It was that same female voice, and this time the crowd parted and she stepped forward. Older than most of the others, or at least more weathered, she had the look of one of the refugees who’d been settled on Hausos after the war rather than the vets who’d come here with their separation bonus. Her hair was long and braided, her eyes dark and glinting with rebellion as she jabbed a finger in our direction.
“The Commonwealth never did a Goddamned thing for us here! When the pirates and the Tahni took us over, you two and those Corporate mercenaries were the only ones who fought for us! I didn’t see a single Commonwealth Marine on this world then! Did you?” The last was directed to the others in the crowd rather than us, and when they shook their head, she went on. “When we needed help, when things were desperate, Marakit was the one who took care of us!”
“Marakit doesn’t ask anything in return except what we volunteer to give her!” someone else shouted.
“Marakit?” I asked, aiming the question at Bob.
“She’s the leader of the Confluence,” he told me.
“And she came here?” Vicky asked, sounding as surprised at the prospect as I was.
“Well, no,” he admitted. “We’ve only heard about her. But they all love her. The people from the Confluence talk about her all the time.”
And here, like a door opened from the heavens, was our opportunity.
“Well, maybe we should talk to the Confluence when they come,” I suggested. “If this Marakit is as awesome as everyone says she is, then we shouldn’t have any problem coming to some sort of arrangement with her. That shouldn’t be a problem, right? Us talking to them?”
Bob looked around at the others, for the first time seeming to be at a loss for words.
“Umm… no,” he said finally. “That shouldn’t be a problem at all.”
“Then I guess we’ll see you all in a couple days.”
The crowd dispersed slowly, and once even Grace and Harold were gone, Vicky turned to me with a look of utter disgust.
“Fine,” she acknowledged. “You’re better at this talking shit than I am. But don’t let it go to your head.”
[ 13 ]
The scream of landing jets split the afternoon calm as half a dozen cargo shuttles descended on columns of fire.
“Wow,” Vicky murmured, watching beside me. “These Confluence people don’t believe in half measures, do they? That’s gotta be thousands of tons of freight.”
As much as it impressed us, it seemed to impress the other residents of Gamma Junction even more. Thousands of them stood at the edge of the landing field like they’d gathered for a church service, their eyes cast upward in prayer to the gods who provided for their needs. Bob and Grace and Harold were out there among them, though I couldn’t pick them out from the rest of the huddled masses. We’d stayed out of the middle of the press and also stayed away from the Dutchman II. I figured the Confluence crews would already be suspicious of another starship on the planet without us hanging around her.
“That’s a lot of personnel along with all that tonnage,” Deke judged, thumbs hooked in his gunbelt.
I frowned at him. He looked more like a gunfighter than a government agent, which was, I suppose, an asset for a spy, but wasn’t going to help at all to build trust with these people. I would have ordered him to stay on the ship and let us do the talking if I had even halfway believed he might obey the command. For all that Vicky and I technically outranked Deke, that was a distinction I doubted he would make.
“Too many for us to take unless we call in the Ellen,” I agreed. “So maybe we should play it cool.”
Deke smirked aside at me.
“You think you’re an expert on diplomacy now, Alvarez? Since when do Marines do anything but shoot bad guys and blow up shit?”
“Since I didn’t have any choice,” I told him. “There was just the one ship of us out there. We shot as many bad guys and blew up as much shit as we could, but we had an entire galaxy worth of bad guys to fight. And trust me, Major Conner, as scary as things got for you here, the rest of the galaxy is just as scary. I had to work with a lot of people I’d much rather have shot.”
“To be fair,” Vicky interjected, “we did wind up shooting some of them after we worked with them.”
Any further discussion of the matter was cut short by the first of the shuttles touching down, their boarding ramps beginning to lower before the turbines had wound all the way down. And out came the people.
“Well, fuck me,” Deke said, eyes widening. “They weren’t bullshitting us.”
The first crew out the door were Skingangers—Evolutionists. I hadn’t seen too many of them even back when we’d been undercover in the Corporate Security Force, but enough for me to recognize the cyborgs for what they were. Gleaming metal replacement parts, obvious on purpose, meant to show they were rebelling against their humanity rather than just people who’d been badly injured and couldn’t afford anything better. Bionic legs, arms, eyes, sometimes parts of the jaw replaced with sharpened, metal teeth in mandibles like a steam shovel.
One of them, at least, had something of a sense of style. He was sleekly designed, the melding of flesh and cybernetics sleeker and less obtrusive than the others, and somewhere along the line he’d had silver dreadlocks implanted into his skull, sometimes hanging free like the hair they resembled, sometimes wriggling like the snakes of the Medusa. He ordered other Skingangers around with short, sharp commands and still talked more than most of the Evolutionists I’d run into.
Tahni cargo handlers followed them out, more on some ships than others, but close to the third that Grace had described. I’d spent enough time working and living with Tahni that just the sight of them didn’t send my balls crawling back into my belly, but these were qualitatively different from Zan-Thint and his followers. Not overtly military, they wore the typical Tahni civilian garb, clothes woven from multicolored strip wrapped around their bodies in an intricate pattern that I could never figure how it stayed together. Most of them were younger, too young to have fought in the war. Probably too young to have played much of a role in the Tahni insurrection Deke had told us about.
The rest… well, I hadn’t been sure what to expect from the Predecessor Cultists. I’d heard about them, read about them, but these men and women weren’t dressed in white robes and weren’t trying to make a show of who and what they were. Dressed in almost uniform gray work fatigues, they could have passed for any other normal worker… if it hadn’t been for the muscles. The Cultists all had outsized musculature thanks to the implant of cloned tissue, making them look like caricatures of humans drawn by the classic superhero comic book artists of the Twentieth Century, their universal broad shoulders and bulging biceps straining against the fabric of their utility garments. Like Deke, they were all too good-looking, but unlike him they hadn’t been built that way before birth, so it seemed more unnatural… and was. They’d had surgical bodysculpts in an effort to make themselves the perfect human specimens they thought the Predecessors would want them to be.
I almost laughed at the sight of them, at their conception of what the Predecessors would have wanted. To the Predecessors, humans had been a control group, left in our natural state to contrast with their creation of the Tahni. They’d had no plan for us, had even tried to wipe us out in the Great Bottleneck tens of thousands of years ago. The fact we’d refused to die made us a nuisance to some of them, a subject of study for others. Right up until the end, some of them had worked to combine our genes with those of the Tahni to make something more perfect, and right up until the end they’d failed.
Maybe these guys had gotten burned out on the whole thing during the battles with the Skingangers, or maybe it had taken the Psi War to change their minds, but they looked like they were just doing their best to blend in now.
“Only place I ever expected to see Tahni hanging out with Cultists and Skingangers,” Deke added, “is in a prison work camp.”
“That one looks like he’s in charge,” Vicky judged, nodding toward the dreadlocked Evolutionist who was snapping orders to the others, sending them scrambling to unlimber pallet loaders from the utility bays of the freight shuttles. “Maybe we should go talk to him.”
“Yeah, let’s,” Deke agreed, and set off at the same pace that had nearly lost us last night.
I didn’t try to keep up this time, just shaking my head.
“He’ll fuck this up for us,” Vicky said, looking as if she wanted to take off at a jog after him but sticking with my casual stride instead.
“This is his operation,” I said with a philosophical shrug. “We’re here so we can get Munroe to take the Unity seriously. If he fucks it up, it’s his problem.”
I wasn’t being completely honest—with myself, more than her. Project Rho was a disturbing concept, and I knew it better than anyone. The problem was, autonomous weapons systems had only been kept in check by the central authority not just of the Commonwealth military and law enforcement but by the Corporate Council coopting anyone who started researching it. With the Commonwealth weak and the Council gone, it was only a matter of time until that genii was out of the bottle.