Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

it would change you to unify with me, and you deserve better than that. You can choose to believe me when I say that, or not. I don’t give a shit anymore.”

I turned away and climbed back into the front seat. The tight metal space filled up with the silence between us.

The distance crawled by through the narrow windows, only black silhouettes of mountains against the stars. The ear-splitting, metal-hammering sound of that engine ironically lulled me into half-sleep.

A hundred and twenty years ago, I remembered, I’d driven on this very road. A lover and I had pooled our life savings for a piece-of-crap used solar car in San Francisco and set off for the ghost of Route 66. We’d only made it to Albuquerque before the thing broke down on the highway—this same highway, now just a ghost of pulverized asphalt through the naked wasteland. The world had been dying then too, but by comparison the process had barely begun yet. Cities had still stood, complete with gleaming towers of fragile glass. Nothing had been burned by nuclear fire; nothing blown away on the storms; nothing bleached to dust by naked solar UV light; nothing swallowed by the sea.

It had been so long since I’d let myself remember these things. For the first time in countless years, I wondered whether anything could be like that again. That safe and carefree. That hopeful.

Then I woke up.

“Wake up,” Alexei was shouting. “We have a problem.”

A sound came from behind. A faint creak of deforming metal. A smell followed the sound, sharp and warm. Burning plastic.

“The engine?” I asked.

“No. We’re under attack.”

“From who? What?” My pulse quickened. I twisted around, trying to see.

“No, stay back from the windows! Close the shutters. All of them.”

“Who’s attacking us?”

“Aerial drones. At least two of them. I’d guess fully automated.”

“Medusas?” Naoto demanded. “Have they found us?”

Alexei shook his head. “It’s more likely the drones were left here as traps, maybe by raiders, maybe Confederate patrols. Their attack pattern doesn’t strongly suggest they want us alive.”

Naoto jumped when he touched the lever to close the shutters over his window. “Ow! Hot!”

“Waver strikes,” Alexei said, and jerked the wheel to swerve.

I scanned the metal cabin frantically. “Do we even need to worry? They can’t penetrate these walls with their beams . . . can they?”

“No, but they can burn right through the sidewalls of these antique rubber tires. We’ve already lost one. If they gain on us any further, they’ll be able to shoot us through the windshield. There’s no shutter on it.”

“Shit!” Naoto yelled, nursing his hand. “What do we do?”

“One of you take the mounted gun. There’s a full box of ammunition. You just have to slot the feeder and fire.”

“Do what to the what?” Naoto shouted. “Slot? Feeder?”

“Hold on.” Alexei threw the steering wheel hard to the right, hitting us with so much centrifugal force that I was surprised the machine didn’t fly off its wheels. He repeated the same maneuver in the opposite direction. Only then did he spare us one glance over his shoulder to say, “Listen carefully. My evasive maneuvers are buying us time, but someone needs to take that gun and shoot down those drones, or it won’t be enough. I can walk you through it”—he paused to swerve violently again while we held on for dear life—“but I need you to do exactly what I say, the first time I say it.”

It was already dawning on me what I would have to do, but I was still racking my brain for any other option. I looked at the scarred mercenary sitting there at my left, expertly handling the arcane controls of this groaning, roaring war machine. I looked back at Naoto as he scrambled for the gun. The last thing I needed now was one more thing he couldn’t forgive me for.

No. Not this time. I unhooked myself and climbed into the back compartment to help Naoto.

“Ready!” he shouted down through the hatch. I crouched by his side, peeking fearfully past the shield, seeing nothing but the stars.

“Keep your head down. Now you need to attach the loaded feeder to the slot on the main body of the gun and chamber the first round.”

“Feeder?”

“That long segmented object. The rounds are inside.”

“Rounds. You mean bullets?”

“Yes!”

Alexei swerved again and I fell hard into Naoto’s knee. When I recovered, I found the feeder. I picked what I thought was the right end and handed it up through the hatch.

Alexei continued, speaking more quickly now, barely intelligible over the noise around us. “You need to lock the open end of the feeder into the slot on the bottom left side of the gun body, pull the two pins back and push them forward again until they lock under the feeder’s metal lip. Push the first cartridge upward out of the feeder and slot it into the receiver, then close the two swinging doors over the exposed belt, front door first, check that the timer’s locked in, and then flip the safety toggle upward to enable firing with either of the two thumb controls.”

“Did you get any of that?” Naoto shouted at me.

I studied the mechanism. I’d heard everything the mercenary had said, and I was still at a loss. “Repeat, Alexei,” I said. “How do we attach the feeder to the gun body? Did you say there are pins?”

“We don’t have time for me to keep explaining this!”

I heard Naoto yelp and caught him when he darted back down through the hatch. I felt the heat of fresh waver strikes radiating from the metal roof above us, and a moment later a terrible smell filled my nostrils—I clutched at Naoto, afraid it was burning flesh and blood, but it was his hair. A waver shot had seared off one of his braids. I almost thought I could hear the drones now, rhythmically slicing at the air above and us. We were running out of time.

Naoto looked into my