There was a reason the lab had been built with a tram, though Roslyn was still wondering where the power for all of this came from. She supposed they could be hijacking the treatment plant’s power lines—or just running a fusion plant using the water from the reservoir, for that matter.
Sorprendidas had a lower-than-normal ratio of heavy water, but enough was running through the drainage and reservoir for the lab to pull oxygen and deuterium from the system easily enough.
And even a small fusion reactor would power what she saw in Knight’s half-second-long video clip.
“Active sensors here, here and here,” Mooren told everyone, flagging them in the image they’d quickly thrown together. “These four units up here are combat lasers. The Republic’s personal laser weaponry was always better than ours, so those can almost certainly punch through your suits.
“And if those didn’t scare us enough, this pair down here are eight-barrel twenty-millimeter gatling railguns,” the Sergeant continued, marking two more objects on the screen. “At that size, it doesn’t matter if they’re firing penetrators or not. A hit will turn you to jelly inside your armor.
“All automated, but it’s not like we brought an EMP bomb with us.”
Roslyn snorted. That was a terrible idea on multiple levels.
“We could call in a bunker-buster strike from Huntress,” Knight suggested. “That would end this whole situation real quick.”
“And potentially spread their toxin across half a continent, even if we ignore the fact that we’re right next to a park, a suburb, several apartment complexes, a school…” Roslyn didn’t finish the list. She didn’t need to.
“I know, I know,” the Corporal conceded. “What do we do about the door? Mage-shield close enough for AP grenades?”
“Doable,” Roslyn confirmed. “Sergeant? This is your area of expertise, not mine.”
The guns were around another turn in the passage, denying anyone approaching the ability to engage at long range. They’d turn the corner and find themselves within fifty meters of the weapons platforms. The corner itself would give some cover but not enough.
“Mage-shield is an option,” Mooren agreed. “But we know there’s Mages in there, sir. How are you doing?”
Roslyn mentally poked at her internal “gas tank.”
“If I have to face another Mage, I’d really rather not push things more than I have to,” she admitted. “I can handle it, no problem, but if we have another option…”
Mooren grinned.
“That’s what I figured. And as for this, well, there’s a reason they sent Augments out to stop us before we got to it. The Republic knows damn well that Marines can handle this, clever as the setup is.”
The answer, obvious even to Roslyn in hindsight, was grenades. Lots and lots of armor-piercing grenades, combined with the exosuit-clad Marines’ ability to target through the optics of the weapon without exposing themselves to fire.
They suffered accuracy-wise, but by the time the two Marines with grenade launchers had walked several magazines of armor-piercing grenades across the heavily fortified door, there wasn’t much left.
“Grenadiers, fall back,” Mooren ordered, stepping back and lowering her own weapon. “Penetrator rifles up; target anything still moving.”
Six Marines moved forward. Roslyn followed them, but only enough to stand next to the Marine Sergeant, thoroughly aware that Mooren would stop her from doing anything stupid.
“Seems straightforward enough,” she murmured as the heavy rifles spoke in the corridor, ripping apart the single still-operating turret with their high-velocity tungsten darts.
“Straightforward, yes,” the Marine agreed. “But we are now out of armor-piercing grenades, so if we run into any defenders with exosuits, it’ll be down to the penetrator rifles to handle them.”
“That’s what they’re for, isn’t it?” Roslyn asked.
“Yup. But I’m always more comfortable with a backup option,” Mooren told her. “And since I’m one of my grenadiers, I’m always aware of the grenade magazine levels.”
“Fair,” Roslyn allowed. “We clear?” The firing had stopped.
“Hold on.”
The Marine NCO stepped forward to check on her people. After a few seconds, she waved the rest of the squad forward.
“One wrecked door, Lieutenant Commander,” she reported. “Now we see what the hell they decided to hide down here.”
The door itself had seemed impressive enough, but it had failed in the face of Marines with sufficient aggression. Roslyn crossed the last few meters of corridor gingerly, with exosuited guardians all around her, but it was clear that the automated defenders hadn’t even fired a shot.
As Mooren had said, the lab’s defenders had sent Augments out to fight them in the corridor because they’d been all too aware of the vulnerabilities of the fortifications against Marines. The Marines weren’t the Protectorate’s best—that title was reserved for the handful of elite forces that guarded the Mage-Queen and supported her Hands—but they were damn good.
“Open sesame,” Mooren said drily as she stepped through the wreckage her grenades had made. “Knight, get new drones up. I’m pretty sure we blew the crap out of the anti-drone systems, and despite the pretty foyer we just made a mess of, I don’t see a map anywhere.”
Moore’s description of the space they were entering was surprisingly accurate—both in the “pretty foyer” and the “mess” aspects. There was a tram dock—empty for obvious reasons—to Roslyn’s left, but the right side of the room could have been the entrance for any large corporate office, with a reception desk and a set of comfortable-looking chairs.
Those chairs had been ripped to shreds by shrapnel from the door’s destruction, and the reception desk wasn’t in much better shape. Roslyn doubted anyone had ever shown up at this entrance to the lab with anything so mundane as an appointment, but they’d been set up for it.
“I don’t see a receptionist, so I think we’re going to have to find our own way around,” Roslyn agreed. “Knight, are there any intact data ports there?”
The cyberwarfare Marine and her drones were already most of the way to the desk when Roslyn asked. Exosuit gauntlets tore through the remnants of the desk,
