The lack of radio contact was a handicap. I bent down next to her window. “Park it up by the main building and I’ll drain the fuel cell there.”
She said okay and sped off. My power was down to 0.01 and the numerals started flashing red. That would be great, stranded a couple of hundred meters from my destination. Well, I could always open the suit manually. And run naked through the snow.
As soon as I started walking, the suit added a “beep…beep” in time with the flashing digits, I suppose as a convenience for the blind. The legs started to resist my commands, feeling as if I were walking through water, and then mud.
I did make it to the floater while the people were still unloading. Max stood there with his arms crossed, the pistol prominent.
I popped the rear utility door and clipped my emergency cables to the fuel cell’s terminals, and studied the directions on the grimy plate on the side of the cell. Then I pushed the “fast discharge” button and watched my numbers start to climb.
They’d reached 0.24 when I heard the heavy thrum of a floater braking, and found out what they could send after a fighting suit.
Two fighting suits. One human; one Tauran.
If they were armed, I was nothing but a target. Either suit’s weapons could vaporize me or slice me like lunchmeat. But they didn’t fire; or couldn’t.
The floater lurched as the Man got out, and he repeated my performance, falling on his face. I resisted the impulse to tell him that the longest journey begins with a single step.
In the floater, the Tauran suit flailed, trying to keep its balance, and tipped over backward. Neither of them had any more recent practice than I had. My hundreds of hours of training and fighting, even though mostly lost in the mists of time, might be worth more than their two-to-one advantage.
The Man had gotten up on hands and knees; I covered the distance with a graceless leap and swiveled a hard sidekick to the head. It probably didn’t hurt him physically, but it sent the suit skidding and tumbling.
I grabbed the front bumper of the floater, my strength amplification whining loud, and tried to swing the heavy machine around to bash the Tauran. It managed to dodge, and the effort made me stagger and fall. The floater buzzed away like an angry insect.
The Tauran threw itself on me, but I kicked it away. I was trying to resurrect what I once knew about Tauran fighting suits; what weakness might give me an advantage, but all the musty ALSC stuff was about weapon systems, range, and response speed, which unfortunately seemed not to apply.
And then the Man was on me, falling on my shoulders with a crash like some heavy playground bully. He tried to grab my suit’s head, and I batted his hands away–that was a good target; the suit’s brain wasn’t in the head, but its eyes and ears were.
I flipped him away clumsily. My weapons systems’ telltales were still dark, but I tried the laser finger on him anyhow. When it didn’t lance out and cut into his suit, I was curiously relieved. My underdeveloped killer instinct hadn’t become fiercer with age.
While I was peering through the snow for something I could use as a weapon, the Tauran had found one; it whacked me from behind, across the shoulders, with an uprooted light pole. I went down and plowed into a snowbank. While I staggered up; it kept clanging against my shoulders and upraised arms.
My visual sensors were smeared, but I could see well enough to aim a kick between its legs, an aim more anthropomorphic than practical–but it did unbalance the thing enough for me to grab hold of the light post and jerk it away. I had seen the Man in my peripheral vision, running toward me; I swung the pole around in a flat arc and caught him at knee level. He spun sideways and hit the ground hard.
I turned to face the Tauran again, but couldn’t see it, which didn’t mean it was far away or hidden–all three of us were white lost in white, invisible from fifty meters in the rolling snow. I tongued over to infrared, which might work if it turned its back to me, with the heat exchangers. That didn’t work and neither did radar, which I expected to work only if the suit moved in front of a reflecting surface.