With a twenty-two-second flight time and the wait for the result of the first salvo, it took just over three minutes from Roslyn’s system telling her the sequence had started to the last explosion dissipating in the sky.
She sighed.
“That’s twelve,” she concluded, reaching up to remove the helmet from her hazmat gear. She breathed fresh, unfiltered air for the first time in hours. Her hair was a mess, she had pressure bruises from the helmet, and she wouldn’t know if she’d won for several minutes yet.
She never remembered dropping the helmet as exhaustion finally overwhelmed her.
49
Roslyn woke up in the medbay. There was a distinct sterile nature to a military medical facility that made that instantly clear—and then she spotted Dr. Breda poking at the console next to her bed.
“Hey, doc,” Roslyn whispered. “I’m…” She exhaled. “I’m hoping I’m okay?”
“You’re fine,” Breda told her, the chubby redhead stepping over to her. “It was just easier to keep you here after we ran the tests to make sure you weren’t in post-Orpheus mode.
“We were worried when you didn’t wake up at any point while the Captain was bringing you aboard.”
Roslyn coughed.
“How long was I out?”
“Fourteen hours,” the doctor told her. “You’d run yourself ragged before you took the Exalt. Your body had to recover from that kind of debt.”
She shook her head.
“So far as I can tell, you never had any of the Orpheus weapon in your system, by the way,” the doctor noted. “That’s not true of everyone they’re examining in the evac zone you put together. Several were definitely cleared by the decon units you were running.
“Damn. That could have been bad,” Roslyn murmured. “I need a report.”
“You need to stay right where you are,” Breda told her. “Like the Captain, I don’t trust Exalt, and I want to run more tests on you now that you’re awake.”
“Doctor, the city, my people…my mission.”
“The pulse worked,” Breda told her. “Samples from recovered former infected show maximum levels around half a percent of that needed for replication. The city is clear.
“There may still be some of the original delivery units floating through the air elsewhere, but Sorprendidas now knows how to handle a localized outbreak,” the doctor noted. “There are tens of thousands of local personnel swarming all over Nueva Portugal. The situation is under control, Roslyn.
“You did it.”
“We did it,” Roslyn replied, letting herself relax back into the bed. “I swear, the only thing I did was set the damn thing off.”
“It’s not my place to argue with you on that, but I think the Captain will have some very pithy commentary—probably quoting from the report she’s putting together recommending you for every medal she can think of.”
“If I hadn’t gone poking around, they never would have set the sprayers off.”
Breda sighed, pulled up a chair and brought herself down to the level of Roslyn’s resting head.
“You and I are going to have some formal sessions over this, I’m sure,” she noted. “But I’m going to remind you of one basic principle: you are not responsible for what your enemy does. Lafrenz had to be brought to justice—if you hadn’t gone after her now, she might have ended up deploying this weapon on her terms somewhere we wouldn’t have had her own systems to tear apart for treatment methods.
“Now internalize that,” Breda told her. “And then say ahh.”
Back in a proper uniform instead of combat armor, Roslyn returned to her office to see what information she could find. There were no formal reports yet, but she could pull a lot of data.
Her original Marines were now back aboard Huntress, a joint cyberwarfare team from her own electronic-warfare section and the planetary government having taken over from Knight. Three Marines had been replaced by at least three dozen specialist hackers.
They might get the data faster. They might not. But Knight deserved the rest.
Her evacuation zone was now one of six treatment-and-processing zones, the greenspace of the park given up for a massive temporary hospital with twenty thousand beds. The regular hospitals had been taken over as well, but what little formal data she had suggested that they had over two hundred and fifty thousand people being treated for post-Orpheus syndrome.
There were no breakthroughs yet, but the systems were in place to keep them alive until there were.
The next thing she checked was Bolivar’s status. He showed as available, and she hoped that he’d managed to get some sleep at some point—but she called him anyway.
“Captain Victoriano Bolivar, Nueva Portugal Guardia,” he answered crisply—and then recognized her face. “Mage-Commander Chambers! You’re all right.”
“I’m fine. Are you all right?” she asked.
“I did not fall off a chair unconscious, Chambers,” he pointed out drily. “I handed command of the park over to a very nervous Planetary Army Brigadier General and then fell over in a more planned fashion for ten hours.”
“I was worried you hadn’t slept,” she admitted. “Are you up to date on what’s going on in the city?”
“As much as anyone,” he said. “You want the rundown?”
“Yeah. I feel responsible.”
“You didn’t do this, Commander. Lafrenz did this,” he told her firmly. “But, yeah, I can give you the high-level.
“Current estimate is that we ended up with about three hundred thousand infected,” he noted. “We’re not entirely certain how many died, but we’ve got two hundred and sixty-three thousand beds filled with comatose Orpheus victims and another twenty-five thousand people who apparently hadn’t progressed far enough to go comatose when the nanites were destroyed.
“We’re busy processing everyone we can through bioscanners to clear out the last remaining nanites and help us ID people who, at best, aren’t entirely cogent yet,” he said grimly. “We haven’t even started to ID the bodies.
“We have Army troops on collection detail with freezer trucks. What’s left of the Guardia are knocking on doors and checking on
