Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

last thought was that it had come to drag me down to the other place. Then I was gone.

ALEXEI

I wrenched the hatch closed against the blast of morning light, and the bubble cockpit hissed and creaked ominously as it strained to re-pressurize itself and stop our blood boiling long enough for the drugs to kick in. My two new clients were sea-soaked ragdolls draped over the reclined seats, leaving just enough room for me to crawl awkwardly over them.

“Is she okay?” Naoto groaned, repeatedly. He could barely form the words, between the shock of the ascent and the chemicals I was feeding into his arm.

“I’m trying to ascertain that.”

Under these circumstances, I could think of several reasons why Danae was still unconscious. I had to hope it was simple oxygen deprivation and not a concussion or embolism or stroke or something else I couldn’t treat. My vision was blurry. My aching hands kept spilling the contents of the trauma kit over my clients’ limp bodies, but I finally managed to dig out the Medusan field medic scanner and unfold it around Danae’s head and neck.

At the last second I held back from hitting the power button. I didn’t have time to tinker with the scanner to make sure it wasn’t networked. If it was, there was a risk it would transmit personally identifying information back to the Medusas. Maybe enough for them to find us here.

“Is she okay?” Naoto croaked, more insistently.

I had no choice. I flipped the switch and watched the screen flare to life.

“She’s—” I started, but when the image cohered, I had no words. I could only stare and wait for it to make sense.

“She’s what?” Naoto demanded.

The overlay began to print out warnings like anatomical variation exceeds diagnostic parameters and anomalous neuroelectric activity and cybernetics not recognized, but these were all crude, euphemistic terms for what I was seeing.

The many-spined, crystalline thing that branched throughout the inside of Danae’s head and down into her spine did not look like cybernetics. It didn’t look like any technology I had ever seen, but neither was it remotely biological.

“I said is she okay?” Naoto grabbed at the sleeve of my coat and pulled hard.

I blinked slowly. “I don’t know.”

The scanner began to flash with frantic warnings: Unidentified nanoweapon. Quarantine immediately. Alarm noise filled the cockpit—abruptly silenced by Naoto’s hands snatching the scanner off Danae’s head and ripping out the power cell.

He glared at me—drugged, half-dead from the ascent, pushing himself upright on shivering arms, yet visibly bristling with threat response to ask, “What did you see?”

However weak he was, I saw him bracing to attack me if I gave the wrong answer—but I had no answer at all. I had no words to describe or even categorize it.

Danae groaned and stirred. “Naoto?”

He was so visibly relieved that he nearly seemed to forget me. He sank back against the wall of the bubble and stroked her hair. “I’m here,” he said. “We made it. We’re at the surface.”

I sank back against the dashboard. With my last moments of full lucidity, I set the autopilot to take us to the shore and hopefully off anyone’s sonar. Waves of light played across bubble around us, eerily serene, and I let myself start to fade into the haze of Pascalex and narcotics.

When I opened my eyes again, four hours had passed, and we were all still alive. The sub bobbed gently just below the water’s surface, in sight of the rocky floor, half-hidden now in a thickening field of debris that had floated up from the fighting below and washed toward the shore. Between the decompression cycle and the drugs, soon we’d be able to open the hatch without succumbing to the pressure change. Until then we were stuck here together, three bodies crammed into this plastic and metal womb, wreathed in multi-colored strata of pollution.

We had been laying in a pile all that time, continually coughing or trying pointlessly to twist into less painful positions. Now that my vision had cleared, I gave them each a look over, as much to check for further injuries as to try to get a better sense of them than I had in the bar. Naoto was in his mid-twenties, Danae a bit older. He had an angular and stubbled face, with a few frayed braids hanging over a neglected undercut; she had deep brown skin and short-clipped hair, and her sea-soaked Epak coveralls draped over a body somewhat hollowed-out by some combination of stress and starvation.

“How do you both feel?” I asked.

“Alive,” Danae answered.

The image of the artificial structure inside her head flashed through my mind’s eye whenever she spoke.

“Barely,” Naoto croaked in agreement. He’d taken the shock harder.

Danae was gritting her teeth and nursing her forearm.

“Are you injured?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It’s nothing. An old break. Hurts with the pressure change.”

“If you need something for the pain—”

“You should have left me,” she interrupted. “When I swam for the emergency seal, you should have kept going. I didn’t mean to endanger Naoto like that.”

Naoto rolled his eyes exhaustedly.

“Moving forward,” I said, “you’ll need to be more explicit with parameters like that.”

She covered her face in her hands and groaned. “I’m sorry. It was beyond reckless of me. I just . . . had to do something. I thought I could save all those people. And for what. They’re all dead anyway.”

“Some,” I said. “Not all.”

“What do you mean?”

“I saw what you were trying to do. I jammed the seals shut with the sub arms before we surfaced. It should have bought them some time to evacuate.”

She pushed herself half-upright, propping herself up with a hand on my chest to meet my eyes. A very strange feeling moved through me. We couldn’t have met before, but my déjà vu was almost dizzying. She braced her head against the wall of the bubble and wriggled her arm free, and