“Think you can do that?”
“Only one way to find out, Mage-Commander,” Dickens told her. “Sergeants, you heard her. Think Marines can distract an army of zombies long enough to cure them?”
“Oorah!”
“Thought so.” There was a grin in Dickens’s voice that Roslyn could hear, even if she couldn’t see him on this channel. “There’s enough Guardia and civilian volunteers to keep building the perimeter if we pull the Marines out.
“Marines, report back to your shuttles. It’s time to do what we do best: maneuver.”
Even with the rush and chaos and pressure on everyone, Roslyn was surprised by how quickly the Marines made it back onto their shuttles. She had access to the video feeds from the spacecraft and, after a moment, realized that the Marine command net gave her access to the video feeds from individual Marines.
That was dangerous. She still had a job to do in the park.
“How many people are we at?” she asked Bolivar, rejoining the Guardia officer at last.
“Hard to say,” he admitted. “We’re only registering and tracking people as we send them inside.” He shrugged. “Sixty thousand still on the surface? Maybe more?”
She whistled softly in shock.
“We have to have cleared most of the area around us,” she told him. “And…we should be able to keep them safe, even up here. For a while, anyway.”
“All we can do,” he whispered.
“No, it’s not,” Roslyn said fiercely. “We have incredibly smart people everywhere on this planet, digging into every scrap of data Knight gets out of those computers. We have the cyberwarfare team on Huntress backing up Knight on that hack and analysis. We have Andrews tearing apart the decon rooms, and I have people on Huntress trying to rig up warheads to duplicate whatever effect the Orpheus people built into the nanites as a fail-safe.
“There is an answer somewhere,” she told him. “I do not—I cannot—believe that these people built a weapon like this without the ability to turn it off if they risked losing control.
“Everybody who knew how is dead, but we will find that key and we will save these people.”
“Or we’ll die with them,” the Guardia officer replied. “I don’t have any hope left, Chambers, I’m sorry. I’m keeping it up and afloat, but…”
“You’re doing enough,” she said. “But there is another side to this, Victoriano. We have to believe that.”
“Or just keep working regardless,” he half-whispered. “It doesn’t matter if I’m going to die, Commander Chambers. It matters whether I get ten thousand people to safety or only five thousand because I gave up.
“I won’t accept the latter. So, I’m going to keep working until the damn thing kills me. But don’t expect me to have hope.”
“Fine,” she told him. “I’m heading to the northern perimeter. If our plan fails, they’re going to get swarmed in about forty minutes. I might be able to make a difference—and I’m as available by coms there as here.”
“I’ll keep these people moving in,” Bolivar promised. “Till the end. You have my word.”
“I know. We’ll all be here to the end, Captain. One way or another.”
She just had to hope that they’d save more than ten thousand along the way.
43
“Marines deploying,” Sergeant Day reported as his shuttle swept in on the east side of the mob. There was an audible thud through the command network as the Sergeant joined his people in jumping from a shuttle still five meters in the air.
“Distance is one hundred twenty meters from the eastern side of the target,” Day continued over the command network.
Roslyn was still well short of even the inner perimeter, but she kept one eye on the feed from the Marines as she walked briskly north. Once she was clear of the inner perimeter, there was no turning back. That was the downside—they couldn’t be sure that the armor of the people they were sending out wasn’t contaminated with the nanites. The outer perimeter was fifty meters outside of the park, and the inner perimeter was two hundred meters inside the park.
Hopefully, that would be enough. The exosuits and hazmat suits should be enough to keep the perimeter defenders safe, but the suits would carry the Orpheus weapon themselves.
“We have no response from the mob,” Sergeant Day reported. “They continue to maintain a southerly course with a few stragglers in any given direction.”
“Based off what we’re seeing elsewhere, it’s almost Brownian motion,” Dickens told the Sergeant. “They don’t have a direction in mind, but they started moving south, so they’ll keep moving south until interrupted.”
The big problem, to Roslyn’s mind, was the ever-shrinking circle marked by smaller groups of the infected. Their current focal point was only one of four groups of twenty thousand or more infected, but the other three were in completely different sections of the city.
But there were groups of five hundred to a thousand Orpheus infected everywhere in the city. Daalman’s suggestion might help them break up the big mob, and if worse came to worst, Roslyn’s people could destroy a single mob of twenty thousand.
A hundred mobs of a thousand infected each coming from a hundred different directions was an entirely different problem.
“Move in closer, Sergeant,” Dickens ordered. The Marine was running this operation, with Roslyn as an eavesdropping observer. The orders were hers. The execution was theirs.
As the Marines moved in, she reached their inner perimeter. It wasn’t much at the moment. A painted line on the ground and a nervous-looking collection of teenagers with megaphones.
“We can’t let you back through if you go any farther,” one of them told her. “Hazmat suit carries the bug.”
“I know,” she replied. “I’m Commander Chambers. Everyone going over the line should know, so thank you. Hopefully…you won’t have much to do.”
The boy chuckled nervously.
“They say you’re the Mage-Queen’s Voice?” he asked. “That means you’re a powerful Mage, right? You’re gonna save
