The Exosuits weighed well over a thousand pounds. No human being could have possibly made one do what it was now doing: crawling up onto the deck. The suit pulled itself up and then it did something even more fantastic—it stood. It was huge and deadly-looking, a robot from a sci-fi flick, water running from it and steam rising from it in plumes.

No man or woman would have been strong enough to hold that bulbous suit of armor upright. It would have taken titanic strength. If it wasn’t for the buoyancy of water, it would have sank like a brick in the lake.

But, yet, it stood.

It was like a gigantic golem from an old movie, a perfect and primeval engine of destruction. Orr could feel the terrible menace coming from it. The helmet bubble was dark and he could not see inside it, yet the ID tag on it assured him that it was Bell’s suit.

“Bell,” he said. “Bell? Can you hear me?”

The hand pod reached out to him, rotary joints hissing, the triple prong manipulator clicking open and closed. It was strong enough to easily crush his arm. One blow from it could have cracked his skull like a walnut. The other hand pod was fitted with an industrial rotary saw with a twelve-inch titanium carbide blade that was used for deep-sea repair work. It could go through steel like cheese. It began to spin with a whirring noise.

“Anderson,” Orr said in a low voice. “Get inside. Do you hear me? Get the fuck inside…”

He obeyed, jumping to his feet and running into the main deck house of the LSB.

The suit stepped forward with a Frankensteinian tread, the footpads thumping on the deck with seismic force. For so many years, Orr had looked on the hardsuits as absolute marvels of technology, he had never even thought of the monstrous things they could be if they were turned against you. Their aluminum anodized shells were nearly indestructible. It would have taken a .50-caliber round to breach them. The hydraulic and pneumatic systems were designed to function under intense undersea pressure, but out of the water, their destructive power was unbelievable. The triple-pronged manipulator—which looked very much like the claw of a bird of prey—could exert something like 10,000 pounds per square inch.

There was no getting around it: Anderson and he were in terrible danger. The Exosuit, possessed by some unnatural, alien force, had become a metallic predator that could have given The Terminator and Gort a run for their money.

Move carefully. It may be able to move quickly despite its bulk.