It took a moment for Roslyn to realize they’d opened fire too late. Even automatic weapons couldn’t slow a charge by ten times as many attackers as defenders when they only opened fire at twenty meters. The mob were among the Guardia far too quickly.
“Incoming,” Mooren suddenly snapped. “Heads down.”
Roslyn obeyed instinctively—only looking up to see two of Song of the Huntress’s assault shuttles come screaming in a moment later. Their engines flared white-hot as they slammed into a jet-fueled hover above the chaos.
Twenty-millimeter ground-support cannon opened up moments later, the two assault shuttles strafing the streets as exosuited Marines leapt out, plunging to the ground like angry meteors as they charged to the Guardia’s rescue.
“Chambers, you there?” Daalman’s voice asked, clearly having overridden her way into Roslyn’s coms.
“I’m here,” Roslyn said in a shaky voice.
“This is a nightmare,” the Mage-Captain said in a disturbingly calm voice. “You’re on the ground; I’m linking you to Dickens’s command and control.
“We had two shuttles up just in case, but I wasn’t going to defy the regional Governor until things really went to shit. We’ve got the feed you forwarded us, but Dickens is going to need eyes on the ground.”
There was a long pause.
“I am assuming the situation is sufficiently diffuse that Huntress’s weapons will only make things worse, correct?”
“Yes, sir,” Roslyn confirmed. “I think the locals are going to be willing to accept your help now, sir.”
“I don’t care if the locals are willing anymore,” Daalman said grimly. “I don’t actually have to listen to them. It’s just rude to drop Marines without permission.”
19
More shuttles delivered the rest of Song of the Huntress’s Marines over the next half-hour, doubling up the perimeter and making sure nothing left the quarantine zone.
Roslyn and her people remained on the rooftop, watching the tactical displays.
“I wish we could be more help,” Mooren muttered. “There’s still a lot of unaffected people in the area, and I don’t know how safe they are. Without something to lash out at, that mob is going to either start breaking into buildings or breaking out of the perimeter.”
“I know,” Roslyn said. “Keep your eyes peeled for movement toward the apartment buildings. We’re going to have to do something if the civilians are in danger.”
Something was probably going to be air strikes from the assault shuttles. That was the last thing Roslyn wanted to enable or order, but what could they do?
“All of the Marines are down,” Mage-Captain Daalman informed her. “I don’t suppose you have any clever ideas, Lieutenant Commander?”
“Nothing that leaps to mind, sir, except seeing what the medical report says on the prisoner we sent up,” Roslyn replied.
“I just got that,” Daalman admitted. “The blood sample is normal. Bioscans are normal. Girl is now in a coma, and Dr. Breda thinks we might lose her.”
“How is she normal?” Roslyn demanded. “She got back up after being SmartDarted, sir. There is something going on.”
“I agree. But our medical systems can’t detect whatever it is. That’s a problem, Commander, as we try to establish who we can let out of quarantine.”
“Yes, sir,” Roslyn agreed. “Sir…I think this may be related to my investigation. Specifically, to the bomb.”
She was responsible for this. The Guardia and Marines had already killed dozens of people. Dozens more had killed each other. All of this was because Roslyn had rushed into Killough’s apartment and found a trap.
Daalman sighed.
“I suspect the same,” she admitted. “But this, Lieutenant Commander, was not something you could have anticipated. You reacted to the clear and present danger in an entirely appropriate manner.
“This? This you can’t hold yourself responsible for. This is down to the bastards who placed the bomb. Please tell me you can find them.”
“I don’t know yet, sir,” Roslyn said. “I have a lead, a contact, but I need access to Huntress’s sensors and computers…and you can’t risk bringing us aboard.”
“So far, quarantine protocols on your shuttle suggest that there is no active infection risk,” Daalman told her. “The medical work-up on our prisoner is perfectly clean, after all.”
“Can you have Dr. Breda send that to me?” Roslyn asked. “We might find something she missed… I have an idea of what the people here were working on that I can’t share.”
“I’d argue that the doctor needs to know, Commander Chambers,” Daalman told her.
“That depends on if I find anything to suggest a connection,” Roslyn said. Given the orders she had from the Prince-Regent, she was going to err on the side of caution for a bit longer.
“Fine. We need to start planning to extract you, regardless,” the Mage-Captain said. “Lieutenant Herbert is still in isolation, so sending her back down should be fine.”
“I feel like I should be here until the end, sir.”
“Permission denied,” Daalman said bluntly. “I’m leaving the ugly choice of whether to risk the unaffected civilians by waiting a day to see if the effect fades or going in now to the planetary Cardinal-Governor.
“I expect him to make that call in the next ten minutes. You, Lieutenant Commander Chambers, are not going to be in there overnight or while the Planetary Army storms the quarantine zone.
“This is not a discretionary order.”
“They almost seem to be drawn to each other, like there’s a marshaling order in their heads telling them to attack the perimeter en masse.”
Knight’s voice sounded more sick than analytical as she watched the display with Roslyn. The deaths of dozens of the affected as they’d rushed one section of the perimeter appeared to have rippled through the remaining people in the quarantine zone.
Now the park to the north of them had been filled with a cluster of at least five thousand people, all making an awful keening noise that tore at Roslyn’s ears and sanity alike.
“Clear the landing pad,” Herbert told them over the radio channel. “I am coming in.”
“Pad is clear,” Mooren replied, letting Roslyn continue to look at the holographic display and wallow in her guilt.
The sound of the shuttle descending finally cut off the horrific keening of the victims of her mistake.
“There it is,” Knight suddenly said.
“There what is?” Roslyn asked.
“The Cardinal-Governor’s orders. He’s going on air in ten minutes, but the first wave of orders just went out: the entire peninsula is being quarantined until further notice. Units of the Sorprendidas Planetary Army are moving in by helicopter to secure the roads and ports.”
“Makes sense,” Roslyn said grimly. She looked over at Killough. “Any clear sign in those medical reports?”
“No,” the MISS agent replied. “I’d say whatever it was dissolved underneath medical examination. So, standard bioscans should be a treatment, but…getting people into them would be almost impossible.”
“That’s disturbing,” she said. She stepped away from the hologram as the shuttle touched down behind them, looking up the road to the park she knew was full of rabid innocents.
“If we could disable them somehow, it would be an option,” she said. “But…SmartDarts only knock them down. Nix gasses do nothing. It might fade in a day or two, but…there’s enough innocents in the quarantine zone that I doubt the Governor is going to risk it.”
“The only thing I’m seeing out of the ordinary is silver carbonate,” Killough told her. “The quantity is…nothing, but it shouldn’t be there at all.”
Roslyn blinked.
“That’s what we make runes out of, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Not quite,” Killough said. “It’s a decay product when the polymer breaks down. You would have silver carbonate in your bloodstream at a slightly higher level
than this, but you have Jump Mage runes that your body is trying to metabolize.
“This girl has no runes, and silver carbonate isn’t something that most people encounter.”
“It’s something for the quarantine line to look for, at least,” Roslyn told him. “Let’s keep it in mind. For now.” She gestured to the shuttle.
“It’s time for us to go.”
20
The new destroyers had enough space that Mage-Captain Daalman had been able to set aside a section next to the shuttle bay to act as a temporary quarantine zone. Medtechs in full-body hazmat suits guided Roslyn and her team into the designated rooms.
“How long?” she asked Dr. Breda, once she’d managed to identify the squat woman amidst the support staff.
“Well, the good news is that it doesn’t seem to be contagious,” Breda told her. “Certainly, there’s nothing coming through the class five biosuits.
“It also looks like about an eight-to-twelve-hour onset, so you’re probably already fine,” the doctor continued. “We’re going to keep you quarantined for twenty-four hours just in case.”
“What’s the Cardinal-Governor ordering?” Roslyn asked.
“No one is leaving New Portugal for two weeks,” the Navy doctor replied. “I believe we’re providing sensor support as well as medical aid as needed.”
“I see the planetary Governor likes us better than the regional one did.”
“Not really,” a new voice interrupted. Roslyn looked around to see Mage-Captain Daalman, identifiable by her height even in a class five biosuit. “Cardinal-Governor Fulvio Guerra is just more desperate than his local subordinate.
“He did, after all, just have to order the death or internment of thousands of his citizens to save tens of thousands,” Daalman said grimly. “Our Marines are going in. It’s…ugly.”
“I thought I saved them by teleporting the bomb,” Roslyn said quietly.
“If you hadn’t done what you did, several thousand people would have died in that moment,” her superior pointed out. “And then we would still have had to deal with this.
“I’ve had our systems people set up full access to our databases and scanners from the quarantine section, linked to your authority,” Daalman continued. “You and your…contact should be able to do whatever you need to do.
“Thank you, sir,” Roslyn replied. “I’m…surprised you still trust me.”
“You misjudged and charged in, but you also handled the result in the best way possible,” Daalman pointed out. The older woman shook her head. “I would have preferred you to put in the work to know there was a bomb, but I won’t pretend I see a better way to handle what you found.
“The blame sits on the murderous assholes who designed and deployed this goddamn modified rabies virus or…whatever it is,” she said. “Find them, Lieutenant Commander Chambers.
“We don’t execute people for much, but I’m going to enjoy watching these assholes swing. Find them for me,” she repeated.
“Yes, sir.”
Every piece of analysis they’d done on the surface was in Roslyn’s wrist-comp, easily fed into Song of the Huntress’s computers as Killough downloaded information from his own machine.
The Marines, finally stripped out of their bulky armor, left the tactical officer and the MISS agent alone with the computers. They seemed to focus on the showers that had thankfully been included in the quarantine quarters.
Roslyn, on the other hand, had panicked at the sight of the showers until she’d confirmed the water was being contained and not fed back into the ship’s main supply.
“The key that I found, shortly before everything went to hell for me, was that Lafrenz and Finley and their partners owned enough of one of the local construction companies to make Lafrenz CEO at one point,” Killough told her. “They had enough ownership of other companies to bury the supplies needed to build a facility, but they needed machinery and people.
“They found them in Triple Q Commercial Construction. They bought three-quarters of the company through assorted fronts, turfed the entire senior executive staff and put Lafrenz and what I assume were carefully selected allies in their place.”
Data on Triple Q was running across the screens as Killough spoke. Most of it was very high-level, the general information submitted to stock exchanges and suchlike around the company’s projects.
“So, if Triple Q built it, we need to find out which project they buried it in?” Roslyn asked.
“Exactly. Which is a problem, because Triple Q no longer exists,” Killough told her. “The files and paperwork that would give us those answers are locked behind a court filing in a secure judicial server.
“They appear to have overstretched themselves and failed to deliver a third of their projects on time or on budget. Penalty clauses wiped them out a year ago, tying up thirty-two construction projects in Nueva Portugal alone in debts and lawsuits.”
Roslyn winced.
“Lafrenz did that intentionally, I’m guessing?” she asked.
“Probably. At this point, the work crews have scattered to every other construction company on the planet, one by one. Any listing of staff below the executive level is in those confidential files the court won’t release.”
“What about the executive level?” Roslyn said. “They can’t all have been Lafrenz’s patsies.”
“Fifteen names listed in the last annual report,” Killough said after a moment. Those names floated in the air between them. “Obviously, we have failed to track ‘Roxana Lafrenz.’ I should have data on some of the others.”
“I’ll see what’s in the public files,” Roslyn told him. “Let’s see what we pull together.”
The answer was a litany of blatant lies, unexpected deaths and people who’d never existed at all. Five of the names joined “Roxana Lafrenz” as being aliases. Six of them had existed but had already been off-planet when they’d been listed as part of the final executive staff of Triple Q Construction.
The remaining six were dead. Two heart attacks, one cancer, three car accidents.
“Normally, I’d trust natural causes,” Roslyn said as she and Killough went through the results together. “Except that Lafrenz is a Mage-Surgeon and I have to wonder if she could give someone cancer.”
“Fucked if I know,” Killough admitted. “Though that is a terrifying thought.”
He shook his head.
“If the people aren’t the answer, the projects have to be,” he told her. “What I didn’t manage to pull together was a list of projects they completed. That’s what I wanted Huntress’s computers for.
“If we can search the public construction records and flag everything Triple Q was involved in over the last five years, that gives us a starting point,” he continued. “We can then try an analysis to see what was big enough for them to have hidden a lab of the scale we’re talking about.
“I’m assuming it’s underground, but to be honest, that’s just an assumption.”
“If they set it up right, they could just as easily hide it in an office or even a residential tower,” Roslyn agreed. “Or just in the basement of a tower.”
“Or bury it when they’re laying the pipes, power and pavement of a residential suburb,” Killough said. “There’s a lot of places and ways they could have hid this project, Commander. But I think Huntress has the computers and access to find all of their projects in a way that a rented console in a library can’t.
“The bastards swapped my analysis setup for a bomb, after all.”
“I’ll start the searches,” Roslyn told him. “You…” She sighed. “Can you take a look at what happened in the quarantine zone? We know that’s related, so I want to see what comes out of it.
“I’m just not sure I can bring myself to look.”
The construction permits and licensing of a midsized city were a massive amount of information that were rarely properly organized, scanned or stored. All of it was at least digitized, but the search Roslyn had set for
Huntress’s computers was far from as straightforward as it should have been.
And that was before the fact that even a legitimate construction company would often bury their involvement behind numbered companies or subordinate contractors to keep competitors in the dark about what was going on.
Roslyn’s involvement as the computers crunched was wading through court files and legal filings to identify the other companies Triple Q might use to hide their involvement and adding those to the search.
It kept her mind engaged and away from the horror show they’d seen on the surface—at least until Killough stepped back into the room with her and sat down heavily.
She looked up at the newly tight lines on his face and swallowed.
“That bad?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he told her. “The quarantine zone is secure, though the locals still aren’t letting anyone out. One hundred and twenty-two Guardia officers are dead. About that again wounded.”
The Nueva Portugal Guardia had responsibility for five million souls. If they had the usual ratios of Protectorate police departments, two hundred and fifty casualties were over a tenth of the entire Guardia.
“And the victims?” she asked quietly.
“Current estimates are over four thousand dead,” he said flatly. “Current reports are that they managed to disable and contain about eighteen hundred, but processing them is being a nightmare.
“Most of the ones they’ve managed to get into bioscanners have… Well.” Killough shook his head. “Like the one you sent aboard Huntress, they’re in comas with mixed prognoses. Like her, though, they seem clean after the bioscan.”
“So, whatever we’re looking at is actively killed and dispersed by the radiation used in a bioscanner,” she said. “How did something that fragile survive an explosion?”
“Different stages in the life cycle?” the MISS agent guessed. “I’m not a bioscience guy. I’m a spy, Commander. The locals are starting mass autopsies on the Cardinal-Governor’s orders…and then the bodies will be burned.”
A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10) Page 10