“Big,” he said bluntly. “I believe we are looking at one central location with maybe a dozen satellite facilities for…processing. The satellite facilities are irrelevant. Only the central facility will have access to their data, and it’s where the Mages are hiding.”
“How big?” she repeated.
He shrugged.
“Around sixty active people, including security and researchers,” he told her. “It was designed for five times that, so the facility itself has to be significant. I think I know which sector of the city it’s buried underneath, but I haven’t had the eyes and the analysis tech to find it.”
“That large a facility should be detectable from orbit,” Roslyn countered. “That seems…unlikely.”
“This might have been a rogue op under Finley himself, but he was drawing on Directorate resources throughout,” Killough reminded her. The Republic Intelligence Directorate had proven themselves again and again to be one of the best covert-ops organizations in human history.
“They know how to hide their shit.”
“So, what do you know that isn’t in the reports I have?” Roslyn asked.
Killough sighed, glancing around to be sure the Marines had bought them enough privacy for this conversation.
“I don’t think the missing-persons analysis made it into anyone’s reports,” he said grimly. “That was why they rushed the job on Yuan. They’d been talking to the Guardia and recognized the pattern—so the lab’s security rushed the op and Yuan was publicly killed instead of disappeared.
“Whoever is in charge of security here is fond of making people disappear,” the MISS agent concluded. “It’s a Mage, but that’s all I know. I’m not even sure where they found Mages for this shit.”
“Finley had a lot of things to teach,” Roslyn guessed. “Some people were willing to do anything, I think, to learn from him.”
“Yeah.” Killough was silent for a few seconds, then sighed. “Here, that anything is running somewhere around six hundred people.”
It took Roslyn a moment to put together the pieces of what he’d said.
“Wait, you’re saying they’ve killed six hundred people?” she demanded.
“Excess-missing-persons analysis,” he told her. “Compared to the prior decade and similar cities elsewhere on Sorprendidas and in the Protectorate, the last two years have seen at least six hundred extra people go missing…and never be found.”
“My god,” Roslyn murmured. “But…why?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Experimentation is my guess, but I haven’t seen any excessive jump in morgue counts. It’s like they completely disappeared. Not even their bodies found.”
“So, they’re either still alive or the researcher moved the bodies elsewhere and disposed of them to keep them disappeared,” Roslyn concluded. “But what are they even doing that would require hundreds of human subjects—and killing them?”
“It’s something to do with the Prometheus Interface,” Killough told her, shaking his head. “I don’t know what, but Lafrenz was one of the critical people building the neural-interface component of the system. Without her, Finley would never have managed to get the captive brains talking to computers or vice versa.”
Roslyn swallowed a moment of nausea. The realities of the Republic’s Prometheus Interface jump system were still sickening to her.
“Building a better drive? Or some kind of…reverse interface?”
“I don’t know,” Killough admitted. “But I do know that Ulla Lafrenz is directly responsible for thousands of deaths and needs to be brought to justice.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Roslyn agreed. “I want to see your data, Killough.”
He tapped his wrist-comp.
“It’s all in here. I’ve had nothing else to work with for weeks. Staying in hotels and suchlike, under false IDs.” He shivered. “Even for me, it’s been a rough month.”
“Sounds it,” she said gently. That explained the weight loss from the file imagery all right. “We need to work together.”
“Agreed. You’re assigned to the new destroyer in orbit, right?” he asked. “I need access to her sensors. I’d love access to her computers to crunch some of the analysis I’ve been poking at, too, but I need her sensors.”
“That’s not entirely my place to give,” Roslyn warned.
“Without it, this could take weeks,” Killough said. “I can theoretically bring you up to speed and have you do the work, but that will take time. And from what I’ve seen, every day we waste is killing people.”
She exhaled and nodded.
“I have to talk to my Captain,” she told him. “I can probably get you aboard ship and access, but it’s not entirely my call,” she repeated.
“Fair.” He tapped a command on his wrist-comp, and her own device chirped receipt. “That’s everything I’ve got so far, just in case something happens to me. I think I’ve managed to avoid notice from the lab’s protectors, but meeting with you has made us both vulnerable.”
Roslyn nodded, considering the situation.
“Sir, I hate to interrupt, but you need to listen in on the Guardia channels,” Mooren suddenly told her. “I don’t know how much attention you and your friend have drawn, but there’s a riot headed this way that did not exist twenty minutes ago!”
16
Roslyn’s team didn’t have official access to the Guardia network, but she was somehow unsurprised when Mooren uploaded her a full link to the local police service’s operations map.
She projected it into the air between her and Killough, with Knight and the other two Marines closing in to see what was going on. It took her a moment to sort out the iconography—she’d been trained on standard Protectorate police symbology at one point, but she’d never used it before—but even the obvious factors were bad.
The entire region around them was lit up with calls for violence, break-ins and vandalism. The icons were shaded by severity, and even as Roslyn watched, more icons flashed to red—and new icons were appearing.
They were clustered in several locations, one of which was now covered by a rough circle in the map with a new code attached to it: the one Mooren had flagged.
Riot in Progress.
“What the hell is going on?” she whispered.
“I don’t know, but look at the geography, Chambers,” Killough told her. “Where did that bomb go off?”
“Directly above the apartment building,” Roslyn said. It couldn’t be…but a chill horror was spreading through her soul as she followed the MISS agent’s logic.
“Wind patterns would have spread it to the east,” Killough continued implacably, drawing a pattern in the hologram with his hand…a pattern that nearly overlapped with the chaos suddenly overwhelming several square kilometers.
“Some kind of…rage toxin?” Knight asked. “Included in the bomb’s casing, to spread it as far as it could go?”
“It can’t be related,” Roslyn said weakly. The logic was too neat. It explained too much.
“Occam’s razor, Chambers,” Killough said grimly. “The simplest solution is often the correct one. If there had been some kind of toxin in the bomb, we’d be seeing a pattern like this. Depending on the weight of the molecules, it could have taken until this morning to take effect.”
“Or most people were breathing it in while they were asleep and we’re only seeing a critical mass of people affected now,” Roslyn pointed out.
“Mooren, get your people down from the rooftops. Fall back on my position. Avoid attention if you can.”
“Understood,” the Sergeant replied. “We’re coming in.”
Roslyn looked at the map again and shivered as the cluster of red icons marking the riot continued to move in her direction. There were four clusters in the affected region, each seeming to gather new people as they moved.
“I need to talk to the Guardia,” she decided. “Watch our backs.”
Knight and Killough nodded simultaneously, exchangin
g a grim chuckle as they realized what they’d done.
“The Marines are in charge, Killough,” Roslyn told him. “This situation is…weird.”
She stepped away from her companions and switched her wrist-comp to pure communications and tried to raise Lieutenant Oliveira.
It took over a minute for the young Guardia officer to respond to her call—a minute in which she started to be able to hear the shouting. It…wasn’t a coherent noise. If there were words there, she couldn’t make them out at this range.
“Commander, I’m afraid I’m rather busy. How can I help you?” Oliveira asked, doing an admirable job of trying to conceal his stress. He wasn’t managing it, but he was trying.
“I was hoping I might be able to help you if we trade information, Lieutenant,” Roslyn replied. “I’m at the Tres Plantas Parque and everything around me appears to be going crazy. What’s going on, Lieutenant…and can the RMN help?”
There was a pause.
“We’re facing a series of riots for unknown reason,” the young officer told her. “I don’t know if you can help, but we’re barely sure of what’s going on.”
“Have you connected with Huntress yet?” Roslyn asked. “If nothing else, my people should be able to provide you with better overhead. Captain Daalman also has Marines and access to Nix supplies.”
Nix solutions were the Protectorate’s tailored knockout gasses. Self-neutralizing above certain concentrations, they were almost perfectly safe. Of course, knocking large groups of people unconscious was dangerous regardless of how safe the drug used was, but it removed one potential problem.
“We have some stocks of Nix of our own, but we’re hoping not to get to that point,” Oliveira told her. He hesitated, then continued grimly. “There’s a Guardia precinct station two blocks to the west of you, Commander Chambers. We’ve lost contact, but there’s too much going on for my superiors to spare a ground unit to check it out.
“If you and your Marine escort could investigate, we would be…grateful.”
“We can do that,” Roslyn said, glancing over to confirm that Mooren had joined them. “Does the precinct station have a shuttle landing site? Several of my people are still at the dock along with our heavier gear.”
“It does,” Oliveira replied. “Commander…while I understand that I have no ability to give you orders, please do not use lethal weaponry. The situation is still under control.”
“I wasn’t planning on it, Lieutenant,” Roslyn said. “But…Oliveira, we have reason to believe the riots may be linked to the explosion last night. You may be looking at some kind of chemical or even biological weapon.
“Your priority has to be containment.”
He was silent for several seconds.
“That isn’t my call, but I’ll pass the suggestion up the chain,” he told her. “And the recommendation to call your Captain. We’ll see.”
The channel closed and Roslyn shook her head as she rejoined her people.
“Guardia realizes something odd is going on,” she told them. “We’ve been asked to investigate a precinct station that’s out of coms. I don’t like the sound of that…but they don’t have the time to check it out.
“Please tell me we have stunguns,” she asked Mooren.
The Marine Sergeant grimaced.
“Knight’s team has full-size weapons, but the rest of us just have SmartDart sidearms,” she admitted. “We were expecting to be countering an ambush by Republic covert ops, not…whatever the hell we’re doing.”
Roslyn had the same weapon, an oversized pistol that fired the intelligent taser darts. The problem was that it took two SmartDarts to reliably disable an adult human—and the pistol only held eight.
“We’ve got what we’ve got,” she told the Marines and Killough. “Let’s go find out what happened to the local cops.”
17
Their first sign that something was even more wrong than they’d anticipated arrived just after they left the park, in the form of a girl of maybe seventeen, who charged out of the bushes with an incomprehensible scream.
She was on one of the Marines before Roslyn and the others could even react, clawing and screaming in rage as her hands scrabbled on cloth-covered body armor. The Marine tried to pull her off of him and she went for his eyes.
The sharp crack of a stungun carbine echoed through the park as Knight opened fire. Three SmartDarts appeared on the teenager, their calibrated electric shocks flinging her away from the Marine and onto the ground.
SmartDarts were locally networked, identifying how many of them were in the target and synchronizing their shocks for the size and weight of the victim. Like most nonlethal weapons available to the Protectorate, they were nearly perfectly safe and nearly perfectly effective, expected to disable a target for a minimum of five minutes.
Everyone in Roslyn’s team was moving on when the girl got right back up and charged at Knight. Clawed fingers tore across the Marine Corporal’s neck, and Roslyn saw blood as Knight went down.
Roslyn flung out a hand and threw power across the edge of the park, picking up the teenage girl and suspending her in the air. The child hung there, still trying desperately to claw at the nearest Marine with madness in her eyes.
“Move,” Roslyn ordered the Marines, maneuvering the girl out of the way. “Someone check Knight’s injuries.”
“I’m just scratched up; she didn’t have long-enough nails to do more,” the Corporal told her.
“Check them anyway,” Roslyn snapped. “We don’t know if the toxin can be transferred.”
The girl’s eyes met Roslyn’s and she shivered. There was nothing there. No personality. No sense. Just mad rage.
“Cuff the girl,” she ordered. “We’ll bring her with us. I can’t…”
“We can’t leave a kid tied up in a park when we have no idea what’s going on,” Mooren agreed, already producing a set of collapsible manacles from inside her fatigues. She approached their prisoner carefully, watching for the spasms as the girl still tried to lash out at whoever was near her.
Once the cuffs were on the child’s wrists and ankles, Roslyn released her from the magic.
“I’ll carry her,” Killough offered. “I’m not armed.”
The agent scooped the girl up into a fireman’s carry with ease, despite her attempts to squirm around and bite him.
“This is nuts,” the Marine who’d been jumped muttered. “She’s way too strong.”
“Not as strong as tempered steel,” Mooren replied. “Come on, people. I don’t know if there are answers at the Commander’s precinct station…but I do know that Lieutenant Herbert is bringing our armor there.”
They managed to make it to the Guardia station without any more surprises—mostly by actively avoiding people. There was no way to be sure if anyone they ran into was going to react like their prisoner, and they couldn’t handle large numbers of prisoners.
The station itself was deathly still…the appropriate term, Roslyn realized, when she saw the doors had been torn from their hinges. It took a moment to recognize the chunks scattered amidst the debris of the front entrance as having once been a Guardia officer.
“I’m going to be sick,” Knight said, her voice surprisingly level.
“No time for that,” Mooren snapped. “Team, forward. Stunguns out.” She took a breath. “Shoot anything that moves. We can apologize later if we tase a Guardia officer.”
The reception area past the wrecked doors was worse. Several physically dismantled bodies were scattered across the benches, and there was blood everywhere.
“What the hell happened here?” Roslyn demanded. “I thought things only started going crazy a few minutes ago.”
“Like you said, people inhaled whatever it was when they were asleep,” Killough noted. “But where would you have a lot of awake people?”
“A precinct station,” Mooren said grimly. “Shuttle pad is on the roof. Do we split up?”
“Hell, no,” Roslyn replied. “Move
as a group, sweep up. Look for more data.”
The door to the first stairwell they found had been wedged shut from the other side.
“Leave it,” Roslyn ordered. “There’s got to be another set of stairs, and I don’t want to risk surprises.”
By then, Knight had a map of the building loaded into her helmet and pointed wordlessly.
“This is a fucking nightmare,” Mooren murmured. “I think I’m at nine dead, but I can’t be certain. Plus, I’d say only half were in Guardia uniform.”
Roslyn nodded grimly as she followed Knight.
“Probably Guardia, prisoners and people being processed were all hit,” she said. “There might still be people in the cells, but everyone who was mobile…was affected.”
“Whatever that entails,” Killough said grimly. “Did they all end up like her?” He gestured at the teenager he carried, who was still occasionally trying to bite him.
“We’ll find out,” Roslyn said, then held up a hand as Knight stopped at a door.
The Corporal paused next to the door, listening for a moment before she pushed it open. Nothing happened immediately, so Knight stepped through.
“Stairs are clear,” she reported. “I think I’m good all the way up.”
“Let’s move as a group,” Roslyn repeated. “Fire team Delta, then Killough with the prisoner, then everyone else.”
She hadn’t even introduced the MISS agent. Everything had gone chaotic so quickly, she was hoping her people were keeping up.
The other two Marines of Knight’s fire team joined her, heading up the stairs, and then Roslyn and the others followed. The station was still and quiet as they moved.
“Sir, this is Herbert, we are inbound on the precinct station,” the pilot reported. “I’m linked in with the Guardia, and they are establishing a perimeter around the affected region. No one is quite sure of the limits, but they’re blocking roads and moving in riot trucks.”
“Good,” Roslyn replied. “There should be a pad on the roof. We’re going to need to improvise a cell. We’ve got one prisoner who I want delivered to Huntress for medical examination under full quarantine protocols.”
A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10) Page 8
