Keeping the Peace

[DeJaVu]

PTI TechWatch: The Kressly Dillinger Police Hovercraft
Normally at TechWatch we focus on the products specifications and performance statistics, noting how well one craft performs against another in terms of cargo capacity and range. With this report, however, we feel the evaluation can best be given by a vehicle crewman himself, who submitted this testimonial to our New Earth offices.

We were on patrol outside of Cadence, a small village about two hundred klicks south of County Shu. We’d been seconded down there, detached duty as the soldiers say, to take care of a protection racket that had gotten its hands on some military-grade weaponry and was trying to set themselves up as petty kings. Now me, I figured it was a job for the Eridani Guard, but with their deployments to [CENSORED] the job fell to us.

They hit us outside the wall, a couple of civilian cars and a Bulldog truck outfitted as a gun carrier. I guess they didn’t expect the Dillinger we were in to carry four machine guns just like their one, but we made short work of the gun truck without having to unbutton. The sergeant was on the horn to higher when someone hit us with a law rocket. The armor stopped most of it, but a piece got through and dinged the sergeant up pretty good. We moved into the city after that.

It turns out that these bozos were pretty good petty kings; they’d turned the whole city against us. We loaded up the guns with rubber bullets to keep them away from us, but they kept coming. Finally the driver dropped the fans into high gear and flared the skirts. He used debris from the gravel roadbed to keep the people back long enough for us to get out of the city and wait for reinforcements from the County Shu Volunteer Battalion. I tell you, I’ve never been so glad to see a Lineholder in my life.

Being in that Dillinger saved my life that day. If we’d been in our usual patrol cards, we’d have been killed in seconds