“We have some stocks of Nix of our own, but we’re hoping not to get to that point,” Oliveira told her. He hesitated, then continued grimly. “There’s a Guardia precinct station two blocks to the west of you, Commander Chambers. We’ve lost contact, but there’s too much going on for my superiors to spare a ground unit to check it out.
“If you and your Marine escort could investigate, we would be…grateful.”
“We can do that,” Roslyn said, glancing over to confirm that Mooren had joined them. “Does the precinct station have a shuttle landing site? Several of my people are still at the dock along with our heavier gear.”
“It does,” Oliveira replied. “Commander…while I understand that I have no ability to give you orders, please do not use lethal weaponry. The situation is still under control.”
“I wasn’t planning on it, Lieutenant,” Roslyn said. “But…Oliveira, we have reason to believe the riots may be linked to the explosion last night. You may be looking at some kind of chemical or even biological weapon.
“Your priority has to be containment.”
He was silent for several seconds.
“That isn’t my call, but I’ll pass the suggestion up the chain,” he told her. “And the recommendation to call your Captain. We’ll see.”
The channel closed and Roslyn shook her head as she rejoined her people.
“Guardia realizes something odd is going on,” she told them. “We’ve been asked to investigate a precinct station that’s out of coms. I don’t like the sound of that…but they don’t have the time to check it out.
“Please tell me we have stunguns,” she asked Mooren.
The Marine Sergeant grimaced.
“Knight’s team has full-size weapons, but the rest of us just have SmartDart sidearms,” she admitted. “We were expecting to be countering an ambush by Republic covert ops, not…whatever the hell we’re doing.”
Roslyn had the same weapon, an oversized pistol that fired the intelligent taser darts. The problem was that it took two SmartDarts to reliably disable an adult human—and the pistol only held eight.
“We’ve got what we’ve got,” she told the Marines and Killough. “Let’s go find out what happened to the local cops.”
17
Their first sign that something was even more wrong than they’d anticipated arrived just after they left the park, in the form of a girl of maybe seventeen, who charged out of the bushes with an incomprehensible scream.
She was on one of the Marines before Roslyn and the others could even react, clawing and screaming in rage as her hands scrabbled on cloth-covered body armor. The Marine tried to pull her off of him and she went for his eyes.
The sharp crack of a stungun carbine echoed through the park as Knight opened fire. Three SmartDarts appeared on the teenager, their calibrated electric shocks flinging her away from the Marine and onto the ground.
SmartDarts were locally networked, identifying how many of them were in the target and synchronizing their shocks for the size and weight of the victim. Like most nonlethal weapons available to the Protectorate, they were nearly perfectly safe and nearly perfectly effective, expected to disable a target for a minimum of five minutes.
Everyone in Roslyn’s team was moving on when the girl got right back up and charged at Knight. Clawed fingers tore across the Marine Corporal’s neck, and Roslyn saw blood as Knight went down.
Roslyn flung out a hand and threw power across the edge of the park, picking up the teenage girl and suspending her in the air. The child hung there, still trying desperately to claw at the nearest Marine with madness in her eyes.
“Move,” Roslyn ordered the Marines, maneuvering the girl out of the way. “Someone check Knight’s injuries.”
“I’m just scratched up; she didn’t have long-enough nails to do more,” the Corporal told her.
“Check them anyway,” Roslyn snapped. “We don’t know if the toxin can be transferred.”
The girl’s eyes met Roslyn’s and she shivered. There was nothing there. No personality. No sense. Just mad rage.
“Cuff the girl,” she ordered. “We’ll bring her with us. I can’t…”
“We can’t leave a kid tied up in a park when we have no idea what’s going on,” Mooren agreed, already producing a set of collapsible manacles from inside her fatigues. She approached their prisoner carefully, watching for the spasms as the girl still tried to lash out at whoever was near her.
Once the cuffs were on the child’s wrists and ankles, Roslyn released her from the magic.
“I’ll carry her,” Killough offered. “I’m not armed.”
The agent scooped the girl up into a fireman’s carry with ease, despite her attempts to squirm around and bite him.
“This is nuts,” the Marine who’d been jumped muttered. “She’s way too strong.”
“Not as strong as tempered steel,” Mooren replied. “Come on, people. I don’t know if there are answers at the Commander’s precinct station…but I do know that Lieutenant Herbert is bringing our armor there.”
They managed to make it to the Guardia station without any more surprises—mostly by actively avoiding people. There was no way to be sure if anyone they ran into was going to react like their prisoner, and they couldn’t handle large numbers of prisoners.
The station itself was deathly still…the appropriate term, Roslyn realized, when she saw the doors had been torn from their hinges. It took a moment to recognize the chunks scattered amidst the debris of the front entrance as having once been a Guardia officer.
“I’m going to be sick,” Knight said, her voice surprisingly level.
“No time for that,” Mooren snapped. “Team, forward. Stunguns out.” She took a breath. “Shoot anything that moves. We can apologize later if we tase a Guardia officer.”
The reception area past the wrecked doors was worse. Several physically dismantled bodies were scattered across the benches, and there was blood everywhere.
“What the hell happened here?” Roslyn demanded. “I thought things only started going crazy a few minutes ago.”
“Like you said, people inhaled whatever it was when they were asleep,” Killough noted. “But where would you have a lot of awake people?”
“A precinct station,” Mooren said grimly. “Shuttle pad is on the
