Devana Files: Chapter 32
Bread and Circuses, Part 2
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.
