Augments weren’t faster than bullets. Tungsten penetrator rounds hammered into the roof, but none struck the Corporal before their attackers were down.
“Danger close,” Andrews reported sharply. “Explosives in the tram!”
The Marines recoiled as one, and Roslyn threw up a defensive barrier between them and the vehicle—barely in time. Multiple explosives had apparently been linked to the Augment’s life signs and detonated simultaneously, spraying intentional fragments and tram debris alike toward Roslyn’s attack team.
None of the deadly spray made it through the shield of solidified air and pure force Roslyn put in its path, the antipersonnel mines failing in their lethal purpose as she protected her people.
But there was a second purpose to the explosions, and that was made clear moments later as gunfire hammered into the barrier. Two Augments had ridden the tram forward to try and take Roslyn’s team by surprise.
The rest had dismounted farther back and brought portable cover with them. Distinctive snap-hiss-crack sounds marked the deployment of foxhole grenades, laying out chest-high barriers of bulletproof foam as the lab’s defenders moved up in full force.
Her people had the same grenades—but they also had Roslyn Chambers.
“Grenades,” Mooren snapped. “Hold on the Mage’s order—Commander?”
“Launch,” Roslyn agreed, opening a gap at the top of her barrier as the Marines hurled their weapons forward. The grenades weren’t the armor-piercing weapons they might use against exosuits—but those weapons required greater accuracy than this mess was going to allow anyway.
Their own waves of deadly shrapnel scythed down the corridor, buying time for Roslyn’s Marines to move up and take what cover they could against the wreckage of the tram. Several more foxhole grenades went off amidst the debris, turning the vehicle’s hulk into useful cover even for the exosuits.
“Locking in targets,” Knight reported. “I make it fourteen. All appear to be Augments, carrying penetrator rifles with medium body armor.”
There were very few unaugmented humans who could carry the big automatic penetrator rifles with their discarding-sabot rounds. Roslyn had encountered the stripped-down version used by the Protectorate Secret Service, but those guns cost more than the exosuits they were supposed to take down.
The Republic had gone for Augment cyborg soldiers instead, with upgraded bones and muscles that could carry and fire the heavy weapons. Now over a dozen of those super-soldiers were dug in ahead of Roslyn’s people.
“Your call, Sergeant,” Roslyn murmured. “I can hold the shield for a while yet.”
She’d pay for it later, but Roslyn was a naturally powerful Mage, of some of the strongest bloodlines out of Project Olympus. A hail of tungsten darts wasn’t going to cause her problems.
“We can’t shoot back through the field, and grenades didn’t do shit,” Mooren replied. “Marines, on my mark. Commander, drop the shield on…mark.”
They couldn’t have done it more smoothly if they’d practiced a thousand times. The Marines probably had practiced the drill, but with Marine Combat Mages.
She dropped the defensive barrier at Mooren’s command, and the Marines opened fire in the same instant. Killough and Bolivar joined the fire a moment later with their own lighter weapons.
Half of the Marines carried the same heavy penetrator rifles as their opponents. The high-speed tungsten darts from those went right through the foam of the foxhole grenades, sending Augment soldiers sprawling backward.
Two more had grenade launchers, dropping a mix of armor-piercing and shrapnel grenades behind the defenders’ cover. The last four Marines had big auto-shotguns designed for specialty munitions. They were firing heavy shot, each “pellet” the size of a smaller shotgun’s slug and punching through armored soldiers like they were made of paper.
The exchange of fire lasted a few seconds after Roslyn dropped the barrier, then everything fell silent.
“Move up,” Mooren barked. “Secure prisoners and watch for a second wave. That’s only half an Augment Corps platoon!”
Unspoken was the warning that the other sixteen cyborgs were almost certainly somewhere in the base. They’d met the first line of defense and overcome it without losses…but that didn’t mean they were done yet.
Far from it.
31
Their trip down the rest of the tunnel was uninterrupted until the very end. That was when Knight’s drones, scouting ahead of them, ran into the same kind of targeted anti-drone pulse screen as had been set up in Killough’s apartment.
“Drones are fried,” the Corporal reported. “I have a second set, but they’re going to run into the same thing. Visual I got says they weren’t playing games at this end of the passageway.”
The tunnel had taken them six hundred meters to the west and almost two hundred meters down. They were now on the north side of the reservoir and almost halfway down its mind-boggling depth.
There was a reason the lab had been built with a tram, though Roslyn was still wondering where the power for all of this came from. She supposed they could be hijacking the treatment plant’s power lines—or just running a fusion plant using the water from the reservoir, for that matter.
Sorprendidas had a lower-than-normal ratio of heavy water, but enough was running through the drainage and reservoir for the lab to pull oxygen and deuterium from the system easily enough.
And even a small fusion reactor would power what she saw in Knight’s half-second-long video clip.
“Active sensors here, here and here,” Mooren told everyone, flagging them in the image they’d quickly thrown together. “These four units up here are combat lasers. The Republic’s personal laser weaponry was always better than ours, so those can almost certainly punch through your suits.
“And if those didn’t scare us enough, this pair down here are eight-barrel twenty-millimeter gatling railguns,” the Sergeant continued, marking two more objects on the screen. “At that size, it doesn’t matter if they’re firing penetrators or not. A hit will turn you to jelly inside your armor.
“All automated, but it’s not like we brought an EMP bomb with us.”
Roslyn snorted. That was a terrible idea on multiple levels.
“We could call in a bunker-buster strike from Huntress,” Knight suggested. “That would end this whole situation real quick.”
“And potentially spread their toxin across half a continent, even if we ignore the fact that we’re right next to a park, a suburb, several apartment complexes, a school…” Roslyn didn’t finish the list. She didn’t need to.
“I know, I know,” the Corporal conceded. “What do we do about the door? Mage-shield close enough for AP grenades?”
“Doable,” Roslyn confirmed. “Sergeant? This is your area of expertise, not mine.”
The guns were around another turn in the passage, denying anyone approaching the ability to engage at long range. They’d turn the corner and find themselves within fifty meters of the weapons platforms. The corner itself would give some cover but not enough.
“Mage-shield is an option,” Mooren agreed. “But we know there’s Mages in there, sir. How are you doing?”
Roslyn mentally poked at her internal “gas tank.”
“If I have to face another Mage, I’d really rather not push things more than I have to,” she admitted. “I can handle it, no problem, but if we have another option…”
Mooren grinned.
“That’s what I figured. And as for this, well, there’s a reason they sent Augments out to stop us before we got to it. The Republic knows damn well that Marines can handle this, clever as the setup is.”
The answer, obvious even to Roslyn in hindsight, was grenades. Lots and lots of armor-piercing grenades, combined with the exosuit-clad Marines’ ability to target through the optics of the weapon without exposing themselves to fire.
They suffered accuracy-wise, but by the time the two Marines with grenade launchers had walked sever
al magazines of armor-piercing grenades across the heavily fortified door, there wasn’t much left.
“Grenadiers, fall back,” Mooren ordered, stepping back and lowering her own weapon. “Penetrator rifles up; target anything still moving.”
Six Marines moved forward. Roslyn followed them, but only enough to stand next to the Marine Sergeant, thoroughly aware that Mooren would stop her from doing anything stupid.
“Seems straightforward enough,” she murmured as the heavy rifles spoke in the corridor, ripping apart the single still-operating turret with their high-velocity tungsten darts.
“Straightforward, yes,” the Marine agreed. “But we are now out of armor-piercing grenades, so if we run into any defenders with exosuits, it’ll be down to the penetrator rifles to handle them.”
“That’s what they’re for, isn’t it?” Roslyn asked.
“Yup. But I’m always more comfortable with a backup option,” Mooren told her. “And since I’m one of my grenadiers, I’m always aware of the grenade magazine levels.”
“Fair,” Roslyn allowed. “We clear?” The firing had stopped.
“Hold on.”
The Marine NCO stepped forward to check on her people. After a few seconds, she waved the rest of the squad forward.
“One wrecked door, Lieutenant Commander,” she reported. “Now we see what the hell they decided to hide down here.”
The door itself had seemed impressive enough, but it had failed in the face of Marines with sufficient aggression. Roslyn crossed the last few meters of corridor gingerly, with exosuited guardians all around her, but it was clear that the automated defenders hadn’t even fired a shot.
As Mooren had said, the lab’s defenders had sent Augments out to fight them in the corridor because they’d been all too aware of the vulnerabilities of the fortifications against Marines. The Marines weren’t the Protectorate’s best—that title was reserved for the handful of elite forces that guarded the Mage-Queen and supported her Hands—but they were damn good.
“Open sesame,” Mooren said drily as she stepped through the wreckage her grenades had made. “Knight, get new drones up. I’m pretty sure we blew the crap out of the anti-drone systems, and despite the pretty foyer we just made a mess of, I don’t see a map anywhere.”
Moore’s description of the space they were entering was surprisingly accurate—both in the “pretty foyer” and the “mess” aspects. There was a tram dock—empty for obvious reasons—to Roslyn’s left, but the right side of the room could have been the entrance for any large corporate office, with a reception desk and a set of comfortable-looking chairs.
Those chairs had been ripped to shreds by shrapnel from the door’s destruction, and the reception desk wasn’t in much better shape. Roslyn doubted anyone had ever shown up at this entrance to the lab with anything so mundane as an appointment, but they’d been set up for it.
“I don’t see a receptionist, so I think we’re going to have to find our own way around,” Roslyn agreed. “Knight, are there any intact data ports there?”
The cyberwarfare Marine and her drones were already most of the way to the desk when Roslyn asked. Exosuit gauntlets tore through the remnants of the desk, and Knight snorted on the squad channel.
“Data connections are trashed,” she replied. “And it doesn’t look like anyone has even sat in this chair in six months. Whole place was probably just decorative.”
“Decorative or not, where are the rest of the Augments?” Bolivar asked. “The Augment Corps works in platoons of thirty-two, as you guys said. This place is…weird.”
“This place is a covert bioweapon lab, Captain,” Roslyn told him with a sigh. There was only so much she could hide from the Guardia officer now. “And everything you’re seeing down here is classified. Your Guardia report is going to be very, very short.”
Bolivar chuckled.
“I’d guessed,” he said. “Both parts, unfortunately. Three entrances deeper into the lab. Where do we go?”
“In the absence of a map, left-hand rule,” Mooren replied. “Do we want to make sure nobody gets out, sir?”
“Even foxhole grenades can be cut through without leaving guards, and we’re not splitting the team,” Roslyn said. “Leave exit security to Major Dickens.”
She paused.
“Speaking of, hold up here one moment. I’m going to check in.”
A few commands on her wrist-comp later, she stared at a red alert on her HUD and swallowed a curse.
NO CONNECTION.
“We’re blocked,” she told the others. “Not sure if it’s jamming or just the construction. Our enemy probably has boosters and a com network linked to an off-site relay.”
That kind of thing was her job, not the Marines.
“We’d need special equipment to transmit out, and we didn’t get that dropped,” she said aloud. “Should have anticipated it when we realized the treatment plant was shielded.”
Of course, it had already been too late at that point. The only option they had was to finish the job.
“We can’t risk anyone running, so load up, people,” Roslyn said grimly. “Left-hand rule it is, Sergeant Mooren. Let’s move.”
32
The left-hand option led them into a collection of boardrooms and offices, all empty. They were well set up with tables, desks, chairs…all of it covered in a faint coating of dust.
“Has anyone been in this area ever?” Killough asked.
“The corridor has been used,” Knight told him. “But these offices and boardrooms…”
A drone zipped through an ajar door into one of the boardrooms, then settled down on top of the long black table.
“Electronics aren’t even hooked up to a network,” the cyberwarfare Marine said. “Everything in this area is dead. If it ever was in use, they actively shut it down.”
“This doesn’t look much like a lab,” Roslyn said.
“You haven’t been in many corporate laboratories, have you?” Bolivar asked. “Most have an office section for the investors and accounting people. Even the researchers have offices, though they’re usually much messier than this.
“Maybe they decided to plan for expansion?”
Roslyn grimaced behind her helmet.
“I hope not,” she said. “These people are…not who I want expanding.”
“Lights are at least on,” Mooren replied. “Think they ever turn them off?”
“We are over two hundred meters below ground,” Roslyn pointed out. “I wouldn’t turn the damn lights off, and claustrophobia is contraindicated in Navy officers.”
The lead drones reached the end of the corridor, lights sweeping right and left as the Marines caught up.
“Left-hand rule?” Roslyn asked as she reached the T intersection. “Right looks like more offices, anyway.”
She had mapping software running in her HUD that suggested the right-hand path would link up with the middle of the three corridors from the foyer area. That implied, to her at least, that those two paths flanked a large area of offices and boardrooms.
Some of the offices might even be in use—but they weren’t looking for offices right now.
“I have power signatures suggesting an elevator to the left,” Knight reported. “Seems like a plan to me.”
“Keep the maps running,” Mooren said. “I have the sinking feeling this place isn’t going to be easy to find our way around.”
“Are there any networks that might have a map we can access?” Roslyn asked.
“There’s a network,” Knight confirmed. “I can tell the damn thing exists, but I can’t even get a wireless protocol off it. Military-style ghosting and encryption—and it’s not Republic or Sorprendidan codes.”
“Is it ours?” Roslyn said. “That would be a hell of a way to screw with everyone’s heads.”
“Checked that, too,” the Marine replied. “I’m guessing custom software, but it’s better than anything I’ve ever seen.”
“We’ll keep searchin
g. There’s people down here somewhere, unless they’ve already run for it.”
And that felt…out of character. Everything about the facility so far suggested it was larger than Roslyn’s worst-case scenarios.
Whoever was in charge had to have known the Navy and Marines coming for them was a chance. That meant there was a plan, and Roslyn wished she didn’t have to find out what it was.
She was certain she wasn’t going to like it.
The silence and emptiness of the complex only grew creepier as the Marine squad traveled deeper into the facility. After leaving the offices, they ended up in a storage section that was clearly along the south wall of the complex.
Nothing in the storage flagged as worth further investigation as they went along. The storage units were at least clearly in use, marked as containing all kinds of laboratory chemicals and similar working material for a lab…but there was still no one around.
“I’m marking side routes as we go, but I think this place is a maze,” Roslyn concluded as they reached the end of the storage section and ran into a blank wall. “One dead end doesn’t a labyrinth make, but…this place is weird.”
“Agreed,” Killough said grimly. “Head back to the last branch and see where it leads?”
“Not much else we can do unless we can crack the system or find a map,” Mooren agreed. “Or find someone to interrogate.”
“I have all kinds of questions to ask,” Roslyn said. “Come on. Let’s keep moving. There are answers somewhere in this godforsaken pit, I hope.”
The branch off they headed back to was more of the same for a bit, then finally they hit a decontamination airlock. The system was entirely automated, to the point where it didn’t even ask them for identification, but Roslyn hesitated.
“Send one fire team in first,” she told Mooren. “That way, we can break them out if something goes wrong.”
“On it,” Andrews agreed. “It’s just glass, after all.”
A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10) Page 16