Devana Files, Part II: Chapter 16

Jibe Ho

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This is Part II. The Sixteenth 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.

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APRIL 9, 2074

NYS VEGA,

TRANSLUNAR ORBIT

The navigational tablet attached to the armrest of her captain’s chair badgered her to EXECUTE MANEUVER in gray-on-green letters. A turn and burn to the colony, carefully calibrated, and she should punch it. A twelve hour return trip. Every minute’s delay cost six and dragged her almost a thousand kilometers in the wrong direction. Dust hung in the air, twinkling pink and violet in the light of the Milky Way, like carnival guests awaiting the big ride. Vega’s crew abandoned ship. Lebofield and his parents were safe in their containers-cum-staterooms, strapped in, only able to damage the airwaves with their ridiculous podcast.

Her finger hovered over the prompt. Her other hand drummed the armrest, click click clicking her suit armor against aluminum. Inside her pressure suit, fans hummed, circulating sweat mixed with its new-suit chemical smell. Fuel pumps and transformers murmured under the bridge floorboards. Her copilot, rucksacks and gear heaped on a nearby chair with a rifle for a skeletal arm, shimmered blue and saluted her, cleared to proceed, captain.

As with most of her decisions, her gut had made hers a while ago. Her cerebral cortex was just catching up.

She withdrew her finger from the prompt. Disembodied threads tugged at her lizard brain. She felt the faint glint of a spider web ensnaring her. The toothy silver zipper on her gear bag frowned at her delay like an exasperated XO.

“NYS Vega, report your status. We show no delta-v.” The voice of the Lunar Spaceport traffic control over the comms.

She missed the simplicity of helming a sailboat. The wind in her hair, the sun on her face, and the primal pleasure of maintaining her balance at sea.

Her fingers clicked a discordant beat on her captain’s chair. A red tendril on the navigation map flickered with her tapping. Vega was at one end, and the Lunar Colony at the other. It lengthened twenty kilometers with each flicker. A white dot, Tesseract, lingered near Vega. A blue dot, Vega’s escape pod with Captain Ward and his crew, drifted towards the moon.

“Lunar Spaceport, this is Vega. Just pulling in the sails and battening down the hatches before we jibe ho.”

Jibing, turning a sailboat into the wind, was dangerous. Wind could change direction, capsizing the boat, or causing the boom to slam across the deck. She learned it the hard way once, sailing with an inexperienced helmsman. She got knocked overboard and was forced to swim. Steering Vega to the colony was more hazardous. It was old, weighed down by five hundred and sixty-eight containers, leaking fuel and air, and its rusty frame was poorly maintained. She’d take her chances swimming through sharks over the hard vacuum of space.

“Copy, NYS Vega. Keeping this channel open.”

She wanded away the navigation window on the armrest’s tablet.

The red warning in her hud nagged her. Malware was trying to bore through her suit’s defenses and connect to her neuroface.

NYS Vega was too old to have a neuroface connection. She bargained for this suit as part of the deal to apprehend Lebofield. It had hydraulics, armor, and military cybersecurity to prevent an enemy from turning it against her. She was lucky. Without it, something would have penetrated like a brain worm.

Why did the captain abandon ship?

“Leyna, you copy?”

“I copy. I am back in the office.”

The office on the moon was now over one hundred and fifty thousand kilometers away, and growing with each flash on the navigation map and each tap on her armrest.

“How’s your guest?”

“Troy is cooperative. Disturbingly enthusiastic. Asked me where we bought the handcuffs and if he could keep a pair.”

“We have leg irons in my desk.”

“What I need is a gag. I told him he could keep the pair he has, so I don’t have to disinfect them after. I am touching this slimy pervert as little as possible.”

The red tendril blinked. She clicked the armrest. Another hundred kilometers in the wrong direction. Shimmering dust bunnies and food crumbs floated by in zero-g.

She should hear Leyna’s full report, but not until she was underway. Instead, she said, “Tell me what happened at the club.”

“The john paid for the Teenage Mermaid Experience, but got the psycho mantis experience instead.” Leyna relayed the homicide at the club, the fire in the server room, and the igniting mermaid sex robot that cremated most of the evidence. The comms had no video. The whole time, Kate watched the violet stars on the exterior display and the crumbs floating around the deck, with one eye always on the navigation map. Leyna talked for six thousand, four hundred and sixteen kilometers, but the stars and the crumbs barely budged.

“I have a mermaid plush my Dads got me a long time ago,” Leyna continued. “That thing looked just like it. It smirked while it crushed the vic’s skull. It had a cube. It was looking right at the camera. At me. I won’t be able to sleep with that psycho green thing staring at me in the dark.”

“And the server fires?”

“I need to burn that doll. The fires started as soon as we clicked off the video. I didn’t know until I got to the server room. By the time I got back, the room at Vapor Trail was incinerated, too. The fires were timed. The dead john’s name—”

A muffled voice interrupted Leyna. Then she said, “Shut up Troy. The dead john’s name was Reid.”

“What’s he saying?”

“Troy insists they are clients, not johns. Says they pay enough. Forensics will be—Troy, no. One sec, Kate.”

A yellow, slashed microphone icon on the tablet warned her that Leyna had muted the comms. Kate waited, one hand clicking and tapping, and the other swiping through menus to bring up Captain Ward’s service record. In his file photo, he had his gray hair cut short and square. His long face, brown eyes, and jowls reminded her of an aging Great Dane.

When she boarded, the Captain requested to remain on the bridge. Backing into the escape hatch, seven meters from where she sat, and waving his pistol, he’d said, “We go we have chance.” The oxygen math disagreed. The lifepod was designed for four. Captain Ward crammed seven crewmembers into it. Her wife Rae whispered hoofbeats mean horses, not zebras, Kate. Rats run from a sinking ship. It’s that simple.

Was it? She opened his resume. Safety conscious captain with over twenty-five years’ maritime and space experience. Graduated from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Served on seven seafaring ships…two cruise ships…five container ships. Worked his way to captain, then went back to school to learn to pilot space-bound supply ships. Experience navigating around and through global hotspots. Industrious and adept at managing cargo and adhering to rigorous space loading protocols. Skilled at engineering and rocketry systems maintenance.

Vega was his second space command. His bullet point list of shipping lanes he’d trafficked read like a State Department travel advisory. Pirates and terrorists, far worse than her, had boarded his ships dozens of times. Not once did he abandon ship.

Click, click, click. Her suit’s armor tapped out the sound of a lot of questions, and no answers.

Smugglers protected their cargo like dealers protected their stash and terrorists protected their caves. Abandoning Vega put the crew in more danger. Captain Ward would know he couldn’t escape. Some gang lord would make a special trip to space to rescue him, just so they could torture his crew in front of him to make a point.

Vega’s poor maintenance wasn’t his fault. No one wanted to live on a ship that leaked enough air every day to empty a stateroom. It required more than skill and a degree in engineering to fix a ship; it required money to buy parts. The pointy-headed bean counters usually thought it was cheaper to load a shipping container with compressed oxygen and send the crew on its way to Mars, than drydock a ship for months while drones patched microscopic leaks.

She’d figured the crew was running from Kuipers, and whatever happened there. We go we have chance, he’d said. Maybe she misunderstood.

Leyna unmuted the comms. “I put Troy in timeout in the conference room. Where was I? The vic leased the robot. If you can call a thing with genetically engineered blue mermaid scales a robot.”

“It’s not sentient, is it? Or, wasn’t sentient?”

“I read the specs. It’s called a SonyeoBot’s XXXyley 6.9. Who came up with that name, anyway? Some pathetic AI drugged on too much porn. Xyley looks like just your average scaly bimbot. A higher IQ than your average Hollywood actress, but not sentient by a longshot.”

She should have been relieved, but her gut twisted itself into a knot. “So someone programmed that goddamn thing to kill.”

“The robot said some weird shit too. It couldn’t have been looking at me, but it felt like it. It knew where the hidden cameras were and stared right into them. It said something about he’s coming. I swear it mentioned Vega, too.”

“Who’s coming?”

“Didn’t say. Troy thinks it was quoting Revelation.”

“Revelation? As in, the bible?”

“I think it might be some sort of code. A message. The whole thing is a fuck sandwich, and not the good kind. The cube that the robot had right before the vic died, I think it’s a device. Maybe what allowed it to hack into the servers. If it hasn’t been incinerated, we might get something off it.”

“You said Troy was in timeout? Not under arrest?”

“I am holding him as a material witness. The creepy bastard copied the video of the murder before everything incinerated. Right now, a lot of our evidence is on his greasy server. I am copying it to our space now.”

She needed to steer the conversation back to the red warning in her hud. “Listen, has Vega’s scan finished?”

“Vega’s scan came back null.”

“Null?”

“N-U-L-L null. No known viruses or malware. I ran it twice to be sure. Whatever is trying to get its claws in your suit isn’t coming from Vega’s computer. Maybe in a container.”

“If it’s in a container, and its pinging me, I don’t want to bring it back.”

“Can you find it and throw it overboard?”

BANG. She slammed her fist. She’d accidentally activated her hydraulics and dented the armrest. “Leyna, you are a genius!”

“What was that noise? Are you okay?”

“A little dent. Nothing. That’s a great idea. I need to go through the manifest before I turn around. I need to drop containers.”

“Won’t that slow you down?”

“When I drop containers, I lower Vega’s mass and momentum. I improve performance. With the same thrust, I can reverse faster and get home faster.”

“How will you know which one is pinging you?”

“I won’t. But I’ll toss as many as I can. Most of Vega’s mass is supply containers. I could dump almost all of them except Lebofield’s.”

“If you find any more mermaid bimbots, eject those too. What happens to all those containers?”

“They will stay on present course. Until they get dragged into a gravity well. There is no air resistance to slow them down.”

“All the way to Mars?”

“Probably. Hard to say. I’ll run the calculations later. Maybe a little dispersion from micrometeoroid hits. I’ll keep the comms open while I go through the manifest.”

She was going to turn the cargo into shipping-container-sized shotgun pellets hurtling through space at sixty thousand kilometers an hour, but she wasn’t going to say that aloud. Space was big and empty. They wouldn’t hit anything important. Probably.

Her hands danced around the tablet, looking for the manifest. Every ship had one; a smuggler’s ship had several. She wasn’t interested in the official manifest. That was what the captain gave to customs and immigration officials. On a smuggler’s ship, it would be a believable lie. Fiction, but plausible. It would tell a story of nine electronics containers instead of ten. Of ten immigrants instead of eleven. Of silver and gold ingots, instead of more valuable rare earth elements. Industrious and adept at managing cargo was Captain Ward’s euphemism for fudging the manifest. Dockworkers took bribes; the official manifest gave them cover. As long as it told a good story, everyone suspended disbelief.

She was interested in the shadow manifest. The real one. The treasure map. With the location of the guns, the drugs, the illegal agriculture, the animals, and people. Maybe the malware relentlessly pinging her hud.

After a few minutes of searching, she found it in a directory named Coyote. The first thing she noticed was that there should have been six hundred and thirty containers. Some didn’t get loaded. Captain Ward and the crew left Kuipers in such a hurry, they left cargo behind. They’d have been penalized, lost bonuses, maybe even been fired when they got to Mars. They ran from something on Kuipers. Did it follow them aboard Vega?

In total, there were five hundred and ninety-four containers, not five hundred and sixty-eight containers. Twenty-six weren’t listed on the official manifest. Those were the ones the captain was hiding.

“One more thing, boss. Remember the FBI Agent Anders?” Leyna asked over the comms.

“Barrett Anders? The one assigned to pick up Lebofield? What about him?”

While she spoke, Kate searched for containers tagged as needing air, water, and power. Agriculture, livestock, or people like Lebofield and his parents would be in those.

Captain Ward had told her, “Container three-ninety-three. I told you. I lock them. They cannot leave.”

He’d lied.

“He disappeared on Kuipers,” Leyna said.

“Kuipers is a space station, and not a very big one. There is nowhere to hide.”

“I got a report from his boss, Special Agent Kristi Lindsay. He disappeared from an airlock. Gone. Poof.”

“Like a bad fart. Hope he never shows his face again.”

When Captain Ward told her Lebofield was in three-ninety-three, she figured he was sending her into a trap. Or to a hard-to-reach container to give him time to escape. Maybe both.

On the schematic, Vega looked like a stack of five toilet paper rolls, or maybe five whisky barrels, bookended by starship engines at the rear, and a toroid ring at the front containing the crew staterooms and bridge. The barrels in the midsection, of course, were not round. Starship shipping containers’ cross sections were hexagonal and packed concentrically around the center axle. They reminded her of the honeycomb shelves Rae got for their bathroom. Four of the five barrel-like sections along the center spindle were fully loaded, six rings deep. The fifth, at the rear, had one fewer ring. That section hadn’t been fully loaded before Captain Ward abandoned Kuipers.

Lebofield was listed on the shadow manifest in container thirty five. Right up front, just off the main passage. Her chameleon drone had probably passed the entrance.

The tooltip question mark brought up text.

Container 035:

Frank F Lebofield, CFM, CFR, CRA. B068666894

Anna C Lebofield-Crutz, LL.B, LL.M, J.S.C., MSc. A424368658

Cristofer G Lebofield. MSc, JD, PhD. A611575778

Livestock Code: L

The long A- and B- numbers were passport numbers and were followed by QR codes.

She chuckled. Lebofield and his parents listed their degrees, as if the shadow manifest was a resume. Captain Ward had coded Lebofield and his parents L, the livestock code for lizards. He had a sense of humor.

“You didn’t like him?” Leyna asked over the comms.

“Liked who?”

“Anders.”

“I only met him once.”

“Then why did you call him a bad fart? Why do you hope he never shows up?”

“He was trying to collect the thirty million bounty on my head. I found out purely by accident. It saves me from listening to a half-assed soliloquy before I kill him.”

She brought up the gravity menu and moved the slider to one revolution per minute. Fuel and power hummed through Vega’s old tubes. The pink and purple stars on the exterior display stirred. One revolution per minute translated to five percent of Earth’s gravity. Barely noticeable to the crumbs and dust bunnies floating in the Milky Way’s violet twinkles. Enough centrifugal force, though, to spin the containers into space once she released the safety clamps.

She flipped over to Vega’s schematic and selected one hundred and seventy-four containers. The entire outer rim of each of the five sections.

A green-on-gray prompt filled the window. JETTISON?

“Anders disappeared from the same airlock where Vega’s crew died,” Leyna said.

Kate punched JETTISON. Metal shrieked and groaned. On Vega’s schematic, containers spread out and away like a cyclone. As the swirling mass expanded, she selected the next layer. Another one hundred and forty-four containers. The shadow manifest listed the contents as electronics, metals, and other commodities. Some held lead for load balancing. No water, no air, no agricultural items or livestock. That made sense. Access to the containers was via the center corridor. The outer layers of cargo, the 4th, 5th, and 6th levels, were difficult to access. Critical items were loaded close to the center. Container three-ninety-three, where Captain Ward tried to send her, was in this batch. Parsing the manifest, she eyed two valuable containers on level one, just off the main passage. If there is a way to hook it up.

Green-on-gray letters prompted her once again. JETTISON?

She waited. She needed enough clearance inside the first cyclone of containers, or they’d crash and wreck.

“They should get that airlock fixed,” she said to Leyna. “Or maybe not. It’s a garbage disposal.”

She punched JETTISON. The pitted aluminum containers looked like a cyberpunk space pinwheel, twisting away from Vega on a canvas of stars.

She selected the next layer. One hundred and fourteen total. The manifest listed nothing useful in this batch, either. More electronics, more metals. One load of water and three loads of furniture.

JETTISON.

“What if the manifest is wrong, Kate, about where Lebofield is?”

She selected the next eighty-four cargo containers. When the prompt opened on her tablet, she waited for clearance, and then pushed JETTISON, sending them into the spiraling flotsam.

There was no way to identify container three-ninety-three drifting with the rest.

“It isn’t. Check his podcast. He’s still live. He’s drawing power from the ship. So he’s still here.”

There were seventy-eight containers left. Vega’s mass was a third of what it was before she dumped the cargo. The manifest listed air and water, plus livestock. Chickens, sheep, goats, too many things she couldn’t leave to die in space. Plus the lizards: Lebofield and his parents. She tapped the schematic to bring up the information on the two containers she spied previously. Rocket fuel. A lot, and accessible through the main corridor. If she could hook it up.

“He vanished, Kate. They scanned with everything. Radar, lidar, and infrared. It doesn’t bother you that his body vanished?“

“Maybe his clothes snagged on something when he floated out. They are going to find him in a blind spot, frozen solid in a few weeks, when maintenance goes on their next EVA. He wouldn’t be the first.”

“His boss is headed here.”

“And I am headed back.”

She was now one hundred and sixty-five thousand kilometers from the moon. But with most of the cargo dumped, she could grind up the g forces without risking a catastrophic failure aboard Vega. Her gut was right to delay. It was always right. Her brain just needed to catch up. The navigation computer calculated that she’d be home in four hours. It prompted her, EXECUTE MANEUVER.

After the turn and burn, she would have forty-five minutes at two-thirds of Earth’s gravity. She needed every second, too, because there were seventy-eight containers to search, and the red light still flashed in her hud. The malware was still aboard Vega.

“Lunar Spaceport, this is NYS Vega. Turn and burn in ten seconds.”

She put her visor down and clutched the armrest. To the dust bunnies, she shouted jibe ho, and then hit, EXECUTE.