The body thrashed.
Just a civilian caught in something that was none of his business. Would’ve been smarter to hide under the bed until it was all over. But then, if Special Units opened up with the kind of firepower necessary to overwhelm the gang’s forcefield, the whole block would melt into a bubbling crater.
That wasn’t going to happen.
“Support,” Hansen said, cueing the artificial intelligence in his helmet. “Is the building’s climate control in metal ducts?”
A green light winked even as the Commissioner’s last syllable rose in an interrogative.
The AI had accessed the data from Central Records; probably out of Building Inspection, but the exact provenance of the information didn’t matter. Every scrap of data about this building, its residents—and the villains believed to be holed up here—had been sucked into a huge electronic suspense file within seconds of when the shooting started. Any extant knowledge that Hansen might need waited at the tip of his tongue.
The trouble was, quite of lot of what Hansen needed to know would be available only in the after-action report on the operation; and Commissioner Hansen might or might not be alive to examine the data then.
“Top to Orange Three,” he ordered, letting the AI punch him through the chatter of the unit he’d just watched launch the SpyFly. “Put one into the building’s ventilation system. Use a One-Star.”
The 1* class drones were old and slow, but they had double-capacity powerpacks and were rugged enough to airdrop with their lift fans shut down.
“Sir, they’ve turned off the air system ‘n the louvers ‘re down!” the Orange Three team leader replied in a voice half a tone higher than normal.
“Then it’ll take the SpyFly a bloody while to burn through the louvers, won’t it?” Hansen snarled. “So get on the bloody job!”
“Hang on, sir,” his driver warned. The aircar bounced to a dynamic halt behind the forcefield barricade at the intersection.
A streak of flame washed from the villains’ hideout. The portable forcefield pulsed like a rainbow, but it absorbed the burst without strain.
Regular police fired a sparkle of stun needles, but the temporary opening in the villains’ forcefield had already closed. The Special Units teams held their fire the way they’d been ordered to do.
Polarized light cast a blue wash over everything on the other side of the barricade. The legless man halfway to the intersection had stopped twitching. Another plasma bolt licked from the far side of the building, silhouetting the roof moldings with its brief radiance.
Hansen glanced at the video loop running across the bottom of his visor. It displayed the sensor log of the patrolman who’d arrived to investigate a reported domestic disturbance.
The cop had been a little fellow and young, to judge from the image of him recorded in reflection from the building’s front door as he entered. He was whistling something tuneless between his teeth. As he climbed the stairs, he checked the needle stunner in his holster.
He’d been a little nervous, but not nearly as nervous as he should’ve been.
It was all a mistake. The reported loud argument had been in District 9, not here in District 7. An administrative screw-up that normally would’ve meant, at worst, that a family argument blossomed into violence because the uniformed man who could’ve stopped it had been sent to the wrong place.
No sign of a domestic argument now. Knuckles rapping on a doorpanel; Who’s there? muffled by the thick panel, and “Civic Patrol! Open up!” sharply from the cop whose equipment was recording events and transmitting the log back to his district sub-station; standard operating procedure.
Maybe if the patrolman had been a little less forceful in his request—
But that was second-guessing the man on the spot, and Hansen wasn’t going to speak ill of the dead.
The video image of the door opened. Before the figure within was more than a blur, the universe dissolved in a plasma flare that the victim didn’t have time to understand.
Hansen got out of his vehicle. The air smelled burned, from the forcefield and the weapons the villains were using; from the hellfire dancing in the Commissioner’s mind.