Other weapons clattered to the floor of the hideout. A small man covered his face with his hands and cried, “I’m clean! I’m clean! Don’t shoot me!”
“Hansen!” Solbarth called without turning his eyes from his fellow villains. “We accept your offer. Warn your men that we’re coming out!”
The android’s left hand keyed a series of commands into the protective systems console. The window above Hansen gave an electronic whine. The forcefield went translucent an instant before it vanished altogether.
“All units, hold your fire,” Hansen said. “The subjects are surrendering. I repeat, the subjects are surrendering. Blue teams, prepare to secure the prisoners. Orange teams, be ready to move in with the medical staff. There’s a wounded prisoner, and we won’t know about the residents here until we check.”
The SpyFly showed Solbarth gesturing the last of his subordinates down the stairs with a negligent wave of his pistol. The slim android set the weapon carefully on the floor, bowed toward the closed heating duct whose paint had blistered when the SpyFly burned through a hole for its sensors, and left the room.
Hansen couldn’t tell whether or not the bow was ironic. Perhaps not.
“Blue teams,” Hansen said, “I want you to accompany the prisoners to the detention center after you turn them over to the Civic Patrol. There’ll be no accidents along the way.”
He swallowed. “Whatever it takes, there’ll be no accidents.”
Six Special Units personnel jogged from their positions in the building across Kokori Street. They held both nets and electronic restraints.
The first of Solbarth’s men poked his head through the entrance door. His mouth was bent into a smile like the rictus of the last stages of tetanus, and his eyes were glazed with fear. Blue One gestured to the villain as though he were a dog to be petted.
The man glanced aside at Hansen, then bolted into the arms of the personnel waiting to immobilize him. A second gang member scuttled out behind the first.
Hansen was still holding his pistol. He tried to holster it, but his hand was shaking too much for him to manage that operation. Swearing under his breath, he set the weapon down on the sidewalk in front of him and clasped his hands together.
There was commotion at the intersection where Hansen’s car lay on its side, but he couldn’t tell what was happening since the portable forcefields were still—properly—in place.
Chief Holloway waddled down Kokori Street from the other direction, at the head of a contingent of Civic Patrolmen. Holloway’s white uniform was streaked and blackened. His face was maroon. Blood pressure might prove fatal though the nearby plasma bolt had not.
Most of the villains had left the building. Blue One was giving crisp orders to the Civic Patrolmen arriving to accept prisoners cocooned in restraining nets. Some civilians poked their heads from the lower-floor windows, able now to savor the adventure they’d survived . . . and how close it’d been, might they never know!
Hansen was tired. He was as tired as he ever remembered being.
“Kommissar!” cried the team leader whose concern was obvious despite compression of the radio signal and the minute speakers in Hansen’s helmet. “This is Pink Two, and something’s—”
The warning crunched to silence, though Hansen could vaguely hear Pink Two continuing to shout behind the barrier.
“Commissioner Hansen,” said a voice more mechanical than any machine needed to be in a day that AIs could manufacture surds and sonants with greater life than those of any rhetoric teacher. “You are summoned by the Consensus.”
Something—a spindle of black fuzz, taller than a man—drifted through the forcefield blocking the intersection. There was another spindle beside the first.
Hansen had never seen anything like them.
The portable forcefield sputtered and vanished.
“Not now,” Hansen said. The sweat on his palms was suddenly cold. “I’ve got to—”
Hansen’s visor went opaque. His helmet was dead, screens and speakers alike. He took the helmet off.
His hands no longer shook. He didn’t glance down toward his pistol, but his toe, with a motion that might have been only a twitch, located the weapon precisely.
Solbarth stepped from the entranceway. The android froze, his blank eyes taking in Hansen and the creatures which slid toward the Commissioner at a walking pace.