When there’s no harness and no hardware, and the suit isn’t customized for your body, it’s neither quick nor dramatic. You squirm this way and that and finally get everything in place, and then try to close it on your own. When it doesn’t close, you go back a few steps and start over.
It took almost fifteen minutes. I walked down the gangway, clumsy at first. The carrier doors opened.
“Thanks anyhow,” I said. “I think I’ll walk.”
“That is not allowed,” it said. “It is dangerous.”
“I’m dangerous,” I said, and resisted the impulse to tear off a couple of its legs, to see what would happen. Instead, I started running, invoking the suit’s strength amplification to give me a broad-jump lope. It wasn’t as smooth and automatic as I remembered, but it was fast. I was at the spaceport door in less than a minute.
The door wouldn’t open for me, sensing that I was a machine. I walked through it. The shatterproof glass turned opaque, stretched, and ripped apart like cloth.
Marygay laughed. “You could have knocked.”
“This is the way I knock,” I said, amplified voice echoing in the huge hall. I turned it down to conversational volume. “Our odd men out went to find their Trees?” The sheriff and Tauran were missing.
She nodded. “Asked us to wait here. How’s the suit?”
“I don’t know yet. Leg amplifiers work. Okay on doors.”
“Why don’t you take it outside and try out the ordnance? It’s pretty old.”
“Good idea.” I went back through the hole I’d made and looked around for targets. What would we not need? I set my sights on a fast-food stand and gave it an order of fries, with the laser finger. It burst into flame in a satisfying way. I flipped a grenade at it and the explosion sort of put out the fire by scattering the pieces.
The personnel carrier came mincing up, accompanied by a small robot with flashing blue lights. It had PARKING POLICE stenciled on front and back.
“You are under arrest,” it said, in a huge stentorian voice. “Surrender control to me.” That was followed by some almost ultrasonic warbling. “Surrender control to me.”
“Sure.” I chambered a rocket, which the heads-up thing called MHE. That’s not an acronym we used to have. I assumed “medium high explosive” and squeezed it off. It did vaporize the parking robot and leave a crater two meters in diameter, in the process knocking the personnel carrier on its back.
It righted itself by rocking back and forth until it tipped onto its spidery feet. “You didn’t have to do that,” it said. “You could have explained your situation. You must have a reason for this arbitrary destruction of property.”
“Target practice,” I said. “This fighting suit is very old, and I had to know how well it works.”
“Very well. Are you finished?”
“Not really.” I hadn’t tried the nukes. “But I’ll hold off with the other systems until I have more real estate to work with.”
“Real estate outside of Spaceport?”
“Absolutely. There’s nothing in here small enough to destroy.”
It actually seemed to pause, integrating that statement into its world view. “Very well. I will not call the police again. Unless you destroy something here.”
“Scout’s honor.”
“Please rephrase that.”
“I won’t hurt anything here without telling you ahead of time.”
It sort of threw a mechanical tantrum, stamping its many feet. I supposed it was generating conflicting orders. I left it there to sort things out.
The sheriff came back to the group the same time I did.
“The Whole Tree gives no warning,” he said. “There’s no sense that anything was going wrong.”
“Just like home?” Marygay said.
He nodded. “More complex things are going on,” he said, “and the Tree is still trying to make sense of what has happened.”
“But it hasn’t,” Po said.
“Well, now it has new information. What happened to us, out in space, and to Middle Finger. And Tsoget. It may be able to piece something together.”
“It thinks by itself?” I said. “Without people connected to it?”
“It’s not like thinking, exactly. It just sifts things; makes things more simple for itself. Sometimes the result is like thought.”