Mooren stayed with her, presumably because she remembered they were supposed to be Roslyn’s bodyguards, not her strike team.
“Coming, sir?” she finally asked as Roslyn finished her calculations.
“No,” Roslyn replied sardonically. “I’m leading. Give me your hand.”
The Sergeant looked at her in confusion.
“Give me your hand, Staff Sergeant, and remember that I am a Navy Mage.”
Realization swept over Sergeant Mooren’s face and she took Roslyn’s hand. Power flashed over them as Roslyn stepped and they moved from the alleyway to the corridor outside unit 322 of the apartment complex.
“The door, please, Sergeant,” Roslyn ordered as she took a deep breath to steady herself. Fifty-odd meters wasn’t as draining as a full light-year—but on the other hand, she had the runic infrastructure of a starship’s amplifier for that teleport. Any teleport was draining.
To her surprise, Mooren was only slightly off-balance. Most people who rode along on a personal teleport ended up vomiting. The Sergeant just took a moment to regather her senses before following Roslyn’s order.
The presence of anti-intrusion measures was more than sufficient cause for Roslyn and her people to break into the apartment, and Sergeant Mooren was an apt student of the Royal Martian Marine Corps’s method for forced entry.
An armored boot slammed into the door next to the lock. It was as much a test as anything else—a lot of doors would resist a regular human’s muscles.
This one wasn’t one of those, and the flimsy manufactured wood shattered under the Sergeant’s boot, sending pieces flying into the room beyond as Mooren followed up with her entire torso.
Roslyn was right behind the Marine as the remains of the door crashed to the floor around the other woman. She had no time to take in the contents or state of the apartment as she realized there were more anti-intrusion measures.
She didn’t know for certain what the black cylinder in the middle of the room was, but it looked like the kind of object that had THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY printed on it somewhere.
“Bomb!” Mooren shouted in agreement with Roslyn’s assessment, charging forward to examine the black device.
Roslyn was right behind her, cursing herself for her failure to follow the risks all the way through.
“No time,” she told the Sergeant, shoving Mooren aside to lay her hands on the device. That the bomb hadn’t gone off already was probably due to the speed of the Marine’s entrance, but Roslyn doubted they had any time at all.
Her magic flared to life again and pulsed through the runes in her hands. She felt the device heat as the explosion began—and then the bomb was gone.
The room was silent.
“Where did you send it?” Mooren asked quietly.
“Fifteen klicks straight up,” Roslyn said. “I really fucking hope there was no one in that airspace.”
13
“Sweep the apartment,” Roslyn ordered the first Marines to join them. Coming down from the adrenaline high had occupied most of the minute it had taken the rest of the squad to reach them. The fire team certainly hadn’t expected to find their two superiors waiting for them in the apartment and had entered with weapons drawn.
“Yes, sir,” the Corporal replied immediately, gesturing for his Marines to check out individual rooms.
“I don’t think we’re going to find much, sir,” Mooren admitted as she and Roslyn finally took the time to look around. “The EMP system will have self-destructed automatically—and so would anything linked to it.”
The apartment was a solid midrange unit that would have looked perfectly normal on any planet Roslyn had ever visited. It was significantly nicer than the unit she’d lived in after leaving prison as a teenager, that was certain.
It was also a complete disaster. Someone had gone through everything. The tightly upholstered furniture had been sliced open with a blade. Every drawer in the kitchen had been emptied out on the floor. Anything in the main space that could be opened had been.
“Someone already went through here with a knife,” Roslyn agreed. “But we’ll see what we can find regardless.”
She knelt down by where the bomb had been sitting and studied the impression in the carpet.
“The bomb was here for a while,” she noted. “I guess that’s positive.”
“Positive?” Mooren asked.
“The bomb wasn’t set for us, Sergeant,” Roslyn said. “It was set for Killough and it was never detonated. That means he didn’t come back here—and while that doesn’t mean he’s alive, it increases the odds of it.”
Her wrist-comp started to buzz with incoming messages, and Roslyn grimaced.
“And now I need to explain why a bomb just went off above me,” she noted. “What’s your bet, Sergeant? Captain Daalman or the locals?”
“No bet, sir. It’s the Captain.”
Roslyn nodded silently and stepped away from the Marines as they continued to sweep the apartment.
“Lieutenant Commander, would you happen to know why a midsized explosive just detonated in the sky above Nueva Portugal?” Daalman asked calmly.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Because it was that or watch it blow up an apartment building, sir.”
There was a long silence.
“That bomb was enough to level several city blocks,” the Mage-Captain noted. “If you’re in an apartment building, how many people just nearly died?”
Roslyn winced.
“Assuming half of the residents are away from home because it’s only midafternoon, several hundred,” she said levelly. “I was investigating a potential location for a contact, sir. And there were anti-intrusion measures.”
“May I remind you, Lieutenant Commander, that the last thing we can afford is to cause trouble with the locals?” Daalman said. “Nearly killing several hundred people would count.”
“I did not anticipate explosives, sir,” Roslyn admitted. “I…” She breathed in sharply, glancing at the Marines and keeping her voice low enough that they couldn’t hear her.
“I don’t think I accurately assessed the risks,” she confessed. “I didn’t think a ground investigation would be dangerous in ways the Marines couldn’t handle.”
Of all people, Roslyn
