Devana Files: Chapter 30
Primary Strike
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