The Quaker City peace officers were the first to arrive of all the potential reinforcements, a pair of distinctly recognizable brightly colored aircars whipping through the air over the scene at a speed that said they had definitely seen some of what was going on.
They returned to settle down around Kira’s crashed car a few seconds later, but they had—quite sensibly, in her opinion—been aware that their patrol units were far from equipped for the situation that had unfolded in that apartment’s park.
An SDC fast mover was there shortly afterward, the armored antigrav craft landing long enough to disgorge two dozen armored troopers before lifting off to hang over the area like a floating citadel.
Kira simply waited for the locals to feel in control of the situation and checked her link to Huntress. The jamming had finally dropped as the peace force cars arrived, which meant that somebody had walked away.
“Lovel should make it,” Whittaker told her and Milani. “He’s stable, and the armor is in sustain mode. A hospital would be better.”
Even as the pilot spoke, the first actual siren cut through the air as an air ambulance blazed out of the night.
“Admiral, are any of your people injured?” one of the peace officers asked as they stepped closer. “I’m Officer Tofa Kristiansen of the Quaker City Peace Service.”
“One of my troopers took several bad hits,” Kira told Kristiansen. “That ambulance sounds very helpful.”
“We’ll ping a second vehicle for the dead,” the QCPS officer told her. “This is…rather outside our experience; I apologize.”
“I don’t expect many people to be experienced with assassination attempts at this level,” she murmured. “I’m certainly not.”
“I…do have to note that hyper-velocity weaponry is utterly illegal for private possession on Bennet,” Kristiansen said slowly. “And your special permissions do not cover weaponry of that scale.”
“Funny,” Kira replied. “I was under the impression that anti-aircraft laser weapons and heavy assault cannon were also utterly ‘illegal for private possession on Bennet.’ Were the ones turned on my people in the possession of the SDC?”
“No,” the peace officer replied. “And the decision on any of that will be far above my level, Admiral, though I suspect I know where it will end.”
She gave a decent-enough salute.
“But I did have to mention it. I will need statements and, if you’re prepared to consent, implant downloads from you and your people,” Kristiansen continued. “I don’t know if it will be enough to track the attackers down. We…”
She sighed.
“We are not generally required to track down murderers,” she admitted. “My job is mostly mediating domestic disputes, Admiral, not dealing with this kind of…event.”
Somehow, Kristiansen managed to pack the force of multiple four-letter words into a single five-letter one.
“I understand, Officer,” Kira replied. “But three of my people are dead. We will provide any assistance we can, but we need to find the bastards behind this.”
“Excuse me, Officer Kristiansen, Admiral Demirci?” One of the armored SDC soldiers had arrived. “From what I’ve been told, Admiral Demirci may be able to make sense of something we just found.”
“What kind of something?” Kira asked carefully. “Soldier…?”
“Captain Chaha Paudel,” the woman replied instantly. “SDC Ground Forces. We’ve got an intact body, and the gear is…weird. You know a bit more about the galaxy than we do, so…”
Kira glanced away to see the emergency medtechs working with Whittaker to get Lovel out of his armor and into the ambulance. They seemed unfamiliar with power armor but otherwise competent.
“All right, Captain Paudel, Officer Kristiansen,” she told the two local officers. “These people took a serious shot at me and killed three of my people. Any help I can be, I will be.”
* * *
From the first attack to the destruction of the second airvan, Kira had never paused long enough to take a good look at her attackers. She’d saved the recording to review later, and she would identify anything that stood out to her then, but she hadn’t registered even the most obvious identifiers on the enemy.
As she followed Captain Paudel across the urban neighborhood that had turned into a battlefield, she could see that recording was probably going to be the best data they had on the assassins. The wreckage of the crashed airvan was spread across at least twenty meters of street, and she suspected the bodies were in a similar state.
“Here,” Paudel told her, reaching a spot where the cops and SDC troops had spread a tarp over something on the ground. “One of your bodyguards landed a lucky shot, and their victim fell from the airvan before it went down.
“Probably the best chance we’ll have for IDing them, but…”
“But what?” Kira asked.
“You’ll see. Pull the tarp off, Corporal,” Paudel ordered the soldier standing guard.
The canvas was whisked away, and Kira swallowed a curse as she recognized the hologram wrapped around her attacker. There was no way to tell how intact the body was after being shot with a blaster rifle and falling a dozen or so meters, because it was still covered in a very familiar hologram.
The Brisingr Shadows were perfectly capable of being subtle, but when the Kaiser’s spies wanted to send a message, they had a specific style. When they came to kill and be known to have killed, they wore a standard holographic cover that concealed their identity from any security recordings…while making it quite clear who had ordered a death.
Even slumped dead on the ground, the masked and hooded figure was familiar to Kira. The Shadows that had come for her on Apollo had rarely worn the hoods, but other assassins she’d encountered elsewhere had.
“You recognize the hologram,” Paudel said.
“They almost certainly aren’t local,” Kira told her. “Some might be, it’s possible, but the hologram is used by the Kaiser of Brisingr’s covert operatives when they’re ordered to make an example of somebody.
“Kaiser Reinhardt, at least, wants people to know why they’re dying when he orders them killed.”
And if Brisingr’s assassins were there on Samuels, she at least understood why they’d passed on the rich target of the entire party. They weren’t going to try to win the war for Colossus…they were just there for Kira Demirci.