A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10)

by Glynn Stewart

  Despite the Captain’s tone and words, the Marines were already moving. The icons were splitting up as Roslyn watched, the Marines dividing into half-squads to split the Orpheus victims up even further—and continuing to taunt and jeer at the rabid civilians chasing them.

  This time, the mob fractured like a dropped glass, and Roslyn exhaled a deep sigh of relief. There were now thousands chasing each Marine section—which could be better, but at least they weren’t continuing to lunge south.

  “Keep moving,” Dickens said, his voice grim. “Corporal Laurent, break contact. Break contact now.”

  Roslyn’s attention followed the Marine Captain’s and she swallowed. One of the Marine fire teams had discovered the disadvantage of planning based on overhead. An alley they’d assumed was clear from the air was blocked on the ground, and the Marines were trying to physically move the small truck barring their way.

  They didn’t have time.

  “We are pushing through,” a woman’s voice said, exhaling sharply as she was struck. “Barrier is moving at last, but they are on us. Armor is…holding.”

  Roslyn didn’t have access to do more than hear Corporal Laurent’s report. She could get it, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  “We are through,” Laurent reported. “They are with us still. Trying to accelerate to break free. Horatio, no, stop! Stop!”

  The channel was silent for at least a minute before Corporal Laurent’s voice returned.

  “Contact broken. Not sure…what happened. Private First Class Horatio Estevez’s armor seals failed and his left vambraces broke off. He…”

  Laurent swallowed audibly.

  “Private Estevez is KIA, sir,” she said in a small voice. “I do not believe we can retrieve his body without using lethal force.”

  “The suit has tracking, Corporal,” Dickens told her, his voice gentle. “We’ll come back for him. For now, break contact and hunker down. You got too close. We can’t retrieve you.”

  “Understood, sir. Will stand by for further orders.”

  The entire command net Roslyn was listening to was silent, and then her coms chirped as Dickens switched her to a private channel.

  “I read you as still having about eight thousand heading your way,” he told her. “That stunt should work again, but I think the triple whammy was key. Toft is still engaged, and rushing her is likely to result in more Marines sharing Estevez’s fate.”

  “What’s your plan, Captain?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a free shuttle,” he told her. “We’re dropping from orbit now to rendezvous with Sergeant Day and Sergeant Kaiser. We’ll make one more pass, Commander Chambers…then I’m afraid it’s down to the shuttles.”

  “What can the shuttles do?” Roslyn demanded.

  “They carry antipersonnel cluster bombs,” Dickens said flatly. “The shuttles can’t distract the infected, Commander Chambers, but they can destroy whatever’s left of that mob.”

  “That’s the last option, Captain.”

  “I agree. But once we make this pass, Mage-Commander, we are out of other options short of your perimeter.”

  “Not entirely, Captain Dickens,” she told him. “Make your pass. Whatever’s left…I’ll deal with.”

  She muted the Marine and stepped to the edge of the barricade.

  “Oliveira,” she called the Guardia officer. “Do we have any vehicles outside the perimeter?”

  Roslyn had used Oliveira’s ID badge to boot up a Guardia power bike and was driving north when the Marines made their final pass. She still had the scan data on the main mob on her HUD as she traveled, making sure she didn’t get lost in an unfamiliar city—but she could also hear the shuttles with their loudspeakers and the Marine exosuit speakers as Dickens led his people into action.

  “Report,” she told the Marine, unmuting the channel now that she was moving under her own power.

  “We’re on the ground, which I might need your Warrant to protect me from the Captain’s wrath over,” Dickens told her cheerfully. “Same triple whammy as last time; there are a lot of angry mind-controlled people chasing us.

  “There’s still some left for you, but I think we’ve managed to pull at least three-quarters of that mob apart and scattered around the city. It’s not a perfect answer, but we bought you some time.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Roslyn said. “How many are left still heading for the perimeter?”

  “Scans from my shuttle say two, maybe three thousand,” Dickens told her. “We can break that up with cluster bombs or cannon…potentially even without killing too many of them.”

  “One last chance first, Captain,” she told him. “We have a Mage on the ground, even if we’re holding most of the crew in orbit.

  “Let’s see what I can do.”

  “There are still thousands of them, Mage-Lieutenant Commander,” Dickens said quietly. “You’re just one Mage.”

  “I am spectacularly aware of my limits, Captain Dickens, but also of our mission. I have a vehicle and I’m moving to intercept. I want your shuttles ready to drop Nix on my command.”

  “We know it won’t do anything,” he objected.

  “We know standard dosages won’t do anything. So, I want your shuttles to plaster the target area with every canister of Nix they have.”

  The problem with self-neutralizing neural paralyzers, though, was that Nix literally could not get above its target dosage. Still…it was worth a shot.

  “Understood. Tactical shuttle command is yours. I’m linking in Lieutenant Herbert as your contact. Nix, missiles, guns, cluster bombs…whatever we’ve got that you need, he’ll drop on your command.”

  “Thank you, Captain, Lieutenant Evanson,” Roslyn said as a chirp announced Herbert was on the channel. “Run safely, Captain?”

  “Believe me, that’s the plan. Do…what you can and what you have to, Commander Chambers,” Dickens told her. “We’ll see you on the other side.”

  45

  It was one thing to look at scans, data, even video of a mob.

  It was quite another to park a power bike in the middle of the street and watch twenty-five hundred people surge toward you in a single body.

  “Lieutenant Herbert,” Roslyn said quietly. “Nix now.”

  The shuttles dropped from the sky in sequence like stooping pigeons. Each plummeted downward and then across the crowd of Orpheus infected, plain steel canisters crashing into the ground in carefully selected positions.

  Roslyn couldn’t see the clear gas, but she knew she should see the effects. There should have been dozens of people falling over—hundreds. Normally, there was enough Nix out there to put down the original twenty-thousand-strong crowd.

  And it was doing nothing. She hadn’t really expected anything different, but it had been worth a shot.

  “We are standing by with cluster munitions or whatever else you need, Commander,” Lieutenant Herbert said in her ear. She and Roslyn knew each other’s tones at least a little bit by now—and Roslyn knew the younger woman was nervous.

  It was extremely unlikely that Herbert had deployed cluster munitions against anybody, ever, let alone against an unarmored mob like this. Even Roslyn wasn’t sure how bad it would be.

  But she could also hear the determination in Lieutenant Herbert’s voice. If Roslyn gave the order, the Marines would do their jobs. They would take the blood guilt of the next few minutes on themselves so that the volunteers at the barricade didn’t have to.

  Because that was part of what Marines did.

  Before that happened, though, Roslyn was going to do everything she could to prevent that. She’d already watched someone burn out their life with magic today. If she had to do the same, what was one life against over two thousand?

  “Range is one hundred twenty meters,” Herbert murmured in her ear. “Do you have a plan, sir?”

  “That’s rude to ask, isn’t it, Lieutenant?” Roslyn replied. She started walking forward. “If I was relying on anyone else, they’d be
justified in asking for a plan…but I’m not.”

  Part of her wished she’d paid more attention in her limited classes on transmutation. If she turned all of the silver in the area into lead, for example, that would neutralize the runes. It didn’t strike her as a particularly likely answer, and it was beyond her abilities anyway.

  Her training had been very focused. She was a Navy Mage: trained as both a Jump Mage and a Combat Mage. She could teleport herself a long way and she could fight.

  And today, Roslyn Chambers wasn’t planning on running.

  “Range is ninety meters,” the pilot told her. “I’m just going to keep updating you until you give me orders, sir.”

  She didn’t say anything in response. There was no point. Roslyn exhaled through the hazmat helmet, wishing she could take the thing off. Claustrophobia wasn’t helping her regain the power she’d already expended today.

  Lafrenz had lost, but holding off the strike she’d killed herself with had taken almost everything Roslyn had. She’d barely restored enough power for a single fight, and what she was about to do was more than that.

  Fortunately—or unfortunately, she supposed—the Navy had long before developed a solution for that.

  Exalt was a mix of drugs and thaumaturgically modified chemicals designed for exactly her current condition. The primary ingredient was a powerful amphetamine, and even the Mages who’d put it together weren’t sure why some of the other ingredients worked as they did. A dose would give Roslyn a full “recharge” and keep her going for an hour.

  The comedown from that would suck…but if she took more doses, the comedown could kill her.

  The syringe she took out of her medpack glowed. The metal tip fit neatly into the port on the hazmat suit designed for the purpose, and Roslyn winced as the hazmat suit’s own needle stabbed into her shoulder.

  Inhaling deeply, she looked up at the slowly surging crowd and slammed the plunger down.

  Her exhaustion faded. Her feeling of depleted power also faded, and a new surge of hope and energy filled her as she withdrew and discarded the needle. Baring her teeth, she straightened and faced the oncoming mob.

  “Range is thirty meters,” Herbert told her. “You are now in the infection zone.”

  “I know. That’s enough, Lieutenant. I’ll see you on the other side,” Roslyn told the pilot, echoing Dickens’s words as she summoned her power.

  Nothing Roslyn could do would keep everyone from dying. They were past that already—just the movement of the mob was probably crushing people to death every so often—but she would be damned if she’d order the deaths of thousands of innocents.

  “Time to see if you’re as clever as I think you are,” she told a dead woman—and then summoned lightning.

  The Orpheus weapon had been designed to keep its victims functioning after a Nix attack or a SmartDart hit. Roslyn wasn’t a nanotech scientist, but she was a warship officer. She’d studied the trade-offs between protection and firepower for military ships across history.

  Every bit of protection and survivability the Orpheus nanites had came at the cost of weight and capability—and the Protectorate built their nonlethal weaponry to very specific standards. Nix and SmartDarts had maximum effects based off the target’s size.

  SmartDarts even networked with each other and could do a rough estimate of the target’s cardiovascular health to make sure they didn’t kill them. There were records of police officers using their stunguns as impromptu defibrillators when medical equipment was lacking—successfully.

  That meant that Lafrenz and her team had known the exact maximum voltage and amperage that the Protectorate’s nonlethal weaponry would apply. Roslyn had no such control over her own less-than-lethal electric shock spells.

  She tried to keep the wave of electrically charged air she threw into the teeth of the crowd beneath lethal levels, but it was only ever a guess. For an area effect like this, she was ionizing an entire mass of air, making every motion a source of shock and charge.

  Roslyn’s power swept over the lead infected in a wave of sparks and burnt ozone—and they fell. She couldn’t spare the attention to cheer as she kept the cloud moving, burning through the charge of power Exalt gave her as she swept her storm through the mob.

  There was no way everyone was going to live—a twenty-fifth-century pacemaker could take a lot, but this shock was beyond it—but it was a lot better than cluster bombs.

  Exhaustion finally tore the spell from her grip, and Roslyn stared across a thoroughfare that had been full of charging zombies a minute earlier. The only motion was twitching, and for a painful second, she thought she’d killed everyone.

  “I have thermal scans on the target,” Lieutenant Herbert told her quietly. “They’re still with us, sir. I don’t know how long they’ll be down for, but they’re still with us. At least ninety-five to ninety-seven percent.”

  Roslyn could have lived without that clarification as she stumbled. She pulled a second dose of Exalt from the suit medpack. Even that one would be a terrible idea—but she had three.

  She’d survive the third until she came down, if it came to that.

  “Movement?” she asked Herbert.

  “Negative,” the pilot replied, her tone hushed. “Shock only puts someone down for a few minutes at best. The hell?”

  “I’m investigating,” Roslyn replied. “Cover me.”

  The shuttle dipped into view, settling onto the roof of a nearby building with its cannon trained on the crowd as Roslyn walked forward to the edge of the crowd.

  Her suit warned her that ozone levels were high. The air was breathable but not entirely safe. That would change quickly enough, but Roslyn wasn’t taking chances.

  “Do you have a drone you can send in for an air sample?” she asked Herbert, kneeling by the closest person.

  “Good idea. On its way, sir.”

  Roslyn’s focus was on the youth next to her. He was maybe sixteen years old, dressed in an old-fashioned school uniform of blazer, shirt and tie in white and burnt orange. His pulse was ragged but present at her touch, and she could see him breathing.

  “Vitals are weak but steady on first exam. Victim is unconscious and unresponsive,” Roslyn said, as much for the record as anyone on the channel, as she worked her way down a checklist. “Minor surface injuries and abrasions from the mob. Some burns from the stun spell.”

  Still unresponsive. The entire crowd was unresponsive.

  “I’m taking a blood sample,” she decided aloud. There was a syringe in the medpack for that, and she swapped the Exalt for it. Something weird was going on.

  Roslyn was by no means a qualified nurse, but she could manage a blood sample and a rough bandage on an unconscious subject.

  “Do we have any way to analyze this on the surface?” she asked the command network. “Lieutenant Herbert?”

  “I think Dr. Breda should be able to run the analysis remotely through the gear in the shuttle. I’m going to come in and land behind you; you can come aboard and load it in.”

  “That’s not safe, Lieutenant,” Roslyn snapped.

  “Safer than you might think,” Herbert replied. “There’s no nanites in the air, sir. They didn’t survive your zap.”

  Roslyn looked at the vial of blood in her hand…and then down at the unconscious youth she’d taken it from…and then at the over two thousand people she’d zapped down who’d stayed down.

  “We need this blood sample analyzed now,” she said firmly. “Bring the shuttle in, Lieutenant.”

  46

  “It’s…not clean, per se,” Dr. Breda told her five minutes later. “But the nanite population appears to be below replication concentrations. I’m going off pure visual analysis here, Lieutenant Commander.”

  “Of course,” Roslyn conceded. “Anything further we figure would dissolve what’s left, yes?”

  “Exactly. Now…the people you shocked, are any of them waking up?” the doctor asked.

  “No,” Roslyn said grimly
. “I think we’re having the same post-Orpheus syndrome that we had before. Mass comas. Fuck.”

  “With what I’m hearing about the Cardinal-Governor’s relief force, we can handle that,” Breda told her. “What we can’t handle is a violent and infectious populous. I’m still hoping for an answer in their files for dealing with the comas.

  “Even if they didn’t care about their test subjects, they had to at least have tested for how to handle recovery from the weapon,” the doctor continued. “Basic sense, let alone medical ethics.”

  “I’m not sure Mage Lafrenz was aware of anything I’d call medical ethics,” Roslyn pointed out. “But…we’re sure this is below replication levels?”

  “If it wasn’t, Commander, you’d be seeing people get back up under the weapon’s control,” Breda said grimly. Data flowed across the screen in front of Roslyn, spectrographics, zoom, video…the Mage understood about a quarter of it. “I need to use the unit to run deeper tests. Can you get more samples? At least three different individuals.”

  “Hey, Herbert,” Roslyn said to the pilot. “Do we have a hazmat suit for you?”

  “Would you believe me if I said no?” Herbert said. “On my way. I’m not good at blood draws, though.”

  “Neither am I. What kind of tests are you running, doc?” Roslyn asked.

  “This unit is capable of a standard bioscan,” Breda told her. “I’m moving the sample into it remotely and running the scan. I then want to run visuals on unscanned samples for comparison, and I want to see how different individuals have reacted.

  “If nothing else, I’m the only person authorized to recalibrate the stunguns issued to our people,” the doctor concluded. “I want to know damn well this worked before I do. The situation is already atrocious. Let’s try not to make it worse.”

  “Agreed. Come on, Lieutenant. Let’s go play vampire.”

  For all of her forced cheer, the street full of unconscious bodies chilled Roslyn. She’d done this. Arguably, she’d done all of this—everything in Nueva Portugal could easily be considered her fault, and she’d be surprised if she didn’t end up in front of a court-martial, Warrant or no Warrant—but shocking twenty-five-hundred-plus people into unconsciousness had definitely been her.