Devana Files, Chapter 3

Suited up and going in.

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I am excited to bring chapters of the new Kate Devana series.

Space 2074 is the new Wild West. Mine machines are glitching, an FBI Agent is looking to avenge the death of his former partner, & Sheriff Kate Devana must wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions. Bodies are piling up. Again. On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

This is the third chapter. You can catch up here: wyattwerne.substack.com/s/kate-devana-s…

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 7, 2074

ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND KILOMETERS BEYOND LUNAR ORBIT

As she suited up in the starlight streaming through Tesseract’s panoramic cabin windows, her knee ached when twisting it to don her pressure suit. Outside, NYS Vega floated like a silvery-gray possum trying to hide among millions of glittering stars. The ship was old, but it was its paint job that made her pause and wrench her tendons.

Kate had kicked in a lot of doors. Her aching joints reminded her that inevitably, the bad guys behind them kicked back. In the lower gravity of the moon, or here floating nowhere in space, it was supposed to hurt less, if at all. All the cruise tours advertised that zero-g relieved back and joint pain.

Not hers. Sometimes her joints ached like a sixth sense.

She could fill a tome with Vega’s safety hazards. The fittings along the docking passage connecting its airlock to Tesseract looked ready to disintegrate. Black starbursts where debris or meteoroids impacted the hull marked decades of space damage. Oxygen spat from weakened gaskets. Of course, there were international safety regulations along with routine maintenance schedules that stated when parts needed to be replaced. She could write them up for a hundred violations. But smugglers were cheap bastards and not the law-abiding type. They’d try to bribe her, and when that failed, they’d bribe the inspectors in port who’d let them install cheap knock-off replacement parts worse than what they had.

Eyeing the gasses sputtering from the docking airlock, she packed twice as many oxygen tanks as she usually did as a precaution. The first rule of crossing space was that there could never be enough spare oxygen.

Once inside her suit, she tested her pressure suit twice for leaks and checked gauges. Good volts, good hydraulics, good oxygen, no ruptures in its armor, and a positive link to her neuroface, the nanowire electrical circuit that linked her brain with the computer in her suit. Nine hours of battery and all green diagnostics. Her hydration and nutrition packs were one-fourth full. Plenty. She wasn’t here for drinks and dinner. If she were aboard Vega that long, then what she really needed was her rifle, which stood at attention against one of Tesseract’s plush, sporty white and red striped chairs waiting for orders.

The suit’s inner fabric was refreshingly cool and felt like a spandex second skin. She flexed her arms, legs, and fingers to confirm the hydraulic joint servos functioned. She rarely needed power-assist, but the fresh paint on Vega needled her knee like a bad tattoo artist.

“Jin, you copy?”

“Jin can’t come to the comms. The department is understaffed and my boss refuses to hire a third deputy.”

“Funny. I didn’t refuse. I need to think about her. If she’s the right fit. We have two hundred other applicants.”

“She’s the most qualified.”

“You’re biased.”

“The algorithm agrees.”

“The algorithm you wrote. You were writing dating algorithms too. Maybe you mixed up the code.”

“I didn’t mix up the code. I reused the one that hired me.”

“I hired you, Jin, not the algorithm.”

“The algorithm filters and sorts. She’s top five of—”

“Can we not do this now? She’s a special case. I need you to check diagnostics on the new suit.”

“You taught me to press my advantage, boss. This is me, pressing.” After a pause, Jin said, “Everything looks green on my end. How’s it feel?”

Jin was a quick study. The algorithm shortlisted him because he had Homeland Security cybersecurity experience, military experience, and a degree from a big-name school. Unlike most cyber desk jockeys, he was athletic. He was tall, with broad shoulders, like a pit bull with an IQ of five hundred. His most important trait, though, was that he showed he could stand his ground with the uber-rich celebrity residents of the colony. He pushed back on her, too, which she didn’t mind. Jin reminded her of her brother, Greg.

With the new hire, though, she was sure the algorithm was wrong. It just didn’t understand human dynamics.

She smiled. “This whatever-it-is material is more flexible than our old suits. Doesn’t feel like I’m walking around in a balloon. I like the hydraulics.”

This pressure suit was new, the latest issued to top-tier military operators. Technically, the suit was an augment because she could use her neuroface to control the hydraulic power-assist servos in her suit’s hip, leg, and arm joints. The more she used it and trained, the more it functioned like an extension of her body. So far, she’d only had time to train a few hours on a simulator because it arrived with the warrant to detain Frank Lebofield and his parents, who were attempting to escape on Vega.

When she agreed to serve the fugitive warrant, she horse-traded with the Attorney General for new pressure suits, and she wasn’t ashamed. In this job, she needed to be half pirate to survive. Her department was small. She was perpetually understaffed and had to be ruthlessly efficient, begging or borrowing equipment, or seizing it when she seized bad guys. Procurement of this suit, let alone three for her department, involved a pile of permission slips from the Department of Defense that would stack to low Earth orbit. But U.S. Attorney Generals have ways of burning through paperwork, so she bargained for this when she agreed to arrest Lebofield and his parents.

The boring horse-trading side of this job would never win medals or make viral social media posts. But in space, equipment saved lives. Three people for three brand new suits. On Vega, it was her against an unknown number of collaborators. With this suit, she liked the odds.

“And its level three-plus bullet-proof,” Jin added.

“So they say.” She eyed her rifle, saluting her from the supple suede chair. “I don’t plan to test it. I need you to dig deeper on this ship.”

“So far everything checks. NYS Vega. Registered to Nippon Yusen. Built by Nippon Heavy Industries and launched March 17, 2052. The registry and engineering diagrams match the ship on the video feed. Two Hanabishi Gen-1 nuclear thrusters. Space for fifteen crew and five hundred sixty-eight containers.”

“The paint job is new.”

“With the number of times Vega has traveled to and from—”

“And nothing else is.” She eyed Vega’s dimpled, gray panels with black starbursts where space debris had hit the hull.

The comms were silent for a few beats, and then Jin said, “They hacked the registry.”

“Looks that way.”

“It has the same specs as the Vega.”

“Seen one flying rust bucket you’ve seen ‘em all.”

“Had to have been made in the same factory.”

“I’d look for ones reported lost or stolen in the last year.”

“You wanna wait while I track this down?”

“I am going in. It’s easier for me to pretend I don’t know what’s going on if I don’t know what’s going on. My neuroface is working with this suit so DM me.”

“They could jam it.”

“I’ll message you every ten minutes. If you don’t hear from me, flash the lights. S-O-S. If you still don’t hear from me, assume I am dead.”

“Roger, that. If you are dead, that makes me the new Chief, so I can hire whoever I want, right?”

Her visor was down. If she could rub her forehead in a spacesuit, she’d do it. She taught him to be relentless. Too well. “If you are the Chief, dating a subordinate is a next-level problem.”

“We aren’t dating. We don’t like labels.”

Kate palmed her pistol, press-checking it, and took the rifle off the chair and slung it over her chest. “I’m going in now. We will discuss this later.”

“Copy. Pressure on the docking tunnel is nominal.”

She eyed Vega’s flimsy, disintegrating gaskets leaking air from the tunnel connecting the ship’s airlocks. The stars beyond twinkled as the gas evaporated into space. There could never be enough spare oxygen in space.

Her boots clanked on Tesseract’s floor as she walked to the cabin ladder to climb to the airlock. “Captain Ward, NYS Vega, this is Kate Devana. Over.”

She hoisted herself up the ladder. Tesseract was formerly a race yacht. Its cylindrical inner airlock was painted blue, decorated with brass handles, with a wood-veneered wheel. Chic, yet simple and easy to manipulate, so billionaire real estate moguls could spacewalk drunk and high.

“Captain Ward, over.”

She gripped the faux-wood wheel and spun it counterclockwise until the mechanism thunked and the edges hissed. “Permission to come aboard.”

“Permission granted.”

She doubted that very much. Captain Ward was hiding something more than three fugitives. He thought he could hide behind a cheap paint job, but he was wrong.

She climbed in the airlock as its status light changed from green to red.

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