the purple cartoon gremlin on her chest. She had that creepy religious serenity vibe on her face, as if shooting her was all part of God’s plan. He could blast her to smithereens, but she was going to heaven, and he wasn’t.

He struggled to answer. But he had to say something. “I am still…studying. So much to learn.”

“Oh, me too. I am so excited. Have you begun the process yet?”

The process? He shouldn’t linger, but this might be his only opportunity to find out about this place.

“Well, I have…the cube, but I have not begun. Not yet, anyway. Say do you think it’s true what they say about the process?”

“They gave you a cube?” Her eyes lit up, like he’d told her he had a yacht and his own private plane and was taking her to see the Pope. “Oh, so you are ascending soon. You must be excited.”

“I confess, sister—” Every religious sect called each other brother and sister, right? “I confess, I have doubts. Do you think it’s true, what they say about the process?”

She looked into the cubicle farm. The tranquility left her face for a breath, but then she returned to creepy calm. “They say the distillation process produces artifacts. That the ascendant will hallucinate, but it’s like dreaming.”

“Will you be…ascending also?”

“Oh, no. Only the chosen can ascend. You are so blessed.”

He wasn’t feeling blessed. He wondered if this was what it was like to be the only lucid person in a cult, telling the others that there were no aliens riding the tail of a comet, so don’t drink the cyanide.

Still, he wanted to know what was going on here. “But it’s worthwhile, to see the gods. Right?”

Pajama woman grinned. “Worthwhile to live forever, Disciple Knight, as you will.”

An ice-cold finger traveled down his neck. The rifle’s blade trigger was smooth and flat. Only five pounds of pressure and she’d be meeting whatever god she worshiped, although her look suggested it might be him.

Her gaze switched to something behind him. He heard the beeping of a biometric lock and then solenoids moving a deadbolt. The stairwell door handle jiggled. He turned. Shit.

Three people came through the door. First, the temptress from upstairs. Now her hair was in a bun, she wore a black tunic, and carried a rifle as big as his at low-ready. Next, the beefy, scowling android he’d encountered outside her door, holding a pistol. Finally, the clown voted most likely to ruin a colony birthday party, FBI Special Agent Barrett Anders, who should be three thousand kilometers away picking up fugitives, not here.

Except as Anders got closer, something was off. His walk was right. Unmistakable. Anders had cybernetic legs. But he looked pallid, like he’d eaten bad seafood for lunch.

Temptress waved her hand. “Good job, Ness.”

Pajama woman let out a little happy shriek and quivered. Maybe she was getting extra poison at dinner for a job well done of trapping him.

“Looks like you ascend today,” creepy pajama woman said as she spun and receded down the hall.

Jin didn’t wait for introductions. He aimed the barrel of his rifle at Ander’s advancing torso and did what he should have done the instant that cybernetic clownfish came through the door. He pulled the trigger. Again and again and again. He kept pulling, as fast as he could, but instead of a bloody, misty explosion, all he heard were clicks.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Then, he threw the rifle at Anders.

The android stepped forward, batted it away, and raised its pistol. Jin heard the click of the trigger, the whoosh of the dart, and then felt the prick on his neck.

He fell, paralyzed. His vision shrunk. At the end of the tunnel, the temptress was standing over him, dangling a necklace with a black cube.

“He got farther this time,” Anders said.

“He’s proven to be an exceptional candidate. Alpha wants him for ascendance. Now.”

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This is a long chapter…but I decided not to break it in two. 🩵

This is the Twenty-eighth chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

APRIL 11, 2074

LUNAR SURFACE. LPS: UNKNOWN

The hallway outside his door confirmed his suspicion that his captors had moved him while he was drugged. When the robots escorted him here, it was marble white with human busts. Now, it was yellow-orange sandstone lined with mahogany doors in both directions and decorated with tableaus of ancient cave art. Reliefs of cartoon-esque humanoids wore white, triangular skirts, multicolored beads, and strange helmet-like masks. They held spears and stood beside tall, triple-stacked cylinders that could either be an ancient grain elevator or someone’s rudimentary conception of a rocket.

Of course, drones etched it all, probably from a prehistoric image, but it looked like they’d used pointy sticks and horsehair brushes. The sandstone was engineered moonstone tiles. If he squinted, he could see the joints. The wood was real, though. He could smell the fresh varnish.

Footfalls came from his right. It sounded like a dozen or more people in militaristic lockstep.

He couldn’t stay in his room.

They wanted him to look around, and that posed a problem. His AI room concierge told him they’d downloaded a map to his phone and said he was free to roam—in this temple, crypt, mausoleum, hotel, whatever this place was—except areas designated off limits.

This was some sort of immersive show. They pretended to treat him like a diplomat, called him a disciple, all while drugging, searching, and moving him. He was only a rat in a maze. Would they watch him scurry for the cheese and then drug him again and put him back…somewhere else? Maybe at the beginning, to do it again? Or maybe euthanize him when this sick experiment was over?

The footfalls were growing louder.

Yellow tuna-can ceiling fixtures lit the hallway. He didn’t see cameras. He didn’t have any weird new scars, either, so he didn’t think they’d put a tracker in his body.

He reached into his pocket, shut his phone off, and popped out the battery. Then he tossed it on his bed. One less way to monitor him. The AI room concierge beeped and objected from the ceiling speaker in its dissociative, female voice. He ignored it. The squad coming his way would have to arrest him.

Fighting was not an option. Not in a hallway, not with a gun that only held ten bullets, and not with a dozen or more humanoids approaching, some of which might be androids.

He trotted down the hall to the sixth door in the opposite direction from the footsteps and retrieved his lock pick set from his jeans. He figured six was close enough to peer at the action if the squad searched his room, but far enough that they’d give up searching the hall before they reached him. Hopefully, they’d think he’d moved on.

The door had a traditional-looking black bronze handle with a backup key slot but no biometric panel. The fingerprint reader, he guessed, was on the inside of the handle so that as you grabbed it, it would register your prints and unlock.

There was no obvious way to override the biometrics, but it turned out he didn’t need tools. When he gently nudged the handle, it was unlocked.

The door cracked open to the loud whine of a blow dryer. Standing in front of a full-length mirror, temptation herself, naked, with her long blonde hair undulating in the tornado coming from her hair gun. She was all human, that was for sure, from her blue almond-shaped eyes, to her perky breasts, down to her perfect, heart-shaped hips.

She clicked off the hair dryer and turned towards him, giving his hormones a full frontal assault and a flirty little smile. “I see they gave me an upgrade. Mmmm, you’ll do.”

The overheated air hit his face like beach sun and shrunk his pants. Naturally, he did what every confident, over-educated, successful male does when faced with a naked goddess. He stammered, and then backed out and slammed the door.

“Wrong room,” he muttered.

The marching was almost on top of him. A squad, for sure. Up and down the hall, the doors blended into the artwork, becoming part of the tableaus. An ancient stick-figure family feasted beside a massive fireplace, except the fireplace was a real wooden door, like a portal to the present, with flames painted above it. Above the flames, a solar system with twelve planets, and primitive, wedge-shaped writing.

This place was surreal. He was sure, though, that he wasn’t hallucinating or inside a simulation because he was hungry and tired, and the stone floor felt solid under his feet.

There might be people behind those other doors. People who would scream instead of flirting.

He couldn’t hide here. Not unless he wanted to go back inside and play gigolo. But he wanted to see what or who was coming, and he couldn’t stay in the hall, either.

He pushed the door open again. Temptress had returned to blowdrying her hair. He shut the door behind him as she clicked off the hairdryer and turned to him.

“Shy boy.”

“I have a girlfriend.” He tried not to make eye contact, or any other contact.

“Oooh, what fun.”

“Sit there.” He nodded towards the chair in the middle of the room. “And close your eyes.”

“Ooooh, you were worth the money.”

The official log would reflect he didn’t watch Temptress giggle and jiggle her way into the seat.

He had so many questions. Who was she, and why was she here? But she was naked, and his face was on fire. The interrogation would end badly, with her on top riding him, and then later with Leyna bitterly hacking his balls off. He liked his balls. He was attached to them. Plus, Leyna might be pregnant, and she’d had enough heartbreak for five lifetimes.

He needed to cover this woman up and tie her down. Maybe not in that order.

The only things he saw in her room that were useful were the two pillowcases. They were white linen and almost see-through. Not ideal, but the best he could do, and she’d already seen his face anyway. He shook the first pillow from the pillowcase, dumping it on the bed, and then did the same with the second. The first pillowcase went over her head. The second, he twisted into a rope and then gagged her with it. She moaned and writhed the whole time, like it was a game. He yanked his belt from his buckles and tied her to the chair.

The official log would reflect he did it all with his eyes closed and nose pinched. Not once did he whiff her rose shampoo.

He told her to stay put. She writhed some more. Had he opened his eyes, he would have seen her breasts bouncing and hips squirming in the chair.

He snatched the bedsheets from the bed and covered her up. She mumbled something through the gag.

She’d painted her toenails strawberry. They poked out from under the bedsheets. The record would not reflect the word strawberry. He’d leave that out. Eric would probably ride him for days.

He took the duvet from the bed and tossed it over the bedsheets and then kicked it over her now-curling, perfectly manicured toes.

How would he explain this to Leyna? His dad’s voice was going through his mind. Don’t put jiggle or perky in the report either.

The footfalls were just outside the door. Fortunately, there was a peephole. He told Miss Temptress to be quiet while he worked. She shimmied excitedly under all the sheets. A shame, he was going to disappoint her.

Outside the door, a column of humanoids advanced through the hall, three wide and shoulder to shoulder, led by a single android. Row after row marched past the door, each with two humans and either a gynoid or android on the far end, like guardians. The squad wore knee-length pale blue tunics tied with braided black rope and brown sandals. The tunics didn’t hide much. Some were split open down the side, like a hospital gown, and he could see flesh.

The robots were all skinjobs, with vat-grown cadaverish skin, the kind that was pasty pink but cold and dead, like the textured ground-up meat filler they put in vat-grown protein to give it body.

The droids also carried pistols and stun guns, sloppily concealed under the tunics.

The humans weren’t carrying weapons. They wore silver necklaces with dangling black cubes, like the one he’d found in his luggage. Their eyes were glazed over, staring soullessly at the person in front of them.

Those stares weren’t from military discipline, they were from drugs. Were the cubes some sort of weapon? No, nobody gave drugged soldiers a weapon. Plus, they’d taken his weapons—the ones they found anyway—and replaced it with an orange claims tag and a cube of his own.

The pieces didn’t fit. Droids had weapons here; humans had blank stares and a cube. Some of the humans, anyway. Temptress did not have a blank stare, but she wasn’t wearing a cube, either. He would’ve noticed anything dangling between the breasts. If he'd been ogling her, which of course he hadn’t.

The squad stomped past. There were twenty-one in all, plus the leader. Their cadence reminded him of boot camp, if boot camp had been inside some sort of temple with walls of coarse, orangish stone and cave art.

A cold thumb ran down his back. Maybe this parade was for him.

When it sounded like the squad had turned the corner down the hall, he cracked the door and peered out.

Following them was a terrible idea. It was also the only idea he had. If they had pistols, they had an armory, and if they had an armory, they might have rifles that could take down robots.

Temptress’s date was apparently a big, beefy android with too much spray tan. It appeared down the hall, sauntering his way, locking its glassy eyes on him.

He exited the room, smiling, wiping his brow, and thumb pointing behind him as cooly as he could with his heart pounding in his throat. “I’ve warmed her up for you.”

The android tilted its head but said nothing. They were impossible to read. Behind those glassy eyes, the droid might be generating some mood music for his client, or maximizing the angular momentum of the incipient haymaker to his head.

“She likes it a little rough.”

The droid was still doing some sort of calculation. At least if there were a blow coming, he wouldn’t feel it. He’d be dead before he hit the floor.

“She asked for a kidnapping fantasy.” He laughed nervously.

“A common request. Will this be a duo performance?”

He gulped. “She’s screaming for you, pal. In fact, it’s better if we don’t mention I was here.”

“This is not surprising. Humans have inferior stamina.”

“Right, well thanks for the pep talk—” He slapped the android on the shoulder. It was like smacking a concrete wall. His hand stung.

Jin backed away with the android watching him. He resisted the urge to turn and bolt.

He was half expecting the android to identify him. Enjoy your stay at Hotel Ascension, Disciple Knight. Or jump him. His mind rehearsed his training. Step one, chokehold; step two, spin and lever; step three, grab the bean in the back of the android’s skull. A great plan in a simulation, but he’d be unconscious or dead before step two. He’d backed beyond the long reach of the droid, but this android looked fast. All those fake silicone muscles were probably hiding heavy-duty servos.

The android turned and opened the door. Maybe he exhaled a little too loudly. That was too close.

As the droid disappeared inside, he thought maybe he was just being paranoid. Beefcakes was only a dumb gigolobot and would keep Miss Temptress occupied until she passed out, exhausted.

At the end of the hallway, he peered around the corner and saw the last of the squad file into the stairwell.

But by the time he got there, the stairs were empty. He heard a door slam two floors below.

The stairwell signs advised him that the spaceport was up on the first floor. He was on five, so the squad must be on seven.

Escape was up, yet he was going down, chasing an armed band of humanoids.

Not the smartest choice he’d ever made.

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This is a long chapter…but I decided not to break it in two. 🩵

This is the Twenty-seventh chapter.

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

APRIL 11, 2074

PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.

“Where’s your partner?” Eric asked Agent Lindsay.

He’d quit slurping his disgusting brown muscle milk and now held his cup low, like a punching weapon, ready to follow up with a sharp metal straw to the eye socket.

Not that Agent Lindsay had done anything to deserve a jab to the face, except be a Fed, alone on the lunar colony, with her partner wandering around in violation of their thirteen-page agreement. Devana called it the Memorandum of Misunderstanding. She predicted the Feds would ignore it because they couldn’t help themselves, and then excuse it as One Big Ole Misunderstanding.

The morgue hallway was empty in both directions. Forward, it stretched to stairs and an elevator. Rearward to a wall. Her eyesight and hearing were perfect. Better than perfect. The docbot rated her audiogram A+ and her eyesight 20/10. She’d blown her eardrum surfing, and her mother handed down nearsightedness, but surgery corrected both.

The magic of medicine. So she was confident that between the hum of fans and the faint flushing of a toilet one floor up, she neither saw nor heard any rats in the hall. Nor the stairwell. Nor any making the elevator machinery buzz with anticipation.

There were no rats anywhere, certainly not human-sized rats disguised as Feds, which meant Agent Lindsay’s partner and whoever else she brought as help was off somewhere cooking up trouble.

Leyna was suddenly very aware of the phone in her pocket, and that it might jingle at any second. Low-high-low, the sound of a Priority One call. Assault in progress by a Fed. Although, they’d call it a routine interrogation.

“Where is your partner?” Eric asked again.

Agent Lindsay ignored him. She didn’t even acknowledge his existence with a glance. Instead, she put her phone in her pocket and then shot Leyna a pompous, impatient look. Feds were not used to being told no.

She wasn’t going to be bullied by a Fed. Not in her own territory. “Eric asked where your partner is. Did you bring a team? Where are they now?”

“Your office was locked. I came here looking for Dr. Torres but I found you.”

“Enthralling story,” Eric said.

“Evading,” Leyna added.

Leyna nodded to Eric for them to go. She rudely brushed past, intentionally digging her knee against Agent Lindsay’s bad leg. A test. Limps can be faked, but core stability can’t, something she learned surfing. The human brain works overtime to keep an inherently unstable bipedal upright. A little unexpected shove and your pupils contract, arms flail, legs tense, and if you are lucky, all the flapping stops you from tumbling down the stairs and cracking your skull. Three million years of instinct. Impossible to fake.

Of course, she’d feel bad if she toppled Agent Lindsay. But only a little. Agent Lindsay had done nothing except be a Fed. The woman in front of her, on the other hand, Agent Faker, was feigning a limp and actively misunderstanding their Memorandum.

Unsurprisingly, Agent Faker didn’t topple over. In fact, when Leyna brushed her knee against Agent Faker’s knee, she was sure it resisted like a prosthetic.

“I’m here to pick up my prisoners,” Agent Lindsay yelled after them.

“You Feds are great conversationalists,” Leyna yelled back. “We should do this again. I’m free at the turn of the century.”

Leyna darted for the stairwell, Eric in tow.

“I am just here for my prisoners,” Agent Lindsay repeated.

They didn’t slow down or look back. Eric held the stairwell door open.

“Where is your partner?” Leyna asked, halfway through the door.

“It’s classified.”

The door whooshed closed behind her, and he raced ahead. With the Fed behind her and his fumes rising away from her, her nausea receded.

Her office was one flight up, down a hall, and up two more flights. A side benefit of her boss being married to the colony’s Medical Examiner: their offices were in the same wing of the lunar colony, in connecting buildings. So that sickening fresh space mummy smell was never more than a quick sprint away.

Honestly, the space mummies didn’t bother her. They smelled like overcooked jerky and she was craving something salty. What was sickening her right now was Eric’s dirty toilet water flavored muscle shake.

“She’s a fraud.”

“When a Fed’s mouth is talking, they’re lying,” Eric agreed. “Whaddya wanna bet she beats us to your office.”

“She’d have to run. The elevator takes longer.”

“Hard to fit those cheap Fed pantsuits over a brace or a cast.”

Eric caught the fake limp, too.

“I brushed her hard enough to topple her.”

He pulled the door open for her. Leyna looked down the stairs. No Agent Lindsay. They exited the stairwell to another hospital-oatmeal hallway.

“Obviously not. Next time, let me try,” he grinned.

“If she beats us, she outs herself as a fake.”

“You already outed her. She knows you know. Now it’s a game to see who calls who’s bluff first.”

They entered the next stairwell, Eric holding the door. He rushed up the stairs. She lingered. There was a cool breeze coming from a ceiling vent.

“Think I can get away with the dumb blonde routine? Pretend not to know? Maybe I’m clumsy?”

Eric stopped at the landing, took a pull from his metal cup, and looked her over. “I can’t see you as a blonde.”

She should have shrugged it off, but his off-handed comment hit her hard. She couldn’t dye her hair, at least until she was sure. Red hair, fair skin, baby blue eyes. There was no way around it. She’d see her mother every day in the mirror.

He stood there like a doofus, sipping his whatever. She could feel tears building. Christ, not now. She squished her face to try to hold them. She was not going to cry. Not in a stairwell.

Eric mulled something over, sipping, and then descended on her. She turned away. He shifted his drink to his other hand and put his arm around her. She let herself be pulled into a side hug.

“Don’t be sad, sweet cheeks. They’ll be other chances to topple a Fed.”

She wanted to punch him. He was so cavalier about everything. And he called her sweet cheeks. He knew how much she hated that.

But he cracked a smile, and she laughed. “You are such a jackass.”

He side-squeezed her shoulder. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“This is so silly.”

“You are worried about Jin?”

She decided to force herself to wipe her face and swallow. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go, but since when did her life go the way she planned?

“I got a note from Jin.” She explained how she received it and hadn’t had time to decode it. “These last two lines, ‘In the code we find our love. in bytes we send.’ It means he encrypted something in the data.”

“I’m confused, he got a message out?”

“I’m not explaining this very well. This line, ‘I accepted a nap,’ is kind of a weird way to say he took a nap. I think it means he was drugged. Like he didn’t accept the nap, it was forced on him.”

“Ahh, I see.” He sipped. “No I don’t.”

“Every line is like a clue.” She pushed away and read the entire first paragraph from her phone. “Dearest Leyna. I have arrived safely. I miss your voice, a melody of bliss. I miss stroking your auburn hair. I accepted a nap. I dreamt of you. We were at Grouppa Six for your twenty-ninth birthday party. We hired a clown magician, and your mother was there. She loved the tricks. When I woke, I was humming our favorite song.”

“Your hair is not auburn.”

“And I sing like a coyote. It’s an opposite gram.”

“Okay. What’s Grouppa Six?”

“Grouppa Six is where Agent Anders’s old partner was gunned down.”

“Agent Anders, as in Agent Faker’s missing partner?”

“The same, but here is where it gets weird. He talks about it like a dream. A clown is how my mother referred to Feds. And she’s…dead, so she couldn’t be at my twenty-ninth birthday, which I haven’t had yet. But I think he’s trying to tell me he saw someone. Someone associated with Grouppa Six.”

“A Fed?”

“That we hired. One my mother would really hate to see, a corrupt one.”

He sipped. “A magician, like he’s in two places at once. You think he saw Agent Anders?”

“Everyone knew Anders was out for revenge. He blamed Devana for his partner’s death. And she suspected he would try to collect the bounty on her head. In fact, she hoped to lure him here.”

“I thought they came for the famous prisoners they lost and let escape Earth.”

“She called it a two-fer. Two criminals, one job.”

Her phone pinged. Low-high-low. The text: PS1. Loc: Your office. P1 meant ‘Priority One.’ The ‘S’ stood for ‘Silent.’ It was from the head of security of the Lunar Sunset Hotel, who was going to meet her at her office. Priority One crimes were homicide, rape, usually anything violent and urgent. ‘Silent’ meant security did not want the colony guests to panic, so they wanted it kept secret. There was no crime in the colony, except that there was, and the marketing robots weren’t going to let a little thing like transparency harsh the Vacation Vibes. Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t worry the guests, trademarked by the Lunar Tourism Board. Almost all crimes, priority one or otherwise, were kept silent.

She started back up the stairs, Eric behind her. She received just the text, no images, notes, or context, nor had she met the head of the Lunar Sunset Hotel. He seemed like the cryptic, silent type.

“Jin is, what, three thousand kilometers away?” Eric asked.

“We don’t know where he is. I think they drugged him and diverted his lunar rover somehow. Maybe he saw Anders doing it, who, by the way, is conveniently missing.”

“Wait—you think the Feds kidnapped Jin? I mean, they’re assholes, but kidnapping?”

“In for a penny in for a pound. It’s a big bounty. Like thirty mil or something. Agent Lindsay is lying. I think she’s in on it.”

They exited to her office hallway. Predictably, Agent Faker was standing at the door waiting for them. Unpredictably, the head of colony security was also standing there, in bloody clothes, holding a kevlar hotel safe bag, the kind guests used to store valuables. His nametag read LUNAR SUNSET BATH. His name was Bath, and it looked like Bath had bathed in blood.

Eric whistled. “I say we go beat the shit out of her, and see what she knows.”

“We won’t do anything until Kate is back. She always says there’s strength in numbers.”

“I can take her.”

“No doubt. You could dissolve her with that disgusting potion in your cup, too. She's hiding a prosthetic leg. We don’t know what else she’s hiding. Or where her team is.”

Leyna marched to the door. It had a big silver badge logo and her likeness in a trio of images, along with Devana and Jin, all three of them sporting dress blues and looking constipated for the camera.

If she opened the door to her office, all the bad air and bad people would drift in.

She nodded to Bath. “Be with you in a second, I need to take out the trash.” To Agent Lindsay, she said, “Where is your partner, Agent Anders?”

“Agent Anders is not here.”

“I see that. Where is he?”

“Classified.”

“Fuck it is,” Eric said. He was back to casually working his straw. Jesus, how much poop could one man swallow?

Agent Lindsay again pretended Eric wasn’t there. Bath handed her the kevlar bag and said, “I see you’re busy. Here. All taken care of.”

“What’s taken care of?”

Bath spun and receded down the hallway, leaving her holding the bag.

“Who’s blood is this?” She yelled, but he ignored her. He opened the stairwell door, tipped his head goodbye, and then disappeared.

“Do you know where Devana is?”

What was in this bag? Who’s blood was this?

“Deputy Darcy? The telemetry on NYS Vega seems to be—”

“Classified,” Eric said. “Its location is classified, like your partner’s.” Maybe the way Eric punctuated his words with his metal straw was brandishing, bordering on assault. Maybe it wasn’t.

“You two want to play this game with me?”

“Deputy Darcy, who is the law around here?” Eric adopted a serious tone, like a lawyer in a show.

“Well, it says right there on the door. Katera Devana, Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the Lunar Colony.”

“And where is she?”

“That’s classified. But I can say she’s not on the colony right now and not taking messages.”

“I see, and so based on this diagram, next in line is Senior Deputy Jinho Knight.” He was pointing to Jin’s picture on the door. “With whom I believe you are having carnal relations?”

He just had to go there. He knew exactly where to stick the knife. She wanted to kick him in the balls. But she wasn’t going to let him get to her, not in front of Agent Faker here.

Agent Lindsay was visibly irritated with Eric, too, shifting on her fake cane, face scowling. Well, that made Eric's jackassery worthwhile, so she decided to lean into it.

“That is not the proper form of a question.”

“Let me rephrase. Where is Jinho Knight currently?”

“Gone, I am afraid. After we’ve been bred, we Darcy’s eat our mates, much like a praying mantis.”

His facade of seriousness cracked a little. He sucked some of his goop, his cheeks and throat working up to some kind of snide comment. It was going to involve shotguns and weddings. No amount of denying anything was going to plug his mouth, either. He was enjoying himself. He got to tease her in front of a Fed, plus he got to irritate Agent Faker at the same time.

He let the knife twist a few gulps. She tensed her thighs, ready to block Agent Faker, who looked like she would whack him with the cane.

“Well, with him eaten, I guess that makes you the girlboss and acting Chief Law Enforcement officer on the colony. Is that right?”

“So I am the law?”

Damn, she should have stated it, not questioned herself.

“Yes, you are the law. So if you ordered me to, say, electrocute a Fed—“

Leyna smiled at Agent Lindsay. “He would be obligated to obey the lawful order of a peace officer.”

“Don’t play this game with me.”

“If it were a game, we’d be enjoying it. There would be power-ups and prizes,” Eric answered.

“Where is your supervisor, Deputy Darcy?”

“Go back to your hotel. Enjoy the sights. Go brush your tail. Polish your horns. Then fuck right the hell off. When your prisoners are ready for pickup, I’ll find you.”

“Such a warm welcome.”

“Feds are as welcome here as a fart at a funeral,” Eric said. He shifted his weight as if getting ready to walk away. “Well, as much fun as this is, Leyna and I have a case. Some poor fuck got a metal rod wedged up his ass maintaining heavy machinery. Stick around, we’ll show you how to get yours out.”

Agent Lindsay looked at Eric, and then back at Leyna. “Are we done with the pissing contest?”

“Doubt it. He’s been drinking that disgusting muscle juice all day. I bet his bladder’s back pressure could put a kidney stone through body armor.”

“Can I?” Eric asked.

“Please.”

“He pulls that little wanker of his out I’ll charge him with indecent exposure.”

“Did she call me a little wanker?”

“Everything about him is indecent, I give you that. Just that smug face of his is probably five felonies. But I am the law, and no, you won’t. Now tell us where your partner is.”

Agent Limp Faker Lindsay shuffled her cane uncomfortably. Then she scrunched up her face as if she were about to shit a brick of paperwork scrawled with galactic secrets. The effort was a little over the top. She shifted and danced, but then her face relaxed as if it were just gas. The show ended with no secrets, only a shrug.

“You know the agreement,” Leyna said. “My boss’s exact words were ‘tight leash,’ and authorized me to choke you off. You two are here for one purpose, the prisoners. Not harassing guests who happen to disagree with the current administration. If—when—I find him trolling around the colony on a fishing expedition, I will lock him up and send him home.”

“I thought this was a new era of cooperation.”

“My theory,” Eric said. “You ate him. Like Deputy Darcy here, you’re a mantid. That’s what you Feds do, right? Or are you more like zombies that gut the living and chew on their rotting flesh?”

Agent Lindsay gave Eric a constipated grimace, threatening twenty-five pages of tedious paperwork.

“You can tell us,” he continued. “This is the safe circle.” He put his hand on his heart, the one not holding his cup. Then he did the silly gorilla thing where he puffed his chest and bulged his pecs and shoulders. Men. So ridiculous and so useful at the same time. “Cross my heart, I can keep a secret. You ate his liver, didn’t you? It’s not a crime to eat Fed liver here, and trust me, I’ve seen worse.”

Agent Lindsay shifted her gaze to Leyna. “Your technician here is a real piece of work.”

“He’s my partner,” Leyna corrected. “This conversation ends in three seconds. Then I go find Anders and trespass you both.”

Agent Lindsay once again shuffled on her cane dramatically, this time as if she was in pain, and then let out a small sigh. “Anders is dead. He fell out of an airlock on Kuipers.”

Eric raised one eyebrow, telegraphing, ‘Can you believe this bullshit?’ Then to Agent Lindsay, he said, “People don’t just fall out of airlocks. There are safety protocols.”

“Well, he did. I was there. It was an accident. But it’s classified. We are keeping it quiet while we investigate.”

“You mean cover your ass.” He underlined his words by waving his straw. If it had been a Katana sword, Agent Lindsay would be in three pieces.

“Some sort of virus?” Leyna asked. Why was she going along with this baloney? She wanted to see how deep a hole Agent Lindsay would dig herself.

“Cybercrime swept it twice but hasn’t found anything. It’s probably just an accident.” Agent Lindsay’s voice softened. The fake limp. The fake story. She was a terrible liar.

If Agent Anders wasn’t on the colony, though, Jin’s message made more sense. Were they holding him on Kuipers? No, Kuipers was in high Earth orbit. Too far. Plus, she’d get an alert if there was an unscheduled rocket launch.

She needed to get rid of Agent Limp Faker and get back to work. She glanced at Eric. He wasn’t the subtle type. In fact, sometimes, he wasn’t the direct type, either. A little obtuse. She hoped he would take the hint.

“Eric and I are just finishing a case. Vega was delayed. Your prisoners will land in a few hours, give or take.”

“What kind of delay?”

“A thrust vector postponement problem.”

“That sounds like horseshit.”

“Horseshit, bullshit, we don’t give a shit, dipshit,” Eric said. “Come back in a few hours after they’ve disembarked. Meet here.”

Leyna smiled at him, grateful. He returned a ‘we got this’ expression. Eric and Jin were different. Jin was her boyfriend. Where Jin was sweet, Eric was crass and an annoying pain in the ass. She’d kissed him once, drunk. It felt awkward and incestuous for them both. With his red hair, Viking beard, and fair complexion, somewhere in the back of her mind, her ancestors and his were related. He was a jackass, but a useful jackass, and she thought of him like a big brother.

“I want to be there when the prisoners land. I will meet you at the spaceport. ”

“No problem,” Leyna said. “But we’ll be using the stairs. It’s seventeen flights.”

“No elevator?”

“We have one, but won’t be using it. Security protocol.” A lie.

Agent Lindsay did some sort of calculation in her head and then said, “Why wasn’t I notified of the delay?”

“Consider yourself notified,” Eric said. He looked at Leyna. “We have a case to button up and not much time. Is that the fenser rod, in that pouch, from the mechanical room?”

Leyna almost forgot she was holding a bloody kevlar security pouch. She was pretty sure ‘fenser rod’ was a made-up term. “Oh, right. Yes, the fenser rod. Hotel security delivered it straight away so we could examine it.”

“Well, let’s scan it and see if it’s a match for the wounds.” To Agent Lindsay, he said, “You are welcome to sit in. We have a real fun one. Industrial accident in the power plant. Traumatic avulsion to the prostate and bladder. Pipes exploded and literally ripped the vic a new asshole. Life insurance wants a complete exam so they can sue the manufacturer, and we need to finish this today.”

Eric smiled at her and guzzled from his straw, making those annoying bubble slurps as the juice ran dry. He belched, clouding the hallway with the smell of his revolting brown stew. She felt woozy again.

“No thanks. I’ll take a raincheck.” Agent Lindsay grimaced and then half-swiveled, pausing as if she had one more thing to say. But she didn’t. Instead, she completed her melodramatic pivot and step-limped down the hall, talking to the ceiling, reciting the name and room number of her hotel.

Days, months, years, whole centuries passed as Agent Limp Faker Lindsay affected a Broadway-quality production of Step-limp Down the Hall.

When the door closed behind Agent Faker, Leyna said, “Thanks for backing me. You are not so bad for a jackass.”

“You are not so bad yourself, sweet cheeks.”

She punched his arm, which practically broke her knuckles. It was like punching a brick wall. “Ow. You need to stop calling me that.”

“So what’s really in the bloody pouch?”

She unzipped it.

Another black cube. This one giving off blue sparks. Charged, like the one from the Comet.

And humming.

No, not humming. A voice. Jin's voice. She wasn’t hearing it with her ears. She felt very warm. A picture opened in her mind, like a heads-up display. She was with Jin. Inside Jin, seeing through his eyes. She heard his heartbeat in her ears as if it were her own. He was in a hotel room with wooden walls. Pictures of constellations everywhere. An image of the Skull Nebula hung over the bed. Its red eyes bore through her as if it could see her soul. It made her shiver. Then, we were nudging open the door. Outside the hotel room, a sandstone yellow hallway. Lots of mahogany doors in both directions. Art everywhere. Ancient cave art on the walls and wedge-shaped writing.

Where were we?

Someone was coming. People were coming. Maybe not people. Humanoid. And she could hear footfalls. Regular, rhythmic, disciplined footfalls, like an army squad.

Someone was here. With her. In her mind.

Come with us.

Who’s voice was that?

She dropped the bag.

The world went black.

If you are here for the fiction, don’t worry, the next chapter is slated for release this weekend.

If you bought Total Eclipse during the sale, thank you! Be sure to leave a review!

“If you plan to put out work that you want readers to enjoy and take seriously, you must think of it as a business.”—Jody Wenner

A new writing craft book hit the market yesterday. I am simultaneously going to review it (Spoiler alert: 5 stars), and make this post about me and my serial fiction experience. Because I Am The Author, I do what I want.

Should you buy this book?

Of course, you should. That’s a really dumb question. It’s by Jody Wenner, who has been doing beta reads, developmental editing, and writing books for fifteen years. She has 20 distinct works on Goodreads. She knows a thing or two because she’s written and edited a thing or two.

My view on writing craft books is the same as my mother’s view on recipe books. Mom was in the Successful Italian Restaurant Business. She said if you pay $25 for a cookbook and get one good recipe out of it, it was worth it because you could make it back by serving it to a thousand people.

This book reads like Wenner’s collection of manuscript margin notes, “ohhh… did you really do that? No, no, you shouldn’t.”

There are lots of excellent tips in here that make it well worth the $7.99. If even one of the tips helps you sell a few extra books, you’ve made your money back. There are tips on character development, conflict, foreshadowing (“teasing”), when to query (before or after editing, if you go down that road), many others.

I am not going to go into tremendous detail. I highlighted two dozen or so sections as my own personal reminders. If you are curious about how not to be boring, go buy the book.

Buy Dont Be Boring

One section I do want to discuss from the book: scenes and chapters, specifically as it relates to serializing fiction.

From Chapter 3, story structure:

Sometimes we forget that each chapter has a job to do all on its own. For example, if we consider a single chapter in our manuscript as a scene, or a mini-story in itself, then we know that each chapter needs to have some basic elements we’ve already discussed. In order for a chapter to feel compelling and complete to the reader, it should have us question the same things: (1) What is the character trying to do within this smaller scene/chapter (establish expectations)? (2) What is getting in the way (adding conflict)? (3) What happens if the expectations set out at the beginning of the scene are not met (consequences/stakes)?

This is a mistake I see a lot of serial fictionistas make. When I dive into chapter 27, because I see it on my substack dashboard, I first ask: Why am I here? What is the point of this chapter?

Some authors are very good at giving me a summary and delivering compelling chapters that make me want to move forward or go back and read earlier sections.

Others…dive right into dialogue, or action, or worldbuilding. Here I will just quote Wenner:

The reader has no idea who the character is yet, so it often reads like a jumbled, adrenaline-fueled mess and the stakes aren’t there because we haven’t gotten attached to the MC yet. Why do we care if they survive the high-speed chase?

I’ve started, and not finished, a lot of serial fiction on Substack because:

• I did not know why I was there

• There was no summary of the story to-date

• No link to earlier chapters

• No hook for me to get into the chapter

• No hook for me to go back and reread

Each chapter of serial fiction starts in media res (literally). People click on chapter 36 because they see it in their feed or they subscribed last week.

Let me say it louder: Each chapter of serial fiction starts in media res.

In fact, I’d argue that serial fiction is the penultimate example of in medias res.

You can’t assume the reader has read the earlier 35 chapters. And even if they did read the earlier 35 chapters, those might have been posted 6 months ago. Who remembers that minute detail from 6 months ago? Not me.

I am reminded of some of the long-running series I’ve completed: Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar series, and Diane Capri’s Hunt for Jack Reacher series. You don’t need to read these books in order. Within each book, they give us gentle reminders of backstory or relevant details that you may have missed or forgotten. Not a lot. Not enough to take us out of the story. Sometimes only a sentence or two. But they do refresh us.

You need to treat each chapter the same.

Now, you are serializing a novel, so obviously, your chapters have to have an overarching story structure. I am not saying each chapter should be a short story. Nor am I suggesting a lot of redundancy.

But, please, please, please, give us a hook. Give us a gentle summary. Assume your reader has come in on the latest chapter and give a sentence of refresher—even if it’s at the beginning before the chapter—but not so much as to take us out of the story.

Most importantly, give us a reason to be there.

I try to do all these things when I deliver serial fiction. Do I succeed? You tell me in the comments.

Go buy Wenner’s book, 5 stars.

Buy Dont Be Boring

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Leave a comment

Buy my book.

Total Eclipse is available an ebook, paperback, and audiobook from Amazon and Barnes and Noble:

Finally, don’t forget we are 26 chapters into Kate Devana’s next electrifying adventure. Stay tuned for the cover reveal and release date in summer 2025.

Catch up here:

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This is the Twenty-sixth chapter.

You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

APRIL 11, 2074

PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.

Deputy Detective Leyna Darcy opened the bathroom tap after flushing her lunch and maybe her job down the toilet for the second time in a day. Air hissed from the faucet. Somewhere in the colony’s bowels, pumps forced recycled water into pipes. It traveled up to the lunar surface, circulated through patches of permanently dark permafrost the temperature of dry ice, and then returned chilled, sputtering into the sink. Tourist marketing videos called it LunarThermal, but Jin said that was just a fancy brand name for old-fashioned geothermal, except in reverse, because the pipes went up instead of down. She hoped the pipes were protected from the surface’s harsh cosmic rays. She wanted cold water, not radioactive water, and she wouldn’t put it past the greedy builders to cheat with substandard insulation and dimwittedly nuke the tourists. The water probably wasn’t dangerous. If it was, she figured Jin would have warned her.

It didn’t matter how it all worked. The bathroom was spinning and what mattered right now was that the water tasted icy and soothed her nausea.

This wasn’t happening to her for a second time today, except that it was. The first wave of nausea she chalked up to nerves. Seeing a man killed roiled her stomach, or that’s what she told herself. But it had to be the smells. First the rancid popcorn smell at Vapor Trail, and then the chemical smells in the morgue. Now she was worried. She wasn’t ready. Over and over she kept thinking she was a probationary deputy. She could be dismissed for any reason. Jin was missing, and she couldn’t do this by herself. In some primitive part of her mind, she always thought it would be Jin coming to her rescue, not the other way around.

She fidgeted with her ponytail. When she met Jin, her hair was brown. She’d let her natural fire red grow out. Now she looked too much like her mother. Scrunching it, banding it, testing it in a bun, whatever she did, her mother still tormented her in the mirror.

Maybe she should go back to her college look. Black hair, black lipstick, and black nails. Black eye shadow would hide the puffiness in her eyes from vomiting. Maybe the colony needed a goth detective. If you look edgy, you feel edgy. Wasn’t that how the saying went? Goth makeup would clash with the blue uniform, but so what? She needed to be edgy.

Her mother had been the opposite of edgy. She painted the colony as a glorious five-star hotel, with its brass fittings, expensive artwork, marble, and celebrity. Everything looked fancy here, like the quartz bathroom countertop and tile floor, but it was all engineered moonstone, and moonstone was nothing but colored glass and cheap resin. It was all fake. Affectations, for the tourist experience. Her mother was naïve, unable to see past what was right in front of her. The result, someone she had known for forty years snuck up and murdered her in the middle of a wedding party.

She gave up on her hair and banded it loosely. Jin liked her red hair, so she’d keep it. Plus, hair dye might be out for a while.

The coded note on her phone was the key to bringing Jin home. He wrote, ‘in bytes we send,’ so he’d embedded some sort of image in the message that she needed to extract. The second half of the message contained lyrics from a horrible song that had hit number one the week they started dating. The last line, ‘Our love’s code, no one can break,’ was a reference to a one-time pad cipher. Only she knew the key. He’d given it to her, it was a secret between the two of them, and it didn’t exist on any server anywhere for a decryption algorithm to scrape and test.

The first paragraph still puzzled her. It was some sort of warning. But he’d written it like some sort of dream. Some of it made sense, the rest was surreal.

Still weak and shaking, she took a deep breath and shoved the bathroom door open to the basement’s puke-green hallway, the same color green as the lunch she’d flushed down the toilet. Eric and Dr. Torres waited for her down the hall at the morgue’s aluminum double doors.

What was she going to say? They’d think she couldn’t handle the job. She looked like shit. There was no point in hiding the fact that she’d just retched. Her eyes were swollen, and sound broadcast through the hospital’s ductwork as loud as a rock concert. Probably the whole universe heard her. If she was going to be fired, she wanted to go out on her terms, not theirs.

Problem was, she didn’t know what her terms were. Not yet.

She straightened her uniform and quickened her pace. Fake it till you make it.

Eric’s long, iron-red beard couldn’t mask his devilish grin. His lips were pinched around a straw full of brown liquid, and his cheeks pulsated, sucking muscle juice into his ear-to-ear smirk. He’d changed into jeans and a too-tight blue golf shirt. His shoulders and biceps bulged, nearly busting the seams. He held his cup upright like a barbell as if it had the density of Thor’s Hammer.

Christ, he was thinking up some way to embarrass her.

Dr. Torres scanned her like an x-ray machine, up and down. Her icy green eyes assessed Leyna’s every pore, and then she crossed her arms. “Do you have a fever?”

Where were the black cubes? Still in the morgue? Leyna tried to peer over Dr. Torres’s shoulder and through the glass window, but all she saw were the morgue’s metal cabinets and its phlegm-yellow ceiling.

“No fever. I feel fine. Maybe a delayed reaction to what I saw at Vapor Trail.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Maybe she should have gone with, ‘yes, fever.’ She didn’t sound fine. She sounded defensive and lame.

Dr. Torres’s face, expressionless, was impossible to read. Either she believed her, didn’t believe her, or was about to sedate her and carve her up on a cadaver table.

“I just needed some fresh air.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Dr. Torres had the same expressionless look, all the time. A brilliant interrogation technique. If Leyna was being accused of hiding something, she didn’t know what.

Well, yes, she did. Trying to lie to Dr. Torres was dumb. Uh, why don’t you flop your hair around like a bimbo, too, Leyna. Deputy Detective Leyna Dumbass, that’s me.

Eric’s jowls suctioned brown goo through his straw, working up to something snarky. She did not need his shit.

“Fresh air,” he said. “Have to go four hundred thousand kilometers for fresh air.” He punctuated his comment with a noisy slurp.

He was enjoying himself. She wanted to flip him off. Or pull her stun gun out and shock that grin off his face. But Dr. Torres was right here and there were laws against torturing jackasses.

She should have let it go, but her shakes got the better of her. “Helpful. Eric the Obvious. Thanks. I’ll note it.”

“Maybe you’re—”

“Maybe you should shut it.”

Eric made a show of sucking his disgusting brown liquid through his smug lips. He got to her, and he savored it more than whatever was in the metal cup. She could smell it, too, and it smelled like poop. It was making her sick again.

He opened his mouth to take another run at annoying her, upping the stakes, but Dr. Torres cut him off. “I’ve asked Eric to help you until Kate is back.”

Wonderful news. The best, really. They thought she couldn’t handle it herself. Next, she’d be getting a departmental award and signing autographs. Congratulations, you’ve managed the shortest assignment in the history of police forces anywhere.

Well, maybe not the shortest. Kate said one of her partners only lasted a week and ran a drone shop now, so she had a bright future as a tourist toy jockey.

“Howdy, pardner,” Eric grinned.

“Gee, I’ve never had my own personal jackass before.”

“Eee-awww. At your service.”

“Let’s go donkey boy. I want those victim names in our department computer so we can correlate them.”

Donkey boy. Good one, Leyna. If you’re fired, you can do standup comedy.

“Donkey boy already did that. I returned the artifacts to your office safe. While I was there, I entered the four victim’s names into Eclipse for you, and tasked it to scrape everything, including financials. We are still waiting on the name of the Vapor Trail vic. If they are connected, we’ll find out in about an hour.”

Eric did all that while she was puking in the bathroom? Was she in there that long? Also, she didn’t think he had access to Eclipse, the department's investigative AI.

“Who gave you access?”

“Jin tells me everything.” He emphasized everything with a deep pucker and a long pull from his straw. Eric the gloater, gloating.

She glared at him, shooting as many porcupine quills as she was receiving, trying not to panic. Jin told him she was late. He and Eric hung out together, and the two of them were always in constant competition to manifest more testosterone. But she thought they only talked about guns and video games and lifting. Anyway, being late didn’t mean anything. She hadn’t taken a test and wasn’t going to for a while. There was no point, at least until Jin was back. It could be nerves. Or a virus. Could be anything, really

She had a vision of a bassinet beside her desk, with bells and a music box and some rockets hanging for the baby to play with. Then the baby was a toddler, and the greasy prick from the Comet was in her office. She was trying to handcuff him while the toddler crawled all over her.

Raising a kid on the moon. No way she could do this alone. She needed Jin back

Whatever Jin said to Eric didn’t mean anything, but Eric was going to torture her about it anyway. For weeks. She’d be forced to murder Jin. Some kind of gory way, too, involving cutting out his tongue and stuffing it down Eric’s throat. Whatever the mafia did to snitches.

She swallowed. “So the artifacts are secure, in our vault?”

“Tighter than a nun’s—”

“As tight as my hands will be around your neck if you don’t shut up?”

He grinned at her, shaking his head. There was no way she was going to get her tiny hands all the way around his thick neck, and he knew it. That brown poo goo he was guzzling was making her nauseous again.

Dr. Torres uncrossed her arms and walked away. “Play nice, kids. I want an update in an hour, when the results come in.”

Her stomach settled a little, watching Dr. Torres recede.

If the artifacts were in their office vault, she would have access to them later. One of them had power. Maybe she could figure out how it worked and download data from it.

Eric said, “You are thinking she doesn’t smile, but I saw it once, when this cadaver came in. Frozen solid on the surface for six months and perfectly preserved inside a spacesuit. She got two papers out of it.”

“What did Jin tell you?”

“Kinda weird when you think about it. We will all end up naked and dead on her aquamation prep table. Unless she dies first, in which case I will be doing her. But either way, its the perfect business model. Everybody dies, and their bodies go through her office. She could make a killing. Haha—get it?”

“No wonder you’re still single.”

He pouted, twisting his face into a sad puppy frown. “Now, that hurt.”

In truth, he was single by choice. He had a plan and had mapped his whole life out. He liked to say, ‘there has to be a me before there is a we.’ His working-on-himself phase involved secret night classes and gallons of that revolting brown puree in his cup.

She was a little envious. Nothing about her life was planned. And if she tried to plan, the universe would intervene with a meteor. If something was ninety-seven percent effective, she was the three percent. Shit.

“Shut up and answer my question.” She slapped him. It stung her knuckles. His pecs and shoulders were as hard as rocks.

“Eee-awww.” The veins in his biceps pulsed. His eyes curled into his you-know-what-I-know smug expression. He was going to be stubborn and would just keep teasing her.

She slapped him again, gentler this time. “You don’t know anything.”

“Donkey boy know plenty.” He offered his straw. “Try it.”

“What’s in it today?”

“The usual. Yeast protein. Creatine. Leucine. HMB. Mixed in bourbon and cola.”

“Jesus, you’ll be the most jacked kidney dialysis patient in the solar system. She lets you drink on the job?”

“I am not on her job anymore, am I sweet cheeks? I’m on yours.”

“Call me sweet cheeks again, I will put three million volts through your dick.”

He puckered up and blew a kiss. “I love you too, sweet cheeks.”

She put her hand on her stun gun. He pushed his straw closer. “Take a sip. Sweet cheeks.”

She tried to hold his stare. Instead, she giggled and then grabbed the cup. It smelled like a warm wet fart and made her gag. She almost retched on the spot.

“Did you put any cola in this at all?”

He shrugged.

She handed it back. “No thanks.”

“So…now we aren’t drinking?”

“I am not drinking that. I need my liver, thank you.”

He made a show of licking the straw up and down and then taking a giant slurp. “Mmmmmmm. Delicious, sweet cheeks.” The smirk under his red beard wrapped all the way to his temples.

She flipped him off. “Whatever you think you know, you don’t know.”

“Jin tells me everything. He’s a drunk talker.”

“Told you what? There is nothing to tell. It’s also none of your business, and I am going to murder both of you violently while you sleep.”

He raised one eyebrow, but before he spoke, the elevator dinged, and a woman with a long blond ponytail and wearing a blue pantsuit walked into the hall. She swiveled, looking both ways. Her suit jacket flared, exposing the black pistol on her belt for a nanosecond. Standard issue and unmistakable. The woman eyed them and aimed for a direct confrontation.

“I smell sulfur,” Eric said.

“I haven’t seen one of those in a while. Don’t they have tails and horns?”

“The horns are retractable. The tail is hidden under the cheap pantsuit.”

“They travel in pairs. Where’s the other one?”

“Probably gnawing its teeth on a poor soul upstairs.”

The woman limped and used a cane. It felt like it took hours for her to shuffle down the hall. Step. Limp. Step. Limp. Step. Limp. The cane clacked on the fake granite floor.

Leyna had never seen a Fed limp, and she didn’t think she was seeing one now. She’d seen surfers with all sorts of leg injuries. The supposedly gimpy leg was a little too strong and stable. Something was off.

The woman stopped an arm’s length away, checking their nametags. She settled on Leyna and then displayed a badge on her phone lockscreen. “Deputy Darcy. I am FBI agent Special Agent Kristi Lindsay. Here to pick up my prisoner.”

Agent Lindsay was alone. Her partner was wandering somewhere, and unsupervised Feds roaming the colony only caused trouble.

Something in the first half of Jin’s message clicked in her brain. He’d warned her. This wasn’t good. Not good at all.

Chapter 26 of Devana Files comes out in a week. Stay tuned, too, for the title/cover reveal and release date in the summer of 2025.

"This sentence sounds like you're describing a prolapse, Wyatt"

More on that quote later. Today’s post is about writing advice. I don’t like writing about writing because authors’ opinions about writing rules are like assholes: We all have them; they all stink. So be careful what you're sticking your nose into.

I am seeing a lot of spammy writing advice on Subtack. Fact: The number one theme in Substack’s “fiction” category is not actual fiction. It’s writing about writing. This is true of Youtube and social media generally, but Substack seems to be bloated with it.

So here we go on our little adventure, one that will surely end with you in the comments, pissed off. I will not censor comments, not even from trolls. You are entitled to your opinion.

Much of the Substack advice is very clickbaity. "The secret to sales is a catchy title and a good cover to sell a book. Subscribe or buy my book to find out more!" or "My Save the Cat personal writing journey!"

Free advice is typically worth what you paid for it. Sure, there are gems. Sometimes, you find a priceless piece of history at a flea market, too.

Is writing advice worth a "subscription to my unabridged opinions?"

Probably not. Here are some exceptions.

I am putting the comment button right here because as the hate flows through you, you will need to press it.

Leave a comment

Listen to Gatekeepers

I feel your hate flowing already. Nooooooo Wyatt, we hate gatekeepers!

We do. Hear me out.

Here is an entire thread on X about what an editor wants to see:

It bombs all the Usual Suspects™️: Passive voice, infodumps, cliches, etc. I bet you can name them all by heart. I am not endorsing this editor or publication or his rules. Not my point.

Trad publishing has rules, some of them dumb, like, “Don’t start a novel with the character waking up.” I just read a bestseller where the novel starts with the character waking up. Yes, that author can get away with it because they’ve sold zillions of other books.

At my dayjob (writing/reviewing extremely mathy technical papers), I rigidly enforce active voice because we submit them to an audience who cannot, under any circumstances, be confused about who did what, when, where, why, and how. I am the gatekeeper. Business writing should always be done in active voice. Period. And if you send me a paper in passive voice, I will return it severely and harshly redlined, with few exceptions.

But fiction is not business writing, and there are certainly times in fiction when passive voice is acceptable. Some cultures, out of deference to authority, heavily use passive voice. Sometimes, the character doesn’t know who left the bloody knife on the floor.

Here is the thing: if you want to submit to a publication or agent, you need to follow their rules. If an editor does not like gratuitous violence, don’t complain if you submit horror and it’s rejected. If an editor does not like passive voice, avoid it. If an agent does not like infodumps, don’t do it. If the submission criteria say 5000 words, don’t give them 5001.

You can say its not fair, hypocritical, arbitrary, untrue, whatever. Nothing changes the fact that agents and editors get 237 submissions for every 5 manuscripts they accept. They are the gatekeepers. It's their rules; they make them up.

Bottom line: If you want to raise your odds of being accepted, find out what the rules are for your submission and follow them.

Listen to successful authors

Has the source of the advice sold books (scripts, etc)? Have they received good reviews? Or have they chiefly sold “how to sell books?”

Equally importantly, is the advice applicable to books in the genre you want to write?

Harlan Coben and Lee Child videoed a Masterclass. Take it. Stephen King wrote On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft. Read it. Kurt Vonnegut, Elmore Leonard, and many others have offered writing advice. Read it all.

Not all of it will apply to you. Advice that applies to literary fiction, for example, will not apply to thrillers. In a thriller, incomplete sentences and comma splices are common. Sometimes they’re used to overcome the aforementioned “was” passive voice. Sometimes, to break long sentences; to make the text more punchy. Your text should have a rhythm, like poetry.

Conversely, don’t listen to bloggers who specialize in “how to sell books.”

Bottom line: Mimic success in your genre.

Ignore your English professors

Ooooh, now the hate is really flowing, I see. Goooood. Let the hate flow through you.

Some of the worst writing I have ever seen has come from MFAs (some good stuff, too; I am not lumping everyone together).

English professors may be the single worst source of literary advice on the planet. I said what I said and will repeat it louder: English professors are the single worst source of literary advice on the planet. I am reminded of Michael Crichton's experiment at Harvard when he submitted an Orwell essay and got a B-.

Yes, I was one of those geeky STEM majors. Yes, I got As in my writing courses and wrote for the college newspaper. So what?

Oh, so you plan to bully your readers and impress them with how smart you are! Your audience will probably not consist of English majors who appreciate your 36-word sentences and flowery use of multi-syllable, rarely-used adjectives that they need to look up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Fuck that, your thriller reader will skip it. Of course, your literary fiction reader will love it! So know your intended reader.

Bottom line: It’s more important to know your audience than listen to floofy professorial advice. When I say, “Some of the worst writing I have ever seen has come from MFAs,” it is invariably because the writer followed “the process” and “the rules” while ignoring their audience.

Again, I resort to business writing (and I am including journalism here) as the quintessential example: You want to write at the 10th-grade level, in the active voice, telling them who, what, where, where, why, and how upfront. Not hard. You don’t need an MFA for it. Michael Connelly, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, and Freida McFadden (among others) wrote (and are writing) outstanding thriller series—and not in flowery prose. Follow their lead.

Take Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and other software with a ton of salt.

70% of the time, Grammar and style checkers work every time (to paraphrase Anchorman).

I use both Grammarly and PWD. They disagree on comma placement. PWD will sometimes tell me, “don’t do that,” when exactly what I want to do is that, for emphasis.

Software style checkers are based on the law of averages: “The average author would do this here,” based on it’s training data.

Sometimes it’s solid advice. Other times, it isn’t. Use discretion.

I suggest reading your work aloud (or having someone read it to you). Hear the rhythm, or lack thereof, and adjust accordingly.

Listen to your editors and beta readers

Mrs W constantly reminds me: “You know what you mean, Wyatt, no one else does.” 😂

"This sentence sounds like you're describing a prolapse, Wyatt" is the kind of feedback you want from a beta reader or editor (yes, true story, a beta sent me that 😂).

The advice your editor is giving you is worth its weight in platinum. The advice your reader is giving you is worth a thousand times that. If they are telling you they are confused, can’t picture that scene, or a paragraph does not work, then you should listen and fix it.

Mrs W draws frowny faces in my drafts (she prefers to read my manuscripts in print). You bet I listen! She is meticulous. Also, I love sex. ❤️

Bottom line: Following the process and the rules is never a substitute for appreciating the impact on your reader.

Finally: The law of diminishing returns.

While you should absolutely absorb craft, you’ve probably absorbed too much.

10,000 hours of woodworking videos don't add up to a sculpture. You need to pick up a knife and go out and carve your first failures. Destroy some wood. Write a prolapse. Then, find editors and beta readers who know your genre, who are invested in you, and listen to them.

Filled with hate?

Leave a comment

I want to thank J.F Lawrence for the review of the Total Eclipse audiobook. I am very humbled and glad he enjoyed it. Lauren did an amazing job narrating. She swears well!

Total Eclipse is available an ebook, paperback, and audiobook from Amazon and Barnes and Noble:

Finally, don’t forget we are 25 chapters into Kate Devana’s next electrifying adventure. Stay tuned for the cover reveal and release date in summer 2025.

Catch up here:

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This is Part II. The Twenty-fifth. chapter. You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is escaping for Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home to stop the killer.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

APRIL 10, 2074

NYS VEGA, TRANSLUNAR ORBIT

Lebofield was going to make her pull the trigger, and she was going to regret it. Her rifle light danced over the right android’s face and then the left. She didn’t know what his play was, commandeering them like this. They were antiques, at least fifty years old, and in great condition. No simu-flesh. With coarse black nylon hair sewn into the head, like an old doll. Their silicone had yellowed and hardened in spots, maybe from the heat of being in a spotlight, but there were no cracks or scars. Their flaws were only palpable under her harsh rifle light.

The droids were identical. A collectible pair. Maybe even sequential serial numbers off the same assembly line. Worth a fortune if their circuits were original, which probably explained why they were here. Stolen from one rich person and smuggled to another.

The only difference: Lebofield puppeted the right one. Not the left.

Was he attacking her? Delaying her? Or just too cowardly to come out of his space RV? She pictured Lebofield inside his comfy shipping container-turned-studio apartment less than fifty meters away. Probably sitting at his desk, wearing a headset, with the droids on speed buttons.

A shame. No matter how much these droids were worth, she couldn’t take chances. His slimy, dark soul defiled them. Now she’d need to exorcise him with a metal slug.

Her rifle dot was on the right android. He could switch instantly, so she kept an eye on the left.

Hud diagnostics reported six minutes and eleven seconds remaining to MECO, or main engine cut-off. After that, zero-g. Vega’s velocity was eighty-eight percent of cruising speed, so she had options. Theoretically, she could shut the Hanabishi engines off now, although it would delay her return forty-five minutes. She originally planned to conserve fuel, remaining in zero-g for the balance of the trip, but now with at least one container full of live animals, she’d be forced to spin the ship to generate centrifugal gravity. The thought of a donkycorn and alpinka floating around in zero-g made her giggle a little too much. It was probably safe for the animals. Probably. Either way, some poor robot would be tasked with cleaning donkycorn and alpinka shit off the ceiling when they landed. Maybe she’d make Lebofield do it. Manual labor might do him some good.

“You don’t belong here, Devana.” Lebofield’s voice crackled from a speaker in the back of the android’s throat, like an old amateur radio broadcast. The droid’s eyes jittered over the barrel of her rifle, unblinking, and its faded red lips barely moved. They say a dog looks like its owner. Lebofield operated the droid like an anxious ventriloquist dummy.

“Can you make that thing spit?”

“Can I what?”

“Make it spit. Say, ‘You don’t belong here, Devana,’ louder, like a Marine drill sergeant, with a shower of spittle.”

“Umm…no?”

“Shame.”

She pulled the trigger. Click. Boom. Her coilgun’s capacitors discharged, firing a metal slug into the android’s face at thirteen hundred meters per second. Its head vaporized. Yellow silicone globs and circuit board slivers flew in all directions. The bullet ricocheted, showering sparks off the container wall, and then pink cleaning solution sprayed everywhere when the slug landed in a maidbot.

Decapitated, the droid collapsed, torn metal and wires jutting from its neck. A coilgun was not as satisfying as a 12 gauge. Instead of the intimidating thunk of a cycling bolt, its capacitors whined, recharging. No sulfurous burnt gunpowder smell, either. Still, smoldering silicone did make her smile.

She sighed. That was probably six million dollars of paperwork on the floor.

The left android shifted. She swung her rifle, putting the red dot sight center mass. “Frank F. Lebofield, you are under arrest.”

“You can’t make me.”

What are we, five? “You have the right to remain silent.”

“You can’t arrest me.”

“Can. Did. Done. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

“You highjacked this ship. You aren’t supposed to be here.”

“You highjacked these droids.”

“I am defending myself. This is self-defense.”

“The crew took your money and ran. So, welcome to Devana Cruise Lines. You have the right to an attorney, plus free handcuffs and locktails. Watch out for the jailhouse buffet, you wont poop for a week.”

“This is an illegal arrest. I will sue you for wrongful arrest, wrongful imprisonment, and malicious prosecution. I’ll take every nickel you have.”

Click. Boom. Boring conversation. Flames erupted from the gaping hole in the android’s chest. She’d hit the power bank. It crumpled to the ground in a fog of oily black smoke, landing face up on the first android.

She shook her head at the carnage and sighed. “I don’t think you understood. You have the right to remain silent.”

She pivoted to the exit. Five minutes and thirteen seconds to MECO. The five mechanicbots between her and the doorway resembled pony-sized metal scorpions, with long aluminum legs and six cranes for pincers and tails. They were crouched in a zig-zag pattern, blocking her path. The two maidbots were against the walls, out of her way, one on each side. Pink and blue chemicals splattered the left wall like a fountain above the maidbot.

Two pincer-like crane-arms lifted on the front mechanicbot. Each had a drill, with whirring tungsten carbide stingers that could punch through her armor like a spade through donkeycorn shit.

The other four cranes didn’t rise. Nor did any of the other robots activate. That was good news. He could only coordinate one robot at a time and only two arms at that. He planned this, but he wasn’t skilled. He didn’t have software to make them swarm, either.

Still, there was no way she could get through the exit without those drills poking a big hole in her suit. She could shoot them all. But as much fun as it would be to blow them up, she’d rather save them for later to clean and repair the ship.

“Back off,” Lebofield said through the mechanicbot’s staticky speakerphone.

“This is a lawful arrest. Your warrant has been signed by the U.S. Attorney General, a Supreme Court Justice, and the Governor of the great State of Texas. The crew abandoned ship and left you here. There is nowhere to go. So put away the dolls and strap yourself in before this turns into resisting arrest.”

“I want to make a deal. I can explain everything.”

“If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed, who will be happy to make a deal. Do you understand your rights?”

What was his play here? She still didn’t see it. Lebofield was slowing her down. Did he really think he could escape? He was in a space container on a ship traveling about nine hundred kilometers a minute, towards the moon, in translunar space.

“I know my rights.”

Click. Boom. The mechanicbot flipped and skidded away in a fountain of green sparks.

Another spidery mechanicbot activated, rolling between her and the container door. Its crane-arms rose like an oncoming two-tailed scorpion, drills brrrring.

Click. Boom. It toppled, showering blue and red flames like spin-top fireworks. She took three steps forward, kicking the wreckage out of her way.

Two down, but Lebofield was already in the third mechanicbot, rolling in front of her and blocking her path. Damn, he was quick.

“My father and mother are my attorneys. Will you stop shooting for a second and listen?”

“Bad news about that. They are under indictment as co-conspirators, so they can’t represent you.”

“I want to make a deal.”

“You said that. I am not here to make a deal.”

“I have the money, I just need time.”

“All your assets belong to the Feds now. It’s out of my hands. Plus, I don’t negotiate through speakerphone.”

Click. Boom. The third bot froze, but nothing else happened. No fireworks. Disappointed, she kicked it aside and advanced halfway to the door before the fourth mechanic bot powered up, waving its arms.

“Listen to me and stop shooting.”

“My advice is to keep your mouth shut and put the toys away before you earn yourself resisting arrest and assault on a police officer. I don’t make deals, and I left all my fucks at home. Strap in. When we get back, you will get a nice lawyerbot and robojudge.”

While she talked, she inched towards the door. Shadows moved outside the container. She swiped through Vega’s security camera feeds and then those from her two chameleon drones buzzing around the outer corridor. Nothing. Something moved, but she couldn't see it.

“I want a human lawyer and a human judge. I want my trial in person.”

Financial fraudsters always thought they had the charisma to hypnotize the detectives, the prosecutors, and the jury. “It’s your funeral.”

“What does that mean?”

The Federal prosecutor wanted him held in her colony jail until the new lunar prison facility was finished, maybe in six or seven months. He wanted the trial on the colony, too. A big spectacle, and dangerous in her mind. Federal marshals with an acute case of low-gravity sickness would have to shuttle Lebofield back and forth in a thin-walled vehicle under constant threat of space decompression.

But this was the crime of the century. Or at least the microsecond. A megawatt trial required a megawatt locale, the colony. The prosecutor was probably getting dental implants and whitening his teeth right now, in preparation, because a megawatt trial needed a megawatt smile. She wasn’t sure whose ego was bigger, Lebofield’s or the prosecutor’s, or whether the colony’s environmental system could handle all the hot air. Colony engineers would probably need to build a whole new power plant dedicated to generating the electrons for the media posts.

She needed the publicity like she needed those whirring tungsten drill bits to puncture her lungs. The only upside, the pissed-off Federal judge, who’d end up traveling four hundred thousand kilometers to suffer gravity sickness and Lebofield’s whiny excuses, would probably tack on an extra five years out of sheer irritation.

“It means, it’s your right to have a trial by a human judge and jury.”

“Let me go, now. I can make a trade. ”

“Was that your gold I saw in the next container over?”

“Not mine, I swear.”

A shame. If the heap of gold had been his, there’d be hope that his victims would get their money back.

Click. Boom. The fourth mechanicbot tumbled in a geyser of sparks.

He activated a maidbot next. Maybe because it was the closest to her. It rolled to the center of the container, a claw holding a wide black broom with red bristles. Scary stuff.

She put her red dot sight on the claw holding the broom and squeezed the trigger gently. Click. Boom. The claw severed in a spray of shrapnel. The broom fell and knocked over the top tray of chemicals, splashing purple cleaning solution on the floor.

The maidbot swiveled and jerked until it got stuck in a heap of wreckage, spinning back and forth as Lebofield tried to free it.

He gave up. It halted, and the fifth mechanicbot pivoted into the doorway. She raised her rifle.

“I know about the black cubes. Stop shooting and listen to me.”

The scorpion-like robot didn’t have eyes, or even a face, so she couldn’t know whether he was bluffing. She thought back, was her visor down when she talked to Rae about the cubes? There could be a microphone or intercom on the door to his quarters. Could he have overheard the conversation?

She couldn’t remember. But he was a financial fraudster, hardwired to lie.

Her red dot sight was on the bot’s power supply. It would rocket out of the threshold on a wave of flames. “Let me guess, you’re innocent. Not interested.”

“They have been after me since day one. I am too successful. But I know where the lightning cubes are coming from.”

There was a groan outside, the shriek of metal on metal. Three minutes and forty-five seconds to MECO and zero-g. Was he trying to jettison his container with the emergency system?

Fraudsters always thought one more lie would set them free. She stepped towards the door. The mechanicbot stood in her way, drills spinning.

“You overheard our conversation. Good bluff.”

“I am not bluffing. The crew left one. They thought they could use it on you. I told them it wouldn’t work. You let me go, I’ll tell you where the rest are.”

The passageway turned red and a klaxon sounded. Instinctively, she ran diagnostics on her suit. Ninety-nine percent oxygen. Good volts. Seventy-eight percent power. Enough for six hours and change. Three minutes and seven seconds to MECO. If he jettisoned before MECO, the engines would tear him up. Maybe the ship, and her with it.

Chameleon drone number two caught a robot moving outside. A little butlerbot, like a tray table with an arm and wheels. It tossed something into the container.

Dread filled her. More than when she saw Rae’s files. There was no doubt what it was. A black cube bounced inside the threshold and rolled to her feet.

“There are more. A lot more. You let me go, and I’ll split it with you.”

Six had shown up on the colony. There weren’t supposed to be any at all. She thought they were all destroyed. At her feet, number seven.

She saw it now. The malware pinging her suit. This was the source. A ship this old should not have a neuroface controller, but Vega did, maybe on a side circuit, hidden in a container. Someone brought lightning cubes aboard and set it to ping her neuroface.

Her mech suit cybersecurity blocked it. If not, her brain would be a hard-boiled egg. She got lucky. The crew assumed she’d show up wearing a cowboy hat and riding a horse. They couldn’t know she’d bargained for the latest defense technology.

Two minutes and thirty seconds to MECO. Her hud flashed a yellow warning. Zero-g imminent.

“You have nowhere to go, Lebofield. This ship is traveling at almost fifty-five thousand kilometers per hour, under thrust.”

“We both know the thrust is ending in a few minutes. When it does, you are dropping me off.”

She wasn’t sure she believed him. Cornered fugitives sometimes became desperate and suicidal. Over the last four years, she’d had two fugitives off themselves rather than go to jail. The last one did a bird impersonation off a Dallas skyscraper and pancaked on a flatbed in traffic.

“The emergency thrusters on that container of yours don’t have enough oomph to slow you down. You are headed for a crash landing, on the surface of the moon.”

“Someone will pick me up.”

She checked her telemetry. No one within fifty thousand klicks of Vega. His plan was nothing but hope and prayer. He would suffocate slowly when his container ran out of air.

But it was worse than that. Her suit was recording everything. Lebofield knew about the cubes. He might foolishly try to make a deal with the Feds. Goodbye country club prison. Hello black site prison.

She could let him go. That was an option. He’d stolen billions. Save the taxpayers the cost of a trial. She’d avoid the publicity of the megawatt media.

“If they are on this ship Lebofield, I will find them.”

“They aren’t on the ship. Except the one at your feet, of course.”

“You don’t know what it is.”

“Oh, I know what it is. It didn’t take me long. The crew of course didn’t know what they had. It killed three of their crew trying to use it. Superstitious idiots. They thought it was cursed.”

They weren’t wrong.

It didn’t matter if there were more on the ship, or just the one. The mere fact that Lebofield knew about them was an excuse for the Feds to lobotomize him.

She needed to get to Vega’s crew before their escape capsule landed.

Goddammit, decisions. “If you know what it is, you know I can’t let you take any of them.”

“It’s not my fault, you know.”

A criminal’s monologue was bad, practically a war crime as far as she was concerned. One delivered through a crackly speakerphone was torture. But the klaxons were sounding on the supply deck. It was decompressing, and there was less than two minutes to MECO. She needed to keep him talking.

“You used all your client money to buy worthless asteroid mining claims at inflated values, then fraudulently used their deeds as collateral to borrow money, which you then deposited in your own account. How was that not your fault?”

She realized she also needed to be out of this container when the thrust ended, or she’d be floating in zero-g with a lot of sharp metal objects.

One minute and thirty seconds to MECO. She didn’t wait for him to respond. “Let’s take this conversation outside.”

Click. Boom. The fifth mechanicbot erupted in a geyser of fireworks and fell out of the threshold. She kicked the smoking robots away and picked up the black cube on the floor as she marched to the door.

On the supply deck, the red sirens and alarms warned her the air pressure had dropped below fifty percent. She locked the container door behind her.

Lebofield peered through his container window, wearing a headset over his trademark big bushy black hair, like a criminal’s tiara. Her phone rang inside her hud and she answered it.

He said, “The loans were supposed to be used to develop land that would soon be worth ten times what we paid for it. If the Feds hadn’t come in and fucked us over, my clients would be richer than their wildest dreams.”

While he talked, she looked for a way to disable the emergency jettison. The red box was way up the wall, and open, with a droid reaching in. Too far to climb in the little time she had. If she shot the droid, she might hit the box, jettisoning the container anyway. She needed to keep Lebofield talking.

“There is a lot of gold in one of these containers. Are you sure it isn’t yours?”

“On my life. I’d know if I had gold.”

“We could split it.”

“You would never let me have it.”

“So, you didn’t know about the deeds being used as collateral?”

“Nobody told me until later.”

Fifty-three seconds to MECO. She looked for a handrail, grabbed it, and tethered herself.

“I should have been a better CEO. I was financially available while not being emotionally available to support my staff when they needed me.”

She didn’t know what that meant. But as long as he kept talking, he wasn’t dying. The animals in the container across the supply deck were making a lot of noise. Maybe they sensed that zero-g was imminent. The supply deck air pressure was down to forty percent. If the container separated before the deck decompressed, the air pressure alone would blow him into space.

“You said there are more of the cubes. Where?”

“Marley was the one who went to the Feds. She blamed me after I broke it off. We just weren’t right for each other, and she couldn’t be professional. I hate to use coarse language, but she became a vindictive bitch.”

Who was Marley? He was rambling, but at least he was talking. Thirty-three seconds to MECO. “I said the same thing to Rae. I was in a situationship with a superior officer a few years ago. I thought we’d get married, the works.”

“What happened?”

Bonding with a fugitive to keep him alive. Don’t ever say she didn’t take her job seriously. “I was just a trophy to her. Her little Pomeranian to show off at D.C. parties. She only loved me because she thought I’d help her climb the D.C. ladder.”

“What a bitch. Just like Marley—”

The ship’s rumbling and dull roar ended. MECO. She exhaled hard, blowing steam onto her visor. She was weightless. Lebofield floated away from his window.

Decisions. Decisions. There was no way to rescue him if he blew himself into space. She couldn’t let him talk to the Feds, either.

She raised her rifle and rapid-fired two slugs into Lebofield’s window. It cracked, the spiderweb grew, and then his container’s internal air pressure exploded the glass outward onto the supply deck.

Between the air inside his container and the air remaining on the deck, he had about a minute before he passed out.

The rush of air pulled his black blinds through the window, and then papers. His head appeared in the window frame, eyes wide, trademark bushy black hair sticking out in zero-g like he’d been zapped with static electricity. “Fucking insane bitch, you shot my window out!”

“Leave the ship, you’ll die. The oxygen in your little space RV will last about sixty seconds in open space. No one will pick up a container full of corpses. That’s my deal.”

“Fuck you and your deal.”

“One-time final offer. You don’t know it, but I am saving your life.”

He turned and squealed something, probably to his parents. She couldn’t hear it over the rush of air, but the deck’s ceiling vents creaked open. The deck’s red siren switched to yellow. The air pressure was rising rapidly.

“Hey, you wanted an in-person trial to clear your name. I aim to deliver.”

She ended her mech suit video recording and started swimming back to the bridge in zero-g, leaving her drones to watch him.

“You are such a cunt. I want a lawyer.”

“Smartest thing you’ve said so far.” She didn’t know who he’d already told about the cubes, but she couldn’t risk him talking to anyone else. “I am revoking your social media privileges, too.”

“Where are you going?” He was holding onto the window frame with one hand, stretched out and floating like a scuba diver. Brown and black droplets drifted through the opening. Probably coffee and tea.

“I am going to the bridge to spin the ship and give us a little gravity. I enjoyed our chat. I will be back.”

“I am not telling you anything.”

She climbed away. They had two hours and fifty-three minutes before the landing sequence. She’d let him cool off and then come back to interrogate him. She needed to know what he knew, in tremendous detail. He would talk. They always did. Fraudsters like Lebofield couldn’t stop themselves.

The good

• Accountability. Serialization forces discipline on your schedule.

• Immediate feedback. Gimme those post likes and shares! Gimme the comments!

  Leave a comment

• It will make you a better writer (see below for more)

The bad

• Accountability and immediate feedback

  These are two-edged swords. Nobody likes bad feedback, lol. If you miss a week because life happens, your readers will let you know.

• Format. No underline! What? No colored text? I dare you to indent your text! (Can’t do it). Emojis in notes? Heck no.

  God forbid you want to do something fancy, like a set of text messages between people in a romance novel.

  The format options available on Substack make 1980 text editors great again. It sucks. It’s designed for newsletters, not fiction.

  If a post looks good, it feels good to the reader (i.e., smoother reading), so you may have to experiment with the format.

How will serialization make you a better writer?

I like the process. I like the accountability and immediate feedback. Practice makes perfect, but it’s more than that:

• Serializing fiction forces you to think about your story chapter by chapter, each on its own merit. No fluff or hoopdedoodle that your readers will skip and move on.

• Ask yourself:

  Does your chapter advance the plot?

  Does your chapter develop the character?

  If not, why are we here? Are we world-building or just info-dumping?

• Leave your readers wanting more chapters, or they will unsubscribe.

• Hook and cliffhanger rules apply to each chapter:

  Does your chapter have a hook? Pretend this is the first chapter of your book. Draw them in in the first sentence, even if its chapter 23.

  How do you end? Leave them wanting more:

  Raise a question.

  Drop a bomb.

  Leave unresolved emotion.

  Have a time constraint.

  Have an obstacle.

Writing efficiency and pacing

The optimal word count for a chapter is 1500-3500 words—in the neighborhood of a 15-20 minute read, give or take. Not too short, because “Omg, that’s disappointing!” But also not too long because it becomes difficult to scroll, plus you will lose your reader’s attention.

“But Wyatt, I want to write a 13,000-word chapter!” NO. You are competing for your reader’s time with the work, the dishes, the kids, video games, streaming, etc. Give them “bathroom reading” length.

Cut the fluff and get to the point. Yes, it was good for you, but was it good for them? If your chapter is more than 3000 words, consider breaking it in two. If your scene has a natural cliffhanger break, end your chapter there and split it.

This is not a comprehensive list. I will probably revise this post as I think of more. There are several excellent compilations from authors who have been serializing fiction for much longer than I have. Go find them.

As I mentioned above, I like the process because it forces some writing discipline. I think overall, it's much harder (because it forces writing discipline chapter by chapter, lol). Is it for you? There have definitely been times I was “What am I doing?” Those moments pass once you experience the immediate feedback.

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This is Part II. The Twenty-fourth. chapter. You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is escaping for Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home to stop the killer.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

APRIL 10, 2074

NYS VEGA, TRANSLUNAR ORBIT

While Rae delivered a play-by-play of her case files through the heads-up display like a sports commentator, Kate swept her flashlight over the remaining four unopened container doors. Lebofield’s was third in the circle, but she’d save him for last. Silica quartz glittered on the gray floor in front of number four. Fingers of fog, or maybe condensation, hovered on the floor, barely visible against the worn gray nonslip surface covering the floors and walls.

The fog was new. She unslung her rifle and ran diagnostics.

“So you know what these are?” Rae asked.

Rae meant the black cubes. The Pentagon buried their origin story at the bottom of a Pennsylvania limestone mine. The same one that stored her medals, along with other crates whose contents would be declassified a few lifetimes from now.

“What they are, is worth a fortune. And they will cause a lot of trouble. Take all of them straight to the vault in my office. Delete the biometrics. Change the password. Encrypt all the files.”

“Delete the biometrics?”

“Yes. And don’t tell me the password. Burn down my office on the way out, now that I think about it.”

“What are you talking about? One already survived incineration.”

“Of course. They would be immune to fire. And I am all out of nukes.”

“Talk to me, love.” The hospital’s dingy yellow ceiling framed Rae in the window of Kate’s hud, bouncing as Rae walked. A pair of recessed lights passed overhead every few jiggles.

Kate switched on her weapon light, spotlighting door number five, and maglocked her flashlight to her suit. “I’ll explain when I’m back. Secure them. Don’t talk to anyone. Tell Leyna not to talk to anyone.”

“Leyna got one from that prick that runs the Comet.”

That didn’t make sense. “He must not know what it is or what it’s worth. If he did, he would’ve tried to sell it. Good news, actually.”

“What are these?”

“Several felonies punishable by imprisonment at a black site.”

“Seriously, sweetie.”

“I have never been more.” Kate puffed her cheeks, putting the rifle’s red dot sight on door number five. Rae could be a hound on a scent. Kate loved that about her, and it made them a great team. Rae wouldn’t give up and she wouldn’t accept now is not the time.

She checked her rifle diagnostics while thinking of something to say. She liked the ergonomics and power of this new coilgun, but it wasn’t her weapon of choice. It was a bullpup, with an overall length shorter than her reach. Shorter in part because there was no blast of gunpowder, so there was no sound suppressor. That didn’t make it quiet. When its twelve high-efficiency capacitors discharged, one thousand amps sent a jacketed slug down the tube at over thirteen hundred meters per second. The bullet made a satisfying supersonic crack leaving the barrel, and then a ding and sparks when it penetrated armor.

She didn’t like it. This rifle was a necessary tradeoff. Carbon and nitrogen were scarce on the moon, so ordinary gunpowder was outrageously expensive. Electricity was cheap, but tapping a diagnostic button felt feckless compared to the gratifying chung-chunk of loading a regular rifle. She’d prefer heavy cartridges loaded with boom. This rifle, there was no explosion when it fired. No acrid blowback. No muzzle fireball. Its rate of fire was slower, too. If she tried to fire faster than the capacitors could charge, the trigger would just click. The sound of death in a firefight. If the sensitive electronics failed, it wasn’t even a good club.

Still, it was a powerful rifle, and as her grandfather Jerry taught her, there was no such thing as too much suspicion, too great a speed, too big a gun, or too much body armor. Those were his rules. This coilgun could eviscerate a bear. Or droids, if it came to that. Droids were stronger, faster, but they had vitals to shatter, too. Man or machine, a supersonic metal slug was the great equalizer.

Her rifle diagnostics were green. She stepped toward the fifth door and pulled the handle.

All the scenarios in her head told her Rae was too smart and too cynical to believe a cover story, so she went with the truth. “I don’t remember what the eggheads call them. We called them lightning dice. It’s a controller that allows your neural interface to operate an android.”

“Like a video game controller?”

“Exactly.”

“Axio has one of those. I don’t see what’s so special?”

“You are right. The Pentagon overclassifies everything. Just stuff them in the vault and go. Forget I mentioned it.”

Her rifle light peeled the darkness from a pyramid of gold bars strapped down on a pallet. Otherwise, the fifth container was empty.

“I got gold here. Probably half a billion dollars. You know the entire history of gold is that it’s been dug up and either moved to a vault or hung around people’s necks as jewelry?”

“That’s nice. What aren’t you telling me about these cubes I am carrying?”

Kate sighed. “They are high bandwidth and high efficiency. It allows the user to access sensor data, including visuals, real time.”

“I still don’t see the big deal.”

“Think petabits of neural interface bandwidth per second.”

“That’s impossible. It’s a million times more than what’s on the market.”

“That was three, four years ago, too. The eggheads said they didn’t know the true upper limit.”

“It would cook your brain.”

“Like a microwave, from the inside out. Operators called it riding the lightning. You are the droid. At least until your medulla oblongata becomes medulla zapped-to-nada. I’ve never used one myself. But if I were offered, hell no.”

“They discontinued the program because of safety?”

“Oh yeah. The brass is real big on servicemember safety. Safety first, but have your life insurance up to date and kiss your ass goodbye.”

Rae was silent for a beat. “The first three—we didn’t do autopsies. We ruled those suicides, so we didn’t do scans either. The fourth—his skull was smashed by the mermaid gynoid thing. There wasn’t much to scan.”

“Maybe destroying the evidence.”

Kate opened the sixth container. It was empty. On a backhaul supply run, Mars to Earth, there would be a lot of empty containers. But this was a fronthaul run. Earth to Mars. The direction of the flow of goods. Containers should be filled to the brim to minimize the high shipping rates. Nobody paid to ship an empty container. Or sand, for that matter.

She backed out, rifle up, and swept her weapon light over the fourth container. She only had number four and Lebofield’s container-cum-quarters remaining to search. The seam between its doors was larger than the others. Cracked? Did she miss it because of the angle of the light in this passage?

Her rifle inched lower. No, not cracked. Its doors were ajar. Condensation crept out like foggy fingers.

She was sure all the doors were closed and locked when she came up here.

“So, if this is a controller, and this john, if he was using it, he would have been controlling the gynoid?” Rae asked.

“That’s right. Does that make it mermaidicide? It sure gives new meaning to go fuck yourself.”

“You might say he had his own little shell-abration.”

Kate laughed. “He was the starfish in his own porno snuff film. Is there an award for that?”

“Probably a trident. But I am sea-ing a flaw. If he was committing mermaidicide, why destroy the evidence?”

Admittedly, the theory was weak. “We are missing something.”

Kate stepped towards the fourth container. She saw nothing but black between the doors. If the crew had left them open, the vibration from Vega’s engines would have swung the doors wide. Someone opened and shut them quickly, forgetting to turn the locking handle. Maybe to retrieve something while she was fiddling with the alpinkas and donkycorn. Or stash something.

She threw her weapon light on Lebofield’s door. Locked, with the blinds down. It had to be him or his parents. Who else was here?

If there was any sound coming from inside the last two containers, she couldn’t hear it over the dull roar of Vega’s engines and the thumping of the animals behind her.

The fourth door loomed at the end of her rifle. Whoever coined the saying, “when one door closes another opens,” had never kicked as many doors as she had. Doors were never dangerous until you opened them. Behind them, there might be opportunities or high-value targets. But between you and the target, there were RPGs and guns and grenades and knives and a whole lot of unspeakable hurt. She’d kicked open doors that should never be opened. Doors that should have been welded shut, firebombed, and reduced to rubble from orbit. You don’t open a portal to a trapdoor spider. You toss gasoline on it and burn the monster out.

“Not a little something either,” Rae said. “There must be a connection between these victims. And another thing—I understand military stuff is super triple top secret. But surely the Defense Department has made a million of these, and they are all over the black market.”

“Not these. They rely on a very rare type of 3D printed semiconductor that they don’t make anymore.”

“Don’t make anymore? What, the Pentagon lost the plans?”

The Washington bureaucracy ate things. Files went into a memory hole at the bottom of a limestone mine, where hard drives sometimes corroded, or paper sometimes molded. The collective institutional knowledge of a program wasn’t all digitized or scribbled down, either. Engineers knew stuff, maybe not the physics, but they tinkered and were sometimes reluctant to write it all down because keeping the only copy in their meat brain meant job security.

It happened. ‘Lost the plans’ was as plausible a cover story as any. “Something like that.”

“You are bullshitting me. If they lost the plans, how do they know it was 3D printed?”

“A good question. I will bring it up at the next secret society meeting.” When Rae frowned, Kate said, “You know NASA lost the plans for the Saturn V rocket a hundred years ago? It’s like that.”

“That was a baloney cover story they told people to cover corruption in the parts supply chain.”

Relentless Rae, the bloodhound with a scent. “Any chance we can postpone this until I get back? I may be attacked by androids at any second.”

“I know when you are lying because you get melodramatic and deflect. What am I getting into?”

Being soulmate and wife to Doctor Rae Torres, the smartest woman in the universe, made for fun poker nights. “You can’t lose plans you never had.”

“What does that mean?”

“I have been told by the eggheads with the appropriate clearance that it’s some sort of silicon carbide semiconductor. Did you know that ninety-nine-point-nine percent of all the world’s silicon carbide is synthetic?”

“Yes, I took chemistry. Pretend I practically have a Ph.D. in it. So?”

Hard to fool Rae on anything science-related. “It's remarkably common in meteorites. This particular deposit was found in a lunar core sample.”

“It was made on the moon?”

“Maybe.”

“What do you mean maybe?”

“A definite maybe. For sure, probably maybe made on the moon where we found it.” Kate lowered her rifle to low-ready. Nothing came crashing out of the door in front of her. As far as she could tell, the lights were off inside the container.

“Where we found it? You mean you found it?”

Shit. “The royal we. We are all one big happy family of select Defense Department Space Force special operators. Also, ‘find’ is maybe misleading. I prefer ‘obtained’ since the people who found it are, well, now scattered about space as atomic nuclei.”

“Are you saying someone, maybe the Pentagon, made a rare super efficient 3D printed semiconductor and lost the plans? And left it on the moon for your squad to ‘obtain’ years later?”

“Stranger things have been true.”

“Not by a longshot. There is more, isn’t there?”

“You know what Sherlock Holmes says: It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

“Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character addicted to opium. This is not human-made, is it?”

“Don’t jump to conclusions. When the Russian Federation and communist China collapsed, who knows what got lost? Washington does not have a monopoly on stupid history-eating bureaucracy. A lot of history was destroyed when Beijing was bombed, and their entire space program was retconned.”

Rae was silent.

“What we do know is that Lunar Foundries has not been able to recreate it. It's very dangerous.”

“It kills people. A lot of people, apparently. Now they are showing up in my morgue.”

“Worse. Whole governments and civilizations have been brought down by new technology. The unknown is always the biggest threat of all. This will bring an army of hyper-paranoid Feds down on us and another army of vultures trying to steal it. Lock all six artifacts up tighter than—I can’t think of the right metaphor—and then throw away the password.”

“Five. I have five artifacts. The sixth is with Jin.”

Was he baited to go to the mining claim? Arranging for two miners to be killed on a derelict plot of rubble halfway around the moon to lure him seemed far-fetched. She pictured him in the spaceport hangar, loading the rover. Jin was meticulous. He had checklists for his checklists. But she also pictured Leyna by his side, begging him not to go.

“They must have stuffed it in his luggage,” Kate said, “while he was distracted. We should send someone to search his room.”

“I’ll send Eric to help Leyna. You finish your search. Go kill some androids.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too. Come home safe.” Rae’s window went black and then shrank from the hud.

Kate took a breath and then inched up to the container door as quietly as she could in a mech suit on a ship with two nuclear rockets at full thrust. She unwound a loop of rope she carried for spacewalks and locked its carabiner to the door handle.

She stepped back, rifle up, wishing for a grenade. She pulled the rope. The door creaked open.

Inside, crates labeled THORIUM with the familiar yellow radioactive hazard symbol. The ship’s missing robots and droids, too. She counted five mechanic bots. Those looked like dog-sized spiders with six arms, like cranes. Two maidbots. Those had four long arms, one at each corner of a rolling cart loaded with bottles of pink and blue cleaning supplies.

Two androids stood in the back, naked, with matted short black hair and silicone skin yellowed with age. No, these were not sexbots. They were smooth, like mannequins, with round bumps instead of penises and nipples.

The brown eyes of the android on the right tracked her as she stepped into the container.

They say a dog looks like its owner. Maybe not the skin or hair, but certainly the face and eyes. An android looks like its rider. She couldn’t vouch for the lack of sex organs. But the one on the right, its eyes, watching her. She knew. The eyes always reflected the controller.

When she put her weapon light on the right android’s face, it glanced down the barrel of her gun and then back up at her. “You are out of your jurisdiction, Devana.”

“Hello, Lebofield.”

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This is Part II. The Twenty-third. chapter. You may find earlier chapters here:

Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is escaping for Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home to stop the killer.

On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.

For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.

Note: due to technical difficulties, the voiceover was not available at publication time. It will added to this post as soon as it is available.

APRIL 10, 2074

NYS VEGA, TRANSLUNAR ORBIT

Kate's chameleon drones tracked the glittering sand trail from the bridge, down ladder rungs, through hissing pipes, and under dripping yellow water to a dead-end section of supply deck at the bottom of Vega. She followed. Now a circle of six cargo containers towered over her like three-story pillars, arranged hexagonally and each with a door. None of them on the manifest. A layer of gray, zero-skid plastic covered everything—the walls, the handrails, the floor—along with two decades of dents and scuffs. One container was special. It was Lebofield’s.

Beneath her, Vega’s muscular Hanabishi engines chanted a dull roar, rattling the ship under maximum thrust. Despite the vibration, the sand stuck to the walls. Boots had pressed it into the non-slip layer. The ship wasn’t spinning now, but when it did, the centrifugal force allowed the crew to walk the walls to access the containers.

There was no reason to link the malware relentlessly pinging her mech suit to the glittering silvery sand, other than that neither belonged on a ship to Mars. The malware wasn’t in Vega’s computer. It wasn’t in any of the five-hundred-plus containers she’d jettisoned. It had to be broadcasting from a container still aboard. Her gut told her it was one of these six. The crew likely dug something out of a crate full of fine silica before they abandoned ship. Either they took whatever it was with them, eight giants cramped into an escape capsule designed for four, or they’d activated a sabotage device.

Her hud alerted her to an incoming call. Rae. The physics of Rae’s calls were mystifying. Kate could be halfway across the galaxy fighting alien xenomorphs, and Rae would appear in that little window dressed in scrubs, always green or blue scrubs that brought out Rae’s succubus-like green eyes and Lilith-like demonic smile, promising something erotic or dangerous. Or erotic and dangerous.

She and Rae had orbited each other for a long time. Her grandfather Jerry knew Rae before she did, working cases together. They never got together because there was always someone or something else. When they finally fell together last year, it felt as if they fit together like two perfect puzzle pieces. She didn’t like the word ‘soulmates,’ but she wouldn’t be surprised to learn they’d been together in some other universe. They got married five months ago. Rae had a child by her first marriage, Axio, and Kate was mastering the step-mom thing. Jerry raised her since she was twelve. He died in March. She regretted he hadn’t lived long enough to see great-grandkids. Death comes for us all. She only wished it didn’t come so fast, with unfinished business.

Kate pushed those thoughts away and made her neuroface answer the call. “Kate’s piracy service. If they don’t surrender, we apprehender. No job too menial. How may I direct your call?”

“Your new Deputy ran out of my morgue,” Rae said, her voice crackling over the comms. A small window in Kate’s heads-up display pixelated, and Rae appeared in blue scrubs framed by her drab yellow office wall.

“Press five. One of our human resources robots will be with you after the heat death of the universe.”

“Funny. I have something you need to look at.”

“You have two things I need to look at.”

“This isn’t about my boobs.”

“Your love handlebars, then.”

“It’s about some—I don’t know, objects we found.”

“You know, Leyna was our Deputy when we hired her. Now she's my Deputy. I told you to stop showing the space mummies to the new hires.”

Rae chuckled. “I didn’t show her any mummies. Anyway, as I recall, you didn’t run.”

“Your lavender aura was like a tractor beam.” She also remembered Rae’s ample lunar lift bouncing under her scrubs. “Call me sick and demented.”

“Don’t forget dark and twisted.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“And I love that about you.”

While Rae was talking, Kate was inspecting the doors with her flashlight. Four were ordinary. The kind you see on every container at every port in the world. They had a cam and lock system. Twin metal rods on each side, each with locking lugs at the bottom. In the middle of the doors was a plate with a biometric lock. A gasket around the threshold sealed the doors, protecting the contents from decompression.

The fifth door, to her left, was a set of double-wide barn doors with a simple drop-style barricade lock. Behind the barn door, crashing and stomping. She’d heard thumping on the bridge but thought it was Vega’s frame being torn apart under thrust. Now she thought it was something else. Her flashlight found hay on the floor in front of that door.

The sixth door was Lebofield’s space camper. His door had a regular handle, taupe and brown racing stripes, and a window, which was blacked out with shades. The window was space glass, so if she decided to jettison him, he could watch her wave goodbye with her middle finger.

“When are we going to be twisted again? What’s your ETA?” Rae asked.

“A few hours. Depends what I find behind door number six. You know, I did mention once or twice I wasn’t sure Leyna was ready.”

“She is handling the job fine. She is worried about Jin.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t say its a bad idea to hire a Deputy sleeping with another Deputy.”

“Do as I say, not as I do?”

“That was a long time ago. And a mistake,” Kate said, flicking the light over the barn door. Big things went through that door.

“You can’t save everyone, sweetie. People have to make their own mistakes.”

“I’d like to think I made mistakes so they don’t have to.”

She decided to open the door on her right first. It had an ordinary lock that was snug, secure, and, most importantly, wasn’t booby-trapped. She walked up to it and keyed the override code. When the security panel turned green, she lifted the handles and pulled. The container had no light, but even in the oblique shadows, she recognized the contents.

“Are you watching the feed?” She asked Rae.

“Your feed is a black square.”

Kate turned on her helmet lights and stepped into the container, shining her flashlight over the black, body-sized boxes strapped down on a pallet in the middle of the floor. “I have coffins here.”

“I see them now. Those aren’t coffins. Those are the liners. The coffins are inside.”

And bodies were inside the coffins.

People wanted to go to Mars, alive or dead.

“Your powers of deduction are most impressive, Doctor Torres. The seals aren’t broken. You think I should open them?”

“They should be vacuum sealed to preserve the bodies, so if they did it right, you won’t be able to.”

A corpse’s all-expenses-paid burial trip to Mars would cost more than most of Earth’s inhabitants’ lifetime earnings. Times three, even. No one cheated death. But the rich could afford hope. People shipped their bodies to Mars to store themselves for the day death was curable. Presto, undead on Mars.

She backed out and closed the container door. She heard thumping in the container behind her, the one with the barn door. As she approached it, she opened her visor, catching a foul straw and urine smell. Running her flashlight around the door, she saw a simple counterweight mechanism. Two handles. No airlock. No seals. Not even a regular lock.

“There is hay and urine behind this door,” Kate said. “And a lot of banging and stomping. What do your powers of deduction say about opening this door?”

“The three possibilities as I see it are, a xenomorph waiting to eat you, or slaves being transported to Mars and trying to escape.”

Xenomorphs, of course, didn’t exist. Rae was joking. On a spaceship like Vega, the real monsters were the ordinary gutless human crew. Clean quarters weren’t part of the all-inclusive smuggling package.

“Jesus. Is it terrible to hope for the xenomorph?” Kate asked.

“If it’s a xenomorph, we are living in a simulation, and the developers programmed a happy ending where the monster dies. You are dressed in a mech suit and ready to go.”

“Yee-haw. Make sure to post this video on the server after my death. If I die, I want a billion views.”

Kate lifted the bar and rolled open the doors. The hay and urine stink made her want to vomit. There were four half-height floors inside the container and a center shaft with a ladder.

It wasn’t people they’d locked in this container.

“Love, what was choice number three?” Kate asked.

“Shit, are you kidding me? I was kidding. Am I really seeing this?”

As she climbed the rungs, her flashlight probed the piles of straw, the corners, and the dirty aluminum walls. There were troughs of food and water, much of which had spilled when Vega shifted from centrifugal-force simulated gravity to a deceleration burn.

There were cages. Hundreds of cages of various sizes. And the cages had animals. She climbed the ladder through four levels of zoo stink and droppings.

The container had a whole petting-zoo’s worth of animals baaing and grunting, cordoned off by chickenwire in cramped pens. Five sheep, two llamas, three pigs, three or maybe four restless goats, including one billy goat, chickens, bunnies, a donkey, and an alpaca—at least that she could see while steadying herself on the ladder as it shook under thrust. Not just any animals, though. The llamas were purple, the alpacas pink, the rabbit blue, the sheep teal, and the donkey white with a horn and pink tail. All marvels of human genetic engineering, except the goats, which were standard white and brown, with the standard and intense goat smell.

“I am not sure if this is better or worse than a xenomorph,” Kate said. “I’ve got an alpinka here, and a donkeycorn.”

“Just what Mars needs, more than water recyclers and oxygen generators. A petting zoo.”

“There is no owner listed on the manifest, but I’d bet these are Lebofield’s animals.”

“How do they look?”

How did they look? Animal husbandry—not a topic they cover in the Space Force Academy.

“You tell me. You are the one that went to medical school and grew up on a farm in Wisconsin.”

“A dairy farm. I don’t see any cows there. I can barely see anything at all on this fisheye feed.”

The animals were lining up for attention, or food, but she didn’t dare touch them or unlock the cages. The servos in her mechanical space suit were calibrated for combat and lifting heavy objects, not petting rabbits. And the last thing she needed was to be chasing chickens around the spaceship.

“My official report will reflect that they smell. If they can make alpacas pink, why can’t they engineer goats that don’t pee on themselves?”

“Tell me what you see. Sores? Mange? Are the hooves cracked? Do they limp? Are they fed and watered?”

Kate had twenty pairs of pitiful furry eyes on her, waiting expectantly for her to pet them, or render judgment.

“They look cramped. The donkeycorn’s hair looks recently brushed. Its hooves are trimmed. No limp. The straw looks fresh. The troughs spilled, but there is still food and water in them.”

“Any signs of abuse?”

“Other than being caged on a months-long trip to Mars? Not really. On the witness stand, I’d be forced to say I’ve seen worse care at the Texas State Fair. There is not a month’s worth of poop in the donkey’s cage. Days, if that. I think something or someone has been cleaning the cages.”

Which was interesting. She hadn’t encountered droids or robots yet. She doubted Vega’s crew would feed the animals themselves.

“My advice,” Rae said. “Close up and move on. Nothing you can do for them until you get back. They will be fine for a few hours.”

“Roger, moving on.”

Kate backed out of the container and closed the doors. Hay stuck to her boots. There was hay on the floor here, but her flashlight beam found no hay at the threshold of Lebofield’s door. Nor sand. Who or what was cleaning the cages? There had to be robots somewhere. Her flashlight caught a glimmer on the floor, a concentration of silica quartz outside the container to the right of Lebofield’s.

“Sweetie, I know you are busy, but can you take a moment and look at the pictures I sent? Then I’ll leave you to continue filming Lifestyles of the Rich and Paranoid.”

“I hope they comply with Space Force regulation 69-D.”

“What is Space Force regulation 69-D?”

“All downloads to your wife, that’s me, must include one or more nudes. In furtherance of Team Devana morale.”

Rae flashed a grin, but it faded quickly. “These things are…I don’t know. They look like large dice, but they aren’t marked with numbers. One has some sort of static charge. Leyna thinks they contain electronics.”

Rae sent a nude selfie, posed in their bed with a rose in her teeth, but the images of the black cubes gripped Kate’s focus.

She swiped through the pictures, using her neuroface, dread curdling in her stomach. “You said one is charged?”

“Like static electricity. Except it doesn’t spark. Do you know what these are?”

She knew what these were. Very dangerous. Was this what the crew activated? As unlikely as it seemed, she couldn't dismiss the possibility. If there was one aboard, she could destroy it. If they carried these aboard the escape capsule, she couldn’t let them get to the colony.

“I have seen these before. First, though, tell me exactly how you obtained these. And more importantly, how did you get six of them?”