Five coffins. No flags draped over them; besides, what flags? Some of the officers buried tonight weren't yet naturalized citizens. No speeches. ADP officers dying has become too routine for people to care that much. And neither flags nor speeches were in the budget, nor was a salute, nor even live music. Yet another set of things in the long list of what the ADP was doing wrong because they didn't have the money to do it right.
But there was a crowd, and they did mostly wear uniforms.
Two of the coffins were empty. Patrolman Ishikawa and a new kid whose name he'd never known. A C-type Boomer's laser had killed them both. There was literally nothing left of Ishikawa that they could actually identify as Ishikawa; some scraps of a pair of ADP-issue shoes, the remains of his rifle. The new kid they had found an arm and a leg.
Sometimes, K-11-2 wonders how the foot cops ever manage to hold it together. It's true, in absolute terms, that their casualty percentages are lower than those of the armored trooper pilots. But the AT people rarely have to bury more than one or two of their own. The foot cops bury at least three of their own a week, more often five or six. Going after boomers with nothing more than an assault rifle, a bulletproof vest, and solid steel gonads has a high price.
Perhaps they shouldn't hold public funerals like this. It would mean they didn't have time to dwell on their losses. There were military units engaged in active combat that didn't suffer as badly as the ADPolice did in the day-to-day grind of stopping and investigating boomer crime.
At least the death benefits are good. Fatalism will get you far, K-11-2 thought sardonically, and avoided speaking with Ishikawa's parents and girlfriend while noting that the new kid's family was apparently too far away to make it to his funeral, if he'd had family. What are you supposed to say to the grieving parents, anyways? Words can't make this right. They can't even make it better.
You can't tell his parents those responsible aren't going to get away. A C-type boomer gone rogue, no frame numbers to pull; no parts which can be traced. The number of people who could have assembled such a machine was, of course, very small. But all of them were major corporations and had the ability to fight back against search warrants and other tools of gathering the necessary evidence to find those responsible for putting it on the street. Whoever made that boomer was literally getting away with murder.
He felt about how Leon looked; out of place and uncomfortable in formal uniform. The black bodysuit he wore along with his K-11, that was uniform. This was...something else, something meant for show. The only thing meant for show about this whole farce. Unless you counted the existence of the ADP itself, and K-11-2 was not quite ready to concede that point.
One of these days we aren't going to have to bury someone. I swear it.