Profiteer

Sergeant Mariah Zanzibar, for the first time in seven years, found herself questioning Mr. Magnus’ judgment. Those doubts were perhaps the most painful thoughts to cross her mind in those seven years. She had given her loyalty to Dominic Magnus, and personal disloyalty was one of the worst crimes she could think of—up there with incest and fratricide.

 

She had tried to convince him, preach caution, warn him about the people he was using. However, she’d known she was preaching to deaf ears even before his interview with Shane.

 

She should have resigned then.

 

Instead, she had accepted his decision to go on with the bizarre plan. He was right about her knowledge of GA&A security. They needed her.

 

She should still have resigned in protest. It might have made him reconsider, though Zanzibar knew him well enough to know that would have been unlikely.

 

So, after having her protests brushed aside, she had gone along ...

 

To end up shot full of holes in the middle of Godwin with the two people in Magnus’ new organization that she trusted the least.

 

Even as she approached the intersection of Sacco and West Lenin, she still found it incredible that they had escaped from the ambush with their lives. Worse, she kept feeling unprofessional irritation at the fact that it was Tetsami who had saved them. Mr. Magnus had placed Tetsami in command of the trio, and she’d performed well—

 

That made Zanzibar mad.

 

Neither Tetsami nor Shane deserved his trust. Tetsami was a freelance software jock with no loyalty except to herself. Shane was a traitor; she had sold out every trust she had ever earned.

 

Zanzibar spat into the middle of the intersection. She checked the chronometer on her wrist—fifteen minutes late for the meeting. Not bad, considering she was on foot. Tetsami had stolen a truck from the construction site to evac Shane and get her to a medic, leaving Zanzibar to meet with their bookish contact, Levy, and the Paralian ship expert named “Flower.”

 

What a name.

 

Zanzibar scanned the surrounding buildings for an ambush, and saw nothing. She tracked with the nearly discharged plasma rifle anyway. There might only be a half-second burst left on the thing, but its deterrence value helped keep the casual Bakunin night crawlers at a distance.

 

After one last survey of the night-emptied landscape, she slung her weapon and walked up to the entrance of Bolshevik Books. The windows were opaqued, and the store was obviously closed. She paused before she pressed the call button.

 

Could she have been followed?

 

It was a paranoid thought but one worth reviewing. There was the possibility of a ground team of marines out there. She had avoided further ambush by going underground at the construction site. The Godwin sewer system was hideously complex. No one knew it all, but Zanzibar was aware of the best subterranean highways. She’d surfaced nearly ten klicks away from the construction site.

 

Was that good enough?

 

She never got a chance to answer her own question. The intercom came alive, a laser began scanning her, and a small holo of a nervous-looking gentleman asked, “Who’s there?”

 

The man was balding, middle-aged, and had an accent that Zanzibar thought belonged to either Paschal or Thubohu. It was probably Levy. She gave the password, “I’m a patriot.”

 

“There are no patriots on Bakunin.”

 

“Then perhaps I’m a partisan.”

 

“Enter, comrade.” The “comrade” part was laced with audible sarcasm. Zanzibar shrugged. The exchange had gone as she expected. Now all she had to do was meet this Flower, and see if the “expert” was what the plan needed.

 

What the plan needs is a miracle.

 

The door opened, and Johann Levy ushered her into his bookstore. She followed him through the stacks of paper-bound books. Levy led her into a windowless office awash in clutter. The only concession to order was a clear spot on the metallic green desk upon which sat a counter-surveillance generator, a wide-band signal detector, and a secure holo communicator unit. Everything was off except for the countersurveillance box, since you couldn’t transmit in or out of an RF-damping field.

 

Flower was sitting behind the desk.

 

Zanzibar suppressed a gasp when she crossed the threshold, and she had to summon a reserve of composure to continue striding over to Levy’s offered seat without showing her surprise.

 

She hadn’t expected Flower to be nonhuman.

 

Not only nonhuman, alien.

 

Nonhumans were fairly common in the Confederacy, on Bakunin at least. Most people had met at least one descendant of pre-Unification genetic projects. The Seven Worlds, the Tau Ceti arm of the Confederacy, were all populated by those Terran nonhumans. There were over a hundred species of them.

 

But whatever mistrust—even horror—existed between humans and their creations, they weren’t aliens.

 

In three centuries, the humans of the Confederacy had found evidence of only five intelligent extraterrestrial species.