Ballistic

by Marko Kloos

  Dahl put the gyrofoil down on the square, drawing a few curious looks from passersby. There was a fountain nearby that sprayed changing water patterns into the air, something that would have been a scandalous waste of water on every other world in the system. The mist from the sprayers permeated the air above the square. Idina climbed out of the gyrofoil and enjoyed the sensation of cool humidity on her face.

  “Here we go,” Dahl said. She had left her helmet on, something she rarely did on patrol because she felt it depersonalized her and encouraged conflict escalation. In the beginning, Idina had entertained the idea of patrolling without a helmet, but the bombing a few months prior had dissipated the notion completely. To her, planning to put on a helmet only when trouble required it was like flying in a gyrofoil without a safety harness and planning to buckle up just before a crash. Dahl wore her green police bodysuit as always, but now it was reinforced with ballistic armor on her chest, back, and shoulders.

  Idina was in full light scout armor, tinted dark blue and emblazoned with “JSP” and MILITARY POLICE. It wasn’t the most comfortable setup in the summer heat even with the built-in cooling system, but it would keep out bullets and shrapnel, and Idina had learned long ago that it was impossible to predict when those would start flying.

  “I don’t like it when guns are in play,” Dahl said, echoing the sentiment of Idina’s thoughts. “It never ends well. Somebody ruins a life one way or the other. Theirs or someone else’s.”

  They crossed the intersection and turned onto Eleventh Street. Overhead, the drone kept watch, silently and invisibly, transmitting a visual stream to Idina’s helmet display. The street was not as busy as she would have liked, not enough people for her and Dahl to disappear among. But it didn’t matter. The suspect in the blue bodysuit and the white thermal vest was walking toward them, looking at a comtab screen projection as he rushed down Eleventh. He was close enough for Idina to make out his face: a young man, short and slender, with a fashionable asymmetrical haircut that was colored stark white and wearing a wraparound sun visor. He could have been any of the kids they usually chased off the front steps of the Sandvik vactrain station on a weekend night. Idina maintained her casual pace, trying to pretend that she wasn’t walking with a purpose. If they got close enough to rush him, they could secure him before he could draw his stolen gun and make things complicated for everyone. Eleventh Street wasn’t very crowded, but there were still plenty of people around, and Idina didn’t like the idea of having to fire her weapon here. Even with the aim assist of her suit, rounds could miss their target, or overpenetrate it and strike someone who didn’t need to get shot. Out in the field as an infantry trooper, she’d rarely had to think about things like collateral damage or restrain her firepower for fear of hitting the wrong target. The AI in her armor wouldn’t let her fire on a friendly accidentally, and all the people on her side had their own armor, which would deflect stray rounds and ricochets.

  And that’s why soldiers don’t make good police officers, she thought.

  “Eighty meters,” Dahl said, with her head turned pointedly to the side as if she were merely looking at the food stand they were passing instead of tracking their target. “Do you see anyone who might be walking with him as rear guard?”

  Idina studied the live overhead footage from the drone again. It was strange to see Dahl and herself from this perspective, like unsuspecting targets in the crosshairs of a missile strike.

  “I don’t think so. Can’t rule it out, though.”

  “When we make contact, I will secure him quickly and you will stand guard,” Dahl said.

  “You got it,” Idina replied. Her brain didn’t like to concede the possibility that anyone on this street could be working in tandem with their suspect. In this setting, the other side didn’t wear uniforms or armor, so anyone could be on the suspect’s team, and she wouldn’t know it until they started drawing fire. For a moment, she considered telling Dahl to back off and call in the JSP’s quick-reaction team. But that would be an overwhelming and very public show of force, overkill for what was most likely just a single armed and unaware suspect, and they were too far along in the original plan already.

  “Fifty meters,” Dahl said. The suspect’s attention was still absorbed by the contents of his comtab screen. He was striding along briskly but without unusual haste. His step had the slight swagger common to young men in every culture. The thermal vest he was wearing to mitigate the summer heat showed no sign of the gun he was likely hiding underneath, no telltale bulge, no muzzle poking out from beneath the lower hem.

  The suspect looked up. The pace of his stride faltered. Idina could practically hear the gears in his brain grinding to a halt as he spotted the two police officers only a few dozen steps away from him. In the next second, he would either continue walking and try to be inconspicuous, or he would let his brain’s flight-or-fight response make the call for him.

  “Shit,” Idina said.

  His brain chose flight. He whirled around and ran back up Eleventh Street, arms and legs pumping.

  She took off after him, not having to wonder whether Dahl would follow. She had never been a fast runner, and the light armor she was wearing weighed her down a little, but Gretia’s lower gravity turned Palladians into high-performance athletes. Pedestrians jumped aside with exclamations of irritation and surprise as she dashed down the street after the running kid in the light-blue bodysuit. He looked over his shoulder and redoubled his efforts. When she was just a few meters away from him, he nimbly hooked to the left and ran toward the entrance of a nearby indoor gallery. She was faster, but he was smaller and had less mass to swing around, and she couldn’t match his turn at the same speed and overshot her mark. By the time she had changed direction, he was twenty meters in front of her again. Dahl had been slightly behind Idina and was able to adjust her own trajectory more quickly. She reached the kid and grabbed him by the back of his thermal vest. In one impressively quick motion, he rolled his shoulders and slipped out of the vest, then ran into the gallery, a wide passageway lined with shops.

  Dahl stumbled and almost fell to her knees. She caught herself and took off after the kid again, still holding his vest. Idina overtook her, once again at a full run. Between the two of them, the kid had no chance to make it out of there. Another look over his shoulder seemed to make him realize it as well. He took another sharp turn, this one to the right. Idina could almost smell the fear trailing in his wake, a panicked prey animal fleeing from two predators and realizing it had run into a dead end. She saw the pistol now, tucked into a pocket high up on the waist of his bodysuit.

  “Gun, gun, gun,” she called out to make sure that Dahl was aware of the confirmed threat, even though she was certain the other woman had seen it as well.

  He ran into a shop that sold custom-printed clothing, knocking over a display near the entrance and sending sample bodysuits flying through the air. Dahl yelled something in Gretian that Idina’s translator didn’t understand. The kid slipped and crashed into an order terminal, toppling it over as he fell. The store attendant, too surprised to react to the sudden intrusion, started to voice a protest, but backed away from the entrance when he saw Dahl and Idina barging into the store behind their quarry.

  When the kid rose from the pile of clothing samples that had fallen on top of him, he had the pistol in one hand. He wasn’t aiming it at anyone in particular yet as he was struggling back to his feet, but Idina’s adrenaline spiked at the sight of the weapon’s muzzle swinging in her general direction. She unlocked her own weapon and drew it from its holster. Next to her, Dahl’s gun was already out and aimed at the kid. The Gretian police sidearms still used visual aiming assists in the form of a green laser chevron. The tip of the chevron was square in the middle of the kid’s chest. Even though Dahl’s suit didn’t have automatic aiming servos and she had just run a sprint, the green laser mark didn’t waver very much.

  “Drop the weapon now,” Dahl commanded in a loud voice that wasn�
�t quite a shout.

  The kid didn’t drop the pistol, but he didn’t raise his arm any further. His wraparound sun visor had fallen off his head when he had crashed into the sales terminal. His eyes were wide and fearful.

  “If you move that gun toward us another centimeter, we will shoot you,” Dahl told him. “We are in armor. You are not. If you try your luck, we will both have a very bad day. But yours will be worse than mine.”

  The kid appeared shaken. For a moment, the gun in his hand dipped a little, and it looked like he wasn’t willing to try his luck.

  “Tell him the gun probably won’t work anyway,” Idina said. “It’s coded to its owner’s biometric profile.”

  His expression of wide-eyed fear mixed with anger. Before Dahl could provide the translation, the kid spat in Idina’s direction.

  “Fuck off, occupier,” he said. “You do not belong here. You cannot give me orders. You do not have the right.”

  “She did not give you an order,” Dahl said. “I did. And I do have the right.”

  For a few heartbeats, they were at an impasse. The kid was angry, but not enough to let that emotion override his survival instincts. He was still holding the gun though, and Idina could tell that his ego wouldn’t just let him obey Dahl’s commands without a gesture of defiance. He needed a nudge to get him away from the precipice. To her relief, Dahl read the situation the same way.

  “You do not want it to end like this,” Dahl told him, in a gentler tone. “Dying here, now, for no reason. You will not leave a mark. You want to matter, do you not?”

  From the way the kid’s posture changed and his gaze flicked from Dahl’s face to the floor and then back, Idina could tell that she had picked the right angle. He let out a long, shaky breath and slowly put the pistol on the ground. As soon as his hand had left the grip of the weapon, Dahl was in front of him and kicked it away.

  Idina stood back while the Gretian police captain put restraints on the kid. She let out a long breath of her own and opened her helmet’s visor. She always hated the feeling of light-headed nausea from a rapidly receding adrenaline high. But she knew that she would have hated seeing this kid on the ground with bloody holes in his chest even more, seeing the light go out of his eyes forever and knowing that she’d had a hand in it. She walked over to where Dahl had kicked the weapon and picked it up to inspect it. It was an older model, superseded by a more modern handgun over a decade ago, but the brigade usually phased their gear out gradually, and some troopers just liked to hang on to what they knew well. She ejected the magazine block. It was still unused, twenty factory-loaded caseless rounds stacked in a staggered column, white propellant blocks topped with red explosive-tipped rounds. Her scout armor would have stopped them, but only just, and she wouldn’t have wanted to bet on her helmet’s face shield standing up to more than one.

  With the magazine feed empty, she cycled the weapon manually, aimed it at the floor, and pulled the trigger. The weapon’s haptic grip panel vibrated against her palm, the signal for a successful dry firing. Someone had hacked the biometric lock on this pistol, and if the kid had pulled the trigger with the ammunition block still inserted, it would have fired. She checked the cadence selector on the side of the gun. It was set to salvo mode. One pull of the trigger would have let loose three rounds at once, each powerful enough to punch through light armor or blow a hole the size of a fist into an unprotected body.

  You stupid, reckless child, she thought. What were you going to do with this in the middle of a crowded stadium?

  When they were outside on the street again, the restrained kid walking between them under Dahl’s control, Idina had to make an effort to keep her knees from shaking. She took a few slow breaths and allowed herself a long sip from her armor’s water cartridge. Back at the gyrofoil, the kid blinked up into the hot sun, then closed his eyes while they waited for Dahl to open the passenger hatch, as if he were feeling the sensation of warmth on his face for the first time.

  “Tell him he’s lucky. He almost didn’t get to see the sun again,” Idina said to Dahl.

  “Oh, I think he knows that already,” Dahl replied.

  CHAPTER 4

  SOLVEIG

  When she was on her morning runs, Solveig felt like she was the only person alive on Gretia.

  The exercise trail was a seven-point-five-kilometer loop that started and ended at the gymnasium behind the house. Falk Ragnar thought that running in a straight line was boring, so the trail meandered like a river, looping and curving around natural obstacles instead of cutting through them. Solveig had run the trail thousands of times, and she knew every little twist and bend. The first kilometer and a half snaked through the fruit tree orchards before making a long downhill turn toward a brook. When she was still running for best time, she’d use the downslope to pick up speed and let the gravity assist shave twenty or thirty seconds off the total, but she couldn’t run against herself constantly and expect to improve her time each day.

  Instead, Solveig had set herself a new challenge, one that would be achievable every single day if she remained focused on the task. Now she ran for accuracy, not speed. Every morning, she set out to run the trail to the same time down to the second, aiming to step back onto the wooden deck between the gymnasium and the pool exactly thirty minutes after starting her loop. With precision as the new benchmark measure, it made no sense to speed up on the downslope because it messed up her rhythm and timing, so she paced herself, enjoying the lessened effort and taking in the smells and sounds instead. It was summer; the early-morning air was cool and fragrant with the smells of dew-covered grass, and tiny pollination drones were silently flitting from tree to tree and flower to flower all over the orchard. All of this tranquil beauty was carefully managed and groomed, of course, but out here it was easy enough for Solveig to let herself be fooled by the illusion of unspoiled nature. She knew that even though nobody else was in sight, there were security drones high in the sky above the estate, monitoring her run. If she showed any signs of distress, she wouldn’t even have to use the flexible comtab bracelet she was wearing around her wrist. Marten or one of the other corporate security agents would be overhead in a gyrofoil in less than a minute. The estate was ringed with multiple layers of sensors. Whether by land or air, nothing bigger than a pollination drone could make it onto the Ragnar homestead unseen and unchallenged. But all of those guardians did their work out of sight and earshot, so for half an hour every morning, Solveig pretended they did not exist.

  Six minutes, thirty seconds. Bottom out at the brook and start up the hill again.

  She passed the little bend where the path came closest to the softly murmuring waters of the brook that marked the edge of the orchard. Her left foot hit the side of the trail in that spot right at the six-minute, thirty-second mark, and Solveig nodded with satisfaction. From here, it was a brief stretch uphill, eighty-six meters of incline followed by a thirty-meter stretch of even ground. Then the path took another left turn and led across the brook on a small wooden bridge. Beyond, the forest began, purposefully untidy rows of graybark oaks that had been planted here decades before she was born. Now the trees were ten, fifteen meters tall, and the path that snaked along between them was entirely in the shade. Solveig took deep breaths through her nose, soaking in the smell of dark soil and tree sap, and listened to the soft rustling of the leaves in the morning breeze as she ran.

  Eleven minutes, forty-five seconds. Pass the edge of the forest and turn toward the lake.

  She was right at the mark when the chime of an incoming comms link yanked her out of her meditative state and back into the real world, shattering the illusion of solitude. Solveig let out an angry huff, touched the bracelet on her wrist without looking down, and flicked a finger to accept the link. Half a meter in front of her, a screen projected itself and kept exact pace as she continued running down the forest path.

  “Go ahead,” she said, trying to hold back the irritation from her voice.

  “Miss Solv
eig, I apologize for the interruption.” The face on the screen belonged to Bernard, the majordomo of the Ragnar estate.

  “Let me guess. Papa.”

  Bernard inclined his head. “He wishes to see you at the gymnasium right away when you return to the house. And again, I am sorry for disturbing your morning run.”

  “It’s all right, Bernard. Tell Papa I will be sure to stop by.”

  Bernard nodded again, and Solveig swiped the screen projection in front of her out of existence to terminate the link. There was no reason for her father to have Bernard yank on her leash when she would have been back at the house in twenty minutes anyway, but he rarely missed an opportunity to remind everyone exactly whose schedule and desires still had priority here at the family estate.

  I wonder if he’d do the same to Aden, she thought. Whistle him back from his morning run early just because he can.

  If the war hadn’t happened, her older brother would be the heir to the business. He’d be getting ready to head out to the office right now instead of hiding somewhere in the system under a pseudonym. She had talked to him a few times over the Mnemosyne since he had resurfaced three months ago, but they always had to keep their contact brief because of corporate security. For some reason, Aden didn’t want their father to know that he was talking to her. Respecting that wish made Solveig a coconspirator because Falk would not accept any excuse if he found out that she hadn’t told him.

  Solveig thought about getting back into her flow state, but between having to check the time on her wristband and her irritation at the interruption, it had dissipated like morning fog in the sunshine, and she wasn’t about to worsen her mood by trying and failing to conjure it again. She passed the edge of the forest and took her turn toward the lake, then slackened her run to a slow trot. If Papa got to ruin her run this morning, she’d take her time getting back to the house and enjoy the quiet for a little while longer. He could make her bend her agenda to his, but he couldn’t make her hurry.