“All units, be advised that someone armed with a military-grade sidearm just tried to enter security lock eleven. They’re still out there, so be alert,” Idina sent to the Joint Security Patrol troops embedded with the Gretian police. They were down to one JSP to every four Gretian officers—not because the JSP had reduced their numbers, but because the Gretian police had grown bigger and more competent with every passing month. But the JSP troopers were still in charge of their counterparts when it looked like the riot shields or the guns were about to come out. Her troopers sent their acknowledgments wordlessly through the data link.
“Got him,” Dahl said with satisfaction in her voice. “Male, one hundred seventy centimeters, light-colored short hair, light-blue bodysuit, white vest.” She froze the sensor image on-screen and pushed a duplicate to Idina. “He walked toward the checkpoint and stopped short when he noticed the sensor locks. Turned around and walked back east.”
“He knew security would see the gun if he walked through the scanner. He may not know we already got a ping on him from the asset chip in the gun,” Idina replied. She sent the image to all her JSP troopers over the platoon’s data link. The JSP soldiers and their Gretian patrol partners had shared voice channels, but the police and military data networks still didn’t talk to each other. Even after five years of nominal peace and improving cooperation, the Alliance still wasn’t willing to let a recent enemy interface with its sensitive data infrastructure.
“If he is on foot, he is no more than a hundred meters away,” Dahl said. She brought up two more display projections. The gyrofoil kept doing its slow autopilot loops high above the stadium square, but the sensor package was mounted in an underbelly pod that could monitor all directions at once.
“I see him,” she announced a few moments later. “Light-blue thermal suit, walking on Eleventh and crossing the intersection with Twentieth.”
On the visual feed, their quarry was easy to spot. His light-blue bodysuit didn’t particularly stand out among the Gretian fashion choices of the crowd, but he was one of the few people moving against the current flow of foot traffic, away from the stadium instead of toward it. Dahl put a sensor marker on him for the AI to track. Then she disengaged the autopilot and brought the gyrofoil around in a lazy turn toward the west, away from the stadium and Eleventh Street.
“Don’t you want to follow him? The optics won’t be able to track him once we lose line of sight.”
Dahl shook her head.
“If we fly in his direction, he may notice. Then he will know we are following him. There are too many indoor galleries and passages in this area. If he goes into one of those, we will not find him again.”
Idina checked the dispersal of her JSP troopers on the tactical map. All of them were on the square, working the security checkpoints with the Gretian police officers, with hundreds of people between them and the end of Eleventh Street, where the suspect had gone. Even if she sent a team in pursuit, it would take them a while to make their way through the crowd.
“Any of yours close enough to do an intercept?”
Dahl checked her own map and shook her head.
“Everyone is tied up. The closest patrol not on stadium duty is replying to a disturbance at the entertainment center on Fifth and Fourteenth. We are the closest unit. I am already bringing us around to fly ahead of him, out of sight.”
“You know, for patrol supervisors, we spend an awful lot of time on the ground,” Idina said, and Dahl’s mouth twitched her little smile again.
“That just means we are doing our jobs right. Prepare for a quick drop.”
Idina’s harness tightened automatically as Dahl put the gyrofoil into a steep descent and increased speed. Dahl kept them on a westerly course until they had dropped enough altitude to break line of sight with the suspect, who was still walking down Eleventh Street in no hurry. When they were almost at the level of the highest buildings in the area, Dahl nudged the gyrofoil into a left-hand turn that brought them parallel with Eleventh.
“All units, we have the suspect in sight and are moving to apprehend,” Idina told her JSP officers. “Stay vigilant in case there are more.”
For a city of Sandvik’s size, even the JSP and the beefed-up Gretian police were not enough to keep eyes on everything, so the JSP had a few dozen high-endurance surveillance drones on call. They did not patrol the city from above on a regular basis because the Gretians objected to their presence without cause, but today there were six of them on station, three thousand meters above the city and all but invisible to the naked eye. Idina tapped into the network and assigned the closest one to shift its patrol pattern and focus its attention on her and Dahl. If something went sideways during the arrest, the drone would be their guardian spirit.
“All right, we have the eyes in the sky on us. Where are we putting down?”
Dahl pointed at a spot on the navigation display.
“There, in that little square past the intersection with Forty-Fourth. He will not see us landing, and we can turn the corner and come down Eleventh right when he is just a grid away. If he runs when he sees us, we will be close enough to follow.”
“Let’s
