Page 19 of Redstone
“These are like gold here,” he said as he handed one over to Kyle. “Most of the food you have to eat in the mess, it isn’t easily transportable, but these are given out every so often.”
“Thank you.” Kyle took a bite. It was just as nasty as he’d expected it to be, no flavor at all, but he chewed gamely and swallowed. “Will you tell me how you got involved in this?” he asked.
Isidore actually laughed, gentle and quiet. The sound made Kyle’s toes curl. “It’s a long story,” he warned.
“We’ve both got time.”
“I suppose we do.” He came over and sat next to Kyle on the bench—or maybe it was functionally a bed, Kyle wasn’t sure—and crossed his legs under him. “Do you know where Paradise is?”
Kyle thought for a moment. “It’s a Fringe planet, right?”
“Yeah. I was born there. I thought I’d die there too, one way or another.” Isidore’s smile fell away. “I still think I should have, sometimes. Instead, I met Garrett, and he changed my life.”
“How?”
“Utterly and completely.” The smile was back, but it was small and private now. “It started in a club …”
Chapter ten
Redstone was even more bleak and joyless than Wyl had thought it would be. He’d been in prison before, not a serious one like this but the version that housed nonviolent offenders as a means of working off their debt to society, or in some cases, just their debt. Wyl had signed on to get bonded as soon as the option was offered to him, thinking that anything would be better than the bland, colorless life of an Alliance minimum-security prison.
He’d ended up enslaved to a madwoman on a ball of ice in the Fringe so—bad deal, overall. He should have stuck with bland.
The point was, Wyl was intimately familiar with imprisonment. After living with Robbie for a while at Caravan, he even knew a fair bit about maximum-security conditions. This place … this place wasnotmaximum security. This place was hell, pure and simple. There were no attempts at rehabilitation, no genuflections in the direction of mental andemotional health beyond trips to the Regen tank and then only when absolutely necessary.
In Caravan, if you fucked over another inmate, you were put into isolation for a week before gradually being reintegrated back into the prison population with additional, but largely temporary, restrictions. From what little Wyl could tell about Redstone, it was basically, to use an Old Earth metaphor, a shark tank. The big and powerful ate the tiny and weak, and the guards were little more than puppets, put there to keep the bots running and provide a last-ditch fail-safe against total anarchy.
Robbie, needless to say, wasn’t happy. He hadn’t said anything, in fact, but Wyl hadn’t been in love with the guy for over a decade without learning his tells. He saw frustration in the curve of Robbie’s lips, annoyance in the slant of his eyebrows, and downright rage as his nostrils flared. One fucking day they’d been there,oneday, and Robbie was already close to either breaking down or breaking faces.
Wyl wanted to coax the tension out of him and planned to, in fact, but he had his own project to get underway. Thank fuck he’d gotten his iron transmitters staged on the exterior surface of Redstone from a distance because once they’d landed on the meteor, the warden’s secretary was stuck to them like they were molecularly bound.
“You’re late,” he’d said to Robbie the moment they’d stepped off Warden Grave’s transport ship. He’d been pinging their ship’s comm for the past hour, but the pilot, a usually cheerful woman who was polite to a fault, had restricted all communications to text only, citing “mechanical issues.” Wyl had laughed at the time. Now he was starting to get it, though. “You should have been in training with the other guards an hour ago.”
“Gravity wave,” Robbie said easily, his crisp military voice giving over to a slouchy Old Earth accent that he’d toldWyl was loosely identified as “redneck.” “Can’t get ’round ’em sometimes.”
“Regardless, you will have to make up the hours. I’ll take you to get processed. Your … spouse,” he continued, glancing dismissively at Wyl, “can get started transporting your things to your quarters. Agent ZB89 will guide you there.”
“So much for the welcoming committee,” Wyl said, softly enough that only Robbie could hear it, just to see him crack a little smile. “Go get processed and meet the rest of the boys, honey,” he said more loudly, punctuating his statement with a noisy kiss that made the sour-faced secretary frown harder. “I’ll get us all settled.”
“Thanks, babe.” Robbie sidled off, leaving Wyl alone with ZB89. The robot was a single-wheel model, ancient by modern standards, actually using a gyroscope to stay upright and with no hover technology at all. Wyl itched to take it apart, but that wasn’t the way to make a good first impression. He shouldered a bag and grinned.
“Lead on, ZeeBee.”
ZeeBee’s green eyestrip brightened momentarily. “Command accepted. Follow me, human-male-spousal counterpart.”
Wyl grimaced. “That’s a hell of a mouthful. How about you just call me Wyl?”
“Wyl is not a complete designation.”
“You need a last name too, huh? Or maybe a title.” He thought about it for a moment. “How about … Wyl the Conqueror?”
The eyestrip brightened again. “Suggestion accepted. Follow me, Wyl the Conqueror.”
“Aw, shit yeah,” Wyl crowed as he followed the robot. “I can already tell that we’re going to have a good time together, ZeeBee. When you see my husband, I want you to call him Christopher Robin, okay?” It was an old jab, but Wyl never got tired of it.
ZeeBee’s head swiveled back to regard Wyl even as his body continued to roll forward. “Are you authorized to change human-male-guardian-spouse’s designation, Wyl the Conqueror?”
“I am legally, morally, and hilariously entitled to change all of my husband’s designations,” Wyl said confidently. “He’d be the last person to argue with you about that.”
