Title: Redstone Chapter 9, Part 2.
Demarcos Gyllenny grew up on a Central System planet. On the Central System planet, honestly:
Bayt, the biggest and most populated planet in Federation space. It might not
house the Federation’s capital, or even any of its major centers of industry or
government service, 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 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 any more.
Bayt was colonized due to a firefight between two different
colony ships. The shameful battle between Surina
and Santa Maria was 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. Surina was closer but Santa Maria had 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 hit 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, 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 in leaving Bayt.
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 actual schooling. 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
took care of his own, and never counted on anyone to help him for 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 it means,” 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…
“It most likely means that he simply wasn’t issued an intake
number,” Harrison said with cold calm. “One bot did return a blank notation.”
“Why doesn’t Mr. Alexander have an intake number?” Tamara
Carson asked. She was the president’s resident flunky, and Demarcos had
honestly expected her to be way more of a pain in the ass than she was actually
being. It was strange, having the support of someone on the very definition of
the other side. Not that he wouldn’t mind trying to sway her to his side, to be
honest; she was sharp in a way he respected, and had dealt with plenty of her
own shit growing up as a natural in a Regen universe. Now, however, was not the
time to be thinking of her.
“We didn’t have a chance to issue one to him before his introduction
into the general population.”
“Before he was stolen out of his Regen tank and shoved into
the Pit by a yet-unidentified guard,” Demarcos corrected, just as cold as
Harrison. Fuck that son of a bitch, he wanted professional? Demarcos would professionally
get his ass canned by the end of this.
“If you’re looking for further justification, I have nothing
new to offer you,” Harrison said. “Internal investigations are proceeding into
the unauthorized extraction from the clinic, but I’d think you’d be more
interested in what’s happening to your client now than resurrecting the past.”
“That happened less than twenty standard hours ago, it’s
hardly the past,” Demarcos argued, but he knew that flying this flag wouldn’t
get him anywhere with the warden. “What happens next, then?”
“We have to confirm that the blank is indeed Kyle Alexander,
and then a guard will remove him from the common area and complete his intake
properly.”
Well, that sounded fucking ridiculous. “How will you ensure
his safety while he’s waiting around for a guard to pull him out of there?”
“It isn’t our responsibility to ensure anything other than
his presence, Mr. Gyllenny.”
If a person like Warden Harrison had been in charge of the
lower levels of a Tower on Bayt, there would have been no one left alive in
under a year. “You have a constitutionally-mandated duty to tend to the needs
of your subordinates under adverse conditions.”
Harrison folded his hands complacently. “Prisoners don’t
qualify as subordinates. At best, they’re low-value human capitol. At worst,
they’re enemies of the state. Recent laws passed by the Federation Senate spell
out new provisions in maximum security prisoner care that necessitate some hard
decisions, but the welfare of my guards comes before the welfare of any of the
prisoners in Redstone. Is it a hard system? Yes, I acknowledge that it is. But
I reiterate: every person in this prison has been convicted of murder at a bare
minimum, including your client. His upcoming trial focuses not on his guilt,
but on his culpability for the murder. I certainly hope that he lasts until
then, but if you were so concerned, you should have fought harder to get him
into a lower-security facility where prisoner comforts are given more weight.”
If he ground his teeth any harder, Demarcos was going to
lose them. “Continued survival isn’t
a comfort, it’s a basic expectation of—”
“Excuse me,” Tamara interrupted quietly. For the most part
she seemed about as forceful as a puff of air, but there were occasions when
she’d speak and Demarcos found himself shutting up, even though he didn’t
intend to. “But what’s the procedure for getting him an intake number?”
Harrison pivoted smoothly to address her. “He’ll be brought
into the guard’s room just outside the prison entrance, his retinas will be
scanned and entered into the system, and we’ll do a DNA match as well. Then he’ll
be associated with a number, and returned to the general population.”
“Who does the actual scanning?”
“Our guards.”
“Unacceptable,” Demarcos said instantly. “At least one of
your guards has proven to harbor ill intent toward my client, to the extent of
attempted murder—”
“That is an unwarranted assumption—”
“And given that your internal investigation hasn’t turned up
the guard in question yet, the idea that you would let a potentially murderous
individual have access to my client yet again, an individual who is your subordinate even if his or her
identity isn’t known, calls into question your judgement.”
Harrison frowned. “The entire process will be observed.
There’s no way that—”
Demarcos couldn’t keep his mouth from twisting
incredulously. “One of your guards broke my client out of the Regen tank in
your clinic. That was observed too, and nothing has been done. Don’t tell me my
concerns are unfounded.”
Harrison’s lips thinned. “Fine. Fortunately, Redstone has a
new transfer from Caravan who just arrived a few hours ago. There’s no way this
individual could be the one who supposedly
endangered your client,” and here Demarcos had to take a deep breath just to
keep himself from screaming, “so I’ll instruct my chief to have him to the
intake. Is that acceptable to you?”
It was the only concession Demarcos was going to get at this
point, and he knew it. “Yes.”
“Good.”
Tamara didn’t say anything, just kept her hands folded
demurely in her lap, but there was something about the way her eyes shone,
about the way the lines at the edges of them had relaxed, that made Demarcos
wonder. Did she know something he didn’t? What was her game? She said she didn’t
have any real loyalty to President Alexander, that she was his charity case and
nothing more, but she had made it a point to be involved in all of these
conversations, and in none of them had she come down on the side of Harrison
and his guards.
He’d have to get her alone and talk to her later.
“I’m glad we’re agreed,” Harrison continued. “As soon as
Kyle Alexander appears on vid, I’ll have the guards retrieve him. If he doesn’t
show up in the next four hours, I’ll gas the prison and have my people search
it manually.” He smiled thinly. “You’ll be welcome to observe if it goes that
far.”
“I’ll take you up on it, if it comes to that.” Demarcos
hoped it wouldn’t, but if that was what it took to ensure Kyle was still alive,
well…
Harrison clearly didn’t mind paying the price in potential
anarchy among his prisoners.
No comments:
Post a Comment