“So, when my hazmat armor runs out of air, I’ll die,” she said grimly. “On the surface, honoring my oath to protect people. Of course, with the Orpheus weapon, it’ll take me a while and I might hurt other people before I finally fall down.
“Given that fate, Ms. Hase, I don’t expect to have to face a court-martial for anything I do here.” Roslyn conjured visible fire around her fists for a moment, reminding the Augment of what she was.
“There are lines I still don’t think I’ll cross, but you knowingly worked for the project that made this shit. I might bend a few more with you.” She shrugged. “We both know torturing you for information is pointless, but if I summarily execute you and interview the next prisoner next to your corpse, I think that might make a point?”
Roslyn probably wouldn’t do that. It was a violation of every code she’d sworn to uphold, everything she believed in. But she was tempted enough that she suspected she could make Hase believe it was a risk.
“I’m just a guard,” Hase finally said quietly. “I don’t know anything about the damn weapon.”
“You can give us access codes for the base network,” Roslyn said. “That gives us a starting point. I’m guessing you had training on countermeasures for the damn weapon, too?”
“Okay.” Hase exhaled. “How bad is it?” she asked.
“We’ve quarantined the peninsula with a secondary quarantine around the planet,” Roslyn admitted. “Best guess is around six or seven hundred thousand civilians infected or dead. We can’t evacuate the rest of the city—we don’t have the biohazard-secured lift capacity anywhere on the planet.
“So, at a minimum, we’re looking at writing off the two million people in Nueva Portugal,” she said coldly. “Less whoever I can shove in this bunker and feed until everyone on the surface is dead. It’s about as bad as it could possibly be, Ms. Hase.”
Hase nodded. Unless Roslyn was crazy, there were actual tears in the woman’s eyes.
“Most of my codes are in my implants,” she warned Roslyn. “I’ll give you my backup login, but I’m not sure how much help that will be. As for emergency procedures… The decon rooms.”
“The decon rooms?” Roslyn asked.
“That was all we were told,” the Augment admitted. “If we had any reason to believe we’d been exposed, we were to immediately proceed to the nearest decontamination chamber and let it run.
“My understanding was that there was a purge function that would kill any unprotected nanites in the facility, but I don’t know what it was,” Hase continued. “I do know that the decontamination chambers have something that is specifically tailored to kill the nanites.
“Otherwise…I know they need silver, carbon and iron to self-replicate. Most of that they can find in humans, but we weren’t permitted any silver in the facility. Jewelry, art, electronics, whatever. It all was checked for silver before it entered the main lab.”
She looked down at the table.
“I don’t know what else to give you,” she admitted. “I was a loyal soldier of the Republic. But this… You do know there’s a suicide charge in our implants, right? It’s not supposed to be externally accessible…but ad Aaron could.”
“I’d keep that in mind when you go in front of a judge,” Roslyn told Hase. “I will make sure the judge knows you cooperated as best as you could.”
She snorted bitterly.
“The value of that, of course, depends on me being alive to tell them.”
Andrews was waiting for her when she left the cell, the Marine Corporal she’d left to search for Killough now drafted to help keep people organized.
“Did you find him?” was her first question anyway. She knew the answer—someone would have told her if they’d found Killough.
“No,” they confirmed. “We didn’t find Killough. We didn’t find the Mage. We did successfully sweep up what we think are all the remaining Augments, but there’s no evidence anyone else was here.
“It’s like Killough just vanished after the fight with the security Mage. Except for…”
“Except for?” Roslyn asked, after the Marine trailed off.
“We did find Lafrenz’s lab partner, another Mage,” Andrews said. “Shot in the back of the head, three times. He never even realized he wasn’t alone, I don’t think. But…other than the bullets, no real sign of a shooter.”
“That makes no sense, Corporal,” Roslyn pointed out.
“Someone knew how to hide their tracks, even in a place like this. I don’t know what they did, but they were a ghost.” They shook their head. “Killough seemed good at his job, but this was magic. Literally. I think we had a Mage ghost in here somewhere, and I’m not entirely sure they were on our side. The doctor’s console had been accessed.”
“Hopefully, they were just as blocked as we have been,” Roslyn said grimly. “I’ll admit that I want to see most of this place’s databases burned. I’ve passed access codes to Knight that will hopefully help us get in, but…”
“This place is a nightmare. It looks like they didn’t have any prisoners at the moment, but at least one Augment was shooting scientists when we found him,” Andrews admitted. “We’ve found twenty-two presumably non-Mage scientists in the complex. All are dead.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. Cleanup protocols. We interrupted enough that I think we still have databases, but…they really set this up to make sure no one could deal with what they unleashed in their GOTH plan.”
“What I know, right now, is that they told the security detail that the decon chambers were guaranteed to remove the weapon,” Roslyn said. “I want you to find whatever techs or engineers we have in the evacuees, pick a decon chamber and tear it apart.
“We’ll cycle everybody through them before they go deeper, but we’re also hoping our class six protocols hold up for
