“You have a plan,” Daalman said flatly. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “I’m taking my team in through what we believe is the main entrance. I’m forwarding you a map of the drainage tunnels they have previously used for entering and exiting the facility. The network is large enough to handle transport vehicles.
“I need Huntress’s Marines to move against anyone who exits from that network as we move in. I don’t think we can afford the time or the risk to bring in the Guardia or the local Army.”
“No. This has to be Martian,” Daalman agreed. “You’re talking about kicking in the front door with twelve Marines and one Mage, Chambers. Surely—”
“We’re looking at over a hundred potential exits, sir,” Roslyn interrupted. “I need Major Dickens’s Marines to make sure no one escapes. I trust Sergeant Mooren and her people to back me while we punch through whatever they have.
“They can’t have an army down there. They couldn’t have hidden that from the locals—and all of this was as hidden from the Republic as it was from us.”
Daalman sighed.
“All right,” she agreed. “But I’m moving Navy Mages in with the Marines, and you will call for backup if you need it, Commander. I’ve got your back, to the end of the line.
“Let’s not fuck this up.”
“I’m not planning on it, sir. I will keep you in the loop as much as I can.”
“You’d better. At the end of the day, if this goes wrong, the court-martial will string me up right next to you,” Daalman told her.
Roslyn chuckled bitterly. They both knew the truth: if this went wrong, Roslyn would be long dead before any court-martial took place.
28
“We don’t have much that fits exosuits,” the young Guardia Lieutenant said nervously, watching as twelve Marines, each augmented to a full two meters in height by the battle armor, crossed his precinct’s front yard.
“Do you have enough?” Roslyn asked gently. She couldn’t be much older than the Guardia officer, but experience mattered as much as years sometimes—and there was a vast gulf between her experience of war and conflict and the local cop who’d never left his world.
“We can fit four in the back of one of our SUVs, but the suits won’t fit in the front to drive,” the youth told her. “You’d need three SUVs and three drivers…”
“Well, we’ve got two drivers,” Killough replied, stepping up beside Roslyn. Like her, he was dressed in the same lighter combat gear they’d worn before. There just hadn’t been time to fit anyone in exosuit armor, let alone train them.
Roslyn had left the Academy with a field promotion long before she’d been supposed to receive exosuit training, and the armor training given to a Navy officer was perfunctory at best, regardless. The MISS spy had no training.
Light armor and hazmat add-ons, it was.
The hazmat helmets Killough was carrying drew the Guardia officer’s gaze, and he swallowed as Roslyn took hers from the spy.
“I’ll ask for volunteers to drive the third vehicle,” he offered. “I don’t know if we have the proper hazmat—”
“That won’t be necessary, Lieutenant,” a rich baritone said from behind them. “I brought my own gear, and I’ll drive the Lieutenant Commander’s people.”
Roslyn turned to find Captain Bolivar having just emerged from a Guardia car at the edge of the precinct yard. She caught herself smiling brightly at the man, his presence a breath of hope in a difficult situation.
“You didn’t brief us that you were pulling off another stunt, Commander,” Bolivar continued as the Lieutenant skittered half-consciously away. “Can we help, beyond providing cars?”
“Huntress’s people are standing by to capture anyone who runs, Captain,” she told him. “If we’re in the right place, your people aren’t ready for this fight.”
“There’s only three things in the universe I won’t back my tac-teams against,” Bolivar said drily. “There were four, but you guys dissolved the Space Assault Regiments.”
“Mages, Augments and Marines in exosuits?” Roslyn asked.
“You didn’t even need two guesses,” Bolivar agreed. “And from that…”
“Your people aren’t ready for this fight,” she repeated. “I can’t say more.”
The Guardia officer whistled softly.
“Read and understood, Mage-Commander,” he told her. “I’m just the driver, then, but I think Sorprendidas has the right to have somebody in this operation, don’t you?”
“It’s not the worst plan,” Roslyn agreed. “You get the back car.”
“The most protected one, huh?” the Guardia Captain noted. “Who’s driving the one in front?”
“Who do you think?” she asked.
The drive from the precinct station to the water treatment facility was probably the safest part of the trip. Roslyn had no intention of taking their borrowed vehicles—two of which were marked Guardia trucks—into the drainage tunnels. They were unlikely to be attacked on their way to the lab.
Which was good, as overhead and commentary hadn’t quite given Roslyn the true scale of the school they were driving past. It was the crowning jewel of the suburb Triple Q had built there, a solidly built complex that had to be home to at least two thousand kids.
“I do not like how close that school is to this,” she murmured on a private channel to Killough and Mooren. “We need to keep that in mind. If things go sideways, we need to pull any action away from the school.”
“I wanted to wait until nightfall,” the Marine reminded her. “But you were right. A lot of people could die if we wait.”
“Or Lafrenz could escape,” Killough added, the spy’s voice grim. “If she gets away, all of this might end up being for nothing.”
“Let’s try to keep the fighting underground,” Roslyn told them. “Swift and surgical. This ends today.”
The water treatment plant’s security gates happily gave way to their vehicles’ Guardia codes, the automatic systems pulling the entrance open to allow the three vehicles entrance into a parking lot concealed amidst a carefully manicured collection of trees.
The plant itself was a low-slung bunker only visible as a structure—as opposed to a hill slowly growing
