Page 5 of Redstone
“He isn’t a fake. Not exactly.”
“There’s an actualsupermaxprisoner in Redstone who’s working for you? Seriously?”
“Peacock and Puffin both vouched for him.”
“Fucking Puffin.” Tamara grunted because there was entitled, and then there was dismissive, and none of her exchanges with Puffin had been anything but both of those. “How are we going to get him in touch with Fledgling?”
“He’s going to have to do it without our help, I’m afraid. Unless you can pass Fledgling information about an operativewho’s largely in the dark, which I doubt. He’s modded, though, I do know that much. And Peacock oversaw the mods himself, so they’re going to be the best quality. If things go well, Fledgling won’t be alone in there.”
“Well, that’s something at least,” Tamara agreed. “Can I have a designation for this shadow operative?”
Sir smiled faintly. “Call him Magpie.”
Tamara raised one eyebrow. “Does he like shiny things, then?”
“He’s adaptable, or so I understand.” Something beeped, and Sir frowned as he glanced at a screen on his desk. “I have another communication coming through that can’t be delayed, I’m afraid.”
“I understand, Sir. Hummingbird out.” She cut the power with a sigh. If someone had asked Tamara when she was a teenager whether or not she’d enjoy spending so much time on her own, she’d have answered with a resounding, “Yes!” Now that she’d been in the game for a few years, though, she could feel it wear on her a little. She hadn’t spoken with her father for months; they’d never been very close to begin with, but her dropping out of the Academy and then going to work for President Alexander were unforgivable as far as Dad was concerned. She wondered if he was eating right, wondered how things were on Pandora.
She wondered when the president would launch his attack on the planet.
Not that she could prove that, not even with all her time as his aide. She was careful, but he was completely paranoid. He needed to go, and to manage that, they needed Fledgling.
“Magpie better be good,” Tamara said to herself as she started to disassemble her transponder.
He had better be damn good.
Chapter four
As prisons went, Redstone was in some ways fairly standard for the Alliance. It was a floating prison, not stationed on a single planet. Planetary prisons were for local miscreants, people who had committed crimes that necessitated locking them up but either weren’t bad enough or ambitious enough to be judged by Alliance courts.
Alliance prisons were mobile, either repurposed asteroids, bulked-up generation ships, or some mishmash of the two. Most of them had split staffing, part robot and part human, and they were required to have complete medical, psychiatric, and legal facilities available to prisoners.
Redstone’s core was a solid iron meteorite, a two-kilometer chunk of rock with a heart of metal that disrupted even the most modern communicators. Redstone had a strange sort of magnetism, the kind that pulled at the iron in a person’s blood, put people off-balance, and made them brain dizzy if they stayed there too long. The meteorite’s manufactured facilities had cleanrooms designed to combat the effects of the blood tide, but no guard ever served there for more than a year unless someone really hated them. Serving at Redstone was a rite of passage for Alliance penitentiary employees, a necessary evil and nothing that anyone wanted to do more than once.
Out of deference to peoples’ health, the authorities in charge split the staffing seventy-five/twenty-five instead of fifty/fifty like most places, letting the robots do almost all in-population work with the prisoners themselves. It would have been a good system if not for the high rate of malfunction in the robot guards.
They went down sometimes—not easily, but occasionally, and their carcasses were stripped to nothing and disseminated among the prisoners before any human guard could get to them. The black market in scavenged electronics was booming, and prices were sky-high.
Redstone wasn’t quite complete anarchy, but it wasn’t a drugged-up and dulled-down population of prisoners either. There were two sorts of criminals who ended up in Redstone: psychopaths who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be fixed by Regen, and political prisoners. Shockingly, the brutal murderers, obscene rapists, and mad scientists were more often cowed by the imprisoned politicians than the other way around; there was nothing like the flame of righteousness to invigorate someone in their own defense.
You could choose a side in Redstone if you wanted to. Most people did. It was easier to be part of a pack, to be one of many wolves, staking out your claim and pissing on it, sometimes literally. Deals were made and promises broken every day, and blood flowed smoothly and steadily in the dark zones, a simmering, seething cauldron of violence just barely stopped from boiling over. When the violence became overly blatant, guards would order a time-out; then sleeping gas was poured into the cells and common areas, and it put everyone under.
People reacted differently to time-outs; there was no telling who’d wake up first, and no one wanted to be the last person back on their feet. The aftermath of a time-out was when most of the revenge happened in Redstone, and there was no way to get around that sort of helplessness. None of the leaders of the packs wanted to be overthrown, so they modulated their violence carefully, found the edge, and stuck to it as best they could.
Some people weren’t offered a side even if they wanted one. They were either too abhorrent for even the locals to stand or too clearly an invitation to a feud. No one wanted a weakling in their group, and the few lambs that made it to Redstone were too quickly turned into ground meat. And the abhorrent ones, well … you couldn’t trust someone who was completely crazy, right? Couldn’t predict them, couldn’t bend them to your will, so you didn’t let them in to play. Social isolation was the way to go with the sharks, and the sharks seemed to agree.
Then there were the straddlers. They were usually people who’d been refused entrance into a pack and yet somehow survived despite the lack of protection. They were wolves in sheep’s clothing, people who had a skill that was useful and kept them alive, people who kept their heads down and did the occasional favor but put themselves first.
Lone wolves could be tolerated as long as theystayedalone. No new packs, that wasn’t how the hierarchy went. You paid in blood to get to the top; you couldn’t just make something out of nothing. If you paid in blood to be left alone, well, maybe you’d last.
Isidore Cain had already lasted longer than anyone thought he would.
At first glance, he was a perfect little lamb. Slender and soft-spoken, it was hard to believe he’d orchestrated a successful attack in the heart of an Alliance outpost on the planet Paradise, connected to the former governor’s mansion, nonetheless! He’drun afterward and had finally been caught a few months ago on Solaydor. His trial had been fast, his sentencing even faster, and then he’d come to Redstone.
Dusky skinned, a face that would have been heart shaped if he were a healthier weight, black hair that brushed his shoulders, and dark, fathomless eyes—he was the very definition of a lamb, right down to his gentle voice. And lambs were only good for a little bit of play before you ground them up.
Two people tried to take advantage of Isidore Cain on his first day in Redstone. He’d barely been in gen-pop for more than a minute, looking lost in his dark-red uniform as he hovered by the doors he’d been tossed through, when one of Kliassne’s men went after him. The guy had barely had enough time to say, “Know what your mouth’s gonna be doing for the next fucking hour, bi—” before Cain had closed the distance and punched the man so hard in the side of the head that blood was already sloshing out of his ear as he fell to the ground. Which …
