Expendable - James Alan Gardner [46]
…and in that moment of quiet, the Bumbler finally noticed her. Its alarm chittered Beep, beep, beep! in the still night air.
The woman’s head whipped around. She couldn’t help but see me. Lit by the full moon, her mouth and eyes flew open in horror.
“Greetings,” I said as I kicked the Bumbler’s SHUT-UP switch. “I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples. I beg your Hospitality.”
With an agonized howl, the woman spun away from me and sprinted for the coffin.
Submergence
By the time she reached her vessel, the coffin lid was fully shut. That didn’t stop her—she threw herself onto the top and hammered at the mirrored surface. Glass fists clacked sharply against the glass lid; but the coffin showed no sign of opening, no matter how hard she pounded.
Slowly, the craft slipped back into the water…and the woman hung on, shouting words I didn’t understand but could easily guess: “Help, help, a monster!” How else would she react to a purple-faced stranger, dressed in bulky white? The coffin paid no attention to her screams. With increasing speed it withdrew from the shore, fast enough to throw spray in its wake.
Wet glass fingers clung to the wet glass lid—and as water sprayed in the woman’s face, her grip slipped with the squeal of glass on glass. The coffin’s surface was too slick to offer purchase; and when the sarcophagus started to submerge, a thickening onrush of water pushed the woman clean off, coughing, spluttering…and sinking.
“Bloody hell,” I muttered. Could she swim? Could she breathe under water? Did she need to breathe at all?
If she really was glass, she’d be heavy as an anchor.
“God damn it,” I said. But I knew I would have to play lifeguard.
Emergency Evac
I couldn’t rescue her in my tightsuit: with the helmet off, it would fill with water and drag me down as soon as I started swimming. Growling profanities, I dug my thumbs under the twin flaps protecting the emergency release buttons, then pressed down hard. It was something I’d never done before, not with an active outfit—all our escape drills were performed with deactivated gear to avoid destroying valuable equipment. This time, however, the suit was live…and it stayed that way for precisely two seconds, just long enough for me to splay out my legs and throw my arms wide over my head.
Then the suit exploded off my body.
It went in pieces, splitting along seams invisible to anything less than an electron microscope. The gloves rocketed into the sky while the sleeves peeled themselves back like bananas, then ripped free from my shoulders as tiny charges of plastique blew them away. The breastplate had plastique of its own: enough to blast the front half five paces down the beach and the back half ten centimeters deep into the sand of the bluffs. The crotch slumped away without force—the males on the tightsuit design team must have been squeamish about high-powered explosives near that part of their anatomy—but the leg releases had enough plastique to compensate, spraying a confetti of fabric over a radius of ten meters and leaving me with nothing but shin-high white boots…that and the sweaty cotton chemise I wore to protect against the tightsuit chafing.
“Mmmm,” I said, in spite of myself. No matter what other things I had on my mind, it’s hard to stay focused when all your clothing is blown off in a single zipless whirlwind.
“Mmm. Mmm-hmm.”
And you are left standing on a moonlit beach, exposed to the soft night air.
“My oh my,” I said.
Then I saw that some of the fabric tatters had slapped like useless bandages onto Admiral Chee’s corpse. And I thought of the woman, maybe with the ponderous