Devana Files: Chapter 23
Please don't feed the donkycorn
This is Part II. The Twenty-third. 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
NYS VEGA, TRANSLUNAR ORBIT
Kate's chameleon drones tracked the glittering sand trail from the bridge, down ladder rungs, through hissing pipes, and under dripping yellow water to a dead-end section of supply deck at the bottom of Vega. She followed. Now a circle of six cargo containers towered over her like three-story pillars, arranged hexagonally and each with a door. None of them on the manifest. A layer of gray, zero-skid plastic covered everything—the walls, the handrails, the floor—along with two decades of dents and scuffs. One container was special. It was Lebofield’s.
Beneath her, Vega’s muscular Hanabishi engines chanted a dull roar, rattling the ship under maximum thrust. Despite the vibration, the sand stuck to the walls. Boots had pressed it into the non-slip layer. The ship wasn’t spinning now, but when it did, the centrifugal force allowed the crew to walk the walls to access the containers.
There was no reason to link the malware relentlessly pinging her mech suit to the glittering silvery sand, other than that neither belonged on a ship to Mars. The malware wasn’t in Vega’s computer. It wasn’t in any of the five-hundred-plus containers she’d jettisoned. It had to be broadcasting from a container still aboard. Her gut told her it was one of these six. The crew likely dug something out of a crate full of fine silica before they abandoned ship. Either they took whatever it was with them, eight giants cramped into an escape capsule designed for four, or they’d activated a sabotage device.
Her hud alerted her to an incoming call. Rae. The physics of Rae’s calls were mystifying. Kate could be halfway across the galaxy fighting alien xenomorphs, and Rae would appear in that little window dressed in scrubs, always green or blue scrubs that brought out Rae’s succubus-like green eyes and Lilith-like demonic smile, promising something erotic or dangerous. Or erotic and dangerous.
She and Rae had orbited each other for a long time. Her grandfather Jerry knew Rae before she did, working cases together. They never got together because there was always someone or something else. When they finally fell together last year, it felt as if they fit together like two perfect puzzle pieces. She didn’t like the word ‘soulmates,’ but she wouldn’t be surprised to learn they’d been together in some other universe. They got married five months ago. Rae had a child by her first marriage, Axio, and Kate was mastering the step-mom thing. Jerry raised her since she was twelve. He died in March. She regretted he hadn’t lived long enough to see great-grandkids. Death comes for us all. She only wished it didn’t come so fast, with unfinished business.
Kate pushed those thoughts away and made her neuroface answer the call. “Kate’s piracy service. If they don’t surrender, we apprehender. No job too menial. How may I direct your call?”
“Your new Deputy ran out of my morgue,” Rae said, her voice crackling over the comms. A small window in Kate’s heads-up display pixelated, and Rae appeared in blue scrubs framed by her drab yellow office wall.
“Press five. One of our human resources robots will be with you after the heat death of the universe.”
“Funny. I have something you need to look at.”
“You have two things I need to look at.”
“This isn’t about my boobs.”
“Your love handlebars, then.”
“It’s about some—I don’t know, objects we found.”
“You know, Leyna was our Deputy when we hired her. Now she's my Deputy. I told you to stop showing the space mummies to the new hires.”
Rae chuckled. “I didn’t show her any mummies. Anyway, as I recall, you didn’t run.”
“Your lavender aura was like a tractor beam.” She also remembered Rae’s ample lunar lift bouncing under her scrubs. “Call me sick and demented.”
“Don’t forget dark and twisted.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“And I love that about you.”
While Rae was talking, Kate was inspecting the doors with her flashlight. Four were ordinary. The kind you see on every container at every port in the world. They had a cam and lock system. Twin metal rods on each side, each with locking lugs at the bottom. In the middle of the doors was a plate with a biometric lock. A gasket around the threshold sealed the doors, protecting the contents from decompression.
The fifth door, to her left, was a set of double-wide barn doors with a simple drop-style barricade lock. Behind the barn door, crashing and stomping. She’d heard thumping on the bridge but thought it was Vega’s frame being torn apart under thrust. Now she thought it was something else. Her flashlight found hay on the floor in front of that door.
The sixth door was Lebofield’s space camper. His door had a regular handle, taupe and brown racing stripes, and a window, which was blacked out with shades. The window was space glass, so if she decided to jettison him, he could watch her wave goodbye with her middle finger.
“When are we going to be twisted again? What’s your ETA?” Rae asked.
“A few hours. Depends what I find behind door number six. You know, I did mention once or twice I wasn’t sure Leyna was ready.”
“She is handling the job fine. She is worried about Jin.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t say its a bad idea to hire a Deputy sleeping with another Deputy.”
“Do as I say, not as I do?”
“That was a long time ago. And a mistake,” Kate said, flicking the light over the barn door. Big things went through that door.
“You can’t save everyone, sweetie. People have to make their own mistakes.”
“I’d like to think I made mistakes so they don’t have to.”
She decided to open the door on her right first. It had an ordinary lock that was snug, secure, and, most importantly, wasn’t booby-trapped. She walked up to it and keyed the override code. When the security panel turned green, she lifted the handles and pulled. The container had no light, but even in the oblique shadows, she recognized the contents.
“Are you watching the feed?” She asked Rae.
“Your feed is a black square.”
Kate turned on her helmet lights and stepped into the container, shining her flashlight over the black, body-sized boxes strapped down on a pallet in the middle of the floor. “I have coffins here.”
“I see them now. Those aren’t coffins. Those are the liners. The coffins are inside.”
And bodies were inside the coffins.
People wanted to go to Mars, alive or dead.
“Your powers of deduction are most impressive, Doctor Torres. The seals aren’t broken. You think I should open them?”
“They should be vacuum sealed to preserve the bodies, so if they did it right, you won’t be able to.”
A corpse’s all-expenses-paid burial trip to Mars would cost more than most of Earth’s inhabitants’ lifetime earnings. Times three, even. No one cheated death. But the rich could afford hope. People shipped their bodies to Mars to store themselves for the day death was curable. Presto, undead on Mars.
She backed out and closed the container door. She heard thumping in the container behind her, the one with the barn door. As she approached it, she opened her visor, catching a foul straw and urine smell. Running her flashlight around the door, she saw a simple counterweight mechanism. Two handles. No airlock. No seals. Not even a regular lock.
“There is hay and urine behind this door,” Kate said. “And a lot of banging and stomping. What do your powers of deduction say about opening this door?”
“The three possibilities as I see it are, a xenomorph waiting to eat you, or slaves being transported to Mars and trying to escape.”
Xenomorphs, of course, didn’t exist. Rae was joking. On a spaceship like Vega, the real monsters were the ordinary gutless human crew. Clean quarters weren’t part of the all-inclusive smuggling package.
“Jesus. Is it terrible to hope for the xenomorph?” Kate asked.
“If it’s a xenomorph, we are living in a simulation, and the developers programmed a happy ending where the monster dies. You are dressed in a mech suit and ready to go.”
“Yee-haw. Make sure to post this video on the server after my death. If I die, I want a billion views.”
Kate lifted the bar and rolled open the doors. The hay and urine stink made her want to vomit. There were four half-height floors inside the container and a center shaft with a ladder.
It wasn’t people they’d locked in this container.
“Love, what was choice number three?” Kate asked.
“Shit, are you kidding me? I was kidding. Am I really seeing this?”
As she climbed the rungs, her flashlight probed the piles of straw, the corners, and the dirty aluminum walls. There were troughs of food and water, much of which had spilled when Vega shifted from centrifugal-force simulated gravity to a deceleration burn.
There were cages. Hundreds of cages of various sizes. And the cages had animals. She climbed the ladder through four levels of zoo stink and droppings.
The container had a whole petting-zoo’s worth of animals baaing and grunting, cordoned off by chickenwire in cramped pens. Five sheep, two llamas, three pigs, three or maybe four restless goats, including one billy goat, chickens, bunnies, a donkey, and an alpaca—at least that she could see while steadying herself on the ladder as it shook under thrust. Not just any animals, though. The llamas were purple, the alpacas pink, the rabbit blue, the sheep teal, and the donkey white with a horn and pink tail. All marvels of human genetic engineering, except the goats, which were standard white and brown, with the standard and intense goat smell.
“I am not sure if this is better or worse than a xenomorph,” Kate said. “I’ve got an alpinka here, and a donkeycorn.”
“Just what Mars needs, more than water recyclers and oxygen generators. A petting zoo.”
“There is no owner listed on the manifest, but I’d bet these are Lebofield’s animals.”
“How do they look?”
How did they look? Animal husbandry—not a topic they cover in the Space Force Academy.
“You tell me. You are the one that went to medical school and grew up on a farm in Wisconsin.”
“A dairy farm. I don’t see any cows there. I can barely see anything at all on this fisheye feed.”
The animals were lining up for attention, or food, but she didn’t dare touch them or unlock the cages. The servos in her mechanical space suit were calibrated for combat and lifting heavy objects, not petting rabbits. And the last thing she needed was to be chasing chickens around the spaceship.
“My official report will reflect that they smell. If they can make alpacas pink, why can’t they engineer goats that don’t pee on themselves?”
“Tell me what you see. Sores? Mange? Are the hooves cracked? Do they limp? Are they fed and watered?”
Kate had twenty pairs of pitiful furry eyes on her, waiting expectantly for her to pet them, or render judgment.
“They look cramped. The donkeycorn’s hair looks recently brushed. Its hooves are trimmed. No limp. The straw looks fresh. The troughs spilled, but there is still food and water in them.”
“Any signs of abuse?”
“Other than being caged on a months-long trip to Mars? Not really. On the witness stand, I’d be forced to say I’ve seen worse care at the Texas State Fair. There is not a month’s worth of poop in the donkey’s cage. Days, if that. I think something or someone has been cleaning the cages.”
Which was interesting. She hadn’t encountered droids or robots yet. She doubted Vega’s crew would feed the animals themselves.
“My advice,” Rae said. “Close up and move on. Nothing you can do for them until you get back. They will be fine for a few hours.”
“Roger, moving on.”
Kate backed out of the container and closed the doors. Hay stuck to her boots. There was hay on the floor here, but her flashlight beam found no hay at the threshold of Lebofield’s door. Nor sand. Who or what was cleaning the cages? There had to be robots somewhere. Her flashlight caught a glimmer on the floor, a concentration of silica quartz outside the container to the right of Lebofield’s.
“Sweetie, I know you are busy, but can you take a moment and look at the pictures I sent? Then I’ll leave you to continue filming Lifestyles of the Rich and Paranoid.”
“I hope they comply with Space Force regulation 69-D.”
“What is Space Force regulation 69-D?”
“All downloads to your wife, that’s me, must include one or more nudes. In furtherance of Team Devana morale.”
Rae flashed a grin, but it faded quickly. “These things are…I don’t know. They look like large dice, but they aren’t marked with numbers. One has some sort of static charge. Leyna thinks they contain electronics.”
Rae sent a nude selfie, posed in their bed with a rose in her teeth, but the images of the black cubes gripped Kate’s focus.
She swiped through the pictures, using her neuroface, dread curdling in her stomach. “You said one is charged?”
“Like static electricity. Except it doesn’t spark. Do you know what these are?”
She knew what these were. Very dangerous. Was this what the crew activated? As unlikely as it seemed, she couldn't dismiss the possibility. If there was one aboard, she could destroy it. If they carried these aboard the escape capsule, she couldn’t let them get to the colony.
“I have seen these before. First, though, tell me exactly how you obtained these. And more importantly, how did you get six of them?”
