“Yes, yes and I damn well hope so,” Roslyn told him, glancing at the others. “But the rules we made say I don’t come back across this line either. Understand? It doesn’t matter who is coming from out there; you warn them back and call for support.”
“We know,” another of the teens agreed. “Good luck!”
“Thank you,” Roslyn told them.
She meant it. Faith. Luck. Whatever they wanted to call it, she and her people needed every scrap of it they could find.
“Range is eighty meters; we have no response,” Day reported. “I think the suits might be stopping them from registering us as targets.”
“No clever ideas, Sergeant,” Dickens snapped before Roslyn could. “You’re probably safe at that range, but if you take off your helmet, I am relieving you on the fucking spot. Am I clear?”
“Didn’t consider it for a second, sir,” Day said virtuously.
Like Dickens, Roslyn figured he was lying.
“Continuing to move in. Seventy meters…”
The gap between the two perimeters was deathly silent as Roslyn walked the quarter-kilometer. They’d know soon enough whether the mob could be distracted.
“Range is fifty meters,” the Sergeant reported. “Should we take air samples to test for infection risk?”
“Not a bad idea,” Roslyn interjected. “Assuming they give you the time. They went for drones above them, after all. Even in exosuits, you should be pissing them off by now.”
“Taking samples.” Day paused. “Under one PPM, sirs. Fifty meters should still be safe.”
“All right. If you have any suggestions for getting their attention without getting closer, I’d appreciate them,” Roslyn said. “I don’t want you to risk it if we can avoid it.”
“I figure we just make a lot of noise,” Day replied. “Loudspeaker mode active.”
Roslyn closed her eyes in half-exhaustion, half-amusement as the Marine Sergeant paused to consider his words.
“Hey, you smelly zombies,” he bellowed. “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you!”
There was another pause, then Day chuckled ruefully.
“Yep, that worked. Time to move, Marines! If any of them get within thirty meters of you, you’re buying the beer!”
The icons for Day’s squad told Roslyn the Sergeant and his people were already moving—and dozens of the infected were surging after him.
“I’m not sure we’re pulling away enough,” she murmured after a moment. The momentum of the mob was still south, even as plenty of infected surged after Sergeant Day and his Marines.
“Each round is an experiment,” Dickens admitted. “Now we’ve got a response, Sergeant Toft is going in on the west side to see what she can pull away.
“Piece by piece, Commander, we’re going to distract them from the northern perimeter.”
That was ahead of Roslyn now, a line of trucks and foxhole-grenade cement filling the between two office towers. This particular barricade was the one directly in the mob’s path.
The one that would see twenty thousand innocent-but-rabid victims of the Orpheus weapon swarm it if the Marines failed.
“I’m playing backstop, Major,” Roslyn said quietly. “But I can’t handle twenty thousand of them.”
“I know, Mage-Commander. We’ll do everything we can.”
Roslyn had never met Sergeant Milly Toft, but she watched through the woman’s helmet cameras as the shuttle dipped down toward the crowd.
“Drop point is fifty meters, and then you get the hell out of Dodge, Lieutenant. You read me?” she asked in a soft Australian accent. “No games.”
“No games,” the pilot agreed. “Beyond abandoning you fifty meters from that.”
“That is the objective, Lieutenant. I make the range one hundred meters. Marines, are you ready to play bait?”
There wasn’t even enough time for a cheer before the shuttle ramp popped open and the first Marines went barrelling out. Exosuits could handle drops of up to ten meters while absorbing the impact for the user, and that was the height Toft went out the side of the spacecraft at.
Roslyn winced in sympathy. She’d never made an exosuit cold drop, but her understanding was that while ten meters was doable, it wasn’t comfortable.
“We’re down,” Toft reported. “Twelve Marines in the wind; watching a whole bunch of people just… Well, I don’t know if I have a word for what these people are doing.”
Toft’s helmet cams gave Roslyn one of the better views of the Orpheus victims she’d had so far. They were moving in a crowd, but it clearly wasn’t a planned or organized thing. Individual infected were bashing themselves against everything to hand, and every one of them that she could see had visible injuries and torn clothing.
The heat of the afternoon sun in Nueva Portugal and a lack of hydration was probably going to hurt the victims as much as anything else, but the chaotic mess was bone-chilling to see.
“Still ignoring us. Well, not quite,” Toft noted. “I’ve got a few eyeballs on us and a couple of people heading our way. Moving in to see what else we can draw.”
Roslyn swallowed the urge to order Toft to run. The Marines were playing a very specific game, and the half-dozen or so infected now approaching them aggressively were not the prize they needed.
“All right, this isn’t going to work,” Toft said after a moment. “I am not going to test if our exosuits stand up to the weapon while the infected are trying to tear them open. Marines! Form a line.”
The rough skirmish line on Roslyn’s helmet displays tightened into a parade formation in a heartbeat. There was still twenty meters from the nearest infected, but Roslyn suspected that wasn’t enough.
If nothing else, those Marines’ exosuits were now coated with infectious levels of the Orpheus weapon. So long as the seals held and they didn’t come near anyone else, that was fine…but now Toft’s Marines definitely couldn’t enter the inner perimeter.
“Marines…” Toft said grimly. “Over their heads, volley fire on my command. Fire!”
Roslyn heard the sound of a dozen heavy weapons through the Marine command net and shivered. What goes up must come down—the rounds were high-velocity, but they weren’t going to reach orbit.
Somewhere, those bullets would fall back down. For now, the sound of unsuppressed exosuit weapons echoed across
