The other two vehicles slid to a halt around her and she drew a deep breath.
“Sensor check?” she ordered.
“Nothing pinging so far,” Mooren replied. “There’s nothing in the parking lot, but the building itself is solid enough to defeat our mobile passives.”
“Is that normal?” Roslyn asked. “Because that doesn’t sound normal to me.”
“Most water treatment plants are built with twenty-centimeter concrete shells so they can do things like plant trees on top,” the Marine replied. “But most don’t have a lead lining, and I’d say this place does.”
“Right,” Roslyn said drily. “I think this is the place.” She switched to the squad channel. “Lock and load, everyone. Remember: we want prisoners, but we are expecting serious resistance.
“This is effectively a Republic Intelligence Directorate facility. Whatever the RID would have packed in, we can expect the rogue Prometheus Mages to have packed in—and we know there are at least two Mages in here.
“We have backup if things go sideways, but I don’t expect to face resistance in enough force to hold off a full squad of Marines,” she told them. “They hid this place from the Republic, from the Sorprendidas government, from us. They couldn’t risk an army, and it isn’t big enough for one.
“They almost certainly know we’re coming, but they have no idea what they’re dealing with,” Roslyn said. “Let’s remind them why everyone fears the Royal Martian Marines!”
“Oorah!”
29
“I’ve got the doors,” Bolivar promised as Roslyn reached the entrance to the treatment plant. “I’m sure you’ve got six ways in, but I’d rather we minimize the property damage.”
She chuckled and waved him forward. The Guardia officer wore very similar hazmat and light armor to her and Killough. Like them, he was dwarfed by the Marines in their exosuits, but all of them were equally anonymous now.
With properly fitted armor, even Roslyn’s chest was flattened into androgyny. Modern armor handled that surprisingly comfortably, while rendering the team utterly uniform except for height.
The doors opened within seconds as Bolivar tapped a command sequence into the door, then stood back and gestured the Martian personnel forward. He was clearly not so foolish as to go first when there were people with exosuit armor around.
“Clear,” Corporal Andrews announced as their team swept the first area. “Treatment plant itself seems quiet, but there’s enough machinery to muck with the motion and heat sensors.”
“Keep the mark one eyeball peeled, then,” Mooren ordered. “Marines, move up! Rest of you…follow on.”
Roslyn chuckled at the rest of you designation—though she didn’t exactly follow the instruction, either. She was in the middle of the pack, with half a dozen of the Marines ahead of her and six behind. Power flickered around her hands, invisible even to her, ready to shield the entire squad when—not if—their enemy made a move.
The water treatment plant was an entity of open pools and massive pipes, with machinery humming efficiently and ignoring the mere humans who wandered through its depths. From the statistics she’d seen, it could handle over a trillion liters a day. At that rate, it would still take three weeks to empty the massive reservoir installed under the park—and Nueva Portugal had four similar facilities.
And the new one had been installed out of clear need. The rainy season on this section of Sorprendidas brought enough water that each district of the city had its own drainage system leading to a reservoir-and-treatment facility like this.
Roslyn was glad she wasn’t visiting the city in that rainy season, even if it would have made this job a lot easier if the drainage tunnels were full of water. Right now, the machinery around her was running at less than five percent of capacity, almost quiescent against the thunder that the plant must be filled with during the rainy season.
“Anyone seeing anything other than tanks, pools and piping?” she asked. “All of our estimates and guesses say they have to have an access in here.”
“Nothing at this level,” Mooren admitted. “Knight, get some drones up. I’m guessing we need to go down.”
“Two more levels under us,” Roslyn told the Marine. Tactical drones launched from several of the Marines’ suits, the pigeon-sized winged robots flickering out across the facility. “And not a soul. I understand the logic, but damn, is it creepy.”
“A team of thirty does a full inspection on one of these plants every day,” Bolivar said quietly. “Five days a week and they take weekends off. This one was inspected yesterday, and the report was clean. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Yeah. There’s nothing here that wasn’t built when the plant was,” Roslyn agreed. “And somewhere, I’m guessing on the very bottom level, is a door that’s either hidden from the inspection team or the team just takes for granted now.”
“We’ll find out,” Mooren replied. “Marines! Map says the stairs are in the middle. Do not split up.”
It seemed Roslyn wasn’t the only one feeling twitchy.
The waste treatment plant had large freight elevators to handle replacement parts, but it was clear that the main method of reaching the two lower floors was the stairs Mooren had sent everyone to. Wide enough for six exosuited Marines to walk down abreast, the shallow steps spiraled down a large opening descending twenty meters into the earth.
“Skip the middle level,” Roslyn ordered. “Scan for threats with the drones, but I’m betting our access is on the bottom.”
No one verbally acknowledged her, but four of Knight’s drones flashed away as they passed the first sub-level, and the Marines kept tramping downward. Each ten-meter-high level was a duplicate of the one above, with a few large cylindrical tanks descending the full height of the treatment plant.
The bottom of the plant was the same smoothed industrial concrete as the two floors above it. Nothing about the facility yet indicated that it was a cover for a secret bioweapon lab—but that, Roslyn supposed, was the point.
Secret labs shouldn’t look like secret labs.
“Stick to a group, move
