Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV)

by JC Andrijeski

  Behind the shelter of one of the concrete pillars outside the glass-enclosed building, Jet stopped again to make sure she’d fully memorized the Nirreth map, and laid it over the human one. At the same time, she tried to orient herself in the real, physical layout of the course itself. She had no idea how much time she had left at this point, but she had a feeling she’d already been out here for more than a few hours, which meant she was running out of time...and probably without enough points to get a positive vote from the Rings Board on her overall performance.

  For better or for worse, Jet had pretty much given up on going out of her way to gain points. It was too late to find the main runs now, anyway.

  Knowing she’d already screwed up their strategy, she’d decided to ignore Richter’s words and bank everything on completing the task within the timeframe and thus “winning” the game. She could only hope that, even if she bombed the rest in terms of points and bonuses and the like, they might let her squeak by into the next round if she managed to complete the main objective they’d set for her character.

  Which was pretty much the exact opposite of what Richter and Laksri told her to do.

  But it was a little late to fix that now. She was pretty sure they’d boot her otherwise, considering how few actual kills she’d managed.

  Once more envisioning the arena components in her head, she shied away from the temptation to superimpose them over either map, knowing they would be forced to adjust the scale and proportions of the projections dramatically to fit the different physical objects they required. Besides, they would have changed everything while she’d been traveling underground anyway...and then again in terms of where the ladder actually popped out onto the higher level, to better accommodate the physical course.

  No, she would have to wait until she ran into one of the arena’s stationary components and map it from there. Until then, she was stuck with the projection alone, along with the two VR maps.

  Checking her pockets and vest to make sure the explosive and the small disc bombs and the pulre were still where she’d left them, Jet shoved the maps back into the zippered pockets and hoisted the sandblaster back over her shoulder.

  Then, her fingers resting lightly on the hilt of Black, she ventured into the darkened building, and its entryway covered in broken glass.

  According to the Nirreth map, the command ship lay deep in the water just past the end of the Canada Place pier. Jet knew human vessels dotted the bottom of the harbor, too, especially closest to the city. She’d occasionally seen them while fishing out there with Anaze, and even witnessed a few Nirreth salvage operations from the inside of buildings along the shore.

  She’d never actually seen a Nirreth command ship before...or a fully-intact human ship outside of movies and story books, for that matter. She hoped she could tell them apart well enough to go to the right place. She didn’t know how cold the water would be, but assumed it couldn’t be too cold, not if the alligator was any indication. She didn’t know how long she’d be able to hold her breath, either, or how toxic the water might be in the simulation.

  Richter warned her they would probably make swimming a requirement in a lot of her matches, since she was registered as being able to swim, and the whole swimming thing was such a novelty for Nirreth. From what Jet could tell, the Nirreth fascination with water remained virtually endless...perhaps because their dense bodies made swimming pretty much impossible without some sort of mechanical assistance.

  They seemed to view swimming the way a lot of humans viewed flying...like a magical power of some kind, or as something they all felt they should be able to do, as part of their birthright, but somehow couldn’t.

  Still, the fact that they were going to make her swim in the likely dense and toxic-looking waters of a post-war Vancouver Harbor to try and find some way inside one of their own ships, seemed a bit much to Jet, at least for a first run.

  Walking through the hush of the old cruise ship loading terminal, Jet passed half-burned posters of wild animals that used to live in what had been the lands far north, the ones her mother told her stories about as a kid, and where Biggs and Jet used to pretend they lived. They even had a picture of the great white bear god, like the one from which the skull Chiyeko had on her front door had come.

  Some of the animals shown in the posters still existed, of course, even in Jet’s time...like the foxes that were slowly coming back as the rabbit populations increased, and the great eagles with the white heads that her mother told her used to be considered magical animals as well, spirits that lived on the totem poles and canoe heads of their ancestors.

  Jet walked past the last of these kiosks and into the segment of building that led out over the water, as part of the dock itself. On that end, as with the parking structure, most of the glass was gone, letting in wet, salt-filled sea air and the smell of brine and dead fish and seagull scat. Jet walked along the dock inside the building for as long as she could, then picked her way through piles of broken glass and charred wood to reach the outside deck.

  Once out there, she was scanning the water with her eyes, trying to glimpse the hint of a shape that might be the submerged command ship.

  As she thought it, she realized she had to be looking at some portion of the actual water pool...meaning, in the arena itself. They would find some way to twist the images around to get her to walk where they needed her to walk and to end up where they needed her to end up, but somewhere in here, if not on the other side of that wooden pier, stood the artificial lake that formed the center of the oval-shaped Rings arena.

  Jet wondered if she would simply ‘die’ if she jumped in at the wrong place...or maybe hit something on her way down. She suspected they would just bar her from jumping, however, until they had her where they needed her.

  As she thought all of this, another sound came into her awareness, a bare whisper of air, discernible through the salt and sea-filled wind that chafed Jet’s face.

  Her eyes jerked up.

  A culler ship was descending right over her head.

  The long, alive-seeming lines of its net reached down towards her like spiked tentacles, or snakes with metal heads and mouths. Another sound forced Jet to look down a second later, just in time to see a dozen or more armed Nirreth walking through the rubble of the same broken wall where Jet had left the port building.

  They were headed right in her direction.

  Well... Jet had time to think. At least I know how they plan to motivate me to jump into the right part of the water without breaking my skull...

  With that thought still hovering somewhere in her mind, Jet took the last sretch of dock at a full run.

  ...And leapt into the murky waters of Vancouver Harbor.

  The water shocked her...mainly by not being as cold as she’d expected, or as dirty as it was in her version of Vancouver.

  The water of Jet’s youth was an oily, gritty mess of various poisons...at least close to the shore. Really, it was almost a sludge in parts, until she and Biggs managed to paddle out far enough to reach the current of the sea. Choked with algae and seaweed and bits of metal and old tires and other garbage, it was considered highly dangerous by most, and their mother scolded them whenever she caught them in it, even when they brought back fish they’d caught from the float where most of the adults went out to fish, and where the water ran almost clear from the currents and its relatively greater depth.

  Their mother was afraid Jet or Biggs would cut themselves on one of the old rusted hunks of metal, or accidentally swallow some of the poison in the water, or drown in the oily sludge left over from some of the crashed tankers and barge ships.

  A lot of chemicals still made the water highly unsafe, too, depending on the shifting currents and temperatures and whatever else.

  This water felt clean, compared to all of that...even compared to what Jet thought of as “clean” in the currents by the float she and Biggs fished from back home.

  As an added bonus, the helmet she’d be
en wearing, that she’d forgotten she had on, slid over the front part of her face, too, providing her with transparent goggles to see, and even a small supply of oxygen. Although not enough to do much more than extend her time by maybe two or three breaths through the nose, it should triple her time underwater.

  If the Nirreth had thought to give her an actual oxygen tank, she would have been totally comfortable.

  As it was, she found herself staring at the eggshell-white shape that appeared in front of her under the harbor’s waves. She could only hope that she was right, and that the massive object, which appeared to be the size of an old, human sports field, was the Nirreth command ship.

  She struggled to swim, to move her arms in spite of the sandblaster strapped to her back, and the bulkiness and heaviness of the vest with those explosives and detonator and the disc-weapons and the pulre. A few explosive charges made tunnels through the blue-green water only yards from where Jet swam. She knew they were likely pulre blasts, and also that the Nirreth must not be able to see her well, which confused Jet at first, given their infrared vision.

  Either way, she took a last deep breath and dove under the water.

  As she swam almost straight down, approaching the eggshell-white ship, Jet thought maybe she understood why the Nirreth’s infrared hadn’t helped them as they shot at her in the water. At first she’d thought maybe it’d been sloppiness on the part of the Rings operators, or even that they might have taken pity on her.

  Instead, she noticed that the water was getting warmer, the closer she got to the submerged ship.

  It was bathwater temperature within a few yards of the hull.

  Then it grew hotter still...until it was uncomfortably hot...enough that Jet felt claustrophobic inside her clothes, even though everything but the boots was relatively light-weight and Jet had always been a good swimmer. She was used to swimming in heavy footgear, too, since that was the only way she’d ever gone in back home.

  She already knew only one way existed for her to enter the white-hulled ship.

  Besides, she was running out of air. She took small inhales out of the oxygen trapped in her mask, but she’d nearly run out of those, too.

  She’d known since she found the explosives in her vest that she’d need them to get to the end of the game. She could feel the clock ticking on that too, even as she wondered if she could have seriously miscalculated the amount of time she’d spent out here already. She was beginning to think this was going to be her one and only jaunt into the Rings, but she had to keep trying. She would keep trying; right up until the end.

  In any case, she was still alive, and still in the game, technically at least. All she could do was try to get to the end. From that perspective, her strategy got real simple.

  There was no possible way she would have time to do a thorough recon of the command ship to determine a quiet way inside. There wasn’t even time to find the best place to blow a hole in the hull under however-many pounds of pressure from the harbor water.

  So when she reached the heat-radiating outer hull, Jet didn’t hesitate.

  Slapping the long bricks of C-4 to the smooth, egg-like outside, after ripping the plastic off it before it could melt in the hot water, she stuck the detonator on one end, set the timer, and kicked off the hull as hard as she could, feeling a low-level panic at the thought that the temperature alone might be enough to detonate the C-4.

  More than that, she’d started to worry about air for real.

  Thanking the God of the old world and those of the new that she’d thought to figure out that detonator device in advance, Jet ripped the trigger out of her vest pocket and decided not to wait, once she was out of range.

  She scrambled a bit when she pulled it out too quickly, nearly losing her grip and seeing it disappear into the murky water, but she managed to clutch it tightly in her fingers even as she paddled as far to the side of the explosion zone as she dared to go. Making sure she was behind the first hard curve in the hull, she figured she had to risk it...before she ran out of air, or the Nirreth sent something even more deadly after her, or both.

  Hoping like hell she wasn’t about to kill herself and end the match earlier than she expected, Jet closed her eyes, and hit the trigger with her thumb as she floated only a few inches away from the hot metal of the ship’s hull.

  A deafening rush of water and bubbles exploded out from the side of the ship.

  The force of the water and escaping air hit her in the face even before she felt the impact concussion and heard the loud screech of metal.

  Luckily, because of where she’d crouched past a curve in the white-sided ship, Jet missed most of the force of the water as it was thrown away from the hull wall.

  Even so, the metal sides trembled under her hands, and Jet felt that smooth surface jerk, close enough to her skin that she flinched from the burning hot metal.

  Before she could think about moving from her spot, water displacement began sucking her towards the new opening in the wall, pulling her in a sudden, hard current. Jet found herself being yanked along, banged against the hot metal of the ship, unable to do anything but go along with it. By then, she was panicking about air, so trying to kick towards the surface, but the current wouldn’t let her.

  It wasn’t until that precise moment that it occurred to her that she might drown.

  Possibilities flickered through her mind about how this might play out...and what she would do if whatever lived on the other side of that hole didn’t connect her to the rest of the command ship. Even if it did, they might lock it down before she got through. Moreover, if she did manage to get through, if she picked the wrong spot, she’d probably get shot for her trouble...disintegrated with a close-range sandblaster before she’d finished sucking in Nirreth air, which would be high on oxygen anyway, at least if that culler ship was any indication.

  She’d probably be high as a kite for the first few minutes.

  All of these things ran through Jet’s mind as she got pulled through the opening.

  It sucked her in so quickly she fought to protect her head and limbs.

  Even so, she cried out, using up the last of her air when her leg got smacked against a jagged piece of hull at the breach point.

  Seconds later, she found herself inside and pressed flush against a wall from the flow of water. The space was already nearly full. She fumbled frantically along the smooth surface with her hand. Sliding around some protruding equipment, she moved as fast as she could, making it a few more yards before her fingers found a depression in one segment of wall. Before she had time to hope it wasn’t a closet, the sliding panels opened to let her through...again, before Jet had time to think about what might be on the other side.

  That time, however, Jet managed to hold onto the wall when the water got sucked violently through the opening, at least long enough to hit the door panel a second time.

  She let go of the wall the instant she had, praying the mechanism would engage...and without cutting her in half before she could get to the other side.

  Right when she worried she hadn’t hit it hard enough...it began to close.

  Seconds later, she was ripping off her helmet to get at the air, fighting for balance in the water filling the room almost to her waist.

  She found herself choking and gasping once she had it off, leaning her weight against the nearest wall as her eyes took in this new space. The floor where she stood consisted of the lower level of a two-level room, beneath what looked like an engineering station on a catwalk. The overall space wasn’t particularly big...only a little larger than Laksri’s room.

  Sucking in grateful breaths, she nearly passed out when the first big dose of oxygen hit her system. She managed to keep hold of the wall and keep her head above the water...and her mind conscious.

  She even had the clarity to be grateful that she was alone.

  Once she’d mostly recovered, she paddled over to the set of ladders built into the wall and dragged herself up the steps and to
the dry catwalk the next level up.

  With a sigh of relief, Jet realized something else.

  She knew where she was again...meaning, inside the physical layout of the Rings. The pool had only one ladder to get out, which meant she now stood directly beside a stretch of moving walkway that would take her by several clusters of weapons launchers and at least two rope and hook ‘escape tricks,’ as she jokingly called them while working with Alice.

  So she could expect action coming soon, but also some possible ways out.

  She should also be able to predict where she’d be attacked.

  Heading down the stretch of hallway that followed the dimensions of the track, she felt the faintest sensation of motion under her feet, even as she unslung the sandblaster from around her shoulders, feeling that through some wild stroke of luck, she’d finally arrived at the part of the course for which she’d actually been trained.

  Hitting the door-opening panel to the left of the double doors she met at the end of that same hall, Jet fell into a combat crouch, or near to, even before the mechanism engaged and the doors began to open. When three Nirreth were waiting for her on the other side, she hit two of them in the chests with the sandblaster before either had time to raise their weapons. Then she drew her sword and pinned the third one to the wall, pressing the blade to its neck by its gills after she yelled the Nirreth word for ‘disarm!’

  It dropped its weapon to the floor.

  Once it had, Jet breathed a sigh of relief. Then she looked him over more carefully, trying to decide if he was real or not.

  There was really no way to know.

  From the cut of his uniform, she figured he was meant to be some kind of tech, likely sent to investigate and repair the breach in the hull she’d caused. Which meant there was some chance the ship didn’t yet know it was under attack.

  She wondered how long it would be though, before the Nirreth cullers above the water contacted the ship below and they put two and two together with the explosion and the girl who’d jumped into the water twenty minutes earlier.