“You’re too good for me,” he told her, then coughed up more blood. “Don’t know where you found the fucker who killed me. He knew…he was here for…”
More coughing. This time it didn’t stop as the rogue Mage doubled over. He fell over, his working hand slipping away from the tourniquet.
Roslyn didn’t have time to do anything before the leg started bleeding again, deep spurts of arterial blood…blood that ad Aaron didn’t have much left of to lose.
He was dead before her magic replaced the tourniquet.
35
“Where’s Killough?” Andrews asked, looking around the wreckage.
Roslyn rose, looking with distaste at the blood on her knees. Connor ad Aaron’s blood. There weren’t many people out there she’d have expected to be happier to see dead, but it was still disturbing to have his blood all over her.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, joining the Marines in sweeping the battlefield. “My math says this was all the Augments? Assuming they had a full platoon in the complex?”
“A bit more,” the Marine Corporal told her. “Forty at least. There may still be more around.”
“And they may have taken Killough,” Roslyn said quietly. “But the time I can spend looking for seven people, I can’t spend looking for one.”
She only had two Marines with her, and she was carefully not trying to work out which of the half-dozen dead Marines in the battlefield was Mooren. She’d been leaning on the Sergeant for this entire mission, and losing her hurt.
“I have to get to the surface,” she decided. “And I can’t leave one of you looking for Killough on your own.”
“You can’t travel on your own,” Andrews told her. “You’re the commanding officer and a goddamn Voice.”
Roslyn grimaced. She really hadn’t wanted to use that Warrant.
“Only until this is over,” she told the Marine. “Assuming we all live that long.”
She gave the defenses around the power core another look and shook her head.
“We’ve wiped out most, if not all, of the Augments—but I don’t know what Mage killed ad Aaron,” she admitted. “Killough…is either dead, a prisoner or lost. I can’t leave someone to look for him in any of those cases.”
“I don’t like leaving our dead behind either,” Andrews told her, their voice grim. “Let alone a living agent. But we can’t send you up to the surface on your own, either.”
“Believe me, Corporal, I’m more capable of protecting myself than Killough is,” Roslyn told the Marine, her decision suddenly made. “Voice or CO or whatever else I’m hauling, I’m a trained Mage, and I haven’t met anyone on this planet yet who can threaten me.”
There’d only been one person on the planet she’d been personally afraid of—and his blood was smeared across her armor’s kneepads.
“You and Klinger stay here, keep up the search for Killough,” she ordered. “We don’t leave anyone behind.” She shook her head. “Make sure no one tries to detonate the reactor or something similarly stupid while we’re at it.
“Knight will get me the data from the lab. You make sure the lab is still here for her to do it and find our stray MISS agent. Understood?”
“You can’t trave—”
“I can,” Roslyn told them. “If I had slightly better data of where I was, I could teleport out of here, let alone anything else. I’ll be fine. Killough won’t.”
“Most likely, whatever Mage killed ad Aaron has him,” Andrews warned.
“And you will under no circumstances engage a hostile Mage,” she agreed. “But if that Mage killed ad Aaron, they’re probably on our side.” She shook her head. “Find them, too. But I’m going and you’re staying and that’s an order.”
“Yes, sir,” Corporal Andrews conceded. “Good luck, sir.”
“Same to you, Marines,” Roslyn told them. “I think we’re all going to need it.”
The trip back out through the lab complex was even creepier than the way in. She knew what the place had been now—everything she’d feared it was and more—and the deathly silence was stark and terrifying.
If nothing else, there should have been prisoners in the complex, and the lack left her with grim suspicions of other parts of Lafrenz’s go-to-hell plan. Either Finley had trained his people to be psychopaths or he’d recruited psychopaths like him to begin with.
Either way, her conversations with Lafrenz and ad Aaron were going to join her nightmares. So was the entire damn lab complex.
She guessed as to where the connections would be to get her out of the underground facility and got it right—or, at least, figured she had when she made it to the decontamination room.
The sprays washed off ad Aaron’s blood along with anything else she’d picked up in the bioweapon lab, while a radiation pulse swept her to kill off anything the antiseptics missed.
Roslyn froze in a moment of realization as the doors slid open in front of her. The entire central core of the facility was sealed and atmosphered to keep anything from escaping, but the same protections and securities would stop anything getting in.
The vast size of the laboratory complex suddenly seemed far too small, but there was space for thousands of people in the Orpheus lab. It had other dangers they’d sweep for, but it would be safe from the damn nanites.
She took off toward the exit tunnel at a full run. She didn’t know if she’d be able to save everybody, but if she made the right use of her enemy’s tools, she could save a lot of people.
36
Bolivar and the Marines she’d sent with him were standing by the vans in the treatment plant parking lot, looking…lost. The body language of their stunned horror came through the armor, and she knew it had to be as bad as she’d feared.
“Bolivar, report,” she snapped. Only her Warrant gave her the authority to command local law enforcement, but since that cat was out of the bag, she might as well ride it.
“It’s bad,” he said quietly. “No one was sure what was going on before I reported,
