She slung her rifle, then called Jackin back. He walked her through the steps to reboot the communications systems and the mainframe, which—once Puck had hacked the system to give them clearance without a biometric scan—equated to throwing a couple of large levers, waiting a few minutes, then flipping them back on. When the screen beside the mainframe barrack indicated the commencement of a successful reboot, they started their trek back to the other side of the massive vessel.
As they reentered the maze of hallways that’d led them to the starboard air lock, Cavalon found he still itched with unused potential, and he suddenly wished Mesa had cooled it a bit on the dose of epithesium. He was ready to crawl out of his skin.
“I have a follow-up question,” Rake announced as they rounded a corner. “About the boy.”
Cavalon’s eyes widened. A follow-up question? That, he had not seen coming. He cleared his throat and tried to act casual. “Go ahead.”
“Why did he care?” she asked, tone fervent yet perplexed. “About the shithead building the Guardians? They were meant to replace Legion soldiers, but what repercussions did that have for the boy?”
“It wasn’t about him.”
“What was it about, then?”
Cavalon let out a long breath. “Well, two points. One—replacing Legion soldiers with mindless clones might seem all nice and humanitarian on the outside. But it means one very bad thing.”
“Which is?”
“Well, so … your troops are like robots, right? Fleshy and meaty, sure, but ones you can control. They may have protocols to act their rank autonomously, but that’s all just for show. They’re all the same, and you can control their every move, if you want. So the real power would lie in only one place. With whoever’s sitting at the controls.”
“The man who made them,” Rake confirmed.
“Right.”
“So Augustus Mercer has control over the clones, and thus control over the Legion.”
Cavalon nodded. “And thus control over the SC.”
Sweat beaded under his collar as they turned a corner into a warmer corridor.
Rake pushed her sleeves up to her elbows. “Okay, and the second point?”
“Let’s just say … the elder Mercer’s interest in genetic engineering doesn’t stop with creating fodder for wars.”
“How so?”
“Well,” he said, scratching his chin. “How caught up are you on Mercer family history, Viator War-era edition?”
She blew out a long breath. “The basics, I guess. What we learned in school. Renowned geneticists and genetic engineers who helped stop the virility mutagen from spreading, then reverse engineered it to turn it against the Viators. Some think that was the real tide of the war, that we’d never have been able to win without it.”
“Right. So, Augustus takes that legacy very, very seriously, and as a result has some, uh, interesting opinions about genetics.”
“Like what?”
“He thinks the Viator War was an opportunity. A chance for mankind to start fresh, a way to sculpt the human population into something … unpolluted, clean. Weed out the weak and ineffectual.”
“Eugenics.”
He nodded, readjusting the strap of his rifle as it dug into the side of his neck. “A thousand-year war with billions of deaths gives us a much smaller crop to choose from. In theory, some of the stronger and smarter folks survived. He thinks we need to take the chance to be more selective. Breed a stronger, healthier species.”
“But what about the mutagen?” she asked. “Some of the mutations have taken generations to surface. That’s not much of a clean start.”