Page 36 of Redstone
“Good.” Now for a more nuanced directive. “ZeeBee, show me your baby.”
The robot rolled forward to Wyl’s chair, lowered its arms, and gently lifted Wyl out of his seat. It cradled him close to his chest and said, “There, there. There, there. There, there. There, the—”
“Well done, reset.”
“Command accepted.” ZeeBee promptly dropped Wyl to the ground.
“Ow.” Okay, so that one would take a little fine-tuning. Wyl picked himself up and brushed off the seat of his pants. “ZeeBee, listen to the birds.” Not that Wyl expected this one to amount to anything, but it was just in case Isidore developed a way to get a Morse signal through the prison walls to him.
Surprisingly, ZeeBee started to click in a recognizable pattern. “Oh, shit,” Wyl muttered. That couldn’t be good. He wondered how long Isidore had been trying to get in touch. “ZeeBee, translate.”
“Check your messages, damn it. Hummingbird. Check your messages, damn it. Hummingbird. Check your messages, damn it. Hummingbird. Check—”
“Well done, stop.”
“Command accepted.”
Hummingbird? They weren’t supposed to be talking to her yet. Wyl opened his tab and checked his encrypted feed, tapping in passwords he barely remembered setting up. There wasn’t just a message, there was a vid link. Anactiveone. He opened the channel. “Hummingbird?”
“There you are! Where have you been; I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for hours?”
“I put my room on a communications lockdown while I was … tinkering.” Only Robbie’s comm would get through the shield that Wyl had put up to minimize distractions. “What’s going on?”
“You haven’t spoken to Garrett yet?”
Wyl shook his head.
Hummingbird—and damn it, pseudonyms were all well and good, but that just sounded too weird in his head—Tamarairritably blew a lock of blonde hair off her forehead. “Great, then I get to be the one to pass things along. I’m going to need to do some breaking and entering, and I haven’t brought along everything I need for that.”
“Breaking and entering? Here?” Wyl knew he was gaping, but it was hard to stop. “How the hell are you supposed to manage that? Who’s important enough to—oh, shit, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Nope.”
“You can’t get into the warden’s office without setting off a ton of alarms if it’s anything like Caravan was.”
“Well, I need to figure it out, and fast. We need information from his private computer.”
Of course they did. Because nothing could ever go as planned. “Soon?”
“The sooner the better. I don’t suppose there’s any way you can get out of the spouses’ quarters and lend a hand?”
With so many eyes on him every time he stepped out of his and Robbie’s door? “I doubt it.”
“Then you’ll have to help me figure out how to do it myself.”
Oh, boy. “That’s going to be difficult.”
Tamara laughed. “You’re telling me. It’s got to be done, though.”
“Well, then.” Wyl sat back. “Tell me what you’ve figured out so far.”
***
The funny thing about habits learned in early childhood, as far as Demarcos was concerned, was that you never really outgrew them. The Towers of Bayt were enormous, Frankenstein creations birthed from the skeletons of the colony ships. Because of the vital ship structures colonists had been able to access as they built, the bones of the buildings, those massive, awkward edifices, were made not of durable plasticene meta-materials that resisted impact and vibration and had a dozen other safety features built in. They were metal: old, hard metal that itself had been recycled out of the ruins of Kuala Lumpur’s greatest skyscrapers.
On a planet where keeping up your technology was hard, especially in the beginning thanks to the dust storms, communication between different sections of the buildings happened along those metal bones. They were beaten out in a variant of Morse code, in fact.
Demarcos kept his communicator wide open when he was alone in his quarters, monitoring as many frequencies as he possibly could inside Redstone. He didn’t expect to get access to the internal comms between Redstone workers, but occasional bits and pieces of code from the medical unit came in unshielded. It was the one part of the prison that had to beable to connect with everyone who worked there, apart from Harrison’s comm, so it had the broadest reach.
