Redstone Ch. 10, Pt. 1

Notes: Back at last, and longer than usual! Have some Isidore being a total badass, ladies and gents, I hope you enjoy it. Remember, Reclamation is out and it has a playlist, so go enjoy that too. Free stuff for the win!

Title: Redstone Chapter 10, Part 1.

*** 

Isidore was feeling fairly confident as he led Kyle along their dark back corridor toward the Pen. Wyl and Robbie were here, which meant Robbie was integrating into the guard unit. He wouldn’t have a lot of clout there yet, but at least he’d be a moderating influence when it came to Kyle’s treatment. Kyle needed that if he was going to get through his official intake in one piece. Isidore remembered his own, and it had been…uncomfortable. And thorough. He was lucky his records had shown him as diseased when he got here; there were a few illnesses that even Regen had a tough time eradicating in just one go, and the guards were less inclined to take chances on a new piece of tail when there were other, far healthier inmates to take advantage of.

Klia’s crew had something close to a monopoly on the guards’ “personal attention” in exchange for better food and equipment. It was dirty but necessary, and she drove her best people hard to keep the rest of them safe. Klia was tough but reliable. She would jump into a situation as fast as anyone if she saw something to be gained, but other than that she held her ground and waited for opportunities to present themselves. She wouldn’t bother them now, in the Pen, but she wouldn’t offer them anything.

Rory’s crew was bigger but less cohesive than Klia’s, a lot of dangerous and violent personalities crushed together by Redstone and kept that way by Rory’s enormous fist. He was undoubtedly the most dangerous person in the entire prison one-on-one, a wanderer who’d gone past the farthest reaches of human-occupied space and returned with the most vicious will to live and conquer that Isidore had ever seen. Rory was elemental chaos, violence distilled into the heart of this dark place like a neutron star. He always pushed, and forced his people to do the same. They would come for Kyle, Isidore knew. If not now, then very soon. And Isidore wasn’t enough to keep Kyle safe.

He knew that Kyle would object to being typified as helpless, but it was very nearly the truth. It would have been different if Kyle had kept his mods; physical ability counted for a lot in the Pen. But he didn’t have them, and without fast fists and feet to back up his forceful desire for independence, he looked exactly like what he was: a young, mostly untested young man too full of idealism to really understand just what some of these people were capable of.

Kyle was armed with a single use, button-sized taser that would do for a one-on-one confrontation, and Isidore had his mods and a few surprises tucked here and there, but they needed allies. The independents were their best bet, but Big Charlie and his shadow were right out. That left six other inmates that might be willing to work with them, which was…not much. Let us just get through this first day, just one with no problems, Isidore thought fervently as he stepped into a broader hallway. A few hundred more yards and they’d be in the Pen, where people were already jockeying for position for food. If the guards were fast coming for Kyle, if he found independents willing to sit with them soon enough, if people needed what Isidore was offering…so many maybes.

“Hey there, lads.”

Kyle started, but Isidore was able to keep himself from jumping, just barely. “Pence.” He turned toward the man in the shadows, who was twirling his copper moustache like some ancient holovid villain. “What do you want?”

Pence held his hands up as he took a step forward. “No need to be hostile, Is-adore. I’m just pleased that you’re still both here, and looking so hale and hearty too! I heard there was some trouble with a bot earlier.”

“Where did you hear that?” Kyle asked suspiciously. Pence’s little smile got broader.

“Oh, I hear all sorts of things.” He tapped his ear knowingly. “Knowledge is a garden, and I like to cultivate mine. There might mean growing more mushrooms than flowers in this shit hole, but every little bit of information has its value.”

“What do you want?” Isidore repeated flatly. Pence had come here for a reason, but you had to pry information out of the man with a molecular destabilizer sometimes, and Isidore was in a hurry.

“My dear, you’re no fun sometimes.” He inclined his head and got down to business, though. “I come bearing gifts, actually.” He reached behind his back and pulled out a pair of shoes. They were tiny, the sort of basic sleeves that would expand to almost any size and kept most things from puncturing the material and the skin it protected, but didn’t do much for support. They were far better than Kyle going in there on bare feet, though, and an expensive thing to offer up. Especially as a gift.

“Where did you get those?”

“Does it matter?”

“It does. If you got them from a corpse, then you’ve probably violated someone else’s claim to the body because it isn’t a corpse you made.” Pence was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a killer. “If you stole them and people see them on Kyle, then I’ve inherited your trouble. I don’t need more trouble right now.” Stealing was more likely, honestly.

“Neither is correct this time, my ever-insightful darling,” Pence declared. Isidore felt Kyle stiffen slightly, and had to keep himself from rolling his eyes. Kyle would get used to Pence’s grandiose use of pet names eventually. “Three of Klia’s people just got new boots, and these were up for grabs. All it took was a little down-and-dirty prophylactic assistance that only yours truly could provide, and voila! Now I gift them to you and your new boy.”

“In exchange for what?”

Pence tilted his head slightly, the copper in his hair gleaming as he moved. “Call it a gesture of goodwill. I can’t associate with you officially, of course, it’s far too early for that sort of thing, but I sense a change in the wind. I simply want to be sure that I’m ensconced with the winning side.”

“What kind of change?” Kyle asked.

“Mouthy, isn’t he?” Pence commented. “Dear pet, let me tell you this and save your new master the trouble: silence is golden. You’re Isidore’s boy, so you do what he says when he says it, and nothing else. You don’t ask questions, especially not the kind that might cost you something.” Pence looked at Isidore and shook his head. “You’re being overly nice to this one, sweetness; he’s too accustomed to leading when he needs to be submitting to your leash. Silence him or risk losing him.”

“I handle my boy my way,” Isidore said, not that Pence was wrong. They’d talked about it, and Isidore had thought that Kyle understood, but Pence was dangerously disarming. His demeanor invited intimacy and conversation, but hopefully he would be the only one who slipped past Kyle’s guard like this. Kyle didn’t say anything else, so that was good. “And I accept your gift.” He held out his hand, and Pence inspected it carefully before laying the shoes in it. Isidore passed them back to Kyle, who put them on immediately. “Anything else?” There was always something else with Pence.

“Something that might be rather immediately useful, actually, provided you have a spare battery on hand.” Pence smirked and fluffed his hair mockingly. “My vanity mirror needs a new light source.”

Naturally. Luckily, Isidore had plenty of batteries now. He made one appear in his palm, and saw the glimmer of avarice in Pence’s eyes grow a little brighter. “Define immediately useful.”

“Information that’s face saving, quite literally,” Pence replied. “The sort of thing that might give the guards time to take your darling boy away and give you time to talk to the grownups without risking damage to your magnificent reputation.”

“Tell me.”

“Prove it works first.”

Oh, cheeky bastard. “I don’t deal in bad product.”

“Just checking, darling.” Pence shrugged, then continued. “There’s a little wolf pack waiting to try your mettle up ahead, and I do mean up. Two on the lintel and one enterprising little bugger clinging to the wall above them. Someone got a rather interesting set of mods past security,” he added with a little whistle. “No weapons that I could see, but that doesn’t mean much.”

“True.” Three of Rory’s guys. Not terrible, and a good show would certainly make the other independents more likely to give them the time of day. “Accepted.” He handed the battery over, and Pence caught the very edges of his hand and held it lightly as he bowed low, blowing a kiss across Isidore’s palm before tipping the battery into his own.

“You are wise beyond your tender years, dear heart.” Pence scooted away, and Isidore turned back to Kyle.

“We don’t have to stop them for long, just long enough for the guards to come and get you,” he said quietly. “It’s a test, not a real attack. Rory’s checking to see how committed I am to you. I’ll go in first, try to take at least two. Save the taser for yours. If you get into trouble,” please don’t get into trouble, “run toward me. I’ll handle it.”

“Got it.” Kyle looked nervous and grim, which was completely appropriate, but Isidore hated to see that expression on his face. He leaned in closer and lowered his voice to a whisper.

“Remember, Robbie is here. He’s probably going to be watching, and as soon as he sees you he’ll move to get you, I’m sure of it. You’ll be all right.”

“As long as you are too.”

“Don’t worry about me.” Isidore turned away before Kyle could protest again and led the way toward the pen. Ten more steps…five… Kyle hung back a bit, smart boy, and Isidore stepped through the door. The conversation nearest to him slowed, and he could almost feel the wave of sudden attention flow over him. His proximity sense kicked into overdrive, detecting the electrical fields of the men above him, letting him turn and catch the first one as he leapt down from above the entryway.

It was Lightning Ray, a long, skinny guy whose mods had added an extra foot of length to each limb. If he could keep you back he was hard to fight, but Isidore was already inside of his range, and grabbed the man by the throat as they both tumbled toward the floor. He turned his hand into a claw and dug inward, his nails puncturing flesh and gristle with ease. Blood began to bubble out of Ray’s gasping mouth, and Isidore kicked him away just in time to sit up and lunge for the second man, who’d jumped down and headed back toward the hallway to run down Kyle.

The second man—Nathaniel, Isidore thought—was unfortunately a much better grappler than Lightning Ray. He turned into Isidore and charged, putting him flat on his back again. Isidore struck out with his hands, but Nathaniel just leaned in and wrapped Isidore’s arms up as high as the shoulders, immobilizing them. He did the same with his legs, twining his own around them like vines. Nathaniel was incredibly flexible, and it didn’t take Isidore long to realize that if he didn’t do something fast, he’d be incredibly stuck.

“I hope you like being on the bottom like this,” Nathaniel whispered in Isidore’s ear as he leaned in close. Isidore didn’t say anything, just stretched his neck as far as he could, and then bit Nathaniel hard on the cheek.

Nathaniel reared back but didn’t let go immediately. “You fucking little shit, what the fuck was that? I’ll take that…take it out of…out…of…” His grip loosened and Isidore fought free immediately, already looking for Kyle, where was he, what had happened—

Kyle’s attacker, a bald man that Isidore didn’t recognize, was laid out at his feet. Kyle’s one-shot taser sent a tendril of smoke up from where it was still embedded in the guy’s gut. Kyle himself looked stunned, staring wide-eyed at Isidore. After a moment, Isidore realized he had Nathaniel’s blood smeared across his mouth. He licked his lips. It tasted foul.

“Back up, people.”

Isidore could have melted at the sound of Robbie’s voice, but he just took a step back from the carnage instead. Robbie led four bots, one of whom snatched up Nathaniel, who was beginning to foam at the mouth, and another who went after Lightning Ray, noisily choking on his own blood. Another bot went for Kyle’s attacker, and the final one? Straight for Kyle. It reached for his hand with its gripping appendage and Kyle let it take hold.

“You need an intake number,” Robbie grunted. “And these idiots apparently need the infirmary. And you…” He turned gimlet eyes on Isidore, who met them in total silence. “You need to learn to finish the job, punk. Save me some fucking time, why don’t you?” He turned around and the bots went with him, leaving nothing but stains across the floor.

Isidore spat his mouthful of another man’s blood out onto the rest of the filth, then turned to the watching crowd. “If Rory has something to say to me, he should just say it,” he said quietly. “No need to waste people.”

“Come on, then.” The man in the very front stood up from a table: Sylvester, one of Rory’s lieutenants. “Let’s take you to speak to him.”

RT and DRiTC! OMG!

Hi darlins!

So, as if life couldn't get any more frantically exciting...I won a contest held by the fantastic author L.A. Witt/Lauren Gallagher to get my way paid to next year's RT Conference in Las Vegas! I'll get to meet a lo of people in the writing industry, many of my current editors, and spend 5 days in Vegas with my honey, who will inevitably find other ways of amusing himself. I'm totally humbled by the opportunity, guys. Seriously. I'd better put up or shut up heading into this phase.

Other big thing: my second DRiTC story, Reclamation, is now available to read on the M/M Romance Group's page, here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/17441136-reclamation-by-cari-z-nsfw-9-7  There's a playlist associated with the story that you can get to from there as well. Reclamation is a near-ish future, dystopian-ish, undercover-ish cop adventure tale...it's a lot of things, so a lot of -ish, but it's also sweet and romantic and hopefully enjoyable, so! Please go and enjoy.

Karmic Whiplash

First things first: I'm so sorry, this isn't a Redstone post. I hate getting behind on these, but my life is so busy at the moment I genuinely don't have time to dedicate to writing a chapter this morning and making it anywhere near decent. Normally I'd write it early if I know I'm going to be busy on posting day, but that wasn't possible this week.

Why? Lemme 'splain you a thing.

I think everything that could happen just decided, "Hey, it seems like a busy time for her and her man, let's jump on that bandwagon!" Two weekends ago, we were heading back from looking at houses (more on that in a minute) and ended up getting into a car accident with a teenager who decided to do an unsignalled U-turn in the middle of the highway. We clipped her bumper, there were no injuries, but insurance declared my man's car totaled. It sucks, he has a great car, old but super low mileage, so now we have to work around that.

We decided to make an offer on a house we liked on Friday, right before we headed out of town for knife camp. Cue lots of paperwork, signing and running around like the proverbial beheaded chicken. We went up to knife camp and focused on kicking ass for three days, which we excelled at ;) I won a gorgeous custom acid-etched knife, which is my precious, don't touch my precious.

Then we came back to town early Monday morning and went to work. The realtor called at 10 to let me know our offer had been accepted (we wrote a letter to the seller about how awesome we are and why we were the best people to buy their house, no joke), and yay! But also holy shit, so much paperwork, everything but my blood type and I'm not even sure that's off the table yet. We have inspections to schedule, tests to pay for, finances to reveal, and that's just the beginning.

Additionally, my year-end review at work is scheduled for this Friday. I'm not worried about that, but I do have prep work to do to prepare for it, not to mention re-certifying in First Aid and CPR. So there's that as well. I'm sorry, darlins, I really am. If I can write a chapter and give it to you later this week, I will, but I sincerely doubt I'll have time for much of anything story-related until next week.

Thank you for your patience, guys. *kowtows*

Redstone Ch. 9, Pt. 2

Notes: On we go! A nice, on-time post is exactly what I need to set my back on my mental tracks after a kind of fucked up weekend, so enjoy some faux-legalese and a smidgeon of literal worldbuilding :)

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.

Redstone Ch. 9, Pt. 1

Notes: Back to Kyle and Isidore we go! We're finally getting into the meat of the story, tripping merrily down the lane of plot and action and narrative tension. My favorite things. Enjoy, and never fear, everyone will get their time in the sun. So to speak, I mean.

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.”

Redstone Ch. 8, Pt. 2

Notes: More Redstone today! A little bit longer than usual, and a hell of a lot darker. This chapter includes graphic depictions of violence and a non-graphic depiction of rape/non-con. No, it's not between any of the main characters, but it does happen and I don't want to trigger anyone, so...please. Don't read if that's going to be an issue for you. It's highlighted, so it's easy to skip.

This is going to be a rough story in some ways, but I swear there will be plenty of moments of light as well!

Title: Redstone, Chapter 8, Part 2.

***

Robbie Sinclair, unbeknownst to most people, was a hell of an actor.

It was an odd skillset for a career soldier to have, he knew that. Weapons expert, yeah! Close combat aficionado, definitely. Even linguist, those who were acquainted with him could get behind. Most people didn’t bother learning any languages other than Federation Common these days, because it was the lingua franca of the human-inhabited universe, utilized by every central system planet and most of the Fringe for doing business. Hell, most people didn’t even know what language lingua franca had originally referred to anymore; it was a dead metaphor.

But Robbie, well, he was old school. Old blood. His parents were Martians, for heaven’s sake; that was as old system as you could get. He had learned French and Spanish from his mother, Russian from his grandfather, and had taught himself three other languages in his youth, all without the help of mods. It was…cute. Quaint. An interesting skillset, if not necessarily a useful one. But acting? Why would a career marine need to know how to act?

Only to ensure his own survival. In a universe that was increasingly insular and xenophobic, coming into a situation as an outsider was dangerous. Staying an outsider could mean anything from pain to death to, even worse, harm coming to someone he loved. That meant Robbie had to be a chameleon, had learned to be one from the moment he woke up out of cryo-sleep and realized that half of the people who had come with him from Mars had died, their cryo-pods malfunctioning. His parents had died. His peers were diminished. Robbie was an immigrant without a support system, and if he didn’t want to be dismissed into some menial position, he needed to appear as Central as he could, as quickly as possible. And he had, and he’d survived. Thrived, even.

The only person who’d understood this aspect of him from the very beginning was Garrett, probably because Garrett was just as familiar with the high stakes of blending in as Robbie was. Not that Garrett blended in, really, but he was resolutely dedicated to a persona that was light-years away from his true self. Wyl…well, Wyl was always himself, but Robbie could be anybody. It was a good thing that Wyl was used to seeing Robbie slip in and out of different skins depending on their circumstances, because the one he’d have to wear here was particularly slimy.

“You go in in force, and you stay together if you’ve gotta be down in the pit,” his new commander, Loven Cray, explained casually as he and Robbie looked at vidscreens depicting different areas in the prison. “Can’t let them get you alone, ‘cause they’ll try to strip the armor off of you first thing. Like fuckin’ animals, they are; buncha cannibals who’ll eat you alive just to trade your liver to some other animal for a piece of kidney.”

“They ever get a guard before?” Robbie asked, squinting a little as he examined the screens. Internally he was absorbing everything: plotting points, entrances and egresses and taking count of how many inmates were lounging where.

“Almost. Last guy in charge before me, he went down in there to teach somebody a lesson but he only took bots with him as backup, no people. The bots use strictly non-lethal countermeasures, which,” Cray snorted, “is complete fuckin’ bullshit, but that’s what’s written in the charter. Guy was swarmed, bots torn apart and he was almost choked to death before his crew could get in there. Three inmates were killed, but they got him out.”

“Rough shit.”

“You’re tellin’ me.” He shook his head. “These are the worst of the worst. I know you’ve done a stint at Caravan, but that’s a fuckin’ paradise for prisoners compared to this place. Those are little lambs, while we’ve got the wolves. This place ain’t about rehabilitation, it’s about containment.” Cray scowled at the screens. “There, you see that shit?”

Two inmates were getting into an argument, which quickly turned into a fight. A short, vicious fight that ended with one of them on the ground, bleeding from his head, and the other…

Robbie took a slow, deep breath and didn’t let any of the horror he felt show on his face as a man was rolled over, bound with his own clothing and viciously raped on vid, right in front of him. “Not gonna send bots in to stop that?”

“Nah.” Cray tapped the section indicator in the corner of the screen. “That’s in the back half of the pit; it would take a bot too long to get there to do any good. If the inmate doesn’t get up afterward, well, we might go in and get him so he can do some time in a Regen tank, but he shouldn’t have started that fight. He’s going to be that guy’s bitch for the rest of his time here. Which for that particular prisoner,” Cray consulted his personal tab, “looks like another fifteen years.” He smiled widely. “That’ll teach him a lesson.”

“Reckon it will.” Robbie kept his gaze forward but let his eyes go unfocused. “When do we go in, then?”

“Gotta go in case of murders, or really sick shit.” Robbie wondered what qualified to this person as “really sick shit” if violent rape didn’t. “We go in force, though, and we activate the blackout mode on our headgear so they can’t identify us individually. You don’t want these animals knowing who you are, they’ll just try to play games with you. Lure you in, set a trap. Some of these little fucks are cunning as shit, and there are issues with illegal mods, but as long as they only use them on each other we don’t bother too much with it.” Cray laughed suddenly. “Lemme show you one of my favorite vids. Love this one.”

He pulled up a video on his tab and activated the hologram a few feet in front of them. The scene was Redstone prison’s dining hall, crowded with people. “Watch that skinny little fucker there,” Cray said, indicating someone in the bottom left corner. Robbie glanced at the man, then almost did a double-take. That was Isidore. And that was a person creeping up behind him, reaching out and grabbing a fistful of his hair before giving it a vicious backward pull.

Robbie’s abdomen clenched with adrenaline even as he kept his face impassive, watching the scene. If Isidore had been hurt, if he was already out of the game before they’d even arrived…

But, no. Isidore went back, but his attacker was already reeling away, clutching his pulling hand with the other and staring at the blood that welled there in horror. It didn’t end there, though. Isidore turned to look at his attacker with hard eyes, then reached up to the very base of his scalp and plucked what looked like a single hair. He stood up from the table, advanced on the man and had the hair wrapped around the guy’s hand before his attacker knew what was happening. And then, he yanked it tight.

Blood. Screams. Not a complete severing, the hair wasn’t tough enough for that, but some blood vessels in the guy’s wrist had definitely been severed. He fell to the ground and Isidore let him go, watching him like he was a curiosity, and not the man who’d just tried to take advantage of him and paid so dearly for it. He was detached. Dissociated. If that was acting, then Isidore was even better at it than Robbie.

“I love it,” Cray said with a chuckle. “I mean, obviously it’s an illegal mod, but look at that shit! You can’t ask for better free entertainment than that. Plus, little guys need all the help they can get, right? It keeps things fair.”

“I hear you,” Robbie said easily. “My guy’s kind of the same. Small, but he earns his respect.”

“Yeah, your guy.” Cray let the hologram dissolve. He actually looked a little uncomfortable. “Look, about your guy…see, the guards working here are good guys, yeah? They are. But this can be a rough place to be for long periods of time, and they get kinda…stir crazy, every now and then. The line blurs a little. I’m just saying, it might be best if your guy spends most of his time in your rooms. Yeah?”

Or else these sadistic motherfuckers will go after him with just as much joie de vivre as the inmates go after each other. Robbie could read between those lines. He’d be damned if he was going to tell Wyl to restrict himself to their fucking rooms, which meant a demonstration might be in order. Wyl could take care of himself, but after seeing this… “I get you,” Robbie said. “Wyl’s no fool, he’ll do what’s best for himself. Keep out of the mix.”

“Good.” Cray nodded. “You’re in the system now, and you’ve got the basics of the schedule down. Your shift starts in four hours, so you’ve got some downtime before then. I’ll be your crew leader for the first few days, so just ask if you’ve got questions.” He held out his hand. “Welcome aboard Redstone, Sinclair. I think you’re gonna do okay here.”

Robbie smiled sharply as he shook Cray’s hand. “I expect I will.”  I expect that someday I’ll drive my fist so hard into your gut that it tickles your spine.

Getting to the central living room for the guards was easy. Getting there to see two of them banging on the door that Robbie knew led to the rooms he and Wyl were assigned to was almost enough to drop a red curtain across his vision. Three other guys were there, lazing around on couches or playing games on the holosystem, but not doing anything to stop the other two. Robbie ambled his way to the second level and closed in on the men, who were joking with each other as they yelled through the door.

“This ain’t the way to make friends!” one of them shouted with a grin. “Come on out, sweetheart, come meet your new friends!”

“The last wife we had here was a swinger,” the other one called. “You like to swing, baby?”

“That’s a husband, not a wife,” Robbie said calmly once he was close enough. Both guys swung around to look at him. “My husband, actually.”

“Yeah?” The younger of the two, a man a little taller than Robbie with stubbly black hair shaved to look like a demon was glaring out of the back of his skull, grinned manically. His buddy, a little more measured and definitely more intelligent, took one look and backed a few steps up. “Do you share?”

“Nope.” Robbie popped the “p” in the word. “I didn’t come to this shithole to share my piece of ass with every motherfucker in the joint.”

The man pouted dramatically. “That ain’t the way to make friends, man.”

“Neither is this. And trust me, you’re gonna want to be my friend.”

The man’s grin didn’t falter as Robbie drew a little closer. “Why’s that?”

“Because.” Robbie lowered his voice to something hard as diamonds. “If you’re my enemy, I’ll throw your dumb ass over this fuckin’ balcony and break both your legs, or maybe your back. And when you get outta Regen, I’ll do it again. And again, and again, until you decide you do want to be my friend. And being my friend means leaving my husband the fuck alone. Got it?”

For a moment Robbie thought he’d have to throw the guy over the wall right now; he was still grinning, something challenging in his amber eyes. But after a moment he held up both hands. “No worries, buddy! Let’s be friends!”

“Let’s,” Robbie agreed. He let the men ease past him before opening the door himself and going inside. He resisted the urge to slam the door shut as hard as he could, and leaned back against it instead. Their apartment was tiny, and strewn with parts and half-unpacked bags of clothes. He saw Wyl in the corner, fiddling with something, one of Redstone’s bots standing patiently at his side.

“Hey!” Wyl said as soon as he noticed Robbie. “I got the array set up, so communications are a go. I also adopted a pet; his name is ZeeBee. Say hello, ZeeBee!”

“Hello, Christopher Robin.”

Wyl appeared to be waiting for something. When Robbie said nothing, he frowned. “What, no groan? No threats of bodily harm for teaching the robot to call you—oof!”

Robbie couldn’t take it anymore. Not the distance, but especially not the thought of Wyl and threats. He was across the room and hugging Wyl to his chest in an instant. Wyl got with the program fast, turning into the embrace and hugging Robbie back as hard as he could.

“Hey,” Wyl said gently. “What is it? What happened?” He kissed Robbie’s collarbone. “Baby?”

“We’re going to have to be careful,” Robbie said softly. His voice broke on the last word. “So fucking careful.” He couldn’t put the horror of the past few hours into words: what he’d learned, what he’d seen. Luckily, Wyl didn’t need him to.

“We will be,” Wyl whispered. “I promise, I swear, Robbie. We’ll be careful. I’ll be careful.”

Robbie sighed heavily. “Good.”

It was a start, at least.

New Spanish Translation Available: En Todas Tus Formas

Hi guys!

The phenomenal Traductores Anonimos has done it again. They translated my story In All Your Ways into Spanish, gave me glorious files for everything and then I sat on it for THREE FREAKING WEEKS because of family issues. So, not only are they the most generous people around, they're pretty fantastically patient too.

So, without further ado, I give you...the links for the story!

You can read it on AO3 here (without massive flaws this time around, I think): http://archiveofourown.org/works/4538853

Or, you can read it here on my blog. Just go to the right-hand side of the site and look for the page titled "En Todas Tus Formas." Or, click this: http://carizerotica.blogspot.com/p/en-todas-tu-feras.html

Many, many thanks again to this wonderful team. You are too kind to me, but please know that I appreciate your fantastic work.