Many neuro-plastic printings were coded into every Gygan before completion. Vocational training and data. Standard overview of Consortium internal policies and procedures. A familial, slavish loyalty to the Consortium. And a xenophobic disdain for other client species.

Some might be surprised that for the culture of the Consortium, an entity ostensibly devoted to free enterprise, money and trade were seen as an unclean if necessary business. Internally, the Consortium had no sense of private enterprise. For the Gygans, all labor and the products thereof were to be utilized solely for the betterment of the Consortium as a whole, guided and directed by the unseen master's of Gyges. From the Gygan perspective, trade with outside civilizations was an act of charity and vulgar communication between the Consortium and cultures to ignorant to see their perfect system. Aliens were to be pitied, looked down upon, and be carefully directed through Gyges' ubiquitous, economic influence.

Hundred was not a typical Gygan, she had divorced herself from the Consortium and all that it represented. She had learned to be skeptical of her internal programming with a violent intensity that bordered upon blind hate. Hundred sneered to herself at the barbarians around her. Not all of her programming had been proven wrong by experience.

Perhaps they would prove themselves useful, non-Consortium powers were not without perspicacity. Her would-be comrades must have been chosen for [i]some[/i] reasons and with [i]some[/i] logic, flawed though it may be. Their problem solving skills, however, did not seem to be one of those reasons. She looked over at the one fiddling with his quaint firearm as he voiced his impatience. Well he wasn't wrong.

Hundred stood from her seat at the far end of the shuttles seating. The Dust shifted and reoriented itself in the air, a golden shimmer from countless phasic transference events signifying their activity. Hundred's fluttered near her face, millions of programmable particulate rushed around her head, compacting, coalescing, constructing into the sealed helmet of her suit. She walked over to the airlock, more particulate filtering into the activation circuit, cycling the internal aperture into an open position. Stepping inside the Dust flooded in after her from the cabin, one final wisp remaining to cycle the hatch shut behind them. Hundred sniffed in the closed, quiet confines of her freshly constructed helmet, activating her suits comm. Clear, curt, and dripping with disdain, Hundred's husky voice materialized from the shuttle cockpit's speakers.

"Open the airlock, pilot. I will get us inside."