Mage-Captain Daalman somehow managed to look less tired than Roslyn or Guerra, but some of that had to be a façade. Roslyn knew the Mage-Captain had been following everything since Roslyn had first taken her Marines underground—and that felt like it had been weeks ago, even though it had been less than four hours.
“Where are we at, Chambers?” Daalman asked.
“Quarantined,” she replied. “We’re clear for six to seven kilometers out from the park on three sides of four, but the closest mob of infected is only seven kilometers from the entrance we’re using.
“I have Marines trying to blockade the street entrances and add distance, but we don’t know how well it will work. We have established that we can engage at ranges in excess of about sixty meters safely, but…”
“But the infected are just as much victims as everyone else,” the Mage-Captain agreed with a sigh. “Any good news, Chambers?”
“We know the Orpheus decontamination chambers could kill the nanites—or so they told their own people, at least,” Roslyn said. “That gives us a starting point. We’re tearing one apart now to see if they’re doing anything different.
“Otherwise…” She sighed. “I swear there’s an answer in front of my face, sir, and I’m too damned in the middle of things to see it.”
“That’s about how it normally goes, but you’re not a doctor, Chambers,” her Captain said gently. “You’re a tactical officer and the Voice of the Mage-Queen of Mars. Your job, right now, is to provide other people the authority to do what they have to do.”
Roslyn exhaled.
“I don’t think I like that job, sir,” she admitted.
“Get used to it. That’s also a description of being a starship captain,” Daalman told her. “We’ve run out of drop pods for supplies, but if there’s anything we can do to support you…”
“Knight is linked up to our cyber department on Huntress, right?” Roslyn asked.
“I authorized it, at least,” the Mage-Captain agreed. “Where’s your MISS agent? Shouldn’t he be helping?”
“He vanished in the lab. No idea what happened to him and no time.” Roslyn knew she was turning time into a curse word. “We didn’t even manage to fully sweep the lab before we started pouring evacuees into it. We’re clear now, but…
“Hell, I need to check that we sealed the accesses to the storm sewers,” she admitted. “Too many moving pieces, sir.”
“Can we help coordinate?” Daalman asked. “We’re that step removed and above everything, but we have overhead visual and we can see everything going on. Kristofferson and I can help organize things—I’ll have him check with Andrews on the storm sewers.”
“That would help,” she said with a sigh. “I… I’m running out of options that aren’t ‘kill a lot of innocent people,’ sir.”
“Well, what are their targeting priorities?” the Mage-Captain said.
Roslyn blinked.
“I don’t think they have any,” she replied. “From what Lafrenz said, they’re basically just running on an order to kill everything that isn’t Orpheus-infected.”
“So, they’re not actively hunting for your evac zone,” Daalman pointed out. “If you lure them elsewhere, that buys time, right?”
“That’s brilliant, sir,” Roslyn said. “I… I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”
“You’re face-down in the middle of it all, Commander,” her boss told her. “I’ll start picking people’s brains up here and elsewhere on the surface. We’ll see what we can come up with for clever ideas…but you’re on the ground. A lot of it ends up on you.”
Roslyn nodded, swallowing hard—and then it hit her.
Bioscans.
“Sir, I need to talk to my tactical team,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ve got a final answer, but a possibility just occurred to me.”
Roslyn managed to get both of her Mage-Lieutenants and the ship’s doctor on a single conference within a couple of minutes, a sign of the priority her Warrant and the situation were getting her.
“Commander Chambers, how are you feeling?” Dr. Judith Breda asked immediately.
Roslyn snorted.
“I’m going to have some new nightmares and PTSD symptoms when this is over, doc,” she told the other woman. “But that’s a ‘Future Roslyn’ problem. Kirtida, Semele.”
She nodded to her two direct subordinates as their images appeared on her helmet screen. They couldn’t see much, but hopefully they’d get the intent.
“What do you need us for, sir?” Kirtida Samuels asked, getting one second ahead of Semele Jordan asking the same question.
“I need you three to sit down with whichever Chief is most familiar with our new modular warheads for the Talon Ten ground-bombardment missiles,” Roslyn told them. She could see the confusion in everyone’s eyes—especially Dr. Breda’s.
“I want to know if you can rig up a warhead to pulse the entire city with the radiation pulse of a standard bioscan.”
The call was silent for several seconds.
“A standard bioscan involves a lot of different types of sensor and pulse, Commander,” Breda told them. “It includes, over the course of a ten-second sequence, X-rays, ultrasound, magnetic imaging and several other EM radiation pulses.”
She shook her head.
“I’m not sure much of that can be duplicated outside of the very specialized structure of a bioscanner,” she noted. “We might be able to manage the radiation sequences, but to achieve it on that kind of geographic area, you’re going to drastically increase a series of other medical risks.”
“Doctor, if we can’t disable the Orpheus weapon, those people are going to starve to death,” Roslyn pointed out. “I will trade ten years off the average life expectancy of Nueva Portugal’s people in exchange for saving them today. That decision I will gladly make.”
“But why a bioscan?” Samuels asked.
“The nanites from the first Orpheus weapon we encountered dissolved in the bioscan, fast enough that we didn’t even see them on the scan, right, Doctor?” Roslyn said.
“That’s correct,” Breda agreed. “There was very little on the bioscans of the living—or dead—victims of the Orpheus weapon to suggest they’d been infected with anything at all.
“Given the sturdiness of the delivery mechanism required to survive an explosion, that designed fragility surprised me,” she admitted. “This is extremely
