Unity (21 page)

Despite all the knowledge appearing in my mind, on how to use everything from the Shugoten to the massive rifle in my hands, it’s still possible to overlook simple things, like physics. The Shugoten can fire a railgun, no problem, but like a human being with a high powered weapon, you have to lean into it so it doesn’t knock you back. You also need to have your feet on the ground.

When the projectile launches from the front of the rifle at 5600 miles per hour, a lesser but still powerful force pushes the rifle back. My amazingly strong arms absorb the jolt, but the energy is transferred into my body. I flip through the air and fall, all of my weight coming down on the mountainside, crushing a swath of jungle and shaking the hidden base’s interior.

I feel the impact and the small amount of damage it caused, but it mercifully doesn’t register as pain. I can be shot, or have an arm torn off and feel it, but not in a way that cripples me.

The daikaiju stumbles away from Vegas. I can’t see it, but I know. It seems surprised, searching for what shot it. Then Hutch sees the impact site. There’s a crater in the armor on its back. The round could punch through a row of sky scrapers, but it didn’t penetrate this thing’s armor.

So,
I think,
shoot it in the same place until it does.

Ten shots.

The information appears in my mind. Ten shots per minute max or I risk melting the gun. F-B0MB wasn’t loaded for combat. I’m assuming that’s because Unity’s plan went out the window, and we were all supposed to be trained on these things before fighting an actual enemy. So I also don’t have ammunition to reload. Ten shots in a minute. Ten shots total. Check.

I return the weapon’s halves to my thighs and push myself up. Once I’m on my feet, the repulse discs kick in. I lift off the ground, weightless and stationary.

Time to build up some speed.

Using Vegas’s trick, I let gravity give me a kick start, sliding down the mountainside, never touching the carpet of trees. I feel like I’m on a skateboard again. As confidence and adrenaline surge, I see the luminous stripes on my arms glow brighter, reflecting my inner strength. I nearly flinch when I reach the water, but I don’t even register the difference when moving from land to water. With a thought, the flaps on my back open up. The twin repulse discs kick on, pushing me forward, toward the speed of sound.

Hutch is closing in from the far side, descending from above.

Let it know you’re there,
Hutch,
I think, and my plan filters out to him and Sig. Executing it requires no more thought, and each moment, the minutia of it is refined by Sig’s mind, taking it all in on the viewscreens, breaking down the numbers and supplying us with real-time tweaks.

There are seven classical maneuvers of war used by great leaders and generals throughout history. We’re trying one of the more commonly used techniques: the indirect approach.

Hutch descends in clear view of the monster, opening fire with a cloud of rockets. Many of them will miss, but there is no way to escape all of them.

I cruise around the island, moving into the open ocean and then around toward the daikaiju’s back. While this is the same tactic employed by Vegas, a second Shugoten and two Strikers, I’m making one big change. Pushed forward by the repulse engines, I reassemble the rifle from my legs, lean into it and take aim.

The daikaiju bends forward just before the rockets hit, absorbing the attack with its thick hide, and showing me its back. Sure, it’s not the most noble attack, but this is war, and there is nothing noble about war. Killing this thing is all that matters. If I have to fight dirty to do it, so be it.

I fire the railgun, but am prepared for the kick this time. The round strikes the monster’s back before I’m even done pulling the trigger. An armor plate bursts, but I’ve only managed to create another fifteen-foot-wide crater. The daikaiju lurches forward from the impact, and my second shot sails over its back, landing in the ocean hundreds of miles away.

When I fire my third shot, Hutch flies overhead, arcing around for another pass.

The daikaiju rounds on me, thrusting its tendrils out further. I feel a momentary pang of fear, of Howard the human monster, spiders and my dead self, but I push back, seeing the alien invader but mentally transposing Howard’s face on it.

Fueled by rage at monsters of all forms, the missile pods on my shoulders snap open and fire. A hundred snaking trails of smoke swirl out ahead of me, breaking the sound barrier, while I creep up toward it.

I can’t see through the cloud of smoke trails, but I don’t need to. Thanks to the two extra sets of eyes linked to my mind, I know exactly where the monster is. I fire one more time with the railgun, striking the monster’s armored chest. It pitches back and is then slapped by a hundred rockets. I’m not sure if they’re enough to kill it, but I hear the thing let out a wail. Wormy tendrils fall free, landing in the ocean.

We hurt it.

‘Effie, look out!’

The thought comes from Sig. I was so distracted by my minor success that I missed what she was seeing on her screens. The creature’s massive tail, nearly as long as it is tall, hidden beneath the ocean, rises up beneath me.

I give the repulse discs in my feet a surge and spring off the ground, but the tail rises up faster than I can, slamming against my back and damaging the repulse discs. I aim down at the daikaiju’s writhing face, but before I can pull the trigger, a squirming mass of tendrils shoots out of the tail and engulfs my arms and body. Using my own momentum against me, the tail lifts me up and over Howard and smashes me, face down, into the beach. Even with the sand compressing beneath me and the shock absorbers dulling the impact, I feel the first twitch of real world pain in my chest.

Then I’m airborne again, pulled backward and slammed down into the ocean. Water engulfs my field of view, and I hold my breath despite being able to breathe just fine.

Above me, the monster snaps its tendrils back inside its body and raises both clawed hands in the air, ready to dig them into my metal gut.

The moment those tendrils shrink from view, the disabled Bases in Operations start groaning. Outside, Vegas’s Shugoten is shaking its head, mimicking what its Operator must be doing. Berg starts to sit up. If we can keep this thing busy long enough, we might get some help.

But I don’t have much time.

I can feel its brutal arms, crushing F-B0MB’s body, rending the limbs. I have just seconds before I’ll be torn apart and filled with seawater, which is when the real me will also fill with seawater and drown.

But there is hope.

The plan is Hutch’s.

He swoops in, skimming the ocean surface, facing the creature head-on once more. He unleashes another fusillade of rockets. They’re not intended to hurt the monster this time, just add a little more kick to mine. I lift my legs as the rockets close the distance, and when they hit, I give the repulse discs everything they have.

The daikaiju holds on, its mighty body vibrating from the strain. And then I’m free again, a four-hundred-foot torpedo. F-B0MB bends at the waist and I emerge from the water like I’ve been baptized. Energized. Possessed by something greater than myself.

And the monster sees it, too, taking a single step back before holding its ground.

I’ve lost the railgun in the waves. The shoulder rocket pods are reloading, but they need another thirty seconds. There is one weapon I haven’t used, though.

With a quick pump of my arm, the large two-sided blade slides out. The front is a razor sharp, segmented blade. The back side is red hot and probably able to melt through anything the front side can’t slice.

This is what I do best,
I tell myself.

This is how I’m strongest.

How I will survive.

With a boost from the repulse rockets in my feet, I dash forward, cock my brightly glowing fist back and plunge the blade toward the monster’s chest.

This is the twisted, but happy ending when the abused girl overcomes her oppressor and puts a blade between his ribs. That’s how it worked when I was seven. That’s how it will work now.

Only it doesn’t.

The daikaiju catches my fist and stops the blade before it can strike. I try to throw a punch with my other hand, but I’m ensnared by the tail once more, lifted back and tossed.

F-B0MB tumbles through the air. I try to right myself, but I don’t engage the repulse discs at the right time. I only manage to spin myself higher before falling to the beach in a tumble that takes me back into the ocean.

But maybe it was enough? Gwen and Ghost have turned around. Vegas is standing up. Berg is about to fire his rocket pods.

The massive alien stomps its foot on the ground and roars at me. Its plates of armor burst open again, and the warbling tentacles whip out. Berg pitches back. Vegas drops completely beneath the waves. And both incoming Strikers are once again spiraling away.

I feel looming defeat.

And then hope.

“I got you,” Hutch says, even though it’s not necessary for me to ‘hear’ him. For a fraction of a second, I wonder what he’s doing.

But I already
know
what he’s doing. In the last five seconds, Sig uncovered a Shugoten function that is both new to Daniel’s original design and untested.

Now
, I think, and I leap. The repulse engines carry F-B0MB several hundred feet into the air, directly into the course of the incoming Support Striker.

The Striker turns nose up and nearly passes by above me, but doesn’t. Not completely. And that’s the plan. Massive magnets pull the two machines into place, the Striker locking onto the Shugoten’s back.

There is a moment of equilibrium as the Striker struggles with the massive amount of extra weight, but four more repulse engines kick on, in time with the engines on my feet. We lift off together, rising to two thousand feet, where a kind of metamorphosis occurs.

The Striker’s underside opens up and folds around F-B0MB’s arms, legs and torso, providing an extra layer of armor and a jolt of power, supercharging the machine. Hutch’s missile pods rise up over my shoulders, adding their number to mine. The armor on my left arm unfurls into a sharp-edged shield that could just as easily be used like an axe. While the Striker’s repulse engines fire from my back, its broad wings separate into six airfoils, each able to rotate individually, providing us with a freakish amount of maneuverability for something so large.

The best part about this conjoined formation, officially called ‘the marriage’ by someone with a bad sense of humor, isn’t the newfound power, speed, armaments or even the fact that I’m flying. It’s that I’m no longer alone. The back of F-B0MB’s head merges with the Striker, and Hutch’s control chair slides in above and behind mine.

I shift my vision back to my real eyes for a moment, and I see the blank interior of F-B0MB’s head. I look up at Hutch as his chair is locked in place, held by a framework of shock absorbers, and his body locked down tight. He smiles down at me. “See? I got your back.”

“Literally,” I say.

Then I slip back into my robot body and a funny thing happens.

I take control. It’s not a conscious choice. It just happens. One moment, I’ve got a body that in many ways is humanoid. But now...I’ve got wings. I can fly. And for a fleeting moment, I just want to fly away. But like Icarus, I won’t make it far. There is no escaping the monster waiting for me, so I don’t use the wings to run, I use them to fight.

After climbing another two thousand feet, I stop, let gravity pull me in the other direction and then dive.

The sound barrier comes and goes with a thunderous boom of breaking pressure.

I swoop in low, cutting a wake of thirty foot waves into the ocean. Shield raised, blade cocked back above my fist, I turn myself into a missile, making no effort to hide myself from the daikaiju.

It turns to face me, pulling its tail back to strike.

Two hundred rockets streak out ahead of F-B0MB, launched simultaneously from the shoulder pods and Striker pods.

I lose sight of the daikaiju, and it loses sight of us.

But I still know where it is. What it’s doing.

I roll to the right, raising my shield in time to block the tail strike. Then, as I continue rolling, I cruise beneath the creature’s left arm, swiping up with the blade, severing hundreds of tendrils.

The monster shrieks.

The writhing mass of red flesh pulls back inside the creature’s body and the plates snap back into place.

Past the monster, I flip over, and push the repulse engines to their limit, kicking up a small mountain of sand and creating a new bay, as my supersonic flight is stopped within a thousand feet, and then reversed.

What happens next is the most natural thing in the world for me: I punch the daikaiju in the face, knocking it back.

But it’s not done.

It’s a monster, after all.

A clawed hand rakes across my chest, peeling away metal shielding, but thanks to the Striker’s additional armor, it doesn’t reach anything essential. And the blow leaves the creature open. I bring my left hand down, thrusting the shield’s edge down onto, into and then through the creature’s arm.