Unity (19 page)

I don’t know how wheelchair-bound people do it. Having your top speed limited by a motor or the person pushing you is frustrating. While even the fully mobile have a top speed, you can always improve it, or push against it, expand the limits a bit. But in a chair, being pushed, options are limited to sit back and enjoy the ride, or make the life of the person pushing you a living nightmare.

I choose the latter.

“I’m not someone’s aging grandmama,” I grouch at Hutch.

“You have broken ribs,” he says. “Two bullet holes.”

“One bullet hole. One bullet scratch.”

“You
died,
” he complains.

Is this what having a real mother would have been like?

“From loss of blood,” I say, “which you gave back to me—thanks for that—and you’ve plugged all the leaks. This glue stuff will hold, right?”

During the alarm-whooping seconds of his non-response, Gwen and Sig round a corner far ahead of us. I slap both armrests. “Move it, Hutch, or I swear, I’m going to jump out of this thing and run.”

“Hold on,” he says.

My hair slides back in the breeze of our acceleration. As we approach the turn, I grasp the armrests. It takes a supreme, pride-fueled effort to not shout as we take the corner, the wheelchair tipping onto one wheel, nearly careening into the wall. When the chair thumps back to the ground, pain bursts through me, and I’m glad Hutch can’t see my face.

The alarm goes quiet just before we reach Operation’s entrance. Its shrieking call is replaced by the sound of shouting voices. Sounds like everyone beat me here, and no one knows what’s going on.

Hutch slows us down as we enter the large control room. The first thing I notice is the people. Everyone is here. Vegas is wearing a white flight suit that matches Gwen’s. Berg and Ghost are wearing armored flight suits, too. They’re maroon and covered in a pattern of glowing yellow stripes that converge on their various Unity symbols. Where did they find them?

Then I see Quinlan’s body is missing. They somehow got him, and the ExoFrame, out of here. The blood and debris has been removed, too, though I can still see a smear on the long hangar window, where someone hastily wiped it down. I must have been unconscious for a while. A few hours at least.

The third thing I notice is the wall of screens. Many of the smaller displays still show satellite views of the world in ruin. But the large screen shows a tropical ocean and something large moving just beneath the surface.

“Where is that?” I ask, but no one hears me. They’re too busy shouting at each other about what to do.

“Hey!” I shout, and the pain caused by the lone word nearly makes me gasp. But I put on a strong face when everyone turns toward me. From the far side of the room, sitting at a terminal, Gizmo whispers, “Effie, thank God.”

Thank God? For
me?
That’s a first. I’m not sure how I came to be that person, whose presence can only be explained by divine intervention, thus requiring thanks to a supreme being—to Gizmo or anyone else. It’s not something I ever wanted, or thought possible. And as views of the ravaged world glow around the room, the whole ‘Why would God allow bad things to happen?’ argument flits through my mind. It’s the same question I’ve wrestled with all my life in regard to my parents. Why would loving parents subject their daughter to a life like mine?

As I push myself up out of the chair, my subconscious provides an answer:
To make you strong enough.
For what? To survive a life of abuse? Of solitude and confusion? Or to survive the horrors of an island my mother planned to abandon me on for a second time?

The back of a massive body rises through the water, creating a wake. I look from the screen to the hangar window below it, and to the Shugoten standing sentinel on the other side.

Strong enough for this.

I point at the large screen. “Where is that?”

“Three miles out and closing,” Daniel says. “It triggered some kind of proximity sensors. The security system picked it up. Sounded the alarm. Has been tracking it automatically since.”

“When will it get here?” I ask, and I think someone like Vegas might have said, “ETA?”

Daniel looks back at me. He’s terrified. “Ten minutes.”

I can tell he has more to say. “What?”

“It’s approaching from the West. We already know these things hatch from the pods, and that they fell from the sky. I think this might be the one we saw crash that night. The one that caused the Tsunami. Since they seem interested in eating...people, there is no good reason for a pod to land in the middle of the Pacific. It being in this part of the world was probably unintentional. But it coming here, to this island, is not. Effie, it
knows
we’re here. I don’t know how it knows, but it does. And it’s coming for us. To
eat
us.”

Daniel’s declaration sets the room abuzz once more.

“Quiet!” I shout, ignoring the pain a little easier this time.

With all eyes on me once more, I point at the hangar and ask Daniel, “You know how these work?”

“In theory,” he says. “If they didn’t change too much.”

To Vegas. “And you can operate them?” To Berg. “Both of you?”

“If they work like an ExoFrame, we can manage.” Vegas looks ready to charge out there and try. After seeing the state of the world, he seems ready for a fight.

“There’s more to them than an ExoFrame, but the controls are similar enough,” Daniel says. “Again, in theory.”

I turn to Gwen, not wanting to ask anything of her, but I understand how this is supposed to work—even if I don’t yet know the physical mechanics of it. “What about you? Can you fly one of those?”

Daniel pipes up again. “The Support Strikers should be identical to—”

“I asked her,” I say.

“Yeah,” Gwen says. “I aced the flight sims.”

“This won’t be a simulation,” I tell her.

“I always assumed it wouldn’t be someday,” she says, and smiles. “And in case you haven’t figured it out yet, it’s our job to worry about
you
, not the other way around.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” I say, turning to Ghost. “How about you?”

“I haven’t flown one of those,” he says, “but I passed the flight sim exam when I was fourteen. I’m more at home in the air than I am down here.”

That settles it. “Vegas, Berg, see if you can get those things working. Ghost, Gwen. You’re their Supports. Get in the air and back them up. Duff, Daniel, you’re their Bases. Figure all of this out. Do what you can to guide them.”

And just like that, everyone snaps into action. Vegas opens the hangar door at the side of the room, revealing a staircase leading down to the floor of the wide-open space. Berg and Ghost follow him out. Gwen isn’t far behind, but I stop her. “Gwen.”

She waits for me, as I hobble up to her. “I half expected you to jump in one of those robots yourself. You’re showing strength and wisdom. I think—”

To our mutual surprise, I cut her short with a hug.

“Be careful.”

She leans back, looking me in the eyes. “I will...but I’ll also do what I have to.”

I nod. “I know. Just come back alive.”

She smiles, but makes no promises before leaving.

Daniel, Gizmo, Duff, Doli and Sig are all seated at consoles, working hard. I watch Doli for a moment and Hutch, the only other person left standing, notices.

“Killing Quinlan brought her back a bit,” he says. “She hasn’t said much, but she never really did. She’s more at home in the digital world.”

I watch Doli’s curved screen, seeing only streams of text and numbers. “What’s she doing?”

“Trying to make contact,” he says.

“With who?”

“With anyone.”

“Duff.” Daniel leans back in his chair, looking past Gizmo to the older, chubby ex-Diablo. He holds up the strange white helmet connected to his system. It looks like some kind of sea creature—a jelly fish with holes and small sensors on the inside. “Have you ever used psy-controls?”

Duff nods. “Yeah, but we’re not controlling anything from in here.”

Daniel pulls the strange helmet over his head. “There are corresponding psy-controls in the Shugoten and Strikers. When all three are activated, we’ll be able to communicate in real time, just by thinking. We’ll also feel what they feel, so be ready for that. Just remember, we’re inside a bunker under a mountain. We’re safe. Our lack of fear can be a buffer for theirs.”

“Unity,” Duff says. “I know how it works.”

And now I do, too. At least a little more than I did before. I had pictured the functions of Base, Support and Point as wholly external. Base supplied information. Support provided physical relief and emotional strength. Point led the way and did the dirty work. At best, it was all about trusting your team. But the three-person unit—mind, soul and body—merged through psy-controls, really could act as one. Separate, but unified.

And while that is kind of cool, I still don’t really see the strategic advantage to simply having an army of Points in giant butt-kicking robots. When dealing with something the size of a daikaiju, brute force seems like a more appropriate response than the touchy-feely, ‘let’s share our feelings’ Unity method.

But I suppose that’s about to be put to the test.

“Copy,” Daniel says, and I realize he’s speaking to Vegas or Gwen. “Umm, I’m not sure.”

“What’s the problem?” I ask.

“Gwen can’t figure out how to get the Striker running.”

That’s a bad sign
, I think, but I keep it to myself. Then I ask what I think is the most obvious question. “Is there a place for a key?”

“Uhh,” Daniel says. “Is there a place for a key?”

He waits, and then his face lights up. “Yes. Use that.” He turns to me. “It’s the badge,” he says, tapping the center of his chest where the metal badge would be if Bases wore flight suits.

“Why are you guys even talking?” I ask. “I thought you were supposed to be—” I tap my head. “—mind-melded or something.”

“Technically, it’s called a psy-net, but it doesn’t engage until the others are wearing their—” Daniel goes rigid, his eyes opening wide. He sucks in a deep breath, as a shiver rolls through his body. “We’re connected.”

“Us, too,” Duff says from his console.

Motion through the hangar window draws me toward it. On the other side of the glass, two Strikers are lifting off the floor, held aloft by humming, blue repulse engines.

Light from above pours into the open space. Sunlight. Triangular sections of the circular ceiling lift up and separate, revealing the inside of the volcano’s crater.

Is this really happening?

The Strikers rise straight up through the opening, and once they’ve cleared the top, the white Shugoten to my right and the maroon one next to it, step into the center of the room. Now fully powered, the pattern of stripes and spots covering the bodies glow; the maroon robot is covered in a luminous yellow pattern, the white one in red. As they move, a barely perceptible mesh of yellow hexagons appears and then fades. The giants move with the fluidity of human beings, crashing through the uncanny valley—that uncomfortable feeling when humanoid robots creep you out—and stepping into awe-inspiring awesomeness.

Despite weighing untold tons, I can’t hear or feel their movements. When they’re both positioned at the center of the room, the floor rises beneath them, lifting the two giants toward the sky. Everything happens so smoothly that I think the four operators have done all this before. But then I realize they’re being directed, without a spoken word, by Daniel and Duff, who are also fully present in this room, their fingers clattering over keyboards, their eyes scanning information, schematics and readouts.

“Here it comes,” Gizmo says, and I turn to the big screen in time to see the daikaiju rise from the ocean and take its first monstrous step onto the island’s tsunami-ravaged western side. Onto our island.

“Can they hear me?” I ask Daniel.

His fingers tap a few keys. “They can now.”

“Vegas,” I say.

“I hear you.”

“Kick its ass.”

Using the island and its trees for scale, I guestimate the creature’s size to be around five hundred feet. And as big as that is, it’s the least horrifying thing about the monster.

It emerges from the ocean on all fours, like the one we saw rampaging in Southern California. The dark gray skin of its vast armor plates glisten from the water. It’s torn up a bit in places, but it looks more like scratched leather than any kind of real damage. Wounds from its rough landing, maybe.

Unlike the first daikaiju, this one is fully armored on all sides. Where most creatures on Earth would have a nose and mouth, this thing has folds of armor, like overlapping plates, speckled with blue. As the sun shines over its body, I see glimmers of light refracting off the water rushing down its coarse-textured body. If I hadn’t already seen one of these treating San Diego like a smorgasbord, I might have been able to find some beauty in it. But I really just want to crush this thing under my heel. To stamp it into oblivion. Unfortunately, the opposite is far more likely.

The creature stops on the shore, its hind legs still in the ocean, its long tail cutting back and forth through the water. I imagine the force of that sweeping tail, the amount of liquid it’s moving, and I can see these things pushing back the tide.

They’re going to reshape our world
.
And they’re going to start with us.

Since the human race figured out we were destroying the planet and instigating an extinction event on par with the asteroid that ended the Cretaceous Period and wiped the dinosaurs from the face of the planet, we’ve tried, and mostly failed, to undo the damage. But we’ve also romanticized what the planet would be like if people simply ceased to exist. The environment would rebound. Species on the brink would recover. New species would evolve. In short, life would go on without us, and in a few thousand years it would return to the pristine state it was in before the Industrial Revolution. But in all our imaginings, humanity never pictured the end like this, at the hands of colossal aliens with the power to leave our planet a lifeless husk. The human race was responsible for kicking off a mass extinction, but now we might be the only thing that can prevent a
final
extinction.

The daikaiju narrows its four yellow eyes. Then it flexes and stretches, the massive plates of armor shifting around, leaking sea water out from between the armor’s fault lines. The body puffs up and expands, revealing an almost heart-shaped, reddish underside. The world’s worst valentine. The armor covering its chest splits and separates, exposing more of the ruddy skin. Thousands of black holes covering the red flesh open and close, like mouths the size of cars, saying ‘mop, mop,’ and pushing out dribbles of fluid. The shell-like folds composing the creature’s neck peel open to the sides, like big, spiky clam shells, revealing even more pores. The last bit to open is its mouth, which isn’t really a mouth at all. What looks like armor covering the lower half of its face, snaps open like mandibles, revealing more of the pocked flesh. Then it shakes like a dog, spraying ocean water and some kind of viscous goo from its pores. The daikaiju’s whole body sneezes the stuff.

I glance through the hangar window. The Shugoten are nearing the top.

Moving images appear on two of the screens, circling the giant at a safe distance. Video feeds from the Strikers.

“How are you doing, Gwen?” I ask.

“Like riding a bike,” she says, “if you learned how to ride a bike on a simulator. I’ve got the hang of it, though. Daniel’s teaching me how to use the weapons. The ones he knows about, anyway.”

The lost look in Daniel’s eyes reveals his level of concentration. It’s like his consciousness isn’t in the room anymore. There is just a hint of a smile on his face. But is that how he’s feeling, or how Gwen and Vegas are feeling, their emotions filtering back to Daniel?
It’s all three of them,
I realize,
but are they just geeking out or looking forward to a little old-school retribution?

The main viewscreen shows the daikaiju from one of many hidden cameras mounted atop the volcano, tracking every one of the creature’s movements. The alien invader flexes its three nubby fingers. When it brings them down, long hooked, retractable claws slide out, puncture the sandy beach and dig troughs, as they slide back inside their fleshy sheaths.

“Can they see the feeds?” I ask Daniel.

I’m not sure if he’s heard me for a moment, but then he blinks, apologizes and says, “I can see them, and they’re getting all that info from me. They knew about the claws the moment I saw them.”

“They can’t see through your eyes?” I ask, sounding more aghast than I feel.

He shakes his head. “Information I take in is passed on to them in real time. They don’t feel it. They can’t experience the flow of data. They just simply know things they didn’t the moment before, like they always knew. There’s nothing jarring about it.” He sucks in a quick breath. “It’s standing up.”

I turn to the big screen and see the daikaiju rising up onto its hind legs. While Gwen and Vegas are knowing things through Daniel, he’s also getting knowledge from them—in this case, from Gwen, who’s still circling the monster.

I can’t tell where its four yellow eyes are looking, but its face is upturned right toward the camera.

Toward the volcano.

And the rising Shugoten.

The clamshell plates on its face snap back down. Its body clenches from the inside out, and the armor snaps back together.

That’s where it’s weakest.

“Tell them to attack the points where the armor comes together,” I say.

Daniel smiles. “They already know. Vegas saw the same thing.”

“Effie.” It’s Sig, sitting at a terminal, looking a little surprised.

I lean in next to her. “Yeah?”

“I just found a network of camera feeds around the island.”

“More security cameras for the base?”

She shakes her head. “I think it’s more than that. I’ll put them up.”

All around the room, the screens change to views of the island. Cameras aren’t just atop or around the volcano. They’re everywhere
.

I guess Vegas only found some.

I recognize several locations. The landing pad. Several views of the river. Every single coastline. The Unity campsite with its hammocks. The Perseverantes campsite. A third campsite I don’t recognize, but assume belonged to Los Diablos.

They knew.

She
knew.

About the island’s real dangers. And they sent us here anyway, knowing full well that some of us, maybe even all of us, would die. They clearly hoped that wouldn’t be the case, that we would rise to the occasion and overcome hardship, but they were willing to risk all our lives.

One of the video streams catches my eye, and it has nothing to do with the daikaiju. It’s a beach, devoid of everything but a strip of sand separating ocean and jungle. I reach for my chest pocket, which is no longer there. “My photo,” I say, speaking to myself, but Hutch answers.

“I took it from your flight suit,” he says, digging the dented rectangle from his pocket and handing it to me.

I hold the photo up beside the screen in question. On the left, I see empty beach. On the right, my parents embracing on the very same beach. They were here, even back then, on this island.
Is this where I was conceived? Where I was born?

Vegas snaps my attention from the confusing past, and back to the horrible present. “We’re going in.”

His words are for the benefit of those who aren’t connected via the psy-net. From a variety of views around the room, the action unfolds like some kind of immersive movie experience.

Moving with surprising grace and speed for their size, the Shugoten slide down the mountainside like surfers catching a wave. But there is no rumble inside the mountain. Onscreen, the trees beneath them simply bow away before springing back up. They’re not actually touching the ground. The repulse engines in their feet keep their weight off the ground, allowing them to move without relying solely on mechanical muscles.

The two Shugoten separate halfway down the mountain, carving the invisible wave in opposite directions, putting them on either side of the daikaiju. Vegas’s white Shugoten reaches the ocean first, and I expect it to plunge in, topple and sink to the bottom. But it slides out over the water, kicking up twin streams of water behind its feet. Flaps in its back open up, revealing two more repulse engines that kick in with a flash of blue light, pushing the giant robot forward, even faster.

Berg mirrors Vegas, bringing his maroon Shugoten around toward the monster’s other side.

The daikaiju seems confused, pulled in two directions, unsure which side to defend. But it doesn’t back down, either. It’s not afraid.

It should be.

Blades extend from both robots’ forearms.

They close the distance, spraying arcs of water out behind them.

I’m so captivated by the impending collision that when a cloud of rockets hit the monster’s back, I hiccup in surprise. When two Strikers punch through the rising ball of fire, spinning before pulling up over the island, I let out a cheer that is joined by a, “whoop!” from Gwen in her Striker.

But the pitched-forward monster still moves within the cloud of smoke, rising back up.

Not fast enough
, I think, as the Shugoten close in, leading with their blades and aiming for the seams between the armored plates.

Just when the collision seems inevitable, the daikaiju moves with surprising speed, leaping off the ground, reaching out and spinning. Berg misses his mark completely, sailing beneath the monster, which hooks its claws into the robot’s back and throws. At the same time, Vegas leaps up over the daikaiju, flipping upside down, hundreds of feet in the air, and swiping his blade across the monster’s back.

The monster continues its spin, swiping at Vegas, but it falls short. The robot lands on its feet and is carried out of range by the repulse engines.

Vegas cruises in an arc, out into the ocean, coming back around. Berg climbs back to his feet and turns to face the creature. He’s not moving quickly though, and I think his repulse engines have been damaged.

Sig looks up at me from her station, pointing at the scrolling information on screen. “They’re going to hit it with rockets again, from Berg, Gwen and Ghost. Vegas is going to hit it from behind.”

Sounds like a good enough plan, but I think they’re underestimating it. It’s faster than I thought possible. Vegas’s first strike scratched the armor, but nothing more. And he’s headed straight toward the creature’s monstrous tail. I want to say something, but in the time it takes me to voice my concerns, the attack will be over.

Large flaps on Berg’s shoulders snap open, revealing rocket pods.

Vegas cocks his blade back, aiming to impale rather than cut.

The two Strikers descend from each side, ready to unleash rockets before narrowly missing each other and flying away in opposite directions.

It’s a carefully timed and coordinated attack, all thanks to the psy-net. But will it work?

The daikaiju answers the question even before the first rocket fires.

No.

The armor covering the thing’s sides peels open. The face opens up. The tail rises from the ocean, its many segmented shells pulling wide to reveal softer flesh. For a flash, it appears to be taunting us, daring Vegas to strike its exposed flesh. Then its pores open up, unleashing a wriggling mass of red tendrils, and along with them, our darkest, most vile fears.