Roslyn swallowed a moment of nausea. The realities of the Republic’s Prometheus Interface jump system were still sickening to her.
“Building a better drive? Or some kind of…reverse interface?”
“I don’t know,” Killough admitted. “But I do know that Ulla Lafrenz is directly responsible for thousands of deaths and needs to be brought to justice.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Roslyn agreed. “I want to see your data, Killough.”
He tapped his wrist-comp.
“It’s all in here. I’ve had nothing else to work with for weeks. Staying in hotels and suchlike, under false IDs.” He shivered. “Even for me, it’s been a rough month.”
“Sounds it,” she said gently. That explained the weight loss from the file imagery all right. “We need to work together.”
“Agreed. You’re assigned to the new destroyer in orbit, right?” he asked. “I need access to her sensors. I’d love access to her computers to crunch some of the analysis I’ve been poking at, too, but I need her sensors.”
“That’s not entirely my place to give,” Roslyn warned.
“Without it, this could take weeks,” Killough said. “I can theoretically bring you up to speed and have you do the work, but that will take time. And from what I’ve seen, every day we waste is killing people.”
She exhaled and nodded.
“I have to talk to my Captain,” she told him. “I can probably get you aboard ship and access, but it’s not entirely my call,” she repeated.
“Fair.” He tapped a command on his wrist-comp, and her own device chirped receipt. “That’s everything I’ve got so far, just in case something happens to me. I think I’ve managed to avoid notice from the lab’s protectors, but meeting with you has made us both vulnerable.”
Roslyn nodded, considering the situation.
“Sir, I hate to interrupt, but you need to listen in on the Guardia channels,” Mooren suddenly told her. “I don’t know how much attention you and your friend have drawn, but there’s a riot headed this way that did not exist twenty minutes ago!”
16
Roslyn’s team didn’t have official access to the Guardia network, but she was somehow unsurprised when Mooren uploaded her a full link to the local police service’s operations map.
She projected it into the air between her and Killough, with Knight and the other two Marines closing in to see what was going on. It took her a moment to sort out the iconography—she’d been trained on standard Protectorate police symbology at one point, but she’d never used it before—but even the obvious factors were bad.
The entire region around them was lit up with calls for violence, break-ins and vandalism. The icons were shaded by severity, and even as Roslyn watched, more icons flashed to red—and new icons were appearing.
They were clustered in several locations, one of which was now covered by a rough circle in the map with a new code attached to it: the one Mooren had flagged.
Riot in Progress.
“What the hell is going on?” she whispered.
“I don’t know, but look at the geography, Chambers,” Killough told her. “Where did that bomb go off?”
“Directly above the apartment building,” Roslyn said. It couldn’t be…but a chill horror was spreading through her soul as she followed the MISS agent’s logic.
“Wind patterns would have spread it to the east,” Killough continued implacably, drawing a pattern in the hologram with his hand…a pattern that nearly overlapped with the chaos suddenly overwhelming several square kilometers.
“Some kind of…rage toxin?” Knight asked. “Included in the bomb’s casing, to spread it as far as it could go?”
“It can’t be related,” Roslyn said weakly. The logic was too neat. It explained too much.
“Occam’s razor, Chambers,” Killough said grimly. “The simplest solution is often the correct one. If there had been some kind of toxin in the bomb, we’d be seeing a pattern like this. Depending on the weight of the molecules, it could have taken until this morning to take effect.”
“Or most people were breathing it in while they were asleep and we’re only seeing a critical mass of people affected now,” Roslyn pointed out.
“Mooren, get your people down from the rooftops. Fall back on my position. Avoid attention if you can.”
“Understood,” the Sergeant replied. “We’re coming in.”
Roslyn looked at the map again and shivered as the cluster of red icons marking the riot continued to move in her direction. There were four clusters in the affected region, each seeming to gather new people as they moved.
“I need to talk to the Guardia,” she decided. “Watch our backs.”
Knight and Killough nodded simultaneously, exchanging a grim chuckle as they realized what they’d done.
“The Marines are in charge, Killough,” Roslyn told him. “This situation is…weird.”
She stepped away from her companions and switched her wrist-comp to pure communications and tried to raise Lieutenant Oliveira.
It took over a minute for the young Guardia officer to respond to her call—a minute in which she started to be able to hear the shouting. It…wasn’t a coherent noise. If there were words there, she couldn’t make them out at this range.
“Commander, I’m afraid I’m rather busy. How can I help you?” Oliveira asked, doing an admirable job of trying to conceal his stress. He wasn’t managing it, but he was trying.
“I was hoping I might be able to help you if we trade information, Lieutenant,” Roslyn replied. “I’m at the Tres Plantas Parque and everything around me appears to be going crazy. What’s going on, Lieutenant…and can the RMN help?”
There was a pause.
“We’re facing a series of riots for unknown reason,” the young officer told her. “I don’t know if you can help, but we’re barely sure of what’s going on.”
“Have you connected with Huntress yet?” Roslyn asked. “If nothing else, my people should be able to provide you with better overhead. Captain Daalman also has Marines and access to Nix supplies.”
Nix solutions were the Protectorate’s tailored knockout gasses. Self-neutralizing above certain concentrations, they were almost perfectly safe. Of course, knocking large groups of people unconscious was dangerous regardless of how safe the drug used was, but it
