by Marko Kloos
“Drones going to active mode in three . . . two . . . one. Drones are on line and active, sir.”
In the space ahead, all around the spot where the computer had placed the marker for the emergency beacon, sensor echoes started popping into existence, first dozens and then hundreds. Dunstan’s dread increased even before the AI had analyzed the data and labeled the new contacts in the color that stood for INERT/BALLISTIC. The debris field was a hundred kilometers across and still expanding.
“Give me an optical feed,” he said, even though he already knew what he would see.
Mayler brought up another overlay and expanded it. The AI stitched the feed from the drones together into a cohesive image that reminded Dunstan of the internment yard carnage they had witnessed firsthand three months ago.
The debris field was a hundred kilometers across and still expanding. Whatever had happened to the light cruiser Danae had been sudden and catastrophic. Some of the bits and pieces careening through the darkness were recognizable as shards of laminate armor, still wearing the titanium-gray paint layer that was standard on RN warships, but much of the rest looked like the result of a high-velocity collision between a small space station and an asteroid. When the optical sensors picked up the first unmistakable floating bodies, Dunstan let out a low sigh. He had seen lots of dead sailors during the war—some of them in one piece and looking like they were merely sleeping, some torn to bits so thoroughly that only the shredded remains of pressure suits clinging to them identified them as body parts, some just reduced to dissipating clouds of viscera and body fluids. But most of his crew had not been in active service in the war, and this would be their first exposure to the realities of death in space combat. It was an unforgiving environment even when nobody was shooting at you.
“Bosworth, contact fleet command and let them know we’ve reached the crash buoy location, and that we have spotted a large debris field. Transmit our telemetry data and tell them to send whatever recovery teams are in the area. And we’ll be on station awhile, so ask for some extra guns out here. Whoever did this may still be in the neighborhood.”
“Aye, sir,” Bosworth replied.
“Any word from the Oceanians yet?”
“They have a corvette on the way, but it’s still six hours out.”
“So it’ll be all us for a while. Run out the drones for max coverage. I want early warning if someone’s trying to sneak up on us.”
“Aye, sir.” Bosworth was tight-lipped and slightly pale, and the temperature in the AIC seemed to have dropped several degrees in the last few minutes.
“What do you think happened here, sir?” Boyer asked.
“I have no idea yet, Boyer. If they ran into that stolen fuzzhead cruiser, they would have gotten off a contact report. And I can’t imagine there’s a pirate out there with enough firepower to just blot one of our light cruisers out of space like that. Not if the crew was alert and awake.”
“Danae’s Point Defense System is better than ours,” Mayler said. “And they have twice the missile tubes we do. Had,” he corrected himself with an unhappy shake of his head.
Dunstan looked at the optical feed composite from the drones again. At this distance, the resolution of the imagery was still too low to make out fine details, but some of the floating objects looked like bodies in vacsuits. If the ship had blown apart so suddenly that the command crew never had the time to send a warning or distress signal, the chances were slim that anyone had made it to the escape pods. But Minotaur would be looking anyway, because that’s what Danae’s crew would do for them if the roles were reversed.
“Thirteen minutes to turnaround, sir,” Boyer said.
“Very well. As soon as we turn, go active on all sensors and take us toward that crash beacon. Let’s hope some of them made it out alive.”
CHAPTER 3
IDINA
The patrol gyrofoil hung in the summer sky above Sandvik, its rotors churning the hot air. Idina looked at the temperature readout on the flight control screens. It was a sticky thirty degrees Celsius outside, and the cabin’s environmental controls kept the inside at a much more agreeable twenty-one degrees.
“I’m not sure I could ever get completely used to the weather on this planet,” Idina said.
“Is it too hot for you, Sergeant?” Captain Dahl asked. “I can turn the climate down a few degrees.”
Idina’s Gretian police partner was watching the screen projection in front of her, which showed a magnified high-resolution image of the city streets a thousand meters below the gyrofoil. The surveillance hardware on these prewar police flyers wasn’t as good as military gear, but even from this altitude, Dahl could still zoom in on an individual closely enough to read the text on their comtab screen if she wanted.
“It’s not the heat,” Idina replied. “I don’t mind the heat. It’s the seasons.”
“I keep forgetting they do not have those on the other planets. What is the weather like on Pallas?”
“Cold. Windy. Ten, twelve degrees on a warm day. But it doesn’t matter much inside the mountains. It’s always eighteen degrees underground. This place?” Idina gestured at the view of the Gretian capital outside the gyrofoil’s large observation windows that had tinted themselves almost fully to keep out the sun. “I’m on my third tour here on Gretia, and it still feels unnatural. One month you need heaters in your armor, the next month you need coolant packs.”
“And in the spring and autumn, sometimes you need both on the same day,” Dahl said, smiling, without taking her eyes off the display.
After the May bombing in Principal Square, the weekly protest marches had abated gradually as the Alliance and the Gretian police had cracked down on mass demonstrations, and the heat of the summer had all but suffocated the rest. But for the first time since the beginning of summer, there was a sizable crowd gathered below, one that had nothing to do with political discontent. It was the first day of the socaball season, and the gathering was happening at Sandvik’s stadium.
For all their political differences, every planet in the system shared the socaball passion. Gretia had exported the sport when they had started to colonize the rest of the system, and it was the one cultural constant, the single unaltered piece of their common heritage everyone had willingly retained, all centered on a ball and a square field measuring one hundred meters on each side. It was equal parts strategy and athletics, brains and muscles, fast-paced and exciting. Idina had played it as a child, but she didn’t usually watch matches except during the interplanetary contest that took place every three years. The last one had been held ten years ago. None had happened during the war—stylized battle on the socaball field had been superseded by real warfare—and everyone had been too busy picking up the pieces to concern themselves with restarting the contest when the war ended. But the Gretians had received permission to reestablish their planetary league two years after the war, and the games had provided a diversion from the hardships of the postwar years that had been welcomed by occupiers and occupied alike.
“That is dedication. Standing in the heat like that just to see a ninety-minute match. They could all be at home and watching everything in perfect comfort,” Idina said.
Down below, the crowds funneled through the newly installed security measures the occupation authorities now required for large public events. As people arrived on the plaza in front of the stadium, they had to walk through sensor fields that could detect weapons and explosives. The sensors were unobtrusive and didn’t look like obvious policing or military hardware. They were large see-through panels that appeared to be safety barriers or weather shielding to the uninitiated. Everyone who wanted to get into the stadium had to walk into a twenty-meter tunnel made up of panel segments. The AI connected to the panel sensors could scan a person from head to toe in a few milliseconds, and it could sniff out anything that could be made to go boom, even the components to binary explosives before they were mixed together. Anyone walking through the passage with a weapon
would be intercepted by the police officers on the far end of the sensor pathway. If the system detected a bomb, it could erect a set of blast walls from its base and seal off the tunnel in just a few seconds. For a culture so conditioned toward structure and hierarchy, the Gretians had a surprising fetish for privacy rights in the public sphere, but few had objected to the new surveillance measures after the May bombings.
“I do not follow the sport, but all of my colleagues do,” Dahl said. “I am given to understand that the experience is quite different when one is actually present in the stadium.”
“I’ll have to take their word for it. There just isn’t much that will make me overcome my dislike for getting stuck in crowds.”
“Then I’m afraid you may have chosen the wrong profession,” Dahl replied with the faint smile Idina knew well by now. She had gotten used to her partner’s expressions and the translator bud’s annoyingly stilted interpretation of Dahl’s Gretian, and after three months on patrol with the woman, Idina understood a fair number of Gretian words. Police and military work involved a lot of repetitive phrases. Cruising around with a Gretian police officer was almost an ideal way to pick up the language, at least certain aspects of it. On her patrols in the city over the last few months, she had become particularly proficient in the recognition of invective and obscenities.
At least they’re peaceful, Idina thought. And I’m not down there in riot gear getting piss-filled bags thrown at me. Let them bake in the sun and watch their silly ball game.
The console chirped a subdued alert and projected another screen into the space between Idina and Dahl. The Gretian police captain brought it over to her side of the cabin and inspected the data.
“One of the sensor fields just alerted,” she read. “Number eleven, by the east entrance.”
Idina focused the gyrofoil’s surveillance array onto the spot Dahl had indicated and magnified the view. A steady stream of spectators was moving through the sensor field, but nothing looked out of the ordinary. The police officers at the end of the security gate had clearly received the same alert because they were squaring off toward the oncoming pedestrians with unmistakably attentive body language.
“What is going on, post eleven?” Dahl sent on the tactical channel. In the security gate, the civilians had noticed that something wasn’t right, but then the officers at the end of the tunnel stepped aside to clear the way and kept waving the crowd along.
“False positive, Captain,” someone from the post guard replied. “Secondary scan shows nothing. Nobody in the sensor field is armed.”
“That wasn’t a false positive,” Dahl said to Idina. “Those look different.”
She expanded the data field in front of her and rotated it a little so Idina could see the contents of the projection.
“That’s a near-field return from an asset chip,” she said. “One from a duty weapon. One that wasn’t there before. Military or police. But it’s not one of ours. The central database doesn’t recognize the code.”
Idina looked at it and ran it through her military data link. It came back with a result just a moment later, and she sat up as straight in her seat as her safety harness would let her.
“It’s Palladian,” she said. “It’s a sidearm. Pallas Brigade military issue. Where did the sensor get that return?”
“The chip in the gun sent an automatic proximity ID when it picked up the interrogation by the sensor. Twenty meters from the eastern edge of the security lock.”
“See if you can get a visual on that spot from the moment the chip went active,” Idina said. She was proficient with the gyrofoil’s systems after a few months of flying around in it, but it still took her conscious mental effort to navigate the controls for the surveillance suite’s multitude of data streams. Dahl had been patrolling in this vehicle type for a decade, and she could do any task four times as fast. Whenever speed was of the essence, Idina was happy to let the Gretian take charge.
“All units, be advised that someone armed with a military-grade sidearm just tried to enter security lock eleven. They’re still out there, so be alert,” Idina sent to the Joint Security Patrol troops embedded with the Gretian police. They were down to one JSP to every four Gretian officers—not because the JSP had reduced their numbers, but because the Gretian police had grown bigger and more competent with every passing month. But the JSP troopers were still in charge of their counterparts when it looked like the riot shields or the guns were about to come out. Her troopers sent their acknowledgments wordlessly through the data link.
“Got him,” Dahl said with satisfaction in her voice. “Male, one hundred seventy centimeters, light-colored short hair, light-blue bodysuit, white vest.” She froze the sensor image on-screen and pushed a duplicate to Idina. “He walked toward the checkpoint and stopped short when he noticed the sensor locks. Turned around and walked back east.”
“He knew security would see the gun if he walked through the scanner. He may not know we already got a ping on him from the asset chip in the gun,” Idina replied. She sent the image to all her JSP troopers over the platoon’s data link. The JSP soldiers and their Gretian patrol partners had shared voice channels, but the police and military data networks still didn’t talk to each other. Even after five years of nominal peace and improving cooperation, the Alliance still wasn’t willing to let a recent enemy interface with its sensitive data infrastructure.
“If he is on foot, he is no more than a hundred meters away,” Dahl said. She brought up two more display projections. The gyrofoil kept doing its slow autopilot loops high above the stadium square, but the sensor package was mounted in an underbelly pod that could monitor all directions at once.
“I see him,” she announced a few moments later. “Light-blue thermal suit, walking on Eleventh and crossing the intersection with Twentieth.”
On the visual feed, their quarry was easy to spot. His light-blue bodysuit didn’t particularly stand out among the Gretian fashion choices of the crowd, but he was one of the few people moving against the current flow of foot traffic, away from the stadium instead of toward it. Dahl put a sensor marker on him for the AI to track. Then she disengaged the autopilot and brought the gyrofoil around in a lazy turn toward the west, away from the stadium and Eleventh Street.
“Don’t you want to follow him? The optics won’t be able to track him once we lose line of sight.”
Dahl shook her head.
“If we fly in his direction, he may notice. Then he will know we are following him. There are too many indoor galleries and passages in this area. If he goes into one of those, we will not find him again.”
Idina checked the dispersal of her JSP troopers on the tactical map. All of them were on the square, working the security checkpoints with the Gretian police officers, with hundreds of people between them and the end of Eleventh Street, where the suspect had gone. Even if she sent a team in pursuit, it would take them a while to make their way through the crowd.
“Any of yours close enough to do an intercept?”
Dahl checked her own map and shook her head.
“Everyone is tied up. The closest patrol not on stadium duty is replying to a disturbance at the entertainment center on Fifth and Fourteenth. We are the closest unit. I am already bringing us around to fly ahead of him, out of sight.”
“You know, for patrol supervisors, we spend an awful lot of time on the ground,” Idina said, and Dahl’s mouth twitched her little smile again.
“That just means we are doing our jobs right. Prepare for a quick drop.”
Idina’s harness tightened automatically as Dahl put the gyrofoil into a steep descent and increased speed. Dahl kept them on a westerly course until they had dropped enough altitude to break line of sight with the suspect, who was still walking down Eleventh Street in no hurry. When they were almost at the level of the highest buildings in the area, Dahl nudged the gyrofoil into a left-hand turn that brought them parallel with Eleventh.
“All units, we have th
e suspect in sight and are moving to apprehend,” Idina told her JSP officers. “Stay vigilant in case there are more.”
For a city of Sandvik’s size, even the JSP and the beefed-up Gretian police were not enough to keep eyes on everything, so the JSP had a few dozen high-endurance surveillance drones on call. They did not patrol the city from above on a regular basis because the Gretians objected to their presence without cause, but today there were six of them on station, three thousand meters above the city and all but invisible to the naked eye. Idina tapped into the network and assigned the closest one to shift its patrol pattern and focus its attention on her and Dahl. If something went sideways during the arrest, the drone would be their guardian spirit.
“All right, we have the eyes in the sky on us. Where are we putting down?”
Dahl pointed at a spot on the navigation display.
“There, in that little square past the intersection with Forty-Fourth. He will not see us landing, and we can turn the corner and come down Eleventh right when he is just a grid away. If he runs when he sees us, we will be close enough to follow.”
“Let’s do it,” Idina said and surreptitiously flexed her right hand. She was a soldier, not a police officer, and most of the time she found police work boring and frustratingly restrictive. But chasing down live quarry was one of the few exciting activities of this assignment. The adrenaline rush from the threat of impending conflict made her feel awake and alive. It was the challenge of the chase more than the tussle at the end that gave her enjoyment. Too few of the belligerent Gretians she had fought during an arrest had any direct experience with Palladians, and they always overestimated their own abilities against a short, stocky woman who was used to living under 20 percent higher gravity than they did. Fighting them was never a challenge, but she always enjoyed seeing the look of astonished surprise on the face of some young Gretian hothead after getting put on his ass by a woman who was two heads shorter.