Jet found herself grateful briefly for her own rashness in not waiting to blow the hull, even as she pinned the Nirreth to the curved wall. His dark eyes widened in fear on his blue-black face, even as he began babbling at her in Nargili.
When he didn’t stop to take a breath, Jet shook her head, making the ‘enough!’ gesture she’d seen Laksri and the other Nirreth use.
“Leader,” she said in broken Nargili. “Where is leader? Big part on ship?”
Understanding leached into the technician’s eyes. It looked so real, Jet found herself having to remind herself that she was in the middle of a simulation...that the technician in front of her likely wasn’t really there.
Jet hoped so, anyway.
Remembering the Nirreth she’d already killed in the underground tunnels, and with a weapon she knew was real, Jet felt her jaw harden.
“Leader!” she said again, switching abruptly to English. “Where’s the command bridge? I know you understand me...”
When the Nirreth only made that head-inclining ‘no’ gesture, it occurred to Jet again that she was running out of time.
“Map,” she said, sawing into his neck a little that time, enough to bring a trickle of red down his neck and into the collar of his uniform shirt. “...Where is map?” she said again in Nargili.
That time, the Nirreth seemed to be thinking about how to answer.
Jet sawed Black deeper into his midnight-blue skin and he let out a strangled cry. He pointed at the far wall, babbling at her in Nargili. She didn’t understand most of it, but followed his eyes and pointing fingers to the blank surface that stood above a bank of Nirreth computers. Once she had, Jet recognized the discolored patch of wall in the center as a display terminal.
“Show me,” she said.
Keeping the sword at the Nirreth’s throat, she stepped to the side, using her hand to indicate that he...or she...was to lead the way.
After a nervous gesture of agreement, the technician began to walk, stiff-legged, towards the opposite wall. Jet jabbed the Nirreth again, which she was beginning to think was a female after all, feeling another rush of nerves around how much time she might have left to finish this thing before the clock ran down. Jet knew the judge might also subtract points if she didn’t kill the technician, or the two techs already lying on the ground with sandblaster burns in their respective chests. Jet knew how things worked; Alice made her watch enough recordings of previous matches that she got the jist of what the Board liked.
Mostly, that involved a lot of bloody kills...the bloodier the better.
Which was pretty much why they’d liked the idea of a sword-wielding human in the first place.
Jet’s eyes kept roaming to the opposite door of the small engineering room as they walked...and the several clusters of live rounds that she knew lived just on the other side.
She was already so jacked up on adrenaline that the floor might have moved under her without her noticing. It could have happened while she shot the two techs, or even in the time since.
Meaning, at any minute, something a lot deadlier might be coming at her through that door.
Aiming the sandblaster at the opening with one hand and arm, Jet kept the sword on the throat of the female tech with the other.
Jet watched as the Nirreth pulled up the schematics of the command ship on the monitor. The tech arranged the images on the screen, then pulled them into focus by hitting a number of almost-invisible...to Jet anyway...keys on the smooth console. Once the virtual reality panel sparked to life in the air in front of the monitor, Jet’s eyes left the door, long enough to take in details of the ship’s layout.
All of the labels and markings were in Nargili, but Jet found herself able to recognize a few of the symbols that went along with the words. Realizing one of those matched the only symbol in Nargili written on the map from the humans, Jet put down the sandblaster long enough to point at it, looking the Nirreth tech in the face.
“Leader?” she said, her voice a command.
The Nirreth technician nodded, her deep, black eyes wide with fear.
“Where are we?” Jet said, indicating the map, then the surrounding room. “Where is this? Show me...” She pointed at the map again, wishing she’d paid more attention in language classes with Laksri. “Show me on here...where am I now? Where are you?”
Understanding reached the Nirreth’s eyes.
Looking back at the map, she squinted slightly, as if thinking, then pointed to a section of the diagram completely on the opposite side of where the command center stood. Jet might have questioned whether the tech was telling the truth, but right next to where she pointed, a segment of the map flashed red and blinked. 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 said. She 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 after all. 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 that 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 and 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 in the long room, 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 it 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 instead.
“Base 2? This is Alpha-10, Digger Unit.”
“Where the hell are you?” the voice said, rising at once. “Are you inside the lizard-skin ship? 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...are you really under the Harbor?”
“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-sounding. “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 sounded skeptical now. “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 said. 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, and 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 suggested, chuckling again. “We could use you better alive than dead...”
Even as he said it, 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.
Jet managed to twist out of the way of the first few rounds they aimed in her direction, but 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 in 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 at him, and managed to catch him by surprise enough to hit him in the thigh...mostly be sheer luck, given how she was fighting just to tread water.
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.
She had time to hear the cries of shock from the Nirreth as the wall of water hit them in a violent wave, right before all she could hear 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 feeling almost desperate for air, which told her that maybe she’d been holding on longer than she’d realized, or maybe that she’d breathed in the last of the mask’s oxygen when the waves had been buffeting at her body and head. Either way, 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.
Even so, 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 that sent out a wide ring of waves in all directions.
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 just 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.
THE 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, as if 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 those injuries, either, cataloguing them 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 a bit, 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, so loud it nearly made Jet flinch.
The rising tide of yells and screeches 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 with a turn of her wrist and thrust of her elbow.
Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV) Page 35
