by Marko Kloos
Idina looked at Dahl with a raised eyebrow, but the other woman maintained the unreadable expression she had probably mastered decades ago.
“That’s an interesting fact,” she replied.
“I thought so, too.”
Idina brought up a map of Sandvik and isolated Philharmony Station, then laughed when she magnified the view.
“That’s barely in our sector. The border line goes right through that station,” she said. “Half of it is in the Oceanian sector.”
“That is true,” Dahl conceded. “But our half is the one with the main entrance. And all the transfer platforms.”
Idina laughed again.
“That is one tiny loophole. We have jurisdiction there. But it won’t do us any good unless we just happen to be there when he changes trains, and we spot him. And somehow get to him before he jumps on the next Artery train or leaves by the eastern entrance.”
“If we knew his work schedule, we wouldn’t have to happen to be there.”
Idina finally figured out Dahl’s intent. She shook her head with a grin.
“That’s a sort of rule-bending ingenuity I hadn’t expected from you.”
“I am glad I still manage to confound your expectations sometimes,” Dahl said.
“Do we know his work schedule?”
Dahl nodded.
“He works from 1600 hours to 0000 hours this week. The Artery ride from the spaceport to Philharmony Station takes thirty-one minutes.”
Idina checked the time. It was 2210. They would be on station until 0600 hours tomorrow morning. If they encountered Vigi Fuldas in their sector during their shift, they could detain and question him without waiting for a judicial order.
“I know you are ordered to be on light duty,” Dahl said. “And you have the final authority here on military security matters. But I am the patrol supervisor for the Gretian police in this sector tonight. And I think that the platform at Philharmony Station has not had a foot patrol checking on things in a good while. At around 0030 hours tonight, I may decide that all patrols are either tied up or too far away, and that I want to take a good look around. Personally. And you would have to accompany me. Regardless of your commander’s wishes.”
“Well,” Idina said. “If you did that, I really wouldn’t have a choice. Those are the rules.”
Dahl shrugged, and Idina could see the hint of a smile in the corners of her mouth.
Prejudices dispelled once again, Idina thought.
The Artery transit stations in the center of the city were built underground, but only barely. Idina and Dahl walked down the soft and gradual incline that led from the surface of the Philharmony plaza to the main station entrance below. The station had an entrance atrium, and the ceiling of it was also the surface of the plaza above, made from a layered grid of energy-collecting panels that were set to be completely translucent at night. As they walked through the entrance and into the atrium, Idina looked up at the see-through ceiling, where the rain was collecting in puddles that refracted the lights from the nearby buildings and advertising projections.
Even after midnight, the atrium was still bustling with activity. Late-night commuters were making their way through a crowd that seemed to be mostly young Gretians out for nighttime entertainment, socializing inside the covered court while the summer thunderstorm was passing over the city. Half a dozen food vendors were selling snacks and drinks from mobile stations set up at regular intervals. Idina followed Dahl as she walked through the atrium and past the vendors. Someone in a small group of young men standing nearby saw her coming and jokingly offered up his friend for arrest. Dahl declined the offer, and they laughed as she walked by.
“I did not do it, take this one instead,” Dahl said to Idina over the helmet comms. “They all think they are the first ones to think of that joke.”
The Artery was a network of magnetic suspension trains that crisscrossed the city and connected major points of interest. It was one of the Gretian engineering achievements Idina could admire without reservation because it didn’t have a military application. The trains were sleek and white, and they moved over their smooth magnetic pathways in almost complete silence. The only way to tell that one was about to come out of the pathway’s tunnel was the slight change in air pressure right before it emerged. The platform beyond the atrium was divided by color markings, one side green and the other blue. As they walked out onto the green half of the platform, a train glided out of the tube on the blue side and slowed to a gentle stop. Everywhere else in the Gaia system, the screen projections for timetables and directions in transit centers were at least bilingual—the local language plus Rhodian, the de facto common language since the end of the war—but the Gretian signage remained defiantly Gretian only.
“It is now 0032 hours,” Dahl said. “The green-line train from the spaceport is due at 0040. Let us hope he did not miss it. There will not be another until 0110.”
They paced the platform while they waited, drawing occasional looks from passing commuters. Idina’s translator picked up snippets of conversation here and there, background noises of everyday life, mundane and routine. It had taken her a while to shake off her constant fear of another ambush, but she’d always have the professional paranoia of an infantry soldier. This wasn’t quite the hostile territory it used to be, but it was still unfriendly ground. She knew that the minute she let herself forget that fact, fate would remind her of it in unpleasant ways. Police duty required that she let people get closer to her than she’d ever allow a civilian from a former enemy planet in an infantry setting, and it was mentally tiring—watching hands in pockets, scanning waistlines for bumps and bulges that could be concealed weapons, looking for objects that were out of place. Human brains had a practical bandwidth for information, and it wasn’t difficult to probe the limits of it by having to be alert for threats in a place full of people, where an attack could come from anyone and anywhere.
The minutes ticked by slowly, unmoved by Idina’s desire to hurry the minute marker along on its path toward the hour mark on her helmet display’s chronometer.
“Thirty seconds,” Dahl finally said. “He will be on the next train on the green side. Or we will have to make an excuse to spend another thirty minutes down here.”
The train came out of its pathway tube and stopped silently. Idina noted that the doors opened at precisely 0040 and zero seconds.
“Look casual,” Dahl advised.
“I’m wearing light armor that has the word POLICE stenciled on it in reflective letters,” Idina pointed out. “It’s not the best outfit for staying unnoticed.”
“That is the joke,” Dahl said.
“Gretian humor. I didn’t think it existed.”
“We get to make one joke per week. There are ration cards.”
This got an actual laugh from Idina, and Dahl smiled with satisfaction without taking her eyes off the crowd alighting from the train doors. To give her hands something to do, Idina checked her equipment by touch as they waited: kukri, stun stick, restraints, riot shield handle, sidearm.
“There he is,” Dahl said and turned her head to the right. “Green bodysuit, brown vest, orange sling pack.”
Idina followed her gaze and saw the suspect, who was walking off the train while looking at the screen projection of his comtab. Vigi Fuldas had the physique of someone who regularly lifted heavy things for a living. There were stains on his green bodysuit, and his white-and-red hard-shell work boots were scuffed and dirty. She tried to will him to pay attention to his screen just a few moments longer, but as Dahl set herself in motion, he extinguished the screen and glanced in their direction. His face froze in the familiar expression of the unpleasantly surprised, a blend of shock and momentary paralysis. Then he turned toward the atrium and ran.
They dashed after him. He sprinted off the platform and into the wide passageway that connected the transit tubes to the atrium. Once again Idina was amazed at the speed Dahl was able to work up at short notice eve
n with ten kilos of equipment weighing down her duty belt.
He almost made the atrium, but then he looked over his shoulder, and seeing Dahl almost within grabbing range made him flinch and stumble. He bumped into a fellow commuter, and his momentum carried him sideways into a store’s merchandise rack. Snack packages and electronic trinkets scattered all over the floor of the passage. Dahl and Idina swooped in from two sides, and Vigi Fuldas backpedaled with wide and panicked eyes. He looked from them to the atrium and the distant exit doors.
“Help,” he shouted. “Someone help!”
The racket had already drawn the attention of the nearby crowd, and Vigi’s cries seemed to signal that there might be good entertainment to be had. As Dahl hauled him to his feet and prepared to put the restraints on him, he looked over his shoulder at the slowly gathering crowd and repeated his loud pleas.
“If you do not shut up, I will stun you unconscious and have my colleague carry you out of here on her shoulder,” Dahl said, irritation in her voice.
He jerked away from Dahl, and she lost her grip. When she lunged to grab him again, he kicked out with his hard-shell boots and connected with the armor pad on her thigh. She gave him a shove with both hands, which sent him stumbling backward but didn’t quite bring him down.
“Have it your way,” Dahl said and pulled her stun stick from her belt.
She swung it at him, but he dodged the first swing. For a man of his build, he was surprisingly nimble. When she took another swing, he had his orange sling pack in his hands and parried her blow with it. All around them, a crowd of mostly young men had closed in to watch the event. They had the attention of almost everyone in earshot now, and with every passing second, it would get more difficult to walk out of this place without incident. Idina decided to cut the proceedings short. She dashed toward Fuldas, shrugged off the blow from the pack he was swinging her way, and bodychecked him. He was over a head taller and muscular for a Gretian, but the collision finally knocked him on his ass and sent him skidding across the passage floor for a meter or two. When she hauled him to his feet and turned him toward Dahl so she could put the restraints on him, Fuldas shouted for help again. Some people in the crowd that all but surrounded them by now responded with whistling and jeers.
When Idina’s hands were free again, she turned to look for the path out. When she saw the hostile faces surrounding her, she realized that her move had been a mistake. Their own police officer roughing up Vigi was not a noteworthy event, but seeing a foreign occupation soldier mixing it up with him had riled up some of the spectators. Crowd dynamics were volatile. The smallest spark of aggression could erupt into a conflagration very quickly, and groups of young men were the most flammable kindling of all.
“All available units, I need backup for crowd control now,” she sent on her platoon channel. “Home in on our location and put the Quick Reaction Force on alert.”
A kid with a scruffy red chin beard squared off in front of Dahl and Fuldas.
“Why are you so mean?” he said. “Why are you so mean?”
It seemed like a mild and slightly ridiculous accusation to Idina, but she knew that the translator tended to err on the side of excessive formality. He kept saying the phrase, getting closer to Dahl with each repetition, until he was standing just beyond arm’s length. Behind him, the crowd jeered again, which seemed to encourage him. The space between them and the rest of the crowd grew smaller with every moment.
“Back off and be on your way,” Dahl said in her command voice. She brought up her stun stick to keep the kid from getting nose to nose with her while she only had one hand free. Fuldas used the opportunity to unbalance her slightly by yanking his body weight away from her. The kid with the chin tuft reached out and grabbed Dahl by the wrist, then tried to take the stun stick out of her hand.
With that move, the mob decided that the show had turned from a spectator to a participation event. Several young men crowded around them, encouraged by Dahl’s momentary lack of a stern response. Dahl recovered her hold on the stick and brought it down on the side of her attacker’s head, putting an end to his ongoing lamentation of their meanness. But Idina knew that the scale had already tipped. She took the riot shield handle from her belt and activated it. Before the cruciform frame could fully deploy, someone crashed into her, pushed by another member of the crowd, and the shield handle fell from her hand and clattered to the ground. She shoved the kid back toward the crowd, but they were too close and too numerous. Next to her, two more young men had pushed Dahl backward and against the window of a nearby shop while others were pulling Fuldas away from her.
Idina pushed her way toward Dahl and put one of them in a headlock from behind, then yanked him away. She felt people reaching for her arms, her helmet, the remaining equipment on her belt. Someone tried to yank her sidearm from its holster. Idina lashed out with her elbow and was rewarded with a cry of pain, and the hand left her pistol’s grip again. She felt the blow of a kick against her back armor and stumbled forward against Dahl, who had freed herself with the help of her stun stick. Then it was just blows and kicks, too many for her to deflect with her hands and arms. For a moment, she had the impulse to draw her sidearm, but even if she could get it clear from its holster, she knew they’d wrestle it away from her before she could get off more than a random round or two. In the sudden rush of bodies against and around her, she lost track of Dahl and Fuldas.
“Officers under duress,” she shouted into her comms. In just a minute or two, the first backup units would arrive, but a minute seemed like a very long time right now.
Someone tried to take her down by wrapping his arms around her legs. She shrugged him off with a knee thrust and a kick. If she ended up on the ground, she knew they would swarm her and kick her to pieces, armor or not. She took a wide stance, knees bent to lower her center of gravity, and punched back at every arm or leg that was coming her way. All she saw in the faces around her was anger and hatred. The crowd had found a convenient adapter to channel their testosterone and their resentment, and she knew they wouldn’t stop now until someone died, and maybe not even then.
I’m like a robot in this armor, she thought. They’re just kicking a robot to bits. I’m not a person to them.
She reached up, unlocked her helmet, and pulled it off her head, then swung it around and cracked it right across the nearest face. Then she shouted out her fear and anger. It was the height of idiocy to take the helmet off in a melee. But everyone needed to see that she was someone, not something. If they beat her to death, they’d at least have a face to haunt them in their dreams, not just an anonymous helmet visor.
The crowd retreated a little in collective surprise. It was just enough space for her to reach down and draw her kukri from its sheath in a wide sweeping motion. The blade made a ringing sound as it cleared the sheath and carved through the air molecules in front of her. Instantly, the crowd recoiled away from her as if she had just sprouted meter-long steel thorns all over her body.
So you have heard of these, Idina thought with grim satisfaction. She swung the blade in a flashy and aggressive flourish. Nobody tried to take the kukri from her hands. If they had, she would have started lopping off hands and arms and heads, and then there would be much more blood on the floor than just her own at the end.
Now there was fear in some of the eyes and faces around her. She kept moving the kukri in slow and deliberate flourishes. It was a strange thing, but people often seemed to fear edged weapons more than firearms. Maybe it was because getting shot was an abstract concept very few of them had ever experienced. But she knew that almost everyone in the crowd had gotten cut before, knew the bright pain when a sharp blade sliced open skin and tissue.
“When this cuts you, you don’t even bleed. Not at first,” she growled at them in Palladian she knew they wouldn’t understand. But the strange and aggressive-sounding words seemed to add to the tempering effect of the kukri she was swinging, and she followed them up with a grin.
There was another commotion to her right, behind the crowd in the atrium. Idina didn’t have her tactical screen in front of her right eye because her helmet was on the ground three meters away from her, but she knew that the other patrol teams had started to arrive. A ripple of nervous energy seemed to go through the crowd. With the threat of dismemberment in front of them and the certainty of detainment coming up from behind, the fire went out of their eyes, and they started to disperse. Within a few moments, most were rushing toward the east entrance, away from the police officers and JSP troopers Idina knew were now advancing through the atrium. She made no attempt to stop any of them. Her and Dahl’s helmet sensors had registered all the faces, and the AI back at the police headquarters would be able to match them to their owners’ ID passes in just a few seconds.
Dahl stood a few meters away, breathing hard. She had never lowered her helmet visor during the encounter. In the space between them, four of the attacking crowd were splayed out on the floor of the passage, knocked out by Dahl’s stun stick or Idina’s helmet blow.
Vigi Fuldas was gone.
Idina gritted her teeth and suppressed a particularly profane curse involving all the gods and their various genitalia. Her heart was still hammering in her chest. She sheathed her kukri and walked over to her helmet, then picked it up and placed it back on her head. As soon as she did, comms traffic assaulted her ears.
“Well,” Dahl said, pushing the words out in quick bursts between her fast breaths. “That did not go quite as planned.”
CHAPTER 11
SOLVEIG
Seeing Acheron with her own eyes for the first time felt like she was fulfilling an old promise.
At university, most of her classmates had chosen Rhodian or Oceanian for their foreign-language requirements because those were the easiest to learn for Gretians. Solveig had chosen Acheroni, which was more difficult by several orders of magnitude. It took four times as long for a native Gretian to get proficient in Acheroni than any of the other system languages except Palladian. But Acheron was where Ragnar had its most important business partners, and she had always found the culture fascinating. So she had slogged through four years of grueling classes, learning a new writing system and wrapping her vocal cords around new ways to make sounds while most of her friends were breezing through their tourist Rhodian. But the payoff was waiting for her just ten thousand kilometers off the corporate yacht’s bow right now. Acheron’s atmosphere was all swirls of yellow and orange, constantly in furious movement. The surface was somewhere below that thick layer of corrosive clouds, too hot and with far too much atmospheric pressure for human settlement. Acheron’s life was all in the middle layer of its atmosphere, fifty kilometers above the surface, where the cities rode the invisible currents in normal pressure and perpetual twenty-degree weather.