“I see. Thank you, Lieutenant Commander,” Guerra told Roslyn. “Continue, please.”
“Navy Mages are trained in several methods of less-than-lethal engagement,” Roslyn said quietly. “We use the phrasing specifically—with stunguns and Nix, we can almost guarantee full nonlethal engagement. With less-than-lethal magic, we cannot.
“Since the Orpheus weapon was designed to survive both stunguns and Nix, this was to our advantage. I electrocuted the mob and disabled them. This is normally a short-term effect, relying on pain and uncooperative muscles to disable a target for more than a few minutes.
“In this case…it appears to have disabled enough of the nanites to knock the infected out and send them into post-Orpheus syndrome, the coma we’ve encountered in other victims,” Roslyn concluded. “The victims were below the replication threshold of the nanites, as was the air content.
“Sufficient electric shocks appear to disable the nanites,” she told them. “Analysis of the decontamination chambers in the Orpheus complex shows that they used electromagnetic fields similar to those in a bioscanner to destroy any nanites present.
“Between the shock and the EM wave of our area less-than-lethal stun spells, infected crowds will go down and stay down, without an infectious presence. We are, of course, vulnerable to the arrival of new infected to the target area who will restore the nanite levels.”
She exhaled a long, determined sigh.
“I believe that our six Mages should suffice to provide a clear safe zone around the park and the Orpheus complex itself,” she told them. “That would permit us to evacuate the citizens in the park and set up a hospital there to handle the post-Orpheus patients.
“It will not be a fast process to clear the city, not without significantly more Mages, but we can begin the process of securing and evacuating civilians,” Roslyn continued. “We now know the sequence of EM fields used by the decontamination chambers and should be able to duplicate it aboard shuttles.
“My biggest fear at this point is that we will lose some of the people we disable without rapid medical care.”
“And that we need to secure the entire city,” Guerra said quietly. “I have doctors, nurses, medical personnel and field hospitals—all ready to go. But there are hundreds of thousands of victims. With six Mages…how long to clear them all?”
“Weeks,” Daalman said grimly, before Roslyn could answer. “Even with reinforcements arriving, most of our Mages cannot duplicate Commander Chambers’s spell to her scale. She is a powerful Mage.”
Roslyn couldn’t help but wish that Jane Alexander was nearby. She’d watched the Rune Wright Crown Princess of Mars demolish a fleet from the cockpit of a shuttle—that fleet had been far too close, but it was still a demonstration of the power of the Rune Wrights that ruled Mars.
Either of the Alexanders could likely have swept the entire city.
“Forgive an old man his foolish questions,” Guerra said after a moment’s thought. “But I understand that you were working on electromagnetic-radiation weaponry to try to secure the city before. Knowing what we know now, could those weapons be used to duplicate this effect?”
Roslyn froze.
“No,” she said slowly. “The warheads available to us do not create electrical shocks or electromagnetic fields in the same way that the systems and spells we’re talking about do.”
“But?” Daalman asked.
“I think that the nanite we are seeing in the final infection is more vulnerable than the deployment version,” Roslyn said. “We’ve seen the deployment version exploded, blasted out of aerosol sprayers, generally treated like a stable munition.
“But the actual infection can be shocked out with enough electricity.”
“An EMP creates localized electric fields,” Jordan said quietly, the junior tactical officer the person most directly responsible for the weapons. “It wouldn’t be as effective as the area spell.”
“It wouldn’t destroy enough of the nanites to get them beneath replication thresholds,” Breda objected. “For an active victim, we’re likely looking at upward of five hundred PPM of the nanites in the blood, with the replication threshold being a thousandth of that.
“Without the localized, directed pulse of the spell Commander Chambers used, you’d be looking at…maybe a fifty-percent kill rate?”
“So, we hit them ten times,” Roslyn said flatly. “Or twelve, to make damn sure. We sweep the entire city with sequenced electromagnetic pulses.”
“That will destroy all but our most hardened gear,” Daalman warned. “Exosuits, shuttles, the city’s infrastructure… We’ll create a new humanitarian disaster.”
“I have the resources of an entire world standing by,” the Governor said flatly. “We can restore power, repair shuttles, rebuild power lines—but we cannot rebuild my people.
“Will it work?”
Roslyn and Breda shared a long look. Neither of them was certain, but…
Breda nodded.
“At the very least, we’ll probably get every airborne nanite and buy ourselves time for the rest,” she concluded.
“We’re talking about bombarding a Protectorate world,” Daalman noted. “I have that authority, but…”
“You have my permission—my order, if that can be done,” Guerra told him.
“And that of the Voice of the Mage-Queen of Mars,” Roslyn added. “I think… I think it’s the way we’ll save the most people, sir. As the Governor said: we can fix the city if we save the people.”
“What about the Orpheus lab?” Dr. Breda asked. “Our best hope for treating the aftereffects of this nightmare is still the databases there.”
“It’s buried deep and it’s well shielded,” Roslyn told her. “We couldn’t detect it from the surface, and they have a fusion power plant down there. The lab will be fine. Even our military equipment is going to be in trouble on the surface, but…we can replace shuttles and so forth. People are harder to duplicate.”
“So be it,” Mage-Captain Daalman said firmly. “Mage-Lieutenant Jordan?”
“Sir?”
“Pull together the tactical Chiefs. I need a firing plan in fifteen minutes—and my tactical officer is on the planet.”
And, as both Roslyn and Daalman knew perfectly well, about to fall over.
48
The Exalt crash hit exactly on schedule, hammering Roslyn with a bone-crushing exhaustion that overwhelmed every corner of her body. Despite that, she managed not to stagger as she
