“Lieutenant Herbert,” Roslyn said quietly. “Nix now.”
The shuttles dropped from the sky in sequence like stooping pigeons. Each plummeted downward and then across the crowd of Orpheus infected, plain steel canisters crashing into the ground in carefully selected positions.
Roslyn couldn’t see the clear gas, but she knew she should see the effects. There should have been dozens of people falling over—hundreds. Normally, there was enough Nix out there to put down the original twenty-thousand-strong crowd.
And it was doing nothing. She hadn’t really expected anything different, but it had been worth a shot.
“We are standing by with cluster munitions or whatever else you need, Commander,” Lieutenant Herbert said in her ear. She and Roslyn knew each other’s tones at least a little bit by now—and Roslyn knew the younger woman was nervous.
It was extremely unlikely that Herbert had deployed cluster munitions against anybody, ever, let alone against an unarmored mob like this. Even Roslyn wasn’t sure how bad it would be.
But she could also hear the determination in Lieutenant Herbert’s voice. If Roslyn gave the order, the Marines would do their jobs. They would take the blood guilt of the next few minutes on themselves so that the volunteers at the barricade didn’t have to.
Because that was part of what Marines did.
Before that happened, though, Roslyn was going to do everything she could to prevent that. She’d already watched someone burn out their life with magic today. If she had to do the same, what was one life against over two thousand?
“Range is one hundred twenty meters,” Herbert murmured in her ear. “Do you have a plan, sir?”
“That’s rude to ask, isn’t it, Lieutenant?” Roslyn replied. She started walking forward. “If I was relying on anyone else, they’d be justified in asking for a plan…but I’m not.”
Part of her wished she’d paid more attention in her limited classes on transmutation. If she turned all of the silver in the area into lead, for example, that would neutralize the runes. It didn’t strike her as a particularly likely answer, and it was beyond her abilities anyway.
Her training had been very focused. She was a Navy Mage: trained as both a Jump Mage and a Combat Mage. She could teleport herself a long way and she could fight.
And today, Roslyn Chambers wasn’t planning on running.
“Range is ninety meters,” the pilot told her. “I’m just going to keep updating you until you give me orders, sir.”
She didn’t say anything in response. There was no point. Roslyn exhaled through the hazmat helmet, wishing she could take the thing off. Claustrophobia wasn’t helping her regain the power she’d already expended today.
Lafrenz had lost, but holding off the strike she’d killed herself with had taken almost everything Roslyn had. She’d barely restored enough power for a single fight, and what she was about to do was more than that.
Fortunately—or unfortunately, she supposed—the Navy had long before developed a solution for that.
Exalt was a mix of drugs and thaumaturgically modified chemicals designed for exactly her current condition. The primary ingredient was a powerful amphetamine, and even the Mages who’d put it together weren’t sure why some of the other ingredients worked as they did. A dose would give Roslyn a full “recharge” and keep her going for an hour.
The comedown from that would suck…but if she took more doses, the comedown could kill her.
The syringe she took out of her medpack glowed. The metal tip fit neatly into the port on the hazmat suit designed for the purpose, and Roslyn winced as the hazmat suit’s own needle stabbed into her shoulder.
Inhaling deeply, she looked up at the slowly surging crowd and slammed the plunger down.
Her exhaustion faded. Her feeling of depleted power also faded, and a new surge of hope and energy filled her as she withdrew and discarded the needle. Baring her teeth, she straightened and faced the oncoming mob.
“Range is thirty meters,” Herbert told her. “You are now in the infection zone.”
“I know. That’s enough, Lieutenant. I’ll see you on the other side,” Roslyn told the pilot, echoing Dickens’s words as she summoned her power.
Nothing Roslyn could do would keep everyone from dying. They were past that already—just the movement of the mob was probably crushing people to death every so often—but she would be damned if she’d order the deaths of thousands of innocents.
“Time to see if you’re as clever as I think you are,” she told a dead woman—and then summoned lightning.
The Orpheus weapon had been designed to keep its victims functioning after a Nix attack or a SmartDart hit. Roslyn wasn’t a nanotech scientist, but she was a warship officer. She’d studied the trade-offs between protection and firepower for military ships across history.
Every bit of protection and survivability the Orpheus nanites had came at the cost of weight and capability—and the Protectorate built their nonlethal weaponry to very specific standards. Nix and SmartDarts had maximum effects based off the target’s size.
SmartDarts even networked with each other and could do a rough estimate of the target’s cardiovascular health to make sure they didn’t kill them. There were records of police officers using their stunguns as impromptu defibrillators when medical equipment was lacking—successfully.
That meant that Lafrenz and her team had known the exact maximum voltage and amperage that the Protectorate’s nonlethal weaponry would apply. Roslyn had no such control over her own less-than-lethal electric shock spells.
She tried to keep the wave of electrically charged air she threw into the teeth of the crowd beneath lethal levels, but it was only ever a guess. For an area effect like this, she was ionizing an entire mass of air, making every motion a source of shock and charge.
Roslyn’s power swept over the lead infected in a wave of sparks and burnt ozone—and they fell. She couldn’t spare the attention to cheer as she kept the cloud moving, burning through the charge of power Exalt gave her as she swept her storm through
