Free Prophets by S. Andrew Swann Page A

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