Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 53
“All units, take up blocking positions,” Idina sent. “Everybody on the ground now, now, now.”
The much-smaller patrol gyrofoils swarmed down from their staging altitude and landed on their assigned intersections almost at the same second. As soon as they were on the ground, their pilots turned on the emergency lighting and deployed warning screen projections that blocked the intersections in all four directions.
On the hotel rooftop, the QRF troopers had disengaged from their lines. The combat gyrofoil gunned its engines and started a steep ascent, then swung around and took up a covering position a hundred meters away. The troopers lined up at the rooftop access door and swiftly filed through it. Ten seconds after the combat gyrofoil had pulled into its deployment hover, all the QRF members were inside the staircase and on the way to the suspect’s floor.
Not bad for a bunch of Rhodians, Idina thought.
“He’s barely going to have time to scratch his ass before they haul him out of that capsule,” she said to Dahl, who was watching intently as the action unfolded on the surveillance screen.
For a few long moments, there was silence again. The rooftop access door stood open, casting a long shadow in the searchlight from the nearby combat gyrofoil. On the tactical overlay, the outlines of the QRF squad descended to the fourth floor and lined up for entry. The lead trooper unlocked the door with the law enforcement override, and they rushed through, weapons at the ready. Idina felt like holding her breath when the QRF troopers filed into the capsule suite beyond. If Fuldas was awake and in a mind to put up resistance, they would hear gunfire any second. She imagined him cowering at the back of his sleeping capsule, clutching a stolen Palladian pistol loaded with dual-purpose explosive ammunition, the same shit he had sold the idiot kid they had arrested the other day. The QRF troopers all wore medium assault armor, but none of the other nighttime guests in that building did, and dual-purpose explosive rounds could travel through the interior walls of the place like a kukri could punch through a slice of stale bread.
Ten more seconds passed in silence.
“Subject is in custody,” the QRF team leader sent. “We are on the way out.”
Idina exhaled sharply. “Copy that, QRF Actual. The perimeter is secured. No activity other than our people.”
“Affirmative. We are leaving through the front entrance in thirty seconds.”
“Yellow Two, clear your intersection for the QRF bird,” Idina sent to the patrol unit closest to the building. “Let’s wrap this up and get out of here.”
“Looks like our friend will not be making his flight tomorrow,” Dahl said.
“Yeah, it’s a shame. What’s the world coming to when a man can’t even sell stolen military weapons to young hotheads in peace?”
Down below, one of the patrol gyrofoils left its blocking position on the intersection to make space for the QRF combat gyrofoil hovering nearby. When the smaller unit was out of the way, the QRF bird moved in and set down in the middle of the intersection. The patrol units were deliberately nonmartial in appearance, but the combat gyrofoil was obviously and unapologetically a military craft, all aggressive angles and flat black paint. Once things got dangerous enough for the QRF to come into play, the intimidation factor of an armored war machine reinforced the message that the time for a nonconfrontational approach had passed.
“All that running and hiding. And in the end, he only got another day of freedom. Now he is going to go to Landfall for a few years,” Dahl said.
“Should have thought of that before he ran and left us to the crowd,” Idina grumbled. “I hope he freezes his ass off up there while he contemplates the error of his ways.”
She magnified the view on the surveillance screen to show the front of the hotel. The tactical overlay showed the gaggle of QRF troopers and their prisoner emerging from the staircase in the interior of the building and moving through the foyer to the entrance doors. Two troopers had Fuldas between them, and the rest were in tactical formation in front and behind, securing their egress in every direction. But there was nobody to oppose the arrest tonight. The foyer was empty, and the next pedestrian on Idina’s display was five blocks away. As the group approached the door, Idina zoomed in on Fuldas’s face. He looked bleary-eyed and satisfyingly scared. The QRF had dragged him out of the sleeping capsule and hauled him off without letting him put on clothes, and he was wearing only his undershirt and shorts, padding across the marble floor of the foyer barefooted.
The front door opened, and Idina’s screen washed out into gray noise. For a heartbeat, she thought something had passed in front of the sensor. Then the gyrofoil rocked violently, as if a giant fist had struck it a glancing blow from below. Idina’s helmet smacked into the side of the seat’s headrest. The bone-shaking thunderclap of a high-order explosion followed just a moment later. On the gyrofoil’s system displays, yellow and red warning lights started flashing for attention, accompanied by the discordant trilling of alarms. For a few seconds, the craft spun wildly, the horizon in front of the windshield replaced by city streets and buildings that flashed by entirely too close for comfort. Idina fumbled for the emergency eject lever at the front of her seat.
“Do not touch that,” Dahl commanded from the left. “Not until I say.”
The Gretian police captain had her hands on the controls now. A few heartbeats later, the gyrofoil righted itself, and the horizon reappeared. Idina looked out of the side window and saw a rooftop close enough that she could have jumped out