His jaws hurt. He’d been clenching them as he watched the patrolman die. Hansen’s muttered order cleared his visor of both the remote and the recorded images, but the fatal plasma burst continued to blaze a dirty white in memory.
Bad luck for the cop, knocking on the wrong door. And very bad luck indeed for Solbarth.
Four Special Units personnel squatted behind the forcefield they’d stretched between their vehicles. Two sighted over plasma weapons; one had a wide-muzzled projectile launcher; and the fourth, the team leader, carried the forcefield controls, a pistol, and long knives in both of her boots. They were all dressed in light-scattering camouflage uniforms which blurred their outlines and hid anything that an opponent could use for an aiming point.
The team members kept their faces rigidly to the front, pretending they didn’t know the Commissioner was standing behind them. “Pink Two to Top,” Hansen heard the leader say. “Are we clear to fire?”
The question didn’t come to Hansen through the commo net, because the Commissioner’s AI blocked out all the idle chatter that would otherwise have distracted him from the real business of solving the problem.
Hansen stepped over to the team leader, put a hand on her shoulder, and said, “We’ll get where we’re going, Pink Two. Don’t worry.”
“Sorry, sir,” one of the plasma gunners said, though the reason he thought he needed to apologize was beyond Hansen’s understanding.
Nobody needed to apologize. No matter how good your training was, no matter how much on-line experience you had, there were going to be tics and glitches in a real crisis. People said things, people forgot SOP . . . sometimes people shot when they shouldn’t’ve, and even that was forgivable if you survived it.
Training went only so far. Situations like this went right down into the reptilian core of the brain.
With his fingers still resting on Pink Two’s shoulder, Hansen said, “Support. Give me a fast three-sixty of the target site. Left side only.”
Hansen’s artificial intelligence began walking him visually around the apartment building. Remote images from other police personnel were remoted to the left half of the Commissioner’s visor, changing every ten seconds to proceed around the site in a counterclockwise direction.
A patrolman in an apartment to Hansen’s right poured a stream of stun needles toward the gang’s hideout. There were brief sparkles on the forcefield and occasionally a puff of dust from the plastic facade. Raindrops would have been more effective than the one-gram needles were at this range.
On a roof halfway down the block, Special Units personnel stripped the tarpaulin from the 4-cm plasma weapon they’d just manhandled from an armored personnel carrier. Two other teams watched tensely from behind the forcefield they’d erected to shelter the gun installation. They knew the weapon could probably batter through the villains’ protective screen; but they knew also that the sidescatter of powerful bolts hitting powerful armor was likely to incinerate every unshielded object within a kilometer of impact.
Ten seconds later a white aircar picked out with gold braid skidded to a halt behind a forcefield manned by Civic Patrol personnel. Holloway, Chief of the Capital Police, got out. He was still trying to seal his bemedaled uniform blouse over his fat belly.
An aide lifted a pair of slug-throwing hunting rifles out of the car and handed one to Holloway. Both men aimed as a police technician spun narrow loopholes in the protective forcefield so that his superiors could fire at the hideout.
No one but Special Units personnel was permitted to use deadly force. No one.
The AI cycled to the next image around the circle. Hansen’s mouth was open to bark an order that Holloway, even Holloway, would obey—or else—when his right eye saw a whorl gape in the villains’ forcefield. Solbarth must be using tuned elements so that merely presenting a weapon opened his shield wide enough to fire. That sort of hardware was too expensive even for Special Units.
And the weapon being aimed in Hansen’s direction this time wasn’t a plasma gun.
“Watch it!” he screamed, and, “Down!” to the personnel near him who thought their forcefield protected them from the villains’ fire.