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This is Part II. The Thirteenth 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
PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.
It was the john’s raspy gurgles as he died that punched her in the gut. Leyna spiraled down the stairs, lightheaded and dizzy, escaping Vapor Trail’s filthy security office and its troll, Troy. She couldn’t unsee the revolting gynoid staring back at her. Its manga green eyes mocked her while it cracked the john’s skull like an egg, splattering blood on the hidden camera. Grease flared in her throat and coagulating blood coated her nostrils.
Two floors above her, a door clicked open.
The iron smell of blood made her queasy. But it was a video. There couldn’t be a smell. She touched her nose and didn’t have a nosebleed, either. It was a memory. She paused at the basement door, propping herself in the corner, closing her eyes and breathing raggedly. Her stomach convulsed, and she tasted acid at the back of her teeth. She leaned against the wall, catching her breath, hoping the spinning would stop.
“Leyna?” Troy’s voice, two floors up. She pictured him leaning over the rail, his raw brown eyes scanning up and down for her. Shit. She needed to pull herself together.
She reached for the door. Two boys wearing silvery hoodies and blue shorts bounded through, nearly jamming her fingers. The back of the hoodie had a blue circle with a red rocket. A government space agency logo. The same government agency that let corruption fester until a director murdered her mother. The boys were innocent, though. Sightseers, finishing a colony backstage tour. She stayed in the corner, unseen, as they kangarooed up the stairs five at a time.
Their stair-stomping tapered off to Troy’s voice. “Officer Darcy?”
The industrial-gray stairwell door swayed lazily. It had one of those shiny, elbowed closers at the top that hissed leisurely to a final, gentle clack. She yanked the handle, hurried through the threshold, and then jerked the door closed behind her.
The basement passages were the arteries that kept the colony functioning. People swerved around her as she stepped into the colony slipstream, pushing rolling carts with clanging metal wheels. Drones zipped left and right. She was a rock in a river of traffic. To turn left, she’d need to dodge charging robots. Woozy, she moved with the slow-moving and overburdened humans hugging the walls to the right.
She thought she was numb to death after her mother was murdered, but the rasping hit her hard. The john’s body futilely twitched and jerked, even after his brain was pulp. She counted nine hollow gasps, which dwindled to gurgling. What was making her sick was the image of her mother on a hospital gurney six months ago. Four brutal stab wounds that drenched her dress in blood. The doctor said she died instantaneously. Nothing they could do for so much blood loss. Watching the john’s rasps and twitches, she knew the doctor lied.
An android with dry black eyes and stringy, short blue hair walked by her, going the other direction, flitting its eyes over her as though she were a museum exhibit. It grinned and dipped its head hello.
What was that teal gynoid thinking, grinning at the hidden camera as it crushed the man’s skull? No; that gynoid wasn’t thinking. It wasn’t sentient. It was a robot, and robots didn’t think. They acted. They were scripted and directed by their training data, with a little improvisation mixed in by pseudo-random number generators.
She’d encountered sentient AI. There were some on the colony. One ran the Vapor Trail Lounge. Just because AI could answer some academic tests didn’t give it a soul. Their eyes were empty. Not reptilian. Not predatory. Just empty probability fields and calculations that added up to nothing.
Kate warned her that the training simulations, the AI, none of it was real. Some things the AI simulator doesn’t get right. Gravity. Human behavior. You can’t just train an AI with a bunch of snuff films, no matter how gruesome the snuff film, or advanced the AI, and expect it to understand death.
Kate said that AI couldn’t understand death the way people did, because it didn’t have the instinct forged by clawing its way out of the primordial soup. Death was organic. Unique. AI was only a watcher, producing a facsimile averaged from its training data. Every cell in that man’s body fought for survival down to its molecular core. Like her mother. To the bitter end. And in the end, it was always every cell for themselves.
She was going to be sick. She imagined her mother weeping blood and having seizures on the floor. The doctors told her what they thought would make her feel better.
There was a bathroom four doors ahead on the right. She sucked air as the staff passed her. Automated hotel luggage carts and delivery drones whizzed past. The air was hot and acrid and the food tasted acidic in her throat. The walls spun. If she had been there when her mother was stabbed, would it have made a difference? Could she have warned her? Half-digested shrimp slammed her larynx like a freight train.
Her mother’s death was her fault. Kate said no. Jin said no. Her therapist said no. Everyone at her mother’s funeral said no, poor sweet Leyna, it wasn’t your fault. Except for the one voice that counted, the only voice that got a vote, her guilt. She lied about the flashbacks and anxiety when she applied for this job. She thought they’d pass. Now she knew the flashbacks would end when her guilt ended. Probably never. Kate said that while she couldn’t save her mother, she could save others. So now she was a deputy. She needed to pull herself together and not let whatever controlled this murdering robot kill someone else’s mother.
“Officer Darcy.” Troy’s voice over the hallway din, about ten steps behind her.
She darted into the bathroom, and then into a stall, kicking the space gray door shut behind her as she bent over. The wall was pink tiled, with white and black flecks, and spotless. The cubic black flecks glittered. Rotated. A shadow moved in the back of her mind, something shapeless and dark, like she’d forgotten something, but when she tried to grab it, it evaporated. The black cube the gynoid produced. What was it?
Her mind and body were stuck in neutral. The stall was spinning. She could be here for hours before the nausea passed. Her therapist told her not to rush it. That grief takes time. The thing about grief was that it never went away. She didn’t want it to go away because it’s all she had of her mother. The flashbacks, the anxiety, the nausea, it made her feel alive, and alive was what she wanted to be. She decided that five months ago. Jin made her feel alive, too. Maybe that’s what she saw in the droid’s eyes. AI was sentient, but dead at the same time, because it didn’t feel anything. It had no sense of loss.
Fuck it. She had a case and needed to move on. Her mother wouldn’t want her to stand here and pity herself. She stuck two fingers in her throat. Convulsions rolled through her and the metallic burn of half-digested fries was in her mouth. And then the toilet. A wave of cold sweat hit her, and more retching.
The adrenaline and cold sweat felt cleansing. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and flushed. Her nose burned, but there was no blood smell. It was over. That’s how it went. She could be the spinning wheel on the computer that hung for hours, wallowing in self pity, or reboot. She chose reboot. Whatever she went through, it was never going to be as bad as what her mother suffered.
She laughed, squeezing tears out and wiping her mouth again. Her hands shook.
“Officer Darcy, are you ok?” Troy’s voice. He followed her into the bathroom. What did he want?
In the space between the stall door and the floor, she could see Troy’s black shoes. She didn’t see any point in denying it. But her flashbacks were her business.
“Wait outside, Troy.”
“Did you throw up?”
“Get the fuck out, Troy."
“I will wait outside.” The treads on his shoes squeaked as they turned and padded towards the exit.
She retrieved her phone to call Jin. The map showed him two-thirds of the way to the mining claim. She didn’t expect him to answer, but she dialed him anyway. His image popped up, smiling, the one she’d picked and animated. He invited her to leave a note.
She hung up. Her finger hovered over his avatar. Drones glitching at the mining claim had killed at least two miners. Now they were glitching here, and killing people here. There had to be a connection.
He would think she was a stalker. She touched his avatar, redialing, to watch him again.
On the third redial, she left a video note. I miss you.
Outside the bathroom, she pushed past Troy.
She took four long strides before Troy hollered after her. She quickened her pace, hoping to disappear at the next intersection.
“Officer Darcy,” Troy shouted above the corridor’s din. “Lieutenant Darcy, you are going in the wrong direction.”
Two quick right turns and she could double back, if she could escape her tail. “Did you leave the login and password like I told you to?”
“I did. The CPU is not with the others—the gynoid’s CPU, I mean. I didn’t get a chance to tell you.”
She smiled, turning to face him, gritting her teeth. The bright hallway lights reflected in his coarse brown eyes, but all she could see was the porn he sold, and all she heard was the warning from Greg and Jin echoing in her head. She tried to erase the image of him, munching caramel popcorn, and enthusiastically watching the mermaid having sex with the john. He looked normal in his yellow-on-black SECURITY polo, black pants, and black shoes. He was wiry, mid, maybe even a little pitiful. He didn’t have an I-resell-private-client-videos-for-money tattoo. But who did? The trouble with scruffy-bearded perverts like Troy is that they looked innocent, like everyone else. A human depravity meter hadn’t been invented yet. How much did a snuff film go for, anyway?
Colony staff in blue and silver uniforms swerved around them, glaring at them, their cargo wheels scraping on the floor as they shoved their gear aside to avoid a collision. She smiled at them, apologetically, as they hooked around her.
“I can take it from here, thank you, Troy.”
“I would like to show you. You will have to call me to unlock it anyway. Also—”
The siren in her lizard brain was wailing. He was saying, I’ll unlock the door if you let me video you taking off your bra. She steeled herself, pretending to shift her belt, but keeping her hand near her tazer. She had a knife. If it came to it, she could cut off his fingers. Dead fingerprints would unlock doors, same as live ones.
“Also, I think something is erasing the CPU.”
Aluminum scraped aluminum. She had the tazer halfway out of the holster before she realized what he said.
He flinched and took a step back.
“What did you just say?” she asked, settling her tazer back into its holster.
Palms out, he said, “It wasn’t me. I swear. Don’t shoot me.”
“What wasn’t you, Troy?”
“Are you going to shoot me?”
“No one is getting shot today.”
“Because you seem a little edgy.”
If he said she had PMS, she would definitely shoot him. In the crotch, so he’d live with the scar. “Unanswered questions make me edgy, Troy. Murder makes me edgy. What about the CPU?”
He didn’t respond. He took a step back. She took a step forward. He took a step back. She was walking the wrong direction on a busy corridor at rush hour. He was backing up against traffic. Staff scowled, grinding their carts and gear around them.
“Troy, what did you mean, something is erasing the CPU?”
“I started backing everything up,” he said, palms up, taking another step back. “That’s protocol before we take droids offline. Only, the files started disappearing. And then—”
The woman behind him wore a restaurant server uniform, pewter, the color of the daylight lunar surface, with a yellow logo. She had long, inky black hair banded into a ponytail, and was pushing a cart topped by a skyscraper of aluminum plates stacked with metal plate covers.
Leyna put up her hands in surrender. “Troy, stop backing up.”
Troy took another step back. Restaurant woman was driving the jiggling metal menace by levering the cart left or right, watching the cart and compensating, not watching Troy.
“I can’t. Its done.”
“I mean don’t move.”
Impact. Plates clanged to the floor. Aluminum columns collapsed. Food flew. Plate covers gyrated like tops on the floor, and then the wreckage clattered to a halt.
“Shit. I’m sorry, it wasn’t my fault,” Troy said as the woman cussed and pushed something on her phone. She frowned at Leyna, holding the phone to her ear, shaking her head, as if asking why didn’t you shoot him when you had the chance? Leyna shrugged. Maybe next time. About a hundred feet down the passage, the blue light of a janitor drone flashed.
She couldn’t stay in this lane. This was like being on the wrong side of a highway. She looked both ways, hoping for a gap in the long line of whooshing drone traffic.
“Cross over. Let’s go, then tell me what happened,” she said, stepping into a void. The congestion rippled almost imperceptibly, like a wave of drones slowing, and then speeding.
He hesitated, gawking gawked wide-eyed as she passed on the other side of the passage.
“Now, Troy! Lets go!”
She heard more metal clanging, another apology, and then yelling. “I saw the files disappearing. And then the screen went black.”
Shit. She raced in slow motion, brushing past people and their freight. If she hadn’t stopped to puke. She was always late, and it was always her fault.
The staff first swore at her as she dodged them, and then at Troy a few steps behind. More plates clanged on the floor. She heard thumps. Luggage hitting the floor.
She caught a whiff of something acrid, smoky, like insects burning in a lamp. She came to an intersection, organized as a roundabout. Drone traffic entered, zipped around, and then exited. People skittishly steered their payloads into the circle and then wended around with expressionless resignation.
The acrid, burning odor drifted from the left, down an empty-looking and dim east-west passage painted industrial standard cream. The third stop in the circle.
She smelled fire, but didn’t see any fire drones with flashing lights. If there was something burning, why weren’t the fire alarms going off?
Troy shouted, “Right.”
They needed to go left, towards the burning. Was he trying to take her to the wrong room?
“I mean right, and then the third right.”
She looked back. He was five steps behind her, buffeted and slowed by the staff’s snarls. If she didn’t kill him before the day was up, the staff would.
She crowded into the roundabout and cruised around, taking the third exit. Once out of traffic, she bolted. She could see the smoke curling under the door. She skidded, followed by Troy and his squeaky shoes.
When he put his thumb out to press the lock, she smacked it away.
“That’s police brutality. That hurt!”
She grabbed his throat. “Why is the fire suppression off?”
“It’s—it’s not.”
“There are no fire or EMS drones here. That room is on fire.”
He eyed the smoke curling from the door. Was he going to deny it? He said, “the servers are all protected.”
“Where are the fire drones?”
Troy opened and closed his mouth like a largemouth bass. “You’re—choking me.”
“What happened to the fire suppression?”
“It’s supposed to be—” He made the largemouth bass face again.
“Supposed to be, what?”
“I want a lawyer. I am not talking without my lawyer.”
“No lawyers. No lawyerbots. Just me, you, and my tazer.”
“That’s police brutality.”
“Police brutality happens when I tell my boss, Sheriff Kate Devana, that you withheld material information and hindered a murder investigation.”
“It was supposed to be a prank.”
“Murdering someone is a prank?”
“He never said anything about murder.”
“Who?”
“I shouldn’t be talking—”
She grabbed his hand and twisted his wrist. When he yowled, she pressed his thumb to the lock. She spun him around and yanked his other hand behind his back, smashing his patchy beard into the industrial cream paint.
“I will sue you bitch. You’re breaking my arm.”
She wrenched his arm higher until she heard another howl and his shoulder joint crack. “You can explain it to the judge. How you resisted arrest.”
“I—I got paid three grand.”
“By who?”
“Some guy. All online. He said he wanted to play a prank on one of the clients. I wasn’t dumb enough to turn the fire system off. Jeez.”
“Which client?”
Troy didn’t answer.
“So, this client, Reid, or whatever his name turns out to be after we ID the body.”
After a beat, Troy said, “He didn’t say anything about no murder. I swear.”
“Name of this guy?”
“No name. Just an IP address.”
“You in the habit of sending money to random IP addresses?”
“Usually they are wiring me.”
“For the clients’ porn you sell?”
“I want a lawyer.”
She kicked his legs wide and handcuffed him. “Don’t go anywhere.”
The door to the server room opened with a billow of thick, gray smoke that smelled like plastic burning. It wasn’t hard to ignite a server rack. There were hundreds of amps, moving zillions of electrons around thin cables. Circuit boards shed more heat than light. Half the equipment in the room was for cooling, a quarter was to stop a fire. But as the cloud cleared, and the charred remains of the rear server rack appeared, it was clear someone’s idea of a prank included shoving lithium batteries between the servers and shaving insulation off the wires. A homemade firebomb. Droids had much bigger power packs and when they failed…
She looked up at the ceiling, and the hair stood on her back. Her heart collapsed. NO. NO. NO.
She dashed from the room, telling Troy to stay put as she passed.
The intersection. The roundabout. She had to push her way through foot traffic. It was like running down a crowded city street. People moved gruffly, if at all. She sidestepped and weaved. Luggage racks. Carts stacked four high with plates. Someone’s dry cleaning on a hotel rack on an automated drone. She nearly overran the door. She grabbed its handle, braked, and then kangarooed and corkscrewed up the stairs.
Her phone chirped an alarm when she arrived at Vapor Trail’s rear door. She didn’t need to read it because she knew what it said.
The hallway leading to 19B, where the john’s dead body lay, was black with teal ceiling lights. The doors were Caribbean blue. 19B was already sealed off and there were two red and yellow fire drones blocking it off. Clients with angry and confused faces filed past her towards the emergency exits.
She kicked the wall. Her boots sounded like a steel drum as she beat the hollow metal. Exhausted, she slid down the wall and sat.
Her phone chirped again. This time, higher pitched. Three tones. The avatar confirmed it. She had to take it.
She stared up at 19B. There was nothing she could do. When droids failed, their power packs overheated and incinerated everything within ten meters. Barbecuing the john. Barbecuing the cube. Barbecuing all her evidence. Whoever controlled the drone had made sure the CPU was barbecued, too.
Some fucking deputy she was. So much for proving herself.
On the fourth ring, she wiped her face and picked it up. Kate was distracted and didn’t look straight into the camera. “I am about to turn this ship around. I need you to tap into Lebofield’s livestream.”
She wiped her face again and stood. “You want to talk to him?”
“No, I am not ready for his excuses. Video only. I need to make sure he’s fastened his restraints, that’s all.” Kate turned to the camera, finally looking at her. “Why are you crying?”
Leyna hadn’t realized she was. As she searched the Vapor Trail for an explanation, Troy rounded the corner. His hands were handcuffed behind his back. He was covered with someone’s salad clumped in red sauce.
“I puked,” was all she could manage. Troy slithered her way, his coarse brown eyes feigning innocence. Troy, who ate buckets of sweet-and-salty caramel popcorn, surreptitiously watching clients.
“Puked? What happened?”
Troy, who watched clients covertly, and who copied the videos for resale.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand, smiled, and waved him over. “We had an incident at a strip club.”
“What kind of incident?”
“That guy, your brother warned me about, the one at Vapor Trail.”
“What about him?”
She grabbed Troy under his armpit and towed him through the hall. “He and I are going to reboot our relationship. He’s about to show me his private collection.”