“Guess there’s something even a battlesuit can’t deflect,” the Armorer said.
“Do you think it’s chilled?” Krysty asked.
Jak snap kicked the head. The arms didn’t move. “Mebbe,” the albino said with a shrug. “Mebbe not…”
“Look, it dropped its tribarrel blaster,” Dean said. He pointed at the butt of the bullpup-style rifle, which protruded from between two of the wall’s boulders. Dean tried to pull it free, but couldn’t budge it.
Ryan gave it a try, but had no luck, either. “The front sight or the pull-down front grip must be caught on something,” he said. “Let’s take the helmet off and see if the bastard’s alive.”
The companions had watched Gabhart and the others get out of their armored suits, so they knew where the helmet release mechanism was and how to operate it. J.B. pressed the small inset button on the outside of the battlesuit’s collar and Ryan rotated the helmet. With a click and a hiss, it turned and came away in his hands.
Dix held the torch close so they could get a good look.
The trooper’s face was pale and the features slack. The hair was cut so close to the head it might as well have been shaved. Blood oozed from the nose and mouth.
“Is it a man or a woman?” Krysty asked.
“Can’t tell for sure,” Mildred said. “Not without seeing the rest of the body.”
Doc peered down and said, “No more extensive observation is needed, dear colleague. I’ll warrant the skin on those cheeks has never seen a razor’s edge.”
The trooper’s eyes opened. The mouth moved, and there was a wheezing rattle of breath. Realizing his or her predicament, the trooper panicked and began pushing and pounding at the rock, thrashing in vain to break free.
If a battlesuit couldn’t repel tons of rock, Ryan thought, it couldn’t be crushed by it, either. If the wild arm movements were any guide, the trooper was solidly pinned but not seriously injured,
Ryan knelt just out of reach. “You aren’t going anywhere for a while,” he said. “Might as well calm down.”
Their eyes met and the trooper exclaimed, “Shadow Man!”
The unamplified voice was definitely female.
“She knows you?” Krysty said.
“No, she doesn’t know me,” Ryan answered. “She just recognizes me from the vid billboards of her Earth. My face was plastered on them twenty feet tall. It was part of a campaign to sell the migration to Deathlands and quiet the mobs.”
The trooper’s gauntleted hand reached up to her throat, her fingers applied pressure to the front of her neck, then she spoke, “We’ve got seven alive in here. Burn ’em out!”
“Fireblast!” Ryan snarled. He ripped her fingers away from the throat mike’s actuator, then tore it out of the battlesuit.
He didn’t even see her hand move in response, that’s how fast she turned the tables on him. Quicker than a cat or a snake strike, the trooper gained control of his wrist, and she used it to pull him closer to her.
She was amazingly powerful. And not just for a woman, either. Her grip held him like the jaws of a machine. Ryan felt himself being dragged, all two hundreds pounds of him, on his knees over the sand. Before she could get her fingers closed around his throat, he picked up a chunk of rock in his free hand and smashed the flat side down onto her unprotected face. He had to hit her twice more before her grip weakened. He jerked himself away from her, cradling his numbed hand.
J.B. passed the torch to Mildred and, standing at a safe distance, leaned over the trooper. “She’s still breathing,” he said. “You just stunned her. Bloodied her nose pretty good but her eyes are opening. I’ll be nuked, she’s coming around already!”
“A most curious example of femininity,” Doc remarked. “What say you, Mildred? Is this the future of the fairer sex?”
“She is a strange one,” Mildred agreed. “Look at that brow ridge, and the density of the bone in her jawline. I’m sure it isn’t acromegaly. There would be much more gross distortion than this at her age. Some other hormonal imbalance has to be involved. Whatever the root cause is, from how easily she got hold of Ryan and controlled him with one hand, she’s a very unusual human being, both in her physical strength and her reaction time.”