For a long second, nothing happened. I smelled the first acrid hint of the tear gas. Then the suit closed around me with a disconcerting jerkiness.
The monitor and displays came up and I looked to the lower left: power was at 0.05, weapons systems all dark, as expected.
A twentieth of normal power still made me a Goliath, at least temporarily. The cool machine-oil smell meant I had my own air. I reached down to pick up my clothes and fell on my face with a huge crash.
Well, it had been a long time since I’d been in one of these, and even longer since I’d used a GP unit–General Purpose, one size fits everybody. Normally, I’d had one tailored to my dimensions.
I managed to clamber back up to my feet and stuff the clothes, minus boots, into a front “pocket,” just before they beat the door open. There was a lot of coughing and sneezing. One figure came staggering out of the cloud, a female Man who was pumped up like our sheriff, in a similar uniform, also with a pistol. She was holding it in both hands, waving it in my general direction, but her eyes were streaming and I assumed she hadn’t seen me yet.
These people were not my concern. There was an emergency exit door behind me. I turned, rocking like a zombie from a 1950s movie, and lurched toward it. The Man fired three shots. One of them put a nice hole in a display of nuclear weapons and one broke an overhead lamp. The third must have ricocheted off my back; I heard it sing away but of course felt nothing.
I supposed she knew the suit was unarmed but extremely dangerous. I wondered how brave she would have been if I’d turned around and started lumbering toward her. But there was no time for play.
I pushed on the emergency door and it ripped open, then ducked slightly as I passed through. The suit was almost eight feet tall; not really for indoor wear.
People scattered in all directions, making considerable noise. The Man or someone else was shooting at me–an easy target, a matte-black giant in a snowscape. Twisting the wrist control turned me camo green, then sand yellow, then I finally found a glossy white surface.
I walked as fast as I could to Main, almost slipping twice in the snow. Come on, I thought, you’ve operated these things on frozen portal planets a few degrees above absolute zero. But not lately.
At least Main Street had salt and sand, so I could run. Some of the traffic was on manual, and it noisily parted for me as I sprinted down the middle. A lot of them went spinning dangerously out of control. I shifted back to green, so they’d have more warning.
I picked up the pace as I became more sure of the clumsy thing’s abilities and limitations. I was loping along at about twenty miles per hour when I met Marygay’s bus, just outside the city limits.
She opened the driver’s-side door and stepped halfway out. “Do you need power?” she shouted.
“Not yet.” The readout said 0.04. “Back at the spaceport.”
She spun it on its axis and slid to the outbound lane, sending a delivery van that was on auto straight out into a field of snow. The people on manual were all pulling over, evidently from some police command; it was interesting that the ones on auto took longer to comply.
They were no doubt clearing traffic to get to me. I ran after Marygay as fast as I could, but soon lost her in the white distance.
What could they send after a fighting suit? I’d find out soon enough.
Strident blue flashing lights cut through the swirling snow as I approached the spaceport. Marygay’s bus was blocked at the entrance by a Security floater.
Two officers, evidently unarmed, were standing by the driver’s side, yelling at her. She looked down on them pleasantly, and gave no reaction when I passed behind them.
I picked up one end of the Security floater and easily flipped it over. It went crashing down into a drainage ditch. The two officers, sensibly, ran like hell.