Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

eyes for a moment, clutching at the singed patch of his scalp as if he wasn’t sure he wasn’t dead. I knew what I had to do. I knew what would happen if I was squeamish about it now.

There was only one way out of this night.

I reached over the seat-back and put my hand on the top of Alexei’s head, and between the short-buzzed hairs my palm made easy contact with his skin. I closed my eyes. I willed. I opened them again.

“What did you—?” Alexei stammered.

Without another word I grabbed Naoto and yanked him hard down and away from the M134-derivative minigun. I locked the feeder into place. Pushed the first cartridge in and flipped down the front door, then the back. Toggled the safety, took aim, mashed my thumbs into the triggers. The gun sprang to life, hungrily eating up the ammo belt and spitting out whole unspent cartridges. No light, no noise, no fire. Of course. I hurriedly ripped out the securing pins the non-firing cycling sector, tossed it away and replaced it with the live one. I took aim and fired, clenching my teeth as the ancient machine gun exploded to life.

I sprayed the white-hot tracers wide across the lightless sky, based on the best guess of the vector of fire I could mentally extrapolate from the geometry of the waver burns on the APC’s outer plating. I knew the assault drones—judging by the sound, there were probably three of them, most likely mark six “Marauder” unicopters with a priming rate of ten shots per minute—would be all but invisible in the night, but they would be highly vulnerable to a dense volley of small antique metal rounds like these. Even a grazing blow might splinter their fragile carbon blades.

There, out in the roaring pitch black above us, I saw one of the luminous tracers connect with solid metal and blow it apart in a hail of hot sparks. I caught the merest glint of the fire in the metal bodies of the other two drones, and I rushed to put that light in my sights, knowing I only needed one shot for each of them now. At such close range it was almost easy. Neither of them was able to get another shot off in our direction before they fell screaming down into the desert sand, frantically beating their own rotors into shrapnel against the ground.

I turned the turret around and around, searching for any sign of another drone, listening carefully, but all I could hear now was the hammering of the pistons and the white noise of the road below us. Starlight gradually returned to the void as my eyes re-adjusted to the dark. I let myself breathe.

Naoto squinted up at me through the hatch. He looked at Alexei, then back at me, and his face told me he knew what I’d done. He reopened the shutters on his window and slumped there, looking out.

“You got them?” Alexei called back, with some audible disbelief. “We escaped?”

I took one last look out into the moonless night, half-wishing I could dissolve and blow away on that dry wind. I sat back down and shut the hatch.

Naoto sulked wordlessly and leaned his head into the window, all his body language shouting that I’d lost him for good this time. I wanted to shout back. I wanted to explain the crucial differences between personal and procedural memory, what it meant to access one and not the other, but I knew he wouldn’t hear a word.

When he finally spoke up, it wasn’t what I’d braced for.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t owe me anything. What I want . . . isn’t something that can ever be owed. It can’t be demanded. I’ve been such an ass.”

I let out a long-held breath. I stared ahead into the ghost of the road in the headlights, just breathing.

“All you ever talk about is how broken you are,” he said, softly. “How much wiser and stronger and more capable you’d be, if only you were whole. And I know your trauma is something I can’t understand, it’s something beyond language, but . . . I try to imagine that other you, that whole you, and I can’t. I don’t love some abstract entity. I don’t yearn to be part of it. It’s only you.”

I resisted the urge to dismiss his words. I took time to hear all of them. I reached out and held tight to the parts of his hand that weren’t blistered.

“You’re worried about Redhill,” he guessed. “About what the rest of you will think when it sees you again.”

“Not worried.” I swallowed hard. “Terrified.”

“Whatever happens when we get there,” he said, “we’ll face it together. And I know you’ll—”

He trailed off. He followed my squinting gaze to the thing that had distracted me: a glimmer of light through the window behind him, resolving into a circular glow with a dark center. A tiny solar eclipse, growing.

He dove across the seat and wrapped his arms around me, shielding my body with his. There wasn’t time to scream, to panic, to shove him away, to hit him, to remind him of the promise he was breaking. There was only time enough to know.

The rocket hit us.

Part III: Unity

I

MY VISION IS FULL of stars and fire. My ears are ringing. I’m locked inside this machine and it’s flipped onto its back, torn open and bleeding to death. I’m in the driver’s seat, hanging upside down from the seatbelt, looking out through the empty windshield at a sky made of sand stretched over an ocean of stars. At the same time, I’m crawling out into the fire-lit billowing smoke. Somehow I’m in both places at once. That’s strange—but I’m too full of adrenaline and in too much of a hurry to stop to think about it, because they’re coming. Whoever fired that rocket is