Another nod, accompanied by a small, terrified whimper.
“Great. Call everyone over, then, quick as you can. Any false moves, any funny business, and the last sound you’ll ever hear will be the hiss of your breath escaping through the hole in your windpipe.”
“Ahem,” said the technician, trying to clear a very dry throat. “People? Little problem here. Can I have your attention?”
It went surprisingly smoothly. The technicians were a biddable lot, as Reston had predicted. One of their own being held at swordpoint was a convincing argument for co-operation. Being smart men and women, they grasped that they were in the presence of two individuals who were not only capable of killing them all, but quite prepared to if the situation demanded it. They knuckled down, and within minutes two of the suits had been trundled out from the racks and Mal and Reston were being given a crash course in flying technique.
“These things are actually beautifully straightforward,” said one of the technicians, the seniormost and by all appearances the man in charge. “A complex system with an uncomplicated interface. The flight dynamics — roll, pitch and yaw — are all conditional on your own movements. Basically, lean or bend in the direction you want to go and the armour will comply. The antigrav excitation selector is incorporated into the helmet, so as to keep both hands free. You lower your head to descend, raise it to ascend. That’s the only part that takes some mastering. The rest is no trouble.”
The suits had to be put on in sections. Mal kept her macuahitl and the hostage technician in close contact while the pieces of armour were clamped onto her and linked together. He trembled like a leaf throughout the process, casting imploring looks at his colleagues as if to say, Please don’t do anything rash. They obliged, and Mal and Reston were soon fully suited.
It felt weird being contained head to toe inside this hard, jointed casing. Mal experienced a stifling surge of claustrophobia. She wanted to rip the armour off, get out of it any way she could. Be calm, she told herself. It was only a few pieces of light metal. She moved a leg experimentally, then an arm. It barely felt any different from normal — a little more resistance, that was all. She flexed one gauntleted hand. The segmented fingers rippled like caterpillars.
“Faceplate appears and disappears at the touch of this sensor,” said the head technician. He pressed a spot on the side of Mal’s helmet, and all at once everything went yellow and she realised she was staring out through the snakelike lenses. “The tinting on the eye screens filters out glare from l-gun bolts. That’s crucial after dark, so as not to compromise your night vision.”
Reston tried his faceplate too. “Nice.”
His voice came directly to Mal via her right ear.
“All the suits are in constant comms-link contact,” the head technician explained. “There are two channels, proximity and general. Proximity, the default setting, works up to a range of three hundred metres. General is a wide-spectrum band that picks up all Serpent Warrior chatter at all times. Is there anything else you want to know?”
“Is there anything else we need to know?” Reston replied.
“I don’t think so. Now, will you kindly let poor Yolyamanitzin there go? The boy looks like he’s about to faint.”
“Give us a couple of l-guns and we’re done,” said Mal.
The guns were lodged into her and Reston’s hands. Mal laid her macuahitl aside and gave Yolyamanitzin a gentle shove. “Off you go.” The young technician almost collapsed to the floor in relief.
“I would wish you godspeed, but I can’t bring myself to,” said the head technician, finding some courage now that none of his people was in direct danger any more. “Whoever you are, coming in here dressed in holy garb, you don’t deserve to get away with this. The Great Speaker knows all, sees all. Vengeance will be his.”
“What you mean is you’re going to blab to him about us as soon as we’re gone,” said Reston.
“That’s right.” The man blinked defiantly. “And to Colonel Tlanextic.”
“How?”
“Through the hotline link.”
“What hotline link? That one over there?” Reston was looking at a console with a number of telephone receivers attached to it, each a different colour.
“That very one.”
Reston charged up his l-gun and blasted the console to pieces.
“Not any more you’re not,” he said.
Mal lifted her head… and flew.
It was strangely exhilarating and exhilaratingly strange. Her feet were off the floor. She was floating. She had to resist the urge to waft her arms and legs as though treading water in a swimming pool.
She lifted her head again and rose a little higher. She wobbled uncertainly in the air. She felt on the verge of overbalancing and inclined herself forwards ever so slightly to compensate. All at once she was in motion. The further over she leaned, the faster she went. Wishing to decelerate, she instinctively straightened up. The suit of armour halted, returning to hover mode.
“This is…” She couldn’t think of a word for it.
“I know!” Reston beamed, executing a tentative midair pirouette. “Where has this been all my life?”
Mal tried for speed again, bending forward until she was near horizontal. The armour flung her towards the tunnel, far faster than she was expecting. She collided with the edge of the entrance and rebounded off. Picking herself up off the floor, she marvelled that she hadn’t felt a thing. It had been like sprinting headlong into a wall of cotton wool.
What was it Tlanextic had called it? “Impact-dispersant.”
Phenomenal.
She resumed her progress through the tunnel, warier than before but only marginally. Reston caught up and flew alongside her. They exchanged looks through the snake-eye lenses. His eyes were boyishly wide. He was having fun. And so, she had to admit, was she.
The bunker doors could be opened manually from the inside; Reston turned the wheel, and the doors ground grudgingly apart a few inches, then stopped, refusing to go any further. They’d warped them when they’d blasted their way in, and they no longer neatly followed their tracks.
“Let’s see if we can get them to budge the old-fashioned way,” he said, and grabbed one and began to tug sideways.
What happened next surprised them both. The door started to bend as Reston pulled on it. The more pressure he applied, the more it curved inwards. Solid metal buckled in his hands as though it were cardboard. Finally, with a cracking screech, both the top and bottom edges of the door jumped out of their tracks and the whole thing hung askew.
“Well, either I don’t know my own strength,” Reston said, “or this suit enhances the wearer’s muscle power by a factor of ten. The head technician didn’t mention that.”
“Maybe he just wanted us out of there as soon as possible,” Mal said.
“Imagine if I’d had one of these instead of my Conquistador armour. Imagine what I’d have been able to accomplish then.”
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Too late. I already have.”
“Let’s focus on the now. We still have to get off the island, and armour or not, I have a feeling it isn’t going to be easy.”
“Why not? The only people who’d have any interest in stopping us are Serpents, and to them we look like, well, them. They won’t bother us.”
“Yeah,” said Mal, “but to Quetzalcoatl and pals we look like Serpents too. And on recent evidence, gods don’t show their enemies much mercy.”
Reston was sobered. “Ah. Good point. We’d better go carefully, bettern’t we?”
“No shit, sunshine.”
Outside, the concourse was as before, a field of corpses. Wounds and spilled blood glistened blackly in the lamplight.
The worst of the fighting seemed to be taking place over on the west side of the city, so they elected to head east. As she took off into the open air, Mal was filled with a giddying sense of possibility. The exhilaration she’d felt down in the confines of the bunker was magnified a hundredfold. This suit of armour could transport her anywhere.