Devana Files: Chapter 31
Bread and Circuses, part 1
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.”
