Looking at her clothes, Jet realized those had changed, too.
She wore a dark gray uniform with armored plating, and heavy boots, human-style, not the Nirreth wall-walkers. The latter realization brought a faint twinge of disappointment; the wall-walkers could make the course fairly interesting.
On the other hand, it also made it harder to keep her bearings as they manipulated the simulation around her dimensionally to accommodate the anti-grav boots.
Jet took a few cautious steps forward.
As soon as she did, a familiar rush of sound greeted her ears from overhead.
Looking up, she saw the underside of a dark gray and green mass, the shifting contours of camouflaged metal, and suddenly the uniform and its familiarity clicked.
It was the invasion.
She was fighting. The imagery around her came from the historical records of the Nirreth invasion of Earth.
Even as she thought it, Jet flattened her back to the wall of the smoking concrete building next to where she stood, her eyes shifting upwards along with the VR contact lenses that attached her vision to the rest of the sense-suit.
She saw the hooks of the culler ship extended like the tentacles of a great, floating leviathan, and although it was an older, strangely more animal-looking version than the ones Jet had grown up dodging, the sight of it was so familiar, so real, it snapped Jet roughly back to the reality of her old life… to Biggs, her mother, Chiyeko, Larks and his gang of thugs in the tunnels, Aunt Lara and Uncle Draven, Marcus and Mishio, the hunters and trappers and fighters who made up the men and women of the skag pits, half of them wearing the tattered remains of the same uniform Jet wore now.
Her breath caught in her throat, a near claustrophobia as it all came rushing back.
The sword-fighting lessons with Mishio. The raids by Richter and his men. The packs of dogs that tried to fight their way into the Longhouse to get at their goats and their meager stores of food. The poisoned fish that killed Shiatu’s kid the following spring.
Traveling underground with Anaze to reach Everest and the other traders in Gastown. Making the longer trek to the Hamster Cage, south of old Vancouver, where they’d go to trade eggs and fish for medicines and sometimes sugar and synthetic clothes and other hard-to-get items.
For a long moment, Jet just stood there, her back flat against the wall.
She forgot she was looking at a projection, forgot everything she was doing and stared up at the culler ship, thinking only one thought.
Don’t run. Humans who ran got culled.
When the spotlight of the culler switched on, roving over the nearby alleyway and up the buildings on each side of where Jet stood, crouched in a burnt-out alcove, heart hammering in her chest, she managed to pull her mind at least partly together.
It all felt real, down to the smell of smoke in the air and the gravel under her feet. She couldn’t fully convince her senses or her mind it wasn’t real.
She fought to remember that in this game, unlike in real life, hoping not to be seen while she got underground likely wasn’t an option.
They would find her.
She needed something else.
Even so, out of habit or reflex or something else, Jet found herself scanning the ground, looking for escape routes that led down instead of up. Her mind tried to rationalize her preference, even as she did. Either they wouldn’t have any escape routes, or the projection would shift around the terrain to accommodate her apparent change in levels.
In any case, going up, with that ship overhead, was out of the question.
Her mind was working again, sparking back to life in that crystal clarity left by the remnants of the venom, along with the vitamin and energy shots and whatever else the techs gave her as they handed her the sense-suit.
Reaching for her backpack out of habit, due to the familiar-looking landscape, Jet remembered she wouldn’t have that here, either. No digging tools, no compass. Not even her knives, or the bow and arrow she usually kept with her in case she needed to fire from cover.
This would be strictly hand-to-hand.
Which wasn’t such a big deal against opponents carrying swords, arrows or even spears, but she couldn’t expect to be encountering a lot of swords in the Nirreth invasion fleet or their military clean-up crews.
No, they’d be carrying sandblasters and what her uncle used to call “cutters,” those small, hand-held weapons that looked like flat stones.
The Nirreth called them pulre, or “hammers.”
Despite their small size, and relatively innocuous-looking shape, those things packed a punch of blue flame that could blast a three-foot deep hole into a concrete wall with one hit.
On the plus side, they took a good ten to twenty seconds to recharge between blasts, so she’d still prefer them to the sandblasters.
She was still standing there, trying to decide what her first move should be, when the radio in a helmet she hadn’t realized she wore sparked into life.
“Alpha-10, Digger Unit. This is Base 2. Do you copy?”
The voice was so human, the accent so perfect, Jet answered without thinking.
“Receiving you, Base 2.”
She felt thrown back into the games they played as kids, listening to their aunts and uncles and parents relay their stories of those battles in the ruined Earth cities.
A sudden tightening came to Jet’s chest in that fraction of a second, a realization that she’d missed the real fight. It had been over before she’d been born.
All the settlement kids felt that way, to one degree or another, because that was the reality Jet’s generation faced. They’d been born too late. They came into the world after the big war for their species had already been lost.
Their futures had already been negotiated and surrendered away.
“You’ve got a lot of heat headed your way…” the voice in her helmet told her, again sounding so real it was difficult to remember she was in a simulation. “…You still think you can find this command center for us? Relay back the coordinates?”
Jet nodded, feeling her muscles tense.
Her voice remained steady.
“I can do it.”
“Those cullers reached you yet?”
“As we speak,” Jet muttered, her eyes trained upwards at the shifting patterns on the metal underbelly of the nearest of the same. The culler spanned a distance maybe twice the size of the Longhouse in the pits.
“Stay sharp,” the voice said. “We need those coordinates, and you’re the only one left in that area. We can’t get to you with back up, either… they’ve got force fields shutting down the docks.” The man grunted, his voice a humorless smile. “It’s the main reason the brass is listening to you now, Alpha-10. It looks like the lizards have something to protect down there after all…”
“Right,” she said. “How much time do I have?”
“Four hours,” the man confirmed. “Not a minute more. Base 2 out.”
Before Jet could do much more than nod, her headset went dead.
Four hours. So one long run, single target.
Fair enough.
Her eyes refocused briefly on the stretch of street in front of her, finding an old-looking, freestanding clock in the middle of unmarked sidewalk, almost like a potted tree.
Steam came out of the clock’s top, expanding as a cloud in the cold, dry air.
Blinking at the out-of-place clock like it was something out of a fairy tale, Jet felt her mind click suddenly into sharp focus.
She’d seen that clock before.
Only when Jet saw it in real life, it hadn’t been steaming.
Everest, who knew old Vancouver like the back of his hand, showed it to her once, probably to impress her. He told her it used to steam, but that the mechanism stopped working, right around the same time that the clock’s hands stopped moving.
This wasn’t some random, make-believe Earth city fighting a losing battle against the invading Nirreth military.
Jet w
as back in Vancouver.
They’d sent her back home.
18
Orientating
Jet stood against the wall, panting, trying to wrap her head around the idea.
It crossed her mind to wonder if the game operators had done the Vancouver thing on purpose to screw with her head.
Then she realized… of course they had.
They wanted to know if she would crack.
The realization clicked her back into a more clinical focus, back to that crystal clarity, only this time, stripped entirely of emotion.
As that happened, the map returned to the forefront of her mind, immediately giving Jet her bearings on the physical layout of the arena itself.
It also occurred to her they might have given her help––VR help.
She’d been warned to always look for that.
She immediately felt over her person and found a map shoved into one side of her armored vest, covered in waterproof plastic and marked all over with different-colored lines. Still keeping her head and body shoved tightly into the alcove, she put the map directly under her eyes and spent a moment examining it… and memorizing it… so she wouldn’t need to look at it again.
The map itself was so straightforward, Jet wondered at first if she was reading it wrong.
She remembered the coded maps her uncle Draven had shown her, all the symbols and confusing lines, so that if any of them happened to get picked up, they wouldn’t be giving away key holdings or positions, much less more strategic targets or civilian settlements.
Staring at the map she held now, with its clear markings for the base and their last sightings of the mobile command center of the Nirreth, she found herself flipping it over a few times, looking for the real version.
The only strange thing she saw on it was a series of symbols written by hand next to one of the target points. Those symbols appeared to be in Nargili.
Why on Earth would humans use Nargili in their code?
Reminding herself that, one, this was a simulation and, two, this was her trial run in the Rings, she flipped the map back to the front, memorizing every marked spot for ammunition and gun caches, along with all the Nirreth holdings as well as all water boundaries and streets, especially those with underground tunnels she could use.
Then she stuffed it back into her vest.
She tried to decide if having the simulation in a city she knew would be an advantage or a liability.
In the end, she decided it was more likely to be a liability.
If they didn’t get the architecture right in areas Jet knew well enough to get confused, or if they missed key details she was counting on, it might be enough to get her killed.
In many ways, the terrain she’d mapped beforehand continued to be the most critical thing. If she didn’t lose sight of that, it might help her bridge any gaps between reality, her memory of the real Vancouver, and the simulation.
Realizing she’d probably been standing there for too long already, at least as far as the crowded stadium and the Board members were concerned, Jet peered out from under the alcove at the culler ship, if only to get a good idea of its location.
Immediately, the spotlight swiveled to the shadowed doorway where Jet stood.
Seeing the tentacled lines begin to descend, Jet made a break for it, along with a split-second decision to veer right, in the direction where she knew a ladder lived, along with at least two of the hatches into the floor. Jet figured she could side-step triggering the latter as long as she didn’t get within a two or three foot radius of the hatches themselves.
As she thought all of this, she ran, all-out, under the building’s eaves.
The culler ship made only the barest exhale of sound, but Jet had been trained to listen for that sound since she learned how to crawl.
She knew it was pacing her over that same, narrow outcropping of roof.
She also knew the lines whipping through the air could slip under the eaves, but that they couldn’t get low enough to catch her, not with the roof in the way, not without employing the ship’s guns. Assuming they were following regular protocol, they’d want her alive––especially during the war, when the Nirreth were supposedly obsessed with gathering intelligence.
Back then, that included eating the humans they’d finished interrogating, at least if Jet’s aunt and uncle could be believed.
Connecting that idea briefly to Laksri, Jet felt a little sick.
Shoving the image of him eating the dark red meat of a T-Rex out of her head, she fought her mind back to level.
Through all of that, she didn’t stop running.
She didn’t stop, in fact, until she came into sudden range of the lowest part of the ladder, which mapped to a fire escape up the side of a brick building.
The fire escape, unlike most of those in real Vancouver, had a metal covering around it that should protect Jet from the culler, but also would leave her trapped if something waited for her on the other end… as something likely would.
The covering itself had to be virtual-only, so she could risk jumping off the ladder anyway, but the sensors in the suit would make it hurt like hell, as if she’d really cracked through metal with enough force to break it.
The sensors might even tell her suit that she’d broken her spine, which would make it impossible for Jet to fight, even if her body remained totally intact in reality.
Jet made that mistake once, in one of her later practice sessions with Alice after she’d started using her memory of the physical course to plan out her moves.
She’d found herself lying on the floor of the practice arena, paralyzed with pain, helpless while her virtual body was hacked to pieces by sword-wielding humans, then eaten by their dogs.
The pain had been so bad, Jet couldn’t believe she wasn’t hurt in reality.
Alice stood over her through the whole thing, refusing to turn off the simulation.
Afterwards, she only informed Jet that if it had been the real Rings, it would have been worse. The pain, that is.
Also, Jet would have lost.
Remembering again why she was here, Jet remembered also that she needed to get into a situation where she could win points, but not be killed, at least not right away.
She’d already gone too long without a kill.
A pro, no doubt, would have found the main run by now and started collecting points on the bad guys, whether lizards or cave people or dragons or stone age Nirreth wielding clubs––or, in Jet’s case, modern-day Nirreth with sandblasters.
Thinking about this a second longer, Jet’s eyes roved to the hatch.
Going up meant being trapped.
But if there was no pathway to collecting points that way, would they give her the option to go down? After all, according to the map, her virtual allies suspected the Nirreth command center to be located underground, or else underwater. Either coincided with what her uncle had told her about the real war, as well.
Jet was guessing they’d put it in the Sound.
She was human, after all.
The crowds would go crazy if they forced her to swim.
The more she thought about that, the more sense it made.
She needed to get closer to the water. The easiest way to do that would be to go down.
Therefore, when Jet got to the end of the covered stretch of sidewalk and within grabbing distance of the bottom of the ladder that led up into the brown-brick building, she hesitated.
After another long-seeming second of thought, she ran past the ladder to the manhole cover, throwing herself to the asphalt on her knees and feeling around for how to open it. Gripping the edge in one hand, she used her fingers in the holes to pry it up, just like she would have done on a real street back home.
Once she got the cover off, she climbed quickly to her feet, stepping back a few paces and unsheathing Black.
She held the sword up in a ready position, gripping the hilt tightly in both hands.
But nothing came out.
>
Jet stood there, a few seconds too long, not sure what she should do.
Then a blast of air from the descending culler ship decided things for her. It crossed Jet’s mind that if this had been real, she would already be too late… but she didn’t take the time to curse herself out for that, either.
Instead she lurched forward, fumbling her foot onto the first rung of the ladder.
She climbed rapidly down into the dark, trying to look down, but not enough to slow her descent. Once she got a foot or so past the lip of the tunnel, she felt over her helmet until she found the light on top, and switched it on.
She tried to feel for when the image would shift around her, the VR turning her around so it would only seem like she had gone underground, when really, she would be climbing back up again, or simply stepping in place.
That shift never happened.
The illusion of climbing down was seamless.
Jet reached up at the last minute to jerk the manhole cover over to protect her exit as she disappeared into the round hole.
19
Underworld
Under the virtual Vancouver street, everything was pitch black, just as Jet remembered from the real sewers.
The feeble light from her helmet spread a weak, scattered glow.
She hit the switch a few more times and got that to transition into a search-beam that lit the tunnel at least twenty paces, wherever she aimed her head.
Unsheathing Black, which she’d put back in the scabbard to climb the ladder two-handed, she ventured down the tunnel, heading in the direction the map indicated lay towards the Sound, and the last known whereabouts of the Nirreth command ship.
As she walked in the dark, she tried to regain her bearings according to the map she’d made of the terrain, but none of it made sense.
She tried to decide if she was actually walking in circles and it only appeared she was going in a straight line, but she didn’t feel that subtle pulling in her legs or feeling of imbalance Laskri taught her to look for.
Similarly, Jet tried to sense that motion or pressure she knew from moving platforms, stairs, or any other element of terrain that might account for the long tunnel, or map to anything near the ladder, or the two traps in the floor.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 35