Devana Files: Chapter 18
Far Side of Daylight, Part 1
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This is Part II. The Eighteenth 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 9, 2074
LUNAR SURFACE. LPS: UNKNOWN
A starburst on the lunar horizon startled Jin awake. He squinted at the dash console, wishing he could rub his eyes through his pressure suit. Its fans buzzed like a swarm of wasps around his head, stinging his eyes with dry air. His neuroface throbbed behind his sinuses like electrified needles. Outside the cockpit window, the moon’s hypnotic gray monotony rolled underneath, confirming what the navigation map told him, that he’d descended to three hundred meters and slowed to one hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. In green blinking block letters, the navigation computer alerted him he was on final approach.
He blinked, trying to wet his eyes. The starburst grew brighter. Or maybe closer. It wasn’t the sun because the sun was behind him. The surface albedo under the rover was high, making the sky nearly starless. Thankfully, the brightest stars were still visible. He could see Mars and Jupiter to his right, Arcturus to his left, and Sirius just above the horizon, over the starburst. His three escort ships had sprinted ahead. He saw their asterism, red and green beacons in a perfect triangle, flying towards Sirius.
We will escort you to our temple, his captors had said.
The starburst resolved into the tip of a polished brass globe, reflecting the sun. He could make out a glinting metal rod beneath. He pinched and scrolled the map, but it didn’t show a structure in the vicinity. His escort ships were twenty-six kilometers away, according to the console map, and vanishing behind the globe over the horizon.
Whatever the globe was, he reckoned he’d be over it in less than five minutes.
The console map didn’t show a structure, but it also reported him at the moon’s south pole. Both were wrong. Devana insisted that he study star maps and learn to use the sextant, so he had a good hunch where he was. What was the appropriate gift for ‘you told me so boss?’ She’d want a bottle of something earth-distilled and aged to complement his irritation. Something expensive. If he lived long enough to get her a gift.
He knew that the Earth-facing side of the moon was ninety-two percent illuminated or nearly a full moon. But he was on the far side of the moon. He knew this because the Earth was not visible in the sky anywhere. He was in a narrow crescent, five hundred kilometers at its widest, on the far side of daylight. The sun would be setting here soon. He also knew his approximate latitude because of the sun’s angle behind him, and the position of Sirius and Arcturus. He figured fifty or so degrees latitude north. Fifty degrees, because if he were much farther north, Sirius wouldn’t be visible, and much farther south, Arcturus wouldn’t be visible.
So he wasn’t at the south pole. He wasn’t even close. He’d use the sextant stowed in the dash for a more precise location, when he was sure his captors weren’t monitoring him.
His hunch was that he was within a few dozen kilometers of his original destination, the mining site. It made sense. His captors appeared to have a lot of resources, enough to send escort ships, yet he didn’t imagine them wasting fuel to transport bodies hundreds of kilometers away.
The globe blossomed into a spire connected to an onion-shaped dome and surrounded by four smaller domes. Everything was formed from polished, opalescent stone that sparkled in the sunlight. The domes topped an octagonal main building made of white marble with brass filigree. Of course, there was no marble on the moon. He doubted whoever built this temple paid to have that much stone lifted from Earth. Manufactured lunar marble was ground up chalk-white lunar regolith, mixed with resins, and 3D-printed into slabs. But even with engineered marble, this temple was massive, and would have been expensive to build.
It stood in the center of a rocky, horseshoe-shaped ridge. Its brilliant, polished marble walls and iridescent domes made the surrounding regolith look dull gray in comparison. It looked so incongruous that it caught his breath. If the rover’s radar and lidar were to be believed, it was over three hundred meters tall, not including the spires. The ground had been compacted around it, like concrete. Fencing the temple grounds, halfway between it and the horseshoe-shaped ridge, were eight minarets crowned with cupolas.
A narrow tongue of mirrored glass led to the temple’s steps. As if someone on the moon could just walk into its shadowed arches.
Another navigation bleep alerted him that the rover was descending to ninety meters and slowing to ten kilometers an hour.
The front facade had one wide central arch, with three stacked smaller arches on each side, and cusped spandrels like teeth. The arches hid their interior in shadows as black as the lunar sky. All the brass gilding was like fractals; zooming in, there were carvings within carvings and filigrees within filigrees. He estimated the smaller archways were twenty stories each, while the central arch was sixty stories. It looked like a marble leviathan with a maw of razor sharp-teeth. The navigation computer was sending him directly down the gullet. Maybe he’d come out the other side. He didn’t think so.
It didn’t surprise him someone built a temple on the moon, as incongruous as it looked. Free from the engineering constraints of Earth’s gravity, lunar buildings could be taller, more open, and made with fewer structural materials. No, what surprised him was that he hadn’t heard of it.
When he was stationed in Germany, he’d visited Cologne Cathedral and Ulm Minster. Ulm Minster was an incredible sight, but the tour guide described it in a defeated tone. It took almost six hundred and fifty years to build Ulm Minster, and as it neared completion, the designers realized it would no longer be the tallest cathedral in the world. So after hundreds of years, they changed the plans, so its spire would surpass the Cologne Cathedral. With a dejected tone, the tour guide finished by noting that The Basilica Sagrada FamÃlia in Barcelona had surpassed the Ulm Minster a few decades earlier. The tour guide sounded defeated, as if the Ulm Minster had lost the race to be closest to heaven. As if churches’ influence was measured in meters above sea level, not followers. He wanted to tell the tour guide there were taller temples in Asia. He wanted to tell her they could just rebuild the spire. Instead, he kept his mouth shut.
The tug-of-war to build the greatest monument was humanity’s oldest sport. At three hundred meters, this would win. It would be the tallest building on the moon and maybe the tallest religious structure in the solar system. Maybe the most expensive, too. Hours ago, his captors had called him ‘one of Katera Devana’s disciples.’ At the time, he thought they meant deputies, and it was a poor translation. Were they a religious sect? One sitting on an extraordinary mining claim? The money to build this temple came from somewhere. Was he flying into a territorial dispute? Mining outfits hired mercenaries and sometimes tried to steal claims. The rightful owners often fought back.
Still, he was surprised he’d never seen an ad. The lunar colony was a tourist town, and temples loved tourists. Sometimes to proselytize. Sometimes to sell tchotchkes. Always to brag.
Why all the subterfuge bringing him here? The far side of the moon was called the dark side because it never faced Earth. Prying Earth telescopes couldn’t see it. But any of three dozen lunar satellites could. He shuddered. Maybe they weren’t ready to be seen. They’d killed two miners, so they weren’t pacifists. Maybe kidnapping him was their idea of a grand opening.
The rover slowed. He drifted into the center arch. He saw faces, hundreds or maybe thousands, carved into the archway’s cusps. Exhausted, his imagination was in free fall. It looked like a marble megalodon, with a million disembodied heads as teeth, all watching him in stony silence.
Ahead, a knife of light cut through the darkness, revealing a doorway. It was three or four times as tall as the rover. About as large as the freight elevators at the spaceport.
The arch’s shadow blanketed him and swallowed the rover.
His groundspeed read one kilometer per hour. His altitude read ninety meters and steady. He drifted into the knife of light, entering a chamber the same height as the main archway, about two hundred meters tall and half as wide. Its walls were tiled in more polished marble. An almost infinite army of white quartz statues, one-third the height of the room, buttressed the walls on both sides and receded to the chamber’s far end. They bowed their heads as if in prayer. Their hair was strung with intense blue-white stars that lit the room. The roof was a pointed arch and carved with strange mosaics. More faces, but as if someone had downloaded thousands of social media images and carved them into the marble ceiling as line drawings. The wall tiles had embellished brass inscriptions. Those were too small to read. On the top right of each tile, he saw a black box. Maybe electronic, like a keypad or access panel. Narrow, almost invisible glass platforms ran the walls. Like observation balconies, where people could walk and read the inscriptions, or use the access panel.
Based on the height of the statues, he estimated the tiles were about three meters by one and a half meters. The size of medium storage vaults. All the access panels were within reach of an average sized human standing on one of the glass platforms. Was this the most expensive temple in the solar system, or the most expensive public storage disguised as a temple? The uber rich were always trying to hide their loot from the government, their families, and each other. That would explain the subterfuge.
Behind him, the doorway closed. The rover’s gauges measured zero Pascals pressure outside the rover and steady. This chamber was hard vacuum, and it was not filling with air. While the walls looked hot and bright from the intense blue light, the infrared scan gauged them at minus forty-eight degrees Celsius. If someone was walking along an observation platform, they’d need a pressure suit with a heating element. He saw no one. Temples loved tourists, but this one was as empty as a graveyard. He never wanted to be first, especially not to a funeral.
At the far end of the chamber, a polished metal set of double doors opened in slow motion. Inside, the cream walls and red stenciled warnings of an airlock. The rear wall had a tall, transparent glass window, with three figures watching him land. Two of the figures’ faces were shadowed, but he recognized their sherwanis. The older man on the right, in the butter yellow sherwani, had called himself Alpha. The man on the left had angled hair. Its shadow fell on the glass like a dagger. He wore a cream sherwani with gold embroidery, and had called himself Omega.
Passing through the airlock, he flew close enough to read the vault’s inscriptions. Names. Names of the owners?
The rover came to rest inside the airlock. As its doors closed, the chamber lights switched off behind him. The only light came from the window.
He shivered. The third man facing him from behind the glass was unmistakable. His face was pale and sweaty and his eyes were cold and reptilian. Above the waist, he had a beer belly. Below the waist, he had a mechanical posture. He wore a navy suit with polished suede shoes. No question about it. He knew this man. He’d seen him once before, and hoped to never see him again.
