Devana Files: Chapter 19
Far Side of Daylight, Part 2
This is Part II. The Nineteenth 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.
Far side of daylight. Part 2
APRIL 9, 2074
LUNAR SURFACE. LPS: UNKNOWN
Jin took his time landing the rover. He spun it around the airlock floor like a floating Zamboni, checking all the angles, expecting to see a battalion in riot gear storm the airlock with guns drawn. As the airlock’s observation glass scrolled past the cockpit window the third time, the man in the middle, the one wearing the navy suit hardly concealing a shoulder rig, turned away. When his back was to the glass, it frosted over. Dynamic glass. One minute transparent, the next milky white, hiding the shadow of a misplaced Fed.
He waited a few moments, painstakingly locking down the rover but really testing the boundaries of his kidnapper’s patience. Nothing happened on the perimeter video feeds. The bar gauge on the console filled green as the outer pressure rose. The engine temperature gauges were orange, two thousand thirty-six degrees Celsius. When the pressure gauge hit a half atmosphere, the airlock’s massive ceiling fans began sucking heat into the cooling ductwork. When the pressure gauge hit one atmosphere, a far door opened.
Everything in the airlock was cream with red stenciled warnings. As the inner door opened, its thin black outline became a white crescent of light. From the light, two humanoids appeared, wearing tunics and odd blue hats, and ambling towards the rover’s rear cargo doors.
He waited, watching the perimeter video. The far door swung closed, silently becoming a thin black line again. Nothing else stormed the airlock.
The humanoids were droids, a male model and a female model. He switched off the security feeds, unbuckled, and exited the cockpit, plucking two hard gray cases from the overflowing equipment shelves on his way through. As he opened the rear doors, a ding in his hud alerted him he had a signal.
The droids bowed as he took the first of the rover’s four aluminum rear steps. His pressure suit boots clinked. The airlock’s red and yellow block stencils warned him about VACUUM and LOW GRAVITY and told him to BEWARE OF BLAST and to use CAUTION-FLAMMABLE. He opened his visor. The blast of hot air from the engines reminded him of the summer he ran a marathon in Death Valley. He was an idiot to go there then; he was an idiot to be here now. Some things never changed.
He had five signal bars. He took his time locking the rear doors. More dings alerted him that messages were rolling in. He could barely hear them over the ceiling fans whooshing the heat from the airlock.
The droids remained in their bow, with their arms at their sides, their eyes fixed downward, and their blue hairnets making a deep forty-five degree angle with the floor. What kind of kidnappers were they? The airlock remained empty. Still no mercenaries with guns and riot gear.
The fedboy on the payroll, the one he’d seen in the window, itself didn’t mean anything. Feds could be blackmailed or bought and sold or traded like anyone else. They were tools. Some knew it. The good ones understood the game and played it well, leaving the world a little cleaner than when they entered it. This was what Devana preached. To her, it was about balance and equilibrium, tipping the scales, and leaving her life’s personal campsite better than she found it. This fedboy was not one of the good ones. An energy vampire, he seemed to thrive on chaos. He held a grudge and would probably kill Devana for amusement. He wasn’t hiding, either, appearing behind the glass and then vanishing melodramatically like an apparition. This fedboy wanted to be seen.
It brought him back to his original question: why was he exiting the rover on two legs? Why not tie him up? Or bring out the muscle in riot gear? And why the hell were these two droids bowing?
“Rise,” he said. Exhaustion and kidnapping brought out his quick wit.
His hud’s message counter ding-ding-ding-dinged. Emojis and text whizzed in his feed like the reels of a slot machine. His neuroface punctuated each notice with a haptic buzz in his ears, eventually stopping at sixty-three. There was no way he could read them all now. A rush of warmth wet his eyes. He’d never been so happy to have five bars. He started typing out a message to Leyna, covertly, with his neuroface.
“Welcome to the Temple of the Ascension,” the gynoid on his left said. It had a soft, calm voice. The kind he expected from a therapist, or maybe a sociopath. He’d been on the colony long enough to recognize a repurposed sex model. A silicone-over-aluminum frame, covered in vat-grown strains of cloned human skin, and embedded with hard sensors that monitored blood flow and skin temperature and fed it all into an algorithm that maximized bank account discharge. It wore a black tunic that hugged its curves. The blue-white hairnet of lights covered a mop of short black hair. He imagined sadness in its empty brown eyes. There was nothing wrong with it, if one was into that sort of thing. A perfect, trim, pull-me-closer waist. Ample cup-me breasts. Wide thrust-here hips. And the soft, red, pay-me-now tongue. There was nothing wrong with it, except that it was an older model, and it was here because it had been tossed aside for something younger and fresher. He only imagined the sadness; droids didn’t have feelings on the subject.
“We are deeply honored to host a Disciple of Katera Devana,” said the android on the right. It was dressed like a priest, wearing a long white tunic, but spoke like a butler. Its net of blue-white lights covered short, sandy hair. Equally empty brown eyes glistened under the airlock’s LEDs. Oily, as if its nutrient solution leaked through its eye sockets. Its flesh was pasty and cadaverish, like something out of an old sci-fi movie. It looked like a low-budget service model, old and poorly maintained.
He got halfway through his message to Leyna before he stopped and deleted it. His abductors hacked his rover, taking control, so he had to assume they could decrypt his messages. He tried to rub the heat out of his eyes. He needed to think. Half of him was overjoyed he had a connection. The other half knew it was a trap. He had to calibrate his message. To send something cryptic that only Leyna could decipher.
“Who is ascending?” More quick wit. Over his shoulder, there was no sign of the three figures beyond the frosted glass. Not even the heat mirage from the engines could unscramble a shadowy outline. The dynamic glass was probably one-way. They were probably observing him.
Maybe he should give them something more to observe than his snappy interrogation skills, like the quick one-two-three he’d been practicing in the gym simulator. One, chokehold. Two, spin and lever. Three, get two fingers into the base of the droids’ skulls and remove the communication bean. The brains of the droids were not in the bodies. They were on a server somewhere, probably in the basement of this temple. The bodies were all silicone and vat-grown simflesh and sensors, controlled wirelessly. Yanking the bean would deactivate the droid temporarily, until the brains connected to another silicone host.
A moderately difficult maneuver with one droid. They were faster and stronger. Even if he brought both down, the far door would open, and more would flood into the airlock.
“Humans are ascendant, of course,” the gynoid said in a calm voice.
“Ascendant. Of course, that explains everything,” he said, nodding and smiling at the glass, in case they were watching him.
“We will transfer your luggage to your room.” Between the two droids was a knee-high aluminum luggage cart.
The gynoid bowed again, this time with her arms bent, palms up. The luggage cart rolled forward.
“You must be weary after your long travel, disciple Knight. Your room awaits. We have taken the liberty of drawing you a hot bath,” the butler model said.
What game were they playing? “I was told I would be brought to see the crime scene to retrieve the bodies. I want to go there now.”
“Of course. The bodies are secured,” Butler said. “They are, to be crude, not getting any deader. We have your room prepared. Rest. Supper will be served.”
“I want to meet Alpha and Omega.”
Droids didn’t exchange glances. They exchanged electrons across a network. But he detected a pause. He imagined them exchanging the equivalent of surreptitious glances across cyberspace.
“There is no Alpha or Omega here,” Butler said.
“Siddhi Alpha and Omega. On the video, on the way here. Where are they?”
“There is no Siddhi Alpha and Omega here. You were misinformed.”
“If I were, it was your damn cheap AI video that misinformed me.”
There was another pause, and then Butler said, “We will look into it. Perhaps our concierge AI hallucinated.”
Concierge AI? “Your concierge AI took over my ship.”
“We offered assistance so you could rest, disciple Knight.”
“By kidnapping me?”
There was more blue-hairnetted bowing from both droids. Up. Down. Up. Down. Like a see-saw, making him dizzy. “We are honored to host you. We apologize if our methods seem crude and offensive.”
“Who is in charge here?”
“Alphonso and Omesa are in meditation. They will receive you for dinner in several hours. Come now, rest.”
Now he saw the game they were playing. Alphonso and Omesa, not Alpha and Omega. He was being hosted, not kidnapped. If he asked, they would tell him the three armed droneship escorts were the equivalent of black SUVs on Earth protecting an arriving dignitary. His brain was heavy with exhaustion, but he was sure he hadn’t misremembered their names.
They were trying to gaslight him. If he asked to leave, they would invent a few hundred completely reasonable-sounding excuses to make him stay.
Another drone appeared from the far door as if reading his thoughts—and he couldn’t rule out they’d hacked his neuroface, too. This one was short, boxy, black, with a lot of crane-like arms.
“What’s that?” Jin nodded at the new drone. But he knew. A mechanic drone.
“It will refuel your ship and perform a full mechanical inspection,” Butler droned. “Replacing parts as needed.”
“How long will that take?”
He also knew that answer before Butler spoke. “A very thorough inspection and refueling will take hours. Come, rest. Your bathwater is precisely forty degrees Celsius. We have pastries and fruit in your room. Fresh pears imported from Argentina. Strawberries from Brazil. Peaches from Georgia.”
“Cream from Wisconsin?” Three credits of the Stanford online negotiation course, paying dividends. When kidnapped, make sure your kidnappers know your demands upfront.
“The cream of Ayrshire cows, sir, from Scotland.” He got an ‘A’ in that negotiation class. What did an ivory tower human know about negotiating with sentient AIs, anyway?
“Hours, huh.” Obviously, they kidnapped him for insightful conversation. “Fine. I’ll eat the peaches with Scottish cream, but I won’t like it. Show me to my room.” When kidnapped by psycho droids, it’s important to set boundaries.
Was the butler drone smiling? Androids did not have feelings, not even sentient ones, and therefore didn’t smile. Not really. To a droid, smiles were a servo configuration. Nothing but programmed interactions based on cultural norms to facilitate interactions with humans. The gynoid was smiling, too. Its database probably stored thousands of flirty smiles to separate johns from their wallets, pants first. And now him from his senses. If he was attracted to curvy, psychotic robots, it might work. But he wasn’t. Plus, he already had a girlfriend. Leyna was a redhead. He had all the curvy psychosis he could handle.
“Your luggage,” the gynoid said.
The first bag had clothes and toiletries. The second, his forensic equipment. He lifted them onto the luggage cart. Both had guns and knives hidden in the lining. If Devana taught him anything, it was to be prepared for everything. They were taking them. That was ok. Both had passive tracking tags hidden in the hinges, too.
Butler waved his arms towards the airlock door, which opened.
The temple passages were built of more of the white polished (fake) marble tiles. There were human busts hung near the ceiling, with blue LEDs lighting the halls. Fake lunar-engineered marble was easy to spot up close because the gray or opalescent marbling was a little too perfect and sharply defined. The tiles looked like the same size as in the outer chamber, wide, like long drawers, with black biometric scanners in the top right corners. Some had inscriptions in English. He saw Arabic, Hindu, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, too. The English and Korean he could read. Names. Were these the names of the vault owners?
When the door to his room opened, the gynoid offered to come in. When he said no, it queried a you’ve-rejected-me pout from its database and plastered it on its face. Unbelievable that he was rejecting those unhinged silicone curves when he had a real human female who loved him waiting three thousand kilometers away. What was wrong with him? All that was missing from her approach was a guilty lip bite, a bad line like, “we might die tonight,” and a fifth of whiskey.
The droids closed the door, leaving him alone. He exhaled. A line like, “we might die tonight,” might have worked, because it might be true.
A king-size bed with fluffy white sheets held court in the middle of the room. Steam and floral scents wafted from the left, which was an open bathroom with a jacuzzi and glass-enclosed shower. The walls were faux wood veneer, red oak, and lined with a lot of framed pictures. One of Orion at night, shining over a mountain village. One of the Carina Nebula. Colorful, as always. And the Tarantula Nebula, which, in his opinion, didn’t look like a tarantula. The Skull Nebula, framed in black, hung right over the middle of the bed and absolutely looked like a bloody red skull. It was obviously some sort of message. A picture of a full moon rising between the arms of a cactus on a desert plain hung above a side table on his right. On it, a silver coffee decanter, matching cups, and a pile of fruit and pastries. Fresh peaches and clotted cream, as promised. The fruit and pastries had been arranged around a pyramid of obsidian cubes.
He walked over and picked up one of the black cubes off the pile. They were squishy, like a jelly bean. Brown powder coated his fingers. They smelled like dark chocolate. It wasn’t poison. If they wanted to kill him, there were more efficient ways. He popped it into his mouth. He tasted nuts. Coconut. Chocolate. Honey.
“What is this?”
“It is Turkish Delight, also known as lokum or halgoum.” A disembodied voice answered him. Maybe from the Skull Nebula.
He was exhausted. He popped another bite of lokum into his mouth and then grabbed a pear. Holding it in his teeth, he peeled off his pressure suit. As he stepped out of it, he decided to skip the bath and get into bed.
He tossed the pear carcass in a waste bin beside the bedside table. “Dim lights.”
The room went as black as coal. The Carina Nebula glowed in the dark. Orion, too. Thankfully, the Skull Nebula above him, didn’t.
The Fed’s face flashed through his mind as he drifted off. Then the tiles in the passageways. Names. Shit, he knew what they were. This wasn’t a temple. Those weren’t storage drawers. Not exactly. He needed to message Leyna.
Dearest Leyna. I have arrived safely.
The words formed in his head, but he couldn’t be sure his neuroface was sending them to his phone. There was no haptic feedback.
He tried to sit up to retrieve his phone from the nightstand to check. He couldn’t. He tried to speak. He couldn’t. The room’s blackness enveloped him. The sedative in the lokum had already taken hold.
