Roslyn held her peace on that—transmutation Mages were quite capable of making a lot of very tough materials transparent—and watched the first three Marines go into the decon room.
The transparent barriers slammed shut on either side, scanners beeped, and several different systems activated at once.
“Knight?” Roslyn murmured.
“Antiseptic spray and several radiation purges,” the Marine told her. “Not sure I’d want to be in there in regular scrubs, but everyone’s armor should be fine.”
After thirty seconds, the airlock cycled, releasing Andrews’s fire team into the next area.
“Team by team,” Roslyn ordered. “Let’s be careful.”
Three by three, her team made their way past the decontamination room into a more stereotypically medical portion of the underground complex. Walls had been painted sterile white. Doors were clear glass but heavily secured.
“Sir, you need to see this,” Andrews announced, gesturing Roslyn forward to join them.
She joined the lead team next to a clear glass wall as they pointed into it. It took her a moment to register what she was looking at, and then a hard, cold shiver ran down her spine.
The room had four fully articulated beds designed to hold patients and adjust them for examination. Blinking arrays of computers and sensors walled the room—but what drew Roslyn’s gaze were the iron-bar restraints positioned to hold patients against the beds.
As the Marines’ lights filled the room, the beds became more clearly visible. All four had seen heavy use, with visible damage to the fabric where the occupants had struggled against the iron bars.
“Fuck me,” Mooren whispered. “What the hell is this place?”
“Somewhere several hundred people came to die,” Roslyn said grimly. “That’s not news, even if it’s horrifying to see the evidence of that.”
“Yeah,” Killough agreed, his voice very quiet. “Turn around, Commander.”
She did, following his gaze to see what had drawn the MISS spy’s attention. There was only one bed in the room on the other side of the hallway, but Roslyn recognized the equipment in it. She’d never seen it in person, but every Mage in the Protectorate had seen pictures of the brain-extraction equipment at the heart of Project Prometheus.
She just hadn’t expected to see it here, even knowing that the lab was run by Mages from that project.
“Is that what I think it is?” Mooren asked.
“Yes,” Roslyn said shortly. “I should have expected it, but I didn’t. This place is a fucking nightmare.”
“We knew that,” Killough said. “We should keep moving. There isn’t anyone here.”
“Knight, can we get into those computers?” Roslyn asked, gesturing to the blinking machinery around the medical horror show.
“Let me see,” the Marine replied. An exosuit gauntlet demonstrated that while the transparent material wasn’t glass, it wasn’t tough enough to stand up to the powered muscles of Marine battle armor. A drone zipped through the gap and clicked on to the computers.
A few seconds passed and Knight cursed.
“Different network,” she told them. “Same encryption. I might leave the drone here and see if some of our software can break through over time.”
“Do it. We need to keep moving,” Roslyn ordered. “We’re not going to end this horror show without finding the people behind it.”
The Marines slowly got moving again, but everyone had seen the restraints and the damage. The beds had been heavily used. Roslyn suspected that if their targets had been any less fastidious, there would have been blood on the beds.
But that probably would have contaminated the experiments.
“Fuckers,” she muttered.
“Sir?” Mooren asked.
“Just…these fuckers,” Roslyn repeated. “We need them alive, Sergeant. But we can’t lose your Marines, either. I trust your judgments, all of you.”
“I know,” the Marine Sergeant replied. “We are going to get them, sir. I promise.”
“Sir, Sergeant…” Andrews’s voice came through the channel again, but this time, they sounded actively ill. “You need… You need to see this.”
At first glance, Roslyn thought that Andrews had just found another storage unit and wondered what it was doing in the sterile medical section. Then she recognized the side of the square sixty-centimeter-by-sixty-centimeter doors that lined the walls of the room in even rows.
“Open the fucking door, Corporal,” Roslyn ordered.
Gauntleted fists smashed glass door and wall alike, clearing the path for everyone to step into the morgue. Roslyn looked around as she followed the Marines in, counting and estimating.
There were at least a hundred cadaver drawers in the room, and she suspected this wasn’t the only one.
Worst, though, was the far wall. A section large enough for a dozen drawers instead held a single large door. Roslyn couldn’t stop herself. She crossed the morgue and pulled the door open with a flash of power augmenting her muscles.
Even through her armor and hazmat helmet, she felt the heat wash up out of the open door. A conveyor belt started as she stared at the slanted surface leading away and down toward a secured hatch.
“Plasma flue from the reactor core,” Andrews said quietly. “At least a thousand degrees. Instant incineration.”
“Corpse disposal,” Roslyn said. “When they learn everything they can from their victims, they burn them away so there’s no evidence of what happened. They just…disappear. And then they die. And then they are incinerated.”
Anger burned through her and she glared at the disposal conveyor belt. Her magic slammed the door shut and she turned back to face her team.
“This isn’t working,” she told them. “This place is too big, and we don’t know enough about what we’re looking for. I hate it, but we have to split up. Andrews, Knight, your fire teams are with me.”
She stepped outside the morgue and looked around her.
“Mooren, take the rest and Killough. You sweep right,” she ordered. “I’ll sweep left. Use the drones as relays and keep in touch, but the priority is finding Ulla Lafrenz and Connor ad Aaron.
“Do not engage either unless you are certain you have complete surprise,” she told them. “You know how to fight Mages, all of you, but leave them for me if you can.
“These people are the last vestige of the worst Magekind has produced in the last two hundred years,” she continued. “We will bring them to justice. The people who died here will have justice.”
It wasn’t safe to split the squad, but sweeping the facility one corridor at a time was taking too damn long. Mooren didn’t even object, gesturing for her Marines to form up around her.
“You heard the Commander, Knight, Andrews,” she told her Corporals. “Go with her; watch her back.” The Marine turned to look at Bolivar, the suit of armor looming over the Guardia officer.
“Not too late to get out of here, Captain Bolivar,” she told him.
“I’m with Mage-Lieutenant Commander Chambers,” Bolivar replied, glancing over at Roslyn. “This is my damn planet, and the people in that morgue are my people.
“I’m not going fucking anywhere until the bastards behind this are dead or in cuffs.”
33
Six Marines and a Guardia officer followed Roslyn deeper into the laboratory. They made less noise than the entire squad, but their armored boots still rang sharply in the silence of the underground complex.
“This place feels like a fucking tomb,” Knight murmured. “But…I think the drones might have some activity ahead.”
“Activity, Corporal?” Roslyn asked.
“Movement, active equipment, possibly people,” the Marine confirmed. “Might be part of the lab that’s in use right now?”
“Sounds promising,” Roslyn said. “Everyone’s got stunguns, right? We want these people alive.”
“Can we torture them to death after?” someone asked quietly.
&nbs
p; “I did not hear that,” Roslyn snapped. “But if I had, the answer would be no. We are Her Majesty’s people. Everything we do must be guided by Her desires and Her principles…and she’d be very, very angry with us for torturing people.
“We know it doesn’t work for info, and the Protectorate does not go in for revenge. Am I clear?”
She understood the urge. If there was ever a time she wanted to go for revenge, this was it. But…no. She’d see the people behind this lab put on transparent public trial…and then shot.
That was justice, not revenge.
“We need them alive,” she reiterated. “As many as we can get.”
“Wilco, sir,” Knight and Andrews chorused. From their body language, they did know who had spoken and there would be words the Navy officer couldn’t hear.
“Let’s move,” Roslyn ordered, unslinging the stun carbine she had hung over her back. She didn’t need the weapon, but she was far more likely to accidentally electrocute someone to death than the SmartDarts were.
“Twenty meters ahead,” Knight murmured. “Looks like a temporary security checkpoint set up to lock down a segment of the—ow.”
“Corporal?”
“Security checkpoint,” the Marine confirmed. “Three Augments, one of them saw the drone and shot it.”
“Move up and secure,” Roslyn ordered. “Stun them if you can, but do what you have to.”
Augments would be proofed against Nix, but Protectorate military-issue stunguns had SmartDart coding to deal with the cyborgs’ defenses. The SmartDarts would take longer to take an Augment down, but that Augment would need repairs before they got back up.
The Marines passed Roslyn almost before she’d finished giving the order. She couldn’t match the speed of their powered muscles, but she was still barely behind them. She heard gunfire crackle ahead and slid around a corner to take cover behind one of the exosuited Marines.
The Augments were fast and accurate, but that did them only so much good when they didn’t have penetrator rifles. Their standard battle rifles were almost useless against the Marines, but the lab’s protectors took what cover they could and threw lead downrange.
One was already twitching on the floor when Roslyn joined the fight, SmartDart pulses burning out the electrical hardware woven through their body. It was unquestionably cruel, but it was effective.
Almost as effective as Corporal Knight putting a tungsten penetrator dart through a second Augment’s skull as the ex-Republic trooper popped up to take a shot. A spray of metal, bone and gore splattered the wall of the lab as the woman went down.
“Surrender,” Roslyn barked.
“Fuck off and die!”
She shrugged and gestured. Using the man’s voice as a guide, she yanked the Augment out from behind cover, suspending him in the air in shock as three stunguns opened fire.
The last Augment hit the ground as Roslyn released him, twitching like the first one.
“Andrews, cuff them and check their vitals,” she ordered. “We’ll need medevac for them both in short order, but let’s make sure they don’t die on us until then.”
There were definite downsides to disabling integrated cyberware. The Augments should be fine…but Roslyn wasn’t going to risk potential sources of intelligence on should.
“Knight, get the security door open,” Roslyn continued, gesturing the cyberwarfare Marine forward. “Everyone else: cover her. No surprises.”
“The only drones I have left are maintaining the link with Sergeant Mooren,” Knight warned as she plugged wires from her armor into the panel next to the door. “No more warnings in advance.”
“I’m still surprised at how many of them you all had stuck in your armor,” Roslyn admitted, watching the door with her magic ready. “We’ve made it this far. We’ll make it the rest of the way.”
The drones were integral in building the map she had of the complex. It was maybe half-complete, with massive gaps, but she knew everywhere her people had been and everywhere Mooren’s team had been.
She figured they had to be near to the center and close to the section supporting the fusion reactor. There couldn’t be much more lab space left, but they were also in what had to be the most secure sections of the complex.
Nobody, even a bunch of rogue ex-Republic scientists, was going to leave the fusion reactor unprotected, after all.
Protected or not, the security door slid open under Knight’s tender ministrations. The space beyond was another sterile empty corridor. Empty.
“Marines first,” Andrews told Roslyn as their armored gauntlet appeared in front of her. “Something about this stinks.”
“Something about this whole place stinks,” she replied—but she didn’t argue.
Andrews and their Marines swept forward, weapons at the ready as they moved.
“Clear; you can move up,” the Corporal reported.
Everyone else followed and Roslyn shivered as she saw another set of well-used restraints—and another brain-extraction machine. There was only one set of “test subject” rooms, though, before she entered a space that she couldn’t help but recognize.
Every Mage would know it, but a Jump Mage or a Rune Scribe would recognize an enchanting workshop instantly. The runes that propelled a starship through the stars were the most critical use of the silver polymer humanity used for magical constructs, but it was hardly the only one.
Roslyn herself had a third rune most Navy Mages didn’t. Inlaid at the top of her right palm was the projector rune of a Marine Combat Mage, acquired after her sojourn as a Republic prisoner.
The lab in front of her could have easily fit a tank and allowed a team of scribes to work on it. The number of microscopes and what Roslyn guessed were micro-manipulator tools suggested the work was being done at a different scale…a scale that sent a chill running down her spine.
She didn’t have time to do more than recognize the room before a door on the far side opened and a tall blonde woman dressed in a white lab coat stepped out, leveling a sardonic gaze on Roslyn and her Marines.
“If you lay down your weapons now,” Mage-Surgeon Ulla Roxana Lafrenz told the people who’d come to arrest her, “I will make your deaths painless and spare this city the horror you risk unleashing.”
Roslyn wasn’t even sure which of her Marines tried to shoot Lafrenz. At least four stunguns fired at the Mage in near-unison.
The SmartDarts shattered on the shield the woman had raised before she’d even entered the room, and she flicked the fragments back toward the Marines with a dismissive gesture. The fragments hit with enough force to send at least one Marine crumpling backward, their armor penetrated—and a sparking broken capacitor buried in their flesh.
“Fall back,” Roslyn ordered calmly, raising her own shield in time to intercept Lafrenz’s next strike. Tiny darts of fire, both more precise and hotter than Roslyn herself could summon, hammered into the barrier.
She walked forward anyway, bringing her shield with as her Marines thankfully followed her orders.
“Mage Ulla Lafrenz, by the laws of the Protectorate, the Charter of Mages, and even the damn law of the former Republic, you are guilty of more crimes than I can count,” she told the other woman. “You are under arrest. Submit to Mage-cuffing or I will take you in by force.”
Lafrenz laughed.
“Really, child? Do you think that’s going to happen?”
“No,” Roslyn admitted—and she hurled lightning across the room. Machinery and scanners shattered or overloaded as electricity arced across the air and she hammered into Lafrenz’s shield with wave after wave of power.
She couldn’t be sure, but she suspected there was a moment of concern in the other Mage’s eyes. Despite that, Lafrenz’s shield stayed up, and the Mage managed to take several steps forward against Roslyn’s barrage.
“It will cost millions to replace that,” Lafrenz noted. “Your incursion into this lab has been an unexpected complication, but believe me, child, we are more than
ready for you. Did you really think one Mage would succeed here?”
The Marines were out of the room now, Roslyn recognized. Almost certainly at least one was set up with a penetrator rifle, waiting for a shot—but unless Lafrenz was less competent than expected, they weren’t going to get it.
“I’ve had a lot of practice,” Roslyn told the other woman in response to her question, sending lightning hurtling into the roof above the Prometheus Mage, trying to collapse debris onto her.
To her surprise, Lafrenz’s shield extended above her head at an angle. The debris Roslyn pulled down hit the slanted armor of force and slid aside.
She made a mental note, adjusting her own armor slightly as she watched the effect. Lafrenz was surprisingly good at this for a research Mage.
As she was thinking that, Lafrenz launched her own next attack. For a second time, tiny superheated motes of fire flashed across the room—but this time they were all targeted on Roslyn.
The young Mage’s shields weren’t as efficient as Lafrenz’s, but she channeled more power into her defenses as the older woman’s magic hammered against her. Slowly, Roslyn walked forward.
Then she was moving faster, pushing through Lafrenz’s attack like it didn’t matter, and the other Mage took a step back. Then another—and then Lafrenz tore up the floor, trying to both fling Roslyn back and create a barrier between them.
Roslyn countered with a blade of force as large as she was, a variation of the antimissile spell she’d adapted on the fly at Hyacinth. The blade cut the debris away, clearing a path for Roslyn’s advance.
Now Lafrenz looked worried. She was better at this than Roslyn. Better trained and more experienced—both of them could tell that—but she was not more powerful than Roslyn.
Roslyn was born of some of the direct bloodlines of the last children of Project Olympus. There were very few Mages in the galaxy who could match her one on one…and Ulla Lafrenz was not one of them.
“Surrender, Mage Lafrenz,” Roslyn repeated. “Or I will take you in by force.”
A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10) Page 17
