Devana Files: Chapter 24

Ride the Lightning

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This is Part II. The Twenty-fourth. chapter. You may find earlier chapters here:

Kate Devana Files: Table of Contents

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.

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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.”