Prophets (9 page)

But Mosasa paid well, and Parvi needed the money.

So she tucked the cyberplas sheet into her pocket, got onto her contragrav bike, and shot back toward Proudhon. She had a bunch of tach-comm calls to make on her boss' behalf.

The shortest freeway will have the highest toll.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.

—ABRAHAM Lincoln (1809-1865)

The whole process of registering as a member of the BMU alternately fascinated and appalled Mallory. The academic in him was fascinated with how the BMU operated and seeing the detailed workings of a society that operated on completely different premises than his own. The Marine in him was offended by the military pretense of an organization that, for the most part, didn't have a chain of command above the squad level—un-uniformed and mostly unregulated. The Catholic in him kept seeing the implications of a world whose only military was essentially a group of semiorganized thugs for hire.

To which, the academic in him responded,
How is that different from most of human history?

The more he saw of the way Bakunin worked, the more he saw parallels to medieval Europe; the social rationalizations and beliefs might be different, but the BMU reminded him of landless knights. All they lacked was dispensation from the pope to go on a crusade and keep them from ravaging the countryside.

One major difference, though, was in the area of skill assessment. Apparently, any idiot with a gun and some money could join the BMU—gun optional. But if you wanted to be a working member, and do more that pay the union protection money, you needed a rating. You could put anything you wanted on your résumé narrative—experience in hand-to-hand combat, fighter pilot, special forces, covert ops—but what mattered was BMU's own assessment.

In the chaotic economy that was Bakunin, it was worth it to pay for a known quantity. Someone hiring a union mercenary was getting a known skill set. It might be more expensive than hiring random thugs off the street, but it was less prone to surprises. Also attractive to a potential employer, a lot of the BMU's few regulations were specifically intended to prevent their members from turning on their employers. Hire someone from BMU, and you were assured that the whole weight of the union would fall on a member who double-crossed you. Of course the converse was also true; union members had the muscle of the BMU to back them if their employer ever double-crossed them.

Membership served the dual purpose of giving Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick a deeper level to his cover and preventing future incidents with Reggie and his ilk.

He went through their whole system of testing over the course of a week. It was a comprehensive battery of exams; oral, written, and simulated. For Mallory, it was the most rigorous testing he had gone through since he had joined the Marine Special Forces back when he was only twenty standard years old. More so, because he had to keep in the front of his mind that they weren't supposed to be testing a retired member of the most elite combat unit of the Occisis military, but someone who was both more prosaic and more recently employed. Mallory had to work to weight his efforts toward the more basic aspects of infantry skills, and to do more poorly on the more exotic skills like combat demolitions and long-distance marksmanship.

Hardest was the psych evaluation. Mallory decided that he had to give up on Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick for that. He wasn't trained as a deep-cover agent, and he knew that he didn't know enough to skew that kind of testing in a way that would be seamless. He had to hope that Father Mallory's psych profile wouldn't look too out of place in Fitzpatrick's file.

The psych profile was the last test. Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick left the testing facility a fully vetted member of the Bakunin Mercenaries' Union, with certified skills in small-unit ground combat, basic vehicle operation, and logistics. All of which matched the staff sergeant's history with the Occisis Marines. All the other skills rated under 500, the lowest being his sniper rating, at just 150.

The BMU testing facility was on the fringes of Proudhon, sprawling over an area that might have been a series of old landing strips resulting in a low black building that radiated long black rectangular wings at odd angles to itself. On one side the horizon was a humpbacked mountain range, the other was the metallic chaos of Proudhon.

On the Proudhon side was a small private parking area where his rented aircar was waiting. Now that he was done with the BMU for the day, his mind returned to the real reason he was here. Unfortunately, he still had not been having any luck finding potential ships that could take him off in the direction of Xi Virginis.

He was pondering the next place to find someone with an expertise in illicit long-distance travel when he saw Vijayanagara Parvi leaning against his aircar. Instead of a white jumpsuit she wore more civilian clothes. But she still had a BMU logo embroidered on her sky-blue windbreaker and a wicked looking needlegun peeked out from a barely covered shoulder holster.

As he approached he asked, “So, tell me, do Reggie and his brother work for you?”

She smiled. “Tell me if it matters.”

“Slamming into that wall hurt.”

“You can take it.”

Mallory shook his head. “So, are you here to ‘save' me from another attack by Bakunin's lowlife?”

“Actually, I'm here to congratulate you. Not many people pass though the exams this quickly.”

Mallory's expression didn't change, but he winced inside. He had been making such an effort to have the test scores reflect Fitzpatrick's expertise, he hadn't thought about how much
time
Fitzpatrick would have spent on them. “I wanted to get it over with.”

Parvi laughed. “I'd like to see some of your scores if you took some time at it.”

“I don't really see the point.” Mentally, Mallory scrambled for a new picture of Fitzpatrick that would be consistent with what Parvi had seen of him and the results of his exams. “My money's running out and I need to be working, not being tested by some asshole officer.”

“Oh, lord.” She was still smiling. “I can see why you never made it past staff sergeant.”

Perfect.
“You know, maybe I liked where I was.”

“Yes. But people are going to hire you based on those scores.”

Let's change the subject now.
“And how exactly do you go about getting hired?”

“Welcome to ProMex,” Parvi said.

It was a cross between an ancient Roman coliseum, a stock exchange, a casino, and hell's own trade show. It was named the Proudhon Military Exchange. In terms of area, it was probably the largest nonaircraft-related structure in the city.

Walking into the massive dome, they passed aisles where hundreds of merchants sold exotic military hardware. Above them, holo screens showed gladiatorial contests being held somewhere else in the complex. Everywhere kiosks gave scrolling displays of symbols that, Parvi explained, gave values of publicly owned paramilitary organizations as well as odds on various conflicts based on current wagering.

It was a little disturbing, but not surprising, that the conflicts were not confined to Bakunin. It was more disturbing exactly how many of them there were. When he commented on it, Parvi said that, “Members of the BMU have seen action on every inhabited planet in human space.”

He almost said,
not Occisis,
but he remembered the chaos of the Junta and its aftermath. It was quite possible some off-planet forces were involved at some point.

She led him on a winding path across the floor to a large area clear of the arms dealers. The area was marked by a series of three-meter-high towers, all topped with the chromed spheres of Emerson field generators. Mallory didn't need the red and yellow candy-striping on the towers to know that, while he couldn't see it, the area was protected by an anti-personnel Emerson field.

There was one obvious entry, a round portal mounted between two of the towers. Across the top it said, “BMU Members only.” On one side of it, a small open-ended metal cylinder emerged from the skin of the portal. Parvi placed her hand in the cylinder, waited a moment, then walked through.

Mallory put his hand inside, waited for a count of three, then walked through after Parvi.

“Genetic sequencer?” he asked.

“Genes, fingerprints, blood pressure, serotonin and adrenaline levels, toxicology—you name it . . .” She led him down a few steps to a large area sunk into the floor enough to hide it from the public area without use of a solid wall. “To answer your question,
this
is how you get hired.”

The floor was crowded with men and women, and to Mallory's surprise, a few nonhumans. One of the two standout examples was the Rorschach-faced serpent-necked pseudo-avian form of a Voleran. Its eyeless, hard-beaked head bobbed above everyone, except the other nonhuman. Unlike the Voleran, the other obvious nonhuman wasn't really “alien.” At least, its ancestors were of terrestrial origin, victims of morally questionable genetic engineers.

In the twenty-first century, man had not yet established a moral framework around the Heretical Technologies: self-replicating nanotechnology, artificial intelligences, and the genetic engineering of sapient life-forms. The last of these was the most seriously abused before mankind gained control of itself. Thousands of new species, as intelligent as man but—for the most part—less well constructed, were built to fight the wars that ravaged the planet. The weapons outlived the war, and eventually, during the dark days before the rise of the Confederacy, faced exile to the worlds past Tau Ceti.

Understandably, the survivors of that period of human history had very little to do with humanity anymore. Diplomatic communication between human governments and the Fifteen Worlds was practically nil. And even though Bakunin was technically part of the Fifteen Worlds' sphere of influence, this was the first product of that history Mallory had seen here.

The first he had
ever
seen.

The creature was close to three meters tall, and if Mallory had to guess, he'd estimate mass at close to five hundred kilos, all muscle. It had a feline skull and striped fur and moved with a grace that reminded Mallory of a very well-trained martial artist. It wore only a gun belt.

“Never seen a moreau before?” Parvi asked.

Mallory realized he'd been staring and turned away from the giant cat. “No.”

“Get used to it. If you stick around Bakunin, you'll see more.”

Hearing the tone in Parvi's voice, Mallory turned toward her. “You sound like you don't approve.”

Instead of answering him, she led him to one of the kiosks that dotted the floor here, on the opposite corner of the floor from the moreau.

“This ties into the closed BMU database,” she told him. “You can see live queries entered by anyone in the system, on-planet or off.”

“Off?”

“We have tach-transmit updates on an hourly basis—with a transmission delay, of course.”

“Of course.” It was disconcerting to think that a completely extra-legal entity like the BMU had outposts on other planets with enough resources to run a tach-transmitter. Mallory faced the kiosk and started running a few searches. The interface was familiar, like searching the want ads anywhere else—except the ads here were “team experienced with infiltration and underwater demolition,” “EVA-rated flight crew for Lancer-class drop ship, experience handling pulse cannon/ plasma weapon repair/maint a plus,” “IW hackers needed, good pay/benefits for low-risk industrial espionage . . .”

For the sake of his cover story, Mallory really looked though the ads searching for positions that resembled anything that might interest Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick. He'd gather a list of contacts that he could take back to the hotel. He hoped that his search for discreet off-planet transport would bear fruit before he ran into Parvi again and she asked him about his job search. With all the positions available, the longer he went without signing on with someone, the more obvious it would be that he was looking for something more then a source of income.

He went though a series of random sorts when he caught his breath.

Parvi had been staring at the tiger moreau, but she turned to face him. “Is something wrong?”

Mallory shook his head. “No.”

He didn't even sound convincing to himself. The deceptions he had trained for with the Marines had involved not being seen by the enemy.

“Just.” He stumbled for words as he composed himself. “It just struck me, looking at all these listings . . .” He turned to look at her and the distress on his face was honest, even if his words weren't. “And it hit me that my old life's over. I'm really no longer part of the Marines . . .”

Parvi nodded. “I wish I could say you'd get over that.” She turned back to look at the crowd. The tiger moreau was gone now. “Everyone on Bakunin is running from something.”

Mallory nodded, turning back to face the kiosk. It was hard not to breathe a sigh of relief that she had bought his little improvised speech.

Please God,
he silently prayed,
let me understand what this means.

On the display, floating near the top of the holo, was a small listing waiting for him to touch it to see greater detail. The current sort was by job location, so various place names glowed brightest, the most common—filling most of the holo—being “undisclosed location.”