Devana Files: Chapter 22
Ride or Die
This is Part II. The Twenty-second. chapter. You may find earlier chapters here:
Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is escaping for Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home to stop the killer.
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.
Note: due to technical difficulties, the voiceover was not available at publication time. It will added to this post as soon as it is available.
APRIL 10, 2074
PROCELLARIUM IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, LUNAR COLONY, U.S.A.
Before Leyna could respond to Jin’s distress call, a woman in blue scrubs appeared at the door. She had her auburn hair tied in a messy bun, ocean green eyes, and a warm skin glow and ruddy cheeks. Leyna made the mistake once of complimenting her ruddy glow and asking what kind of makeup she used. Not makeup. Dr. Torres—her friends called her Rae—never wore makeup on the job. It interfered with all sorts of giga-syllable chemicals. Rae liked to joke that the ruddy glow came from drinking cadaver blood. She was scary-smart, and just plain scary. Jin said she was popular with the rich assholes around here. Probably because they would all end up naked on one of her cold metal tables, with all their secrets splayed open. Or because she threatened to drink their blood.
“I need you to see something. In my office.” Then, gesturing at the artifact the Comet owner had dropped on her desk, Rae added, “And bring that.”
If it wasn’t already obvious, Dr. Torres was the Chief Medical examiner, her office was the morgue, and she was in scrubs, so she was fresh off a bloodbath.
Leyna fumbled the artifact into an evidence bag and stood, almost bruising her knees and knocking over a stack of envelopes. Her phone tumbled, but she clumsily juggled it back in her pocket.
She was fighting a wave. The last few hours, crashing all at once. The green mermaid. Its manga eyes staring at the camera as the john’s brains splattered on the headboard. The chase and the incinerated servers. Throwing up in the bathroom. The rancid smell of Troy’s office and the mouse droppings in the popcorn buckets. The cube on her desk, floating on static electricity. She tried not to think about the picture of Jin on her phone or the distress message.
“You are that lady,” Troy said through a mouthful of cereal.
That lady. Pro tip: women love being called that lady. Like, that lady will have the oysters. Use it on every first date, because you’ll be having a lot of them with a line like that lady.
Rae’s head swiveled like a turret and her green lasers vivisected Troy. “I prefer your majesty the Ice Queen. Pleased to meet you—”
Jin said some people called Rae the Ice Queen because the bodies she recovered from the surface were colder than dry ice. After exposure to lunar vacuum, the bodies mummified, and looked suspiciously similar to the dried bacon bits atop the lump of mushrooms Rae served at parties (don’t worry, while the vat-grown bacon was grown in recycled nutrient broth, it’s been pasteurized and filtered for earrings).
Her pictures of dead bodies were always a party favorite.
Rae rolled with the joke. Embraced it, even.
“This is Troy Bales, Vapor Trail security. I have taken his statement. The club server videos are copying over smoothly, so he was just leaving.”
She remembered his last name, a surprise.
“Can I stay? I’d like to stay and watch the download. Make sure everything goes smoothly.”
“I have your statement. If we have questions, we’ll call you.”
“I was hoping for another bowl of cereal?”
“You can order it from your room. Luna Belts is available wherever cereal is sold,” Leyna said, quoting the commercial.
“Please…?”
Leyna looked at Rae, who was watching the verbal tennis match, expressionless. Expressionless was the judgiest of looks. It was a test. Rae would not step in. Her giga-brain that stored all those giga-syllable chemical names was solving a complex algorithm that would result in Leyna being fired or promoted.
Maybe she forgot to mention it: Dr. Torres, Rae, was married to Leyna’s boss, Kate Devana. Another reason she was scary.
“No, Troy. Thank you for your cooperation.”
“You can’t make me.”
“I am locking up. If you stay, its going to be in a jail cell downstairs.”
“But I didn’t do anything.”
Debatable. He’d collected video of Vapor Trail’s clients and sold it on the server as amateur porn. He claims it was authorized in the contracts. She’d have to have Eclipse, the office AI, go through each client contract later to confirm his story.
Her immediate priority: getting him out of the office. Not least because he reeked of the indescribably fetid Vapor Trail grunge, and she kept picturing the mice skittering along the floor. She wanted to give him a fine for willful neglect of hygiene, or jail him and make the maidbots hose him down.
“You are free to go. So please do. Take a shower. Change your clothes. Just don’t leave the colony.”
“But—I could go with you. You are going to the morgue, right? I’ve’ never seen a dead body.”
“Troy, the only way you are getting to the morgue is in a body bag. I am going to have Jade here chase you out.”
Jade sat up and barked.
“You are taking a page from your boss’s police brutality seminar,” Troy said, repeating what the Comet’s owner had said.
She held his gaze until he sulked out of the chair.
“I am leaving, but I will come back in a few hours, to check on the download.”
“I will be holding my breath.” Literally. He smelled.
He got up and pushed past Rae, pouting. Watching him leave, she had a strange premonition that she wouldn’t see him again. She felt a pang of guilt. Or maybe pity, as if she’d kicked a stray puppy out of the house. She regretted what she’d said, but it was too late. He was gone.
“You’ve had a hell of a day,” Rae said. “How are you holding up?”
The wave. You didn’t fight a wave, you rolled with it. She pictured herself paddling through the surf in a wetsuit. Ride or die, the surfer’s creed. When the swell came, it didn’t wait for you to be ready. It never asked, is this your first time? It didn’t take it easy on you, or go slow. It towered overhead. So you swallowed your fear and hopped on your board and rode the tube. There was an art to wiping out; but you couldn’t think about it. Stay calm. Roll with it. Protect your head. If two stories of cold, ruthless ocean decided that today was your day to be ragdolled against the sand, you were going to have a bad day, and there wasn’t anything you could do about it. No risk, no reward.
She swallowed and stepped from behind her desk. Today was a wave. She was out of the whitewater and into the pocket, the steepest part of the wave. She would ride it and not think about wiping out.
“Ride or die,” she smiled.
“Ride or die. I like it. Have you heard from Kate?” Rae asked, pivoting for the hall.
Rae likes it.
“She just messaged me. She’s searching Vega and told me to be on standby.”
“You know you can’t save them all.”
Leyna followed down the hall and down the steps. Rae, despite being a few inches shorter, was a fast walker. Her black shoes were silent, too. Not even a squeak on the tile. Like cat’s paws. Add stealth-like capabilities to Rae’s skills. Jin had warned her that Rae liked to sneak up and listen to conversations. A fantastic trait in the boss’s wife.
“You mean Troy? His job. He hasn’t interacted with a human since August.”
“You are a detective, not a guidance counselor.”
“What does that mean?” Leyna kicked herself. She should have said, got it, or understood, instead she sounded defensive.
“Do you know the difference between a billionaire and a dead body?” Rae asked as she opened the basement door to the staff passages. The hall was empty except for one drone whizzing along carrying medical supplies.
“No idea.”
“I can restart the heart of a dead body,” Rae smiled, head cocked to the side, as the door clapped shut behind her.
Leyna half-laughed. A good joke, but she didn’t see the connection.
“Some of the so-called living around here are just as dead inside as the bodies on my table.” Rae pointed to an android walking towards them, holding a serving tray. “What makes you alive or dead is what is in your soul, not whether you have a pulse, or five amps powering your servos. A lot of the clients—because we are using the politically correct term—a lot of the clients patronizing those clubs are all but dead. Just waiting for the EKG to flatline. Troy is not an indentured servant. He can switch jobs.”
“You are saying Troy likes working there?”
“Likes is maybe too strong a word. People around here are never what they seem to be. No matter how innocent Prince of Cereal looks sitting in your office, believe their actions, not words.”
The way Troy left. The glance he’d exchanged with the owner of the Comet. She had a feeling he was going to get into worse trouble.
Rae swung open a door to what Jin called Paradise by the Basement Lights: the morgue. “You want to help him? Figure out what the hell is going on with these rogue artifacts.”
Jin said it was a law of physics: morgues were always on the basement floor. Like a black hole, sucking souls into its event horizon. A body at rest, he said, ended up at the morgue while a body in motion ended up at the morgue faster.
She’d never been here. The walls were vomit-green and phlegm-yellow with brushed aluminum cabinets. The smell was a stomach-turning rendition of body oils, bleach, dried blood, and formaldehyde, and all of it mixed into the wake of Rae’s lavender body wash.
There were five cadaver tables. All empty and shiny, thankfully. An assistant wearing all purple scrubs, with a sock-like protector covering his Viking-length beard, stood at the first table. His nametag read ERIC SCHMIDT.
As they approached, Eric held his hands wide over the cadaver table, like a magician about to do a card trick.
“These started showing up three weeks ago.” Rae gestured towards the table in front of Eric. “The first victim was Xue Jinjing. Female. A Chinese National on holiday. From her, we collected this sphere.”
On the cadaver table, on protective green fabric, were a black sphere and three black cubes, from left to right. The middle cubes were pristine and looked identical to the one in the evidence bag in her pocket. The sphere had the same anodized black finish as the cubes, but was roughly the same size. The final cube on the right was black and charred, which she figured was the one from Vapor Trail.
“She was also murdered by a droid?”
“No. But I’ll get to that.” Pointing to the second object, the first cube, Rae said, “This was taken from Stefan Herman two weeks ago. Male. An EU citizen also on holiday. Then we collected this from Júlia Fernandes, a Brazilian national, last week. And of course the Vapor Trail victim.”
“All four murdered by a droid in the last month?”
“That’s the thing,” Rae said. “We ruled these first three suicides. Jinjing was sixty-seven. Herman, eighty-one. Fernandes, seventy-eight.”
“Suicides? I don’t understand.”
“I am not sure I do either. Jinjing had a very aggressive form of pancreatic cancer. Weeks to live, if that. We found her topside, on the surface, after she spaced herself. Herman had stage four glioblastoma. Brain cancer. Also weeks to live. He shot himself in his hotel room. Fernandes had distant chondrosarcoma. She hung herself, also in her hotel room.”
“Distant chondrosarcoma?”
“Bone cancer in her hips and spine that had metastasized to her lungs.”
“They came here on holiday and then committed suicide?”
“We get a lot of suicide tourism. The brochures promise a painless way to spend your last seconds. Die under the stars. There are videos on how to disable the safety protocols on pressure suits and unlatch your helmet. Some will even provide a tour guide to take you topside. If you’re really rich, you can have a mausoleum built in permanent shade.”
“Why do that?”
“Because you hope the aliens or future humans have a cure? Because its painless? These three, at least, put their affairs in order and left notes. Half the time we don’t find the bodies because they go exploring and wander into a crater.”
Eric chimed in, his beard protector muffling his voice. “Herman and Fernandes left surface coordinates in their notes so we’d find them. I think they planned to go topside, but had their access blocked. So instead they committed suicide in their rooms.”
“Were droids involved?”
“Eric pulled security feeds,” Rae said, waving his direction. “We don’t think so. Jinjing took a self-driving rover to the surface, got out, and wandered. She didn’t get far. The only robots around Herman and Fernandes were maidbots, a few hours after the fact.”
“Who found the bodies?”
“The rental agency that owned the rover reported Jinjing missing. We recovered the body. Maidbots found Herman and Fernandes when they opened the room to clean it.”
Leyna thought about the timeline, straightening it in her head. “Jinjing was first, but she was found with a sphere.”
Eric coughed. “Not with a sphere. It was inside her.”
“Surgically implanted?”
“Protocol does not require a scan, and we didn’t do an autopsy.”
He hadn’t answered the question. “Why no autopsy?”
“Protocol doesn’t require one,” he repeated defensively.
Rae put her hand up. “We are changing our guidelines. I wouldn’t have done one on Jinjing either. We relied on her recent medical records, which showed the cancer had spread to her bladder and liver. There was nothing in her medical file about implants—except for her neuroface five years ago—and external photos show no recent scars.”
“So how did you retrieve it?”
Eric said, “It fell out during aquamation. Maybe she swallowed it. Hard to say.”
Aquamation was a high temperature bath that dissolved the body. Even the bones softened and disintegrated. The result was a nutrient solution of the body’s constituents, which was then filtered, pasteurized, and recycled as fertilizer. The process dissolved everything except internal metal parts and electronics, such as knee and hip replacements, pacemakers, neurofaces, or body jewelry. Basically, anything plastic or metal fell to the bottom of the tank. Including unusual alien spheres.
“Were the other two—the cubes—also inside the victims?”
Rae said, “No. Like the fourth victim, those were found near the bodies. We inventoried them with their personal possessions. These were cut and dry suicides, so we thought nothing more of it.”
“But the sphere was inside Jinjing. That didn’t seem unusual?”
Eric said, “You would be shocked by what people put in their rectum and what precipitates in the aquamation tank. Or maybe you wouldn’t, I don’t know.”
Leyna turned the pattern over in her mind. Three suicides, and then a homicide. All one week apart. “The murder feels like an escalation.”
An escalation of what, though? How were the victims linked? Where were the droids in the suicides?
She reached for one of the middle, pristine black cubes and then pulled her hand back. “Maybe I should wear gloves.”
Eric handed her a pair of black latex gloves from a metal drawer. She snapped them on and then inspected the artifacts in her palm.
“These four aren’t charged.”
“Charged?” Rae asked.
Leyna retrieved the evidence bag and dumped the fifth black cube on the green protective cloth. “Whatshisface, the owner of the Comet, gave me this just before you arrived. He said he found it after he fired one of the Vapor Trail gynoids.” Leyna continued, relaying the entire conversation with the club owner.
“The Volga Vikings?” Rae chuckled.
“I have never wanted to set someone on fire so much in my life.”
“He has that effect on everyone.” Rae snapped a glove on and poked the fifth cube. “It’s charged?”
“Charged. Like static electricity.”
Eric said, “The first four are inert. But the fifth has a charge. Like the others have been used, but this one hasn’t”.
“Used for what? That’s the question,” Rae said, turning the fifth cube over in her hand.
“Can you scan them?”
“Scanning them,” Eric said, “is dangerous. We don’t know what’s in them.”
“Electronics,” Leyna said. “I think electronics.”
“How would one get the electronics inside? Damned if I see a way to open them.”
“3D print the metal around the electronics. I am not good with metals, so I can’t tell whether these are made of aluminum or titanium. If we scan these, I think we’ll find surface electronics, like microscopic wires that connect through the surface to whatever is inside. Invisible to the naked eye but would show up, maybe under a microscope.”
Eric stared at her. The sock covering his beard hid his mouth, but his jaw was half open.
“What? I did more than surf in Hawaii.” That was true, but barely. She put her phone on the table, face up, and dammed up her tears. “While we’re gathered here together, Jin is in trouble. It’s connected somehow. He sent me this.”
“Dearest Leyna?” Rae asked, scrolling the message. “That doesn’t sound like Jin at all.”
“My mother would write me letters in calligraphy. I used to ignore them. They were painful to read and usually made no sense. I would come up with all sorts of excuses not to read them. I’d say I was busy with work. Or school. My phone dropped in the surf so I couldn’t call her back. Whatever. Eventually I ran out, so a few years ago she figured it out and cornered me. It was late at night, when I had no excuse. She read them to me. Then she started reading them at the dinner table during the holidays. I was a hostage.”
“A mothers love knows no bounds,” Eric said.
“Right? Letterboarding, I called it. Like waterboarding, only worse.”
“So the message is code.”
“I dub thee Eric, knight of the obvious.” Leyna cackled hysterically and then wiped foam from her eyes. “Dearest Leyna means he’s being held hostage. This song he quotes, it’s our anti-song. We heard it on our first date and laughed at how awful it is.”
“A clown magician being at your birthday party? What does he mean by that?” Rae asked.
“I am not sure. My mother hated clowns and magicians. It’s an opposite-gram. I can crack it. All I need is coffee and sugar. I need to do it off-grid too, at least until I know how the droids are involved.”
Rae pinch-zoomed the image and spun it around. “I can’t read the orange tag. But next to it, in his suitcase…”
“A sixth artifact. A cube, wrapped like a present. I think the droids lured him there, and now plan to kill him.”
But what droids, and who was controlling them?
“They couldn’t have known he would go. It must have already been in his luggage before he left,” Eric said.
“Jin was fond of saying that the high level AIs are always four steps ahead of us.” She halted, looking around. She didn’t want to be the rookie crying in the morgue, in front of her boss’s wife. “Is fond of saying, I meant, not was. He’s missing, not dead.”
It sounded hollow out loud.
Rae squeezed Leyna’s shoulder and smiled. “We will get him back here in one piece.”
She had another premonition. Back here was the morgue, the gravity well for dead people. She didn’t want Jin back here, in this place, on a metal tray butchered like cattle, like her mother. She wanted him home, in bed. The wave was breaking over her. There was foam in her eyes. She spun, looking for the exit and a bathroom stall. She heard Jin’s voice whisper, “Everyone returns to the morgue, sweetie. It’s a law of physics.”
Not Jin. Never. The vomit-green walls and metal cabinets were a blur on her way out. She didn’t make it through the door before her cheeks were wet.
