Shuffling the books around to remove the map, Roslyn carefully undressed, stacking her clothes on one of the chairs to make them easier to carry into the bathroom—and to give her an excuse to bring the only mobile furniture she had into the bathroom with her.
She turned on the shower, looking around the room and trying to match the interior of her prison to the exterior she’d seen of Alexander’s. There. That corner—the one in the shower, where heat and warmth might have weakened the weld even further than she dared hope.
Roslyn knew that what she was about to attempt might be impossible. She was in good shape, but she was going to be trying to break welds and bend metal walls. If she was Alexander or Montgomery, she might have been able to pick the weak spot in the ward and focus on that.
As it was, all she could do was try to break open a wall and hope she could get it to work. The water was hot now and she took a deep breath. If she was lucky, the cameras were at least a bit fogged up now.
She knew she was still watched in the bathroom. Fogged-up cameras and a chair with her clothes on it were her only hope.
Tossing the clothes onto the floor, she threw a towel into the shower to give her footing and then stepped into the stall, carrying the metal chair. She judged the angle as best as she could and then slammed the furniture into the corner of the wall.
Nothing. She repeated the gesture, hammering futilely against the wall with all of her strength for several seconds.
She stopped, standing in the hot water and considering her results so far. She might have made a dent but not much of one. She certainly hadn’t broken the welds.
So far, no one had reacted. Either they hadn’t noticed, or they thought she was taking her frustrations out. That lucky reprieve wouldn’t last, not with guards like these.
This time, she picked up the chair and placed it more carefully, slowly wedging the top of the chair’s back into the corner and putting her full body weight against it. Water slicked over her, covering her efforts but impeding the grip her feet could get on the now-soaked towel.
Roslyn wiggled the chair, pushing into the gap with all of her might. She wasn’t trying to bash through anything now. She was trying to lever the corner open, to break the mediocre welds she’d seen on the outside…or at the very least, apply enough pressure to temporarily sever the links of silver that made up the ward matrix.
There was a bang in the other room. Someone was knocking—her guards were probably opening the door.
She was out of time and she threw herself full-force into the chair, trying to create enough pressure to do something. Anything. She wasn’t going to get a second chance.
For one moment, one physically painful moment that tore through her like a burning blade, the matrix parted. The walls were intact, but Roslyn had magic. Just a tithe of her usual power and only for a moment.
It was enough.
Roslyn Chambers stepped, a teleport of only a couple of meters of most—the critical meters that put her, naked and dripping wet, outside her cell.
For a few seconds, Roslyn fell into a defensive crouch, looking around her as she poked at her power. Then she exhaled, straightening as her magic rushed back into her for the first time in weeks. A blade of force answered her call as she turned, and she looked at the weak weld and silver ward that had almost defeated her.
Force and magic did what leverage and determination had failed to do. The corner split apart under the blow, revealing the still-steaming shower. Most importantly to Roslyn at that moment, however, was that the split broke the ward—and also revealed her clothes.
She’d mastered the art of teleporting her clothes onto herself at the RMN Academy. It was discouraged, but the trainers turned a blind eye when it made sense.
That party trick meant she was dressed in the plain black fatigues the Republic had given her when her two guards broke into her bathroom and came to a stunned halt, staring both at the hole in the wall and at the angry Mage on the other side.
Water could disperse electricity, but not as much electricity as Roslyn blasted through the ten-centimeter gap she’d opened in the wall. Both Augmented guards went down in a heap, cybernetics and flesh alike twitching as they overloaded.
They’d been sufficiently kind that Roslyn vaguely hoped she hadn’t killed them, but her priority had to be escaping. Her guards were down and out, and they hadn’t had a chance to report her escape.
Hopefully, they’d also been the people watching her security feeds. With their implants, that was easily possible. Roslyn would have had the cameras going elsewhere, though, so she doubted she was that lucky.
Someone almost certainly already knew she’d escaped. Her time was limited, and she took off toward Alexander’s apartment. Twenty meters away—and she could see a door that looked like it was in the right place.
The hallway she burst into looked like the right kind of residential hallway to be the one Alexander’s prison was on, but there was always the risk she’d guessed wrong. She was certain she could get to the other warded cell she’d seen.
What she wasn’t certain of was whether that cell was Alexander’s. There might well be other Mages held prisoner on Styx. If nothing else, there was a Prometheus Interface facility around somewhere. That station would have Mage prisoners, but those prisoners were likely kept separate.
The sheep held for slaughter weren’t kept in the same place as the ones you wanted to interrogate.
Roslyn’s fear that she was in the wrong place meant that she greeted the appearance of the two armed guards as she came around the corner with relief. Whatever warning they’d received about her escape, the women hadn’t been expecting her arrival.
Augment cybernetics meant they reacted anyway. They moved like lightning, carbines snapping up as they saw Roslyn—but they weren’t fast enough. Fire flashed from the Mage’s fingers, bolts of white-hot plasma that hammered through armor and flesh and implants alike.
Roslyn strode toward the bodies she’d created, letting her anger and fear carry her. Her guards might have survived, but these two women were definitely dead. She’d killed before, she knew that, but that was a matter of lights on a console and sparks in the void.
This was the first time she’d killed with her own magic face-to-face. She knew that if she slowed down, if she let that sink in, she would be doomed.
Instead, she forced herself to lean down, to pick up the woman closest to the door and lift the corpse’s hand to the scanner. She pressed the dead guard’s palm against the control panel, hoping it didn’t require some kind of mental command from the guard herself.
Nothing happened.
“Fuck,” Roslyn cursed, and let the body fall. That would have saved some time and definitely some attention. She stepped back and considered the security door. The wards would have a gap in them for the door, and destroying it wouldn’t break them—and Roslyn really didn’t know what breaking the ward matrix would do to the Mage inside it.
The door was probably sturdier than the rest of the cell, but she didn’t have much choice.
Blasting the door down would risk Alexander, so instead, she teleported it. One moment, it was in front of her, blocking her way. The next, it was falling to the ground several meters up the hallway.
Or most of it was at least. The inner several millimeters appeared to be inside the antimagic ward and remained in Roslyn’s way. Carefully, ever so carefully, she stepped forward and pushed it.
The lock had been in the chunk she’d teleported. The fragment of door fell inward, hitting the ground with a loud clatter, and Roslyn looked across the threshold of the prison.
Mage-Admiral Alexander looked up from her couch, still looking vague and dazed.
“That doesn’t sound like knocking,” she said slowly.
“Admiral, it’s Roslyn. We have to go,” Roslyn told her. “I need you.”
“Okay,” Alexander said dreamily, rising and walking languidly over toward her. “This place was comfortable, but I trust y
ou.”
“What the fuck do they even have you on?” Roslyn demanded.
“No one was so kind as to explain,” Alexander answered, her voice still slow and vague. “But leaving sounds nice.”
Roslyn took a moment to make sure that she was actually rescuing her Admiral and not some doppelganger. She wasn’t sure how to do that beyond inspecting Alexander’s face closely, and she ended up just shaking her head.
“Come on,” she told Alexander. “Hopefully, whatever’s in your system works its way out fast. I need your power if we’re going to live through this.”
“I hope so,” Alexander agreed, her words a relief even if her tone remained worrying. “I’ll follow; don’t worry.”
The drugs might be making Roslyn’s Admiral vague, but she seemed to still be in there. That was the best she could hope for, she supposed.
41
Whatever security lockdown protocols Styx Station had didn’t account for the maintenance voids wrapped around her decks. She wasn’t designed to be a prison—she was designed to be a heavy defensive fortress, with ease of regular maintenance far more critical than internal security.
Roslyn and Alexander crossed the maintenance section unopposed except for cleaning robots that Roslyn blasted to scrap as a matter of course. The robots’ destruction was probably an obvious trail, but their cameras would have been just as effective.
There was going to be resistance at the transfer pods; she was certain of it.
“Can you fight?” she asked Alexander. “There’s going to be Augments at the next stage and they’re trained to kill Mages like me.”
“I… I… No.” Alexander’s tone was still dreamy, but there was a frustration in it, too. “No strength. No magic.”
“It’s all right, sir; the drugs will fade,” Roslyn assured her boss. “We’ll both get out of here.”
That was going to leave dealing with an Augmented and armed security squad waiting for them up to her, and Roslyn wasn’t feeling that confident. She focused on her mental map as she considered the access she could see ten meters away.
If she went through there, she could hit the squad from the side. That assumed they were waiting for her at the door—but even if they were expecting her to go through a wall, they would never know where she was coming through.
“Wait here,” she told Alexander. “I’ll be back for you, I promise.”
“Okay.” The Admiral nodded, her eyes unfocused again. “I hate this.”
“Join the club,” Roslyn hissed. She gave her boss one firm nod, then stepped up to the wall.
Force answered her call, her magic even more eager than usual after weeks without it.
The wall exploded away from her in a spray of metal shards that cleared any possible threat—and Roslyn’s magic snatched up that shrapnel into a whirlwind of power that went ahead of her as she charged down the hallway.
The security alert was working perfectly, just as she’d feared. A dozen soldiers in black armor, half of them even in combat exosuits, had taken up positions around the door she’d been planning to charge through. Several were positioned to cover their backs, clearly anticipating exactly the trick she’d pulled.
Her swarm of metal slammed into the Augments waiting for her. The ones covering the ambushers’ backs went down first, metal tearing through lightly armored flesh and spraying blood across the others.
Gunfire answered her approach, but Roslyn held a second shield of force in front of her, deflecting the blind-fired bullets that reached her as her storm tore into the enemy. The metal shards hit exosuits and failed to penetrate, the armor resisting even those projectiles as Roslyn faced them.
Even in exosuit battle armor, Augments moved with a speed no unmodified human could match. They were charging her now, heavy battle rifles echoing in the corridor as they slammed high-speed penetrators into her shield.
The walls around her disintegrated under misses and ricochets, and Roslyn’s power spoke once more. A lance of superheated plasma answered her call, air compressing into a line of intense heat and flame that cut through the leading exosuits like butter.
Two attackers went down. A third. Two more reached Roslyn through everything, vibroblades snapping clear of their armor as they swung for her with speed augmented by implants and armor alike.
Her training was clear: if an Augment has you in arm’s reach, be somewhere else.
Instead, she summoned a blade of force, stepping deeper into the lead Augment’s reach and removing their vibroblade at the elbow. As the other trooper tried to swing their blade to hit her and miss their compatriot, she threw the blade of force at them and conjured another one to stab through the chest plate of the trooper she was next to.
Both soldiers went down, and Roslyn was alone with the wounded and the dead. Some of them would live, she hoped, but none of them were going to get in her way now.
Triumph warred with nausea, and the young Mage forced down both as she went to collect her Admiral.
They wouldn’t be triumphant until they were back with Second Fleet.
The transfer pods were locked down to prevent anyone using them, but the controls for the system were surprisingly simple. Roslyn parked Admiral Alexander in one of the seats and opened up the panel.
She had to chuckle. Inside one of the most secure stations in the galaxy, the controls for the transfer pod looked almost identical to those of the cars she’d stolen as a misfit teenager. Hotwiring the pod was a matter of moments, the vehicle starting to move along the track under its own internal power.
“We’re going to lose gravity in a few moments,” she told Alexander as she rose from the panel. Her own magic was already generating a gravity field to keep her feet on the ground. “Can you keep yourself down yet?”
“No.” Alexander’s voice was more stable now, but that only made the frustration stand out more clearly. “No magic.”
“All right,” Roslyn said gently, poking through the emergency supply cabinet in the pod. She found what she was looking for quickly enough—a portable oxygen mask and a tether. She gave the mask to Alexander and then tethered the other woman to herself.
Alexander was sufficiently present now to put the mask on on her own, smiling gently at Roslyn.
“I’m still here, Lieutenant,” she murmured. “But…the world’s a haze still. I don’t know what they did but I…I know they did it, now.”
“That’s an improvement,” Roslyn admitted. The pod came to a slow halt, sending Alexander drifting up into the air until Roslyn grabbed her by the tether. “We’re going to hit trouble. Stay behind me.
“We need a shuttle, which means we need to get someone to unlock one for us.”
“Didn’t you just hotwire the pod?”
“I can hotwire ground and aircars,” Roslyn confirmed. “Apparently, transfer pods use groundcar control systems. I am a hundred percent certain I cannot hotwire a military shuttle.”
“Then…convince someone?” Alexander asked.
“That’s the plan. We just have to get out this door first,” Roslyn said grimly. She adjusted the tether, making sure Alexander was behind her, and then summoned her most powerful shield.
The door slid open and a superheated blast of plasma hammered into it. Plasma blasters were rare as hen’s teeth, but Roslyn was aware of their existence—and of the fact that they were one-shot weapons.
She pushed her shield out through the door as gunfire and shrapnel rockets burst against it as well. Pulling Alexander behind her, she stepped out behind the shelter of her barrier of impenetrable air…and into hell.
They’d been hoping to catch her unaware. The Augments had to have known what was going to happen if they fired those kinds of weapons against her shield, but she’d been ready—and the backblast from the plasma bolt had been bad enough.
The Republic force’s own weapons had gutted their front line, and the second had dumped their heavy weapons in horror. Gunfire smashed into Roslyn’s shield and she trembled. She w
as reaching the end of her own limits now; she could recognize the feeling.
The RMN Academy made very sure their Mages could recognize that feeling.
Roslyn charged forward into the chaos, pulling Alexander with her as gunfire battered her shield uselessly. She wasn’t even trying to strike back now, just to get past them. She didn’t have the strength left to do both.
Finally, she was clear enough to spare some strength. There was a gap as the defenders tried to swing around to catch her from behind—and she pulled the walls in behind her. There was no real “floor” or “ceiling” there. Roslyn’s spell let her walk wherever she liked, and the Republic troops had mag-boots to do the same.
So, she pulled all four walls in toward the center and crushed them together. No one was getting through after her and Alexander.
“Now the shuttle bay,” she muttered.
The blast door to the shuttle bay was closed, but that didn’t slow her down. It took most of the last of Roslyn’s strength to blast it apart, but she did it. She barely managed to hold a shield long enough to get into the massive void where the shuttles waited, but thankfully, no gunfire echoed against it.
There was no time for calculating or even guessing. She ran for the closest shuttle, what looked like an armored assault shuttle. There was a man hanging in the ramp, gaping at her as she charged. He probably had mag-boots, but he must have missed the security alerts.
From the warmth of the deck, the shuttle had just landed in the last ten minutes or so. It was probably empty, but Roslyn didn’t have time to care.
She used her magic to pin the man to the shuttle and studied his uniform for the insignia she needed to be there.
She barely managed to conceal a sigh of relief when she spotted the pilot’s wings.
“You’re going to unlock this shuttle for me to fly out of here,” she hissed at him.
“Not a bloody chance,” he snarled. “Who the fuck are—”
The Service of Mars Page 23