The flow of water looked strange.
It seemed to spring out of a wide line of water-smoothed stones and volcanic rock, heading straight for her. Larger boulders pock-marked the foam, but not enough to explain the sound.
She’d been right about the waterfall, but where was it?
Confused, Jet stared at that broad flow through the trees, then looked behind her, half-expecting it to reappear.
Something was off.
The river was too big to divert that much in only a few hundred yards.
Jet still couldn’t see the waterfall, although she continued walking in the pause, albeit cautiously now. That could just mean the waterfall lived somewhere further back, higher up on the slope, maybe even around a bend in the water flow, or behind a rock formation, but the whole layout was strange. The gully where she walked looked like it should be the riverbed; it was as if the stream had been diverted purposefully.
The sound grew deafening in those last few steps.
Jet could barely think past the noise, and it almost sounded like––
She stumbled, nearly fell.
She caught herself on a tree trunk.
Looking down, focusing past the dense clumps of ferns and long grasses by her feet, Jet suddenly experienced vertigo so dramatically she nearly lost her hold on the tree.
Below her, she saw nothing but open space.
White spray drifted up through the ferns she now realized completely covered the edge of a steep, volcanic cliff. The feeling of space below her grew dizzying as she glimpsed the edge of the river where it fell off the lip of a massive crater, the opposite side of which Jet now stood.
She’d nearly walked right over the edge. She likely would have, if something hadn’t told her to look down when she did.
Briefly, the realization of her close call paralyzed her.
Her heart thudded in her chest as she took it all in.
Lowering herself carefully to her knees, Jet crawled to the edge, holding her breath and part of the tree’s roots. Gripping the volcanic stone tightly in her hand, she got as close as she dared, then forced her way through the dense growth of ferns that blocked her view.
Once she had, she sucked in a breath.
The sheet of volcanic rock just… ended.
A sheer drop met her eyes, one close to seventy or eighty meters.
Jet took in the semi-circle of waterfall that crashed downwards at least two hundred meters from where she crouched. Between her and it, a dark, cave-like chasm shaped like a cauldron had been formed out of volcanic stone.
Under and past the waterfall, the cave receded well past the crater’s edge on the opposite side, leaving much of the lake below the waterfall and deep in shadow.
Jet tried to get a sense of the size of it anyway, glimpsing areas where light struck the green-blue water, indicating more holes in the lava flow that exposed the underground lake to sunlight. It looked like a volcano had erupted here, creating the natural formation.
The crater’s mouth appeared to have pushed its way up through the earth and stone, creating a cavern for the river, after an eruption that must have taken place hundreds, if not thousands of years ago.
Jet had to remind herself that none of this was real.
There was no true geologic history to map for any of what she saw.
Even so, the cauldron fascinated her, especially when she stared down at the green-blue water directly below where she crouched.
She’d been right.
The stream went underground.
It also flowed roughly in the direction of the town.
Of course, with the darkness around the lake on the opposite side, Jet had to assume she would be going in blind, but still, the logic made sense. The river should take her close to the village. In the real world, that would be crazy-thinking, of course, but here, in the Rings?
Yeah, it made sense.
There was only one lake in the actual, physical arena of the Rings.
She knew where she was again––more or less.
She didn’t know exactly which side of the man-made Rings lake she now crouched beside, but she could guess. Only five or six platforms stood above the real lake, meaning the one inside the game arena.
One of those was accessible by a ramp that could be angled up and down at different heights, that didn’t have a moving platform she would have noticed while walking. It was the tallest of the platforms, too, so could account for the immense drop.
It tracked. She likely crouched on that platform.
Of course, the Rings pullers could simulate such drops without needing the arena’s layout to facilitate the sensations of falling.
They could do it merely by using the sense-suit Jet wore.
She didn’t think that was the case here, though.
No, she was on the high platform. They wanted to see her jump this thing for real.
Half the fun of the physical arena for spectators lay in the chances it afforded her for real injury, even death. The Rings Operators would definitely want to milk that for the audience if they could.
Knowing where she was in the real world reassured her, though.
Truthfully, it was worth the jump, just for that.
She knew the landmarks around the lake like the back of her hand. Having access to the map again would make everything easier.
She’d already made up her mind, even before she straightened to her feet. There could be a few decent point runs down there, even if she didn’t make it to the final objective before the clock wound down. She should be able to maintain a respectable spread, enough to avoid killing her overall average. Maybe enough to keep her undefeated status with the Rings Board, if she hauled ass and killed some stuff.
Anyway, it couldn’t hurt to put on a good show.
The pullers liked throwing a few dramatic things in at the end of every run.
To the Nirreth, water always constituted something dramatic.
It made sense they’d make her do something like this, as her only way into town, and the only way to nail her final objective.
Jet gripped the tree tighter, leaning out over the rim of volcanic stone. Moving her body out of the way of the tree and checking her feet to make sure her boots didn’t catch on any roots or stones, she took a deep breath.
…and threw herself off the edge of the cliff.
11
Family
She didn’t try for anything fancy.
She jumped out to clear the cliff walls (well, really, the arena platform), but otherwise, let gravity handle the rest. Feet first, arms outstretched and pinwheeling––maybe in some instinctive effort to create at least a minimum of wind resistance––she fell.
For a long moment, she fell in near-silence.
It only occurred to her mid-fall that she might not be by the arena lake at all.
She might be falling onto some other part of the arena.
They could have simulated water as a means of ending the match prematurely. The fall probably wouldn’t kill her outside of the run, but it might earn her a nice long visit to the Royals’ medical sanctuary under the water gardens.
All of that ran through her head in those moments of silence as she fell.
The crystal blue water rushed up to meet her.
Jet took a breath…
…and hit into the water’s surface like a bullet from a gun.
The impact itself didn’t hurt exactly, but it shocked her.
Pressure swam up around her, in the form of freezing cold water. The act of connecting with the water jarred her very bones, seemingly from her teeth to her toes.
It also nearly tore the sword and its scabbard off her body.
Instead, it just jerked the bottom end of the sword away from her body, knocking the hilt into her head and forcing her body into an awkward somersault.
Luckily, there wasn’t much play in the leather harness around her shoulder, and the scabbard itself rose up high enough to protect most of her skull.
She managed to keep both the sword and scabbard strapped tightly to her body, but they still jerked her backwards when the drag hit, forcing water between her body and the weapon.
The feeling of being pulled under briefly panicked her, causing her to thrash around even before she’d stopped falling.
Her swim strokes quickly corrected that, if with more effort than usual.
The weight of her sword got heavier as she started to move her arms to propel her body back to the surface. When she breached, she found she was smiling, even as she took in a relieved gulp of air. Coughing out water, she continued treading water and sucking in air as she looked around, getting the lay of the virtual landscape, this time from inside the watery cave.
When she looked to her left, she saw it, and the smile returned to her face.
An underground river.
It fed in the exact direction where Jet knew the physical canal fed into the lake inside the indoor Rings arena.
Moreover, within the simulation, it aimed roughly in the direction of the virtual town.
Without another thought, Jet began to swim, awkwardly at first, with the sword strapped to her back. She finally settled on a modified version of side-stroke and began covering more ground. She could feel herself closing the distance, both in the virtual world, and the real world of the physical arena.
She could hear it by then, too.
White water. More of it, and fast-moving.
She would either have to go through rapids––which meant rocks, navigating jammed logs, and whatever else––or Jet would be going over a second waterfall pretty soon.
Either way, the whitewater lived pretty much exactly where Jet would have expected to find the actual, physical canal from the arena.
Whether the rapids were real or virtual mattered to her less.
She knew where the canal went in the physical map, and she knew it had a number of gun turrets along either side once it cleared the lake. She also knew roughly where those towers stood, distance-wise, from the wider pool. They would try to mess with her sense of distance, of course, to get her to think the passageway stretched longer or shrank shorter than that of the physical arena. They’d likely use the rapids themselves to that end, by tossing her around and disorienting her… but Jet felt reasonably confident she could keep her bearings, now that she had the basics of her location.
If they used the turrets, which she fully expected they would, she should have ample opportunity to collect points.
Either way, the river should get her to that village.
Whether she would have time to rescue her target remained to be seen, but she had a fighting chance again.
Jet swam faster, working her arms and shoulders and frog-kicking hard with her legs.
Pushing water behind her as she alternated between breast and side-stroke to propel herself towards the darkest corner of the lake, Jet felt the clock ticking again, as if from somewhere directly overhead. She reminded herself to conserve at least some of her breath and strength for whatever she found on the other side.
She could already sense some kind of drop up ahead, and not only because the air increasingly filled with mist.
A current began pulling her faster forward in the dim light.
She felt her heart beating faster as she realized she couldn’t see the canal, maybe because of another sudden drop, or maybe because she would soon be forced to navigate the underground river in complete darkness.
Still, the drop had to be there. She could hear it.
Forcing the misgivings out of her mind, Jet reminded herself that the surrounding cave, no matter how real it looked, was only an illusion.
As the mist got heavier and the sound of white water louder, Jet felt her strokes slowing, her heart beating faster.
By then it didn’t really matter; she was being pulled fast by the current. Too fast to change her mind. She couldn’t even tell if the pull was real at that point, meaning something they were doing with the canal, or simply an illusion created by the game pullers and her sense-suit.
Not being able to see didn’t help.
Jet wasn’t claustrophobic––no one could survive the skag pits and be a true claustrophobe.
Even so, like any human, she didn’t like being cut off from any one of her primary sense-organs. Water pounded in her ears as the darkness increased, deafening her, and worsening that feeling of being cut off. She found herself gasping for air, taking in mouthfuls of mist that tasted more like water than oxygen.
She didn’t know when to breathe, when to take a deep breath, how to prepare for what she could feel coming, so close now she could almost taste it. She tensed every muscle in her body, knowing that wouldn’t help her either, but unable to help herself.
Despite all this, the drop managed to catch her completely by surprise.
The water, and therefore her sense of gravity and earth, disappeared out from under her.
No warning, no change in sound or light.
Jet fell fast, arms and legs flailing.
She knew they shouldn’t be––flailing, that is.
She should try to keep her limbs close to her body, so she’d be less likely to break something on the way down, but she couldn’t seem to help that, either.
Another smack of impact and Jet’s mouth and nose filled abruptly with water.
Gasping and coughing as she resurfaced, she blinked into the dark, fighting to see as the current pulled her faster, out of the path of a shorter waterfall she’d just surfed to the bottom.
She couldn’t see anything now.
She was just moving… fast enough, she felt it in her belly, that near-nausea of free-fall, even though water still surrounded her limbs. The sound of white water faded as she traveled further, which filled her with relief, if only because it made it less likely she was about to slam her head into a rock.
Even so, the darkness was disquieting.
Coupled with the speed of the current, the silence of the lightless tunnel upgraded the experience to terrifying.
Jet fought to regain her sense of where she was in the canal, but the waterfall had effectively thrown her off again. She tried to count back in terms of seconds, and got a better handle on where she likely was.
Like every other moving object in the physical arena, she knew the normal speed of the current in the canals. She also knew the pullers could change that speed, as easily as they could change the speed of the moving sidewalks in other parts of the Rings playground.
In that, the darkness almost helped.
Jet could focus solely on the sensation of movement, trying to note inconsistencies that would clue her off that the physical canal might be moving at a different pace than the impression given by her sense-suit. Within another thirty or so seconds, Jet felt like she had a pretty good guess on the discrepancy.
The real canal was definitely moving slower, maybe by a factor of two or three.
Between that difference and her disorientation after the waterfall, Jet figured she still had to be off in her calculations, maybe by as much as thirty yards in either direction. Still, she at least knew roughly when to start expecting an attack from the projectile turrets lining either side of the canal.
She only hoped it wouldn’t happen in pitch darkness.
She was starting to wonder if she should unsheath her sword, when the light changed.
Subtle at first, it seemed to happen quickly regardless, and Jet soon realized the speed of the virtual current was the cause.
As the water pulled her smoothly down the underground stream, Jet began to make out the outline of rock walls up ahead, what amounted to a curve in the passage. By then, she could almost see the rock ceiling, and the water where it reflected that blue-white glow.
Sunlight, Jet thought.
The light grew swiftly brighter, feeding Jet more and more of her surroundings, as if they were being painted into the ceiling and walls right before her eyes.
Stalactites appeared, hanging down over the ch
asm.
Jet glimpsed flickers of eyes up there, reflecting that dim light.
From the way they hung, suspended in the darker corners of the high ceiling, Jet found herself thinking of bats, like what they had back home. The likelihood of an Earth animal showing up here struck Jet as slim––which was too bad, since bats were harmless, other than being disease-carriers.
Whatever animal owned those eyes, they peered down at her from directly overhead.
If they attacked, she’d be at a huge disadvantage.
The thought had her reaching back to grip the handle of her sword, gritting her teeth at the awkward angle as the current pulled her swiftly along in the widening light.
After a moment of hesitation, she decided not to unsheath it, not until it became absolutely necessary.
She would need both hands to climb out of the canal once she reached the sunlight, and she didn’t want to risk losing the sword.
Even as she thought it, she heard the change again.
More white water.
That time, Jet knew exactly what to do.
They wouldn’t use the same trick twice, not in broad daylight, not at the end of a run, when she was low on clock-time and so close to the final goal. Whatever lay up ahead, it would probably kill her if she faced it head-on.
She needed to get the hell out of this canal.
It didn’t escape her notice that the source of that light––as well as the source of that roaring, white-water sound she could hear, now getting louder every second––lived roughly where Jet estimated the gun turrets to be waiting for her.
Feeling her heart rate accelerate, she put out an arm in the current, as well as a leg, trying to steer herself towards one side of the fast-moving canal. She did it just as she was being carried around that broad curve in the tunnel, which helped pull her towards the right side of the cave, where she could see more sets of those eyes watching her silently from the rock walls.
Keeping some part of her attention on them with her peripheral vision, she kept most of her focus directed towards the rocks at either side of the cave.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 56