A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10)

by Glynn Stewart

  But they were alive, and they weren’t tearing into her evacuation zone.

  “Chambers, this is Dickens,” the Marine CO greeted her calmly. “We’ve pretty thoroughly broken up the mob, but the overall circle is drawing closer. I think we’ve got a steady plan and can slow things down, but…”

  “But you’re playing matador for a bunch of people we don’t really want to hurt,” Roslyn replied, carefully slapping a bandage on another subject. “We may have an answer.”

  “I think that might be the best news I’ve heard all day. I see a bunch of disabled contacts on my tactical; what’s the sitrep?”

  “Zapped down with a mass stun spell,” Roslyn told him. “And they’re staying down. Response appears to be similar to the prior victims that underwent bioscan. Comatose.”

  “Fuck.” The Marine was silent for a second. “But they’re alive?”

  “They’re alive. Dr. Breda is examining blood samples and plotting stungun recalibrations,” she told him. “But…my spell cleaned the air around them as well. Not sure stunguns would do the same.”

  “Likely not,” the Marine said. “And it’s not like I have lightning cannon to hand anywhere—but if there’s actually something the Mages can do, Daalman will bring the rest of you down.”

  Roslyn snorted.

  “You mean lead the rest of the Mages down herself,” she said. “Yes. And if that’s the answer, I’ll be right there with her.”

  The six Mages from Huntress’s crew could probably handle ten thousand or so of the infected at a time. It wouldn’t be a fast solution, but…it might just work.

  “I’ll keep you informed, Captain,” she told him. “Keep me informed of the situation of the evac zone. I get the feeling that circle is still going to shrink.”

  “Unfortunately,” he agreed. “I think we’ve doubled the time you’ve got, so I hope that’s enough.”

  “Here’s the samples, Dr. Breda,” Roslyn told the other woman, sliding samples into the analysis unit one at a time. “One from the same teenager, one from a mid-thirties-ish woman, one from a forty-ish male.”

  “Working remotely like this sucks,” Breda noted. The analysis unit had a pair of remote-operated arms in the middle of a two-meter-tall cylinder with various tools. It was, by design, next to a full bioscan unit that doubled as a surgical bed.

  It wasn’t so much a portable medical analysis unit as it was a remote surgery unit, but the tools had been included anyway. Just in case they were needed for that remote surgery, Roslyn supposed.

  “If it gives me the answers I need, I’ll make it up to you however you need, Doctor,” Roslyn promised.

  Breda snorted.

  “I’ve got part of an answer,” she told the Mage. “Give me a moment to look at the new samples.”

  The arms grabbed each sample in turn, taking a tinier amount of each and putting it under a microscope sending images up to the destroyer’s proper medical lab.

  “Okay. So, all three samples are averaging four-point-two parts per billion, plus minus five percent,” Breda told them. “Replication level, based on what we’re seeing, is around four hundred parts per billion.

  “I ran some…destructive testing on the first blood sample while you were collecting more,” she continued. “The nanites are quite resistant to electric shock, but that resistance falls off rapidly above the designed maximum charge application of SmartDarts.

  “It appears to be the magnetic-field aspects of the bioscan that cause the self-destruct,” Breda noted. “I suspect the combination of electrical and electromagnetic fields created by your electrical storm was a perfect counter to their defenses.”

  “So, magic is the answer,” Roslyn said quietly. “I can live with that. We can bring in more Mages if we need to. The Link is good for that.”

  “I’m forwarding everything I have back to Mars via the Link as soon as we’re done here,” the doctor agreed. “Hopefully, they’ll see something I don’t. Like a way to blanket the entire city in a Mage’s electrical storm.”

  “Nothing is coming to mind,” Roslyn admitted. “I’m going to check in with the people tearing apart the base. Maybe they’ve found an answer—but at least we know how to knock down the crowd.”

  She paused, then swallowed.

  “How long can we leave these people without further medical attention?” she asked.

  Breda was silent for at least five seconds.

  “My preference would be under ten minutes,” she admitted. “If… If we don’t have a choice, as we don’t, I project long-term degradation of their health outcomes within twelve hours. Twenty-four before anyone starts dying…most likely.”

  “We can’t move them,” Roslyn said quietly. “We don’t have the hands; we don’t have anywhere to put them.”

  “Knock out everyone and the Governor can send in his people. Hell…if we’re sure we can secure your park, we might be able to send in extra doctors there,” Breda suggested. “I’ll have to talk to the Captain.”

  “We might be at that point, if we bring the Mages down,” Roslyn agreed. “I’ll talk to everyone…”

  She shook her head. She didn’t want that to be her call…but it probably was.

  “Send your data to Mars,” she ordered. “I’m going to have Jordan pull together a conference of you, me, the Captain and the Cardinal-Governor. And while she’s doing that, I’m going to see if my friends underground have any clever ideas.”

  Because Roslyn was up to one clever idea—and while that was a hell of an improvement, there was no way they could secure the city in twenty-four hours. Now she knew she could win…which meant it was time to work out how to save more lives.

  “We’re just finishing up scratching our heads here,” Corporal Andrews told Roslyn after she linked to the Marine. “The decon chambers look normal enough, but we think we found the oddity.”

  “Magnets?” Roslyn suggested.

  There was a long silence on the channel, and then Andrews sent her their helmet feed.

  “Basically,” they agreed. “How did you guess?”

  The video showed a series of solenoids. It took Roslyn a moment to realize they were mounted on a moving bar that looked like it belonged in a car wash.

  “This wasn’t even part of the normal decon suite,” they continued. “This bar of electromagnets was above the usual array of gear in the ceiling. We almost missed it.” They sighed. “We did miss the matching bar under the floor until we went looking for it.

  “From what I can tell, it sweeps the entire space with an electromagnetic field. How it does that without fucking the electronics in things like our exosuits, I’m not sure, but it didn’t trigger any warning signs when we took the suits through.”

  “Probably calibrated not to damage cybernetics,” Roslyn told them. “And designed to mimic the magnetic scans of a bioscanner—which they intentionally made the nanites vulnerable to so that we couldn’t work out what the hell they were doing to people.”

  “That fits with what I’m seeing here, sir,” Andrews agreed. “I’m sorry it took so long. We didn’t realize the magnets were there until we went back a second time, thinking there had to be something.”

  “It’s better than nothing, Corporal. Do we have any software data on what sequence or anything those electromagnets would be using?” she asked. “They would have it calibrated exactly for what we need.”

  “I think we can pull that from the decontamination chamber’s hardware without needing access to the overall systems,” Andrews agreed. “Might take a few minutes.”

  “That’s fine, I need to talk to Knight…and then to the Mage-Captain and Cardinal-Governor,” Roslyn told them. “We’ve found a way for Mages to deal with this shit. Now I just need a better answer.”

  Andrews snorted.

  “If we have an answer, that’s better than we were doing when you left,” they pointed out.

  “Agreed. Forward that software, once you have it, to Dr. Breda and Mage-Lieutenant Jordan,” R
oslyn ordered. “Thank you, Corporal.”

  She had switched over to Knight before Andrews responded.

  “Corporal Knight, report,” she ordered. “Please tell me you’ve got something. We did get you a login.”

  “You got a surface-level user login from your prisoner,” Knight pointed out. “From that, we had to work out how to get more user logins so we didn’t lock ourselves. Then we needed to create higher-security logins, and then we needed to find the hidden encrypted files and then create logins to access those files—”

  “And where in that list are you?” Roslyn said.

  “Finding the encrypted files,” the Corporal admitted. “We’ve built ourselves a decent array of access logins now, but we still don’t have full admin control or access to anything of Orpheus clearance—that seems to have been restricted to Lafrenz and the researchers.

  “We’ve got some basic medical data on their test subjects and a lot of information on how this place was built, but I don’t think we have any answers for you,” she confessed. “I’m sorry, sir; this isn’t a fast process.”

  “I know,” Roslyn conceded. “You’re linked with Huntress?”

  “That’s the only reason we’ve made it so far,” the cyberwarfare Marine agreed. “Give us a week, sir, and we’ll have everything in this database spread out for you. But I don’t know if I can get you anything soon.”

  “Okay,” Roslyn said. “You said medical data for the test subjects, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Forward that to Dr. Breda if you haven’t already,” she told the Marine. “We have a way to disable the Orpheus victims, but they all go into a coma we can’t fix yet. There might be an answer to that in the medical data—so, let’s hand it to all of the damn doctors we can find.”

  “Will do,” Knight confirmed. “Sir…I hate to admit it, but the spy would be better at this. What happened to Killough?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I think he may have run afoul of a third Mage, one who abandoned the facility. We’ll find him, Corporal, but I don’t think we’re going to do so in time to help with this.”

  “I’ll see what I can extract for the medical data beyond what we’ve seen,” Knight promised. “Fuck…that was what we came down here for in the first place, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. And now instead of having two thousand people suffering from post-Orpheus syndrome, we’re going to have something like a hundred thousand,” Roslyn told the other woman. “So, that data might be the most critical thing on the planet.”

  “Right. No pressure.”

  “If it was easy, I wouldn’t have asked a Marine to do it.”

  47

  “Mage-Captain, Cardinal-Governor, Mage-Lieutenant. Surgeon-Lieutenant.”

  After the first three titles she greeted the members of the meeting with, Roslyn felt that Dr. Breda also needed the hyphen. Her full rank of Surgeon-Lieutenant wasn’t used very often—it was rare, in fact, for a medical officer on a warship to use any title other than Doctor—but it was hers.

  “Thank you all for joining me. I believe we have an answer,” Roslyn told them all.

  Daalman and Guerra both straightened, looking directly at her. Jordan was supposed to be Roslyn’s “face” for this meeting, but the Captain and Governor appeared to be choosing to look at Roslyn’s helmet plate instead.

  “I am listening, Envoy Chambers,” Guerra told her. “I hope, I pray, that your answer does not involve the mass death of my electorate?”

  “It does not,” Roslyn confirmed. “It is not, I must warn everyone, a perfect solution in any sense. Some of the Orpheus victims will still die. It’s not going to be a fast solution, and it’s going to require more Mages than we have to fully resolve the situation.”

  “We have five more Mages aboard Song of the Huntress,” Daalman pointed out instantly. “I can request reinforcements via the Link. I am not certain of the number of Mages we can get here quickly, but my understanding is that there are at least four Link-equipped RMN warships within three days’ jump. Another four without Links—and for every day we can wait, those numbers will at least double.”

  “I hear hope, officers,” Guerra said. “Please. Do not dash this old man’s hopes. Tell me.”

  “We used Marines as a distraction to split one of the major crowds of infected apart,” Roslyn told them. “You should have received at least some updates on that. We believe we’ve successfully bought several hours to provide relief to the refugees we’ve moved into the park.

  “However, a component of the crowd, estimated at approximately twenty-five hundred infected, was still heading for the park. To avoid the use of lethal weapons, I engaged them with magic.”

  “I know the only way you could have done that, Lieutenant Commander,” Daalman said quietly. “When are you coming down?”

  “Soon,” Roslyn admitted. “So, we should probably hurry this up.”

  “Captain?” Guerra asked.

  “The Mage-Lieutenant Commander used combat drugs to restore her magic after draining her reserves,” Daalman laid out bluntly. “She is going to crash completely sometime in the next twenty minutes.”

  “I see. Thank you, Lieutenant Commander,” Guerra told Roslyn. “Continue, please.”

  “Navy Mages are trained in several methods of less-than-lethal engagement,” Roslyn said quietly. “We use the phrasing specifically—with stunguns and Nix, we can almost guarantee full nonlethal engagement. With less-than-lethal magic, we cannot.

  “Since the Orpheus weapon was designed to survive both stunguns and Nix, this was to our advantage. I electrocuted the mob and disabled them. This is normally a short-term effect, relying on pain and uncooperative muscles to disable a target for more than a few minutes.

  “In this case…it appears to have disabled enough of the nanites to knock the infected out and send them into post-Orpheus syndrome, the coma we’ve encountered in other victims,” Roslyn concluded. “The victims were below the replication threshold of the nanites, as was the air content.

  “Sufficient electric shocks appear to disable the nanites,” she told them. “Analysis of the decontamination chambers in the Orpheus complex shows that they used electromagnetic fields similar to those in a bioscanner to destroy any nanites present.

  “Between the shock and the EM wave of our area less-than-lethal stun spells, infected crowds will go down and stay down, without an infectious presence. We are, of course, vulnerable to the arrival of new infected to the target area who will restore the nanite levels.”

  She exhaled a long, determined sigh.

  “I believe that our six Mages should suffice to provide a clear safe zone around the park and the Orpheus complex itself,” she told them. “That would permit us to evacuate the citizens in the park and set up a hospital there to handle the post-Orpheus patients.

  “It will not be a fast process to clear the city, not without significantly more Mages, but we can begin the process of securing and evacuating civilians,” Roslyn continued. “We now know the sequence of EM fields used by the decontamination chambers and should be able to duplicate it aboard shuttles.

  “My biggest fear at this point is that we will lose some of the people we disable without rapid medical care.”

  “And that we need to secure the entire city,” Guerra said quietly. “I have doctors, nurses, medical personnel and field hospitals—all ready to go. But there are hundreds of thousands of victims. With six Mages…how long to clear them all?”

  “Weeks,” Daalman said grimly, before Roslyn could answer. “Even with reinforcements arriving, most of our Mages cannot duplicate Commander Chambers’s spell to her scale. She is a powerful Mage.”

  Roslyn couldn’t help but wish that Jane Alexander was nearby. She’d watched the Rune Wright Crown Princess of Mars demolish a fleet from the cockpit of a shuttle—that fleet had been far too close, but it was still a demonstration of the power of the Rune Wrights that ruled Mars.

  Either of the Alex
anders could likely have swept the entire city.

  “Forgive an old man his foolish questions,” Guerra said after a moment’s thought. “But I understand that you were working on electromagnetic-radiation weaponry to try to secure the city before. Knowing what we know now, could those weapons be used to duplicate this effect?”

  Roslyn froze.

  “No,” she said slowly. “The warheads available to us do not create electrical shocks or electromagnetic fields in the same way that the systems and spells we’re talking about do.”

  “But?” Daalman asked.

  “I think that the nanite we are seeing in the final infection is more vulnerable than the deployment version,” Roslyn said. “We’ve seen the deployment version exploded, blasted out of aerosol sprayers, generally treated like a stable munition.

  “But the actual infection can be shocked out with enough electricity.”

  “An EMP creates localized electric fields,” Jordan said quietly, the junior tactical officer the person most directly responsible for the weapons. “It wouldn’t be as effective as the area spell.”

  “It wouldn’t destroy enough of the nanites to get them beneath replication thresholds,” Breda objected. “For an active victim, we’re likely looking at upward of five hundred PPM of the nanites in the blood, with the replication threshold being a thousandth of that.

  “Without the localized, directed pulse of the spell Commander Chambers used, you’d be looking at…maybe a fifty-percent kill rate?”

  “So, we hit them ten times,” Roslyn said flatly. “Or twelve, to make damn sure. We sweep the entire city with sequenced electromagnetic pulses.”

  “That will destroy all but our most hardened gear,” Daalman warned. “Exosuits, shuttles, the city’s infrastructure… We’ll create a new humanitarian disaster.”