Devana Files: Chapter 38
Viva la Revolution
After a brief hiatus to work on some other projects, Devana Files returns to complete the story.
Stay tuned. After Devana files, we bring you Colony Crawler. Twenty-eight billionaires are kidnapped, locked underground, and forced to fight to the death on the moon. Only one can survive.
This is the Thirty-Eighth chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty-two 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.
Viva la Revolution
APRIL 13, 2074
PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.
The door in front of them said SERVICE ONLY. Kate thought she’d have to kick it open. As she wound up for the punt, Rae touched her thumb onto the security pad. The lock beeped green, the solenoid clicked, and the door drifted open to the smell of hot metal and garbage. Kate thought it was either a miracle or a trap. She decided it was a miracle because it seemed like an unlikely place for a trap. It would be hard, if not impossible, for droids and robots to track them once they went through the door. Still, it made her nervous. They’d made it through the hospital without being seen, but now there would be a record of Rae’s thumbprint. She had the strange feeling she was being led here, or that she was being helped by some invisible force. Whether it was that or just a lucky break, they needed all the help they could get to survive the next forty-eight hours.
She stepped through, followed by Rae. Machines thrummed and chittered around them.
“This is…not what I expected,” Eric said as the door clicked closed behind him.
Kate didn’t know why they called them service tunnels. The colony’s service area was nothing like a tunnel—not even close. This door, like all the other doors labeled SERVICE ONLY, led to what looked like an industrial facility three or four stories high. The platform they walked on was an open metal catwalk two stories up, made of see-through aluminum grating and suspended by cables fastened to the ceiling two, maybe three stories overhead. It was as if they were hovering in mid-air. There were no railings or balusters to stop them from falling. The only handhold was a thin rope of wire. She wasn’t sure how much weight the rope would hold if she fell and tried to grab it. But then, everything on the moon could be deceiving because of the low gravity. A three-story fall on the moon was equivalent to a two-meter fall on Earth. It would hurt like hell, but probably wouldn’t be fatal.
The catwalk snaked around tanks and pipes and HVAC ducts, some so large you could drive a truck through. A maze of conveyors zig-zagged everywhere. Stickers and plaques warned of dangers like HIGH PRESSURE, HOT, and CAUSTIC. A lot of the pipes had round yellow stickers with maroon trefoils, warning of RADIATION HAZARD. Ceiling chutes dropped garbage and recycling into the river of waste flowing on the conveyors. The waste passed by banks of robots, which fished the stream, beeping and whirring as they identified and clutched and sorted. Metal went to one bin, glass another, and organics a third. All the bins hung by wires from ceiling cranes that ran on tracks that criss-crossed high above. When the metal and glass waste buckets were filled, the cranes hoisted and carried them to other conveyors to start the recycling process. When the organic and food waste buckets filled, the cranes slopped and sloshed them into giant round tanks labeled CAUSTIC to be dissolved into fertilizer.
Like she said, she didn’t know why they called them service tunnels. Maybe to conjure images of dark pits and orcs to keep people from coming down here and exploring.
“The metal blocks signals, like a Faraday cage,” she said, waving them forward. The grating clinked as she walked. “There is no way to send video or audio back. If an android or a drone comes through that door, it will look as if it dropped off the network, or its signal got jammed.”
She knew that eventually, they’d send people to search, if they hadn’t already, or figure out how to get a spider drone down here. They’d need to bring relays and signal boosters. By then, she hoped to have a plan.
“Can’t they hack these machines?”
“Last thing the engineers wanted was a terrorist group holding fifty thousand people hostage on a lunar outpost by threatening the power supply, so most of these machines are single-purpose micro AIs and self-contained. They are not networked.”
That was the theory, anyway. No need to mention that Jin had found flaws and plugged them. She could really use his help right now. She wished he’d stayed here. She wanted to be angry with him for going off half-cocked, but the Feds had tricked her, too. Lebofield was the bait. They wanted her to bring NYS Vega back to the colony and, with it, something aboard, something so dangerous that they were all better off if she’d let it drift into oblivion. She remembered the silvery sand everywhere and the coffins. It would have been disrespectful to open them, which made them the perfect place to hide drugs, or guns, or stolen art…or stolen ancient alien artifacts. Vega’s crew knew what they’d smuggled aboard. They knew, and they abandoned ship as soon as they could, jumping into a tiny life raft with barely enough oxygen. At the time, she didn’t understand why they’d rushed aboard a cramped escape pod and risked death. Now she did.
Vega’s crew probably made the smart choice. If it were up to her, she and Rae would make the same choice. Head straight for a hangar and steal a rocket to Mars. Axio was probably dead. Jin, too. Leyna…well, who knew what state she’d be in after a mind meld with the artifact? Leyna would probably wish she were dead.
She couldn’t even begin to imagine Rae’s pain and anger. Axio was a good kid, a lot like her at thirteen, filled with nervous energy and a sense of invulnerability. She’d taught him to shoot and fly and drive a lunar sand buggy. He had quick reflexes and was a quick learner. Soon he was crushing her at racing and teaching her how to lose to a damn teenager. In some ways, he was more her kid now than his own father, who was on Earth God knows where, wetting his dick.
But as much as she wanted revenge, the smart choice was to climb into a rocket and never look back. The artifact was like a super neural interface. Whatever was on Vega must activate it, or operate it, or enhance it somehow. Once the artifact was unleashed—and unleashing it was inevitable now—people would go to war. It was a chaos engine. There was no way to know what was in the mind of the godlike aliens that left it on Earth. Maybe they thought humans were galactic vermin and left it as bait for a trap. Maybe they left it as a practical joke (jokes on you, you're not alone in the universe, now go away and fuck off). Maybe it allowed an insane, alien AI to download itself into the human brain and possess it like a demon. One thing she was absolutely positive about: it was not a panacea or utopia device. The pointy heads at the Pentagon who studied the device she brought back from the moon four years ago were sure similar devices had been found and lost over millennia. Found and lost, usually after a civilization self-immolated or disappeared, which meant that over forty thousand years, the artifact had only amplified human suffering, not relieved it. Maybe aliens had appeared as gods, but new gods only brought new religions and new wars. People would fight over it, fight for it, fight against it, and fight with it.
No question, the best cards to play were dodge and flee.
Behind her, Rae was balancing herself on the catwalk with both hands on the thin rope. Steam rose from a pipe below.
Rae would never abandon the colony without Axio, and Kate would never abandon Rae. It was that simple. People were going to fight and die, with or without her. They had a better chance with her, although it was barely better than no chance at all. She had no idea how they would get Axio back, or Leyna, or Jin—if they were even alive. But they were depending on her to try. It was the three of them, plus whatever guns and muscle Greg could muster, against a platoon of homicidal Feds and their androids. It would have to be a guerrilla war. She’d fought a lot of guerrilla wars, but she was always on the other side.
“Check those out.” Eric halted, pointing below them into a puddle of condensed steam. He was a big, muscular guy, but he looked like he’d seen a monster.
She followed his gaze. She could hear an odd squealing on the floor beneath them. A dollop of garbage that looked like someone’s leftover chili fell off a conveyor, sploshed on a fat yellow pipe with a radiation sticker, and dribbled to the floor. Then, she saw what he was pointing at.
Splashing and squeaking in the water and rushing to the disgusting brown spot, rats. Big, enormous, rats. She tried not to react, but without question, they were the biggest rats she’d ever seen. They were deep black, like coal, and so big that at first, her brain didn’t even register them as rats. They had to be the size of small cats.
“They’re just rats,” Kate said, trying to sound casual.
“I’ve seen rats in New York. Those are not normal-sized rats.”
Colonists were always bringing their pets. The pets were always getting lost. She’d taken a report from a family whose kid had lost a blue-ribbon breeding pair of gerbils in the walls. She’d sent spider drones to search, but unsurprisingly, they always vanished.
“I’ve read about rats that big in the Philippines.” She watched them squealing greedily as they lapped up the chili oozing out of the waste conveyor. She shuddered, revolted.
“Or maybe they’re regular rats that mutated.”
According to lore, the colony builders had skimped on radiation shielding. The pharma companies conspired with the space companies to push the radiation vaccine on people because it was a lot cheaper to insert a couple of extra DNA-repair genes and wait two weeks for the human body to work its magic than to waste resources building and hoisting gamma ray and neutron barriers. Animals didn’t get the radiation shot. So, the stories went, radioactive monsters bred down here. Phosphorescent molds that would burn flesh. Cockroaches that had so many legs they looked like centipedes. Snakes that had heads at both ends. Gerbil babies that mutated into mongoose-sized animals with canine teeth and glowing red eyes. Colony bartenders loved to tell stories. The mold ate the gamma rays. The roaches ate the mold. The snakes ate the roaches. And then, the gerbils ate the snakes. The tourists—well, the tourists, they ate it all up. The bigger the story, the better the bartender’s tip. There were even outfits that specialized in colony cryptid walking tours and radioactive monster pub crawls.
The maroon-on-yellow radiation warnings were as pervasive as the fetid smell. It was true, people and animals disappeared down here. But it was amply dangerous without invoking glowing radioactive kaiju. The machines surrounding them that picked and sorted garbage happily purred, so long as they stayed out of the way. If they got too close, there would be an angry beep to drive them off. If they ignored the beeps, stray limbs would be mistaken for garbage and get ruthlessly chopped and sent to a shredder to become fertilizer. Anything that went into those tanks labeled CAUSTIC got dissolved into soap and nutrient solution. There were a thousand ways people could melt down here and she refused to believe the rats were mutants.
“I doubt it. These are probably just normal rats that got fat because they eat a lot of garbage.”
“Chernobyl,” Rae finally chimed in. “The frogs evolved extra melanin. To protect them from radiation.”
“Thank you,” Eric said. “Ginormous coal black mutated rats.”
“The rats look fine. Plus, we’ve all had the radiation vaccine and a booster. I doubt we’ll get much more radiation exposure than a trip to Earth and back.”
“Radiation exposure is cumulative,” Rae said, “and doesn’t protect your eggs. The vaccine only protects against chronic exposure. Acute exposure can overwhelm your body’s ability to rebuild.”
There was a first aid box back at the door where they came in. It would have emergency radiation badges.
What looked like a bowl of leftover ramen spilled over the side of the garbage conveyor. Noodles hung over the edge and then plopped right in the middle of the swarm of rats, along with a hail of uneaten meat. They mobbed it, shrieking loudly and fighting.
They couldn’t go back. An agent might come through the door. She was less worried about the Feds right now, though, than falling off the platform. It wouldn’t be fatal, but the rats would probably mistake them for food. She shivered. She had no desire to die getting eaten by a horde of oversized rodents.
Anyway, the radiation badges would either prove everything down here was totally safe, or that they were all totally cooked, and it didn’t matter anyway.
“You know, you really need to work on your motivational speeches,” she said to Rae.
“I’m the medical examiner.”
“What does that mean?”
“I butcher dead people for a living. Sometimes I talk to them. If you have a team of undead soccer moms, I might be able to coax them to do your bidding.”
Kate laughed. “Yeah, ok. The rats look fine. Acute radiation poisoning would kill them, too. Let’s move quickly.”
Her boots clanked on the metal platform. The rats stopped squeaking and stared at them, sniffing the air, as if trying to decide whether they were friend, or foe, or food.
“I hope your brother brought shotguns,” Eric said, exchanging glares with the rats sniffing him from below.
“Just hold on and watch your step.”
Greg met them in a section where the vines of ductwork and pipes opened to an almost cavernous void. Pipes criss-crossed like monkey bars. It was clean, free of garbage and recycling conveyors. And thankfully, free of the rats, too.
“I hope everyone is up to date on their radiation vaccine,” Greg smiled, arms extended.
“The rats aren’t,” Eric said.
There were two women on either side of Greg, neither of whom she’d met. There were two big men flanking the women who looked corn-fed, genetically modified, and fresh off the steroid farm. Both men had tight black shirts with white letters. One said ONGO. The other said BONGO.
Greg and his posse stood in a half circle around a man in a wheelchair, who was coughing and sucking oxygen from a mask. A man she recognized, but only barely.
The woman to Greg’s right smiled. She wore a white blouse, smart black pants, and black flats. She held a very official-looking tablet like a clipboard. Kate detected perfume, the same perfume she’d smelled on Greg at the club. This was his bookkeeper. What was her name? Sophie? Sadie? Sarah? So, they must be seeing each other. Greg’s girlfriends came and went. She rarely remembered their names. He must be serious about this one to bring her to a meeting. Serious or seriously stupid. Letting someone into your bed was one thing. Letting them into your books and business dealings was entirely different. Nothing says trust like giving someone the keys to your bank account. She hoped this one wasn’t crazy like the last one. Who was she kidding? Crazy was his type. Hers, too. It was practically a family pastime.
Wheelchair man gasped and murmured into his mask.
“Jesus,” Eric said as they pulled up and closed the circle. “The fuck happened to him?”
“Not my doing. It was like you predicted, Katie.”
“I always hate to be proven right.”
Wheelchair man’s face was bruised, almost black. His eyes were swollen and hemorrhaged. Take a vacuum cleaner to your skin, hold it until the capillaries burst and the blood underneath turns purple-black; that’s what his skin looked like. If it wasn’t for the signature curly black hair, now partly singed, she wouldn’t recognize him.
“My boys were watching him. We got to him right away.”
“Maybe een aeerlock seexty syeconds,” Ongo added. He spoke in an Eastern European, maybe Polish, accent.
“Can he speak?”
Ongo stepped forward and lifted the oxygen mask from Lebofield’s mouth. “Say gyello, Frank.”
“I was dead, and now look, I am alive forever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades!” Lebofield coughed and inhaled oxygen from his mask.
“That’s right, the Feds tried to space you. Lucky for you, Ongo was there. Now…ready to tell us what was aboard Vega?”