A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Do you have enough?” Roslyn asked gently. She couldn’t be much older than the Guardia officer, but experience mattered as much as years sometimes—and there was a vast gulf between her experience of war and conflict and the local cop who’d never left his world.

  “We can fit four in the back of one of our SUVs, but the suits won’t fit in the front to drive,” the youth told her. “You’d need three SUVs and three drivers…”

  “Well, we’ve got two drivers,” Killough replied, stepping up beside Roslyn. Like her, he was dressed in the same lighter combat gear they’d worn before. There just hadn’t been time to fit anyone in exosuit armor, let alone train them.

  Roslyn had left the Academy with a field promotion long before she’d been supposed to receive exosuit training, and the armor training given to a Navy officer was perfunctory at best, regardless. The MISS spy had no training.

  Light armor and hazmat add-ons, it was.

  The hazmat helmets Killough was carrying drew the Guardia officer’s gaze, and he swallowed as Roslyn took hers from the spy.

  “I’ll ask for volunteers to drive the third vehicle,” he offered. “I don’t know if we have the proper hazmat—”

  “That won’t be necessary, Lieutenant,” a rich baritone said from behind them. “I brought my own gear, and I’ll drive the Lieutenant Commander’s people.”

  Roslyn turned to find Captain Bolivar having just emerged from a Guardia car at the edge of the precinct yard. She caught herself smiling brightly at the man, his presence a breath of hope in a difficult situation.

  “You didn’t brief us that you were pulling off another stunt, Commander,” Bolivar continued as the Lieutenant skittered half-consciously away. “Can we help, beyond providing cars?”

  “Huntress’s people are standing by to capture anyone who runs, Captain,” she told him. “If we’re in the right place, your people aren’t ready for this fight.”

  “There’s only three things in the universe I won’t back my tac-teams against,” Bolivar said drily. “There were four, but you guys dissolved the Space Assault Regiments.”

  “Mages, Augments and Marines in exosuits?” Roslyn asked.

  “You didn’t even need two guesses,” Bolivar agreed. “And from that…”

  “Your people aren’t ready for this fight,” she repeated. “I can’t say more.”

  The Guardia officer whistled softly.

  “Read and understood, Mage-Commander,” he told her. “I’m just the driver, then, but I think Sorprendidas has the right to have somebody in this operation, don’t you?”

  “It’s not the worst plan,” Roslyn agreed. “You get the back car.”

  “The most protected one, huh?” the Guardia Captain noted. “Who’s driving the one in front?”

  “Who do you think?” she asked.

  The drive from the precinct station to the water treatment facility was probably the safest part of the trip. Roslyn had no intention of taking their borrowed vehicles—two of which were marked Guardia trucks—into the drainage tunnels. They were unlikely to be attacked on their way to the lab.

  Which was good, as overhead and commentary hadn’t quite given Roslyn the true scale of the school they were driving past. It was the crowning jewel of the suburb Triple Q had built there, a solidly built complex that had to be home to at least two thousand kids.

  “I do not like how close that school is to this,” she murmured on a private channel to Killough and Mooren. “We need to keep that in mind. If things go sideways, we need to pull any action away from the school.”

  “I wanted to wait until nightfall,” the Marine reminded her. “But you were right. A lot of people could die if we wait.”

  “Or Lafrenz could escape,” Killough added, the spy’s voice grim. “If she gets away, all of this might end up being for nothing.”

  “Let’s try to keep the fighting underground,” Roslyn told them. “Swift and surgical. This ends today.”

  The water treatment plant’s security gates happily gave way to their vehicles’ Guardia codes, the automatic systems pulling the entrance open to allow the three vehicles entrance into a parking lot concealed amidst a carefully manicured collection of trees.

  The plant itself was a low-slung bunker only visible as a structure—as opposed to a hill slowly growing new trees—from this angle. Roslyn pulled her vehicle into the empty lot and turned it off.

  The other two vehicles slid to a halt around her and she drew a deep breath.

  “Sensor check?” she ordered.

  “Nothing pinging so far,” Mooren replied. “There’s nothing in the parking lot, but the building itself is solid enough to defeat our mobile passives.”

  “Is that normal?” Roslyn asked. “Because that doesn’t sound normal to me.”

  “Most water treatment plants are built with twenty-centimeter concrete shells so they can do things like plant trees on top,” the Marine replied. “But most don’t have a lead lining, and I’d say this place does.”

  “Right,” Roslyn said drily. “I think this is the place.” She switched to the squad channel. “Lock and load, everyone. Remember: we want prisoners, but we are expecting serious resistance.

  “This is effectively a Republic Intelligence Directorate facility. Whatever the RID would have packed in, we can expect the rogue Prometheus Mages to have packed in—and we know there are at least two Mages in here.

  “We have backup if things go sideways, but I don’t expect to face resistance in enough force to hold off a full squad of Marines,” she told them. “They hid this place from the Republic, from the Sorprendidas government, from us. They couldn’t risk an army, and it isn’t big enough for one.

  “They almost certainly know we’re coming, but they have no idea what they’re dealing with,” Roslyn said. “Let’s remind them why everyone fears the Royal Martian Marines!”

  “Oorah!”

  29

  “I’ve got the doors,” Bolivar promised as Roslyn reached the entrance to the treatment plant. “I’m sure you’ve got six ways in, but I’d rather we minimize the property damage.”

  She chuckled and waved him forward. The Guardia officer wore very similar hazmat and light armor to her and Killough. Like them, he was dwarfed by the Marines in their exosuits, but all of them were equally anonymous now.

  With properly fitted armor, even Roslyn’s chest was flattened into androgyny. Modern armor handled that surprisingly comfortably, while rendering the team utterly uniform except for height.

  The doors opened within seconds as Bolivar tapped a command sequence into the door, then stood back and gestured the Martian personnel forward. He was clearly not so foolish as to go first when there were people with exosuit armor around.

  “Clear,” Corporal Andrews announced as their team swept the first area. “Treatment plant itself seems quiet, but there’s enough machinery to muck with the motion and heat sensors.”

  “Keep the mark one eyeball peeled, then,” Mooren ordered. “Marines, move up! Rest of you…follow on.”

  Roslyn chuckled at the rest of you designation—though she didn’t exactly follow the instruction, either. She was in the middle of the pack, with half a dozen of the Marines ahead of her and six behind. Power flickered around her hands, invisible even to her, ready to shield the entire squad when—not if—their enemy made a move.

  The water treatment plant was an entity of open pools and massive pipes, with machinery humming efficiently and ignoring the mere humans who wandered through its depths. From the statistics she’d seen, it could handle over a trillion liters a day. At that rate, it would still take three weeks to empty the massive reservoir installed under the park—and Nueva Portugal had four similar facilities.

  And the new one had been installed out of clear need. The rainy season on this section of Sorprendidas brought enough water that each district of the city had its own drainage system leading to a reservoir-and-treatment facility like this.

  Roslyn was glad s
he wasn’t visiting the city in that rainy season, even if it would have made this job a lot easier if the drainage tunnels were full of water. Right now, the machinery around her was running at less than five percent of capacity, almost quiescent against the thunder that the plant must be filled with during the rainy season.

  “Anyone seeing anything other than tanks, pools and piping?” she asked. “All of our estimates and guesses say they have to have an access in here.”

  “Nothing at this level,” Mooren admitted. “Knight, get some drones up. I’m guessing we need to go down.”

  “Two more levels under us,” Roslyn told the Marine. Tactical drones launched from several of the Marines’ suits, the pigeon-sized winged robots flickering out across the facility. “And not a soul. I understand the logic, but damn, is it creepy.”

  “A team of thirty does a full inspection on one of these plants every day,” Bolivar said quietly. “Five days a week and they take weekends off. This one was inspected yesterday, and the report was clean. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Yeah. There’s nothing here that wasn’t built when the plant was,” Roslyn agreed. “And somewhere, I’m guessing on the very bottom level, is a door that’s either hidden from the inspection team or the team just takes for granted now.”

  “We’ll find out,” Mooren replied. “Marines! Map says the stairs are in the middle. Do not split up.”

  It seemed Roslyn wasn’t the only one feeling twitchy.

  The waste treatment plant had large freight elevators to handle replacement parts, but it was clear that the main method of reaching the two lower floors was the stairs Mooren had sent everyone to. Wide enough for six exosuited Marines to walk down abreast, the shallow steps spiraled down a large opening descending twenty meters into the earth.

  “Skip the middle level,” Roslyn ordered. “Scan for threats with the drones, but I’m betting our access is on the bottom.”

  No one verbally acknowledged her, but four of Knight’s drones flashed away as they passed the first sub-level, and the Marines kept tramping downward. Each ten-meter-high level was a duplicate of the one above, with a few large cylindrical tanks descending the full height of the treatment plant.

  The bottom of the plant was the same smoothed industrial concrete as the two floors above it. Nothing about the facility yet indicated that it was a cover for a secret bioweapon lab—but that, Roslyn supposed, was the point.

  Secret labs shouldn’t look like secret labs.

  “Stick to a group, move north, circle counterclockwise toward the reservoir,” Mooren ordered. “Knight, keep the drones sweeping for anything we might miss. I would rather not get ambushed in this mess.”

  “I don’t know; there’s lots of cover in here,” Killough said drily. “Speaking as one of the people in the light armor, cover sounds better than wide open corridors.”

  “Yes, but think of the property damage,” the Marine replied. “We’ll take it out of your paycheck.”

  “I think I might still be legally dead,” the spy said. “They’ll have to fix that before they can dock my pay!”

  Roslyn smiled to herself as she moved with the Marines. At least everyone was in good spirits, even with the vaguely depressing silence of the mechanical plant. This floor was almost entirely shut down at this time of year, it seemed.

  She had an overlay of the map they’d put together of what they thought was under the park on her HUD, and slowed to a halt after they’d circled around a quarter of the bunker.

  “Stop,” she ordered. “The reservoir is directly west of us. Most likely the lab is on either the north or south side of the reservoir, dug out in the same project and built at the same time. So, we are now into the area where I expect to see the access point.”

  She gestured to the south, where several massive pipes emerged from the exterior bunker wall.

  “That’s the reservoir link,” she reminded them. “We know they’re using the drainage tunnels to the reservoir itself as passageways, so we’ve got to be close.”

  “Knight, those drones can rig up a short-range penetrating-radar pulse, right?” Mooren asked. “Sequence them into the wall. I’m betting some of this wall moves aside with the right commands, but we don’t have the network codes.”

  “Setting them up,” the Corporal replied. “This will take a minute. Do we want to sweep the rest of the west wall while I work?”

  “Don’t split up,” Roslyn and Mooren said simultaneously.

  Several of the Marines very clearly swallowed chuckles in response to that.

  “Form up around Knight,” Mooren ordered. “Keep your eyes peeled and watch for incoming hostiles. We don’t know what kind of defenses or security are in place, but there is no way they don’t know we’re in the treatment plant.”

  The drones converged on them once again. Each of them flew forward and attached itself to the wall as Roslyn watched. Within a few moments, they’d formed a wave pattern on the wall, and Knight made a small gesture with her armored hand.

  Roslyn didn’t feel or see anything, but new data immediately appeared on her HUD as the maps updated with the radar data. Knight had calibrated the pulses carefully, and only about ten meters behind the wall was illuminated—and that was enough.

  “All right. Everyone stand back,” Roslyn ordered as she studied the location of the passageway. “Like you said, there’s almost certainly some kind of code or command we can give, but we don’t have time for that.”

  The Marines got out of her way in a flash. Every one of them had seen a Combat Mage make a door before, and they were not going to be in the way. It took Bolivar a few seconds longer to realize what was going on, but ten seconds after her HUD updated, Roslyn had a clear line of sight to the wall concealing the door.

  Explosives would be equally brute-force as Roslyn’s plan, but they would take longer. Time was everything and Roslyn was worried. They needed the data on the damn toxin to save the affected people who were still alive.

  She didn’t know how much time those people had left—but she did know that none of them deserved what the Prometheus Mages had done to them. She let that anger flow through her, pushing her power as she flung her magic against the concrete barrier in front of her.

  Concrete could never stand against a trained Mage. The wall was dust in moments, revealing a heavy steel vault door concealed behind it.

  The door didn’t last much longer as Roslyn stepped forward with blades of force answering her will. Steel parted like paper against an edge forged of pure force, and the heavy vault door fell backward into the tunnel.

  She exhaled a long breath and nodded to herself, holding a shield across the entrance as the Marines moved up.

  “No lights,” Mooren murmured. “Probably killed them when they realized we were coming. Go thermal, people. They’re definitely waiting for us.”

  30

  Roslyn waited for the Marines to lead the way again, falling once more into the middle of the column. The dark tunnel was foreboding, even with the thermal vision and infrared lights lighting it up ahead of them.

  It descended at a shallow angle toward the reservoir. Initially, one side of it was clearly the outside of the big pipes moving water up to the treatment plant. The infrared flashlights only gave them fifty meters or so of visibility as they headed deeper, and a deep chill settled into Roslyn’s spine.

  “Think it’s supposed to be this creepy?” she murmured.

  “Nah, but it’s a nice side effect from their point of view,” Killough said. “Keeps us on edge.”

  “We’ve got a break in the tunnel ahead,” Knight reported. “It curves right, and the descent gets steeper. Watch your step. This tunnel definitely wasn’t meant for vehicles.”

  “Move up to the turn and hold position,” Mooren ordered. “Keep together.”

  That kept getting reiterated, but Roslyn understood. They had too small of a force to risk getting separated when they knew almost nothing about the layout of the complex they
’d entered.

  The turn was enough to detach the tunnel from the pipes as Knight had said. The path curved away from the reservoir systems and headed deeper into the ground.

  “I think you might be wrong on the vehicles,” Roslyn noted, flashing her infrared lamp over the roof. “There’s a power line up there for lights and a tram of some kind. Permanent installation to make the transit up and down easier.

  “Probably means this trip is longer than we thought.”

  “We thought it was a half a damn kilometer,” Mooren pointed out. “That’s quite the walk, boss.”

  “Wait,” Knight snapped. “Drones have picked up motion headed our way…and I’m guessing it’s the Commander’s tram.”

  “Against the wall; stand by weapons,” the Marine Sergeant snapped. Her people leapt to obey, with the non-Marines only a few seconds behind.

  There was no visible trail on the concrete floor to show where the tram usually ran, but with the attack team pressed to the walls, they were probably safe.

  Roslyn swallowed hard. She had a carbine slung across her back, but she had no intention of using the weapon. Power ran through her limbs as she summoned her magic. Whatever happened next was going to be…interesting.

  The tram came hurtling up the slope with its lights disabled, only barely visible in the infrared lights as the SUV-sized vehicle whirred up to them on electric motors—only to violently careen over onto its side half a dozen meters ahead of them.

  It wasn’t quite large enough to fill the tunnel from side to side, but it was large enough that the nearest fire team was in active danger.

  Except they were in exosuits. Corporal Andrews bodily stepped into the oncoming vehicle, leaning their shoulder into the vehicle and smashing it to a halt with a resounding crash.

  Two figures leapt from the vehicle as it ground to a halt, moving with blurring speed as they swung penetrator rifles toward Andrews. Unfortunately for them, there was a reason the Corporal had stepped forward alone, and their fire team opened up on the attackers.