Devana Files: Chapter 39

Dead Man's Party Part 1

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After a brief hiatus to work on some other projects, plus take some much needed vacation, Devana Files returns to complete the story. We have about 8 chapters left. After this, it goes to editing, and then for publication. I am planning on a fall release (date TBD). I will archive and paywall this novel when it goes to editing. The final release will have some changes, such as chapter combinations and reordering, plus some cutting (as it stands now, the novel is 505 pages).

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-Ninth chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty-two chapters in all!

You may find earlier chapters here:

Kate Devana Files: Table of Contents

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.

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Dead Man’s Party, Part 1

APRIL 13, 2074

PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.

Lebofield spent the better part of three hundred and fifty thousand kilometers giving her the middle finger and broadcasting ‘Katera Devana can’t catch me’ to his three hundred million followers. A broadcast that she now realized was a trap. Peanut butter is good bait for a trap because it doesn’t need acting lessons. To attract the rats, it only needs to sit onstage and be itself. Agents Anders and Lindsay used Lebofield like peanut butter and then, just like you do with used bait, tossed him in the trash. Maybe his arrest was only a pretext, or maybe it was a bonus. Either way, the real plan was for him to smuggle something off Kuipers, and then for her to bring it to the colony unaware. Something the agents couldn't just walk through the front door.

She needed to hear it from him, though, and he wasn’t responding.

He stared through the metal grating under his wheelchair. Thirty meters below, a pack of rats looked back at them, sniffing the air, half hidden between a conduit and a steampipe. One was stamped with a blue bolt of lightning, the other with three maroon blades on a yellow background. The three-bladed symbol dated back a hundred and twenty-eight years to a staff doodle at the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley right after World War II. Regulations called for the blades to be magenta or purple or black, not maroon, but she suspected the rats had soiled the pipes. Three blades of magenta were trendy on kids running shoes and ubiquitous on drums of plutonium. No doubt the three blades meant the hot pipes below were delivering haute couture to the colony’s teenagers.

“How about it? Tell us what your deal with the Feds was.”

Greg, Rae, Eric—their faces were all twisted, angry, ready to stand and fight. They were looking to her for a plan that wouldn’t get them all killed. What they were fighting, she didn’t know. Lebofield knew, but he wasn’t answering. Probably a cell of corrupt Feds wielding an otherworldly weapon. If the rats had answers, they weren’t giving them up either. One of them skittered away. The rest followed. She always thought rats as a whole were smarter than humans. Smart enough, anyway, to know when to duck and hide.

“Maybe his eardrums were blown out when he was spaced,” Eric said.

Lebofield glanced at Eric and then at Kate. His grayish cheeks were frostbitten from space decompression. His eyes were dilated and bloodshot. His lips moved, but he didn’t speak. He looked through her. She shivered involuntarily.

Lucky for her, Ongo and Bongo were following Lebofield when the Feds tried to space him. Whether he felt lucky, too, was debatable. A common misperception was that getting spaced killed you immediately. The world record for holding your breath underwater was twenty-seven minutes. The world record for holding your breath in space was only around ten minutes, but that number was going up about ten seconds a month because, yes, there were fools who competed to get their name on the record list and subsequently paid a lot of money for skin grafts and eye transplants and new tattoos to cover the scars. There was prize money and sponsorships. Maybe the prize money covered the cost of healthcare. Maybe the facial scars looked good in a diet soda ad. And then there were the people who jumped in the airlocks for free because they liked the high. Sucking vacuum could be euphoric. She preferred to get high the old-fashioned way, chasing Feds with an alien artifact all the way to the grave.

Ongo said Lebofield was in the airlock for sixty seconds. Sixty seconds to Ongo was probably at least three minutes for an ordinary human. Healing after space decompression was indescribably painful. Your lungs burned with every breath like you’d inhaled hot frying oil. Patches of skin ached worse than third-degree burns. Even if you were only spaced for a minute. Even if you had top-of-the-line healthcare, strapped to a wheelchair in a colony dungeon, like Lebofield. Too many times, she wished they’d kept her in a coma. Lebofield probably wished the same thing.

Lebofield kept whispering. She couldn’t read his lips.

“What happened to his parents?” Kate asked Greg.

Greg shook his head.

Ongo replied, “Ve gyeve dhem good burial.”

Ongo towered over Lebofield, holding an oxygen mask tethered to a green cylinder strapped to the back of his wheelchair. Bongo stood opposite, scanning the overhead pipes and trash conveyors.

“We need to get out of here,” the woman on Greg’s left said. “Before they find us.”

The woman had pixie short hair as white as snow, bronze eyes, a bronze salon cape that matched her eyes, white shoes that perfectly matched her hair, and a bank vault’s worth of gold jewelry and piercings. She had a vague memory of seeing White Hair around Greg’s club, although maybe with fewer clothes.

There was a good reason Greg brought a stripper. There was a good reason he’d brought his girlfriend, too, the heavily perfumed woman on his right, who held a tablet and wore a black impress-the-scary-sister dress. She didn’t remember the new body pillow’s name, although he’d mentioned it twice (Sara or Saraphina or Sasha). He usually got bored. Why junk up her cranium with useless information she’d need to delete in a month? There had to be a good reason he’d brought the girlfriend and a stripper. His last girlfriend was a stripper, so maybe he was showing off his new higher standards. She racked her brain to come up with another reason the two of them were here and decided it had to be because the moon was rising in the house of Virgo and everything was completely under control.

“Did you hear that Frank? Agents Anders and Lindsay spaced your parents, too.”

She expected Lebofield to tell her to fuck off, or bitch about his healthcare, or try to negotiate a deal so he could return to fame and fortune. Any of those would have been better than what he actually did: face Ongo and continue to mutter under his breath.

“Do you remember Ongo and Bongo dragging you out of the airlock?”

Ongo hovered over Lebofield, scowling. “Plyeese ansvyer Dyevana.”

There were a lot of scars on Ongo’s cheeks. If Lebofield was counting them, they’d be here a while. He could be counting them and then relaying the information to someone through an earpiece or a neural interface. He looked like he was praying, though. Praying because he thought Ongo was going to hurt him. Or praying for Ongo to hit him and put him out of his misery.

If Lebofield tried to provoke Ongo, it would work. Ongo’s patience was as thin as his genetically-enhanced and steroid-fortified forearms were thick.

Maybe she forgot to mention, Greg’s corn-fed meatshields, Ongo and Bongo—those weren’t their real names. She didn’t really know their real names. Greg’s bouncers were mostly indistinguishable (as club meatshields should be). They rarely spoke. For the longest time, she simply called them SECURITY1 and SECURITY2. Recently, they’d taken to wearing t-shirts, ONGO and BONGO, after the band Ongo Bongo played at Greg’s club. The Os were styled like ghastly white pumpkins with a perverted grimace. The music was torturous. Some corporate chieftain’s AI convinced some other corporate chieftain’s AI to resurrect old Danny Elfman songs. They hired some up-and-coming producer (also an AI), bought up all the old tracks for nickels, and remade them for modern audiences—into nightmare music with guitar riffs like screaming goats. Imagine being fisted by a demon, except through your ears, and you have the nu-AI band Ongo Bongo. She didn’t know how many people Greg packed into his club, but the tickets went for twenty grand apiece. He said he made a killing. Twenty grand, for horror petting zoo noises set to G major pentatonic. It made her question her life choices.

Rae said all the middle schoolers were listening to Ongo Bongo, and that her constant complaints about the music were worse than the music itself. Thirty-nine was the new twenty-nine, she reminded Rae. Her eggs were still viable. People were living longer, having babies later. They should use the extra time to learn to play piano the way she did.

Okay, maybe she didn’t play piano so much as stomp it the way Ongo wanted to stomp Lebofield.

Getting back to her point about Ongo Bongo: Ongo and Bongo were as good as any names, because sociopathic AI-generated goat screeching was exactly what she expected Greg’s bouncers to play loudly as they maimed small animals. If Lebofield provoked Ongo, you’d have better luck stopping a hungry grizzly from raiding a camp refrigerator. Her side quest today was to keep Ongo from bludgeoning Lebofield to death.

Lebofield turned away from Ongo and stared beneath his wheelchair, lips still moving. Below, the radiation warnings nagged her. Her eggs were still viable when she walked through the door to this place. Maybe not now. She could feel her ovaries frying. She told herself that the stories of the molds that glowed like tritium were just that, stories, to drum up tourist interest. The rats were fat on the colony waste, that was all.

The stripper was right. They needed to get out of here.

Somewhere, high above, something clanged.

Lebofield put his right hand up and closed his eyes. “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: ‘Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last.’”

When Lebofield spoke, his raspy voice sounded like the lowest strings on a bass guitar. It had an odd chirp, like he’d swallowed a cricket. Given how bruised his lungs must be from getting spaced, she expected blood. None came.

“And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain,” he continued.

Lebofield gingerly took the oxygen mask from Ongo’s hand and then gulped.

“The fuck is he saying?” Eric asked.

“He’s been rambling like this since he woke up,” Greg replied.

“He must be drugged,” Eric said.

Bongo was searching the conveyors overhead for the noise, one hand on the grip of his gun. It was a full-size pistol, one of those big steel movie guns with a heavy frame that could double as a brick if you ran out of ammo. Its bullets could probably punch a hole in an aircraft carrier, if an aircraft carrier ever appeared through one of the massive HVAC ducts down here. Bigger game, like an android, was fifty-fifty, although a hot hole through a droid’s battery compartment would turn it into a flamethrower. The gun was impractical for most people. In Bongo’s hands, it looked like a subcompact.

She was more concerned with bombs than droids. One well-placed kamikaze drone in the ducts with a few pounds of explosives would destroy them all. She’d done it dozens of times, to groups of terrorists meeting just like they were meeting now. If she were in the Fed’s shoes, there would be no droids stumbling around the garbage conveyors and no humans getting shot at. A bomb. Simple and effective.

Behind Bongo, there was a stack of gray crates, each about the right size for rifles. She hoped they were unlocked.

If Bongo saw something overhead, he didn’t react. She searched, but saw nothing either. Bongo removed his hand from his pistol and looked at Greg, and then at her.

She decided the noise was probably trash falling off a conveyor, or maybe one of those monster rats scurrying for their daily dose of beta particles.

Still, she nodded to Bongo to go look.

The white-haired woman to Greg’s left folded her arms, watching Bongo walk away, as if ready to flee with him.

“What about an artifact?” She asked Greg.

Greg thumb-pointed at Ongo. “Ongo double bagged it in one of those faraday pouches, like you told me.”

“The artifact is still inside him,” White Hair said.

She wondered about the side effects of getting rapidly unplugged from an alien neural connection. Then she wondered if you could be unplugged from an alien neural connection.

“I didn’t catch your name.”

“I didn’t throw it.”

“This is Bianca,” Greg said. “She works at the hair salon just outside Lunar Foundries and is a part-time dancer at the club.”

White Hair grunted hello. Kate grunted back. The scientists on the nature server would be studying this rare ritual for decades.

“I brought her here as a witness.”

Bianca folded her arms. “A witness to what? A bunch of bickering idiots? He’s obviously talking to someone.” Bianca nodded towards Lebofield. “The artifact is still inside him.”

“There is no signal,” Greg’s new body pillow said.

“How do you know?” Eric asked.

Greg’s girlfriend tapped her tablet with one long, perfectly manicured fingernail painted yellow, the same color as the caution lights that should be going off in her brother’s head but obviously weren’t.

“Is that a good idea?” Eric asked, looking at Kate.

Greg practically batted the words from the air. “It’s a micro AI that runs locally. Saffi’s tablet is offline.”

Saffi. That was her name. Saffi would know the password to the gun crates behind Bongo. Greg usually kept it simple, so it was likely her name, Saffi. Probably spelled with an I and two Fs. Whew. Embarrassing sibling I-already-told-you-what-my-new-girlfriend’s-name-is diplomacy crisis during a gunfight averted.

Saffi smiled. If she was irritated with Greg for patronizing her, she didn’t show it. Kate wasn’t impressed with the dress and perfume and nail polish. She wasn’t impressed that Saffi didn’t stick up for herself either. No challenge. No fight. No excitement. On the plus side, she now knew the password to the gun crate, so she could shoot Saffi to prevent the future misery of listening to Greg whining that he didn’t know what went wrong.

“Jin set it up for us,” Saffi said. “It’s a passive scan. Plus, Greg and I have used this spot before. No signal.”

Jin, doing things behind her back, like setting Saffi and Greg up with a micro AI and running off to investigate a mining accident halfway across the moon. She knew exactly how she would punish him.

She looked around and didn’t see where Bongo went.

That they were still breathing probably meant Lebofield was muttering only to himself, not to anyone over an earpiece or through a neural interface. All the metal in the colony service tunnels blocked outside signals like a faraday cage. She figured the alien artifact was just technology they didn’t understand, but still subject to the laws of physics. She hoped.

If Lebofield had been talking to someone, it would be the Feds. He’d be trying to make a deal to save his skin. The seven of them would already be pink mist on the walls, and the rats would be slurping them up like six hundred kilos of human gore flavored ice cream. She didn’t think he was praying, either. She didn’t figure him for a religious man, although finding religion was a common side effect of getting double-crossed and nearly spaced to death.

“If there’s no signal,” Kate said, “there’s no harm in scanning for one. If there’s a signal, it doesn’t matter whether we scan for it or not. The Feds are probably on their way.”

Saffi looked at Greg. Greg said, “If there were droids or some other unusual signal, Jin’s program would pick it up.”

She wasn’t sure about that. Jin wouldn’t know how the artifact transmitted information.

“It’s inside him,” Bianca said.

Greg shook his head vigorously. “We scanned him.”

Kate flashed Greg a question. When he didn’t pick up on it, she asked Bianca, “Greg said you are a witness. A witness to what?”

Bianca looked away, her arms folded tightly, like one of those rope knots you see holding a boat in a windstorm. “I don’t know what I saw.”

Greg said, “She’s been inside Lunar Foundries since the Feds took over. She’s seen what they’re building.”

Bianca shot Greg an angry frown but didn’t say anything.

“How did you get inside?” Kate asked.

“They made me take lunch to the engineers.”

“Did you see Leyna?” Eric asked.

“She stands over the thing holding a gun like the head of security.”

“Is she okay?”

“I saw seven,” Lebofield interrupted, pointing a weak, shaking hand at Bianca. “And among them, one was dressed in a robe reaching down to her feet and with a golden sash around her chest. The hair on her head was white like wool, as white as snow, and her eyes were like blazing fire.”

“He’s nuts,” Eric said. “He’s not making any sense.”

“Revelation,” Rae said.

“Wanna share it with us?” Saffi said.

“Not a revelation. Revelation.”

Lebofield shook his finger at Bianca. “She wears the robe. Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready!”

“I ain’t no one’s fucking bride,” Bianca said, stepping out of the circle. “Good luck at wierdocon. I’m outta here.”

“You have to tell them what you saw first,” Greg said. He tried to grab Bianca’s wrist but she twisted it away.

“The only thing I have to do is steal a shuttle to L5 and find a new job.”

L5 was the fifth Earth-moon Lagrange point. It was a popular tourist destination, second only to the lunar colony. Nice restaurants, twenty-four-seven starlight views, fewer alien artifacts. Probably. Then again, maybe not.

“If they are here,” Rae said, folding her arms to match Bianca, “they are already on L5, or will be soon.”

Kate added, “Lebofield took off from Kuipers. I agree with Rae, L5 is probably not safe either.”

Bianca made a mocking, dismissive humph. “Mars then.”

“No. We have to fight them,” Saffi said. She said it a little soft and jiggly, like a bad actress in a B sci-fi movie, the kind where all the aliens have four breasts and motorboat you to death.

Bianca was right, the artifact was still affecting Lebofield somehow. She was also right, they were outnumbered. The smart move was to escape on a shuttle to Mars. Maybe that made them rats. But rats survived. So far, the box score was: stripper two, girlfriend zero. Greg might be dating the wrong woman.

“Bianca is right,” Kate said. “The safest option is Mars.”

Seven pairs of eyes looked at her. Eight if you count Lebofield, but he was looking through her with his bloody eyes.

“I am surprised to hear that coming from you,” Eric said.

“Me too,” Greg said. “What happened to outnumbered, outgunned, call in the Marines?”

“War is a dead man’s party,” Kate said. “To win, you have to be willing to do whatever it takes. You have to fight as though you are already dead.”

Outnumbered, outgunned, and fighting an enemy wielding some kind of alien technology. She didn’t add: the odds were better trying to hit double zero on a roulette wheel.

“That’s some kind of Marine Corps bullshit.” Saffi turned to Greg. “Is your sister always this grim?”

Little scalpels shot out of Rae’s eyes, scalpels that had flayed a lot of cadaver skin. “How many people have you killed today? Other than with that awful perfume?”

Saffi humphed, folded her arms, and looked away. That made three. Bianca, Rae, and now Saffi, all with folded arms. Bianca was a real trendsetter. Maybe that’s why she worked at a hair salon.

“I already killed one Agent today,” Rae said. “They have my son.” She turned to Kate. “We can’t run. They will simply come after us.”

“They kill witnesses,” Eric added. “Look what they did to Lebofield. He made a deal with them, and they double-crossed him anyway. He knew what was aboard Vega.” He looked at Bianca. “You’ve been inside, and seen whatever they are building.”

“Built. Not building.” Bianca opened her mouth to say something else, but then looked away.

“You really think we’re already dead?” Eric asked the circle, although he was looking at Kate.

“Or worse,” Rae said, “We end up like Lebofield here, unable to tell reality from simulation.”

Rae had to be wondering whether Axio had been hooked up to the artifact, and whether her son would end up like Lebofield. The little tawny flecks in her eyes were on fire, like little nuclear explosions in an ocean of green. There was no doubt what Rae wanted.

Mars was dusty, barren, and she didn’t want to live long enough to have kids anyway.

Greg thumb-pointed to the gray crates behind Bongo. “We have tesla rifles. We know this place better. We can wage a guerrilla war.”

She heard it again, clanking, as if something metal had fallen on the causeway that snaked through the service area.

Lebofield watched intently, darting and swiveling his head as they argued. His bloodshot eyes tracked the conversation.

She wondered. Unplugged from the artifact, could he really tell the difference between reality and simulation? Did it leave a permanent imprint? Did it reorganize his brain cells into a shortwave radio? Or maybe into something that could receive higher bandwidth signals, like phones? If it could leave an imprint, could it format and write to the human brain the way people wrote to hard drives? What would it store? An alien mind virus?

She looked at Lebofield. Frail. Bruised. Now in a wheelchair. He became a podcast star with hundreds of millions of followers and then graduated to bilking grandmas and grandpas and single moms out of billions because he knew how to milk an audience. She looked at him and wondered something else. Maybe this muttering and nonsense talk was just an act.

Bongo had been gone a long time. The hairs on her neck prickled. Something was coming. Whatever it was, it was bigger than radioactive rats.