‘Sev, it’s a virus,’ Vasco shouted as he lumbered back up the stairs. Horror, flesh-crawling horror constricted his throat. It was the worst possible scenario. ‘We’ve been virus bombed. Fuck, fuck, FUCK!’
‘What? What are you talking about?’ Sev asked. Vasco could hear gunfire over Sev’s comlink. The UNAF forces were moving in.
‘Everyone’s dead. Everyone. Here, Minos. The whole goddamn planet. Rhodes has it, Brock has it. Yashego has it. Haven’t you noticed everyone coughing? The provar have hit Ariadne with virus bombs. Christ knows when, it must have been in the last twenty or thirty hours. The Ascendancy isn’t coming, Sev—they’ve already been!’
‘Ah, shit,’ Sev said, his composure fracturing. ‘Shit. We’ve taken the latest countervirals.’
‘We have, but no-one on Ariadne has. And no-one is coming to bring them either. Sev: everyone one this planet is going to die.’
‘Oh, fuck,’ Sev muttered.
Vasco pounded up the stairs as fast as he could. His exoskeleton was pistoning his legs for him, meaning he could take four, five steps at a time, but it was still slow, so damn slow!
‘Yashego looked just about OK,’ Vasco said, thinking out loud. ‘The coma might slow the spread. We need to get Rhodes and Brock into comas asap. And everyone on world needs to go home, go inside and quarantine themselves!’ He thought of the mass of crowds, the hot, wet weather, the perfect conditions for the spread of the virus. It would be a highly-manufactured, highly-virulent strain, terminal on contraction. The only way to avoid being killed would be to avoid infection altogether—nearly impossible with multiple warhead, mid-altitude airburst bombs. That or have a complete body transplant at a Fleet Medical Station well-versed in severe trauma.
‘We need to get word to sector command,’ Vasco continued. ‘They might send aid.’
He reached the ground floor. His detection alarm suddenly spluttered into life. The whole building had reached LRIS saturation. His refraction shielding was cooked.
‘Shit!’ he shouted, as railgun fire chewed up the walls and floor around him. He squeezed the trigger on his own, sending tungsten fire spitting back down the corridor. He kept moving, and ordered his drone to link up with Sev and Kgosi’s and deadzone the compound. Within seconds, the building was a black hole on electronic sensors.
‘Sev, I’m coming up, get ready to seal it!’ he shouted as he powered through the east-south corridor and to the back stairwell. Parts of the wall had been blasted through. He had to quickly reroute as he discovered a UNAF APC had been rammed into the southeast corner of the building. Its chassis was scarred with repeated magma pulse discharges, and the blackened, wrecked bodies of six troopers lay in crumpled piles around the debarkation ramp. But the laser sponsons had been set to VI control, and they scythed lethally down the hallway.
‘Roger. I’m with the targets on the top floor. Be careful, there are hostiles scattered throughout the ground floor.’
‘No shit,’ Vasco breathed. Another hailstorm of rail rounds slashed through the hallways. Vasco leapt to the side and returned fire. He took one trooper down with a lucky neck shot, before blindly charging back into the main foyer and up the stairwell there.
‘I’m on the first floor,’ he said, using resonance mapping and enhanced optics to pick out enemies. They had no refraction, and their old suits bled signals all over the spectrum, so he was easily able to blow the legs off one with a microgrenade and shoot another enough times to break their spine, even if none of his rounds penetrated. Their reactions were slow, almost ponderous.
He reached the second floor. Here, windows along the building’s façade had been shattered. Laser beams, seemingly un-aimed, carved indiscriminately through the openings, setting fire to the furniture and carpets and melting plastic and steel. A pile of shredded bodies lay crumped at one end of the corridor, where Sev had picked up Kgosi’s RRG and scythed down a whole squad of men. The thing lay discarded, its few last seconds of ammunition spent.
He continued to move. With the deadzone the UNAF forces couldn’t detect him, but they were inside the compound now. Below he could hear APCs and technicals closing in, grinding rubble underneath their big, metalled tires. His Mantix detected at least thirty troopers now on the bottom two floors. All of their concealed traps had either been set off or detected thanks to the electronic warfare disruption and neutralised.
He reached the north west corner of the second floor and threw a handful of microgrenades out of a shattered window. A series of small pops tore through a squad loitering in the north section of the compound. No deaths, but some nasty leg injuries.
He ran up the stairs. ‘I’m clear!’ he shouted to Sev. ‘Seal it!’
Sev hit the trigger without ceremony. Plasma explosives lining key support beams detonated, shearing through carbon polymer and diamond armour and collapsing access stairwells and rendering the elevator shaft inaccessible and inoperable. In a stroke, they sealed off the second floor up, and trapped a few more soldiers in the process.
Vasco ran to the window. Smoke and blue fire raced across the courtyard, dousing the troops and technicals there. They barely reacted. The building shook cataclysmically, and for a nauseating second Vasco was worried they’d got the calculations wrong and the whole thing was going to come down. But after the dust settled, it was clear it had gone to plan. Vasco reviewed a holo of the building to be sure, but the explosives had worked perfectly. Aside from a few bewildered troops trapped on the second floor, there was no-one alive—or at least, no-one who posed a threat—inside the compound.
Vasco reached the roof. Sev had dragged Brock, Rhodes, Yashego and Kgosi up there and tucked each of them, head-to-toe, under the lip of reinforced masonry running the circumference of the roof. Each lay comatose. According to his Mantix scanners, Rhodes was hours from technical death, with Brock and Yashego not far behind. Kgosi’s injuries, though immediately serious, would be triaged as trivial in any Fleet Medical Station.
Vasco collapsed to the floor, his body shaking with stim use and adrenaline. The building protested and burned beneath him, and clouds of smoke churned from the shattered windows. Within the wreckage of the compound, the bodies of nearly a hundred UNAF men and women lay.
‘You OK?’ he asked Sev.
‘Yeah, I’m OK,’ Sev replied tiredly. The floor around him was rust red where the drizzle had washed the blood off his Mantix. Away to the east, the horizon was brightening. It was 0400 local. If Jarle was right, they’d be leaving by 0500. An entire hour. By the pace of modern combat, it seemed unthinkably slow.
Vasco keyed in the comlink. ‘This is Captain Adrian Vasco to all on-world UNAF forces. The provar have hit Ariadne with virus bombs. My guess is the highly virulent strain Jago 541b. Please; go home. Disperse. Get as far away from each other as you can. Get everyone inside and stay there.’ He paused. He wasn’t qualified for this. He wasn’t a medical technician or a quarantine specialist. But what the hell else could he do? ‘If you have symptoms—coughing, fever, bringing up blood—you should isolate yourself.’ He paused again. ‘I’m sorry.’
He cancelled the feed and rested his head against the lip of the roof.
‘Chief,’ Sev said, kneeling over him with his magma pulser on the floor and his railgun aimed in the direction of Independence Boulevard.
‘Yeah?’
‘Think you should take a look at this.’
Vasco forewent using his drone circling overhead, and physically pushed himself off the ground and knelt.
‘Jesus,’ he breathed.
The streets were littered with corpses. Those who weren’t dead shuffled about like zombies. Some crawled across the floor; others dragged themselves through gutters and along pavements. Soldiers and civilians alike carpeted Independence Boulevard. The air was choked with insects despite the rain.
It suddenly made sense. Horrifying sense. His mad scramble back up through Government House. The soldiers who he’d enco
untered. He played it back on his helmet camera feed. The railgun fire was lazy and poorly aimed, the flinching of a dying man who’d been spooked by his appearance. The two he’d killed on the first floor, facing away from him, railguns pointing at the floor, staggering as if drunk. The troops in the courtyard he’d hit with grenades, standing about like automatons while the virus destroyed their brains.
He cancelled the feed and looked back out across the boulevard. He keyed in the comlink, but this time just to receive. There was nothing. Static. Comms traffic had dried up completely. The world had gone quiet.
‘My God,’ he breathed. Theseus was a tomb. A city of the dead. He let his railgun clatter to the floor. ‘My God. I never thought I’d see it.’
He nearly jumped out of his skin as his comlink squawked. ‘VIPER Alpha this is VIPER Bravo, do you copy?’
‘Jarle,’ Vasco said. ‘We’re here.’
‘We’re airborne and heading for orbit. We’ll be with you in forty minutes.’
‘Copy, Sergeant,’ Vasco said tiredly. ‘You have the marker for Theseus Four?’
There was a pause. ‘Yes, sir,’ Jarle replied, slightly guardedly.
Vasco looked at Kgosi, prostrate, unconscious. Dying. He thought of the man’s protestations, the insistence they get Sarbin. ‘Pick up the zhahassi first, Sergeant.’
‘Captain, I—’
‘Theseus Four, then us, Jarle. That’s an order.’
‘Yes, sir.’