by Marko Kloos
“If we don’t have to fire a shot or use our stun sticks tonight, it’ll be a good op,” Idina added when there were no more questions from the troopers. “But don’t get complacent just because the streets are quiet. Things can turn to shit in a hot second.”
“Maybe I’m getting too old for this business,” Idina said when she was back in the gyrofoil with Dahl and on the way to their patrol sector. The sun had set completely now, leaving only the faintest streak of purple lingering above the horizon.
“You are not too old,” Dahl said. “You are in better shape than any of our new officers fresh from police school.”
“I will be thirty-seven this year,” Idina replied. “Seventeen years of service. That’s ancient for an infantry soldier. If I don’t take retirement in three years, they will shunt me off into a support slot until I get bored enough.”
“And why not retire? You have done more than your share for the Alliance, I think.”
“I have done this since I was twenty. I don’t really know how to do anything else.”
“You will only be forty. That leaves more than half a lifetime to learn something else.”
“Infantry skills don’t translate well into the civilian world. There isn’t much call there for killing people or breaking their stuff,” Idina said.
“You would make a fair police officer,” Dahl suggested.
“Not my calling. I don’t have the temperament. When those people overwhelmed us last night, I was ready to chop off some hands and feet.”
“And you would have been in the right,” Dahl said. “I was a moment away from deploying my sidearm. And I do not have that impulse very often. Maybe I am getting too old for this business as well.”
“What a team we make,” Idina said with a smile and looked out over the city. Her eyes had gotten used to the wide-open spaces on Gretia, the way her gaze could drift over the landscape all the way to the far horizon when the weather was clear. Maybe it was the knowledge that her time here was about to end, but for the first time, the thought of leaving this place for good made her feel strangely melancholic. She’d done three deployments to Gretia, and she was at the end of her infantry career. There was little chance they’d approve her for a fourth off-world tour, not after having to cut this one short because of medical issues. After this week, she would never see this sight again.
At least I had a full career, she thought. Half the squad she had lost in the ambush three months ago had consisted of privates on their first off-world deployments, kids with less than two years in the brigade. Self-pity wasn’t the Pallas way, and she had no right to sadness at the thought of going home when so many others couldn’t.
“I have three years until retirement as well,” Dahl said. “I will be fifty-two in two months. The age limit for patrol officers is fifty-five. If I want to stay on any longer, I have to move up into the administrative branch.”
“Shoving you off into a support slot,” Idina said with a smile.
“Until I get bored enough,” Dahl said. “It appears we are in the same pair of shoes, as they say.”
Idina chuckled.
“I don’t think the translator got that idiom quite right.”
Thirty minutes before the scheduled arrest, a dozen patrol gyrofoils left their regular sectors and started converging in the night sky above western Sandvik.
Dahl had set their craft’s autopilot to fly a three-kilometer racetrack orbit with the Worlds Travel Lodge building at its center. The sensor array in the gyrofoil’s chin turret was locked onto the middle of the intersection in front of the building, and Idina watched the image on her surveillance screen shift its perspective slightly as their aspect to the target kept changing gradually. At half past two, there was only sporadic surface pod traffic. This part of Sandvik was dotted with commercial and industrial facilities catering to the nearby spaceport and its customers, and there was little to draw late-night crowds that could be in the way or interfere with an arrest. According to Dahl, it was the perfect location for a high-risk arrest.
“Guest count of the hotel is thirteen,” Dahl read off the surveillance report. “Including our friend. There are only three other people on the floor with him.”
“When’s the last time they got eyeballs on him?”
“The second shift spotted him entering the building at 2023. The concierge scanner has his counterfeit ID pass checking in for floor access at 2025. We have had the building under continuous surveillance since then.”
“Did they get a good look at his face?”
Dahl isolated an image from the surveillance feed and magnified it. Fuldas hadn’t even tried to change his appearance in any way. He was still wearing the same hairstyle and beard. Only the clothes on his body were different from what he had worn the night before, and he had exchanged the small pack he had carried for a larger travel bag.
“Yeah, that’s our guy, all right,” Idina said. “I’m looking forward to having a little talk with him back at the office.”
“The departure registry shows that he booked passage to Acheron on a consumer goods freighter. It departs in two days. But his shuttle transfer to the orbital station is scheduled for tomorrow at 1100 hours already.”
“I guess he figured it was safer to get off the planet as soon as he could. Wonder what he wants on Acheron.”
“We will be able to ask him in a little while,” Dahl said. “Unless he does something foolish when the QRF try to detain him.”
“They’ll try nonlethals first. But if he pulls out a gun, it’s not going to be pretty. They won’t take chances.”
They did a few more laps of the aerial racetrack in silence. Somewhere on the fourth floor of the hotel a thousand meters below them, Vigi Fuldas was holed up in a capsule bed the size of a roomy coffin, unaware of the nearly company-sized force that was homing in on his location.
A status message popped up on the tactical display, followed by a new unit icon. The QRF’s combat gyrofoil had lifted off from Joint Base Sandvik ten minutes to the east.
“All units, the QRF bird is inbound at this time,” she sent to her platoon. “Go time in nine minutes, forty-five seconds.”
The platoon’s teams sent their acknowledgments, a cascade of green check marks scrolling down the left side of her helmet display. A dozen two-officer teams stood ready to swoop in and secure every intersection in a two-block radius around the hotel in a few seconds. Even if Fuldas was still awake and happened to be near a window, he would have just a few moments of warning before the QRF team was on his floor and at the door of his capsule. And this time, there wouldn’t be a crowd around to interfere with the arrest.
She focused on the sensor image of the intersection again. The streets were still and empty. The only movement came from an advertising projection above the entrance of the business next door to the hotel, looping through a text scroll that promised BULK FREIGHT TO HADES/ACHERON: GUARANTEED BEST RATES AT SANDPORT. This would be Fuldas’s last sight in freedom before they hauled him off to the police headquarters in restraints.
“Five minutes out,” the QRF lieutenant sent. “On-scene JSP supervisor, give me a go/no-go for deployment.”
Idina checked the screen one last time. A solitary transport pod rolled through the intersection and continued past the hotel without slowing down. The advertisement continued to flog its cheap bulk-freight rates to the empty neighborhood. There was no movement on the rooftops, nobody crouching in the shadows. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“QRF Actual, you are go for deployment,” she replied.
“Copy go for deployment. ETA four minutes, thirty seconds.”
“All units, QRF is cleared to deploy. Take up staging positions at two hundred meters and watch your surroundings on the descent. We have a lot of birds in this airspace right now.”
The combat gyrofoil came in low and fast from the west. It was a smaller platoon-sized transport, not the enormous eight-engined beast that could deliver an entire c
ompany in a single lift, but it still dwarfed the little four-passenger patrol units. Idina and Dahl watched from their high vantage point as the QRF gyrofoil descended onto the intersection, engines tilted backward to scrub forward momentum. Twenty meters above the hotel rooftop, the machine came to a stationary hover. The shrouded rotors of the engine nacelles made a low humming sound that reverberated back from the concrete and steel surfaces of the surrounding buildings. On the intersection, the downwash from the engines blew around dust and debris. A dozen rappelling lines dropped down from the belly hatch of the ship, and the QRF troopers began their quick descent.
“All units, take up blocking positions,” Idina sent. “Everybody on the ground now, now, now.”
The much-smaller patrol gyrofoils swarmed down from their staging altitude and landed on their assigned intersections almost at the same second. As soon as they were on the ground, their pilots turned on the emergency lighting and deployed warning screen projections that blocked the intersections in all four directions.
On the hotel rooftop, the QRF troopers had disengaged from their lines. The combat gyrofoil gunned its engines and started a steep ascent, then swung around and took up a covering position a hundred meters away. The troopers lined up at the rooftop access door and swiftly filed through it. Ten seconds after the combat gyrofoil had pulled into its deployment hover, all the QRF members were inside the staircase and on the way to the suspect’s floor.
Not bad for a bunch of Rhodians, Idina thought.
“He’s barely going to have time to scratch his ass before they haul him out of that capsule,” she said to Dahl, who was watching intently as the action unfolded on the surveillance screen.
For a few long moments, there was silence again. The rooftop access door stood open, casting a long shadow in the searchlight from the nearby combat gyrofoil. On the tactical overlay, the outlines of the QRF squad descended to the fourth floor and lined up for entry. The lead trooper unlocked the door with the law enforcement override, and they rushed through, weapons at the ready. Idina felt like holding her breath when the QRF troopers filed into the capsule suite beyond. If Fuldas was awake and in a mind to put up resistance, they would hear gunfire any second. She imagined him cowering at the back of his sleeping capsule, clutching a stolen Palladian pistol loaded with dual-purpose explosive ammunition, the same shit he had sold the idiot kid they had arrested the other day. The QRF troopers all wore medium assault armor, but none of the other nighttime guests in that building did, and dual-purpose explosive rounds could travel through the interior walls of the place like a kukri could punch through a slice of stale bread.
Ten more seconds passed in silence.
“Subject is in custody,” the QRF team leader sent. “We are on the way out.”
Idina exhaled sharply. “Copy that, QRF Actual. The perimeter is secured. No activity other than our people.”
“Affirmative. We are leaving through the front entrance in thirty seconds.”
“Yellow Two, clear your intersection for the QRF bird,” Idina sent to the patrol unit closest to the building. “Let’s wrap this up and get out of here.”
“Looks like our friend will not be making his flight tomorrow,” Dahl said.
“Yeah, it’s a shame. What’s the world coming to when a man can’t even sell stolen military weapons to young hotheads in peace?”
Down below, one of the patrol gyrofoils left its blocking position on the intersection to make space for the QRF combat gyrofoil hovering nearby. When the smaller unit was out of the way, the QRF bird moved in and set down in the middle of the intersection. The patrol units were deliberately nonmartial in appearance, but the combat gyrofoil was obviously and unapologetically a military craft, all aggressive angles and flat black paint. Once things got dangerous enough for the QRF to come into play, the intimidation factor of an armored war machine reinforced the message that the time for a nonconfrontational approach had passed.
“All that running and hiding. And in the end, he only got another day of freedom. Now he is going to go to Landfall for a few years,” Dahl said.
“Should have thought of that before he ran and left us to the crowd,” Idina grumbled. “I hope he freezes his ass off up there while he contemplates the error of his ways.”
She magnified the view on the surveillance screen to show the front of the hotel. The tactical overlay showed the gaggle of QRF troopers and their prisoner emerging from the staircase in the interior of the building and moving through the foyer to the entrance doors. Two troopers had Fuldas between them, and the rest were in tactical formation in front and behind, securing their egress in every direction. But there was nobody to oppose the arrest tonight. The foyer was empty, and the next pedestrian on Idina’s display was five blocks away. As the group approached the door, Idina zoomed in on Fuldas’s face. He looked bleary-eyed and satisfyingly scared. The QRF had dragged him out of the sleeping capsule and hauled him off without letting him put on clothes, and he was wearing only his undershirt and shorts, padding across the marble floor of the foyer barefooted.
The front door opened, and Idina’s screen washed out into gray noise. For a heartbeat, she thought something had passed in front of the sensor. Then the gyrofoil rocked violently, as if a giant fist had struck it a glancing blow from below. Idina’s helmet smacked into the side of the seat’s headrest. The bone-shaking thunderclap of a high-order explosion followed just a moment later. On the gyrofoil’s system displays, yellow and red warning lights started flashing for attention, accompanied by the discordant trilling of alarms. For a few seconds, the craft spun wildly, the horizon in front of the windshield replaced by city streets and buildings that flashed by entirely too close for comfort. Idina fumbled for the emergency eject lever at the front of her seat.
“Do not touch that,” Dahl commanded from the left. “Not until I say.”
The Gretian police captain had her hands on the controls now. A few heartbeats later, the gyrofoil righted itself, and the horizon reappeared. Idina looked out of the side window and saw a rooftop close enough that she could have jumped out onto it without even twisting an ankle. Dahl swung the gyrofoil around to the right and deftly avoided an antenna array jutting out of the corner of the rooftop. They climbed away again, the rotors of the craft whining in an unusually belabored pitch. The alarms were still shrilling an unnerving concert in a variety of pitches and volumes.
“We have one engine out and another about to fail,” Dahl announced. Her voice was cool and matter-of-fact, but Idina could see the tension and intense focus in the older woman’s face.
“Well, put us down before it does,” Idina said. Her head was still swimming with the impact against the headrest and the sudden onslaught of chaotic noise and motion.
“That is the idea,” Dahl said. “What happened just now?”
Idina brought up her surveillance feed again, but the screen only showed an error message: FEED OFFLINE. Every sensor in the gyrofoil’s chin pod flashed a yellow or red status. She cursed and closed the screen once more, then looked outside to get her bearings. A cloud of smoke and dust was rising into the night sky to their left, covering a three-block area and diffusing the lights from the nearby buildings. Idina could hear debris bouncing off the top of the gyrofoil like scattered hail.
“Bomb, bomb, bomb,” she sent to the platoon. “All units, report your status. Check in, everyone.”
One by one, the patrol units returned their status messages through the data network: green, green, yellow, green, yellow.
No red, she thought. Don’t come up red.
When all the teams had reported in, she breathed a sigh of relief. No red status messages. Several injuries, but no dead. Whatever trap had just sprung, it had mostly spared her troopers. But her people hadn’t been the only ones on the scene. The QRF squad had been inside the building. She tapped over to their channel with dread.
“QRF Actual, Yellow One Niner,” Idina sent. “Report your status.”
The
channel remained silent.
“QRF Actual, come in,” she tried again. “Any QRF team members, check in.”
For a few long moments, there was nothing but static on the comms. Then one of her troopers chimed in on the all-platoon channel. He sounded as dazed and shaken as she felt.
“One Niner, this is Yellow Two. They’re gone, Colors. The building’s gone. And the one next to it. Went up right in front of us. Nothing but a pile of rubble left.”
“Gods-damn it.” Idina gritted her teeth and banged her helmet against the headrest of her seat. She took a deep breath to collect herself and tapped over to the JSP emergency channel.
“Alliance units, this is Yellow One Niner in charge of Sector Five. We have a major high-order explosives incident at location grid Delta One Three. Our QRF squad is down. There are civilian casualties. Requesting assistance from all available alert forces in the AO. I repeat, send all available alert forces in the AO.”
Next to her, Dahl sent her own emergency message to the Gretian police network, speaking calmly but forcefully while piloting the stricken gyrofoil to a landing spot on an intersection below. Idina looked around with renewed concern. If the explosion was part of an ambush, her lightly armed troops would be easy pickings, especially if the attackers were equipped like the people who had killed her squad three months ago. Her light scout armor suddenly felt woefully inadequate.
“All units, watch your surroundings and stay alert. This may just be the opening bell. And stay clear of the site until we have backup with explosives sniffers behind us. The bastards may have planted secondaries to catch first responders. I repeat, do not approach the site,” she told her troops on the platoon channel.
“Colors, there are QRF people in there,” one of her squad leaders replied. She checked the broadcast ID.
“Corporal Bandhari, you will follow protocol. Stay the hells away unless you see someone crawling out of the rubble right in front of you. That’s a fucking order. Acknowledge.”