“Like your friends did Sam?” Lafrenz demanded. “The man the Protectorate shot in the head?”
“He didn’t surrender,” Roslyn said reasonably. She’d heard the entire story from Montgomery and figured that Samuel Finley had definitely deserved worse than he’d got.
“Fuck off and die,” Lafrenz snapped, unconsciously echoing the Augment outside. Power flared around her, and a veritable tsunami of fire motes, accompanied by darts of pure force, hammered across the room.
What equipment had survived Roslyn’s lightning bolts now shattered as the older Mage threw every scrap of power she had at the Navy officer. Scanners and tables melted. Gas canisters exploded. Debris tore across the room in a whirlwind of force that lasted for ten seconds. Fifteen. Twenty.
Then it collapsed and Ulla Lafrenz collapsed with it. Roslyn walked calmly forward, hiding as best she could the degree to which the other Mage’s attack had drained her.
The Mage-cuffs—silver-rune-inlaid manacles—were in her hand, but she could see the blood on the floor around Lafrenz. She poked the other woman with her foot, then knelt down as Lafrenz twitched away.
The cuffs snapped onto the woman’s wrists, but Lafrenz just chuckled bitterly.
“Too late, little girl,” she whispered. “You’ve met the Orpheus weapon once, haven’t you? I watched the news. That was version thirteen.”
“What do you mean?” Roslyn demanded.
“You don’t even know, do you?” Lafrenz laughed bitterly. “This was Project Orpheus, Finley’s long-term plan. Everything we did with the Republic was to set up this place. We were going to rule everything.
“But it kept failing. Complex thirteen, though, had potential to be a weapon. You met it.”
“The toxin,” Roslyn said quietly.
“Toxin.” Lafrenz coughed bitterly. “The most complex piece of nanotechnology and magitech ever developed, and you call it a toxin. We can override the human brain with magic delivered by a nanite. Did you even know what you were fighting?”
“I need to know how to fix the damage it did,” Roslyn told her. “I don’t care how it works.”
The Mage laughed and lifted her arm weakly, showing her wrist-comp.
“You should have cared,” she replied. “Because I just activated a go-to-hell plan…and you and all of Nueva Portugal are going to hell.
“Complex thirteen wasn’t self-replicating, which made it a tactical weapon at best. A failure both at the original goal and as a weapon.”
Lafrenz coughed again, spitting blood up on the floor. Roslyn could recognize the signs of thaumic burnout. There was nothing she could do for Lafrenz—the amount of blood on the floor suggested that the other Mage was already blind.
The other woman had intentionally overloaded and killed herself to not be taken prisoner.
“But this was a research lab, and if I couldn’t control all humanity, I could sure as hell find a way to damn them,” the dying woman said. “Complex twenty-two is a self-replicating nanoplague. It will infect everyone. It will control their brains—and we never did work out how to give them orders.
“They just kill.”
Lafrenz giggled.
“Seems appropriate, since you killed me,” she told Roslyn. “Enjoy what you’ve unleashed, Navy bitch.” She coughed up more blood, turning bloodily blinded eyes toward the younger woman.
“And when they catch you, I’ll see you in he—” Lafrenz’s words dissolved into choking coughs…and then silence as Roslyn stared down at her in horror.
34
The Marines returned in that silence, six of them circling around Roslyn with weapons trained on Lafrenz.
“Is she…” Knight trailed off, looking at the pool of blood.
“Dead?” Roslyn replied. “Yeah. Lethal thaumic burnout. She killed herself trying to kill me…but not before she triggered a go-to-hell plan. Corporal, I’m pretty sure she came from her office, that way.”
Roslyn pointed toward the door Lafrenz had entered from.
“Find a computer. Any fucking computer. She says she released an updated version of the toxin. It’s a self-replicating nanotech plague that affects people’s minds with magic.”
All seven of her companions were silent for several seconds.
“Is that even possible?” Bolivar asked. “This was an UnArcana World, I don’t know much about magic…”
“I didn’t think so,” Roslyn replied. “But it would explain just about everything we saw in the victims in the quarantine zone. We need more data—how it works, what they were trying to do.
“She said the current versions of Orpheus were useful weapons but failures at the main goal. I need to know that main goal,” she continued. “That’s on you, Knight. Go.”
She turned to the rest of the Marines and tapped into the command channel.
“Mooren, Killough,” she barked. “The situation here has gone very weird and very bad. Report.”
There was no answer.
“Knight, is the drone relay up?” she asked, then realized she’d already sent the cyberwarfare Marine ahead.
“We lost the tail end while you were fighting Lafrenz,” Andrews told her, their voice grim. “No warning, no report from Mooren and the rest. Just…silence.”
“Fuck.” Roslyn looked at the map. She needed options. She couldn’t leave her people down here to an unknown fate, but she also needed to address the Orpheus lab’s GOTH plan.
“Bolivar, take a look at this,” she instructed the Guardia officer. “Do you see the same probable linkage I do here?” She tapped a spot as she projected a hologram. There was a gap between what they had mapped, but it looked like there should be a route through.
“I do,” he agreed. “What do you need?”
“Take Knight’s Marines—the Corporal is going to stay here and get into the computers—and head for the surface,” she instructed. “If Lafrenz is telling the truth, we just hit a scenario so far beyond our worst case, I didn’t even consider it.
“I need you to get in contact with the Cardinal-Governor and with Captain Daalman,” Roslyn continued. “The quarantine has to go full lockdown. No one leaves the city. No one leaves the peninsula.”
She took a deep breath and met Bolivar’s gaze as best she could through their mostly faceless hazmat helmets.
“No one leaves the planet, Victoriano,” she told him, using his first name for the first time. “Full planetary lockdown and quarantine until we know more.”
“I…see the need,” he admitted. “But you don’t have that authority…”
He trailed off as she pulled a parchment-wrapped datachip from a pocket on her armor.
“I bear a Warrant of the Voice of the Mage-Queen of Mars,” Roslyn told him. “The chip will confirm my authority. Full planetary lockdown.”
“I understand,” he agreed, staring at the crowned-mountain seal of the Protectorate on the parchment. “What will you be doing?”
“Taking Andrews’s Marines and finding the rest of the people I brought into this hellhole,” Roslyn told him.
“We all need to move, now.”
The threat of imminent apocalypse was surprisingly effective at getting even Martian Marines to find an extra scrap of speed. The fire teams split at Roslyn’s instructions, two exosuits following Bolivar out toward the surface as three gathered around her.
That was going to leave Knight dealing with the computers alone, and that, Roslyn figured, would end badly.
“Andrews, leave one of your people with Knight,” Roslyn ordered. “Then let’s move.”
“Pavel, you heard the LC,” the Corporal ordered. “Klinger, let’s go.”
The indicated Marine saluted with an armored gauntlet and followed Knight into the offices. The other two fell in with Roslyn as she took off at a steady jog. There was a clear path that would take them to where Mooren had gone silent.
It might not be the fastest path, but the last thing she could afford now was to get lost. She could only affor
d the time to look for Mooren and Killough because she had sent Bolivar to the surface with her Warrant.
She hadn’t expected to ever actually need the Voice of the Mage-Queen, but there could be no delays, no arguments. Depending on how Lafrenz’s GOTH plan worked, the entire city could already be at a contamination risk—even the entire planet.
Roslyn knew, in her heart of hearts, that she might have just ordered the rest of the planet to cut Nueva Portugal off and let the city die. If that was what it took to prevent the Orpheus weapon from spreading, that was what they would do—and she would die with the city if it came to that.
“Here,” Andrews said suddenly, interrupting her thoughts. “This was where we lost contact with Mooren’s half of the squad.”
It was a sterile corridor, like every other one they’d followed. Except that there were three wrecked drones on the floor, clearly taken out by precision gunfire.
“Clean shots, simultaneous,” Andrews reported, checking the debris. “The team probably didn’t even realize the drones had gone down for a half a minute, maybe more.”
“They were headed that way,” Klinger noted, gesturing along the hall. “I don’t see any sign of battle other than the drones.”
“Agreed. On me,” Roslyn ordered. The two Marines flanked her as she followed the path.
A security checkpoint like the one her team had shot their way through was waiting around the next corner. The armored door there had been blown outward with explosives, clearly followed with fire from penetrator rifles…or so Roslyn judged by the shattered armor of the two dead Marines in the checkpoint.
“Mooren would have pushed up,” she said quietly. “I don’t hear fighting, so let’s keep moving. We need to find anyone who’s alive.”
Or give up and run for the surface. Every dead Marine reduced the reasons for her being down there.
The rest of the Marines hadn’t made it far. The space behind the security door appeared to be one of the main access points to the fusion reactor. The battle that had followed the destruction of the door had been ugly—and it did not look right to Roslyn.
Four dead Marines were scattered around the space. They’d taken down four times their number in Augments before they’d died, but at least two had been killed with magic.
“Mooren was good,” she said quietly, “but she wasn’t this good.”
Sixteen Augments with the advantage of surprise and ambush, even a half-expected ambush like this, should have massacred the half-squad Roslyn had sent with Killough. Especially given that the area had been set up as a kill zone, with prebuilt covered firing positions and everything a defender could dream of.
There’d even been automated twenty-millimeter turrets and a laser, same as at the main entrance, to back up the defenders. Those had fallen to penetrator-rifle fire, but as Roslyn stepped forward, she could see that several of the Augments had been taken down by very different attacks.
“A Mage killed these Augments,” she said slowly. “Check for survivors,” she told her people. “Stun anyone you have to.”
“Wait,” a pained voice replied. “That’s…uh, one step further than I need to deal with today.”
Roslyn turned toward the voice. It was coming from the farthest strong point. Grimacing and summoning a shield of power, she walked over and tore the damaged bunker door open with her magic.
Somehow, she wasn’t surprised to recognize the dark brown hair, neat mustache and warmly brown eyes of Connor ad Aaron waiting for her. The rogue Mage was in…awful shape. One of his legs had been torn off by weapons fire, and he was hanging on to a rough tourniquet with his left hand.
His entire right arm was a shattered wreck, and he looked up at her with a level look of despair.
“Only one Mage-Lieutenant Commander who was going to find me in this hole, was there?” he asked, looking at her insignia, then coughed. He shook his head as she stepped closer.
“Your fucker broke my ribs,” ad Aaron told her. “Your Marines got my leg, but your Mage finished me off. And my men. Thought we had you pinned.”
“I don’t have sympathy for anyone working for Orpheus,” Roslyn told him. “If I can’t get you out alive, don’t see a reason not to leave you here.”
She wasn’t sure just who “your Mage” was. There hadn’t been a Mage in Mooren’s team.
“You don’t have it in you, Chambers,” he replied, coughing up more blood. “And…I can be useful in the time I got left. Ulla activated the GOTH, didn’t she?”
“So she said,” Roslyn conceded stiffly. “What do you know?”
“Orpheus is nanite magitech, reversal of the runic structure of a Prometheus Interface on a microscopic scale,” he told her, then laughed. That brought on more bloody coughing and he leaned back against the wall.
“That’s all I really know,” he admitted. “But I know the version in the GOTH plan is self-replicating and infectious…and I know where the GOTH plan put the dispersal units.”
He shuffled a bit to sit up straighter, then stared down at the wrist-comp on his left arm hopelessly and sighed.
“Guess that’ll be a problem, won’t it?” he said with a sigh. “Comp, authentication Prydwen-twenty-six-Llandudno.”
Roslyn heard him say the words, and she wasn’t sure she could duplicate his pronunciation.
“Project file Go-To-Hell-Nueva-Portugal Sprayer Map, latest version,” he instructed. “Then format, authentication llosgi’r sothach hwn.”
“Fuck you, ad Aaron,” Roslyn snapped—but the map of Nueva Portugal was now hanging in the air between them. Six green pyramid icons glittered on it, and she recorded it before it went away.
“You’re too good for me,” he told her, then coughed up more blood. “Don’t know where you found the fucker who killed me. He knew…he was here for…”
More coughing. This time it didn’t stop as the rogue Mage doubled over. He fell over, his working hand slipping away from the tourniquet.
Roslyn didn’t have time to do anything before the leg started bleeding again, deep spurts of arterial blood…blood that ad Aaron didn’t have much left of to lose.
He was dead before her magic replaced the tourniquet.
35
“Where’s Killough?” Andrews asked, looking around the wreckage.
Roslyn rose, looking with distaste at the blood on her knees. Connor ad Aaron’s blood. There weren’t many people out there she’d have expected to be happier to see dead, but it was still disturbing to have his blood all over her.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, joining the Marines in sweeping the battlefield. “My math says this was all the Augments? Assuming they had a full platoon in the complex?”
“A bit more,” the Marine Corporal told her. “Forty at least. There may still be more around.”
“And they may have taken Killough,” Roslyn said quietly. “But the time I can spend looking for seven people, I can’t spend looking for one.”
She only had two Marines with her, and she was carefully not trying to work out which of the half-dozen dead Marines in the battlefield was Mooren. She’d been leaning on the Sergeant for this entire mission, and losing her hurt.
“I have to get to the surface,” she decided. “And I can’t leave one of you looking for Killough on your own.”
“You can’t travel on your own,” Andrews told her. “You’re the commanding officer and a goddamn Voice.”
Roslyn grimaced. She really hadn’t wanted to use that Warrant.
“Only until this is over,” she told the Marine. “Assuming we all live that long.”
She gave the defenses around the power core another look and shook her head.
“We’ve wiped out most, if not all, of the Augments—but I don’t know what Mage killed ad Aaron,” she admitted. “Killough…is either dead, a prisoner or lost. I can’t leave someone to look for him in any of those cases.”
“I don’t like leaving our dead behind either,” Andrews told her, their voice grim. “Let
alone a living agent. But we can’t send you up to the surface on your own, either.”
“Believe me, Corporal, I’m more capable of protecting myself than Killough is,” Roslyn told the Marine, her decision suddenly made. “Voice or CO or whatever else I’m hauling, I’m a trained Mage, and I haven’t met anyone on this planet yet who can threaten me.”
There’d only been one person on the planet she’d been personally afraid of—and his blood was smeared across her armor’s kneepads.
“You and Klinger stay here, keep up the search for Killough,” she ordered. “We don’t leave anyone behind.” She shook her head. “Make sure no one tries to detonate the reactor or something similarly stupid while we’re at it.
“Knight will get me the data from the lab. You make sure the lab is still here for her to do it and find our stray MISS agent. Understood?”
“You can’t trave—”
“I can,” Roslyn told them. “If I had slightly better data of where I was, I could teleport out of here, let alone anything else. I’ll be fine. Killough won’t.”
“Most likely, whatever Mage killed ad Aaron has him,” Andrews warned.
“And you will under no circumstances engage a hostile Mage,” she agreed. “But if that Mage killed ad Aaron, they’re probably on our side.” She shook her head. “Find them, too. But I’m going and you’re staying and that’s an order.”
“Yes, sir,” Corporal Andrews conceded. “Good luck, sir.”
“Same to you, Marines,” Roslyn told them. “I think we’re all going to need it.”
The trip back out through the lab complex was even creepier than the way in. She knew what the place had been now—everything she’d feared it was and more—and the deathly silence was stark and terrifying.
If nothing else, there should have been prisoners in the complex, and the lack left her with grim suspicions of other parts of Lafrenz’s go-to-hell plan. Either Finley had trained his people to be psychopaths or he’d recruited psychopaths like him to begin with.
Either way, her conversations with Lafrenz and ad Aaron were going to join her nightmares. So was the entire damn lab complex.
A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10) Page 18
