She scanned the water with her eyes, trying to glimpse any hint of a shape that might be the submerged command ship.
As she thought it, she realized she had to be looking at the real Rings pool.
They would have twisted 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 however they got her here, Jet had little doubt the artificial lake stood on the other side of that wooden pier.
That deep, clear pool formed the center of the oval-shaped Rings arena.
Another sound slid 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.
Snaking, alive-seeming, metallic lines reached for her like spiked tentacles, or eels with metal heads and mouths.
Another sound forced Jet to look down, just in time to see a dozen or more armed Nirreth walking through the rubble of the same broken wall where Jet left the port building.
They were headed right in her direction.
Well, Jet had time to think, noting the sandblasters in their hands. At least I know how they plan to motivate me to jump into the water.
Turning, Jet took the last sretch of dock at a full run.
…And leapt into the murky waters of Vancouver Harbor.
21
Command Ship
The water shocked her… mainly by not being cold.
It certainly not as cold as she’d expected.
It wasn’t dirty like the harbor in her version of Vancouver, either.
The water of Jet’s youth was an oily, gritty mess of various poisons, at least close to the shore. Really, it was almost 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, suicide by some. 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, and where the water ran almost clear from the currents.
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, or drown in the oily sludge left over from crashed tankers, military vessels, planes, and barge ships.
A lot of chemicals still made the water highly unsafe, depending on the shifting currents and temperatures and whatever else.
This water felt clean, 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 been wearing, that she’d forgotten she had on, slid over the front part of her face, providing her with transparent goggles, 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 oxygen tank, versus just the mask, she would have been totally comfortable.
She forgot all of that, seconds later, staring at the eggshell-white shape that appeared in front of her under the harbor’s waves. The massive object, which appeared to be the size of an old, human sports field, had to be the Nirreth command ship.
It had to be.
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.
She was just getting the hang of it when a number of explosive charges made tunnels through the blue-green water, only yards from where Jet swam. She knew they were likely pulre blasts. The Nirreth must not be able to see her well, to miss her by so much.
That confused her, given their infrared vision, but she wasn’t about to argue the point.
Taking a last deep breath, she dove under the waves.
She swam almost straight down.
As she approached the outer hull of the eggshell-white ship, Jet found she understood why the Nirreth’s infrared hadn’t helped them as they shot at her in the water. At first she thought it was sloppiness on the part of the Rings operators, or maybe even that they were going easy on her, this being her first run.
But 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… uncomfortably hot… enough that Jet felt claustrophobic inside her clothes. 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.
Pushing aside her discomfort, she looked over the hull’s smooth surface.
She already knew there was only one way inside.
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 in 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 finish this.
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 swam to what she figured had to be a safe distance, and ripped the trigger out of her vest pocket.
She scrambled a bit when she pulled it out too quickly, losing her grip briefly and nearly seeing it disappear into the murky water. She managed to paddle after it, snatching it out of the water, and then she was floating again, only a few inches away from the hot metal.
Making sure she was behind the first curve in that white, egg-shaped hull, she figured she had to risk it. She couldn’t wait. She had to do it now, before she ran out of air… before the Nirreth or something even more deadly came after her.
She had to do it now.
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.
A deafening rush of water and bubbles exploded out the side of the ship.
The force of 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 got yan
ked along, banged against the hot metal of the ship.
She couldn’t do anything but go along with it. By then, she was panicking about air, 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 being inside the ship 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.
If she did manage to get through, if she picked the wrong spot, she’d get shot for her trouble––disintegrated by 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 those 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.
When her leg smacked into a jagged piece of hull at the breach point, she cried out, using the last of her air.
Seconds later, she found herself inside and pressed flush against a wall, held in place by the flow of water. The space was already nearly full. She fumbled frantically along the smooth surface with her hand. Using her hands and arms to yank herself 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.
At that point, she almost didn’t care what was on the other side.
She 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, preferably without cutting her in half before she could get to the other side.
Right when she worried she hadn’t hit it hard enough…
The door began to close.
Seconds later, she was ripping off her helmet to get at the air, fighting for balance in water filling the room almost to her thighs.
She found herself choking and gasping once she had the helmet off, leaning her weight against the nearest wall as her eyes took in this new space.
She now stood on the lower level of a two-level room, beneath what looked like an engineering station on a catwalk.
The space wasn’t overly large, only a little bigger than Laksri’s quarters.
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.
She also managed to remain conscious.
She even had the clarity to be grateful she was alone.
Once she’d mostly recovered, she paddle-walked over to the set of ladders built into the wall and dragged herself up the steps, to the dry catwalk the next level up.
With a sigh of relief, she realized something else.
She knew where she was again.
Meaning, she’d located her physical body 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 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 waited 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.
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. She looked him over more carefully, trying to decide if he was real or not.
There really was 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 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 however-many minutes earlier.
Jet found herself grateful briefly for her own rashness in not waiting to blow the hull, even as she pinned the Nirreth. His dark eyes widened in fear on his blue-black face.
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 again had to remind herself 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 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, noticing the technician moving slow on purpose, obviously dragging its feet.
Another rush of nerves hit her around how much time she might have left to finish this thing before the clock ran down.
Jet knew the judge might subtract points if she didn’t kill the technician, too, 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 gist of what the Board liked.
Mostly, that involved a lot of bloody kills.
The bloodier the better.
Which was pretty much why they liked the idea of a sword-wielding female human in the first place.
&nbs
p; 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, the floor might have moved under her without her noticing.
It could have happened while she shot the two techs.
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 her Nirreth prisoner 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 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 the labels and markings were in Nargili, but Jet was 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.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 38