Page 20 of Redstone
“Accepted.” They left the landing zone and entered what looked like a shared living area, one large common zone with a big kitchen and plenty of holoscreen space. Two levels of rooms lined the longest two walls. ZeeBee led Wyl up a ramp to a battered-looking door at the very end of the hall.
“You and Christopher Robin shall be living in suite two-twenty,” the robot recited. “Press your hand to the reader.” It was scarred and cracked, but the palm scanner still worked well enough to accept Wyl’s print. “It will respond only to you and Christopher Robin, who shall be scanned in during his intake. Please enter.”
Wyl did and was depressingly unsurprised by what he found. The suite consisted of a living room, bedroom, and kitchen, all with dingy white walls and well-used furnishings, and a tiny bathroom that contained an even tinier shower. Definitely no room for two in there. “This is the couple’s version?” Wyl demanded. “Really? I thought the suites were bigger than this.”
“Only guest suites are equipped with more square footage, and they are housed in another section of Redstone, Wyl the Conqueror.”
Of fucking course, they were. Because just getting to run into Hummingbird in the halls would be too fucking easy. “Great. How do the other spouses feel about this?”
“You are currently the only spouse in residence, Wyl the Conqueror.”
Oh boy. That was … going to lead to problems, Wyl was sure of it. For now, though, it looked like he had the place to himself. “Where is everybody, anyway?”
“Emergency training exercises, Wyl the Conqueror.”
“Great, perfect. Let’s go get the rest of my stuff, yeah? Are you cleared to help me with that?”
“I am cleared to act in whatever capacity you require that does not go against my base programming, Wyl the Conqueror.”
“Okay, enough of that.” Wyl clapped the robot on the shoulder. “We’re friends now, right? You can just call me Wyl. Think of it as both a name and a title rolled into one, okay?” He watched the eyestrip brighten, then dim, then brighten again. “Come on, ZeeBee, I know you’ve got the justification in your programming somewhere, you’ve just got to dig deep.”
A moment later, the robot’s eyestrip brightened, then settled into a steady green glow. “Command accepted, Wyl.”
“But stick to Christopher Robin right now for my husband, okay?”
“Accepted.”
With ZeeBee’s help, Wyl was able to get his and Robbie’s baggage from the tarmac to their quarters without running into anyone, which was good. He wasn’tafraid, necessarily, but he wasn’t looking forward to running the gauntlet here without Robbie as backup. Places like this became tight-knit and not usually in a good way. Wyl wasn’t going to be able to charm himself into anyone’s good graces, so it was better to have fear or intimidation on his side. And Robbie, for all he had gray hairs and the general demeanor of a lazy lion while in his prison guard persona, was intimidating as fuck when he put his mind to it.
Wyl dismissed ZeeBee after a bit, telling the robot not to be a stranger, which made its green light flash brightly as it struggled to compute the colloquialism. He ignored the bags of clothes and most of the equipment in favor of rapidly reconstructinghis remote pulse emitter. It connected to a tab that Wyl had programmed to assess the wavelengths of Redstone, searching for a frequency that would be close enough to something common that it wouldn’t be remarked upon but different enough that it would be picked up solely by his communications array.
The program didn’t take long to analyze things; Redstone, for all the hype, was still a fairly small place.
“Ah.” Wyl grinned with satisfaction. “Good.” The first pulse would be a test, a way to check on the viability of his array and to tell whether or not he’d need to use dampeners to diminish the strength of the signals. He took a deep breath, then sent his initial pulse out into the blackness of space.
A moment later, the tab pinged. Wyl inspected the graphical feedback, noting node strengths and locations with regard to where he was now and where he anticipated his target was. Eighty-five percent efficacy, well within the parameters he needed to operate. He grinned manically. “We’re in business now!”
Of course, it all might be a lark in the end. There was no way for Isidore to communicate back to them, not unless he happened to have a run-in with Robbie, which, given their respective positions, seemed like a bad option. He might not even get the codes if the density of the prison walls changed too much, or his mod was malfunctioning. But Wyl had to try. If it worked, at least Isidore would know he wasn’t alone.
Very carefully, he tapped out a message in Morse:CAVALRY IS HERE.
Chapter eleven
Robbie Sinclair, unbeknownst to most people, was a hell of an actor.
It was an odd skill set for a career soldier to have, he knew that. Weapons expert, yeah! Close combat aficionado, definitely. Even his ability as a skilled linguist was logical given his origins. Most people didn’t bother learning any languages other than Alliance Common these days, because it was thelingua francaof 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 languagelingua francaoriginally referred to anymore; it was a metaphor so dead it had ossified.
But Robbie, well, he was old-school. Old blood. His parents wereMartians, 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 considered … cute. Quaint. An interesting skill set if not necessarily a useful one.
But acting? Why would a career marine need to know how to act?
He’d done it 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 cryosleep 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 wasalwayshimself, 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.
