“Clear; you can move up,” the Corporal reported.
Everyone else followed and Roslyn shivered as she saw another set of well-used restraints—and another brain-extraction machine. There was only one set of “test subject” rooms, though, before she entered a space that she couldn’t help but recognize.
Every Mage would know it, but a Jump Mage or a Rune Scribe would recognize an enchanting workshop instantly. The runes that propelled a starship through the stars were the most critical use of the silver polymer humanity used for magical constructs, but it was hardly the only one.
Roslyn herself had a third rune most Navy Mages didn’t. Inlaid at the top of her right palm was the projector rune of a Marine Combat Mage, acquired after her sojourn as a Republic prisoner.
The lab in front of her could have easily fit a tank and allowed a team of scribes to work on it. The number of microscopes and what Roslyn guessed were micro-manipulator tools suggested the work was being done at a different scale…a scale that sent a chill running down her spine.
She didn’t have time to do more than recognize the room before a door on the far side opened and a tall blonde woman dressed in a white lab coat stepped out, leveling a sardonic gaze on Roslyn and her Marines.
“If you lay down your weapons now,” Mage-Surgeon Ulla Roxana Lafrenz told the people who’d come to arrest her, “I will make your deaths painless and spare this city the horror you risk unleashing.”
Roslyn wasn’t even sure which of her Marines tried to shoot Lafrenz. At least four stunguns fired at the Mage in near-unison.
The SmartDarts shattered on the shield the woman had raised before she’d even entered the room, and she flicked the fragments back toward the Marines with a dismissive gesture. The fragments hit with enough force to send at least one Marine crumpling backward, their armor penetrated—and a sparking broken capacitor buried in their flesh.
“Fall back,” Roslyn ordered calmly, raising her own shield in time to intercept Lafrenz’s next strike. Tiny darts of fire, both more precise and hotter than Roslyn herself could summon, hammered into the barrier.
She walked forward anyway, bringing her shield with as her Marines thankfully followed her orders.
“Mage Ulla Lafrenz, by the laws of the Protectorate, the Charter of Mages, and even the damn law of the former Republic, you are guilty of more crimes than I can count,” she told the other woman. “You are under arrest. Submit to Mage-cuffing or I will take you in by force.”
Lafrenz laughed.
“Really, child? Do you think that’s going to happen?”
“No,” Roslyn admitted—and she hurled lightning across the room. Machinery and scanners shattered or overloaded as electricity arced across the air and she hammered into Lafrenz’s shield with wave after wave of power.
She couldn’t be sure, but she suspected there was a moment of concern in the other Mage’s eyes. Despite that, Lafrenz’s shield stayed up, and the Mage managed to take several steps forward against Roslyn’s barrage.
“It will cost millions to replace that,” Lafrenz noted. “Your incursion into this lab has been an unexpected complication, but believe me, child, we are more than ready for you. Did you really think one Mage would succeed here?”
The Marines were out of the room now, Roslyn recognized. Almost certainly at least one was set up with a penetrator rifle, waiting for a shot—but unless Lafrenz was less competent than expected, they weren’t going to get it.
“I’ve had a lot of practice,” Roslyn told the other woman in response to her question, sending lightning hurtling into the roof above the Prometheus Mage, trying to collapse debris onto her.
To her surprise, Lafrenz’s shield extended above her head at an angle. The debris Roslyn pulled down hit the slanted armor of force and slid aside.
She made a mental note, adjusting her own armor slightly as she watched the effect. Lafrenz was surprisingly good at this for a research Mage.
As she was thinking that, Lafrenz launched her own next attack. For a second time, tiny superheated motes of fire flashed across the room—but this time they were all targeted on Roslyn.
The young Mage’s shields weren’t as efficient as Lafrenz’s, but she channeled more power into her defenses as the older woman’s magic hammered against her. Slowly, Roslyn walked forward.
Then she was moving faster, pushing through Lafrenz’s attack like it didn’t matter, and the other Mage took a step back. Then another—and then Lafrenz tore up the floor, trying to both fling Roslyn back and create a barrier between them.
Roslyn countered with a blade of force as large as she was, a variation of the antimissile spell she’d adapted on the fly at Hyacinth. The blade cut the debris away, clearing a path for Roslyn’s advance.
Now Lafrenz looked worried. She was better at this than Roslyn. Better trained and more experienced—both of them could tell that—but she was not more powerful than Roslyn.
Roslyn was born of some of the direct bloodlines of the last children of Project Olympus. There were very few Mages in the galaxy who could match her one on one…and Ulla Lafrenz was not one of them.
“Surrender, Mage Lafrenz,” Roslyn repeated. “Or I will take you in by force.”
“Like your friends did Sam?” Lafrenz demanded. “The man the Protectorate shot in the head?”
“He didn’t surrender,” Roslyn said reasonably. She’d heard the entire story from Montgomery and figured that Samuel Finley had definitely deserved worse than he’d got.
“Fuck off and die,” Lafrenz snapped, unconsciously echoing the Augment outside. Power flared around her, and a veritable tsunami of fire motes, accompanied by darts of pure force, hammered across the room.
What equipment had survived Roslyn’s lightning bolts now shattered as the older Mage threw every scrap of power she had at the Navy officer. Scanners and tables melted. Gas canisters exploded. Debris tore across the room in a whirlwind of force that lasted for ten seconds. Fifteen. Twenty.
Then it collapsed and Ulla Lafrenz collapsed with it. Roslyn walked
