Devana Files: Chapter 26
Worth Fighting For, Part 1
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This is the Twenty-sixth 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 trying to escape to 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.
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 11, 2074
NYS VEGA, TRANSLUNAR ORBIT
Deputy Detective Leyna Darcy opened the bathroom tap after flushing her lunch and maybe her job down the toilet for the second time in a day. Air hissed from the faucet. Somewhere in the colony’s bowels, pumps forced recycled water into pipes. It traveled up to the lunar surface, circulated through patches of permanently dark permafrost the temperature of dry ice, and then returned chilled, sputtering into the sink. Tourist marketing videos called it LunarThermal, but Jin said that was just a fancy brand name for old-fashioned geothermal, except in reverse, because the pipes went up instead of down. She hoped the pipes were protected from the surface’s harsh cosmic rays. She wanted cold water, not radioactive water, and she wouldn’t put it past the greedy builders to cheat with substandard insulation and dimwittedly nuke the tourists. The water probably wasn’t dangerous. If it was, she figured Jin would have warned her.
It didn’t matter how it all worked. The bathroom was spinning and what mattered right now was that the water tasted icy and soothed her nausea.
This wasn’t happening to her for a second time today, except that it was. The first wave of nausea she chalked up to nerves. Seeing a man killed roiled her stomach, or that’s what she told herself. But it had to be the smells. First the rancid popcorn smell at Vapor Trail, and then the chemical smells in the morgue. Now she was worried. She wasn’t ready. Over and over she kept thinking she was a probationary deputy. She could be dismissed for any reason. Jin was missing, and she couldn’t do this by herself. In some primitive part of her mind, she always thought it would be Jin coming to her rescue, not the other way around.
She fidgeted with her ponytail. When she met Jin, her hair was brown. She’d let her natural fire red grow out. Now she looked too much like her mother. Scrunching it, banding it, testing it in a bun, whatever she did, her mother still tormented her in the mirror.
Maybe she should go back to her college look. Black hair, black lipstick, and black nails. Black eye shadow would hide the puffiness in her eyes from vomiting. Maybe the colony needed a goth detective. If you look edgy, you feel edgy. Wasn’t that how the saying went? Goth makeup would clash with the blue uniform, but so what? She needed to be edgy.
Her mother had been the opposite of edgy. She painted the colony as a glorious five-star hotel, with its brass fittings, expensive artwork, marble, and celebrity. Everything looked fancy here, like the quartz bathroom countertop and tile floor, but it was all engineered moonstone, and moonstone was nothing but colored glass and cheap resin. It was all fake. Affectations, for the tourist experience. Her mother was naïve, unable to see past what was right in front of her. The result, someone she had known for forty years snuck up and murdered her in the middle of a wedding party.
She gave up on her hair and banded it loosely. Jin liked her red hair, so she’d keep it. Plus, hair dye might be out for a while.
The coded note on her phone was the key to bringing Jin home. He wrote, ‘in bytes we send,’ so he’d embedded some sort of image in the message that she needed to extract. The second half of the message contained lyrics from a horrible song that had hit number one the week they started dating. The last line, ‘Our love’s code, no one can break,’ was a reference to a one-time pad cipher. Only she knew the key. He’d given it to her, it was a secret between the two of them, and it didn’t exist on any server anywhere for a decryption algorithm to scrape and test.
The first paragraph still puzzled her. It was some sort of warning. But he’d written it like some sort of dream. Some of it made sense, the rest was surreal.
Still weak and shaking, she took a deep breath and shoved the bathroom door open to the basement’s puke-green hallway, the same color green as the lunch she’d flushed down the toilet. Eric and Dr. Torres waited for her down the hall at the morgue’s aluminum double doors.
What was she going to say? They’d think she couldn’t handle the job. She looked like shit. There was no point in hiding the fact that she’d just retched. Her eyes were swollen, and sound broadcast through the hospital’s ductwork as loud as a rock concert. Probably the whole universe heard her. If she was going to be fired, she wanted to go out on her terms, not theirs.
Problem was, she didn’t know what her terms were. Not yet.
She straightened her uniform and quickened her pace. Fake it till you make it.
Eric’s long, iron-red beard couldn’t mask his devilish grin. His lips were pinched around a straw full of brown liquid, and his cheeks pulsated, sucking muscle juice into his ear-to-ear smirk. He’d changed into jeans and a too-tight blue golf shirt. His shoulders and biceps bulged, nearly busting the seams. He held his cup upright like a barbell as if it had the density of Thor’s Hammer.
Christ, he was thinking up some way to embarrass her.
Dr. Torres scanned her like an x-ray machine, up and down. Her icy green eyes assessed Leyna’s every pore, and then she crossed her arms. “Do you have a fever?”
Where were the black cubes? Still in the morgue? Leyna tried to peer over Dr. Torres’s shoulder and through the glass window, but all she saw were the morgue’s metal cabinets and its phlegm-yellow ceiling.
“No fever. I feel fine. Maybe a delayed reaction to what I saw at Vapor Trail.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Maybe she should have gone with, ‘yes, fever.’ She didn’t sound fine. She sounded defensive and lame.
Dr. Torres’s face, expressionless, was impossible to read. Either she believed her, didn’t believe her, or was about to sedate her and carve her up on a cadaver table.
“I just needed some fresh air.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Dr. Torres had the same expressionless look, all the time. A brilliant interrogation technique. If Leyna was being accused of hiding something, she didn’t know what.
Well, yes, she did. Trying to lie to Dr. Torres was dumb. Uh, why don’t you flop your hair around like a bimbo, too, Leyna. Deputy Detective Leyna Dumbass, that’s me.
Eric’s jowls suctioned brown goo through his straw, working up to something snarky. She did not need his shit.
“Fresh air,” he said. “Have to go four hundred thousand kilometers for fresh air.” He punctuated his comment with a noisy slurp.
He was enjoying himself. She wanted to flip him off. Or pull her stun gun out and shock that grin off his face. But Dr. Torres was right here and there were laws against torturing jackasses.
She should have let it go, but her shakes got the better of her. “Helpful. Eric the Obvious. Thanks. I’ll note it.”
“Maybe you’re—”
“Maybe you should shut it.”
Eric made a show of sucking his disgusting brown liquid through his smug lips. He got to her, and he savored it more than whatever was in the metal cup. She could smell it, too, and it smelled like poop. It was making her sick again.
He opened his mouth to take another run at annoying her, upping the stakes, but Dr. Torres cut him off. “I’ve asked Eric to help you until Kate is back.”
Wonderful news. The best, really. They thought she couldn’t handle it herself. Next, she’d be getting a departmental award and signing autographs. Congratulations, you’ve managed the shortest assignment in the history of police forces anywhere.
Well, maybe not the shortest. Kate said one of her partners only lasted a week and ran a drone shop now, so she had a bright future as a tourist toy jockey.
“Howdy, pardner,” Eric grinned.
“Gee, I’ve never had my own personal jackass before.”
“Eee-awww. At your service.”
“Let’s go donkey boy. I want those victim names in our department computer so we can correlate them.”
Donkey boy. Good one, Leyna. If you’re fired, you can do standup comedy.
“Donkey boy already did that. I returned the artifacts to your office safe. While I was there, I entered the four victim’s names into Eclipse for you, and tasked it to scrape everything, including financials. We are still waiting on the name of the Vapor Trail vic. If they are connected, we’ll find out in about an hour.”
Eric did all that while she was puking in the bathroom? Was she in there that long? Also, she didn’t think he had access to Eclipse, the department's investigative AI.
“Who gave you access?”
“Jin tells me everything.” He emphasized everything with a deep pucker and a long pull from his straw. Eric the gloater, gloating.
She glared at him, shooting as many porcupine quills as she was receiving, trying not to panic. Jin told him she was late. He and Eric hung out together, and the two of them were always in constant competition to manifest more testosterone. But she thought they only talked about guns and video games and lifting. Anyway, being late didn’t mean anything. She hadn’t taken a test and wasn’t going to for a while. There was no point, at least until Jin was back. It could be nerves. Or a virus. Could be anything, really
She had a vision of a bassinet beside her desk, with bells and a music box and some rockets hanging for the baby to play with. Then the baby was a toddler, and the greasy prick from the Comet was in her office. She was trying to handcuff him while the toddler crawled all over her.
Raising a kid on the moon. No way she could do this alone. She needed Jin back
Whatever Jin said to Eric didn’t mean anything, but Eric was going to torture her about it anyway. For weeks. She’d be forced to murder Jin. Some kind of gory way, too, involving cutting out his tongue and stuffing it down Eric’s throat. Whatever the mafia did to snitches.
She swallowed. “So the artifacts are secure, in our vault?”
“Tighter than a nun’s—”
“As tight as my hands will be around your neck if you don’t shut up?”
He grinned at her, shaking his head. There was no way she was going to get her tiny hands all the way around his thick neck, and he knew it. That brown poo goo he was guzzling was making her nauseous again.
Dr. Torres uncrossed her arms and walked away. “Play nice, kids. I want an update in an hour, when the results come in.”
Her stomach settled a little, watching Dr. Torres recede.
If the artifacts were in their office vault, she would have access to them later. One of them had power. Maybe she could figure out how it worked and download data from it.
Eric said, “You are thinking she doesn’t smile, but I saw it once, when this cadaver came in. Frozen solid on the surface for six months and perfectly preserved inside a spacesuit. She got two papers out of it.”
“What did Jin tell you?”
“Kinda weird when you think about it. We will all end up naked and dead on her aquamation prep table. Unless she dies first, in which case I will be doing her. But either way, its the perfect business model. Everybody dies, and their bodies go through her office. She could make a killing. Haha—get it?”
“No wonder you’re still single.”
He pouted, twisting his face into a sad puppy frown. “Now, that hurt.”
In truth, he was single by choice. He had a plan and had mapped his whole life out. He liked to say, ‘there has to be a me before there is a we.’ His working-on-himself phase involved secret night classes and gallons of that revolting brown puree in his cup.
She was a little envious. Nothing about her life was planned. And if she tried to plan, the universe would intervene with a meteor. If something was ninety-seven percent effective, she was the three percent. Shit.
“Shut up and answer my question.” She slapped him. It stung her knuckles. His pecs and shoulders were as hard as rocks.
“Eee-awww.” The veins in his biceps pulsed. His eyes curled into his you-know-what-I-know smug expression. He was going to be stubborn and would just keep teasing her.
She slapped him again, gentler this time. “You don’t know anything.”
“Donkey boy know plenty.” He offered his straw. “Try it.”
“What’s in it today?”
“The usual. Yeast protein. Creatine. Leucine. HMB. Mixed in bourbon and cola.”
“Jesus, you’ll be the most jacked kidney dialysis patient in the solar system. She lets you drink on the job?”
“I am not on her job anymore, am I sweet cheeks? I’m on yours.”
“Call me sweet cheeks again, I will put three million volts through your dick.”
He puckered up and blew a kiss. “I love you too, sweet cheeks.”
She put her hand on her stun gun. He pushed his straw closer. “Take a sip. Sweet cheeks.”
She tried to hold his stare. Instead, she giggled and then grabbed the cup. It smelled like a warm wet fart and made her gag. She almost retched on the spot.
“Did you put any cola in this at all?”
He shrugged.
She handed it back. “No thanks.”
“So…now we aren’t drinking?”
“I am not drinking that. I need my liver, thank you.”
He made a show of licking the straw up and down and then taking a giant slurp. “Mmmmmmm. Delicious, sweet cheeks.” The smirk under his red beard wrapped all the way to his temples.
She flipped him off. “Whatever you think you know, you don’t know.”
“Jin tells me everything. He’s a drunk talker.”
“Told you what? There is nothing to tell. It’s also none of your business, and I am going to murder both of you violently while you sleep.”
He raised one eyebrow, but before he spoke, the elevator dinged, and a woman with a long blond ponytail and wearing a blue pantsuit walked into the hall. She swiveled, looking both ways. Her suit jacket flared, exposing the black pistol on her belt for a nanosecond. Standard issue and unmistakable. The woman eyed them and aimed for a direct confrontation.
“I smell sulfur,” Eric said.
“I haven’t seen one of those in a while. Don’t they have tails and horns?”
“The horns are retractable. The tail is hidden under the cheap pantsuit.”
“They travel in pairs. Where’s the other one?”
“Probably gnawing its teeth on a poor soul upstairs.”
The woman limped and used a cane. It felt like it took hours for her to shuffle down the hall. Step. Limp. Step. Limp. Step. Limp. The cane clacked on the fake granite floor.
Leyna had never seen a Fed limp, and she didn’t think she was seeing one now. She’d seen surfers with all sorts of leg injuries. The supposedly gimpy leg was a little too strong and stable. Something was off.
The woman stopped an arm’s length away, checking their nametags. She settled on Leyna and then displayed a badge on her phone lockscreen. “Deputy Darcy. I am FBI agent Special Agent Kristi Lindsay. Here to pick up my prisoner.”
Agent Lindsay was alone. Her partner was wandering somewhere, and unsupervised Feds roaming the colony only caused trouble.
Something in the first half of Jin’s message clicked in her brain. He’d warned her. This wasn’t good. Not good at all.