Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 52
“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 company 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