Page 4 of Redstone
“I don’t want him to have any opportunity to wriggle out of his incarceration period, Tamara, so mind that you keep everything strictly above board until Kyle is safely imprisoned. After that …”
“It’s a waiting game, I suppose,” Tamara said. “Until the trial, I mean.”
“No.” Raymond shook his head. “Redstone is endgame, Tamara.”
Tamara’s rapid steps stumbled for a moment, one hand going up to smooth her pale brown hair. “Uh … sir …”
Raymond didn’t stop until he was at the port to his personal ship. When he turned back to her, his face was full of sympathy. The expression looked odd on him, a prey mask stretched over a predator’s maw. “Don’t worry about that,” he said soothingly. “Just worry about keeping my brother firmly in hand before the transfer to Redstone. Once that’s done, I’ll bring you back home. I got an update from the genetic engineers yesterday, and they’re making real progress on a cure for you, Tamara. Soon all of this will be behind you, and you’ll have a very long, very productive life to look forward to.”
Tamara shivered slightly and felt her eyes widen, and Raymond chuckled and touched her cheek. “I thought you’d like that,” he said. “Just one more week, my dear.”
“Yes, sir,” Tamara murmured.
Raymond turned and headed into the ship, the port closing firmly after him. Five minutes laterThe Regencyhad detached from the transport ship, and Tamara headed back to her temporary quarters, hustling head down like a good little worker. Once she got to her private quarters and enabled blackout mode, she set her tab down and wiped a hand roughly across her cheek.
“Slimy fuck,” she muttered. “Sick, slimy fuck.” She pulled her hair back into a bun, then scratched her forehead. “Fucking fashion.” Why it had become trendyin the Central System for feminine to equal having your face mostly covered by your damn hair was a mystery to Tamara, except in all the ways it wasn’t. The resurgence in sexism over the past decade was directly linked to the dismissal of a lot of the Fringe planets and their “atypical” inhabitants, people who didn’t conform and didn’t care to.
The idea that gender expression could even be an issue in this day and age had mystified Tamara until she met Raymond Alexander, and then it had made too much sense.
If there had ever been a man who’d worshipped at the cult of masculinity, it was the president. He was the type to cherry-pick at history, to wax rhapsodic about the great men of the past, most especially Alexander the Great. Not that that was coincidental at all. And never mind that the guy had been a conqueror intent on expanding his empire instead of contracting it, or that he’d died young of illness and/or assassination, or that he’d had male lovers. Raymond was interested in the archetype: the fiction, not the fact. It both explained some of his idiosyncrasies and made others even stranger.
The president clearly wanted to be adored, and by a large swathe of the population, he was. Personally, though, he was alone and seemed to prefer it that way. No close friends or spouses, no lovers, not even escorts spent any time in his bed as far as Tamara could tell. Raymond had no offspring; the closest thing to genuine affection that Tamara had ever seen in him was what he expressed toward his little brother, Kyle, and even that was poisoned.
The urge to take a shower was sublimated by the need to get in touch with Sir. Tamara shrugged out of her too-tight silver jacket—why the fabric refused to adjust properly was another fashion mystery that she wanted to set on fire—and settled on the narrow divan beside the false window. Currently it sported a jungle scene, but Tamara shifted it to a rocky cliff face overlooking a blue-gray ocean, with a dark-purple sky in the background. She added the sound of waves and wind, and it was almost like being home. Then she assembled her private transponder.
Private because of course, Tamara needed something that didn’t hook into the prison ship’s network and also couldn’t be connected to Raymond Alexander’s communications. Assembled because she would never have been allowed an actual private transponder. President Alexander demanded complete subservience in his employees, and that meant giving up all semblance of independence in most aspects of their lives—from what they wore to who they spoke to. Privacy was anathema, cohesion and adherence were everything. It was a good thing that Tamara had spent the time she had at the Academy learning how to make what she needed on her own.
She pulled off part of her tab and set it on the divan, then slipped the retro-but-still-allowable chip from the center of her belt and slotted it into the top of the scavenged motherboard. Her earrings, completely inert when worn, became powersupplies when dipped in an acid environment, which she got from the cleaning supplies in her bathroom. A few more tweaks and a minor calculation to get to the nearest bouncer, and Tamara uploaded her code and waited.
Sir answered after fifteen seconds. He looked as imperturbable as always, agelessly handsome in his crisp Academy uniform, his thick black hair a little longer than Tamara remembered it. In the background, she heard Hermes say, “Mercury protocol activated,” and she breathed a little sigh of relief. They were secure.
“Hummingbird,” Sir greeted her. “What do you have for me?”
“Nothing good,” she replied, wishing it were otherwise. “The president just left. I’m staying on as his liaison until Fledgling is delivered to Redstone.”
“So it is Redstone, then.”
“Yeah.” Tamara winced. She knew just how much time and effort Sir had put into getting a safety net in place at Caravan, where Kyle really should have been sent given his minimal criminal history and family name. “His mods are going to be deactivated, and all his private communications are being monitored except those directly related to his legal counsel. I can’t guarantee that those will stay private for much longer either.”
“I’ll let Peacock know.”
Tamara snorted a little laugh because if there was ever a more accurate descriptor for one of Sir’s operatives, she didn’t know it. Garrett was one of her favorite people, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t kind of ridiculous too. “What’s our next move, Sir?”
“For you, monitoring, just like you’re supposed to. I sincerely doubt there will be any way for you to get close enough to Fledgling to speak with him, and I don’t want you to take undue risks with regard to your position. We do need to know what happens to him, though, so keep me updated as often asyou can. Mercury will let you record messages in fifteen-second increments, so use the coded sequence if you can’t get me specifically.”
“Yes, Sir.” Who’d have thought a modified Morse code would be good for anything in this modern day and age?
“When you get to Redstone, the best option we have is for you to manufacture a reason to stay on at the prison. You’re incredibly useful in your current position, but our top priority is the survival of Fledgling. See what you can do.”
“Yes, Sir.” Tamara would make that happen if she had to give herself an actual heart attack to do it. “Are there any operatives in place at Redstone?”
“Peacock had two in positions of power at Caravan but transferring them to Redstone will take time. The human guard population is only twenty percent compared with Caravan’s fifty, so it will be harder to get both of them in. Thereissomeone on the inside at Redstone, but communication is extremely sparse.”
“Why’s that, Sir?”
“Because he’s in the prison population, Hummingbird.”
“An inmate?” Tamara was genuinely surprised. “I didn’t think it was possible to fake getting into Redstone. I mean, it’s the supermax for a reason. The only fakes that get in are the ones that have no choice, like Fledgling.”
