Devana Files, Chapter 5

All Aboard, Pt 1

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I am excited to bring chapters of the new Kate Devana series.

Space 2074 is the new Wild West. Mine machines are glitching, an FBI Agent is looking to avenge the death of his former partner, & Sheriff Kate Devana must wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions. Bodies are piling up. Again. On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.

This is the fifth chapter. You can catch up here: wyattwerne.substack.com/s/kate-devana-s…

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.

If you like this series, be sure to share and restack and spread the love. 🌞

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APRIL 7, 2074

NYS VEGA,

ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND KILOMETERS BEYOND LUNAR ORBIT

Kate stretched her arms over her head, nudging herself with the balls of her feet, across the inflatable gray tube connecting Tesseract to NYS Vega. In zero-g, space was directionless. So she was gliding upwards, towards Vega’s space-beaten and fatigued silver airlock, which hovered like a gray cyclops tired of visitors. Her heartbeat and breathing echoed inside her suit. Its spandex-like inner layer still had that new pressure suit smell like a new car, instead of the usual dirty gym socks scent.

The hairs on her neck tingled. Stray fibers drifted like thick dust from an old house. Theoretically, she didn’t need her spacesuit to cross. This temporary duct was designed to inflate to one atmosphere pressure, containing eighty percent nitrogen and twenty percent oxygen, like Earth, to avoid the complications of decompression sickness. But her gauges read one third-atmospheric pressure and pure oxygen. Still crossable without a suit if she rebreathed pure oxygen for two hours to remove the nitrogen from her blood.

The low pressure didn’t concern her. The Space Force trained her in low pressure environments. Pure oxygen was a hazard, but that didn’t concern her either. It was the reason for the underinflation. Rot. This tube’s inner lining was space-weathered and gas leaked from gaskets. She dared not touch the walls. She floated slow and steady, up the middle, her arms ready to brake at the airlock. One hard tug of the tube’s rope guide would yank fasteners out. One wayward poke, and the lining would rupture and she’d be floating in space. The shipline that owned Vega had not invested a dime in maintenance.

Except for the fresh paint.

No one peeked through the airlock’s viewport. Above it, there was a mirrored bubble. A closed-circuit camera. She could feel Vega’s crew sizing her up from the video feed, deciding whether to destroy evidence, or arm themselves to repel her.

“Jin, picture?”

“All green. Pressure looks stable in the boarding tube.”

“I trust this boarding tube like a used condom. Interior cameras?”

“Not that I can access.”

“Any attempts to regain control?”

“I have full control of Vega. No attempts to override.”

Her grandfather Jerry’s first rule of door-kicking: know your target and what’s behind it. A good operator always knew as much as they could about what was beyond a door before they kicked it open. She had no intel. She had three new SSEYE Inc. Chameleon surveillance drones maglocked to her suit, and she’d toss one into Vega as soon as the airlock opened. Each was the size of a softball, with twelve embedded omnidirectional 32K cameras, twenty compressed-air thrusters to propel it, and a lightweight ultra-high-res LED monitor for skin that mimicked its surroundings like camoflauge. The Chameleon blended into the background. It was virtually invisible and its omnidirectional cameras transmitted to her heads-up display. Of course, anyone nearby would see condensation in the puffs of compressed air guiding it, or hear its rasps as it stabilized itself or whizzed around a corner.

But if the crew tossed a grenade first, the Chameleons were useless.

She took another lungful of the new pressure suit smell. If they wanted to kill her, they wouldn’t toss a grenade. They only needed to rupture this rickety tunnel of terror. She’d suffocate slowly, flailing in space.

The airlock window blinked, and she exhaled. The Captain’s smartest move was to hand over the fugitives and move on so he could get back on schedule. Vega could be smuggling a lot of things to Mars, three-fourths of which were a waste of her time.

“Any luck on the registry, Jin?”

“I have our new deputy working on it.”

“She’s not a new deputy, yet.”

“You always say, better to ask forgiveness than permission. We have two dead on one of the mining claims. I can only be in four places at once.”

She estimated about a twenty percent chance Vega’s crew would capture her and cut off all her fingers and toes. If they did, she could still count the number of amicable break-ups in her life on her left hand. Zero. Jin and the new deputy’s office cooing and flirting would give way to icy glares, coffee cups thrown across the office, anonymous hate mail and revenge porn—

“You know your neuroface is on, right Kate?”

“Say again?”

“Your neuroface is on. It’s dumping to the feed.”

She resisted the urge to grab the tube’s guide rope to halt her glide. “What’s dumping on the feed?”

“Revenge porn. I don’t really think they will cut all your toes off.”

“Shit. The default setting on this new suit must be broadcast all.” She swiped through menus in her heads-up display and changed her privacy settings. Like talking to yourself aloud while a speaker was on, the neuroface sometimes captured thoughts and transcribed them to the comms feed. Usually, privacy settings prevented this. If broadcasting unfiltered thoughts was the new normal in the military, she was glad she’d retired years ago.

“Until now, I didn’t realize you had a filter.” She could feel Jin’s lips stretch into a smirk as he said it.

She pictured sending Jin a middle finger. “Did that come through?”

Jin’s grin over the comms had a signature silent pause. “We will stay professional. I will quit if we can’t.”

“That’s what worries me.”

He was right, though. They needed a third deputy, and the new hire had the cybersecurity skills and gritty initiative they needed. Plus, the new hire reminded Kate of herself, except three times smarter.

Jin said, “Someone experienced needs to go to the claim and investigate.”

“The mining claim can wait. The bodies won’t get any deader.”

“They were run over by mining equipment. Could be a glitch. Or we could be dealing with malware.”

“Who reported it?”

“Anonymous. And I can’t trace it yet.”

“Someone’s sending a message.”

“I figure either claim jumpers warning people they’ve taken over the claim, or the claim owner killed the trespassers and wants everyone to know they will defend their claim. I won’t know until I secure the hardware and bring it back for analysis.”

The moon’s surface was thirty-eight million square kilometers. Less than five percent of the moon’s subsurface had been explored and cataloged for mineral deposits, yet mining firms stole data and fought over known deposits instead of sending geologists to prospect new ground. Companies fighting over dirt was not her top priority. She usually let them sort it out themselves. But now there were bodies, and a tipster involved her.

“Could be a whistleblower,” she said. “Do what you need to do. Forge my fingerprint and swear her in.”

“Done and done. She’s completed her firearms training too.”

“In a simulator. Not the same.”

“I took her to the basement—”

The airlock window ahead of her flickered again. A grotesque humanoid shadow danced in the connecting tube’s floating dust, then blinked off.

“You said there were eleven aboard Vega?” She asked.

“Eight crew, plus Lebofield and his parents, that’s right.”

“But this ship has capacity for fifteen.”

“Affirmative."

“How sure are you about the eleven?”

“I triple checked. What are you thinking?”

“This is a container ship, with five hundred and sixty-eight places to hide people.”

“Hold while I check again.”

Too late. She was drifting head-first into the airlock. It was less than a meter away, and she didn’t want to spook the Captain by stalling. “I’m here. I think the Captain will try to bluff his way through this.”

She gripped the airlock’s handles and locked her arms, like a handstand, stopping her helmet from clacking against the metal. Twenty-plus years of space debris, meteoroids, and unimpeded high-energy protons had battered it. To the right of the handles, the panel status lights were red. Under the panel, DANGER was stenciled in red block letters, overtop a warning about decompression sickness. She didn’t see any knobs or buttons to open the airlock.

The lights on the panel beside the airlock changed to amber, and then green. “Going in. As soon as I’ve boarded, retract the docking tube and spin up gravity.”

“Roger, retract the tube and spin up gravity.”

She twisted the airlock’s handle. As worn as it was, she expected it to snap in her hand. Instead, the airlock door swung open.

She removed a surveillance drone from her chest and tossed it behind the door. Vega’s airlock had an older two-compartment design. The next chamber was a crew lock, for pressurization, and then, beyond that, the next door was an equipment lock connecting to Vega’s crew sections and bridge.

The crew lock was clear. She climbed in and closed the hatch. The panel light cycled through amber to red.

Her suit ran through checklists and her hud confirmed she was green to repressurize. “Captain Ward. This is Kate Devana. I am aboard. Expedited repressurization requested.” Ordinarily, the airlock repressurized gradually, for safety, over six minutes. Expedited repressurization was for emergencies, although she doubted Vega’s crew worried about safety. In her case, gradual repressurization was unnecessary, since she didn’t intend to remove her suit.

“Copy. One minute thirty seconds. Welcome aboard.”

Outside the viewport, the inflatable connecting tube puckered as the recycling system sucked the gas into tanks. Then Tesseract silently disconnected, and the tube folded. The viewport was not much bigger than a jailhouse window. Her stomach twisted.

Devana Files, Chapter 6