Unity by Carl Stubblefield (epub read online books TXT) 📕

was unknown. It was a welcome change, either way. A green diamond outline was visible on his display through the buildings as his intended destination. A distance meter above it rapidly sped down as he juked and jockeyed around the buildings. Yuki had picked an excellent time; he barely saw another vehicle in the air that would have made navigating this route reckless or even impossible.

Another turn took him on a straight path to his destination. He poured on the speed and passed through the diamond destination marker, it disappearing as he zipped through.

Now what? Gus thought as he looked over his shoulder. Through a narrow breach between two buildings that should have been too small to fit through, Aurora appeared in a flash, a small tether on the back of her psiycle. Attached to it was one of the mobile floating billboards that patrolled the city, this one peddling some alcoholic beverage with a scantily clad hybrid woman being carried on a litter by muscular men, hoisting her over their ripped shoulders. More than half of the sentinels crashed into the sign, causing the image to flicker and go dark. There were explosions and lights flickered behind the billboard.

Gus fist-pumped until he saw the stragglers fly above and below the sign and he pulsed the accelerator and took off again. Making a blind turn, he found himself in a dead-end alley, with a mesh walkway above him and a landing zone below. A large loading door stood locked at the end of the alley. He traveled to the end and saw the doors were thick and there were traces of rust from a lack of use. No one was opening these doors anytime soon.

He turned to face the sentinels, hoping he could speed past them, but by the time he had turned around, they had organized themselves in a big grid. Beams shot out their sides and formed a large net as they connected with their neighbors, quenching any hope that he could just zip through and blast past the weakest area. As he watched in horror, their forward beam weapons began to glow, ready for imminent firing. He tried to move in the limited space, but he couldn’t get enough speed or distance to effectively dodge and he saw the guns tracking his meager attempts to avoid their targeting.

He was sorely tempted to use his shield, but feared that would reveal unregistered supers in the area and make the rest of the mission impossible for the others. Gus had decided he would try to blast through, upending his psiycle and using the base of the bike to smash through. His stomach knotted up, knowing deep down that they probably would just cut through it. The sentinels passed a metal landing on one of the buildings and as expected, melted through it effortlessly, the shorn metal tumbling down and clattering on the landing strip twenty feet below, ends still glowing where they had been cut.

An odd tranquility washed over Gus as he looked at the approaching sentinels. This looked like it was the end. It was a fun ride, especially working with the Crew. He had started to feel like he belonged out here with these ‘real supers,’ and he wouldn’t betray them just to protect himself.

While they approached, he set the command controls to default to Aurora when he died. If he couldn’t use the manor, it shouldn’t go to waste. Tightening his jaw, he stared at the sentinels as they loomed ever closer, not even bothering to use their beam weapons anymore. They knew they had him dead to rights. Gus knew it too.

Bring it on… he thought as he glared at the relentless robots bearing down on him as he revved the psiycle.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Ahjussi Swag

Shamus fidgeted at his desk. Part of him wanted the supers to fail, old memories and old grievances hard to forgive. His more pragmatic side had wrestled his ego down and held out hope that they could deliver. It would save so much time to have his arm returned to him again. Just getting back to what he was used to feeling, the void in his capabilities erased.

He had only felt like he had turned the corner six months ago, and things were finally coming together. Years of pushing the flywheel, not seeing any movement or rewards. Then this. He looked at the input prong at the base of his missing arm, twisting it and staring at the tiny blue lights pulsing all along the plate at its base, studded with inputs.

He mentally flexed his missing arm into a fist, gritting his teeth. He pulled up the picture from his internal feed and froze it on his display. A tattoo on the inner wrist of one of his attackers. He knew he had seen it before, and could have easily pulled up and compared it to his history if they hadn’t taken his stacks. Without those organic memory storage devices, he had lost an enormous amount of his hard-earned abilities.

You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

The memory he sought hovered at the back of his mind like an irritating cough. Ever-present but nothing would calm its incessant tickle. He had seen this tattoo somewhere before, but where?

It was the only thread he had for solving Scarlett’s case. That’s not why he wanted to find out though. He would figure out who was behind this and they would have a reckoning. There were some unsaid rules in Hinansho, and poachers and scavengers were among the lowest of the low. This was supposed to be a sanctuary, and those who attacked their own deserved no quarter here.

A tone sounded and Eliza materialized, breaking his reverie.

“You have a delivery.”

“From who? I’m not expecting anything—”

“It is from Serif Industries. I believe you were expecting something…”

Shamus sprang to his feet and scrambled out the door. He slammed the button to open the inner waiting room and there it was. A large box with