The crossbow weighed over ten kilos, combining a meter-long hardwood stock with a stiff steel bow. Anybody who doubted Hansen was armed with that in his hands was a fool and a—
Hansen buttstroked the man with the broken face, knocking him over the body of his fellow. The other two slaves were running. Hansen ran after them.
—dead man.
“Oh, you’re a fine warrior to fight slaves!” Walker cried. “Are you proud of yourself, now?”
Hansen stopped. His legs were trembling, and he could only breathe in great sobs.
Walker was right. There’d been four of them . . . but trash like that wasn’t what he’d trained for, lived for.
Hansen began walking back toward the battlefield, getting control of his adrenalin-charged muscles by moving them. When he was sure the surviving slaves were gone for good, he dropped the bloody crossbow.
The suit of abandoned armor was still where it had fallen. The crow lighted on it as Hansen approached.
“I can show you where a fine suit, a king’s armor, can be had,” Walker said. “Do my will and I’ll reward you.”
“Will this work?” Hansen demanded.
He knelt beside the body. The casing appeared to be mild steel, though there had to be complex electronics within. There was a single large catch, directly beneath the crossbow bolt projecting from the left armpit.
“Badly,” Walker cawed, hopping to a sapling so slender that it bobbed beneath the crow’s weight. “You won’t dare face a real warrior in flimsy junk like this.”
The helmet was a featureless ball. From a distance, Hansen had assumed there were concealed eye and breathing slits. He’d been wrong.
“Don’t tell me what I dare,” Hansen said. He released the sidecatch and flopped the suit open.
The man within had voided his bowels as he died. The stench hung in the cool air like a pond of sewage.
Hansen pulled the dead man from the armor with as much dignity as his need for haste and the corpse’s stiffening limbs permitted.
The warrior had been old, with a pepper-and-salt moustache and only a fringe of hair on his head. The bolt was through his lungs, and he’d hemorrhaged badly from his mouth and nostrils. At least they were much of a size, Hansen and the dead man. . . .
“How do I make it work?” he grunted as he lifted the body clear.
Walker stopped preening his lustrous, blue-black feathers for a moment. “The suit powers up when it closes over a man,” he said disinterestedly. “A living man, that is. But you’re a fool to trust yourself to it, Hansen.”
Hansen clucked in irritation. The suit could be stood empty on its spread legs—the warriors he’d watched had stripped in an upright position—but the piece was too heavy for Hansen to lift alone. It’d better have servos to multiply the effect of its wearer’s motions.
He braced his hands on the edges of the thorax armor and thrust his booted feet into the leg openings simultaneously. They put their pants on one leg at a time . . . , he thought with a grim smile.
The armor still stank. He lay back in it and fitted his arms into the arms of the suit. It’d stink worse in a few minutes if Hansen died in it also; and the smell would matter just as little either way.
“Walker!” he said. Would he be able to speak and hear with the suit closed up? “How do I make it throw an arc?”
The crow cocked its head. “Point your fingers and say `Cut,’ ” it said. “Spread them wider to lengthen it.”
Artificial intelligence controlled, then. How did you get AI and crude feudalism together? “And to fire a bolt?”
“The first rule of—”
“Bird!”
“Caawk!” Walker said. Then, “Point your palm and say `Shoot.’ ”
Hansen closed the armor. When the latch clicked, a display lighted in front of his eyes and tiny fans began circulating the foul air.
He got up. The visual display was streaked with raster lines and seemed to be compressing 180deg. into the width his eyes would normally allot to ninety.
“Reduce field fifty percent,” Hansen said automatically, before his conscious mind could remind him that this crude unit might not have verbal controls—or any controls at all.