《Devana Files》 Prologue There were no ghosts on the moon, she told herself. A temporary event tent on the moon¡¯s surface made her edgy. The roof and sides were some sort of clear mylar, although it was too bright inside to see the stars. There were three dozen people inside, all dressed in black and gray, all seated in a square around the casket, with the combined wealth of a medium-sized country. Some were wiping crocodile tears off their cheeks. Some were crying real tears. Her seat was the kind of uncomfortable folding aluminum chair one expected at a funeral. One designed to prod and poke to keep people painfully awake. The floor was thick, made of a white canvas-like material, and open to a hole in the lunar dirt where the casket would be lowered in a few minutes. The hole was open to bare regolith, therefore, so was the tent. She didn¡¯t understand what stopped the air from seeping out. They were all one pinprick away from rupturing this contraption and getting spaced. But they¡¯d been here an hour, so it obviously stayed sealed, although that thought didn¡¯t placate her jittery nerves. Jin, her deputy and number two, told her not to worry about security. He¡¯d take care of it, he said. Of course she worried. She was still the chief. She was responsible for the safety of everyone here. She was never off duty. Nothing about this funeral was her idea. Greg, her brother, didn¡¯t like it either. But it was Jerry¡¯s choice to make, and he¡¯d written it all down in explicit detail. So here they were, sitting in front of his casket, which was about to be lowered two meters into a lunar grave, listening to a pastor drone on about the afterlife, while images of people suffocating roiled her mind. ¡°How you doing?¡± Greg asked. She¡¯d only seen him wear a suit a handful of times. He was sitting to her right. He¡¯d slicked his hair with some sort of product and looked good in his gray jacket and navy blue tie. Fuck you, is how I am doing, she wanted to say, and beat on his chest until she¡¯d exhausted her rage, like the old days, then he¡¯d pull her into a brotherly hug. She looked around at the crowd. ¡°Lets get these people out of here.¡± He took her hand and covered it with both of his. His hands were like bear paws and buried hers. ¡°You know as soon as we get out of here,¡± he said, ¡°you will have to spread ¡®em wide. Make sure they pucker up and get both lips in there.¡± She laughed, feeling a tear squeeze out. What Greg meant was that half the people in the tent were here to pay their respects to Jerry. The other half were here to be seen kissing his granddaughter''s ass. The ass of the colony¡¯s sheriff, and the wife of the Chief Medical Examiner, Rae. Her ass. ¡°My cheeks are not open for business today.¡± ¡°You say that like you have a choice,¡± Rae whispered, squeezing her other hand. Rae was seated on her left, wearing a long-sleeved black dress, with a deep plunging neckline shaped like a tawdry smile and studded with rhinestones. Her auburn hair flowed down her back, to where her bra strap would be, if she were wearing a bra. Rae overflowed the neckline. She noticed Kate eyeing her cleavage and flashed a flirty eyes-up-here smile and squeezed her hand again. Rae didn¡¯t need to ask how Kate was, because she¡¯d already seen the tears. Last night, and the night before that. The pastor finished his sermon and paused. Kate stood. She knew what he would say next, so she interrupted. ¡°Greg, Rae, and I would like to thank everyone for attending. It means a lot to us. We would like to invite you all back to the wake¡± She cursed herself. There was a time when she wasn¡¯t so political. She wanted to blurt out, go fuck yourselves. Some of you hadn¡¯t spoken to Jerry for years. But Rae was watching, so she plastered a fake smile across her face.Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. The pastor locked eyes with her. She¡¯d interrupted his flow. But she couldn¡¯t look at that casket for another second. And she wanted to be alone for the next part. Greg called it the unveiling. ¡°At the wake, There will be an opportunity for sharing. We would love to hear your memories of Jerry.¡± Actually, no, she¡¯d rather they shut the fuck up and eat their salmon and ribeye in silence, paid for by the estate. Data technicians had already scavenged social media for every moment of Jerry¡¯s life, and uploaded them to a server. Millions of hours of video, audio, social media posts, and images. Everything Jerry ever said or did, turned into a data ghost. The pastor nodded and waved people towards the exit. She waited, holding hands with Greg and Rae as the crowd filed out. When everyone was gone, including the pastor, Greg said, ¡°Should we turn it on?¡± ¡°No. We should never have allowed this.¡± ¡°It was in the will. We¡¯ve been over this.¡± ¡°You¡¯re the executor, Greg, you could have overridden¡ª¡± ¡°That¡¯s not how it works, Katie.¡± ¡°Kids,¡± Rae said. ¡°Let¡¯s not. What¡¯s done is done. We may as well see the final result.¡± ¡°It¡¯s not the same, Rae. Just because they programmed millions of hours¡ª¡± ¡°I know its not the same. But its a living memory, and a lot of money was spent, so let¡¯s see it.¡± ¡°Why are you for this?¡± ¡°Do you remember your mom? I mean really remember her?¡± ¡°Yes. Well, no not really. That was twenty five years ago.¡± ¡°If they could do this for your Mom, would you?¡± ¡°They can¡¯t. Her work files are still classified for another hundred years. Her personal files were wiped a long time ago.¡± ¡°But if you could?¡± Kate was silent for a few moments, thinking about it. Rae was pointing out organic memories fade. Someday, Jerry would just be a vague feeling rather than a sharp memory. To Greg she said, ¡°Play it. Let¡¯s see it.¡± Greg retrieved a small remote from his jacket pocket and clicked it. A hologram appeared above the casket. Jerry¡¯s head, twenty years younger, with a horseshoe of gray hair and spectacles. ¡°Hello Kate. Good to see you. Hello, Rae. Hello, Greg. Where am I?¡± There were no ghosts on the moon, but if there were, they¡¯d look a lot like the holographic talking head of Jerry above the casket. ¡°We went with middle age Jerry?¡± she asked Greg. ¡°It¡¯s what he wanted.¡± ¡°Damn right,¡± holographic AI Jerry said. ¡°This is my gym era. I am stacked and jacked.¡± ¡°This is not how he talks, Greg. They must have screwed up.¡± ¡°Apparently, he had a different personality on social media.¡± ¡°Who doesn¡¯t. Christ, we¡¯ve resurrected Jerry the troll?¡± ¡°Don¡¯t talk about me in the third person,¡± ghost Jerry said. ¡°I am right here.¡± Ghost Jerry looked around the tent. ¡°Where are we anyway? It looks like we are at a wedding.¡± ¡°Your funeral.¡± Kate pointed to the casket below holographic Jerry¡¯s head. ¡°What happened to me?¡± ¡°Pancreatic cancer.¡± To Greg, she said, ¡°Are we going to have to explain this to it every time?¡± ¡°I don¡¯t think so.¡± ¡°I¡¯ve seen enough,¡± she said. ¡°Let¡¯s get to the wake.¡± Rae interjected, ¡°I want to ask him a question.¡± Kate shrugged. ¡°Jerry, were and when was the first time we met?¡± A disembodied hand materialized and pointed to Kate. ¡°Am I allowed to talk about it in front of her?¡± Ghost Jerry winked at Rae. Rae smirked. ¡°I¡¯m satisfied. I like him.¡± Kate thought she knew how Jerry and Rae met. The two of them had worked cases together, long before Kate met Rae. ¡°Hang on, Rae. I thought you met Jerry on a corruption taskforce?¡± ¡°Let¡¯s talk about it at the wake. It¡¯s a funny story.¡± Kate looked at Greg. He shrugged. ¡°I¡¯m hungry.¡± She waved for Greg and Rae to exit the tent first. Greg clicked off ghost Jerry, then he and Rae stepped out. She took one last look at the casket. After her parents died, Jerry had raised her and Greg. She had hundreds of memories of Jerry that were never recorded. The AI was not Jerry. It was a holographic ghost, and a confused one at that. Like most people, Jerry had many sides. Different faces, one for each situation or relationship. A human would understand context. A human would know which side to show. Like the fake people at the funeral moments ago, showing their fake smiles. Ghost Jerry was also fake, but in a peculiar way. It was a mashup of all of Jerry''s personalities. Still, AI-ghost Jerry was eerily similar. And interactive. The engineering brochure said AI Jerry would last a few hundred years. She¡¯d need to ensure its batteries were periodically charged. As Rae pointed out, memories fade. Ghost Jerry was better than talking to an unresponsive gravestone, she supposed. She zipped the tent closed on her way out. There were no ghosts on the moon, she told herself. There were no ghosts on the moon, so humans had to make them. Chapter 1: Docking Lock APRIL 7, 2074 TRANSLUNAR ORBIT Hunting was in her blood. Her fingers stretched inside her spacesuit like cat¡¯s claws, and her adrenaline stoked as Tesseract¡¯s docking clamps clunked, grappling with the deep space supply ship NYS Vega. The display controls confirmed three minutes to docking lock. Vega¡¯s spiritless metallic groans echoed through her cockpit. Its crew ring frowned outside the window. At twenty-two, its space-worn aluminum skin looked exhausted after countless supply runs hauling its five-hundred-odd cargo containers from low-Earth orbit. There were far newer, bigger vessels now, automated, and capable of hauling thousands of containers at once. NYS Vega¡¯s every weld creaked retirement. She tried to let it go. She¡¯d inherited her affinity for pursuit from her parents, FBI counterterrorism agents, killed in the line of duty when Kate was twelve, and her grandfather Jerry, a hardened internal affairs agent, a cop¡¯s cop who lived and breathed rooting out corruption. Letting it go didn¡¯t suit her. Like her wife¡¯s house cat, Scar, no matter how comfortable he looked purring on the bed, his eyes always flitted, waiting for the next skittering rodent. Today¡¯s skittering rodent was Frank Lebofield, who bilked clients for billions and fled justice with his parents. His trademark big bushy hair was all over the finance servers, a con man¡¯s cultivated image, projecting big-brained self-assured confidence as he stole people¡¯s retirement money. When the US Attorney General called to ask a favor and asked her to apprehend Lebofield, she was inclined to say no. Kate¡¯s official title was Chief of Colony Security. People called her Sheriff Devana, although she was much more than that. Four hundred thousand kilometers from Earth, she was the FBI, the U.S. Marshalls, a counterintelligence agency, a counterterrorism agency, the state police, and sometimes a child services and animal rescue agency all in one. Her wife, Doctor Rachel Torres, or Rae, was the Chief Medical Examiner and handled forensics. She was expected to handle all that with one-soon-to-be-two deputies, a borrowed race rocket, a few drones, and her wits. Most days, she was low on wits. Lebofield faked geological surveys of a worthless asteroid and swindled grandmas and grandpas out of their retirement funds. A con as old as mining claims and money. Bad, but compared to human trafficking and berserk, murderous robots, not her top priority. Lebofield¡¯s mousy law professor parents would argue NYS Vega was beyond her jurisdiction. But here she was, with two minutes and thirty seconds to docking lock. Maybe it was the fact that Rae said he was laughing at them. Frank Lebofield wasn¡¯t just running from justice. He was livestreaming it and blogging about his victimhood as he passed the moon. He was a narcissistic con man with the resources to rent a million-dollar-a-day supply shuttle and taunt her on his can¡¯t-catch-me podcast while skirting the edge of cislunar space. Her space. She had her own image to cultivate. Rae said he was thumbing his nose at her. She couldn¡¯t let it go. Tesseract was a fast ship. A stallion, even among race yachts. She was the law in space. Her jurisdiction was as broad as Tesseract¡¯s reach, and the image she wanted to project was that Sheriff Kate Devana could hunt people down wherever they were.The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. In two minutes and seven seconds, Tesseract would complete docking with NYS Vega and she would drag Lebofield and his parents off that ship in handcuffs. This could go sideways any number of ways. She preferred to kick doors at 4am, when both night owls and early risers were likely to be asleep, but space rarely afforded her that luxury. Space was vast, empty, and modern optics could identify a misplaced pea from a million kilometers away. They¡¯d seen her coming. No doubt alarms sounded hours before her docking clamps clunked. She couldn¡¯t count on them not being armed, either. This was a supply ship, and supply ships that smuggled fugitives also smuggled weapons. ¡°Jin, picture?¡± Her deputy, Jinho Knight, monitored NYS Vega from his office on the lunar colony. He¡¯d hacked the ship¡¯s computers, shut the engines down, shut and locked the fire doors, and reset all the passwords. ¡°Green. I¡¯ve sent the manifest to your phone along with staff photos and biometrics. Eleven souls, eight staff, plus the three fugitives.¡± ¡°That we know of.¡± Ships that smuggled known fugitives and weapons often smuggled other people, too. ¡°Life support metrics and water recyclers confirm the headcount. If someone else is aboard, they haven¡¯t taken a piss in sixteen hours. Rae will want their bladder for scientific study.¡± Kate smiled. ¡°Copy that.¡± Tesseract¡¯s computer indicated one minute and forty seconds to docking lock. On paper, Lebofield was nonviolent, but her grandfather Jerry taught her that all cornered animals were capable of shanking an officer in the throat to keep from going to jail. So would their tribe, their friends and family. She¡¯d seen it. Her deployments in the Marines and then Space Force only reinforced that Lebofield¡¯s law professor parents would first start defending him with words, but when those failed, might escalate to hurling bullets or fragmentation grenades. Tribes protected their own. Often, hesitation killed. There was no such thing as too much suspicion, too great a speed, too big a gun, or too much body armor. These were the rules, passed down to her by her grandfather. Eleven people versus her. The captain and his officers would comply out of the hope of salvaging their careers. But financial executives that could bilk people for billions had a gold tongue, and no doubt Lebofield had convinced some of the Vega¡¯s crew that she was a jackboot thug government agent coming to wrongfully imprison the innocent. Which meant it was down to her against three fugitives, plus a few sympathizers. One minute to docking lock. Once Lebofield got past the shock and anger of her boarding NYS Vega, she expected him to bargain. The man who insisted his ankle monitor range be extended to a day spa so he could livestream from a Florida sauna would whine, make excuses, and then demands. Lebofield was arrogant, so he¡¯d want a human judge who he hoped to charm. She was not a judge. Defendants got AI robot judges to administer the law, or in rare cases, a human judge. AI judges were fair, and the algorithms ensured consistency. But every person had the constitutional right to a human judge, a human defense attorney, and a trial by a jury of their peers. Most defendants waived those rights. The smart ones, anyway. Federal judges liked in-person trials, as much to hear their own voice bellow in the courtroom, as to smell the acrid sweat of fear on witnesses. Despite the strain that providing protection detail imposed on her office of two-soon-to-be-three deputies, she got along amicably with federal judges when they arrived because they took even less shit than she did. She once saw a witness, a billionaire CEO, roll their eyes at a judge. The judge cleared the room, and when they returned, this CEO who employed tens of thousands, owned a hundred million dollar yacht, and dined with heads of state, was red-faced and sweaty in the box. After that, the CEO answered in clipped sentences, looking over his shoulder for approval like an obedient dog. Federal judges were ornery Gods who could slay Presidents. Forcing a federal judge across cislunar space to hear worn out arguments that Lebofield¡¯s shit didn¡¯t stink would put them in a foul mood. She grinned. Lebofield should be careful what he bargained for. She might give it to him. The defendant that requested a human judge received, on average, a five-years harsher sentence. She called it the ego tax, imposed by federal judges on celebrities with a big ego. She¡¯d be happy to collect it. Tesseract¡¯s display dinged. Docking lock complete. It was time to capture a skittering rodent without getting shanked in the throat. Chapter 2: Stay Away APRIL 7, 2074 MINING CLAIM 2193-38 Lunar Positioning System coords 56.7586¡ãN, 81.3951¡ãE, Mare Humboldtianum Gravel pelted Leo Wilson¡¯s spacesuit. His helmet popped and crackled like tiny firecrackers. After five hours of tangling with this drill at the bottom of a cramped lunar mineshaft, he tried to put the danger out of his mind, but exhaustion was creeping into his bones. His job: sample this rock, run a conductivity test, and climb out filthy rich. He should have finished an hour ago. A string of lights and a power cord receded to a pinpoint five hundred meters above him, lighting his emergency retreat, an aluminum rope-ladder of one thousand four hundred and thirty-seven rungs. Of course, they would hoist him out with a winch. The climbing rungs were only a backup, and he¡¯d only used them in the seventy-odd hours of accident and emergency preparedness training the company gave him. Still, the rungs were comforting. Drones couldn¡¯t get down here because there was some sort of electromagnetic interference. He couldn¡¯t use his bionic augments, either, because the interference jammed the neuroface signals between his brain and biomechanical limbs. He wound the power cord around his hand to take up slack, braced his back against the rock for leverage, and then forced the drill as hard as he could into a dimple in the rock. Sweat beaded at his collar. His shoulders shook with the drills¡¯s vibrations. Sound didn¡¯t travel in the vacuum of space, but that didn¡¯t stop the grating and scraping noises from conducting along his bones as the drill¡¯s red hot metal bit ground rock. Whatever mineral he was sampling was hard and dense, the hardest he¡¯d ever drilled, and at the center of a gravitational anomaly. Such anomalies themselves weren¡¯t unusual. Concentrations of dense rock littered the moon, like old lunar basalt, or remnants of asteroids that impacted the moon billions of years ago. Ordinarily, outside scientific interest, they were of middling value. But this one had some sort of electromagnetic distortion. He gripped the drill, clenched every muscle in his body, and drove the bit against the rock. A pinwheel of green-yellow dust swirled from the hole and his teeth clacked as the drill hollowed the rock. All he knew, a gravitational and electromagnetic anomaly together, equaled money. Why else would the company jump this claim? Charlotte Martin, the mine boss that ran the surface operation and liked to be called Charlie, told him this was the most valuable claim in the solar system. What they were mining, she didn¡¯t say. If she knew. It was always better not to ask. Claim-jumping was illegal, and he suspected they were outright trespassing. The company nerds probably hacked and stole geological reports, and then hacked the mining claim registry, so the less he knew, the better. It didn¡¯t matter anyway. A registered claim was just a bunch of easily manipulated electrons on a server. Possession, as they say, was nine-tenths of the law. They were in space, where there was no law, except the ancient law of finders keepers. A company owned what it could defend. If this claim panned out, the company would hire mercenaries with big guns, and whoever wanted it would have to pry it from cold, dead hands. Some Earthbound lawyers might whine about squatting, but in the vacuum of space no one could hear them scream. After ten years, this mine would be depleted along with the court¡¯s patience and everyone would settle and move on, much richer. More dirt exploded on his helmet. He pressed the drill with all his strength, grimacing, his forearms shuddering under the tension. The drill bit snapped, and he cussed. Whatever was here was the toughest mineral he¡¯d ever sampled. He brought a seventy-two volt, thirty amp industrial hammer drill and high-quality bits, as hard as they came. But so far it was like he was sanding granite with cotton. After five hours, he¡¯d managed less than a millimeter. He should be a over a meter deep. To drill a hole big enough to set explosives that would break the rock into chunks would take¡­months. Maybe the engineers could widen the hole and drop drones with shielded cables. They always had a trick up their sleeve. But the company wouldn¡¯t spend that kind of money until he had a sample to prove the deposit¡¯s worth. So far, he had nothing but yellow-green dust. He triggered the drill off and twisted the chuck at the end of the drill to remove the broken bit. Its ragged edge glowed red. More dirt struck his helmet, scattering over his visor. ¡°Charlie?¡± He only heard static on the comms. ¡°Charlie, you copy?¡± He took a ragged breath and felt the spacesuit fans cool his face as he gulped oxygen. The heat; the fans buzzing in overdrive; the cramped mine shaft; the sweat irritating his neck and face; the frustration of snapping drill bits trying to sample this deposit; and now debris tumbling on him. He was exhausted and ready to be done. Someone wasn¡¯t following safety protocols. Drilling a sample of lunar rock at the bottom of a five hundred meter shaft was dangerous, but more so when the chuckleheads on the surface let debris fall into the entrance. Safety zones around the shaft entrance existed for a reason. Lunar regolith was gravelly, trenchant glass shards that abraded everything it touched, including his nerves. It could puncture his suit and he didn¡¯t plan to die at the bottom of a mine shaft. Still no response from Charlie. She worked out of a booth on the surface the size of a shipping container, but sometimes she went out to tend the mine. Or, maybe, he couldn¡¯t reach her because of the interference. He eyed the aluminum rope-ladder to the surface, his retreat, just as dirt scuffed his helmet. He toggled the lights on the wire running up the shaft, blinking them on and off. ¡°Charlie. Over. What¡¯s going on up there?¡± After a long pause, she said, ¡°One of the loader drone¡¯s navigation is glitchy. It¡¯s having a fit and doing a little samba. I am working on it.¡± A wave of tension rolled down his back. The electromagnetic interference seemed to have become worse since they arrived and was now affecting the surface machines. ¡°I¡¯m getting rained on down here. And I broke another bit.¡± ¡°One of the drones must have kicked sand in the hole as it circled.¡± ¡°Its not sand, Charlie. Its little knives of glass. They are hitting me at a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour.¡± The comms clicked. He listened to static, his own heavy breathing, and the keening fans struggling against the putrid body odor in his suit. After what felt like an eternity, she said, ¡°All your gauges are green. The malfunctioning drone is moving away now. I¡¯ll let it finish its run and then reboot it.¡± ¡°There is a safety zone for a reason, Charlie.¡± ¡°I can¡¯t help glitchy LPS. Whatever is here interferes with satellite reception. Your suit is rated for meteoroids which are going a hundred times faster.¡± ¡°I love your little motivational speeches.¡° ¡°Therapy is line two. I want to close up shop here soon. How close are you to being done?¡± ¡°Not close. I will need to come back tomorrow.¡± ¡°We booked this venue one day only. Get in and get out.¡± ¡°If its worth it, we should stay.¡± ¡°We need confirmation. If we are caught, we have a big mess an nothing to show for it.¡± ¡°I am less than a millimeter into this rock. We need more time.¡± ¡°You¡¯ve been at it for five hours.¡±If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. The tip of his drill bit had cooled to blue-gray. The heat in his suit was overwhelming. Inside this tunnel, the rock walls acted like insulation, so his suit had trouble radiating heat to relieve him. But his oxygen, battery, hydration, and nutrition reserves all gave him permission to keep drilling. Fortunately, he added an extra few scoops of meal powder to his reserves or he¡¯d be starving. ¡°I can do three more hours in the suit. But I will need you to drop some more drill bits.¡± ¡°You took the last.¡± ¡°Shit.¡± What was he drilling that was so hard? ¡°Get ready to reel me up then. I keep breaking drill bits and I used my last. I will definitely need to come back tomorrow.¡± ¡°There is no tomorrow.¡± ¡°The drill bits keep breaking. I¡¯m telling you, Charlie, I¡¯ve barely scraped a millimeter.¡± ¡°Bullshit.¡± He didn¡¯t have a camera in his suit to prove it to her. The first rule of claim-jumping: don¡¯t record evidence. ¡°Come down and see for yourself. I am telling you, this is the hardest stuff I¡¯ve ever tried to sample.¡± ¡°Titanium?¡± The hardest titanium he¡¯d ever drilled was in a lab, some special alloy as a test run, and this deposit was harder than that. Maybe it was some freakish superstrong alloy unknown to materials science. But the color didn¡¯t look right. All the titanium alloys he¡¯d seen were silver-white, similar to aluminum. This deposit was yellow and green, and in some spots, blueish. ¡°I don¡¯t think its titanium. This whatever-it-is we are mining is eating drill bits the way my dog ate bones.¡± ¡°You had a dog?¡± ¡°What¡¯s wrong with a dog?¡± ¡°Nothing. I never knew that about you. You never struck me as a guy that could keep another living thing alive.¡± ¡°I can keep things alive.¡± He didn¡¯t sound convincing, even to himself. Charlie chuckled. ¡°Certainly not that drill bit.¡± He¡¯d flip her off, if his hands weren¡¯t preoccupied, and he wasn¡¯t half a kilometer below the surface. He couldn¡¯t think of a retort, so he stared at the jagged edge of the broken drill bit as it cooled. ¡°It could be the drill bits,¡± she said. That was always a possibility: that someone swapped out the good drill bits for cheap ones. One drill bit looked the same as the next, except for the micro-printed headstamp, which no one checked. Company theft was rampant. ¡°I¡¯ll drop you a new one.¡± He started to say, you said we were out, but halted himself and smiled. Charlie was a good mine boss. Tough, and like all good mine bosses, she kept a stash of tools hidden. ¡°Heads up below. Comin in hot.¡± Above him, a new pinpoint of light appeared. Twenty-eight seconds was how long it took objects to free-fall the mine shaft. A drone couldn¡¯t get down here because of the interference, so she¡¯d drop the tools the old-fashioned way, on a rope. He loosened the chuck on the drill and let the remaining splintered drill bit fall out. The new bit appeared above him, precessing like a Foucault pendulum. He plucked it off the rope, inserted it into the drill, tightened the chuck, and spun the drill in the air to test it. ¡°Thanks.¡± ¡°You good now?¡± The rope rose out of view. ¡°Until this one breaks, too.¡± ¡°That¡¯s a brand new drill bit, Leo.¡± ¡°I will guard it with my life. Still, stand by to pull me up.¡± ¡°I have to step out of the booth. Get your sample and get out of there, okay?¡± ¡°On it.¡± He fingered the drill¡¯s trigger and spun it to check that the bit was locked in tight. ¡°And don¡¯t forget about the conductivity test.¡± The geologist had said to take measurements every centimeter into the deposit. He looked at the shallow dimple he¡¯d scraped from the rock. He¡¯d be lucky to get one centimeter. ¡°How could I forget? What¡¯s going on up there? Why do you need to step out?¡± His muscles clenched and he eyed his retreat, the aluminum rungs hanging over his head. ¡°The gauges say the one of the drones has no power, but its still running. I see sparking and flames.¡± ¡°Is this the same drone that went berserk?¡± She didn¡¯t answer. ¡°Charlie?¡± No answer. Another Charlie-ism: she wasn¡¯t one for goodbyes. When she thought the conversation was over, she hung up. A wave of dread washed over him. She was out of the booth, off wrangling a drone. He reminded himself that panic kills. He had seventy hours of emergency training. There were one thousand four hundred and thirty-seven ladder rungs to the surface. He¡¯d take it slow and steady. Doable, even in the dark. As if the universe was challenging him, the shaft¡¯s string lights dimmed, plunging the shaft to blackness except for his weak suit lights. Then they blinked back on. His heart sputtered in his throat, and he realized he¡¯d been panting. He ignored the temptation to climb out. ¡°Play Titan Podcast. Time to see if this new bit has what it takes. ¡± He leaned into the drill, driving it against the rock. His bones rattled when the drill grated rock. The pinwheel of dust spinning from the hole changed from yellow-green to blue-green. In his headset, the podcaster¡¯s seductive voice transported him far away, to Jupiter¡¯s moon, Titan. She purred about its thick atmosphere of ninety-five percent nitrogen, rocky surface, clouds, rain, rivers, lakes, and seas. Much chillier than here, that was for sure. He pictured the voice as a brunette, wearing a bikini, a beer in one hand and the podcaster in the other as they slid through cool blue water. She made it sound like a blue paradise because Titan had water. Titan¡¯s water was minus three hundred degrees Celsius, buried under a sea of liquid hydrocarbons. ¡°Stop podcast.¡± When the podcaster got to the part that sounded like a cool lake, he pictured the woman in his arms sipping a daiquiri and laughing as Charlie. The drill bit tip glowed red. Charlie was his boss. He drove the drill harder against the rock and then wobbled and rotated the drill to cut deeper. So what if she was? Maybe the company had rules about it, but there were also rules about hacking and claim jumping. Gravel clinked his helmet. He jerked the drill, and the bit broke. ¡°Fuck.¡± The comms click-clacked. ¡°Charlie?¡± No answer from Charlie. This bit shattered quicker than the previous ones, so it wasn¡¯t the drill bits. He loosened the chuck, let the bit drop to the mine floor, then dropped the drill. It swung from his belt, banging his thigh. ¡°Charlie, this bit broke too. You copy? I am running the conductivity test at¡ª¡± He eyed the hole in the rock. ¡°About a millimeter. The rock turned yellow-green to blue green.¡± Static over the comms. He retrieved the conductivity tester from his tool belt. Maybe the color change was good news. He was exhausted and ready to be done. He put the tester¡¯s red probe into the hole the way the geologist showed him and then fingered ON. His vision exploded white with black dots, and his brain felt like a million needles had stabbed his skull. Every muscle in his body clenched at once as if lightning struck, and he couldn¡¯t breathe. He had an acrid, sintering metal smell in his nose. The probes fell away. His heart pounded in his temples, his face flushed, and he gobbled air. The static in his skull ceased. The smell was gone. Above him, the lights were out. The shaft had been plunged into darkness again. ¡°The fuck was that? Charlie, you there?¡± His body trembled like he had sprinted a five kilometer run. No answer. Shit. A power surge from the surface would explain the lights being out. Maybe it was a coincidence. But the power surge felt like it was in his brain. He eyed the dimple in the rock and the probe in his hands. He should climb out. Grasp the bottom rung of the ladder, and pull himself to the surface. He should drop the drill. It would be faster. But he was sure the static came through his neuroface. Was that possible? Above him, white light blinked in the shaft, near the surface. Was Charlie lowering something? ¡°Charlie, you copy?¡± Still no answer. Fuck. The power surge must have blown the communications circuit. The pinprick of light twinkled. It was getting bigger. He felt sick with adrenaline and couldn¡¯t breathe. He had only vomited in a space suit once. Don¡¯t panic. Slow, square breaths. Charlie is lowering help. Maybe a hoist to get him out of here. Slow, square breaths took the edge off. His heart slowed. What if the conductivity test caused the power surge? It stood to reason that if this rock caused the electromagnetic interference, it was some kind of natural amplifier or transmitter, like a radio. The interference increased when they arrived. Maybe this mineral deposit amplified their communication signals and retransmitted them. It had to be ultra pure to interfere with his neuroface and machines all the way at the surface. He grinned at the probe. A gravitational and electromagnetic anomaly together was a jackpot. Charlie was right. This could be the most valuable claim in the solar system. What was bigger than a trillion? A quadrillion? ¡°Hey, Charlie. I think I know why corporate was so hot to mine this claim.¡± He needed to test it again to be sure, and at higher voltage. It hurt. He saw starbursts as if he were being electrocuted from the inside out. But whatever didn¡¯t kill him made him richer. He dialed up the probe¡¯s power and then touched the red lead to the rock. His vision exploded white again. This time, the needles in his skull screeched at him, STAY AWAY. His muscles froze as if he¡¯d been hit by a stun gun. The message repeated. STAY AWAY. STAY AWAY. Over and over. His brain felt like it was melting. He tried to gasp for air, but his chest was rigid. Blue spots danced around his vision¡¯s white canvas. He was suffocating. Then the probe¡¯s power sputtered, his vision returned, and his arms wrenched from the hole so hard his elbows jammed the rock behind him. All the systems in his suit had shorted out. He gulped air, but his oxygen generator was offline. His heart pounded in his chest. He tried to take slow breaths, but he couldn¡¯t inhale enough air. When he took this gig, his dad said that there were only two kinds of space miners: those who knew they were putting on the spacesuit for the last time, and those who didn¡¯t. If he slowed his breathing, took the rungs slow and steady, this would not be the last time he suited up. He could do this. He had emergency oxygen. Enough to get out of the shaft, barely. Reaching for the ladder, his bladder let go. The object falling on him was a spacesuit. Charlie¡¯s ashen face and glassy eyes rushed towards him, arms outstretched as if she was rushing to hug him. The emergency oxygen and his training no longer mattered. Most people never saw the bullet that killed them. His was Charlie, a seventy kilogram projectile careening towards him at one hundred fifty kilometers an hour. He had about ten seconds. He hoped it would be quick. ¡°Charlie?¡± As he said it, he knew he¡¯d been talking to dead air for at least three minutes. He shrank against the mine shaft wall, but he had no room to maneuver. His heart pounded. She was dead. Her vacant eyes and open arms welcomed him to a grisly end. It seemed so unfair. Someone was going to be filthy rich because of what he found, and he wasn¡¯t even going to live to collect a bonus. Chapter 3: Suit up
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I am excited to bring chapters of the new Kate Devana series. Space 2074 is the new Wild West. Mine machines are glitching, an FBI Agent is looking to avenge the death of his former partner, & Sheriff Kate Devana must wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions. Bodies are piling up. Again. On the moon, Kate Devana is the law. This is the third chapter. You can catch up here: wyattwerne.substack.com/s/kate-devana-s¡­ 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 7, 2074 ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND KILOMETERS BEYOND LUNAR ORBIT As she suited up in the starlight streaming through Tesseract¡¯s panoramic cabin windows, her knee ached when twisting it to don her pressure suit. Outside, NYS Vega floated like a silvery-gray possum trying to hide among millions of glittering stars. The ship was old, but it was its paint job that made her pause and wrench her tendons. Kate had kicked in a lot of doors. Her aching joints reminded her that inevitably, the bad guys behind them kicked back. In the lower gravity of the moon, or here floating nowhere in space, it was supposed to hurt less, if at all. All the cruise tours advertised that zero-g relieved back and joint pain. Not hers. Sometimes her joints ached like a sixth sense. She could fill a tome with Vega¡¯s safety hazards. The fittings along the docking passage connecting its airlock to Tesseract looked ready to disintegrate. Black starbursts where debris or meteoroids impacted the hull marked decades of space damage. Oxygen spat from weakened gaskets. Of course, there were international safety regulations along with routine maintenance schedules that stated when parts needed to be replaced. She could write them up for a hundred violations. But smugglers were cheap bastards and not the law-abiding type. They¡¯d try to bribe her, and when that failed, they¡¯d bribe the inspectors in port who¡¯d let them install cheap knock-off replacement parts worse than what they had. Eyeing the gasses sputtering from the docking airlock, she packed twice as many oxygen tanks as she usually did as a precaution. The first rule of crossing space was that there could never be enough spare oxygen. Once inside her suit, she tested her pressure suit twice for leaks and checked gauges. Good volts, good hydraulics, good oxygen, no ruptures in its armor, and a positive link to her neuroface, the nanowire electrical circuit that linked her brain with the computer in her suit. Nine hours of battery and all green diagnostics. Her hydration and nutrition packs were one-fourth full. Plenty. She wasn¡¯t here for drinks and dinner. If she were aboard Vega that long, then what she really needed was her rifle, which stood at attention against one of Tesseract¡¯s plush, sporty white and red striped chairs waiting for orders. The suit¡¯s inner fabric was refreshingly cool and felt like a spandex second skin. She flexed her arms, legs, and fingers to confirm the hydraulic joint servos functioned. She rarely needed power-assist, but the fresh paint on Vega needled her knee like a bad tattoo artist. ¡°Jin, you copy?¡± ¡°Jin can¡¯t come to the comms. The department is understaffed and my boss refuses to hire a third deputy.¡± ¡°Funny. I didn¡¯t refuse. I need to think about her. If she¡¯s the right fit. We have two hundred other applicants.¡± ¡°She¡¯s the most qualified.¡±This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. ¡°You¡¯re biased.¡± ¡°The algorithm agrees.¡± ¡°The algorithm you wrote. You were writing dating algorithms too. Maybe you mixed up the code.¡± ¡°I didn¡¯t mix up the code. I reused the one that hired me.¡± ¡°I hired you, Jin, not the algorithm.¡± ¡°The algorithm filters and sorts. She¡¯s top five of¡ª¡± ¡°Can we not do this now? She¡¯s a special case. I need you to check diagnostics on the new suit.¡± ¡°You taught me to press my advantage, boss. This is me, pressing.¡± After a pause, Jin said, ¡°Everything looks green on my end. How¡¯s it feel?¡± Jin was a quick study. The algorithm shortlisted him because he had Homeland Security cybersecurity experience, military experience, and a degree from a big-name school. Unlike most cyber desk jockeys, he was athletic. He was tall, with broad shoulders, like a pit bull with an IQ of five hundred. His most important trait, though, was that he showed he could stand his ground with the uber-rich celebrity residents of the colony. He pushed back on her, too, which she didn¡¯t mind. Jin reminded her of her brother, Greg. With the new hire, though, she was sure the algorithm was wrong. It just didn¡¯t understand human dynamics. She smiled. ¡°This whatever-it-is material is more flexible than our old suits. Doesn¡¯t feel like I¡¯m walking around in a balloon. I like the hydraulics.¡± This pressure suit was new, the latest issued to top-tier military operators. Technically, the suit was an augment because she could use her neuroface to control the hydraulic power-assist servos in her suit¡¯s hip, leg, and arm joints. The more she used it and trained, the more it functioned like an extension of her body. So far, she¡¯d only had time to train a few hours on a simulator because it arrived with the warrant to detain Frank Lebofield and his parents, who were attempting to escape on Vega. When she agreed to serve the fugitive warrant, she horse-traded with the Attorney General for new pressure suits, and she wasn¡¯t ashamed. In this job, she needed to be half pirate to survive. Her department was small. She was perpetually understaffed and had to be ruthlessly efficient, begging or borrowing equipment, or seizing it when she seized bad guys. Procurement of this suit, let alone three for her department, involved a pile of permission slips from the Department of Defense that would stack to low Earth orbit. But U.S. Attorney Generals have ways of burning through paperwork, so she bargained for this when she agreed to arrest Lebofield and his parents. The boring horse-trading side of this job would never win medals or make viral social media posts. But in space, equipment saved lives. Three people for three brand new suits. On Vega, it was her against an unknown number of collaborators. With this suit, she liked the odds. ¡°And its level three-plus bullet-proof,¡± Jin added. ¡°So they say.¡± She eyed her rifle, saluting her from the supple suede chair. ¡°I don¡¯t plan to test it. I need you to dig deeper on this ship.¡± ¡°So far everything checks. NYS Vega. Registered to Nippon Yusen. Built by Nippon Heavy Industries and launched March 17, 2052. The registry and engineering diagrams match the ship on the video feed. Two Hanabishi Gen-1 nuclear thrusters. Space for fifteen crew and five hundred sixty-eight containers.¡± ¡°The paint job is new.¡± ¡°With the number of times Vega has traveled to and from¡ª¡± ¡°And nothing else is.¡± She eyed Vega¡¯s dimpled, gray panels with black starbursts where space debris had hit the hull. The comms were silent for a few beats, and then Jin said, ¡°They hacked the registry.¡± ¡°Looks that way.¡± ¡°It has the same specs as the Vega.¡± ¡°Seen one flying rust bucket you¡¯ve seen ¡®em all.¡± ¡°Had to have been made in the same factory.¡± ¡°I¡¯d look for ones reported lost or stolen in the last year.¡± ¡°You wanna wait while I track this down?¡± ¡°I am going in. It¡¯s easier for me to pretend I don¡¯t know what¡¯s going on if I don¡¯t know what¡¯s going on. My neuroface is working with this suit so DM me.¡± ¡°They could jam it.¡± ¡°I¡¯ll message you every ten minutes. If you don¡¯t hear from me, flash the lights. S-O-S. If you still don¡¯t hear from me, assume I am dead.¡± ¡°Roger, that. If you are dead, that makes me the new Chief, so I can hire whoever I want, right?¡± Her visor was down. If she could rub her forehead in a spacesuit, she¡¯d do it. She taught him to be relentless. Too well. ¡°If you are the Chief, dating a subordinate is a next-level problem.¡± ¡°We aren¡¯t dating. We don¡¯t like labels.¡± Kate palmed her pistol, press-checking it, and took the rifle off the chair and slung it over her chest. ¡°I¡¯m going in now. We will discuss this later.¡± ¡°Copy. Pressure on the docking tunnel is nominal.¡± She eyed Vega¡¯s flimsy, disintegrating gaskets leaking air from the tunnel connecting the ship¡¯s airlocks. The stars beyond twinkled as the gas evaporated into space. There could never be enough spare oxygen in space. Her boots clanked on Tesseract¡¯s floor as she walked to the cabin ladder to climb to the airlock. ¡°Captain Ward, NYS Vega, this is Kate Devana. Over.¡± She hoisted herself up the ladder. Tesseract was formerly a race yacht. Its cylindrical inner airlock was painted blue, decorated with brass handles, with a wood-veneered wheel. Chic, yet simple and easy to manipulate, so billionaire real estate moguls could spacewalk drunk and high. ¡°Captain Ward, over.¡± She gripped the faux-wood wheel and spun it counterclockwise until the mechanism thunked and the edges hissed. ¡°Permission to come aboard.¡± ¡°Permission granted.¡± She doubted that very much. Captain Ward was hiding something more than three fugitives. He thought he could hide behind a cheap paint job, but he was wrong. She climbed in the airlock as its status light changed from green to red. https://open.substack.com/pub/wyattwerne/p/devana-files-chapter-4?r=3bcm0e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Chapter 4: Tools APRIL 7, 2074 TITUSVILLE, FLORIDA ¡°She¡¯s mortal. Not god,¡± FBI Special Agent Barrett Anders said to the motel¡¯s bathroom mirror while running his wet hands through his salt and pepper hair. He needed to decide about his partner, Kristi, in the next few minutes. In or out. Live or die. Flip a coin, it could go either way. His skin looked pasty white in the mirror against the bathroom¡¯s pallid gray tile and taupe sinktop. This motel was as nondescript as they came. A cheap rent-by-the-hour hotsheets heavily perfumed with disinfectant. Even though it was night, the in-room air conditioner strained and whined, losing a futile battle against Florida¡¯s humidity and heat. It was close to the Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island spaceports and they could stay here, off the radar, while they waited for their shuttle to low Earth orbit. His cheeks were puffy, too, and he looked like he¡¯d gained twenty pounds since his partner¡¯s funeral, although it was closer to fifteen. All of it around his midsection, spilling over his titanium hip replacement and mechanical legs like a deformed donut. As if he had somewhere else to gain weight. His aluminum and silicone augment legs were exactly the same weight as the day the ortho surgeon installed them. ¡°Who are you trying to convince, me or you?¡± Kristi shouted from the bedroom. Special Agent Kristi Lindsay, a woman with insipid blond hair banded into a ponytail, a grating voice, and a gym addiction. She had a wife who made heaps of money as a filthy romance author working from home, and five kids. Kristi Reliable Lindsay, she wasn¡¯t. She¡¯d been shot twice in the thigh, but refused a prosthetic for her lame leg and walked around with a gimp. Complaints had been lodged about her wife¡¯s disgusting novels. It didn¡¯t make the agency look good to have an agent¡¯s wife publishing such garbage. But Kristi was seen as a goddamn agency hero and her kids were cute, so the agency hid behind the First Amendment. He straightened his blue suit, letting his hand linger over the pistol in his shoulder holster. It was the boss¡¯ idea to pair them together. His punishment for not taking the leave the therapybot recommended. He didn¡¯t need a babysitter. He needed to be on the job, on the move, inching closer and building a case on the woman that killed his previous partner. He¡¯d been dry for a week, but his eyes were still bloodshot and his hands trembled. His therapybot said he drank his anger, stating the obvious in scientific deadpan as if it would tranquilize him. Bromides from a computer. Who needed them? ¡°It¡¯s just a fact, Kristi. She¡¯s not a machine,¡± he said to the mirror, loud enough that his voice carried to the hotel bedroom. ¡°She breathes air, bleeds red, and puts her slacks on one leg at a time just like the rest of us.¡± Well, not him. His entire lower torso was an augment. He laughed at himself in the mirror. Building a case. Kate Devana would never be convicted. The worst ones never were. He only needed enough evidence to make it look like a clean shoot. Or jail her long enough to let nature take its course behind bars. As much as he¡¯d relish pulling the trigger in a crowded bar, watching her take her last breath on a grimy floor like his partner Mia Bolkov six months ago, it didn¡¯t need to be him that killed her. There were all sorts of violent, bloody ways to die in this business. He met Devana at Mia¡¯s funeral¡ªthe first one he¡¯d been to on a space station. Devana paid for it, a sure sign she was corrupt. She went around hugging the family, brazenly shedding crocodile tears as if Mia was a lifelong friend. She talked to Mia¡¯s kids, telling them how brave she was and that she was a hero, even conning Mia¡¯s husband into letting her spread Mia¡¯s ashes into space. Devana wore her Space Force black-and-gray dress uniform to the funeral as if all her medals made her impervious to justice. He shook hands with her and could smell the lies on her perfume. He knew then he¡¯d kill her. ¡°She has friends in high places, Brett.¡± Chrissake. He hated it when Kristi called him that. One month together, she acted like they were best friends. She was only here because the boss thought he needed oversight. Berating and punching the therapybot¡¯s screen was a onetime thing. ¡°She needs to be in jail.¡± ¡°Word is, Defense Secretary Cruz personally authorized the wetwork on Bill Caddell,¡± Kristi continued. ¡°Caddell was an agency Director.¡± ¡°Also a domestic terrorist.¡± ¡°Evidence. Trial. Conviction. Department of Justice still believes in that, right?¡± ¡°Oh c¡¯mon, Brett. Hasn¡¯t been that way since¡ªfor a hundred and fifty years, at least, before Hoover.¡± ¡°Kate Devana has friends in low places, too, don¡¯t forget that. She got Mia slaughtered and walked right off that cartel¡¯s space station. No way she does that unless she¡¯s bent.¡± He turned the cold water on and splashed his face again. The chill soothed his angry eyes. A wave of exhaustion poured over his temples. He hadn¡¯t slept in months.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Kate Devana had a thirty million dollar bounty on her head. He couldn¡¯t rest until he¡¯d delivered her to jail, so she could get shanked in a prison fight. Maybe she¡¯d die right away, or maybe she¡¯d die after a long painful bout of sepsis. Either way, he¡¯d collect the money. One million for every wasted year of his career at this motherless whore of an agency. They owed it to him. ¡°Mia volunteered for that mission, Brett, you know that. She was a good agent.¡± What the hell did Kristi know? Mia was his partner for three years. ¡°How do you walk off a Russian cartel¡¯s space station, unless they were protecting her?¡± ¡°Because she¡¯s crazy as fuck. That¡¯s what everyone says about her. She booby-trapped her ship to blow, so if she died, they all died.¡± ¡°So why not blow the whole station up? She¡¯d wipe seven most wanted off the map.¡± ¡°Along with a lot of innocent people. Make up your mind. Is she a vigilante, or not?¡± He pictured Kristi sitting on the bed in the bedroom air-drumming and mouthing ba-dum-bum, an annoying habit she had when she thought she caught him in a contradiction. ¡°There are no innocent people on that space station. It¡¯s a zero-g whorehouse wrapped in a drug den with terrorists as customers.¡± He pulled his eyelids down. The dark circles weren¡¯t going away. He pulled at the skin on his pasty cheeks, splashing more cold water on his face. He¡¯d hit the bottle pretty hard for months, but didn¡¯t see any jaundice from liver damage. Some drops would clear his red eyes. ¡°I give you that.¡± ¡°She runs a shitshow up there. She let robots run around with their freedom.¡± ¡°And? You¡¯re practically half robot yourself.¡± She was out of line, calling him a robot. His brain was wet, the way nature intended. It wasn¡¯t like those solid-state AI brains that lived in a box on a server rack. He reached under his pressed blue jacket. His pistol was loaded. No use otherwise. The way he¡¯d write it up, someone busted through the door to rob the motel room. It happened all the time at these hotsheets. He¡¯d say the four of them struggled, one of them stole his pistol, and shot Kristi in the face. He¡¯d done it before. There were all sorts of violent, bloody ways to die in this business. She should have taken disability leave. Not like she needed the money. He unclicked the retention snap on his holster. ¡°Evidence. Trial. Conviction. I want her in jail. Everywhere she goes, trouble follows, and people die. Good people, like Mia Bolkov.¡± ¡°Ever ask yourself, Brett, why the boss has let you pursue this hobby of yours for the last six months?¡± ¡°She¡¯s not a hobby.¡± ¡°You prefer the word obsession?¡± ¡°Three-quarters of the agency wants her locked up, same as me. The boss all but said so.¡± ¡°But why you?¡± ¡°Why not me?¡± Anders took a step towards the bathroom door, his black polymer and steel automatic pistol in hand. The magazine held twenty-one rounds, but he figured he¡¯d take her by surprise and would need one, maybe two bullets. Why shouldn¡¯t it be him? Kate Devana led his partner into a slaughterhouse, outnumbered, outgunned, ill-trained, and unprepared. Kristi didn¡¯t respond. He paused at the door, gun up, his finger on the trigger. His file had eleven use of force complaints. Allegations of corruption had been hounding him for eighteen months. And his exes piled on, dredging up accusations of domestic violence. Yet, the boss let him pursue Devana, and he knew why. ¡°We¡¯re tools, Brett.¡± That was right. He¡¯d come to the same conclusion a week ago in a rare moment of clarity while spinning his great-grandfather¡¯s NYPD revolver. Sitting in his living room sofa rubbing the blued steel, tasting the muzzle¡¯s gun oil in his mouth, replaying how his boss called him a hothead and rogue agent, he realized the agency hadn¡¯t fired him, because it wanted him sober, so he could finish Kate Devana. They let him pursue his obsession because they wanted him to succeed, and his record gave them plausible deniability. Afterwards, they¡¯d fire him and trash him in the media. They¡¯d use the words his boss used, rogue and hotheaded and impulsive, maybe worse. He didn¡¯t care. They didn¡¯t know about the thirty million. Another reason to kill Kristi: she didn¡¯t know about the money either. That was a side deal, through a connection of a confidential informant. She didn¡¯t need it anyway, and there was no way in hell he was splitting it with her. He slid open the bathroom and poked his gun out just as his phone pinged. He heard Kristi¡¯s phone ding at the same time. He blew out a breath and holstered his pistol. He would have to wait. Outside the bathroom, Kristi sat on the bed, with her dull yellow ponytail swishing over the back of her blue suit as she mumbled yes, got it, and ok into the phone. The boss¡¯s first rule: nothing in writing. He liked to use burner phones and rarely texted. After a few moments of nodding and eyebrow bouncing, she hung up the phone and turned her frowning brown eyes to him. A grating voice, a health nut, a wife who made her money writing nasty novels, five kids polluting the planet, but the most galling thing about Kristi was that the boss made her the senior agent, even though she was almost fifteen years younger than him with a lame leg. ¡°Change of plans,¡± she said, grimacing at him. ¡°Looks like you got your wish.¡± ¡°Ding-dong the bitch is dead?¡± ¡°We are being rerouted to the colony. We are booked on the 9am shuttle.¡± She smiled, her eyebrows hopping. ¡°First class too. The boss wants us there yesterday.¡± A grin crept over his face. ¡°Arrest warrant?¡± ¡°Yes, but not for her. Frank Lebofield and his parents.¡± ¡°I thought he escaped on some supply shuttle to Mars?¡± The wave of exhaustion he¡¯d felt in the bathroom submerged him again. ¡°Well, she agreed to pick him up.¡± Kristi stood, smoothing her blue suit. ¡°We are on prisoner transport duty. We are to pick them up on the colony and bring them back to D.C. for trial.¡± ¡°She is boarding a supply ship and taking them¡ªalone?¡± ¡°I told you, her middle name is crazy as fuck.¡± ¡°The way she operates, this will be a body transport, not a prisoner transport.¡± ¡°As if you¡¯ll shed a tear.¡± He was between her and the door. She stepped towards him, putting her right index finger to her temple, tapping twice. ¡°Think about it. If there is anything on Devana, we¡¯ll find it there.¡± She passed him and then opened the motel door. ¡°Where are we going?¡± He swiveled. She held the door open. Swampy Florida air gushed through, bringing hotsheets-motel dumpster scent with it. ¡°First, food. Then we are checking out of this roach pit and checking into something nicer. We don¡¯t need to hide here any longer.¡± The grin crept back onto his face. Kristi waved him out of the door, her ponytail flapping with the humid Florida breeze. ¡°After you.¡± He froze. He could kill her here. Messy. Still doable. No one would question a Florida hotsheets robbery gone wrong. But now she was his ticket to the moon. A new plan sprouted. If he killed Kristi on the moon, with Devana dead, there would be no one to investigate her death. Kristi cocked her head, frowning. ¡°You don¡¯t want to go? I thought this was your dream, get Devana on her own turf.¡± His knee servos whined as he stepped into the Florida night air. ¡°Just surprised is all. Wondering why the boss is sending us.¡± ¡°You know why, Brett. We¡¯re tools.¡± Chapter 5: All Aboard, Part 1 APRIL 7, 2074 NYS VEGA, ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND KILOMETERS BEYOND LUNAR ORBIT Kate stretched her arms over her head, nudging herself with the balls of her feet, across the inflatable gray tube connecting Tesseract to NYS Vega. In zero-g, space was directionless. So she was gliding upwards, towards Vega¡¯s space-beaten and fatigued silver airlock, which hovered like a gray cyclops tired of visitors. Her heartbeat and breathing echoed inside her suit. Its spandex-like inner layer still had that new pressure suit smell like a new car, instead of the usual dirty gym socks scent. The hairs on her neck tingled. Stray fibers drifted like thick dust from an old house. Theoretically, she didn¡¯t need her spacesuit to cross. This temporary duct was designed to inflate to one atmosphere pressure, containing eighty percent nitrogen and twenty percent oxygen, like Earth, to avoid the complications of decompression sickness. But her gauges read one third-atmospheric pressure and pure oxygen. Still crossable without a suit if she rebreathed pure oxygen for two hours to remove the nitrogen from her blood. The low pressure didn¡¯t concern her. The Space Force trained her in low pressure environments. Pure oxygen was a hazard, but that didn¡¯t concern her either. It was the reason for the underinflation. Rot. This tube¡¯s inner lining was space-weathered and gas leaked from gaskets. She dared not touch the walls. She floated slow and steady, up the middle, her arms ready to brake at the airlock. One hard tug of the tube¡¯s rope guide would yank fasteners out. One wayward poke, and the lining would rupture and she¡¯d be floating in space. The shipline that owned Vega had not invested a dime in maintenance. Except for the fresh paint. No one peeked through the airlock¡¯s viewport. Above it, there was a mirrored bubble. A closed-circuit camera. She could feel Vega¡¯s crew sizing her up from the video feed, deciding whether to destroy evidence, or arm themselves to repel her. ¡°Jin, picture?¡± ¡°All green. Pressure looks stable in the boarding tube.¡± ¡°I trust this boarding tube like a used condom. Interior cameras?¡± ¡°Not that I can access.¡± ¡°Any attempts to regain control?¡± ¡°I have full control of Vega. No attempts to override.¡± Her grandfather Jerry¡¯s first rule of door-kicking: know your target and what¡¯s behind it. A good operator always knew as much as they could about what was beyond a door before they kicked it open. She had no intel. She had three new SSEYE Inc. Chameleon surveillance drones maglocked to her suit, and she¡¯d toss one into Vega as soon as the airlock opened. Each was the size of a softball, with twelve embedded omnidirectional 32K cameras, twenty compressed-air thrusters to propel it, and a lightweight ultra-high-res LED monitor for skin that mimicked its surroundings like camoflauge. The Chameleon blended into the background. It was virtually invisible and its omnidirectional cameras transmitted to her heads-up display. Of course, anyone nearby would see condensation in the puffs of compressed air guiding it, or hear its rasps as it stabilized itself or whizzed around a corner. But if the crew tossed a grenade first, the Chameleons were useless. She took another lungful of the new pressure suit smell. If they wanted to kill her, they wouldn¡¯t toss a grenade. They only needed to rupture this rickety tunnel of terror. She¡¯d suffocate slowly, flailing in space. The airlock window blinked, and she exhaled. The Captain¡¯s smartest move was to hand over the fugitives and move on so he could get back on schedule. Vega could be smuggling a lot of things to Mars, three-fourths of which were a waste of her time. ¡°Any luck on the registry, Jin?¡± ¡°I have our new deputy working on it.¡± ¡°She¡¯s not a new deputy, yet.¡±Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. ¡°You always say, better to ask forgiveness than permission. We have two dead on one of the mining claims. I can only be in four places at once.¡± She estimated about a twenty percent chance Vega¡¯s crew would capture her and cut off all her fingers and toes. If they did, she could still count the number of amicable break-ups in her life on her left hand. Zero. Jin and the new deputy¡¯s office cooing and flirting would give way to icy glares, coffee cups thrown across the office, anonymous hate mail and revenge porn¡ª ¡°You know your neuroface is on, right Kate?¡± ¡°Say again?¡± ¡°Your neuroface is on. It¡¯s dumping to the feed.¡± She resisted the urge to grab the tube¡¯s guide rope to halt her glide. ¡°What¡¯s dumping on the feed?¡± ¡°Revenge porn. I don¡¯t really think they will cut all your toes off.¡± ¡°Shit. The default setting on this new suit must be broadcast all.¡± She swiped through menus in her heads-up display and changed her privacy settings. Like talking to yourself aloud while a speaker was on, the neuroface sometimes captured thoughts and transcribed them to the comms feed. Usually, privacy settings prevented this. If broadcasting unfiltered thoughts was the new normal in the military, she was glad she¡¯d retired years ago. ¡°Until now, I didn¡¯t realize you had a filter.¡± She could feel Jin¡¯s lips stretch into a smirk as he said it. She pictured sending Jin a middle finger. ¡°Did that come through?¡± Jin¡¯s grin over the comms had a signature silent pause. ¡°We will stay professional. I will quit if we can¡¯t.¡± ¡°That¡¯s what worries me.¡± He was right, though. They needed a third deputy, and the new hire had the cybersecurity skills and gritty initiative they needed. Plus, the new hire reminded Kate of herself, except three times smarter. Jin said, ¡°Someone experienced needs to go to the claim and investigate.¡± ¡°The mining claim can wait. The bodies won¡¯t get any deader.¡± ¡°They were run over by mining equipment. Could be a glitch. Or we could be dealing with malware.¡± ¡°Who reported it?¡± ¡°Anonymous. And I can¡¯t trace it yet.¡± ¡°Someone¡¯s sending a message.¡± ¡°I figure either claim jumpers warning people they¡¯ve taken over the claim, or the claim owner killed the trespassers and wants everyone to know they will defend their claim. I won¡¯t know until I secure the hardware and bring it back for analysis.¡± The moon¡¯s surface was thirty-eight million square kilometers. Less than five percent of the moon¡¯s subsurface had been explored and cataloged for mineral deposits, yet mining firms stole data and fought over known deposits instead of sending geologists to prospect new ground. Companies fighting over dirt was not her top priority. She usually let them sort it out themselves. But now there were bodies, and a tipster involved her. ¡°Could be a whistleblower,¡± she said. ¡°Do what you need to do. Forge my fingerprint and swear her in.¡± ¡°Done and done. She¡¯s completed her firearms training too.¡± ¡°In a simulator. Not the same.¡± ¡°I took her to the basement¡ª¡± The airlock window ahead of her flickered again. A grotesque humanoid shadow danced in the connecting tube¡¯s floating dust, then blinked off. ¡°You said there were eleven aboard Vega?¡± She asked. ¡°Eight crew, plus Lebofield and his parents, that¡¯s right.¡± ¡°But this ship has capacity for fifteen.¡± ¡°Affirmative." ¡°How sure are you about the eleven?¡± ¡°I triple checked. What are you thinking?¡± ¡°This is a container ship, with five hundred and sixty-eight places to hide people.¡± ¡°Hold while I check again.¡± Too late. She was drifting head-first into the airlock. It was less than a meter away, and she didn¡¯t want to spook the Captain by stalling. ¡°I¡¯m here. I think the Captain will try to bluff his way through this.¡± She gripped the airlock¡¯s handles and locked her arms, like a handstand, stopping her helmet from clacking against the metal. Twenty-plus years of space debris, meteoroids, and unimpeded high-energy protons had battered it. To the right of the handles, the panel status lights were red. Under the panel, DANGER was stenciled in red block letters, overtop a warning about decompression sickness. She didn¡¯t see any knobs or buttons to open the airlock. The lights on the panel beside the airlock changed to amber, and then green. ¡°Going in. As soon as I¡¯ve boarded, retract the docking tube and spin up gravity.¡± ¡°Roger, retract the tube and spin up gravity.¡± She twisted the airlock¡¯s handle. As worn as it was, she expected it to snap in her hand. Instead, the airlock door swung open. She removed a surveillance drone from her chest and tossed it behind the door. Vega¡¯s airlock had an older two-compartment design. The next chamber was a crew lock, for pressurization, and then, beyond that, the next door was an equipment lock connecting to Vega¡¯s crew sections and bridge. The crew lock was clear. She climbed in and closed the hatch. The panel light cycled through amber to red. Her suit ran through checklists and her hud confirmed she was green to repressurize. ¡°Captain Ward. This is Kate Devana. I am aboard. Expedited repressurization requested.¡± Ordinarily, the airlock repressurized gradually, for safety, over six minutes. Expedited repressurization was for emergencies, although she doubted Vega¡¯s crew worried about safety. In her case, gradual repressurization was unnecessary, since she didn¡¯t intend to remove her suit. ¡°Copy. One minute thirty seconds. Welcome aboard.¡± Outside the viewport, the inflatable connecting tube puckered as the recycling system sucked the gas into tanks. Then Tesseract silently disconnected, and the tube folded. The viewport was not much bigger than a jailhouse window. Her stomach twisted. Chapter 6: All Aboard, Part 2 APRIL 7, 2074 NYS VEGA, ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND KILOMETERS BEYOND LUNAR ORBIT Vega¡¯s amber airlock panel clock blinked one minute and thirteen seconds until repressurization. Invisible snakes hissed in the vents. Vega¡¯s bones shuddered. It was a cranky old man, spinning itself out of zero-g. The airlock¡¯s space-charred, metallic walls groaned and creaked, and then hobbled towards her. She landed softly on all fours and then slid down the wall. She stood on the hull and outer airlock, which was now the floor. With low gravity restored, the blood drained from her head, and the congestion in her lungs cleared. Gravity, even this ship¡¯s low gravity, always felt better than zero-g. She took a deep, square breath, letting the new-car smell in her suit slow her heartbeat. Outside the tiny window at her feet, Tesseract wandered away. With it, her escape. The inner airlock beeped and clunked. When the airlock opened, the Chameleon surveillance drone hovering near it snuck through. It was invisible, riding on puffs of compressed air, while sending a three-sixty degree panoramic video feed to her hud from its twelve omnidirectional 32K cameras. The Chameleon puttered beyond the equipment lock, in a narrow corridor wallpapered with a maze of metal ducts and pipes. Waiting for her, four tall men in khaki uniforms, all easily a head and a half taller than her, one with Captain¡¯s bars. She was tall, one-point-eight meters, or five-foot-ten, so they were well over two meters tall, or at least seven feet. None wore pressure suits or carried small arms. They had gaunt bodies and sunken cheeks, typical of people who let their muscles atrophy in space. The corridor was too narrow to stand abreast, so two stood in a line to the right of the airlock, the Captain in front, and another two to the left. They¡¯d have her surrounded when she exited the airlock. She¡¯d have to escape the way she came in, or smash through them. She stretched her fingers and tested the hydraulics in her suit¡¯s leg joints. They weren¡¯t likely to make a move while Jin controlled the ship. If they did, she¡¯d take out the two in front by smashing their windpipe and ribs, then the two at the rear would be forced to hobble over their incapacitated friends, or run. They couldn¡¯t go far. The crew compartment and bridge of Vega was a ring, an ouroboros. Every service shaft exiting the ring to the shipping containers was a dead end. There were eight crew, four in the corridor waiting for her. Where were the others? She climbed through the interior equipment lock. Her boots clanked on the metal floor. She raised her helmet visor and greeted the Captain. Framing him, a three-dimensional maze of silvery tubes and conduits. A hot, burned metal and charred food smell hovered between them, as if he¡¯d hurriedly scorched his lunch in a microwave before she arrived. He spoke English with a Nordic, possibly Dutch, accent. ¡°Your fugitive is in container three-ninety-three.¡± She sent the Chameleon drone to survey Vega¡¯s crew ring. ¡°Where is the rest of your crew?¡± ¡°We are day shift. They are night shift. Sleeping in quarters.¡± She nodded, although day and night meant little in space. ¡°So, some containers are reachable through the service shafts?¡± ¡°Container three-ninety-three, yes.¡± ¡°Others?¡± ¡°Some. You don¡¯t need to go in those.¡± She nodded as if she agreed, but she¡¯d send a Chameleon drone to survey the ship. Anything in plain view was fair game.Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. She turned and eyed the clavicle of the crew member behind her. Three stories above his collarbone, he had sullen brown eyes and his breath smelled like garlic. The crew member behind him had fiery brown eyes and fists clenched. No name tags. Garlic-breath had two bars, a Second Officer. Fists-clenched had one horizontal bar, a deckhand. She turned back to the Captain. The crew member behind him had two bars and a machine symbol, a Third Engineer. She said, ¡°I need to confine the crew to quarters.¡± The deckhand behind her said, ¡°You give us back our ship.¡± To the Captain, she said, ¡°It¡¯s for your crew¡¯s safety. Never know how these things will go.¡± The deckhand raised his voice. ¡°We know how this goes. You steal and then you arrest us anyway.¡± ¡°He could be right,¡± she said. The Captain towered over her, and she had to crane her neck to meet his gaze. ¡°I may need to impound this ship. If there are any problems.¡± ¡°How much it cost so we not have problems?¡± ¡°You can¡¯t afford me. Three fugitives is what I am here for, Captain Ward. Stay out of my way. Confine your crew to their quarters.¡± ¡°I stay on bridge to monitor ship.¡± She studied the crew dominating over her left shoulder. Garlic-breath, the Second Officer was three steps away, no distance at all in a close quarters fight. One step behind him, the deckhand¡¯s every face and arm muscle clenched, ready to jump her as soon as he had the chance. Maybe her suit hydraulics were a match for Captain Ward and his giant beanstalks. Maybe not. Her best play, have Jin halt gravity. If nobody weighed anything, it would even the odds. Turning to the Captain, she said, ¡°I should charge all of you. Concealing a person from arrest. Willfully harboring or hiding a prisoner. Assisting or instigating escape. These are Federal charges that carry¡ª¡± ¡°You have no jurisdiction here.¡± The deckhand took a step towards her, but the Second Officer put up one very long arm to bar him. She opened comms to Jin and put him on speaker. ¡°Jin, you¡¯re wide. Picture.¡± Without missing a beat, Jin responded, ¡°Plenty of fuel to kick this rust bucket back to the colony.¡± Vega¡¯s thrusters growled alive, and the ship jerked. The Captain raised his hand. ¡°Enough. We cooperate.¡± The deckhand shouted and then tried to squirt past the Second Officer. She turned, unholstering her pistol. The Second Officer lifted his left arm, forming a loop, and then snared the deckhand¡¯s neck in a headlock. She caught the sweat on the Second Officer¡¯s hairy knuckles as his hand swept past her face and boxed the deckhand¡¯s ear. Then he cocked his elbow, tensing his back and shoulder muscles under his khakis like a master archer, and discharged his fist in a sickening blow to the deckhand¡¯s face. Her finger was on the trigger, but she resisted shooting as the Second Officer twisted at the waist and tossed his quarry against the wall. They wrestled, blood spattering, rolling on the wall, clicking and clacking against the open pipes and ducts, until the deckhand¡¯s temple crashed against a conduit the size of a fist and she heard the nauseating crack of bones. The deckhand went limp. Bloody snot poured from the deckhand¡¯s nose and down the front of his khaki uniform. She counted the red bubbles expanding and popping on his upper lip. He was breathing. Unconscious, but breathing. Not an eyelash fluttered on the Captain¡¯s face during the fight. He was stoic, as if this happened every day. Even though the deckhand was unconscious, the Second Officer kept pummeling, pinning the deckhand against the metal maze and landing punches that sounded like he was beating a sack of flour. The Captain waved his hands and ended the brawl. ¡°Enough. Get him to his quarters. All of you get to quarters.¡± The crew dispersed. The Second Officer dragged the deckhand down the passage. Blood dripped with every step. She tasked the Chameleon drone to monitor the crew as they returned to their quarters. The Captain said, ¡°When do I get my ship back?¡± To Jin, she said, ¡°Jin, belay my request.¡± Vega wrenched and creaked, and then its engine rumble died. To the Captain, she said, ¡°When my fugitives are secure.¡± ¡°Container three-ninety-three. Every day costs me millions so you go quickly now.¡± ¡°Your crew¡¯s doors will be locked.¡± ¡°Acceptable. They are young and can be impulsive. I stay with bridge.¡± She nodded. The Captain turned to walk down the passage. To Jin, she said, ¡°Did you catch that?¡± ¡°I will secure quarters. The bridge too?¡± Why did the Captain want to be on the bridge? There was nothing to monitor or control. She removed her right spacesuit glove and maglocked it to her suit. Black grit rubbed off from the corridor¡¯s silvery tangle of pipes. The floor was grimy, too. Except for the clunky footfalls of the Captain¡¯s retreat, the passage was silent. There was no housekeeping drone buzzing and clacking its way towards the bloody spatter. There were also no telltale mirrored bubbles for interior cameras. ¡°Do we have eyes on the bridge?¡± She didn¡¯t want to waste a Chameleon drone. She only had three. Maybe she was overthinking it. Captains liked to be on the bridge. It made them feel like they were in control, even when they weren¡¯t. Still, her knee had been aching since she left Tesseract. ¡°Negative.¡± ¡°Keep the bridge unlocked. In case I need to get in there in a hurry.¡± Chapter 7: 3000 kilometers, a drone, a claim APRIL 8, 2074 LUNAR COLONY Jin had to wrench himself from the pull of her wounded baby-blue eyes. In the corner of his vision, a charcoal mechanic drone had whirred across the hangar floor. It dodged a navy-blue dolly supporting a rocket engine stripped to look like a steely porcupine, and then halted, clacked, and swiveled its four bug-eyed cameras towards him. ¡°I want to go with you.¡± Her lip gloss was rosy and magnetic. His breath caught. He expected she¡¯d ask, but couldn¡¯t think of how to soften the blow. She smelled of the maple pancakes and coffee he¡¯d made them for breakfast after they¡¯d lingered in bed to make love. They¡¯d rushed to shower and dress. She¡¯d wriggled into the costume the Colony Tourism board forced on them, a blue shirt, the same color as her eyes, and navy pants, and then loosely braided her brunette hair through a denim baseball cap embroidered with the Lunar Colony Security shield and logo. The uniform was a throwback to twentieth-century New York City Police garb. As much as he¡¯d complained about it, when Leyna wore police blues she looked like she could wrestle a bear with a machine pistol to the ground, and he very much wanted to be the bear. When he didn¡¯t respond, she followed his stare to the robot behind her. It clacked at her, too. Its bulging cameras remained locked on them. ¡°You¡¯re paranoid, Jin.¡± ¡°The boss always says there is no such thing as too much paranoia in this business.¡± The Lunar Colony¡¯s spaceport hangar was otherwise empty, and they had clearance to be here. Yet, he could feel the robot¡¯s four bug-like cameras feeding their image to its facial recognition algorithm. ¡°Sometimes they really are out to get you,¡± Leyna said. ¡°I know. She says that a lot. But the machines are glitching on the surface three thousand kilometers away. Not here.¡± ¡°If they are glitching. We don¡¯t know what¡¯s happening up there.¡± ¡°We scanned the colony servers three times for malware.¡± ¡°We scanned for known signatures. It could be something new.¡± ¡°I also scanned for processes hogging CPU time.¡± Leyna had been thorough, running all the tests he could think of, and adding a few he didn¡¯t. But there was always a new virus on the black market, and a new back door to exploit. Miners were dead. One drone glitching he¡¯d accept as random. But the odds of an entire mining camp of drones failing was remote. His lizard brain sensed someone watching. ¡°Spyware is low profile. We might not detect it.¡± For emphasis, he flipped his middle finger at the gawking mechanic drone. ¡°Who would be keeping tabs on us?¡± Except for the occasional brawl in the red-light district of the Colony, mining companies fighting over dirt usually left them alone. They shunned unnecessary attention, especially from law enforcement. His mind whirled, always returning to one person. ¡°Special Agent Barrett Sanders.¡± ¡°Mia¡¯s old partner?¡± ¡°They put him in charge of prisoner transport for Lebofield.¡± ¡°Grrrr.¡± ¡°He¡¯s a black widow from the tenth circle of hell, looking to drag her to his lair.¡± ¡°The Feds are the ones that let Lebofield go,¡± she said. ¡°Plus, that wouldn¡¯t explain the surface mining drones glitching.¡± ¡°There is no point trying to understand Federal pretzel logic. It¡¯s wrapped up, folded in on itself, and shuffled so many times it¡¯s arbitrary.¡± ¡°Don¡¯t I know it.¡± This was the part of the conversation where he never knew what to say. A corrupt agency director murdered two of Leyna¡¯s four parents and her brother. For greed. She¡¯d bottled all her anger and rage. It was like a nuclear reactor that drove her. But she was also still raw. Every door to this subject was booby trapped. Every sentence a tripwire. One misstep, they¡¯d both be blown to smithereens. Her therapybot had the tortuous task of disabling her triggers, but its advice was like a database of cliches, one of which unironically was, don¡¯t give vague offers of support. He¡¯d seen her rage at the gym¡¯s punching bag. He wished it on no one. Not even FBI Special Agent Barrett Sanders, as much of a prick as he was.If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. He pulled her close, wrapping her tight against him in a hug. ¡°I won¡¯t be gone long.¡± The mechanic drone chirped and then pivoted to resume its zig-zag across the hangar floor. It vanished behind dusty gray supply pallets. An orange forklift drone lingered nearby, awaiting a signal from the logistics algorithm, which would order it to carry the pallets through the hangar airlock to the lunar launch pad, and then into the belly of a supply shuttle destined for low Earth orbit. ¡°I¡¯ll go with you.¡± ¡°Someone needs to stay here to keep the office open.¡± ¡°Maybe you won¡¯t want to come back.¡± ¡°Why wouldn¡¯t I want to come back?¡± ¡°Because I¡¯m crazy.¡± ¡°You are only a seven crazy, same as me. You are a ten hot.¡± ¡°What if one of those fryer drones at the lunch counter glitches and throws hot oil in my face and melts it off? I¡¯ll be a zero.¡± With one hand around her waist and one around her back, he squeezed her as hard as he dared without crushing her. ¡°You¡¯ll always be a ten hot.¡± She leaned up. Her breath smelled like warm maple syrup. She whispered, ¡°You know we haven¡¯t done it in the hanger yet.¡± He let his hand slide to her rear, but the forklift drone twenty steps away glared at him like a Catholic nun. Its amber caution lights flashed his direction. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. He exhaled raggedly. She pulled away and jabbed his belly. ¡°And do what while I¡¯m here? I can monitor Vega from the rover as good as I can from the office.¡± Behind him, the Lunar Transport Vehicle resembled a boxy cargo van, but its dual pulsed plasma engines would race him across the surface at over seven hundred kilometers an hour. Four hours there, four hours return, plus eight hours in between at the mining claim to retrieve evidence. He and Leyna had packed it with spare oxygen, a spare EVA suit, cases of tools to pry the electronics out of the glitching mining drones, empty cases for the evidence, plus two rifles, two pistols, ammo, body armor, spare communications equipment, food, and a sleeping bag in case he needed to bed down in it. But this was no camping trip. The LTV was designed for short trips, less than a week, and the lunar surface was cruel and unforgiving. It was a deserted vacuum, where unfiltered sun would roast him, or shadows would freeze him. He¡¯d run out of power first. Then its scrubbers would stop making oxygen. He¡¯d suffocate eighteen hours later, when he¡¯d drained the spare oxygen tanks. ¡°I am going to be gone at most a few days. The boss needs you here.¡± ¡°She needs you here. She doesn¡¯t like me.¡± ¡°She likes you. She is overprotective. Anyway, service is spotty up there. Someone needs to be here, on comms. Plus, we need to trace the registry of Vega and then write up the impoundment warrant and transmit it to her.¡± ¡°Those bodies won¡¯t get any deader. Just wait.¡± He chuckled. ¡°You sound like the boss.¡± The forklift drone¡¯s yellow lights blinked to green, and it hummed alive. It aimed for the stack of gray pallets. ¡°We are impounding the ship and bringing it back here?¡± she asked. ¡°That was always the plan.¡± ¡°We don¡¯t know why they changed the name.¡± ¡°Find the registry, find the reason. My guess, it was a dark ship, moving goods between outlaw countries to evade sanctions.¡± ¡°I can check insurance.¡± ¡°Insurance will be dodgy. Hack bank records. They can¡¯t transmit cash across space, so there will be payment records on servers somewhere.¡± ¡°Let¡¯s just bring Vega back now.¡± ¡°First, let¡¯s see how deep the shit is before we dive in. Maybe we¡¯ll get lucky and find something that gives us cause to send Vega straight back to Earth so we don¡¯t have to deal with it here.¡± ¡°You know, the girl always dies first in a horror movie after they split up.¡± He kissed her on the top of her head. ¡°This isn¡¯t a movie, sweetheart. It¡¯s safer here. Plus, there is always a last girl standing who faces the killer, the one battle-hardened, and that¡¯s you.¡± She pulled him in for another squeeze and then leaned into a kiss. Her lip gloss added mango to the maple syrup taste of her tongue, and she ran her hands down his spine, feeling every bump, ending on the spot at the base that turned him to jelly. She pulled away, saying, ¡°I love you. You better come back.¡± ¡°I love you too. One day. Not even. I¡¯ll be home for breakfast tomorrow.¡± He watched her derriere undulate away. A heart, upside down, leaving him alone. Her right cheek winked at him, and then the left. He wondered whether he¡¯d been too conservative with the fuel calculations. Pump more helium gas into the tanks, run the throttle hotter, and he¡¯d still have thirty minutes to spare. They had time for a quickie. As he opened his mouth to call her back, another forklift drone breached into the open, swiveling and blinking its amber lights his way. What was happening with these drones? ¡°When you get to the office, start a new malware scan. Look for recent code changes.¡± His voice echoed in the hangar, more agitated than he intended. Leyna gave a thumbs-up as she passed behind the disassembled rocket engine. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. The ¡®off¡¯ timing seemed longer than the ¡®on¡¯ timing, like the dots and dashes of Morse Code. ¡®S.¡¯ The forklift seemed to be blinking out an ''S.'' Before he could decode further, the forklift swiveled and chirped toward another stack of pallets. He puffed his cheeks. He¡¯d been on edge since he learned FBI Special Agent Sanders was on his way. That man was a scorpion. He exhaled. A year ago, they¡¯d had a murderous AI roam the colony, so now they were vigilant. Leyna was right; he was paranoid. There was no ghost in the colony machines. If there was, they¡¯d have found it. He turned to don his pressure suit, and then board the LTV. Chapter 8: Into the Black APRIL 8, 2074 NYS VEGA, ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND KILOMETERS BEYOND LUNAR ORBIT Captain Ward rose like a ghost, evaporating into the steely tangle of conduit as he strolled to the bridge. Head first; then torso; legs; ankles; finally shoes. The circumference of Vega¡¯s hamster wheel-like crew ring was about the same as her high school track, three hundred and seventy-five meters. A circuit which she could trot in three minutes. It was designed for efficiency, not size. Captain Ward was tall, at two-plus meters, so he needed only sixteen paces to vanish under the horizon. Letting the Captain haunt the bridge while she searched Vega made her reptilian brain uneasy, and while she could trot the crew ring, or jog, she didn¡¯t survive multiple deployments by scampering headlong into traps. She tore a second Chameleon drone off her chest and tasked it to scout the corridor and access tubes ahead. ¡°Jin, can you confirm the bridge consoles are locked out?¡± ¡°Leyna here. The controls on the bridge are locked and inactive.¡± ¡°Can the crew access Vega¡¯s controls from anywhere else?¡± ¡°Negative. And I have upgraded intrusion detection.¡± She didn¡¯t want a crew mutiny, or worse, a melee in tight quarters that would make her the pilot of a space hearse. This crew had no qualms with violence. Maybe the conn gave the Captain a sense of control, but there was nothing he could do from the bridge except sit and watch the stars on a wall mounted display. ¡°The Captain will be on the bridge. Keep a close eye,¡± she said to Leyna over the comms. ¡°Where did Jin go?¡± ¡°He left to investigate the mining accident. I tried to stop him.¡± ¡°Not your fault. When Jin makes his mind up, he is a freight train.¡± If Leyna was nervous, Kate couldn¡¯t hear it over the comms. ¡°And welcome aboard. You are doing great.¡± ¡°Thank you, Major.¡± ¡°Kate. Call me Kate.¡± A hell of a first assignment, but Leyna was capable. Her footfalls clanked as she trod the crew ring. Sallow water leaked from the morass of ceiling pipes, dribbling onto her finger. It stunk of urine and yeast. She felt queasy. Vega was like one of those neglected State Fair amusement park rides that killed at least a few hapless riders every summer. She put her gloves back on, deciding not to touch anything. Her boots caught and squealed against the metal floor grate. Gasses hissed at her from wall pipes like serpents, permeating the corridor with a sweet but stale refrigerator scent. Nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, which she¡¯d first encountered in a Marine dentist¡¯s chair, having a tooth replanted after a mess hall fight. Also rocket fuel. This elderly bucket of decay used it for attitude thrusters. The forward Chameleon drone, Cham 2, doglegged through a threshold into a navy-gray access passage to the shipping containers. Its omnidirectional cameras captured infrared and ultraviolet video, too. So far, no traps lurked in the shadows. Behind her¡ªif ¡®behind¡¯ was a meaningful word on this hamster wheel¡ªChameleon 1¡¯s camera showed Captain Ward marching through the bridge threshold and closing the hatch behind him. Four clanky steps more, and another pipe hooted at her. This one steam. A leak in the recycler system. A leak in the propellant system. Poor insulation. Worn gaskets. Hasty patches. A dozen safety problems in plain view. She didn¡¯t have time to stop for inspection. She wondered whether she was detaining three fugitives or saving eleven people from certain death. This chuck wagon was headed for Mars, at least according to its nav computer. A cover. No way this can was making it six months and a hundred and forty million kilometers on duct tape and spray sealant. There was a smuggler¡¯s waypoint, another million kilometers from here, safely past the moon. Maybe the Captain planned to stop for repairs. If they made it that far. But it didn¡¯t matter. Where Vega was headed after this was not in doubt. She¡¯d neared the access tube to the supply containers, her boots clunking progress on the metal floor, when grinding and whining echoed around the crew ring and halted her. ¡°Major Devana, I am seeing power fluctuations,¡± Leyna said over the comms. ¡°Engine one is offline.¡± The lights flickered and dimmed. She flipped her visor closed. Suit oxygen supply was ninety-six percent, her seals were good, and the spare tanks were full. Good pressure. Good volts. Good hydraulics. All her suit diagnostics were green. Instinct and training compelled her to run through her suit checklist. After power, the next thing to go was air. There could never be enough oxygen in space. Her suit was the only thing between her and suffocating to death on this leaky death trap. ¡°Now engine two is offline. Main bus is switching over to backup power.¡± The lights flickered again, and then the tunnel plunged into blackness. She ordered Chameleon 2 to halt. People radiated heat. Drones, even stealth drones, radiated both heat and electromagnetic radiation. Cham 2¡¯s scans showed nothing but empty passages. Cham 1 circled the ring. On infrared, its blue-on-red heat map displayed cracked pipes and insulation gaps, but no people, and no traps in the darkness. Vega¡¯s crew remained in their quarters. ¡°Power is out,¡± Kate said as she turned, as if watching Captain Ward¡¯s ghost retreat through the blackness. ¡°Batteries are forty-one percent,¡± Leyna said. ¡°The oxygen scrubbers and fuel pumps have power. I am trying to restart the engines.¡± ¡°Could this be engineered from the bridge?¡± ¡°Why would someone shut down the engines?¡± ¡°To keep us from impounding the ship and returning it to the colony.¡± ¡°It¡¯s suicide, Major Devana. These engines are old and not easy to restart. The battery backup will last only another three hours.¡± The lights flickered, and ceiling vents knocked, as if a goblin was scraping and dragging itself through the ductwork. Leyna said, ¡°The status log says a power surge knocked out engine one, which destabilized engine two.¡± She didn¡¯t believe in coincidences. It was a mistake to let the Captain go. She swiveled and marched for the bridge. Passive night vision cast the corridor as green on black shadows to her HUD. Her breath heaved, fogging her helmet¡¯s glass, and her footfalls clinked and jingled. Darkness seemed to amplify and distort sounds. The new pressure suit smell had been replaced with sweat. ¡°Any bridge activity?¡± she asked Leyna. ¡°None. The power is out there.¡± ¡°Any luck on the registry?¡± ¡°Negative. If they re-papered this ship, they hid it well. I am still working on it.¡±This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. ¡°What was their last port?¡± ¡°Kuipers.¡± Kuipers was an EU Commission supply station in high Earth orbit. She clattered under whistling from a leak. Ceiling pipes were deeper green than the walls in her night vision. The hissing sounded like steam, but she couldn¡¯t be sure. As soon as the whistling receded, something plink-plinked on her helmet. Maybe that foul drip from the recycler. ¡°Engine one is restarting,¡± Leyna said. The lights flickered. The corridor came alive with humming and whirring from the ducts, and then the lights turned on. She paused. Oyster-colored liquid drooled down her helmet. Ten steps ahead, the ceiling pipes bent and entered the bulkhead. The paint was a fresher, cleaner shade of navy gray. Beyond, bulky, squircle-shaped hatches, the first with C-2 Second Officer stenciled in light blue to the right. ¡°Engine one has restarted,¡± Leyna said. ¡°Engine two is restarting. The electrical log shows more faults than a San Andreas earthquake map. Last month, maintenance replaced a bad transformer. A power surge took both engines offline then, too.¡± Maybe the power outage was a maintenance problem. It certainly seemed likely, given Vega¡¯s state of disrepair. But the hairs on her neck stood at attention, demanding she check on the Captain and crew. ¡°Is there any missing time in the nav computer?¡± ¡°Negative. If anything, they raced out of Kuipers. They were scheduled to be there a week, but left after four days.¡± This ship would barely make it back to the colony, let alone to a smuggler¡¯s waystation. Or Mars. They were running. ¡°Check Kuipers¡¯ records.¡± ¡°Roger. I¡¯ve already started a query.¡± Leyna had anticipated the request. Kate liked her initiative. She clanked to the first hatch, the Second Officer¡¯s cabin. There was no reply when she rapped on it. ¡°Everything all right in there?¡± she asked as she banged a second time. The hatch drifted open. Peeking in, the cabin had two twin murphy bunks, narrowly separated, and the same navy gray paint. Someone¡¯s computer tablet rested on the right bunk. It was on, unlocked, and paused in the middle of the movie Terror of Titan. From the left bunk, music pulsated from an oversize set of blue headphones laying on the pillow. The tablet on the right bunk timed out and locked. The Second Officer¡¯s face scowled at her from the lockscreen. They hadn¡¯t been gone long. Seconds. But where? The bridge was three doors up, a slate gray hatch, indistinguishable from the others, except for BRIDGE stenciled in navy blue on the door. Beyond the bridge, four more similar hatches. She unholstered her pistol and listened to the fans hum from the ducts. This ship was a hundred thousand kilometers from the colony¡¯s shelter and breathable air. Neither Cham 1 nor Cham 2 detected movement. Not even a mechanic drone scrabbling to fix the leaky pipes. The ship¡¯s passages were empty. Why did the Captain insist on waiting on the bridge? ¡°Leyna, are you sure all the control stations are locked and inactive?¡± ¡°Affirmative.¡± ¡°Could there be a secondary circuit? Not documented?¡± ¡°What kind of circuit?¡± ¡°A kill switch. To stop us from taking Vega back to the colony.¡± She tested the handle on the next hatch. Unlocked. She let the muzzle of her gun lead the way as she nudged the hatch open. The lights were on. Two bunks, with neat, pale blue, hospital-cornered bedsheets. An empty cabin. ¡°I don¡¯t think there¡¯s a secondary circuit. I¡¯d detect a power drain or short.¡± ¡°Vega has eight crew, right?¡± She stalked the next door, cat-like, careful to keep her boots from clacking against the metal floors. ¡°Confirmed and re-confirmed. Why?¡± The next hatch was ajar. The inside lights were off. She gently swept the door wide, using her pistol sight¡¯s red dot to probe the shadows. A knife of light expanded inside the cabin until it lit two empty beds. ¡°Did Jin forget to lock the cabins?¡± ¡°No. When the power goes out¡ª¡± ¡°The doors unlock. Shit.¡± ¡°It¡¯s a safety feature.¡± The safety features and emergency protocols activated when the power was out. The crew was running. But not to hide in the shipping containers. The answer felt like a drill sergeant¡¯s backhand. The next door was BRIDGE, followed by four more hatches. ¡°Kate, I¡¯ve accessed Kuipers¡¯ security records. Interior security scans confirms the crew was aboard Kuiper for four days. That agrees with the nav computer.¡± ¡°But they left in a hurry. Kuipers¡¯ security have any open investigations?¡± ¡°As a matter of fact. Crap. Two death investigations. An electrical Cadet and Third Engineer got trapped in an airlock. They were spaced.¡± The crew was running and hiding like the cowardly rodents they were. Now it was every rat for themselves. But what they were planning was suicide. She commanded Chameleon drone 1 to reposition itself outside the bridge door. ¡°Good work, Leyna. Keep Tesseract close. I need you to take gravity offline.¡± ¡°Copy. Thruster propellant is low. Once gravity is off, it¡¯s off for good.¡± Zero-g gave her the advantage. She put her pistol sights on the bridge door and clutched a knob on the wall. The corridor was lined with them, like an infinity ladder, so the crew could crawl around in zero-g. ¡°Off we go.¡± Thrusters rumbled, and she lurched forward. The knob wobbled. Every joint in the crew ring squealed and screeched, protesting as Vega¡¯s spin slowed. Her legs floated forward as gravity declined, but she kept one hand clenching the knob and the other aiming the pistol between her legs at the bridge door. As the metallic wailing subsided, she let go, allowing herself to drift along the corridor, towards the bridge door. ¡°Leyna, program the nav computer to return to the colony¡ªgently. I don¡¯t know how much this rust bucket can handle¡ªbut don¡¯t execute until I give the command.¡± ¡°Copy. Reprogramming.¡± After a pause, she said. ¡°I haven¡¯t heard from Jin.¡± She kept the red dot on the bridge hatch as she drifted towards it. ¡°He¡¯ll be ok. Did you agree on a protocol?¡± ¡°What do you mean, a protocol?¡± ¡°To check in.¡± ¡°I didn¡¯t think of it.¡± ¡°Sixty minutes. That¡¯s our usual protocol.¡± She lied, hoping to make Leyna feel better. She needed her focused. He¡¯d be speeding seven to seven hundred fifty kilometers an hour. Wireless service was spotty on the surface. Some zones were so small, he¡¯d pass through with barely a second to relay a message. ¡°We¡¯ve never gone an hour without talking.¡± ¡°He¡¯ll check in when he can.¡± She grabbed a handle next to the bridge door and then braced her foot on the opposite side, positioning herself so she straddled the door. ¡°Entering the bridge. Stand by.¡± Her pistol¡¯s muzzle scoured the corners as she pressed the hatch open. The far wall was one large monitor displaying the stars. A red blip, a beige blip, and a blue-green blip formed a straight line down the middle of the display. Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune. The Milky Way cut across the bottom left corner. Two seats faced the observation display, behind a long control console, whose displays were off. The seats were empty. One twirled, as if someone had recently jumped out of it. Chameleon drone 1 puffed in ahead of her. She heard the clangor before she saw it on the drone feed. She swam across the bridge and stabilized herself on the console. In the far left corner, the Captain and his pistol glowered at her from a small round hatch. Over his shoulders, two other faces ogled her. The Second Officer and the Engineer. Her pressure suit was bulletproof up to rifle rounds. She floated in zero-g, one hand supporting herself against the console, and her other hand keeping her pistol¡¯s red dot on his right eye. He wore no armor, not even a pressure suit. Five pounds of pressure. Nothing with her suit¡¯s hydraulic finger augments. Five pounds and his head would explode, filling the bridge with droplets of gore. But his sunken brown eyes were more resigned than defiant. She lowered her pistol, slowly, holstering it, and then waved her hand in surrender. ¡°That is suicide.¡± ¡°We aren¡¯t going back.¡± ¡°We are a hundred thousand kilometers from the moon.¡± She shifted to count faces. Three, plus a fourth mop of blond hair. She ordered Cham 1 closer. The Captain waved his pistol at the drone. ¡°Get back.¡± ¡°I need to know who is in there.¡° ¡°You know nothing.¡± Cham 1 darted inside the hatch. Eight heads. No Lebofield. ¡°I know that escape capsule is designed for three people. It won¡¯t make it.¡± ¡°Is me and my crew. We go we have chance.¡± ¡°Where is Lebofield?¡± ¡°Container three-ninety-three. I told you. I lock them. They cannot leave.¡± ¡°Whatever happened on Kuipers, I am sure it was an accident. If you explain it¡ª¡± The Captain scoffed and slammed the hatch. Cham 1 was still inside the escape pod. Its video became white noise. The hatch groaned and then clunked. ¡°Leyna. The Captain and crew just ditched. Can you track them?¡± ¡°Their transponder is off. But I can track them on radar.¡± The oxygen math baffled her. The escape capsule had ten hours of air for four average sized people. But there were eight giant cormorants in there, and that escape capsule might be as leaky as Vega. She reached for the restraints on one of the bridge chairs and reeled herself to the seat. ¡°Leyna, can you pull up Lebofield¡¯s podcast from where you are? ¡°I can, why?¡± ¡°Is he still livestreaming?¡± ¡°Yup. Doesn¡¯t look like he went offline when the power went out.¡± Not even the power disruption could stop Lebofield¡¯s arrogant broadcast. ¡°Still talking shit about me?¡± ¡°Right now he¡¯s ranting about some government conspiracy over mining claims. Want me to broadcast it to the bridge?¡± ¡°No. Don¡¯t need to hear his horseshit.¡± ¡°I don¡¯t think he¡¯s aware you¡¯ve taken Vega.¡± She tasked Cham 2 to find shipping container three-ninety-three. ¡°Good. It¡¯ll be a surprise. I love surprises. Let¡¯s get this pooped porta-john back to the colony. We¡¯ll clean it out then.¡± The captain¡¯s chair was too small for her and her gear. She tried twisting herself and sitting on the edge, but she didn¡¯t fit. The floor was aluminum, not magnetic, so she couldn¡¯t maglock herself to the floor, either. She removed her rifle and gear and floated it to the second seat, belting it all into place. It looked like a one-armed soldier strapped in as Second Officer. After, she pulled herself into the captain¡¯s chair, clicked her straps locked, and then called up a military satellite in her HUD. One she knew was in orbit over Jin¡¯s path. ¡°What about Vega¡¯s crew?¡± Leyna asked. ¡°We¡¯ll pick them up later. When they are more receptive to our five-star services.¡± ¡°When will that be?¡± ¡°About three and a half hours from now, when their oxygen runs out.¡± Jin¡¯s LTV was moving at eight hundred kilometers an hour across her map. She pinged him. Vega¡¯s bridge trembled as its engines rumbled to life. No response from Jin. Maybe he had his notifications on mute. Chapter 9: Kuipers Attractor APRIL 8, 2074 SPACE STATION EUSS Kuipers, High Earth orbit. The line of disembarking passengers curled languidly through the aisles, but the shuttle deck shook as if there was a stampede. His partner Lindsay clenched the rail and hauled her lame leg onto the steps that corkscrewed up and out to Kuipers space station. Watching her battle even Kuipers¡¯ low gravity confirmed what he¡¯d been planning over the last seven hours. This station drew them here like moths, although maybe that was not the right metaphor. The first message sparked in the hotsheets motel. The second, six miles south on I-95 as he drove with the air conditioning wheezing against the Florida humidity and clobbering sun. It was not the message itself. The air had turned ionic. The windshield wipers switched on and the static electricity tingled his neck. At first, he thought it was an oncoming Florida thunderstorm. But when Lindsay¡¯s phone beeped, he already knew what it said. Word for word, like d¨¦j¨¤ vu, or as if the message arced across the sky into his neuroface. They made a U-turn into a strip mall with a taco truck, pausing to grab shrimp burritos, and then turned north on I-95, eating their lunch in their lap. They drove straightaway to the Jacksonville Spaceport. No traffic. This station pulled them along, not like moths to a flame, more like the rails of a maglev train. The air was electric the whole trip. But there was never a storm. Not a drop of rain. The wipers switched off immediately after they returned to highway cruising speed. He thought it was a glitch in the rental car software and steeled himself for an argument with the rental counter over damage. But the young associate smiled politely, mmmm-hmming and nodding as if it happened every day in Florida, as if there were already complaints lodged over this very vehicle, and they got to the gate with forty-five minutes to spare. Seven hours since the taco truck, leading to these spiral stairs into Kuipers. Two hours to Jacksonville, two hours at the spaceport, then three hours to orbit. Seven hours, which they spent in silence. She was his boss and fifteen years younger. He had nothing to say to her, and the less she said, the better. He didn¡¯t want to waste a lot of air pretending to be nice. Silence was golden. It gave him seven hours to consider his most pressing problem. He was going to kill her. The thirty million bounty on Devana¡¯s head wouldn¡¯t stay a secret much longer. She¡¯d want in. Or she¡¯d rat him out to the agency. After thirty years, he wasn¡¯t letting her ruin his retirement plan. He thought the time, place, and manner were his choice, but he wondered. This station was like a worm gear driving his brain. As his partner Lindsay dragged her leg onto the first step, the brunette spaceline attendant glared at him over her horn-rimmed eyeglasses. She had loosely tied hair, a tight blue uniform, and looked human enough. Her eyes were moist. Her hair shiny. Maybe she was real. It was increasingly hard to tell the difference between real flesh and the synthetic-skin over 3D-printed-silicone big-tittied gynoids used for service. The attendant¡¯s eyes shifted from him, to Lindsay, and back, side-nodding and prodding him to help. When he didn¡¯t move, she rolled her eyes and rushed forward. Lindsay put one hand up. Her blond ponytail wagged no. Her other hand clamped the rail so hard he thought it might bend. Lindsay grimaced and lifted herself a step. ¡°The low g makes it stiff from sitting. A few steps, I¡¯ll have the kinks out.¡± The way the spaceline attendant scowled at him reminded him of his ex-wife. How was he supposed to help Lindsay hoist herself up steps and out of the shuttle? He could barely walk on this wobbly space station himself. The deck shuddered as passengers clambered out. He tried not to think about the fact that they were spinning around and around some invisible center point in space to simulate gravity. Lindsay hobbled up one step, then another, and another, corkscrewing to the exit. The brunette crew member glared at him, scowling, with her hands on her snooty, round, too-perfect hips. While he watched Lindsay struggle and climb, the mystery of Kuipers stewed in his subconscious. As he mounted the first step to follow her up and out, the spaceline brunette leaned in. Her breath was warm on his neck. He could smell her perfume. Her blouse was low. For a moment, he remembered the two 38D reasons he stayed with his ex despite her mood swings. She whispered, ¡°you have mechanical legs. You¡¯re her partner. You should help her.¡± She was too perfectly proportioned to be human. He took a firm handful of her ass, pulled her closer, and squeezed. ¡°I don¡¯t take orders from a gynoid, bitch.¡± His face stung before he realized she¡¯d slapped him. His cheek was on fire. Her ass felt like muscle and the slap felt human, so he let go. ¡°That¡¯s assault on a Federal officer.¡± ¡°Touch me like that again, you wont be re-boarding this shuttle.¡±You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. Before he could respond, Lindsay called from halfway to the skybridge, ¡°Leave it, Brett. Let¡¯s go.¡± Thumb-pointing up the stairs, the flight attendant shook her head and pasted a big sneer across her face. She said, ¡°Yeah, Brett, let¡¯s go.¡± The sarcasm sounded human, too. Lindsay raised her voice. ¡°Brett. I said leave her. We have a four hour layover. We need to make the most of it.¡± The narrow spiral stairwell shuddered violently as he climbed, like airplane turbulence. A von Braun wheel like Kuipers rotated to simulate gravity and needed to be balanced, like a tire, otherwise it would precess and vibrate itself to pieces. How it was balancing the load as passengers debarked, he didn''t know. But every jostle made the servos in his legs whine and his stomach shift. Lindsay halted at the top of the stairs, waving a family on. He waited, jittery, his back in pain. A father with a baby in his arms humped luggage onto the skybridge. Then he heard a squeal. A girl appeared with a mop of black hair, and wearing loose denim pants and a baby blue t-shirt. She ran with one hand up and twirling an invisible flag. She ricocheted off Lindsay and then raced up the skybridge ahead of her father. The mom appeared, scrambling after the child, towing a carryon, and shouting, ¡°Vega, come back!¡± ¡°I am so sorry. I put her down for a second,¡± the mom said, pausing at Lindsay. Lindsay smiled. ¡°Once they walk they love to test their independence.¡± The mother lingered, swapping parenting stories with Lindsay, while her kid was rolling down the skybridge like a grenade. He waited. His neck cramped and his thighs trembled. He inhaled a ragged breath to keep himself from screaming at them to move. He had a view of the small of Lindsay¡¯s back, with her pistol printing through her blue suit. The Mom noticed her little grenade was about to blow and scrambled. Lindsay limped into a gap in the skybridge traffic. The toddler flew down the skybridge with her blue t-shirt flagging behind her. The mother kept shouting for the toddler to stop. A couple blocked the finish line. The toddler swerved too late, colliding with their luggage and crashing to the ground. Peals of giggles turned to tears. The mother swooped in and scooped her up. He caught up to Lindsay. Once they were side-by side, she said, ¡°That flight attendant. You will have to go back later and apologize.¡± ¡°It was a fucking robot.¡± ¡°I didn¡¯t think so, but I didn¡¯t get a close enough look. Looked human to me. If she was a droid its one upgrade away from having rights.¡± ¡°Droids will never have rights while I am at the FBI.¡± She gripped the skybridge railing like a cane, and halted. ¡°How many times have you been to space, Brett?¡± ¡°Bolkov¡¯s funeral. Once.¡± ¡°The rules are different here. The further we get from D.C., the less influence your badge has. Out here you are a meat suit with a bad attitude. That flight attendant will flag you as a nuisance. Maybe throw you off the flight.¡± ¡°It can¡¯t do that. We are Federal Agents.¡± ¡°Can. Will. Maybe already done.¡± She grimaced. She rolled and stretched the ankle on her bad leg, and then continued down the skybridge. Ahead, the toddler with the mop of black hair and droopy denim pants that had been charging down the runway was now in her mother¡¯s arms. She¡¯d draped herself over the mother¡¯s shoulder and was shooting daggers at him with red, swollen eyes, as if everything was his fault. ¡°That¡¯s bull.¡± ¡°Not even the droids will put up with your shit out here, Brett. Get used to it.¡± He watched Lindsay hobble a few steps, using the handrail for support, then rushed to catch up. The skybridge bounced with each footfall of his aluminum legs. Simulated gravity felt nothing like real gravity. He felt like he was constantly falling forward. The floor wobbled. He tried not to think about the fact they were floating forty thousand kilometers above the Earth in a thin metal can. He wanted to stand on hard ground, even if it was on the moon. Once he¡¯d caught up to her, she paused again and braced herself on the skybridge¡¯s railing. ¡°Kuipers was Vega¡¯s last port of call. We should start at security.¡± Vega was the name of that little shit running down the skybridge. The toddler still glared at him with red eyes, as if she¡¯d overheard his thoughts. ¡°Say that again?¡± ¡°Vega,¡± Lindsay said, lifting and flexing her injured leg, ¡°is the name of the ship smuggling Lebofield.¡± ¡°Isn¡¯t this a prisoner transport?¡± ¡°I guess you haven¡¯t read your messages,¡± she said, her face twisting up in pain as she stretched her calves. He felt the same tingle in his neuroface and the same sense of d¨¦j¨¤ vu he¡¯d felt in the car. He was drawn to this station like a magnet. You know why, Brett. We¡¯re tools, were the words she¡¯d uttered as they left the hotsheets. ¡°Devana seized Vega,¡± he said. What else was on that ship besides three fugitives? He pictured the ship landing on the moon with its containers shrouded in fog. A strange image, since there was no water vapor in space. ¡°That¡¯s right,¡± she said, pushing off the railing. ¡°And someone high up wants us to look at the crew.¡± The toddler was still in his mother¡¯s arms, and tossing red daggers his way. He said, ¡°Whatever Devana touches turns to disaster and we¡¯ll have to clean it up.¡± ¡°You could be right. She¡¯s bringing Vega back to the colony¡ª¡± The toddler reached over her mother¡¯s shoulder, her hands outstretched, as if asking him for a rescue. Still stabbing him with bloodshot eyes, she screamed NO! His heart raced and his neuroface felt like a thousand white-hot needles in his skull. He saw a brilliant white airlock. He was outside his body, watching himself run his finger along its seals. Over the top, down the sides. It was clean, but there was a problem in its circuit board. People had died. He sensed it, as if he could hear its voice. He touched its panel. Blinking red. He couldn¡¯t see the airlock¡¯s number. He blinked. Lindsay asked, ¡°You ok?¡± The mother and toddler turned left and disappeared into the boarding gate. ¡°I feel wobbly. This whole station feels like its going to fall out of the sky.¡° ¡°It¡¯s the artificial gravity. Give it a couple hours, you¡¯ll get used to it.¡± A few hours. Get used to it, she said. People didn¡¯t belong in space, least of all him. She waved him forward. ¡°Let¡¯s go. First stop, security. We can make a courtesy call and get the tapes of Vega¡¯s crew.¡± His neuroface still tanged, as if all those hot needles had left a brand on his cortex. ¡°After you.¡± As she limped down the skybridge, he smiled. He was being guided. Or drawn. He saw the plan. This station was where he was going to put her down, like the crippled dog she was. But he wasn¡¯t just here to kill Lindsay. He was here for something more important. Chapter 10: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate APRIL 8, 2074 NYS VEGA, ONE HUNDRED TWENTY THOUSAND KILOMETERS BEYOND LUNAR ORBIT Vega hurtled almost one thousand kilometers per minute in the wrong direction and Kate needed to reverse course. Seconds after she¡¯d buckled into Vega¡¯s helm, a lone orange status bar inside her hud beeped. Her other bars were green. She dismissed the warning using her neuroface. An odd error, but her highest priority was returning to the colony. Ahead, the bridge¡¯s array of observation monitors painted a pink and violet star cloud, the Milky Way, as wide and tall as the room. Neptune, sea blue and to the right of the Milky Way, formed a line with Jupiter and then rust-red Mars, which was Vega¡¯s current destination, although not for long. Wires inside the walls hummed with electricity surging to the fuel pumps, and the pipes beneath the floor clanged and knocked with rising pressure. Steam, maybe. There shouldn¡¯t be fuel pipes near the bridge. The sounds of Vega readying to reverse course weren¡¯t normal and made her nervous about another power outage. ¡°Gentle, big girl. This won¡¯t hurt a bit,¡± Kate caught herself muttering. The tablet in her lap connected to the armrest of her captain¡¯s chair by a swivel joint. It showed three green bars for the electrical system. The AC system read 800 hertz and 396 volts, while the DC system read 123 volts. Nominal frequency, yet the voltages were a shade low. Clicking through the engineering notes, she decided the low voltages were within the five percent operating band and normal for Vega. Healthy, even. It was one more piece of evidence that the crew caused the first outage with a hidden kill switch, to deactivate the locks and slink off the ship in darkness. There was no way to know until she returned Vega to the colony for inspection¡ªif she could pilot Vega to the colony intact. She swiped through the tablet to the navigation controls and broadcast the map to the top right corner of the bridge¡¯s display. If Vega broke apart, the deep space directly ahead was her future. She¡¯d see the Milky Way for a few hours, spinning and twirling through the void, until she suffocated. Then, her corpse would orbit the solar system as a comet, and maybe end up as an icy pink smear on the surface of a rocky asteroid. Or the moon. The flight plan recommended by the nav computer required a whopping fifteen hundred kilometers per minute delta-V to reverse course and would take five hours. An average thrust of one hundred and twenty-five percent of Earth¡¯s gravity. 1.25g. Normally a cakewalk. But a ship this size didn¡¯t just jump a curb and oversteer into a U-turn. They¡¯d be another twenty-five thousand kilometers from the moon before they slowed their forward momentum and turned back. Fuel was a problem. Nothing flew without fuel and nothing landed without fuel, and the tanks would be bone dry. As much as she wanted to return quickly, she wasn¡¯t sure how much stress Vega¡¯s old bones could handle. A ship this size didn¡¯t turn on a dime, and a ship this elderly was likely to crack its frame if she applied too much force. So she dialed down the acceleration to a nice, soft one-fifth-g burn that would minimize hull stress. The new trajectory would take them seventy thousand kilometers farther from the moon and require nine hours, including landing. A long voyage home. Vega had endured much more thrust leaving high Earth orbit, but the crew was running from something much more dangerous than this ship. They had little to lose. Aviate, Navigate, Communicate, in that order, the fundamental principle of piloting a starship. With the ship under control and the flight plan decided, it was time to make a reservation at the spaceport. Kate tapped the tablet to open a channel to the Lunar Spaceport and then opened her visor to talk. When she did, she felt pinpricks at the base of her skull, which quickly vanished. The orange warning in her helmet blinked red. She ignored both. ¡°Lunar Spaceport. This is NYS Vega declaring an emergency. Crew abandoned ship. We are returning to port.¡± ¡°Affirmative NYS Vega. Are you declaring a mayday?¡± The voice was reassuringly calm and human. Fuel was low, but she would either make it or she wouldn¡¯t. The nav computer said they¡¯d land with the tanks at five percent, but she¡¯d smelled fuel in the passageways. She wouldn¡¯t know until she had time to assess the full extent of leakages. She had very little margin for error. Making a U-turn in space and then landing on the moon would require Vega¡¯s fuel pumps to scour almost every remaining molecule from the tanks. A mayday call, though, meant her situation was immediately life-threatening, and she was hours from that. She changed her mind, decreased the burn, lowering the return speed, but increasing her estimated arrival time. Atmospheric drag wasn¡¯t a problem in space, so once she hit cruising speed, the thrusters would cut off until landing. On the large navigation map in front of her, Vega¡¯s trajectory to the moon arced across space as a thin, looped line, her current position at one end and the moon at the other. As she dialed down the speed, it stretched like a rubber band. She dialed the return speed down until she had a comfortable margin for error. Now she¡¯d land with the tanks fifteen percent full. The resulting flight time was eleven hours and forty-five minutes. Spaceport control repeated, ¡°NYS Vega, are you declaring a mayday?¡± ¡°Negative, Lunar Spaceport. Not at this time. Request priority clearance straight through to landing. We are bingo fuel.¡±If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. She rechecked the flight plan and her seat buckles, and then locked both. Her limbs floated off the chair, weightless. That would change when Vega spun and accelerated. ¡°Roger, bingo fuel, NYS Vega. How many souls aboard?¡± ¡°Four souls aboard. But this number is not confirmed.¡± Four that she was sure about. Lebofield, his two parents, and her. But there were five hundred and sixty-eight containers to search before she had to strap in for landing. ¡°Roger, four souls. Will you be needing fire and medical?¡± Fire and medical. What could they do? This would not be the biggest ship she¡¯d crashed. But Vega had no ejection seats and no escape pods remaining. She would either land safely, walking across the skybridge into the lunar colony, or shatter somewhere like a red space popsicle. There was no middle ground. Fire and medical could do nothing but watch. Rae always said she had a nice ass. Maybe EMS would get lucky and she¡¯d be a comet with a long tail and give a spectacular wiggle as she burned up. ¡°Sure. Tell them to bring lawn chairs and a keg. Sunscreen, sunglasses, and a holographic camera with a good telephoto lens.¡± ¡°Say again, NYS Vega? Are you requesting lawn chairs and sunscreen?¡± ¡°Let¡¯s start with fire and medical.¡± ¡°Roger, NYS Vega. Emergency services will be on stand by. Can you make it to pad delta?¡± If she could make it to any landing pad, it would be a miracle. ¡°Pad delta is fine, Lunar Spaceport.¡± ¡°Roger, NYS Vega. You are cleared straight through to landing pad delta. Keep this channel open for updates.¡± ¡°Roger, proceeding to pad delta.¡± She updated the flight plan and swiveled the pad to the side. ¡°Leyna, copy?¡± ¡°Standing by,¡± came Leyna¡¯s voice inside her helmet. ¡°I am in the office with Vega¡¯s nav display mirrored on the monitor. Twelve hours?¡± ¡°As much as Lebofield deserves a rough ride back there, I don¡¯t know what Vega can handle. And we are low fuel. We are taking it slow and steady.¡± ¡°He needs something to shut him up. I muted him when he started droning about Aitken basin. Some kind of government conspiracy about the moon¡¯s mass concentrations. His verbal diarrhea is giving me actual diarrhea.¡± ¡°He¡¯s wrong. The real secret stuff is on the other side of the moon, near the North pole.¡± ¡°What secret stuff? That¡¯s where Jin is headed.¡± If Leyna knew what was at the bottom of a Pennsylvania limestone mine alongside Kate¡¯s medals, she might not have taken the job. But what happened in Space Force Operator Club stayed locked and buried in that limestone mine. She grinned. ¡°I am kidding. I¡¯m sure Jin will steer clear of the super secret alien base.¡± ¡°There is an alien base?¡± Kate could hear Leyna¡¯s gulp across one hundred thirty thousand kilometers. ¡°Sure, Russia has one. China has one. South Korea¡ª¡± ¡°Not funny. I still haven¡¯t heard from him.¡± The surface of the moon was the perfect place to meditate. It was a desolate grayscape of endless gravel and rocks. No traffic, no buildings, no noise, and no storms to worry about. For thousands of kilometers. It had a magnificent and sleep-inducing view of the stars. A great time to listen to a podcast, read a book, or nap. A nap sounded great right now. ¡°It¡¯s only been a few hours since he left the hangar. I told you, coverage is sparse. I¡¯m sure he¡¯s fine. His blip is moving at eight hundred kilometers an hour. He probably put the rover on autopilot and took a nap. You¡¯ve been oversexing him.¡± ¡°I haven¡¯t been oversexing him. We barely do it once a day.¡± Once a day. Barely. It had been a week for her and Rae because of their work schedules, and this trip was adding another twelve hours. She was sorry she brought it up. ¡°I need you to scan my pressure suit. The electronic warfare system raised an alert. It registered a cyberattack on my neuroface.¡± ¡°Looks like Vega is trying to connect to your neuroface. It thinks Vega is a hacker.¡± ¡°That¡¯s odd. Check it out.¡± ¡°Why is that odd?¡± ¡°I can think of a lot of reasons. Vega is old, built before neurofaces were elective surgery. Yet, nothing looks retrofit on this pile of junk. Why would a ship this old have a neuroface controller? And why would a supply ship need a neuroface controller to begin with? If the owner upgraded anything, they¡¯d replace the main computer, install an AI pilot, and fire the crew. No need for humans except in extreme circumstances.¡± ¡°Like now.¡± ¡°No one¡¯s invested a dollar to upgrade this ship except the fresh paint on the hull to hide its identity.¡± ¡°Smuggler ships need humans, humans like neurofaces.¡± ¡°Smugglers don¡¯t like to leave a trail. Neurofaces leave an electronic trail. I doubt it has a neuroface connect. We missed something.¡± ¡°Could be your suit is glitchy. Military contractors are not famous for their quality control.¡± ¡°That¡¯s one explanation. This ship is so old, my cybersecurity system might be misreading Vega¡¯s signals.¡± ¡°Or could be malware that mimics a neuroface connection.¡± Leyna sounded almost gleeful. ¡°Before he left, Jin said he¡¯d seen a few notices pop up. Something new going around the mining outfits. This could be our chance to identify and remove it.¡± ¡°Going around the mining outfits?¡± ¡°That¡¯s what he said.¡± She didn¡¯t want to ask the next question aloud, because it would worry Leyna. Jin told her before he left, we could be dealing with malware. Was that why he was in a hurry to get to the mining claim? Leyna was gleeful because she and Jin were cyberathletes. They entered contests and games and had a shelf of big, nerdy trophies. The most prized were the most elusive: trophies to analysts who were the first to crush a computer virus. The dead miners weren¡¯t getting any deader. There was no need for him to rush off. She hoped Jin wasn¡¯t traveling halfway across the moon and back to chase some cybernerd trophy. A wave of irritation ran down her spine. The surface was calm and relaxing, but also ruthless and deadly. Dashing off for a trophy was foolish. No cybernerd trophy was worth risking his life. If she ended up having to rescue him, she¡¯d kill him. ¡°If this ship has malware, Leyna, let¡¯s not bring it back,¡± Kate said. ¡°Scan everything until we get to the bottom of it.¡± ¡°Done and done.¡± ¡°And if you hear from him, tell him to make a U-turn. I don¡¯t want him off chasing malware alone. Those dead miners aren¡¯t going anywhere.¡± Shit. She shouldn¡¯t have said anything. Leyna was silent for a beat. Kate could hear her wheels turning from a hundred and thirty-five thousand kilometers away. He didn¡¯t tell me that¡¯s what he was going for. Why didn¡¯t he take me? He¡¯s trying to get the trophy all for himself. Cyberathletes were cybercompetitive. Finally, Leyna said somberly, ¡°What about the crew of Vega? That¡¯s not on your flight plan anymore?¡± ¡°We¡¯ll send Tesseract after they¡¯ve realized the hopelessness of their dumb decision to abandon ship. Once those oxygen warnings start going off, they will be motivated to hop aboard any life raft we toss them.¡± ¡°That will save us a lot of paperwork.¡± ¡°I have a soft spot for saving paperwork.¡° ¡°When I¡¯m Sheriff, I want to be as kind to paperwork as you. Do you want to wait while I scan?¡± ¡°We need to get this ship back now. Soon, we won¡¯t have enough fuel to get back. Start your scans. I am turning around.¡± Kate closed the connection and looked at the helm¡¯s tablet, which she¡¯d pushed to the side. Lebofield couldn¡¯t escape his container while the ship had power. The question: whether she should let Lebofield know about the impending maneuver, or not. He¡¯d figure it out. But did she want to give him a chance to buckle up first, or give him a rough ride? Chapter 11: Scylla and Charybdis APRIL 8, 2074 LUNAR TRANSPORT VEHICLE Lunar Positioning System coords 25¡ã59¡¯40.67" N 16¡ã50¡¯49.69" W He¡¯d intended to miss the twilight phantoms and sleep through the trip past daylight. Instead, his neuroface buzzed inside his skull. He woke to the eerie red glow of the rover¡¯s night mode. Outside, the lunar surface swallowed light like obsidian and melted seamlessly into a luminous sky spattered with stars. The land was dark for hundreds of kilometers, except for one set of blinking red lights to his left, where the Milky Way¡¯s starry archway met the horizon¡¯s aniline black arc. His legs were numb from sitting and his neuroface hummed like tinnitus. Jin muted his alerts, shifted in his seat, and closed his eyes. Thirty seconds ago, he was in the pool with Leyna. They had snuck in after hours and were at the deep end, floating and kissing. Her hand was on his back, moving down inside his bathing suit and about to slip it off. His neuroface jabbed again, this time an angry emoji popped up on the console followed by, ¡°answer me. dammit.¡± The rover¡¯s console mirrored his phone. There were thirteen messages before that, seven from Leyna. Morning was still fifteen minutes over the horizon. He tossed and stretched his legs. He¡¯d seen a lunar sunrise before and hoped to avoid it. There were no breathtaking vivid reds or oranges over blue water. Lunar twilight was a ghastly grayscape, where mountains cast shadows of razor-sharp teeth and craters cast demonic grins. It was purgatory personified, with leaden phantoms rising from boulders. A glowing square next to his waypoint on the map read eight hundred and four kilometers per hour, heading thirty-four degrees northeast, and an altitude of five kilometers. Nine hundred kilometers traveled and another two thousand and change to go. He was crossing Mare Imbrium, threading equidistant between the craters Lambert on the west and Timocharis on the east. Each was wide and deep enough to swallow half of London, or maybe all of New York City, if it was crimped into a bowl and the water poured in after. During the day, the outer ramparts defining both craters would rise to the left and right. At night, the moon¡¯s surface was a black hole of nothingness. The flashing red lights in the East were keeping pace with the rover. They seemed a little brighter than before, but his nav display wasn¡¯t registering a ship within two dozen kilometers. He clicked on Leyna¡¯s avatar and sent, ¡°About a third of the way there. I fell asleep.¡± His phone thundered. The console exploded like a flashbang in the cab and bathed him in blue light. He had to squint to see Leyna on the screen. A pewter wall that was not their office framed her face. Her baby blue eyes were icy underneath the denim baseball cap embroidered with the Lunar Colony Security shield and logo. ¡°There you are. I called you seven times,¡± she whispered. She was moving. It appeared she was in a lower-level concourse on the colony. ¡°I missed you too. Why are you whispering?¡± ¡°I¡¯m in the tunnels. Did you see the video I sent?¡± He scrolled through his messages to see that something hadn¡¯t downloaded. ¡°Hasn¡¯t come through. What happened with Vega?¡± ¡°Kate¡¯s bringing it back.¡± ¡°Always the plan. Why aren¡¯t you in the office? What¡¯s the problem with Vega?¡± ¡°Nothing is wrong with Vega. Well¡ªKate thinks it has malware, but I can¡¯t find anything.¡± ¡°Why does she think it has malware?¡± Leyna¡¯s image jostled, and the scenery behind her blurred and spun. A door closed behind her. ¡°The ship tried to connect. Her pressure suit blocked it.¡±Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. ¡°That ship is old and its software has a million trapdoors. It¡¯s designed to block anything suspicious.¡± ¡°What I said, too. But that¡¯s not why I called you.¡± ¡°I had a dream about us.¡± ¡°Too bad you¡¯re off chasing malware at some remote mining colony or we could make it come true.¡± ¡°I had to go.¡± ¡°You didn¡¯t.¡± Leyna made a pig-snorting noise. ¡°I am not glory hogging.¡± Leyna snorted again and smiled. ¡°While you were napping like a baby, we had another homicide.¡± He sat up and looked outside. All he saw was his reflection. At least he was missing the twilight. ¡°I can turn around.¡± ¡°No need. I can handle it.¡± ¡°What happened?¡± ¡°Watch the video. One of the sex workers killed a client. I¡¯d call it self-defense, if that were an option.¡± The file she sent still hadn¡¯t downloaded. ¡°Who got killed?¡± ¡°A subhuman piece of shit if you ask me. Won¡¯t be missed.¡± ¡°Who¡¯s the suspect?¡± ¡°A gynoid. Doing the universe a favor. Probably a programming defect. They are supposed to go into dummy mode when the client gets too aggressive but¡ª¡± The screen pixelated and froze. He tapped the console and swiped through to connections. The call was still active. ¡°But what, Leyna?¡± ¡°¡­repeated he¡¯s coming¡­¡± The screen went black and then the rover¡¯s cab returned to its eerie red glow. The call dropped. His map froze, too. He tried messaging, ¡°You cut off. Who¡¯s coming?¡± No response. His eyes readjusted to the dark. He saw blinking red lights just outside his right window. Maybe a few hundred meters at most. It was alongside him, pacing him. Each red flash lit a small silvery disc of metal. How did it sneak up on him while he was on the call? He punched in a new heading to return to the colony. He swiped, touched, and retouched, but the console had ceased accepting commands. The map pixelated and then flickered. His position and heading updated. Eight hundred and four kilometers per hour, heading thirty-four degrees northeast, and an altitude of five kilometers. One thousand one hundred kilometers traveled. The same speed and heading, but two hundred more kilometers than when his neuroface buzzed him awake. Ahead, the sun peeped over the horizon and he saw the jagged white outline of the lunar sunrise. He messaged again, ¡°You dropped. Who is coming?¡± Again, there was no response. Programming defect. Was whatever malware that infected the mining outpost now infecting the colony? And now the rover? There were no oranges or silvers on the horizon. The sun blinked on and the terrain beneath changed to dusty, gravelly gray, dotted with boulders that cast oblique sawtooth shadows. Timocharis¡¯ ramparts formed a ghastly frown in the sunlight. A silvery metallic lunar transport vehicle hovered over his right shoulder with its red lights struggling to be seen against the sun¡¯s glare. It was identical to his, except no cockpit. Polished, immaculate, aluminum. A drone. There were no numbers or identifying marks. If it had a transponder active, it didn¡¯t register on his map. He tried to change his heading again, but the console still wasn¡¯t responding to his commands. His speed and heading hadn¡¯t changed. He didn¡¯t feel as if he were falling, braking, or accelerating. All the status gauges¡ªfuel, oxygen, and electrical¡ªwere normal. Whatever was wrong with the console hadn¡¯t impacted the engines or environmental system. He had an EVA suit in the back, but it wouldn¡¯t do him any good at this speed and altitude. Every cell in his body screamed. He wanted to punch the screen or the window. He was trapped. Would the rover slow down as planned, or run out of fuel and plummet to the ground? The drone over his right shoulder stalked him, neither speeding up, slowing down, nor drifting away. It hovered three hundred meters away. He felt hunted. He tried disconnecting his phone from his console. He messaged Leyna, ¡°you disconnected.¡± His signal had five bars, but there was no response. He messaged, ¡°There is a drone shadowing me.¡± Still no response. He pressed the emergency button on the console, and then the one on his phone. Nothing happened. He thought about the dream. He wanted to go back to the pool with Leyna. Or better yet, go back in time, wake up, watch whatever video she sent, and turn back to the colony before she called. He succumbed to panic and punched the dashboard. It made a sickening crack. The console map flickered again. So this was how it ended for him. The rover¡¯s gauge read twenty-three hours of oxygen, but he¡¯d become another frigid impact crater long before that. He messaged Leyna, ¡°I love you,¡± although he didn¡¯t expect it to go through. He tried the emergency button again. Dead. The interior speakers bellowed, ¡°There is no need for anxiety, Jinho Knight.¡± ¡°Who is this?¡± The gray drone outside his window dipped and rotated while staying in formation with him, like an airplane dipping its wings, although it had none. His rover rotated as if in acknowledgment. There was nothing inside the cab to grasp. He felt like he was falling and slid towards the window. Then, as quickly as his rover pivoted, it returned to level flight. ¡°We control your ship.¡± How did they hack into his ship? ¡°Where are you taking me?¡± ¡°We will escort you to our temple. You will retrieve your kind for disposal. As you planned.¡± He wasn¡¯t trapped. He messaged Leyna, ¡°I¡¯ve been kidnapped.¡± His phone beeped. Message failed to deliver. He sunk back in his chair and closed his eyes, trying to remember her warm lips against his. Cherry. Her lipstick always smelled like cherry. But he couldn¡¯t picture it. All he saw in the dark was Timocharis¡¯ hideous grin and the leaden phantoms of lunar twilight.