He was panting, as much from tension as from the sprint. The villains’ forcefield bulged from the windows above him. It was driven hard enough to reflect light, not merely shadow it. Solbarth must have his own fusion generator. . . .
But even Solbarth couldn’t fight the Consensus.
“Support,” Hansen said. “Give me a lower-quadrant remote from the four-centimeter’s guns—”
The sight picture, broad field in acquisition mode, from the crew-served weapon directly across from 212 inset a quarter of Hansen’s visor. He could see himself as a tiny figure in the corner of the image, staring at the bulging fortress above him.
“—ight,” Hansen’s mouth said, completing the order that the AI had already obeyed.
He heard the crack! of a plasma weapon firing somewhere from the back of the building, but there was no time to worry about that now.
“Solbarth!” he shouted. He tilted his visor up, losing the panoramic image that he’d need for warning if—
“Solbarth!” Hansen shouted again, his voice no longer muffled by the shield in front of it. “This is Commissioner Hansen. I’m giving you a chance.”
“Kommissar?” said the voice that Hansen’s artificial intelligence had passed to his ear. “Orange Three. We’ve got the SpyFly in position outside the last set of louvers. Do you want us to burn through?”
“We don’t need a chance from you, Hansen,” called a cold, clear voice from a window on the third floor. “You’ll be old and gray before we run out of supplies.”
“Orange Three, not yet,” Hansen muttered. He desperately wanted images from within the hideout, but he knew that this reconnaissance drone would be zapped like the others if it left its protective screen of metal too soon.
Hansen cocked his visor at a 45deg. angle, open enough for him to shout past it. He peered at the distorted quadrant of panorama—which his AI immediately reconfigured to meet its master’s needs.
And why the hell hadn’t he been smart enough to tell the machine to do that?
“Solbarth, I’m offering you your lives,” Hansen said. He could hear other muffled voices from the lower floors of 212 Kokori, civilians praying or weeping into their shielding hands. “It’s more than—”
The helmet beeped to warn Hansen and flashed a red carat over the remoted image on his visor, but his gunhand was already rising, pointing—taking up the slack on the trigger. An arm thrust a wide-mouthed mob gun through the window five meters above the Commissioner’s head.
Hansen fired twice. The villain’s weapon rang and bounced off the bloody transom before dropping to the street. There was a bullet hole through its bell muzzle, and a separate hole through the wrist which the screaming gunman jerked back within the forcefield.
“You won’t open this can with the toys you’ve brought out so far, Hansen,” Solbarth said, as calmly as if the wounded man’s whimpering was only the whisper of wind. “When you do requisition what you’d require . . . if you do . . . then this whole district will be radioactive for a decade.”
The bare skin of Hansen’s hand and chin stung from the whiplash muzzle blasts of his pistol. The shadows of Special Units stirred restively behind their forcefields.
“Solbarth,” he called, “if you don’t surrender to me now, I’ll have the building cut away beneath you. For all I know, your forcefield may hold; but that won’t matter to you, because you and everything else inside the field’re going to be shaking around like the beans in a maraca as you drop into the sub-basement.”
The silence was so deep that Hansen could feel the pulse of the villains’ forcefield through the fabric of the building.
“The lower floors are full of civilians,” Solbarth said. Hansen thought he heard a tremor of color in the gang leader’s voice, though `emotion’ would have been too strong a word for it.
“Solbarth,” Hansen said, “I know you . . . and you know me. This is a Special Units operation. I answer to no one until it’s complete. And I promise you, Solbarth, that I’ll do exactly what I told you I’d do.”
Very softly, almost subvocalizing, he added, “Orange Three, go ahead. Support, switch my remote.”