A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10)

by Glynn Stewart

  “I have the resources of an entire world standing by,” the Governor said flatly. “We can restore power, repair shuttles, rebuild power lines—but we cannot rebuild my people.

  “Will it work?”

  Roslyn and Breda shared a long look. Neither of them was certain, but…

  Breda nodded.

  “At the very least, we’ll probably get every airborne nanite and buy ourselves time for the rest,” she concluded.

  “We’re talking about bombarding a Protectorate world,” Daalman noted. “I have that authority, but…”

  “You have my permission—my order, if that can be done,” Guerra told him.

  “And that of the Voice of the Mage-Queen of Mars,” Roslyn added. “I think… I think it’s the way we’ll save the most people, sir. As the Governor said: we can fix the city if we save the people.”

  “What about the Orpheus lab?” Dr. Breda asked. “Our best hope for treating the aftereffects of this nightmare is still the databases there.”

  “It’s buried deep and it’s well shielded,” Roslyn told her. “We couldn’t detect it from the surface, and they have a fusion power plant down there. The lab will be fine. Even our military equipment is going to be in trouble on the surface, but…we can replace shuttles and so forth. People are harder to duplicate.”

  “So be it,” Mage-Captain Daalman said firmly. “Mage-Lieutenant Jordan?”

  “Sir?”

  “Pull together the tactical Chiefs. I need a firing plan in fifteen minutes—and my tactical officer is on the planet.”

  And, as both Roslyn and Daalman knew perfectly well, about to fall over.

  48

  The Exalt crash hit exactly on schedule, hammering Roslyn with a bone-crushing exhaustion that overwhelmed every corner of her body. Despite that, she managed not to stagger as she walked out of the shuttle—now guaranteed sanitized, thanks to an electroshock anti-intrusion system—into the middle of the evacuation zone.

  Bolivar was waiting at the edge of the cleared landing zone, and he saluted as she approached.

  “I heard we might have a solution, sir?” he asked.

  “We’ve got two,” she told him—but she couldn’t keep the exhaustion out of her voice. “Mages can neutralize them nonlethally, and we think we might be able to disable all of the nanites.

  “But it’s going to disable everything else in the city. You should have got a heads-up from Huntress?” Roslyn hoped the Guardia had received an update from Huntress. She certainly didn’t have the energy to walk Bolivar through everything that needed to be shut down for safety. Or to warn the Marines that their armor was about to get shut down—but they, too, should have received an update from Huntress.

  “We did,” he confirmed. “Multiple high-power electromagnetic pulses? That’s…going to be bad, sir, but if it works…”

  “Everything we have says it should,” she said. “And I need to sit down.”

  “Are you all right?” Bolivar asked.

  “She took a Mage combat drug to deal with the crowd of infected that nearly reached the park,” Lieutenant Herbert explained before Roslyn could attempt to make up a story. “The aftereffects are harsh, I’m told.”

  “Come with me,” Bolivar told them, offering Roslyn his arm to lean on. She gratefully accepted the gesture, supporting herself on the Guardia officer as they made their way to a section of the park with chairs.

  Bolivar helped Roslyn seat herself, an apparently half-unconscious gentlemanly gesture that contrasted with the armor both of them were wearing. The folding chair creaked under the weight of Roslyn’s gear, but it held her up.

  She looked up at the darkening sky and realized it was twilight. Less than a day. Everything that had happened since she’d entered the Orpheus lab had taken less than a day.

  “It’ll be soon,” she told Bolivar quietly. “The perimeters are secure?”

  “Your Marines have been leading them on a merry dance,” the Guardia officer said, bringing up the same holographic map she’d been staring at all afternoon. “Closest infected are at least fifteen hundred meters from the line. I don’t know how long that will last if this doesn’t work.”

  “Long enough for Huntress’s Mages to get down afterward,” she promised. “We have a backup plan.”

  “That’s appreciated,” he told her. “I’m afraid, Mage-Commander. This is my city. These are my people. I have…hope now, I suppose. But there are so many people injured, lost, afraid. Who’s going to help them?”

  “The Cardinal-Governor has doctors, nurses, soldiers…the entire Planetary Army and every medical practitioner he could beg, bribe or blackmail into coming. They’ll be here twenty minutes after we’re clear.”

  “And if we’re not clear?”

  “There will be more Navy ships and more Navy Mages on their way,” she said. “It’s not over yet, Victoriano, but we know the dance steps now.”

  “Chambers, this is Daalman,” the Mage-Captain interrupted via the channel. “This is the last chance I’m going to get to say anything before we blow up the sky, so this is your heads-up.

  “Firing sequence commences in sixty seconds. We have two shuttles still up here that will be dropping immediately once the firing sequence completes. You, Mage-Commander, are going straight back to the ship and into the medbay.

  “I do not trust Exalt. I understand why you needed it, but I still don’t trust that shit.”

  Roslyn chuckled. Daalman was far from alone in that sentiment. Every Navy Mage and Marine Combat Mage had access to the drug. From what she understood, less than ten percent had ever used it—and that was after the Martian military had fought a war.

  “Understood, sir. We’ll stand by for the light show. Any idea when we’ll have confirmation when it works?”

  “When I get down there, one way or another,” Daalman said. “And, Chambers?”

  “Sir?” Roslyn was too tired to object to the Mage-Captain coming down herself if the zombie plague wasn’t resolved. She was too tired for much of anything at this point.

  “You did good.”

  The chair was uncomfortable, but it was still a struggle for Roslyn to stay awake. But she managed it until a blinking icon on her HUD informed her the firing sequence had started.

  “Look to the sky, Captain Bolivar,” she told the Guardia man next to her. “It’s going to be a hell of a light show.” She paused. “We have told people without auto-darkening optics not to look up, right?”

  “Yes,” Bolivar confirmed, looking upward himself. “Everyone knows. I’m not sure I believe in salvation by nuclear weapons, but I’ll take whatever God sends me today.”

  For a few seconds after they both looked up, there was nothing. Then Roslyn’s faceplate darkened as the sky flashed bright white, the first EMP bomb detonating directly above the quarantine zone.

  Everything shut down. The heads-up display on her helmet vanished without much fuss, though the faceplate remained dark, making it hard to see in the twilight around her.

  Roslyn sighed—and the second sequence of bombs detonated as she finished the exhalation. Multiple flashes lit the entire sky above Nueva Portugal in brilliant flares of multicolored light as nine EMP bombs went off simultaneously.

  She hadn’t seen the firing program, but she could guess. They would overlay the pulses to cover the entire city, but the first detonation had been a test to let them estimate the coverage.

  The next Talon Ten detonated all ten of its warheads simultaneously, a crash of light and thunder that descended on the park like a falling god. Seconds after that, another ten EMP warheads went off.

  “How many?” Bolivar asked loudly, clearly feeling at least a little deafened.

  “Nine more,” Roslyn said. “Twelve in total. Enough that we should be definitely below replication levels across the entire damn peninsula.”

  Another round of bombs lit up the sky as the Guardia officer parsed that. He leaned back and looked over at her.

  “It’s impres
sive, if nothing else,” he told her.

  “Worst-case scenario is that we only temporarily disable the infected,” Roslyn said. “Even that opens options.”

  More explosions lit the sky and Bolivar nodded in silence. There was a steady staccato rhythm. Every ten seconds, a Talon Ten fell from the sky and ten electromagnetic pulses tore across Nueva Portugal.

  With a twenty-two-second flight time and the wait for the result of the first salvo, it took just over three minutes from Roslyn’s system telling her the sequence had started to the last explosion dissipating in the sky.

  She sighed.

  “That’s twelve,” she concluded, reaching up to remove the helmet from her hazmat gear. She breathed fresh, unfiltered air for the first time in hours. Her hair was a mess, she had pressure bruises from the helmet, and she wouldn’t know if she’d won for several minutes yet.

  She never remembered dropping the helmet as exhaustion finally overwhelmed her.

  49

  Roslyn woke up in the medbay. There was a distinct sterile nature to a military medical facility that made that instantly clear—and then she spotted Dr. Breda poking at the console next to her bed.

  “Hey, doc,” Roslyn whispered. “I’m…” She exhaled. “I’m hoping I’m okay?”

  “You’re fine,” Breda told her, the chubby redhead stepping over to her. “It was just easier to keep you here after we ran the tests to make sure you weren’t in post-Orpheus mode.

  “We were worried when you didn’t wake up at any point while the Captain was bringing you aboard.”

  Roslyn coughed.

  “How long was I out?”

  “Fourteen hours,” the doctor told her. “You’d run yourself ragged before you took the Exalt. Your body had to recover from that kind of debt.”

  She shook her head.

  “So far as I can tell, you never had any of the Orpheus weapon in your system, by the way,” the doctor noted. “That’s not true of everyone they’re examining in the evac zone you put together. Several were definitely cleared by the decon units you were running.

  “Damn. That could have been bad,” Roslyn murmured. “I need a report.”

  “You need to stay right where you are,” Breda told her. “Like the Captain, I don’t trust Exalt, and I want to run more tests on you now that you’re awake.”

  “Doctor, the city, my people…my mission.”

  “The pulse worked,” Breda told her. “Samples from recovered former infected show maximum levels around half a percent of that needed for replication. The city is clear.

  “There may still be some of the original delivery units floating through the air elsewhere, but Sorprendidas now knows how to handle a localized outbreak,” the doctor noted. “There are tens of thousands of local personnel swarming all over Nueva Portugal. The situation is under control, Roslyn.

  “You did it.”

  “We did it,” Roslyn replied, letting herself relax back into the bed. “I swear, the only thing I did was set the damn thing off.”

  “It’s not my place to argue with you on that, but I think the Captain will have some very pithy commentary—probably quoting from the report she’s putting together recommending you for every medal she can think of.”

  “If I hadn’t gone poking around, they never would have set the sprayers off.”

  Breda sighed, pulled up a chair and brought herself down to the level of Roslyn’s resting head.

  “You and I are going to have some formal sessions over this, I’m sure,” she noted. “But I’m going to remind you of one basic principle: you are not responsible for what your enemy does. Lafrenz had to be brought to justice—if you hadn’t gone after her now, she might have ended up deploying this weapon on her terms somewhere we wouldn’t have had her own systems to tear apart for treatment methods.

  “Now internalize that,” Breda told her. “And then say ahh.”

  Back in a proper uniform instead of combat armor, Roslyn returned to her office to see what information she could find. There were no formal reports yet, but she could pull a lot of data.

  Her original Marines were now back aboard Huntress, a joint cyberwarfare team from her own electronic-warfare section and the planetary government having taken over from Knight. Three Marines had been replaced by at least three dozen specialist hackers.

  They might get the data faster. They might not. But Knight deserved the rest.

  Her evacuation zone was now one of six treatment-and-processing zones, the greenspace of the park given up for a massive temporary hospital with twenty thousand beds. The regular hospitals had been taken over as well, but what little formal data she had suggested that they had over two hundred and fifty thousand people being treated for post-Orpheus syndrome.

  There were no breakthroughs yet, but the systems were in place to keep them alive until there were.

  The next thing she checked was Bolivar’s status. He showed as available, and she hoped that he’d managed to get some sleep at some point—but she called him anyway.

  “Captain Victoriano Bolivar, Nueva Portugal Guardia,” he answered crisply—and then recognized her face. “Mage-Commander Chambers! You’re all right.”

  “I’m fine. Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I did not fall off a chair unconscious, Chambers,” he pointed out drily. “I handed command of the park over to a very nervous Planetary Army Brigadier General and then fell over in a more planned fashion for ten hours.”

  “I was worried you hadn’t slept,” she admitted. “Are you up to date on what’s going on in the city?”

  “As much as anyone,” he said. “You want the rundown?”

  “Yeah. I feel responsible.”

  “You didn’t do this, Commander. Lafrenz did this,” he told her firmly. “But, yeah, I can give you the high-level.

  “Current estimate is that we ended up with about three hundred thousand infected,” he noted. “We’re not entirely certain how many died, but we’ve got two hundred and sixty-three thousand beds filled with comatose Orpheus victims and another twenty-five thousand people who apparently hadn’t progressed far enough to go comatose when the nanites were destroyed.

  “We’re busy processing everyone we can through bioscanners to clear out the last remaining nanites and help us ID people who, at best, aren’t entirely cogent yet,” he said grimly. “We haven’t even started to ID the bodies.

  “We have Army troops on collection detail with freezer trucks. What’s left of the Guardia are knocking on doors and checking on people, but it’s a slow process.” He grimaced. “We have retrieved over thirty thousand bodies so far.”

  A weight sank into Roslyn’s stomach. Thirty thousand dead. Intellectually, she understood what everyone was saying about it not being her fault, but that hurt.

  “Speaking of identification, I need you to see if you can find someone,” she said. “His name is Angus Killough. I’m forwarding you what I can of his file, but he was instrumental in us getting as far as we did.”

  “Who is he?” Bolivar asked.

  “Even at this point, some stuff is still classified, Victoriano,” she said with a small smile. “I don’t know what happened to him, and I’m hoping your wellness checks will help find him.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Quietly,” he promised. “The city is…no longer a thing of chaos, but it will be time before we fully have a grasp on what happened. Our people are going to have a mental block on this mess for a long time.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Wasn’t your fault,” Bolivar repeated. “And, as I understand it, you arranged the next best thing to justice we’re going to get.”

  “Yeah,” Roslyn admitted. “Lafrenz is not going to stand trial. She’s dead.”

  “And God will judge her,” the Sorprendidan man told her. “I’ll make sure my people keep you in the loop, Mage-Commander. We will almost certainly talk again, but if we don’t…thank you, Roslyn.

  “It was an honor to work with you. Yo
u did all we could have asked and more. Thank you,” he repeated.

  “I did my job, Captain. Just like you.”

  “And sometimes, that’s more than anyone could possibly ask,” Bolivar said. “You saved us.”

  “A lot of people working together saved Nueva Portugal,” Roslyn told him. “I’m just glad we managed it at all!”

  “Sir?”

  Roslyn looked up from her desk after ending the call with Bolivar. A junior petty officer stood in the doorway. He was probably roughly her own age, but he looked nervous, being in her office.

  “Yes, Petty Officer…?”

  “Petty Officer Second Class Giraldo Coumans, sir,” he said with a crisp salute. “We have a Link communication request for you from Mars. You’re to report to the secure communications center.”

  Coumans looked nervous, clearly concerned about passing on orders to a superior officer. He was just the messenger, though—and Roslyn could guess who the order actually came from.

  “Understood, Petty Officer Coumans. Thank you. Do you know who the request is from?”

  “The Prince-Regent, sir,” the noncom managed to squeak out.

  As Roslyn had expected. Time to face the music for the use of the Warrant.

  50

  The secure communications chamber was set up as a standard conference room, with a Navy-issue standard table connected to a full wallscreen connected to the Link FTL communicator. Cut off from every other part of the ship, it was theoretically immune to eavesdropping of any kind.

  Roslyn took her seat gingerly and tapped a command to close the room and accept the call. The wallscreen lit up, fading from metal into the crowned-mountain seal of the Protectorate—and then a moment later into the image of a slim middle-aged woman.

  “Ah, Mage-Lieutenant Commander Roslyn Chambers?” she asked. “I’m Moxi Waller, the Prince-Regent’s secretary and personal assistant. Please hold on while I connect the Prince-Regent and the Mage-Queen.”