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This is Part II. The Fourteenth chapter. You may find earlier chapters here: https://wyattwerne.substack.com/s/kate-devana-series.
I am excited to bring chapters of the new Kate Devana series.
Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana is away on a deep space supply shuttle, wrangling a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions. But robots are glitching, killing people, and Kate is the target of an FBI Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up. Again. 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.
APRIL 8, 2074
SPACE STATION EUSS Kuipers, High Earth orbit.
FBI Special Agent Barrett Anders exited the skybridge into Kuipers’s boarding gate, thinking he should be afraid of what was happening to him. He wasn’t.
A few steps behind him, his partner Lindsay’s pad warbled. Despite Kuipers’s low artificial gravity, she was stepping and wincing and bracing and stepping again down the bridge on her injured leg. He stopped. She stepped and winced and limped, catching up to him, and then braced herself on a service kiosk, eyeing her inbox and swiping.
Inside the gate, passengers he’d seen exiting the shuttle waited to reboard, fidgeting in the uncomfortable aluminum chairs, or silently bobbing their heads while watching varied handheld electronics. News played on a trio of black monitors hanging from the ceiling, which were arranged in a triangle and angled down, positioned so every passenger had an equal opportunity to ignore the feed.
He couldn’t ignore it. Devana’s face was plastered into a top right corner frame of the LIVE! broadcast, wearing a dark blue Space Force dress uniform, her black hair tied into a tight bun under her service cap, and her chest sagging with medals.
While Devana’s brown eyes and thin smile ridiculed him, a 3D map tracked NYS Vega, still speeding away from Earth. In the middle of it all, a panel of four pundits, three human, and one AI avatar-head hovering above a chair, chattered vigorously as a chyron scrolled by, LIVE! HIGH STAKES SPACE INTERDICTION. REAL ESTATE MOGUL APPREHENDED FLEEING EARTH.
The coverage made him sick; she made him sick.
“Kuipers security just dropped their files on the dead Vega crew members,” Lindsay said, pushing off the kiosk, straightening and flexing her leg.
He raised his eyebrows and willed his best poker face. She couldn’t know that his vague feeling of déjà vu had become snippets, flashes, like a movie playing under strobe lights or flickers of a campfire that radiated warmth. He should be anxious, but he wasn’t. The warmth dispelled his fear. He’d been chosen to be a tool. He felt focused, confident. Suppressed, too, was his feeling of disgust for Lindsay, the insufferable cunt that she was. Her end was coming. Soon. He could see it.
Chin-pointing to the monitor, he said, “Devana is making the news.”
“Somebody has to,” she said. “Better her than us.”
“She’s mocking the bureau.”
“Doing what the FBI couldn’t, Brett.”
“They are calling Lebofield a real estate mogul.”
“He’ll be a prison mogul in an eight-by-ten cell, soon.” She was tapping her pad, not looking up. “The Attorney General wants to make him the first occupant of the new federal prison they are building on the moon.”
“That ship is still careening away from Earth.”
“It takes hours for a ship that size to change direction—” She tilted her pad towards him. “Look at this. The crew was arguing about something before the accident in the airlock.”
In the twilight revelations, he saw racks of boxes in a shadowy container. Tall men in khaki uniforms drew the door wide and then darted flashlights over him. He shivered, exposed and cold. He had the feeling that he needed to be somewhere. Then the tall men were seated at a table, arguing about him. He recognized NYS Vega’s crew. Next, emergency drones carried their dead bodies out of a brilliant white airlock.
He was seeing their past, but Lindsay’s future.
He said, “It wasn’t an accident.”
“I agree, but Kuipers’s security couldn’t find evidence of tampering or a virus. The pointy heads at Quantico haven’t found any either, and the space agency tested the code and said it was safe.”
She clicked her fingernail against her tablet to play a series of videos. He forced himself to watch Vega’s crew on Kuipers, nodding enthusiastically and pretending to be mesmerized. He didn’t want the bossy bitch to know they were extended versions of the fragments he’d already seen.
“The angle is bad in the videos,” she said, retracting the tablet after the last video. “So the lip-reading AI can’t pick up their conversation.”
“Vega’s crew are experienced smugglers. They know where the cameras are.”
She clack-clacked a fingernail on a frozen frame of Captain Ward, while surveying the news and the passengers seated around the gate. “I think they are arguing about cargo. Kuipers’s security thinks Lebofield was a late addition to Vega. Nobody seems to know how he got here.”
“The HMSS Celtic Star.”
Lindsay crinkled her forehead and frowned at him suspiciously. He mustered an innocent smile and spread it thinly across his face.
“I have a buddy on the task force,” he lied. “The timeline and itinerary is the best match.”
His heart rate shot up. Lindsay inspected him a few beats, incredulous, while excuses raced through his head. Why did he say that? He didn’t know anyone on the task force. He wasn’t even sure how he was being fed information, only that he had a higher purpose than detaining Lebofield. Did she suspect?
Her visual inquisition ended when her blond ponytail flip-flopped around her shoulders. “That task force has a bunch of loose lips. Spit is flying as Vega's crew argues. Among the few words the AI did pick up: dangerous and jettison. I think some of the crew wanted to dump it, whatever it is.”
“It’s Lebofield. He’s high risk.” He tried to sound calm over the pounding in his chest.
“So high risk that they let him livestream from his quarters?” She scanned the other travelers, seated, who were lost in the music thumping from their headphones, or giggling at videos on their phones. Her fingers rata-tata-tapped Captain Ward’s glassy image with her pewter polished nails. “No. I don’t think so. This crew has been smuggling arms and hazardous cargo halfway across the solar system for years. Even terrorists, according to state. They’ve seen it all.”
“You said it. They didn’t want him livestreaming. They were afraid they couldn’t control him, and they were right.”
“It’s a good theory, Brett. But the argument happens before they meet Lebofield. So they are squabbling over some other cargo. The only record of Captain Ward meeting Lebofield is after the two crew members were killed.”
“So, kill two crew and take on Lebofield as they are escaping Kuipers? Slowing their getaway? Seems like a stretch. The rumor is—on the task force—Lebofield paid Vega’s crew one hundred and eleven million and change. That’s a lot of spit to haggle over.”
She didn’t respond.
“The simpler explanation is Vega’s crew was squabbling over how to split the money.”
She chewed the corner of her lip, not looking at him, and still not responding.
“Well,” he smiled, “When Vega gets to the colony we can search it.”
She pointed to the news. On it, a gray dot floated in a sea of stars. The chyron read, Astronomer captures Vega crew ejecting. “Vega’s crew will tell us what they were arguing about.”
Around them, the gate seats were filling, although they had a few hours before they needed to reboard. Kuipers was a supply station and refueling stop for people and machines. It was growing into a travel hub. A holographic ad on the wall read Kuipers 2078: Serving all your travel needs. The 3D volumetric display under the ad showed Kuipers, floating over Earth, with two new rings. There would be clean hotels, tasty restaurants, and colorful shows. Miniature holographic families slept in pristine white hotel beds or laughed, sharing a family meal.
There were still far more millionaires on the planet than people who had been to the moon. But space travel was exploding, and he would soon have thirty million dollars to invest. He wondered how much of Kuipers he could buy.
She waved her hand towards the right exit. The sign read TO MAIN RING. “C’mon. I need to move.”
She was piecing it together. Zeroing on the cargo. There were thirty million reasons to kill Lindsay. Now there were thirty million and one. In the visions, he saw himself climbing a ladder. At the top, his salvation, with Devana dead. He wasn’t being sent to the colony to retrieve Lebofield. Or not just Lebofield.
Her legs trembled, waiting for him to move, like his ex’s yappy little shitter. He couldn’t stand that dog.
He offered her an arm and a fake smile. “Grab on.”
She eyed his arm. “You are not so steady yourself.”
Kuipers’s floor wobbled, and artificial gravity made him feel like he was constantly falling forward.
He got that damn dog like a consolation prize in his divorce settlement. After the split, he loaded that stupid mutt into a crate. It took some coaxing. It whimpered the entire sixty-minute ride to the state park and then yelped when he shot it as it scampered away.
He stretched his lips into a disarming smile. “My augments are self-stabilizing.”
Her face softened, and she latched her arm inside his. He nudged her forward, towards the main ring. “We don’t have a lot of time. I—we—need to be back aboard the shuttle.”
“If they let you board after you groped the flight attendant.”
“I thought it was a robot.”
“You didn’t. You need to watch that paleozoic attitude of yours, Brett. Out here its different. They don’t respect the badge.”
His ex had said the same thing to him. Paleozoic. All these cunts went to the same book club.
She said, “The airlock is 26B. Ahead one quarter around the ring and to the right. Let’s go there first.”
They exited the gate, to the main ring. The corridor was slate blue, dotted with black portals to space, and empty in both directions. His temples throbbed. With every thump in his chest, he wondered whether she knew he was leading her to her death, like his ex’s dog on the way to the park. When she shifted her weight and leaned against him, he could feel her steel and plastic pistol in its shoulder rig, and hear the pssst of fabric-on-leather.
When they arrived at the passageway to the airlock, they turned right. She let go. It was the way he’d pictured it. A brilliant white cutout room, with floor-to-ceiling lockers. All the equipment was neatly stowed. There was a portal to space on each wall, but the portals reflected the room like mirrors. The airlock was a squircle on the far wall, outlined in polished aluminum, and big enough that he could step inside without ducking, or shove Special Agent Kristi Lindsay inside and slam it shut along with her cunty attitude.
Its door was ajar, as if Kuipers guided him here. Lindsay was talking, but he was engrossed in the airlock mechanism, running his finger along the seal and locking bolts, just like in his vision. Had he really seen the future?
“They wanted to dump me in deep space,” he heard himself say. Electricity arced to his fingertips.
The overhead PA system dinged. “Flight 0811 Kuipers to Lunar Colony now boarding at gate 19.”
It was early. Hours early.
“Boarding. But not you.”
He turned. Lindsay was standing two inches taller, straighter than before. Her legs were a shoulder’s width apart. Stable. She was pointing her gun at him one-handed. A good firm grip with her finger inside the trigger well. She wasn’t trembling or wincing. Not even a little.
“Because I grabbed a flight attendant’s ass?”
She didn’t respond.
“Your leg looks healed.”
“I got a prosthetic months ago. It’s silicone and aluminum, like yours.”
How did he not notice?
“Because you’re a classic narcissist, Brett. That’s what you’re asking yourself, right? How could I fool you for months?”
“The pain looked real. You should get an Oscar.”
She slid her left hand under her belt, into her navy blue slacks, slithering it two and fro inside her hips, until she came out with a small gray rock. She underhand-tossed it his way. It clacked and rolled across the floor between his feet. While she did this, the muzzle of her gun never left his center of mass.
“Glad to get rid of that.”
“The source of your pain?”
“You are the source of the bureau’s pain, Brett. This is your one and only chance to come clean.”
Kuipers’s PA system repeated the boarding call. “You conspired with the shuttle crew to strand me here?”
“You didn’t really think the agency was going to let you collect the thirty million bounty on Devana, did you?”
“How long have you known?”
“Does it matter? Are you denying it?”
“I was going to split it with you.”
“Is that before or after you spaced me in the airlock?”
A bluff. She couldn’t know. How could she know when he didn’t know?
She lowered the gun, pointing it at his abdomen. “I didn’t know you planned to space me, if you are wondering, but now I can see it in your eyes. If you tell me who you’re working with, I can help you.”
“You know I can’t.”
“What is the cargo aboard Vega? What’s worth killing over?”
“I don’t know.”
“We can get a warrant for your neuroface connection. It’s bureau technology. We will crack your skull open and read it like a bible. Metaphorically. You know the drill. It’s better to cooperate now.”
“Get a warrant.” The gun’s muzzle, black and steely and slippery with oil, retorted that this was not the way he saw it in the snippets. She was supposed to go in the airlock, not him.
“Already done. You are finished, Brett.”
“So now what? Am I under arrest?”
“You get in the airlock. I leave for the colony.”
“Or what? You can’t shoot me.”
“You were going to kill me. You’ve been plotting it for months. It will all come out when we access your neuroface. Don’t deny it.”
He spread his arms wide. “I am not threatening you now.”
“You are a corrupt agent backed into a corner. If I shoot you, its because you resisted arrest.”
“Putting me in the airlock kills me all the same.”
“It’s safe. The agency thinks so. It’s temporary until someone can come to haul you back to Earth.”
If he could break out of the airlock, he’d have to steal a ship. He needed to get there ahead of her. This was Kuipers. There had to be ships he could steal. Maybe this was part of the vision but hadn’t been revealed to him yet.
He raised his hands in surrender. “I have your word you won’t space me?”
She waved her gun barrel towards the airlock. “Get in. Or, I could shoot you now and save time.”
He pivoted, hands in the air, to enter the airlock. Its door hinges gleamed like fluid metal. The seals were immaculate. The locks were well lubricated. It was rigged for silence. A feathery touch would get the door closing.
In the polished metal, he saw his reflection, distorted as if he was seeing himself in a funhouse mirror. His eyes were still bloodshot. His mouth curled into a frown because he was on the wrong side of the story that had played in his mind. He’d been on the outside of the airlock, not the inside.
As he entered, its panel blinked red. The door closed noiselessly, and then its locks clunked.
Lindsay, outside the airlock window, had her thin lips pressed into a smirk. She was giving him the middle finger and mouthing something. She was calling him a fucking idiot, and saying something unintelligible about the cargo.
His heart stopped. He heard the first hiss of air.
Behind him, he heard another clunk and more hissing. When he turned, the door was opening to the pink and blue speckled Milky Way.
The breath rushed from his lungs and his chest felt like it would explode. He screamed, but nothing happened. Why did the visions torture him if this was how it ended? He thought he should be cold, but he wasn’t. He thought he should be anxious, but a glow radiated through him, dispelling his fear. A voice, his voice, told him to exhale, to let the air out of his lungs. He’d been chosen. He was protected.
His sight collapsed to a tunnel around a star cluster. He saw the Southern Cross beyond the airlock. Then, blackness. He was resting in the dark, on a rack in a shipping container. Then he was standing over himself, with his body crumpled on the airlock floor, and his eyes glassy. His voice told him he needed to be somewhere. He turned towards the moon and floated into space.