A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10)

by Glynn Stewart

  She whistled softly in shock.

  “We have to have cleared most of the area around us,” she told him. “And…we should be able to keep them safe, even up here. For a while, anyway.”

  “All we can do,” he whispered.

  “No, it’s not,” Roslyn said fiercely. “We have incredibly smart people everywhere on this planet, digging into every scrap of data Knight gets out of those computers. We have the cyberwarfare team on Huntress backing up Knight on that hack and analysis. We have Andrews tearing apart the decon rooms, and I have people on Huntress trying to rig up warheads to duplicate whatever effect the Orpheus people built into the nanites as a fail-safe.

  “There is an answer somewhere,” she told him. “I do not—I cannot—believe that these people built a weapon like this without the ability to turn it off if they risked losing control.

  “Everybody who knew how is dead, but we will find that key and we will save these people.”

  “Or we’ll die with them,” the Guardia officer replied. “I don’t have any hope left, Chambers, I’m sorry. I’m keeping it up and afloat, but…”

  “You’re doing enough,” she said. “But there is another side to this, Victoriano. We have to believe that.”

  “Or just keep working regardless,” he half-whispered. “It doesn’t matter if I’m going to die, Commander Chambers. It matters whether I get ten thousand people to safety or only five thousand because I gave up.

  “I won’t accept the latter. So, I’m going to keep working until the damn thing kills me. But don’t expect me to have hope.”

  “Fine,” she told him. “I’m heading to the northern perimeter. If our plan fails, they’re going to get swarmed in about forty minutes. I might be able to make a difference—and I’m as available by coms there as here.”

  “I’ll keep these people moving in,” Bolivar promised. “Till the end. You have my word.”

  “I know. We’ll all be here to the end, Captain. One way or another.”

  She just had to hope that they’d save more than ten thousand along the way.

  43

  “Marines deploying,” Sergeant Day reported as his shuttle swept in on the east side of the mob. There was an audible thud through the command network as the Sergeant joined his people in jumping from a shuttle still five meters in the air.

  “Distance is one hundred twenty meters from the eastern side of the target,” Day continued over the command network.

  Roslyn was still well short of even the inner perimeter, but she kept one eye on the feed from the Marines as she walked briskly north. Once she was clear of the inner perimeter, there was no turning back. That was the downside—they couldn’t be sure that the armor of the people they were sending out wasn’t contaminated with the nanites. The outer perimeter was fifty meters outside of the park, and the inner perimeter was two hundred meters inside the park.

  Hopefully, that would be enough. The exosuits and hazmat suits should be enough to keep the perimeter defenders safe, but the suits would carry the Orpheus weapon themselves.

  “We have no response from the mob,” Sergeant Day reported. “They continue to maintain a southerly course with a few stragglers in any given direction.”

  “Based off what we’re seeing elsewhere, it’s almost Brownian motion,” Dickens told the Sergeant. “They don’t have a direction in mind, but they started moving south, so they’ll keep moving south until interrupted.”

  The big problem, to Roslyn’s mind, was the ever-shrinking circle marked by smaller groups of the infected. Their current focal point was only one of four groups of twenty thousand or more infected, but the other three were in completely different sections of the city.

  But there were groups of five hundred to a thousand Orpheus infected everywhere in the city. Daalman’s suggestion might help them break up the big mob, and if worse came to worst, Roslyn’s people could destroy a single mob of twenty thousand.

  A hundred mobs of a thousand infected each coming from a hundred different directions was an entirely different problem.

  “Move in closer, Sergeant,” Dickens ordered. The Marine was running this operation, with Roslyn as an eavesdropping observer. The orders were hers. The execution was theirs.

  As the Marines moved in, she reached their inner perimeter. It wasn’t much at the moment. A painted line on the ground and a nervous-looking collection of teenagers with megaphones.

  “We can’t let you back through if you go any farther,” one of them told her. “Hazmat suit carries the bug.”

  “I know,” she replied. “I’m Commander Chambers. Everyone going over the line should know, so thank you. Hopefully…you won’t have much to do.”

  The boy chuckled nervously.

  “They say you’re the Mage-Queen’s Voice?” he asked. “That means you’re a powerful Mage, right? You’re gonna save us?”

  “Yes, yes and I damn well hope so,” Roslyn told him, glancing at the others. “But the rules we made say I don’t come back across this line either. Understand? It doesn’t matter who is coming from out there; you warn them back and call for support.”

  “We know,” another of the teens agreed. “Good luck!”

  “Thank you,” Roslyn told them.

  She meant it. Faith. Luck. Whatever they wanted to call it, she and her people needed every scrap of it they could find.

  “Range is eighty meters; we have no response,” Day reported. “I think the suits might be stopping them from registering us as targets.”

  “No clever ideas, Sergeant,” Dickens snapped before Roslyn could. “You’re probably safe at that range, but if you take off your helmet, I am relieving you on the fucking spot. Am I clear?”

  “Didn’t consider it for a second, sir,” Day said virtuously.

  Like Dickens, Roslyn figured he was lying.

  “Continuing to move in. Seventy meters…”

  The gap between the two perimeters was deathly silent as Roslyn walked the quarter-kilometer. They’d know soon enough whether the mob could be distracted.

  “Range is fifty meters,” the Sergeant reported. “Should we take air samples to test for infection risk?”

  “Not a bad idea,” Roslyn interjected. “Assuming they give you the time. They went for drones above them, after all. Even in exosuits, you should be pissing them off by now.”

  “Taking samples.” Day paused. “Under one PPM, sirs. Fifty meters should still be safe.”

  “All right. If you have any suggestions for getting their attention without getting closer, I’d appreciate them,” Roslyn said. “I don’t want you to risk it if we can avoid it.”

  “I figure we just make a lot of noise,” Day replied. “Loudspeaker mode active.”

  Roslyn closed her eyes in half-exhaustion, half-amusement as the Marine Sergeant paused to consider his words.

  “Hey, you smelly zombies,” he bellowed. “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you!”

  There was another pause, then Day chuckled ruefully.

  “Yep, that worked. Time to move, Marines! If any of them get within thirty meters of you, you’re buying the beer!”

  The icons for Day’s squad told Roslyn the Sergeant and his people were already moving—and dozens of the infected were surging after him.

  “I’m not sure we’re pulling away enough,” she murmured after a moment. The momentum of the mob was still south, even as plenty of infected surged after Sergeant Day and his Marines.

  “Each round is an experiment,” Dickens admitted. “Now we’ve got a response, Sergeant Toft is going in on the west side to see what she can pull away.

  “Piece by piece, Commander, we’re going to distract them from the northern perimeter.”

  That was ahead of Roslyn now, a line of trucks and foxhole-grenade cement filling the between two office towers. This particular barricade was the one directly in the mob’s path.

  The one that would see twenty thousand innocent-but-rabid victims of the Orpheus wea
pon swarm it if the Marines failed.

  “I’m playing backstop, Major,” Roslyn said quietly. “But I can’t handle twenty thousand of them.”

  “I know, Mage-Commander. We’ll do everything we can.”

  Roslyn had never met Sergeant Milly Toft, but she watched through the woman’s helmet cameras as the shuttle dipped down toward the crowd.

  “Drop point is fifty meters, and then you get the hell out of Dodge, Lieutenant. You read me?” she asked in a soft Australian accent. “No games.”

  “No games,” the pilot agreed. “Beyond abandoning you fifty meters from that.”

  “That is the objective, Lieutenant. I make the range one hundred meters. Marines, are you ready to play bait?”

  There wasn’t even enough time for a cheer before the shuttle ramp popped open and the first Marines went barrelling out. Exosuits could handle drops of up to ten meters while absorbing the impact for the user, and that was the height Toft went out the side of the spacecraft at.

  Roslyn winced in sympathy. She’d never made an exosuit cold drop, but her understanding was that while ten meters was doable, it wasn’t comfortable.

  “We’re down,” Toft reported. “Twelve Marines in the wind; watching a whole bunch of people just… Well, I don’t know if I have a word for what these people are doing.”

  Toft’s helmet cams gave Roslyn one of the better views of the Orpheus victims she’d had so far. They were moving in a crowd, but it clearly wasn’t a planned or organized thing. Individual infected were bashing themselves against everything to hand, and every one of them that she could see had visible injuries and torn clothing.

  The heat of the afternoon sun in Nueva Portugal and a lack of hydration was probably going to hurt the victims as much as anything else, but the chaotic mess was bone-chilling to see.

  “Still ignoring us. Well, not quite,” Toft noted. “I’ve got a few eyeballs on us and a couple of people heading our way. Moving in to see what else we can draw.”

  Roslyn swallowed the urge to order Toft to run. The Marines were playing a very specific game, and the half-dozen or so infected now approaching them aggressively were not the prize they needed.

  “All right, this isn’t going to work,” Toft said after a moment. “I am not going to test if our exosuits stand up to the weapon while the infected are trying to tear them open. Marines! Form a line.”

  The rough skirmish line on Roslyn’s helmet displays tightened into a parade formation in a heartbeat. There was still twenty meters from the nearest infected, but Roslyn suspected that wasn’t enough.

  If nothing else, those Marines’ exosuits were now coated with infectious levels of the Orpheus weapon. So long as the seals held and they didn’t come near anyone else, that was fine…but now Toft’s Marines definitely couldn’t enter the inner perimeter.

  “Marines…” Toft said grimly. “Over their heads, volley fire on my command. Fire!”

  Roslyn heard the sound of a dozen heavy weapons through the Marine command net and shivered. What goes up must come down—the rounds were high-velocity, but they weren’t going to reach orbit.

  Somewhere, those bullets would fall back down. For now, the sound of unsuppressed exosuit weapons echoed across the gathered mob of infected—and hundreds of heads turned.

  “Yep, that worked,” Toft said calmly, as if she was considering a chess strategy instead of a charging horde of rabid humans. “Let’s move, Marines!”

  Her exosuited soldiers obeyed with enthusiasm, rabbiting away from the gathering storm.

  Roslyn watched them long enough to be sure that they were clear, then turned her attention back to the mob. Toft’s efforts had been more effective than Day’s, but the vast majority of the infected were still heading her way.

  “Next up, Captain Dickens,” she said quietly.

  “I know,” the Marine CO replied. “Sergeant Colburn is swinging in from the north, and I’ve got O’Mooney and MacCrumb swinging in from each side. We’ll see what three distractions at once buys you.

  “Give us five minutes to set it up.”

  “The core mob is maybe forty-five minutes from the outer perimeter,” Roslyn warned. “We only have so much time.”

  “I know. And I know what the options become if we don’t distract them,” Dickens said softly. “But we need the time.”

  “Understood. I’m checking in on the outer perimeter now,” she told him. “Keep me informed.”

  44

  Roslyn muted her command channel and called her magic to allow her to “hop” fifteen feet up onto the top of the barricade. The Guardia officer standing with a pair of binoculars started and dropped the tool.

  She wasn’t in position to catch them and watched the electronics-enhanced optics shatter on the roof of the big transport truck at the middle of the blockade.

  “Sorry,” she told him, then recognized the name on his Guardia-issue armor. “Lieutenant Oliveira?”

  “Yes, sir,” the Guardia officer replied. “Commander Chambers! Are you here to help?”

  “That’s the plan, Lieutenant,” she said. “Though the Marines are doing everything they can to make sure you and I don’t have to do anything. Report.”

  Even in hazmat armor and a full mask, Oliveira was vibrating like a happy puppy to see her. The apparent hope her presence alone brought was almost scary to Roslyn.

  “We managed to get in touch with a bunch of truck drivers who were still mobile and uninfected,” he told her. “They use a different communication network than everyone else, but once we were in touch, we had the key components for the outer perimeter.

  “This is the furthest south of our barricades on the north end. We’re making an attempt to funnel them here. Most of the rest of the area across this district has taller buildings we’ve incorporated into blockades we don’t think can be breached, but here…”

  Olivera gestured around them. The blockade there was drawn between a two-story strip mall on the east side of the road and a story-and-a-half light industrial complex on the west.

  “We don’t have the buildings to work with here,” he concluded. “So, we’ve blocked the road with the transport trucks and used up the foxhole grenades the Navy provided, but we’re pretty sure we’re not going to be able to keep them from at least trying to come over the barricade here.”

  “That was the plan,” Roslyn agreed, looking out at the wide road and parking lot directly north of the barricade. It made for a perfect killing field for the machine guns she could see positioned across the top of the trucks and foam-crete bulwarks.

  “Personnel?” she asked.

  “Me and three other Guardia,” Oliveira told her. “Twenty-six civilian volunteers. We have twelve eight-millimeter light machine guns from the Guardia armory and four twelve-millimeter multi-barrels from the supplies the Navy dropped.”

  As Sergeant Colburn had pointed out, none of the Marines’ lethal weapons were designed to deal with unarmored opponents. The four-barrelled twelve-millimeter automatic weapons they used for squad support were designed to go through armor like what Roslyn and Oliveira were wearing.

  “Ammunition?” The Marines had said that was their biggest fear.

  “Fifteen hundred rounds per gun.” Oliveira shivered. “If we run out of that, I’ve got a dozen shotguns and maybe a hundred shells for each of them as a reserve.”

  “Nonlethals?” They’d tried all of those already, but it was still worth having them on hand.

  “Guardia armories have functionally infinite supplies of stunguns and SmartDarts,” the Lieutenant told her. “We have a SmartDart fabricator at each key armory. I’ve got thirty stunguns here… Habit, I guess.”

  “Not a bad habit, Lieutenant,” Roslyn said. “I figure there’s enough Nix on the Marine assault shuttles to make at least one more pass with the gas. Maybe if we hit them with enough Nix, it will take them down.”

  It was extremely unlikely at this point, but she saw no reason not to try.

  “How b
ad is it, sir?” Oliveira asked, his helmet close to hers and his voice quiet so none of the volunteers could hear him.

  “We’ve got eighteen thousand people heading this way, and they’re as innocent as anyone else,” Roslyn said quietly. “We’ve got plans to distract them and pull them away, to buy time for us to find the answer in the bioweapon lab files, but…if they make it here, you’ll have to use those machine guns.”

  “I know.” The Guardia officer swallowed and turned to look north again. “We’re ready,” he said, but his tone was weak.

  “The Marines have a plan,” she assured him. “I have a plan. And there’s an answer in that damn lab, I’m sure of it.”

  “Chambers,” Dickens’s voice interrupted. “Marines are ready for round two. Sergeant Day has broken contact and is coordinating for round three with Sergeant Kaiser.”

  Distance was time and time was hope. That was the only calculation Roslyn could make right then, and it was the calculation that mattered.

  The Marines needed to buy her distance, and she watched as three more shuttles swept toward the infected crowd in a perfectly synchronized operation, engines and loudspeakers screaming as they passed over the mob of infected.

  Marines plummeted out the back of each shuttle, twelve each to the west, east and north of the infected, hooting and hollering as they hit the ground. At the same moment, Roslyn saw that the loudspeakers went silent.

  But the exosuit speakers were loud enough that she could hear from three kilometers away. Not in detail, but the cacophony the Marines were creating was definitely audible—and unlike Toft’s pass, they were now close enough to Roslyn for her to hear the gunfire as the Marines fired over the mob’s head.

  “Oh, yeah,” someone, presumably one of the Sergeants on the ground, said brightly. “We have definitely got their attention.”

  “So I’m seeing,” Dickens replied. “Move your asses, Marines. If you get infected, you become part of the problem, not the solution. So, move.”