Page 34 of Redstone
“Fuck,” Kyle sighed once he could speak again. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Isidore dropped his hand from Kyle’s chest to his knee, a comforting weight. “You’ve had a hell of a time lately. You’re handling yourself much better than I did when I first went to prison.”
That sounded like a good distraction. “When was that?”
“Twelve years ago. My cover story, about blowing up a base full of people? The bomber was my cousin, but that actually happened. I was arrested and charged with conspiracy, and I almost starved myself out of sheer guilty stupidity before Garrett got me into a new situation. And I was alone, not surrounded by a bunch of the Alliance’s worst criminals.”
He shrugged. “It’s not just that I owe a debt to Garrett. It’s that Iwantto help make things better. I’ve seen what happens when order breaks down, and if the Fringe is cut off from the Central System, then the wars that overtake the region will be … intense. Civil wars, not just interplanetary, but those will happen too. The Fringe needs the Alliance, and they need it on their side. If you can help make that happen, then I’m happy to be here.”
Kyle shook his head. “That’s … kind of fucked up, but I’m glad you’re here.”
Isidore hummed in acknowledgment, then said, “Why areyouhelping?”
Surprised, Kyle opened his eyes and stared at Isidore. “What?”
“Why are you doing this? You’ve got enough status, even with your brother being a manipulative dick, that you could do anything you wanted with yourself. You don’t even have to stay in the Alliance if you don’t want to; you could go Beyond or back to the old system. You could have stayed at the Academy and moved up in the military. You had options. Why this path? Why sacrifice yourself?”
Kyle thought about it for a long moment, wrapping his head around the easiest way to explain. “I went into boarding school early,” he began at last. “I had almost no family influence in my life beyond paying my room and board, not after my brother washed his hands of me. There were a lot of kids like me in the elementary Academy system, kids whose rich parents didn’t have time for them. A lot of them were just counting down the time until they got trust funds and could go off and do …whatever they wanted. I could have done that too, but then I met Sigurd Liang when I was ten.”
“The admiral in charge of the Academy?”
“Yeah.” Kyle smiled a little, remembering how impressed he’d been by the man’s uniform. “He reminded me a little of my father, at first; the same flashy look, you know? Lots of ribbons and badges and awards. But he actually paid attention to me, and he encouraged me to do things that interested me, clubs and the like. When I failed at something, he didn’t tell me I was bad; he got me help.” It had been the most personal attention Kyle had had since Berengaria had given him up.
“Maybe he was setting me up to volunteer for something like this by being kind to me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s right. I wanted to be a part of the effort to get rid of Ray, and the fact that I’ve got to be here to do it …” Kyle shut his eyes again. “I’ll get through it. I’ll do my best.”
“I’ll be here to help you every step of the way.”
“Yeah.” Kyle put one of his hands over Isidore’s on his knee. “I know.”
Chapter seventeen
“We have to go bigger.”
Sigurd resisted the impulse to rub his fingers in the aching space between his eyes. It was a common urge when he dealt with Garrett. “Define ‘bigger.’”
“We won’t be able to use Kyle as a pry bar to open up Redstone. It’s going to have to be the other way around if we’re going to get any sort of buy-in from the rest of the Senate.”
“And why is that?”
“Because there’s absolutely no way in hell that Raymond Alexander is going to let anyone have any sort of access to Kyle before it’s too late. The charges he’s facing are too harsh.”
“He was always going to face charges of mental and emotional manipulation—”
“This is worse than that.” Garrett’s tone was iced over with bitterness. “This is genetic manipulation on a fundamental level. This is the sort of thing that hardline humanists might turn into a stick to beat not just the president, but Kyle with. Fivehundred years ago, people like him were burned alive on some planets when the revelation of their modifications came out, and we can’t afford to stick that kind of stigma on Kyle. He’s already being portrayed asother, and we need him to be seen asus.”
It was a bad day when Sigurd couldn’t immediately think of a way to improve upon Garrett’s plans. He was, unfortunately, completely correct. There was a simmering undercurrent of xenophobia within the Alliance that was being stoked by President Alexander and his cronies, and the revelation that some of Kyle’s most fundamental genetic code had been swapped out as a child could get him dubbed a revenant.
It was an ancient term for someone who returned from death. Early in the search for gene therapies’ frontiers, large-scale gene swapping had been an imprecise science that resulted in many people losing their personalities, their mental capacity, and even their ability to move without prompting.
“What do you propose?” Sigurd asked at last.
“A good, old-fashioned exposé. My people can arrange for recordings to be made, and Hummingbird can get them to you.”
“How would you publicize it? No one in the Senate cares if prisoners are being mistreated.”
Garrett smiled grimly. “We’re going to show them a lot more than that. In fact, I need to talk to Hummingbird personally about her ability with a lockpick.”
Oh, wonderful. It wasn’t that Sigurd didn’t have faith in his people’s abilities, but he worried. So many centuries of life, so much loss and death and privation, and he still had the capacity for something as simple as worry. Perhaps there was something to be said for losing all his memories every time he went into the Regen tank; it kept him from becoming irretrievably jaded. “I see.”
