“Officers under duress,” she shouted into her comms. In just a minute or two, the first backup units would arrive, but a minute seemed like a very long time right now.
Someone tried to take her down by wrapping his arms around her legs. She shrugged him off with a knee thrust and a kick. If she ended up on the ground, she knew they would swarm her and kick her to pieces, armor or not. She took a wide stance, knees bent to lower her center of gravity, and punched back at every arm or leg that was coming her way. All she saw in the faces around her was anger and hatred. The crowd had found a convenient adapter to channel their testosterone and their resentment, and she knew they wouldn’t stop now until someone died, and maybe not even then.
I’m like a robot in this armor, she thought. They’re just kicking a robot to bits. I’m not a person to them.
She reached up, unlocked her helmet, and pulled it off her head, then swung it around and cracked it right across the nearest face. Then she shouted out her fear and anger. It was the height of idiocy to take the helmet off in a melee. But everyone needed to see that she was someone, not something. If they beat her to death, they’d at least have a face to haunt them in their dreams, not just an anonymous helmet visor.
The crowd retreated a little in collective surprise. It was just enough space for her to reach down and draw her kukri from its sheath in a wide sweeping motion. The blade made a ringing sound as it cleared the sheath and carved through the air molecules in front of her. Instantly, the crowd recoiled away from her as if she had just sprouted meter-long steel thorns all over her body.
So you have heard of these, Idina thought with grim satisfaction. She swung the blade in a flashy and aggressive flourish. Nobody tried to take the kukri from her hands. If they had, she would have started lopping off hands and arms and heads, and then there would be much more blood on the floor than just her own at the end.
Now there was fear in some of the eyes and faces around her. She kept moving the kukri in slow and deliberate flourishes. It was a strange thing, but people often seemed to fear edged weapons more than firearms. Maybe it was because getting shot was an abstract concept very few of them had ever experienced. But she knew that almost everyone in the crowd had gotten cut before, knew the bright pain when a sharp blade sliced open skin and tissue.
“When this cuts you, you don’t even bleed. Not at first,” she growled at them in Palladian she knew they wouldn’t understand. But the strange and aggressive-sounding words seemed to add to the tempering effect of the kukri she was swinging, and she followed them up with a grin.
There was another commotion to her right, behind the crowd in the atrium. Idina didn’t have her tactical screen in front of her right eye because her helmet was on the ground three meters away from her, but she knew that the other patrol teams had started to arrive. A ripple of nervous energy seemed to go through the crowd. With the threat of dismemberment in front of them and the certainty of detainment coming up from behind, the fire went out of their eyes, and they started to disperse. Within a few moments, most were rushing toward the east entrance, away from the police officers and JSP troopers Idina knew were now advancing through the atrium. She made no attempt to stop any of them. Her and Dahl’s helmet sensors had registered all the faces, and the AI back at the police headquarters would be able to match them to their owners’ ID passes in just a few seconds.
Dahl stood a few meters away, breathing hard. She had never lowered her helmet visor during the encounter. In the space between them, four of the attacking crowd were splayed out on the floor of the passage, knocked out by Dahl’s stun stick or Idina’s helmet blow.
Vigi Fuldas was gone.
Idina gritted her teeth and suppressed a particularly profane curse involving all the gods and their various genitalia. Her heart was still hammering in her chest. She sheathed her kukri and walked over to her helmet, then picked it up and placed it back on her head. As soon as she did, comms traffic assaulted her ears.
“Well,” Dahl said, pushing the words out in quick bursts between her fast breaths. “That did not go quite as planned.”
CHAPTER 11
SOLVEIG
Seeing Acheron with her own eyes for the first time felt like she was fulfilling an old promise.
At university, most of her classmates had chosen Rhodian or Oceanian for their foreign-language requirements because those were the easiest to learn for Gretians. Solveig had chosen Acheroni, which was more difficult by several orders of magnitude. It took four times as long for a native Gretian to get proficient in Acheroni than any of the other system languages except Palladian. But Acheron was where Ragnar had its most important business partners, and she had always found the culture fascinating. So she had slogged through four years of grueling classes, learning a new writing system and wrapping her vocal cords around new ways to make sounds while most of her friends were breezing through their tourist Rhodian. But the payoff was waiting for her just ten thousand kilometers off the corporate yacht’s bow right now. Acheron’s atmosphere was all swirls of yellow and orange, constantly in furious movement. The
