Jet couldn’t read the Nargili text next to the flashing light, but she figured it had to be describing the breach in the hull she’d made with the C-4.
“Okay.” Jet pointed at the door she’d just come through, the one that led to the half-flooded room. “You go. In there,” she added, jabbing the sword meaningfully, to make sure the tech took her seriously. “Leave now.”
The Nirreth tech looked at Jet in open surprise.
Clearly, she’d thought Jet would kill her, so the relief Jet saw blooming in the tech’s eyes again made her hesitate, wondering if she was real.
Forcing the thought from her mind, Jet marched her over to the door and indicated for her to hit the trigger-switch that would take her to the other side. The tech did so, and Jet stayed where she was as the Nirreth walked through.
In Jet’s last look at her, the Nirreth’s face held so much gratitude, Jet found herself speaking in English before the door was all the way closed.
“Sorry,” she told her, indicating the cut on her neck.
She raised her hand in a sort of wave as the door closed.
The tech raised hers reflexively in return, the expression on her dark face now holding bewilderment.
Giving a last glance at the still-displaying map to make sure she had the bulk of it committed to memory, at least the relevant bits, Jet headed for the opposite door, feeling adrenaline spike through her system. Not looking down at the two unconscious Nirreth she’d hit with the blaster, Jet sheathed Black and squared her shoulders, tightening her grip on the blaster before she got ready to hit the panel to the next segment of the ship.
She already knew this portion of the course would be a shooting match, but she had no way to transmit the coordinates of the command ship’s bridge without actually going there.
As the thought repeated in her head, however, it occurred to Jet that might not be true.
She might not need to go there at all.
Stopping in mid-motion, she hesitated, then made up her mind.
Switching direction, Jet lifted her fingers to the radio on her headset.
“Base 2? This is Alpha-10, Digger Unit.”
“Where the hell are you?” the voice said, rising at once. “Do you have the coordinates for the command deck yet?”
“Do you have me on your GPS?”
There was a pause on the other end.
“We have you, Alpha-10.” The voice grew bewildered. “Is this correct? Have you breached the lizard-skin ship? Are you really under the Harbor, over?”
“In the Harbor,” Jet corrected without thought.
She recalled the scale of the Nirreth schematics, glancing at the map in rote, although she was too far away to see it clearly. She closed her eyes to get the exact details as she counted in her head.
“You have the conversion for Nirreth measurements?” Jet confirmed after a pause.
“Yes,” the human said on the other end, a note of surprise in his voice. “Get to the point, Alpha-10. Where are you going with this?”
“According to their own map, I’m exactly 421 ten-res from the command bridge, almost due ragen-le,” she said. “About sixteen degrees above the extens. Do you copy that?”
The human’s voice remained bewildered. “421 ten-res from the current position, sixteen degrees off the extens, due ragen-le,” he said. “Copy that. How deep under the water is that, Alpha-10?”
Jet closed her eyes, looking at the map in her head once more.
“Two hundred ten-res from where I stand,” she said.
It occurred to her that, based on the short distance off the extens, it had to be the next deck up from where she stood.
“You’ll have to punch through the hull in any case,” she added. “So it shouldn’t make much difference if you’re hitting them from above.”
“You’re sure about that, Alpha-10?” The man’s voice grew skeptical. “We had that target tied to your locator. If you’re wrong, we could blow a hole in a stack of water, only to have our whole base destroyed for nothing––”
“I’m not wrong,” Jet cut in.
Her voice turned confident as she went over the map again.
“Unless this whole map is fake, that’s what it says. Evacuate the base if you can, but make that shot. I’ll see if I can distract them down here, if you need more time.”
The man on the other end laughed.
Again, it sounded like a real laugh, not one that came from a VR projection, no matter how sophisticated. Jet found herself smiling with him, even as she rearranged her hands on the grip of the sandblaster.
“Something funny, commander?” Jet said.
“Not at all,” he said, his voice still smiling. “We hit the command center in ten minutes, Alpha-10. That will give us enough time to send up the alarm to evacuate. Hope to see you on the other side.”
Pausing, he added,
“Maybe you should look for a way out, in the time you have left? Instead of impressing us with your ability to kill lizard-skins?” He chuckled again. “We could use you better alive than dead, you know. After this, I might buy you a beer myself––”
The door next to where Jet stood began to open.
“Roger that,” Jet said. “Alpha-10 out.”
Stepping backwards, Jet fired the sandblaster through the opening before the panel finished disappearing into the wall.
As she did it, she stepped back, moving towards the door she’d just left. She’d barely slid out of view of the opening when the Nirreth soldiers on the other side opened fire.
She twisted out of the way of the first few rounds––then one of the Nirreth made it through the opening. A round from his blaster got her partly in the left hip, knocking her backwards hard enough that she fell to the deck.
Without pausing to look at the wound, she fired another few volleys at the guards now standing just inside the entrance to the door.
She fired enough times to drive them back, still kneeling on the deck.
Only then did she get to her feet, moving backwards a lot faster that time, despite the agonizing pain in her hip. In her mind, Jet saw the cluster of live ammunition on the course moving closer as she fumbled backwards on the moving track.
Letting out a yell, Jet ran backwards and hit the panel next to the opposite door, stumbling into the half-flooded room and narrowly dodging a blow from the technician she’d forgotten about, who swung a long, metal tool at Jet’s head.
Ducking and stumbling backwards off the ladder, Jet lost her balance and fell into the pool of water, smashing her arm against the ladder on her way down.
She hit it hard enough that it immediately went numb, even as the salt water on the open wound of her hip lit it abruptly on fire.
Struggling to disentangle herself from the strap of the sandblaster, which now nearly strangled her, Jet ducked underwater when one of the approaching soldiers fired on her.
She fired back up through the water, and managed to catch him by surprise, enough to hit him in the thigh––mostly by sheer luck.
Kicking her legs, she propelled her body backwards towards the doors leading out towards the broken hull and into Vancouver Harbor. She stared up at the six, tall Nirreth soldiers standing over the pool, along with the technician still brandishing the metal pole in the corner, snarling over her cut and bleeding neck.
When Jet reached the doors, she didn’t think.
Smashing her hand down on the panel to open the outer door, she barely had time to take a breath as she dropped the sandblaster and grabbed hold of a metal ring in the wall on one side of the opening. Holding on for dear life, two-handed, Jet felt and heard the pounding rush of water as the Harbor poured in through the opening door.
She had time to hear the cries of shock from the Nirreth.
Then the wall of water hit them in a violent wave, and all she heard were bubbles and pounding surf.
Jet had her eyes closed when the goggles of the helmet re-engaged, stopping the water from smashing into her face and giving her a
few more mouthfuls of air, despite the force of the water, and the fact that her head felt slammed backwards into the bones of her neck.
By the time that pressure began to let up, Jet was already desperate for air, which told her maybe she’d been holding on longer than she’d realized. That, or adrenaline pushed her to breathe in too much of the mask’s remaining oxygen while the waves buffeted her body and head.
Either way, she had to go. Now.
She released the metal ring as soon as it felt safe to do so, and immediately began kicking and paddling her way through the opening.
She swam into the half-broken room on the other side, with the hole blown through the outer hull showing the greener, lighter color of the sun-filtered harbor waters beyond.
Once Jet swam through that crack in the actual hull, she began kicking hard for the surface, remembering the culler ship above in time to swim for the pier itself, instead of merely aiming for the sunlight at the water’s surface.
Even then, she almost didn’t make it.
When she finally breached under the wooden pillars of the dock supporting Canada Place, Jet gasped for air, her lungs burning.
She had to suppress a yell of relief.
While she took those first, gasping breaths, she saw five or six jets of brilliant laser color light up the sky over her stretch of ocean.
As they impacted the ship under the surface of Vancouver Harbor, sending a sharp rumble of vibration through the water where Jet struggled to remain afloat, a white explosion of air and water threw up a mushroom-like plume.
A wide ring of waves curled out in all directions, sloshing water into her face and mouth.
Unable to help herself, Jet laughed.
She laughed again as the tremors dissipated, even as the wave rose her so high under the wooden pillars that she nearly hit her head on the underside of the dock.
Laughing, choking on water, Jet hit the radio in her headset with one struggling hand.
“Did you get it?” she asked the voice on the other end. “Base 2, this is Alpha-10, Digger Unit. Did you hit the target? Were the coordinates good?”
There was a crackling of static on the other end.
Then Jet heard loud whoops of triumph and laughter through the speakers, and laughed again herself. That time, she couldn’t make herself care that it was all a simulation.
That time, she let it feel real, just for those few seconds.
“Should I take that as a yes?” she said, grinning as she caught hold of the metal ladder leading up to a lower segment of deck, where smaller boats had once been moored. Pulling herself hand over hand to reach the wooden platform, she grinned when she heard the amused relief from the man on the other end of the line.
“Alpha-10 made it out,” he said, speaking to the others in the room. “Repeat. Alpha-10 made it out! Our little Samurai will live to fight another day…!”
Jet was still grinning as he finished, pulling herself the rest of the way onto the wooden deck and smiling at the cheers she heard on the other end of the line.
Forgetting the Rings, forgetting the course, forgetting everything but the rush of elated triumph in the moment, Jet was about to answer the man on the other end…
When abruptly, the scene around her vanished…
22
Samurai
Jet blinked into blinding, almost painful lights.
Panting from exertion still, she looked around at the arena in which she stood, confused by the plain, gray and transparent walls, as well as the props standing around her in a near-perfect oval.
It looked like she stood in the pupil of a long, flat eye sunk into the floor.
Jet’s clothes and skin were soaking wet, her once-perfect hair matted to the back of the sense-suit she wore. Her side hurt from the sandblaster hit, telling her that the graze of a shot had been as real as it felt.
Her arm ached, too, from where she’d hit it on the ladder falling into the water in the flooded room on the Nirreth command ship––the same ladder that now stood behind her, leading into the wide pool of water that formed the centerpiece of the Rings arena.
Jet’s knee and back hurt from where the alligator knocked her into the wall of the cement pipe underground, but she barely noticed. She catalogued all of her injuries somewhere in the back of her mind as she stared up at the stadium benches surrounding her in concentric rings.
The arena was completely silent, like it had been when she stood before the judges.
Jet looked around at the dark faces staring motionless at her.
Then her eyes found the enormous clock on the wall, to the left of the largest of the four monitors. It read the Nirreth time, then switched to a human conversion, showing 3:43 in flashing numbers after the Nargili symbols.
The two sets of symbols alternated, a blinking, seizure-inducing neon, high above the crowd on both ends of the arena.
Still, in that bare breath of passing seconds as Jet took it all in…
No one made a sound.
Then, still feeling that lift she’d felt at the sight of the command ship going up in a mushroom cloud of water, and the laughter at the virtual human base when they found out she was alive, Jet unsheathed her sword.
Grinning, unable to help it, she held it up in the air over her head.
Somehow, that was the thing to break the silence of the room.
A roar greeted her smile.
It was so loud it made Jet flinch.
The rising tide of roars, growls, shouts, screeches, screams, and thumping feet and smacking tails alarmed Jet at first, making her smile falter as she wondered whether she might be on the verge of being attacked. Unsure if she was hearing anger or approval, Jet kept the smile with an effort as she slid Black back into the scabbard.
She did it swiftly, easily, with a turn of her wrist and thrust of her elbow.
Something about the smooth, definitiveness of the gesture brought the thumping of the feet and tails even louder, and now Jet could hear the chanting that rose above the sharp reports of snake-like tails smacking partitions like rifle shots.
“SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI!” they shouted.
Jet burst into a laugh.
She saw her face appear suddenly on the largest monitor across from where she stood. She stood there, laughing, the dark kohl makeup running down her cheeks like war paint, her hair matted on either side of her head, a bruise on one cheek under her eye and blood running from a cut somewhere under her hairline.
She looked like she’d just crawled out of the sewers over a pile of dead bodies then got beat up and thrown into a lake.
Which she supposed was more or less the truth.
“SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI!”
Tens of thousands of accented Nirreth voices chanted the word, until Jet couldn’t help but laugh up at them again, wondering if they even knew what they were saying.
The crowd continued to roar and pound the stadium floors and walls.
Above them, announcers’ voices shattered through the more ocean-like sound, speaking so quickly in Nargili, Jet couldn’t make sense of any of it, especially given the still-deafening chants, thumps, and screams of the crowd.
She was just standing there, her hand on the hilt of Black, when the door to the arena opened behind her.
When Jet turned, three figures had already entered through the glass panels.
Alice walked at the head of the bunch, her face unsmiling but her eyes holding a shrewd twinkle that wasn’t wholly devoid of humor. Behind her strode Laksri, his long, cat-like face holding a more complicated profusion of emotion.
Behind him walked a Nirreth Jet didn’t know, but who looked faintly familiar, mainly due to the large, tear-drop pendant he wore around his neck.
Something about the aged and ragged-looking appearance of his face struck her as familiar, too… until it hit her that she was looking at Al-En Mosq, the Nirreth who had been Ringmaster and head operator prior to Trazen.
She recognized the thin scar on his
face; it wound from his eyebrow up to the top of his dark blue head, a jagged, thread-like design that gave his skull a sewn-together look.
Alice spoke first as she reached Jet.
“Come on, mammal. You must come with us now. You are supposed to be at the place of judgment. The Board wants to give you its verdict.”
Jet felt her stomach drop.
Her muscles clenched as she tried to hold onto her smile.
“You know you’re a mammal too, Alice… right?”
A smattering of laughter ran through the crowd above.
Jet looked up on in surprise.
Seeing her face up on the monitor, she realized her words had carried over the entire stadium, due to the sense suit she wore.
The laughter had been from that percentage of Nirreth and humans in the audience who knew enough English to understand her words. Jet heard the snorting version of Nirreth laughter mixed with the more open, human version.
Both sounds echoed strangely in the wide space.
Laksri held an arm out to her then, and Jet looped it with her own, gripping his shirt with her grimy hands, conscious suddenly that adrenaline trembled all of her limbs.
Ignoring the condition she was in, he coiled his tail around her waist, careful to avoid the wound from the sandblaster even as he supported more of her weight.
He pulled her closer as the audience broke out in another set of ecstatic yells.
Jet heard the announcers make another series of comments.
One of those, towards the end, caused Laksri’s tail to tighten around her, even as the audience broke out in a much louder and more Nirreth-sounding roll of laughter at whatever the two Nirreth announcers had said.
Ignoring the obvious joke at her expense––which was easy, really, since she hadn’t understood it, and the distortion and echoes made it even harder to translate the Nargili than usual––Jet held her head high.
Even so, she gripped Laksri a bit more tightly as she allowed him, Alice and the ex-Ringmaster to lead her towards the same door through which Jet entered the arena, four hours earlier.
The contrast struck Jet as almost surreal as she passed through that same opening, following blindly as Laksri led her across the front of the plexiglas partition and into a gold circle that had been painted solidly on the floor beneath the largest of the four wall monitors.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 39
