A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10), стр. 58
“Understood. Where will you be?” Andrews asked.
“On the surface. I’m the only Mage we have, which means I’m our first line of defense,” Roslyn told him. “Keep Knight working on the databases. Find out what you can about anything this base has that we wouldn’t expect—supposedly, there was an emergency purge that could kill all of the nanites in the facility.
“We’ve got a lot going on, but if we can find that, we might just have a chance.”
Andrews exhaled a long sigh and nodded firmly.
“I’ll get it done, sir, but I could use more Marines,” they admitted.
“We can’t risk it,” Roslyn said. “Any Marines I bring in have definitely been exposed. Their armor and shuttles are keeping them safe, but we don’t know how well the weapon will survive on the exterior of a suborbital craft.
“Or even in vacuum, for that matter. Despite its effects and patterns, it’s not actually a biological weapon. Vacuum probably won’t hurt it at all.”
She shook her head.
“There’s an answer in this place and several ways to find it, Corporal,” she told Andrews. “I will do everything I can to make sure we live long enough to help.”
“What happens if all of this fails, sir?” the Marine asked.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “At that point, I’ll probably be dead.”
The problem, however, was that Roslyn Chambers was a Royal Martian Navy tactical officer. She knew what the answer to a major untreatable infection that had effectively wiped out a major population center was.
When all other options ran out, Song of the Huntress would use thermonuclear weapons to sanitize Nueva Portugal from orbit.
40
It was a strange feeling, walking up the Orpheus complex access tunnel while hundreds of people streamed the other way. They’d started with children from the school, but now it was everyone they could find.
They had to desperately hope that no one was making it into the underground structure who was infected. Roslyn had always hoped that the decontamination chambers in the complex would be able to handle the Orpheus weapon—they’d have been of little use to the complex if they hadn’t—but confirmation was valuable.
The fear was the other end of the tunnel, where the wrecked door from the water treatment facility was being sealed off when she arrived. Multiple layers of prefabricated plastic panels were now set up, with a smaller stream of people passing out of the double-wide doors on this side.
After a moment, Roslyn confirmed people were coming through in batches of twenty—as many as the two class six decontamination chambers they’d brought down from Huntress could handle.
With the chambers operating alternately, twenty people entered the tunnel every thirty seconds—and Roslyn didn’t see an easy way out. Whoever Bolivar had co-opted to assemble the quarantine array hadn’t considered the chance anyone might be leaving.
That was…probably reasonable. Sighing, Roslyn pulled Bolivar’s current coordinates and ran a calculation as she stepped to the side of the crowd heading deeper underground.
A few seconds later, she dropped from the air next to the Guardia officer, grunting as she absorbed the impact. Without knowing what was around Bolivar, she’d teleported high enough that she’d have landed on someone instead of appearing in them.
“Sir!” Bolivar greeted her. “The quarantine arrays are set up and the infection zone hasn’t reached us yet.”
“That’s good news. How close are we?” Roslyn asked.
He grimaced.
“It’s not good news,” he told her. “We are now surrounded on all sides. Closest approach is seven kilometers on the north side. There are Marines hanging out above the closest group, and they’re eyeballing a mob of about twenty thousand.”
“Who’s left inside that zone?” Roslyn asked. Nueva Portugal was a large city, with two million people spread across a zone sixty kilometers or so across. Even with the park, though, there should have been at least a few hundred thousand people within seven kilometers of the park.
“A lot of people,” Bolivar admitted. “We’ve got almost ten thousand people underground, I think, but the decontamination slows us to forty a minute…and we don’t know what the infection radius of someone carrying the weapon is.”
“We need to decon everyone,” Roslyn agreed. “Fuck. How many, Bolivar?”
“We’ve probably got another fifteen thousand gathered around the park now,” he told her. “Maybe twenty. But there are a hundred and thirty thousand people living inside that radius of us, Commander Chambers.
“We can’t even save them. We’re ordering everyone who can to shelter in place. Seal their windows and doors as best they can. Most homes have enough air to last the occupants a day or two if they manage to get a proper seal.”
“It’s all we can do,” Roslyn agreed. “And if the danger zone around an infected is low enough, it might be enough just for them to lay low.”
“Maybe,” he agreed. There was very little hope in his tone, though. Somehow, Bolivar kept going—but Roslyn could tell he was beyond hoping for more than saving everyone in front of him.
Roslyn had to hope for more. She wasn’t sure what the answer was going to be yet, but she had a Royal Martian Navy destroyer and half a dozen fully trained Mages. Whether the answer was firepower or magic, she would find a way.
“Sir, this is Sergeant Colburn,” the Marine reported in. “We’re flying overwatch on your closest problem. What can we do for you, Commander?”
“Video relay to start, Sergeant,” Roslyn told him. She was looking at an overall map, but red icons didn’t tell her what she was really dealing with. She needed that view, that understanding of the nature of the problem.
“Understood. Linking through now.”
The projection on her helmet HUD shifted. A square view from the assault shuttle’s cameras lit up, and she zoomed in on the threat and shivered.
Even mob was the wrong word. It was more like a flood of human beings. The front and sides of the flood were smashing into doors, vehicles, anything that