Breathe in. Breathe out. Calm.
Damn this suit. One of his buddies died in a K-11 yesterday, the other pilot of the old school. K-11-8, he wasn't the smartest or quickest of them, but he'd been lucky, and luck will get you far. It eventually ran out, and a boomer's fusion ability got K-11-8. They said in six months, maybe a year, the suits might have something that can avoid that. Six months or a year too late. "Chief's word?"
"Still not coming," the technician replied.
"If McNichol gets killed because the Chief was slow on the authorization, we're going to have a revolt." Leon was one of the ADP's best, but he was also regarded as a sort of good-luck charm by the department. He had looked rampaging boomers in the face so many times and lived he had to have something more than skill going for him.
And of course they'd have a revolt. They'd always have a revolt. They were the ADPolice. They served a very important role, critical to public safety, and they were forced to do it very badly by those in charge. Always halfway between a group never meant to win and the knowledge they were an elite, between total collapse and the highest morale. Confused and pissed off was their normal state. One of these days something would set off the bomb that was the ADP.
K-11-2 shook off that thought. It wasn't something that could be fixed, yet, perhaps ever. He looked up at the other three K-11s in the deployment plane's bay, armed and ready to rumble: K-11-32, K-11-41, and K-11-42. "Remember: you dictate the range and shoot the Boomers to pieces. You do not let them close to you, or they will kill you." He was alive and everyone else from the first and second groups wasn't, so his words carried weight.
"What about the Knight Sabers?" K-11-41 asked.
Rookies. "Don't fuck with them. Don't even think about it. If you manage to provoke them into a fight then you will make our job infinitely more difficult. And then between the hundred-odd people in the department who've been saved by the Knight Sabers you will find yourself socially outcast and doing beat cop work in the Fault faster than you'd think possible." A pause. "Assuming you survive that fight. I don't give it good odds."
"If I can interrupt, we've got the green light," the tech said.
One never learned to really enjoy jumping an armored trooper out of a perfectly good aircraft, but the parachutes and the semi-flight gear at least made it safe. Below, the city at night; almost beautiful, until you spotted the tracers and explosions of a boomer rampage in progress.