“Yep, that worked,” Toft said calmly, as if she was considering a chess strategy instead of a charging horde of rabid humans. “Let’s move, Marines!”
Her exosuited soldiers obeyed with enthusiasm, rabbiting away from the gathering storm.
Roslyn watched them long enough to be sure that they were clear, then turned her attention back to the mob. Toft’s efforts had been more effective than Day’s, but the vast majority of the infected were still heading her way.
“Next up, Captain Dickens,” she said quietly.
“I know,” the Marine CO replied. “Sergeant Colburn is swinging in from the north, and I’ve got O’Mooney and MacCrumb swinging in from each side. We’ll see what three distractions at once buys you.
“Give us five minutes to set it up.”
“The core mob is maybe forty-five minutes from the outer perimeter,” Roslyn warned. “We only have so much time.”
“I know. And I know what the options become if we don’t distract them,” Dickens said softly. “But we need the time.”
“Understood. I’m checking in on the outer perimeter now,” she told him. “Keep me informed.”
44
Roslyn muted her command channel and called her magic to allow her to “hop” fifteen feet up onto the top of the barricade. The Guardia officer standing with a pair of binoculars started and dropped the tool.
She wasn’t in position to catch them and watched the electronics-enhanced optics shatter on the roof of the big transport truck at the middle of the blockade.
“Sorry,” she told him, then recognized the name on his Guardia-issue armor. “Lieutenant Oliveira?”
“Yes, sir,” the Guardia officer replied. “Commander Chambers! Are you here to help?”
“That’s the plan, Lieutenant,” she said. “Though the Marines are doing everything they can to make sure you and I don’t have to do anything. Report.”
Even in hazmat armor and a full mask, Oliveira was vibrating like a happy puppy to see her. The apparent hope her presence alone brought was almost scary to Roslyn.
“We managed to get in touch with a bunch of truck drivers who were still mobile and uninfected,” he told her. “They use a different communication network than everyone else, but once we were in touch, we had the key components for the outer perimeter.
“This is the furthest south of our barricades on the north end. We’re making an attempt to funnel them here. Most of the rest of the area across this district has taller buildings we’ve incorporated into blockades we don’t think can be breached, but here…”
Olivera gestured around them. The blockade there was drawn between a two-story strip mall on the east side of the road and a story-and-a-half light industrial complex on the west.
“We don’t have the buildings to work with here,” he concluded. “So, we’ve blocked the road with the transport trucks and used up the foxhole grenades the Navy provided, but we’re pretty sure we’re not going to be able to keep them from at least trying to come over the barricade here.”
“That was the plan,” Roslyn agreed, looking out at the wide road and parking lot directly north of the barricade. It made for a perfect killing field for the machine guns she could see positioned across the top of the trucks and foam-crete bulwarks.
“Personnel?” she asked.
“Me and three other Guardia,” Oliveira told her. “Twenty-six civilian volunteers. We have twelve eight-millimeter light machine guns from the Guardia armory and four twelve-millimeter multi-barrels from the supplies the Navy dropped.”
As Sergeant Colburn had pointed out, none of the Marines’ lethal weapons were designed to deal with unarmored opponents. The four-barrelled twelve-millimeter automatic weapons they used for squad support were designed to go through armor like what Roslyn and Oliveira were wearing.
“Ammunition?” The Marines had said that was their biggest fear.
“Fifteen hundred rounds per gun.” Oliveira shivered. “If we run out of that, I’ve got a dozen shotguns and maybe a hundred shells for each of them as a reserve.”
“Nonlethals?” They’d tried all of those already, but it was still worth having them on hand.
“Guardia armories have functionally infinite supplies of stunguns and SmartDarts,” the Lieutenant told her. “We have a SmartDart fabricator at each key armory. I’ve got thirty stunguns here… Habit, I guess.”
“Not a bad habit, Lieutenant,” Roslyn said. “I figure there’s enough Nix on the Marine assault shuttles to make at least one more pass with the gas. Maybe if we hit them with enough Nix, it will take them down.”
It was extremely unlikely at this point, but she saw no reason not to try.
“How bad is it, sir?” Oliveira asked, his helmet close to hers and his voice quiet so none of the volunteers could hear him.
“We’ve got eighteen thousand people heading this way, and they’re as innocent as anyone else,” Roslyn said quietly. “We’ve got plans to distract them and pull them away, to buy time for us to find the answer in the bioweapon lab files, but…if they make it here, you’ll have to use those machine guns.”
“I know.” The Guardia officer swallowed and turned to look north again. “We’re ready,” he said, but his tone was weak.
“The Marines have a plan,” she assured him. “I have a plan. And there’s an answer in that damn lab, I’m sure of it.”
“Chambers,” Dickens’s voice interrupted. “Marines are ready for round two. Sergeant Day has broken contact and is coordinating for round three with Sergeant Kaiser.”
Distance was time and time was hope. That was the only calculation Roslyn could make right then, and it was the calculation that mattered.
The Marines needed to buy her distance, and she watched as three more shuttles swept toward the infected crowd in a perfectly synchronized operation, engines and loudspeakers screaming as they passed over the mob of infected.
Marines plummeted out the back of each shuttle, twelve each to the west, east and north of the infected, hooting and hollering as they hit the ground. At the same moment, Roslyn saw that the loudspeakers went silent.
But the exosuit speakers were loud enough that she could hear from three kilometers away. Not in
