Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

forced to memorize. He was looking for true understanding. Synthetic knowledge, he called it. No one spoke.

“Alexei?”

I stood up. After a second’s hesitation, I guessed. “Because it’s a crutch, sir?”

“Correct. An aim-assist can only improve an inferior arm, governed by inferior resolve. This—” he grabbed the deserter’s arm and shook it in its restraints for effect “—is an arm that believes it exists for multiple, contradictory purposes. It thinks it can go to war and hold a waver, and then return home and be used to bake bread, build a shelter, embrace a love. What is your arm’s sole purpose, Cadets?”

“Kill!” we all shouted in unison, holding our dominant hands high. I took pride in the volume. I saw how it made the deserter afraid.

“You have no homes to return to,” the Major told us. “You have no other life waiting for you. War is your life. Your mind and body have but one purpose in this world, from now until death, and we will shape them into the perfect tools to suit that singular purpose.”

He shut off the scanner and the pane and pushed it back a safe distance from the deserter. He opened a metal case and lifted out a small machine: something with long cylinders wrapped with coils of wire. He set it a few feet away from the deserter and we all sat up in our seats, trying to get a better view.

“Secondarily,” the Major continued, “wherever there is a crutch, there is an added vulnerability. Recall that all unshielded electronic devices are susceptible to electromagnetic pulse.”

He flipped a switch. The bound man began to scream through his gag. He writhed in agony. His right arm twitched and snapped in rhythmic pulses and the red lines of internal burns etched themselves like tattoos into the skin.

One day in the open field—in the early days, when Major Standard’s youth battalion was still limited to rear-guard actions, and only a small number of us had died—I walked with him. It was still new and mysterious to me how the ground crunched wherever the scorching had glassed the dirt into thin, oval-shaped plates. He was still teaching me to recognize the signs: how a recent firefight had unfolded, or how a future one might.

The corpse seemed to appear out of nowhere. I thought at first that the Major would want me to pass by without hesitation, but he told me to stop. He raised up his visor and I did the same.

“Tell me what you see here,” he said.

The dead man lay on his back on the dirt mound, his face a black hole. He had been on our side. His helmet and goggles lay neatly at his feet, and his rifle was braced between his knees. The shape of the burn told me it had come from below.

Before I could answer, the Major said, “Desertion of the most unforgivable kind. That’s what suicide is.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You and I have pledged our lives to our great cause. That means our lives are not ours for the taking, nor our enemy’s. They belong solely to our Republic, and they must be used to its maximum advantage. This man willfully disregarded every part of that pledge. He stole his death from us and wasted it. So let’s pause here. Let us get a proper look, so that we’ll never forget this betrayal.”

We stood there for a long time in the passing wisps of smoke, silent amid the sounds of distant shouts and buzzing flies. I studied the burning contempt in Major Standard’s eyes; I tried to feel it too, but I couldn’t—not then. No matter how long I looked, all I saw was one more casualty.

It wasn’t until fourteen years later, pressing a gun to my own head in the restroom mirror on an air transport leaving Antarka, that I felt all the hate he had tried to teach me.

I remember, too, what the Major told us all on the last day of the war. We were nearly adults by then. By his order we had withdrawn from our guerrilla positions and rallied in a half-collapsed subway tunnel on the outskirts of the last city still claimed by the Free Republic of South Cascadia. The front lines surrounded us in a steadily contracting ring.

“In the years we have served together,” he said, his giant voice amplified by the curved walls, “I have never doubted the vision with which I took you on and taught you, but never before now has my pride been greater. Although our strategic position may appear dire, our finest hour is at hand. When we retake the Capitol, the world and its history will know what I have known since the beginning: that I have at my command, in you, the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen. Charlie mike in five minutes.”

We all raised our wavers and shouted, and the volume of that last proud battle cry made me forget for a moment that fewer than fifty of us remained.

I had expected these orders, and I was already prepared. I’d cycled all my waver’s cells and cleaned its coils several times to be sure. I’d filled up on the last of the food and water I’d been saving, and thrown away all the extra weight. I’d meditated. My mind was as sharp and clean as it would ever be.

But when he came to me after the address, he said “Specialist 419 has been briefed on the plans. He’ll be leading this operation with me.”

“Sir?”

“Yes, Alexei.”

“I don’t understand, sir,” I stammered. I felt a pressure in my head.

The outline of an emotion twitched somewhere under his mask of stoicism and blood-caked concrete dust, and his voice was uncharacteristically quiet when he finally said, “This isn’t your mission.”

“What is my mission, sir?”

“Burn your uniform and blend in with the first civilians you come across. That’s your best hope of avoiding their slavers. That’s what I want