Title: Redstone Chapter 9, Part 1.
Kyle didn’t do well being forced into stillness. He could do
it; it actually came very easy to him, the art of not being noticed, of making
yourself small and unavailable and uninteresting, and he wasn’t sure why. It
was an ingrained habit, one of those abilities that it seemed he should have
had memories of learning and didn’t anymore. He could shrink and vanish without
knowing why, and because of that he tried to avoid doing it. Kyle was
inherently reluctant to ever agree with Cody’s friend Ten about anything, but
he had to admit that ze had a point in making hir life’s unofficial motto “Go
big or go home.” If you were going to commit to a course of action you should
do it wholeheartedly, which was why Kyle was here in the first place.
It stood to reason that he should listen to more experienced
voices when it came to keeping him alive
now, but Isidore’s plan still grated on him a little bit. “I still don’t see
why we have to delay this anymore.”
Isidore smiled at him. It wasn’t a condescending smile, not
in the least, but it was measuring in a way Kyle didn’t quite understand. Like
he was being held up to a standard he wasn’t sure how to reach, and for reasons
that weren’t entirely clear to him, Kyle wanted to hit and exceed any measure
that Isidore could think of. “We need the time to prepare.”
“The other inmates already know I’m here. There’s nothing to
be gained by not facing them sooner.”
Isidore shook his head. “Meals might as well be feeding
frenzies here. Lots of deals go down when food gets distributed, and they’re
the most dangerous times in Redstone, which is saying a lot. We can handle
emissaries and small groups, but crowds will be hard to negotiate until we make
more secure alliances. So until we have the means to do that, we’re avoiding
mealtimes.”
“What will we do when we run out of food?”
“We won’t.” Isidore indicated a stash of ration bars
underneath the exterior hull of a robot that had somehow been ripped apart like
a corn husk. That wasn’t supposed to be possible with this level of
nanomaterials. They were harder than Old Earth diamonds.
“But we can’t let them think we’re afraid,” Kyle persisted. “The
longer we hide away back here, the more they’ll rationalize trying to get rid
of us when we finally do appear.”
“I don’t actually plan for us to be here all that long,”
Isidore said. “No more than a day, just enough for us to get the bits and
pieces we need to do some deals.”
“What kind of bits and pieces?”
Isidore looked over his stash of goods consideringly. “I
think we need to take another bot. They carry all sorts of tradeable parts, and
one should be heading our way pretty soon.”
Kyle was lost. “Why?”
“It’s protocol with new arrivals, especially when the guards
lose sight of one of them. They send the bots in to do a body check, make sure
everyone is accounted for. If someone is missing then the guards themselves
will come in, but they’ll probably gas the place first, and that…” Isidore
wrinkled his nose. “That’s a nasty experience. It’s hard to recover from and it
disrupts the chain of command, so they don’t like to do it, but will if it’s
necessary.
“The iron disrupts the vid feeds so they don’t have a way of
looking this deep into the core. That means sending a bot down here. We’re the
only ones this deep, so by the time it gets to us we’ll be the priority
assessment.” Isidore rubbed his long, thin fingers together. “We need to open
it up and get some parts out of it, but keep it functional so that it can
record our identities and get back up to broadcast level.”
“How are the two of us going to take out a robot guard?”
Kyle asked. He tried not to make it sound like a demand, but he felt
uncomfortably out of his depth here. He was used to being…okay, not the best, so to speak, but the one who knew
what was going on. He’d been a star in the Academy thanks to his public
position and his secret one both, but now he was the one struggling to catch
up. “They’re armed, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they are.”
“And they’re nearly indestructible.”
“Also true,” Isidore agreed. “This is definitely going to be
easier with you around; handling one of them by myself was rough.”
“You still haven’t explained how we’re going to do it.”
“Psychic powers.” At Kyle’s blank look, Isidore relented. “Actually,
I rigged a molecular disruptor up a month ago. We’ll let it scan me first, and
then while it’s scanning you I’ll puncture its control system and temporarily
shut it down. I’ll take out the parts we need, turn it on again and let it
toddle back up to the main room.”
How the hell… “Where did you get the parts for a molecular
disruptor?” Kyle demanded. “And why didn’t you have it when you came after me
yesterday?”
If Isidore was put off by Kyle’s tone, he didn’t let on. “I
didn’t have it for two reasons: one, it requires too much power to be moved
from where I’ve jimmied the cord into the wall,” Isidore gestured at the band
of light inset in the stone. “And two, it could be considered a heavy weapon.
If it was seen by the guards, they would have no choice but to come in to
confiscate it, and I don’t want to have to deal with being rousted.”
“Where did you get the parts for it in the first place?”
Kyle might not know much about what went on in Redstone, but he was quite sure
that the guards weren’t lax enough to make it possible for prisoners to create
heavy weaponry on a regular basis.
“Some of them I traded for. Some of them I stole for myself.
But the most important part?” Isidore held up a long metal wand threaded with
scavenged wiring. It looked nothing like a traditional molecular disruptor, the
large size presumably necessary so he could compensate for lower power. The tip
of it, though, the part that was going to do the impossible by cutting through
things that should be almost impossible to cut, it was…odd. Kyle looked closer.
The piece was semi-circular, thin and slightly iridescent. Now that Kyle
thought about it, it actually looked like a…
“Is that a nail?”
Isidore smiled again. “One of my toenails.”
“You implanted a fake nail? How did that not get caught?”
Isidore must have bribed the clinic staff somehow to get them to overlook a
fake body part.
“I didn’t implant a fake, I actually grew this one.”
Kyle shook his head. It was enough of a cue for Isidore to
continue. “I seeded the growth bed for this nail with the chemical components
needed to create a part like this. I figured that even if I didn’t get the
chance to build a disruptor, it couldn’t hurt to have another built-in weapon.
It’s incredibly hard, naturally, but I programmed the stem cells to release
once the growth had achieved the preset length. It literally fell off into my
hand.”
The process Isidore was describing was waaay more
complicated than he was making it seem. Kyle had done decently in his
fabrication and modification classes at the Academy, but this was a whole other
level of creation. “What did you do before you came here?”
“I was in cosmods.”
Kyle shook his head. “This is not cosmodification. Cosmods
are for aesthetic reasons, they’re simple.
This is…not simple.”
“It’s nothing compared to convincing a person’s body to grow
itself a tiger tail,” Isidore demurred. “Solaydor is the Central System’s
leader when it comes to this technology, and I worked with some very good
people while I was there. I picked up a lot.”
“I guess so,” Kyle agreed. “You must have—” He stopped as
Isidore held a hand up suddenly.
“Noise in the corridor,” he murmured. “The bot has a loose
wheel.” He glanced at Isidore as he quickly hid the wand under a pile of scrap.
“Remember, let it scan me first and after that, keep its attention long enough
for me to work.”
“How long will that be?”
“Not long,” Isidore said soothingly. He didn’t have time for
anything else: the bot wheeled into view and stopped in front of them, its
green eyestrip glowing brightly in the dim hallway.
“Identify yourselves, inmates.”
Isidore stepped up smartly. “Prisoner 2571.” The glow flared
as the bot recorded Isidore’s irises, then swiveled to focus on Kyle.
“Identify yourself, inmate,” it repeated.
Kyle carefully didn’t look over at Isidore as he said, quite
honestly, “I’m Kyle Alexander, and I don’t know my prisoner intake number.”
The bot whirred for a moment. “Unable to process. Identify
yourself.”
“My name is Kyle Alexander, and I do not have an official
intake number.”
“All inmates have corresponding numeric values.”
“Well, I don’t.” Isidore was easing the wand out from under
the scrap. Kyle kept talking. “My arrival was a little precipitous, honestly.
It’s not surprising that I don’t have a number yet.”
“All inmates and personnel have official intake numbers.”
The bot scanned his retinas. “No existing match in database. Error:
unidentified inmate. Conclusion: intruder. Course of action: immediate apprehension.”
That didn’t sound good. “Wait, there’s a good reason I don’t
have a—” The armature on the front of the bot began to crackle with the snap of
a heavy-duty taser. “Wait, stop!”
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 heads out 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 me less vulnerable.”
“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 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 to dwell on the what 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, darker
than the rest of his skin. Tougher, somehow, like a callus had built up over
the entire thing.
“Wyl just told me.”
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