Page 24 of Redstone
The bot lifted the taser toward him, and Kyle had just a moment to brace himself for the feeling of thousands of volts coursing through his body before the noise and light suddenly stopped. The bot’s arm dropped, and its eyestrip went dark. He sighed as Isidore appeared from around the back of the bot, the disruptor firmly clasped in one hand. “That was close.”
“That’s bad,” Isidore said, frowning fiercely as he started to cut into the side of the bot. “No intake number means you’ll have to be retrieved and officially entered into the system. We’ll have to make an appearance in the main room, and we’ll have to hold our own for as long as it takes for the guards to get their headsout of their asses and do your intake properly.” He jerked a small piece of metal out of the bot, then got started on another section. “Not that the guards aren’t a problem all on their own, but you’ll be vulnerable in the crowd.”
“I thought the whole point of claiming me was to make melessvulnerable.”
“Claiming you was done to keep you alive for long enough to get down here,” Isidore corrected. “I had a plan, but that plan isn’t worth much if you’re not official, and if we can’t keep people off your back long enough to get you that way.” He removed a few more things, then went to work at the back of the bot’s headpiece. “The guards can’t be trusted. I know you’ve got a lawyer here, trying to ensure decent treatment for you, but—and this isn’t a criticism, just an observation—they haven’t been very effective so far.”
“No,” Kyle said, thinking guiltily of Demarcos and how frantic he had to be now. “He hasn’t.”
“So, we’ve got new problems. Not just keeping you alive in the Pen—the dining hall, it’s called the Pen—but keeping the guards from screwing with you.” Isidore put the wand down and closed something up on the back of the bot’s head. A moment later, it whirred to life again. Kyle unconsciously tensed, waiting for its arm to start snapping with electricity.
Instead, it turned and headed back down the hall without another word. “What did you do to it?”
“Hit restart, basically. It’s programmed to return to its charging station, and as far as it was concerned, it had no mission here. It already reported an unofficial prisoner, though, so the guards will be on the lookout soon enough. We’ll have to get up there if we don’t want this whole place gassed.”
Isidore looked more than a little downtrodden, which was disconcerting. Kyle wanted to shrug off the worries; being afraid wasn’t going to get him anywhere, and even though he wanted todwell on thewhat ifs, he resolutely turned his mind away from them. “We’ll handle it. What did you take from the bot?”
“Hmm? Oh, batteries.” He indicated the little pile of chips. “Battery backups. Not big ones since the bots shouldn’t need them, but they’re one-shot wonders for a lot of prisoner tech. Plus a few other things that no one else will care about, including a—” His voice broke off for a moment as he swept his hand through the pile and settled it firmly onto the iron bench. Isidore pressed his palm as flat as it could go, his eyes intent. Kyle watched as his frown suddenly blossomed into a brilliant smile.
“Robbie and Wyl are here! Oh, they have the best timing.”
“Who are they? And how do you know that?”
Isidore waved his hand at Kyle, who noticed for the first time that the palm looked … hmm,darkerthan the rest of his skin. Tougher, somehow, like a callus had built up over the entire thing.
“Wyl just told me.”
***
Demarcos Gyllenny grew up on a Central System planet. OntheCentral System planet, honestly: Bayt, the biggest and most populated planet in Alliance space. It didn’t house the Alliance’s capital or even any of its major centers of industry or government services, like Olympus. Bayt’s major commodity was, simply put, people. It was one of the first planets colonized after the exodus from the Home System, and it was a poor one for colonization. The soil was toxic, and dust storms rolled across the tumultuous landscape on a regular basis. The sky was eternally piss yellow, lit by two different suns, and the water had to be drilled for so deeply and put through so many cleansing systems that by the time you drank it, it didn’t even taste like water anymore.
Bayt was only settled due to a firefight between two different colony ships. The shameful battle between theSurinaand theSanta Mariawas actually fought over Bayt’s sister planet, the much smaller and far more hospitable Aya. Computer readouts indicated that the most desirable landmass—there were several that were well-equipped for human colonists—wouldn’t support the numbers on both ships.Surinawas closer, butSanta Mariahad bigger engines, and after a drawn-out conflict, during which the irate captains used most of their life pods as makeshift torpedoes, the ships lost control and collided with each other.
Thousands of lives were lost in the mid-space collision, and those who remained were drawn inexorably into Bayt’s gravitational pull. Both ships fell to the surface, and almost a million more people died when they did.
The thing about early colony ships, though, was that they were both enormous—literally, floating continents—and designed with a certain practical ruthlessness in mind. Once a planet was descended to, there was no coming back. The ships weren’t equipped to return to space, and so the people who were left on board, of which there were almost ten million, had to make the best of a bad situation. There was no other choice.
Gradually, the colonists built up the planet, scavenging the ships for the pieces needed to make the first enormous skyscrapers. They built them so tall they would rise above the sandstorms, away from the poisonous ground, and thanks to a surprise surplus in resources due to the unexpected deaths of close to ten percent of the colonists before landing, the first Baytians became an incredibly fertile group. The population grew in leaps and bounds, and by the time contact was reestablished with the larger universe, the people of Bayt had established themselves as both birth prolific and generally interested inleavingBayt.
Demarcos was born on a low level in Tower Three. The higher your level, the more money you had: if you could afford to pipe your water up thousands of feet, you could afford to have windows that actually opened because the dust didn’t rise high enough to bother you. Demarcos didn’t have those advantages as a child. He was the tenth of twelve children to his mothers and one of only two boys.
He still remembered the day that Mama Jill didn’t come home: she had worked as a miner, sifting poison out of the ground and sending the cleaned earth to the greenhouses for use in food production. Her suit had malfunctioned, and she had inhaled a concentrated amount of Bayt dust and died almost instantly. Her body was never returned; bodies were just fuel to be tilled back into the soil, used to feed more bodies.
Mama Opal got a death settlement from the government that was enough to move them up five levels, into a zone where there was more than just vocational training for children—there was actualschooling. Demarcos had still been young enough to take advantage of it, and he’d absorbed reading, writing, and math like a sponge. By the time he was fifteen, he was living on level Seventy-Two, in a boarding school. By the time he was twenty, he’d earned a scholarship that paid for his passage to Liberty, where he worked nights and studied days to become a lawyer.
Demarcos understood injustice. He’d lived it, lived a life shaped by foolish men’s prideful mistakes. He’d been born near the ground, so low he might as well have been buried there, for all the social mobility he’d been raised to expect. His mother’s death had been awful but also a blessing in disguise. He couldn’t remember what Mama Jill had looked like anymore, but he did remember that her suffering had paid for his elevation off world. The least he could do was return the favor.
He’d paid to move the rest of his family up to level Thirty-Seven and hoped to do more when he could. Demarcos tookcare of his own and never counted on anyone to help him for seemingly selfless reasons. It had gained him a ferocious reputation as someone who didn’t make deals, was no good for backdoor meetings, and couldn’t be counted on to fold in order to save face. Demarcos fought every case like he would die for it.
This was the first case he’d taken on where he actually wondered if he would, in fact, die of a heart attack before it could be resolved.
“Your bots didn’t find him.”
Warden Harrison scowled at him. “I believe I just said that.”
“But you didn’t bother to tell me what itmeans,” Demarcos snapped. “If you’re content to sit there and let me think the worst, then be prepared for me to ask some stupid questions in the search for an answer. What does it mean that they didn’t find him?”
Please don’t say dead, please don’t say dead …Demarcos had an entire team back on Liberty currently dedicated to searching for and documenting cases of malfeasance and abuse in Redstone, but he didn’t want to add Kyle Alexander to the list of victims. Shit, the kid had had it hard enough, and now he might be … he might be …
