For all their political differences, every planet in the system shared the socaball passion. Gretia had exported the sport when they had started to colonize the rest of the system, and it was the one cultural constant, the single unaltered piece of their common heritage everyone had willingly retained, all centered on a ball and a square field measuring one hundred meters on each side. It was equal parts strategy and athletics, brains and muscles, fast-paced and exciting. Idina had played it as a child, but she didn’t usually watch matches except during the interplanetary contest that took place every three years. The last one had been held ten years ago. None had happened during the war—stylized battle on the socaball field had been superseded by real warfare—and everyone had been too busy picking up the pieces to concern themselves with restarting the contest when the war ended. But the Gretians had received permission to reestablish their planetary league two years after the war, and the games had provided a diversion from the hardships of the postwar years that had been welcomed by occupiers and occupied alike.
“That is dedication. Standing in the heat like that just to see a ninety-minute match. They could all be at home and watching everything in perfect comfort,” Idina said.
Down below, the crowds funneled through the newly installed security measures the occupation authorities now required for large public events. As people arrived on the plaza in front of the stadium, they had to walk through sensor fields that could detect weapons and explosives. The sensors were unobtrusive and didn’t look like obvious policing or military hardware. They were large see-through panels that appeared to be safety barriers or weather shielding to the uninitiated. Everyone who wanted to get into the stadium had to walk into a twenty-meter tunnel made up of panel segments. The AI connected to the panel sensors could scan a person from head to toe in a few milliseconds, and it could sniff out anything that could be made to go boom, even the components to binary explosives before they were mixed together. Anyone walking through the passage with a weapon would be intercepted by the police officers on the far end of the sensor pathway. If the system detected a bomb, it could erect a set of blast walls from its base and seal off the tunnel in just a few seconds. For a culture so conditioned toward structure and hierarchy, the Gretians had a surprising fetish for privacy rights in the public sphere, but few had objected to the new surveillance measures after the May bombings.
“I do not follow the sport, but all of my colleagues do,” Dahl said. “I am given to understand that the experience is quite different when one is actually present in the stadium.”
“I’ll have to take their word for it. There just isn’t much that will make me overcome my dislike for getting stuck in crowds.”
“Then I’m afraid you may have chosen the wrong profession,” Dahl replied with the faint smile Idina knew well by now. She had gotten used to her partner’s expressions and the translator bud’s annoyingly stilted interpretation of Dahl’s Gretian, and after three months on patrol with the woman, Idina understood a fair number of Gretian words. Police and military work involved a lot of repetitive phrases. Cruising around with a Gretian police officer was almost an ideal way to pick up the language, at least certain aspects of it. On her patrols in the city over the last few months, she had become particularly proficient in the recognition of invective and obscenities.
At least they’re peaceful, Idina thought. And I’m not down there in riot gear getting piss-filled bags thrown at me. Let them bake in the sun and watch their silly ball game.
The console chirped a subdued alert and projected another screen into the space between Idina and Dahl. The Gretian police captain brought it over to her side of the cabin and inspected the data.
“One of the sensor fields just alerted,” she read. “Number eleven, by the east entrance.”
Idina focused the gyrofoil’s surveillance array onto the spot Dahl had indicated and magnified the view. A steady stream of spectators was moving through the sensor field, but nothing looked out of the ordinary. The police officers at the end of the security gate had clearly received the same alert because they were squaring off toward the oncoming pedestrians with unmistakably attentive body language.
“What is going on, post eleven?” Dahl sent on the tactical channel. In the security gate, the civilians had noticed that something wasn’t right, but then the officers at the end of the tunnel stepped aside to clear the way and kept waving the crowd along.
“False positive, Captain,” someone from the post guard replied. “Secondary scan shows nothing. Nobody in the sensor field is armed.”
“That wasn’t a false positive,” Dahl said to Idina. “Those look different.”
She expanded the data field in front of her and rotated it a little so Idina could see the contents of the projection.
“That’s a near-field return from an asset chip,” she said. “One from a duty weapon. One that wasn’t there before. Military or police. But it’s not one of ours. The central database doesn’t recognize the code.”
Idina looked at it and ran it through her military data link. It came back with a result just a moment later, and she sat up as straight in her seat as her safety harness would let her.
“It’s Palladian,” she said. “It’s a sidearm. Pallas Brigade military issue. Where did the sensor get that return?”
“The chip in the gun sent an automatic proximity ID when it picked up the interrogation by the sensor. Twenty meters from the eastern edge of the security lock.”
“See if you can get a
