She probably wouldn’t be able to climb out here, anyway.
The canal had walls like a subway tunnel or a sewer, not like a natural river with a graduated bank. Flicking back to the map of the physical arena she kept stored in her brain, Jet tried to remember her options for getting out of the steep-sided canal as it existed in reality.
Within seconds, she had it.
The solution, but also the problem.
A ladder did live in these walls. Right under the first set of gun turrets. She would have to fight her way out… or, at the very least, be quick as hell.
Still, at least it was on the right side of the canal, both figuratively and literally. She could probably reach it if she didn’t get attacked between here and there.
Jet moved her body more, steering herself closer to the rock walls.
Another curve ahead, and the light was bright now.
According to Jet’s guess, she had to be getting close.
It was likely just past that curve.
Maneuvering herself closer to that side, she reached back and unsheathed Black, gripping the sword as tightly as she could so she wouldn’t lose it in the current. Still, keeping hold of the sword in the water was awkward, and Jet almost immediately found herself rethinking the decision.
She couldn’t sheath it now, though.
She was out of time.
Even as she thought it, the current whipped her around the last corner, and into direct sunlight. Blinded, Jet let out a surprised grunt when she slammed into the canal wall.
Even as she did, something struck the water not far from her body, splashing a wave into her mouth. Her mind immediately went to those bat-like creatures in the cave, when it hit her someone was shooting at her.
Hurting herself had pretty much saved her, if only because she’d been too close to the rock walls to make a good target.
She was still being flung forward in the water, bumping and rubbing against the wall as she picked up speed, but at least she hugged the wall.
Her leg scraped against something under the water and she cried out, clutching it with her free hand and gasping as she fought to see through the influx of light, realizing only then how accustomed she’d gotten to seeing in the near-dark.
She could feel warmth on her hand, and realized it was blood.
It hurt too badly for her to be able to tell if she’d actually cut herself, ripping the sense-suit, or if it was just an illusion created by the Rings operators.
Another shot slammed into the water not far from her and Jet ducked, twisting sideways as she paddled back in the direction of the canal walls, struggling against the fast current. She looked for cover, but in the back of her mind, she also remembered the waterfall up ahead, the possibility of dying. Through the blinding light, Jet made out the dark shape of rocks right before she slammed into the rough wall a second time, hitting the same leg in roughly the same place, hard enough that she let out an involuntary cry, and nearly dropped Black.
When the pain really hit, the cry turned into something closer to a scream.
The whitewater sound grew deafening.
A flutter whispered by her head, and Jet looked up, waving the sword in instinct.
The fanged creature that whispered past her head let out an eerie cooing sound before it winged away. She waved the sword at a few more of them, wondering if the scent of blood drew them, or if her screams managed to wake them up.
Panic about the fanged animals snapped her out of focusing on her leg.
It worsened as she remembered where she was.
The waterfall.
Bats or no, she would die if she didn’t get out of this water.
She reached out with her free hand, grabbed at a rock, cutting her hand without slowing herself much at all. She paused just long enough to swing the sword at another of the flying creatures, right before it snatched off a handful of her hair. Trying to evade another of the winged animals, Jet slammed into the wall a third time.
She barely felt it as she focused every ounce of her concentration on stopping her progress towards that cliff.
She could see better though, and up ahead there was––
A tree.
A small, twisted tree grew out of the rock, right before a line of water that had to form the edge of the waterfall. Three of the bat-like creatures gripped the tree’s trunk with taloned claws, but Jet barely gave them a second thought as she lunged towards it.
Slamming into the root, she cried out again from the pain, but refused to let go of either it or the sword.
Her cry turned into a shriek when one of the flying, lizard-like creatures landed on her back, biting and tearing at her arms and neck until a few desperate swipes of her sword got it to alight on a higher branch. Black’s handle cut into her hand when she slammed it into the tree’s root, refusing to let go under the onslaught of another of those winged animals.
Her hand on the other side gripped a higher and thicker piece of the tree jutting out of the same rock.
It was the ladder. It had to be.
Even as she thought it, Jet saw more motion above.
That time, it wasn’t winged dinosaurs.
Shadows interrupted the light, the size of a person. Bigger, really.
Without thinking, Jet ducked into the rock wall, right before something whizzed past her head, then splashed water over her, hitting only a dozen or so centimeters from her body. One of the flying lizards distracted her by swooping at her face, but when another shot landed even closer, Jet dragged herself up higher on the root.
She hid as much of her body as she could under the shelter of the rock, managing to cut the wings off one of the lizards in mid-flight.
It hit her that she was mostly sheltered from the ledge above.
That meant she was also out of range of the projectile-firing mechanism of the arena. She hadn’t really thought about the fact that the ladder was directly under the firing mechanism.
Still, someone was shooting at her, and they would eventually climb down to get a better angle. Also, there was that whole clock-ticking thing, and the fact Jet still hadn’t collected much in the way of points.
She couldn’t just crouch there to avoid getting shot.
She needed to move.
Gripping Black tighter, she pulled the blade off the root, balancing on her stomach and her other arm as she awkwardly re-sheathed the sword. It wouldn’t do her much good once she got away from the flying lizards; she already knew the armor-clad teddy bears had guns.
Besides, she would never make it up the tree with the sword in her hand.
The instant she got the sword back in its scabbard, another of the lizards screeched and dove at her. Protecting her face and eyes as well as she could, Jet did her best to ignore it as she grabbed hold of a higher part of the root with her free hand and began yanking herself up. Her leg hurt like hell when she scraped it up over the bark and rough edges of the roots, but she gritted her teeth and dragged it up anyway, fighting not to let it slow her down.
The next lizard that got close enough, going for her bleeding leg, Jet kicked directly in the face, causing it to tumble down into the canal.
The splash it made was weirdly satisfying.
Biting her tongue hard enough to taste blood, Jet managed to get up fairly quickly, until she was standing on the root, still hiding under the rock cliff and behind the tree.
She didn’t hesitate from there, but made a jump for a higher branch, swinging herself up. She cursed almost the instant she had––mostly because she immediately saw four of those creepy, teddy bear guys at eye-level.
They saw her, too.
Swinging their guns in her direction, they opened fire.
Jet leapt from the tree to cover, behind the next rock formation.
One of their shots managed to help her out, exploding one of the lizards in mid-flight, but Jet didn’t pause to gloat.
Panting, she crouched behind the lava formation, roughly six feet from the outcr
opping where the tree grew out over the water. Within another breath, she began to crawl swiftly and quietly along the ledge under the curl of rock. She didn’t stop until she reached the place where the rock wall stretched higher, and then only to peer out briefly, trying to get a sense if her pursuers had discerned where she was headed, or what she might be up to.
Thankfully, they still appeared to be focused on the area where they’d seen her last, and the rock outcropping on the other side.
Also, the flying lizards, at least, didn’t appear to be following her.
Jet’s hand, neck and shoulders were bleeding freely now, and her hurt leg throbbed.
She panted from exertion and adrenaline, but didn’t pause for long.
Moving fast, she pulled herself to her feet and ran under the higher bit of ledge. Again, she heard gunshots and panicked, thinking she’d been seen, then realized they were too far behind her for them to be aiming at her precisely.
She sped her legs regardless, making it across the narrow ledge to the higher outcropping of rocks by the cliff wall, where she could stand at almost her full height.
She stood there, wedged in a kind of crevice, protected on both sides, but seemingly trapped in a dead-end of rock that rose up in a steep wall above her.
Jet stared up the cliff, feeling a faint pulse of relief, despite her jacked-up heart rate.
She knew where she was going now.
She just had to move fast.
In the physical arena, a rock-climbing wall stood here, roughly where the cliff wall and the crevasse met. She could almost see the hand-holds through the VR illusion, and the small canyon should shelter her from the murderous teddy-bears, at least until they figured out where she’d gone. Without spending too much time thinking about what might be on the other side, Jet jammed her foot and her hurt hand into the first set of grips and hauled herself up.
Luckily, she’d always been a fast climber.
Her leg hurt.
She also felt more of her skin come off when she used her fingers to grip a particularly sharp crag in the rock.
She did her best to ignore both.
Speed was what mattered now. Within the first five or six meters, she was panting, but she forced her limbs faster, trying to use what remained of her adrenaline. Her muscles shook, half in exhaustion and half from that manic energy, which intensified as her feeling of exposure worsened.
She didn’t look back until she was more than halfway up, and then in barely a glance. Her nerves worsened to outright fear when she realized the ridge of rock disappeared towards the top of the cliff. If any of those teddy-bear things happened to look up, they would see her as soon as she climbed past it.
She remembered that last bit being tricky in the arena, too.
The grips were far apart, smaller than the ones below.
To get to the platform above, and the moving walkway that led from the second floor down to the first, she would need to spend a few minutes getting her weight distribution right, or she could easily fall, even without being shot.
The thought sobered her, enough to get her to slow down and concentrate.
She didn’t look down as she positioned her arms, hands and feet up the last few meters of cliff. Instead she focused all of her mind on how she’d done this wall in the past.
She didn’t relax until she reached the very last yard, and then her heart started hammering in her chest, that time in a kind of giddy victory. She was just reaching up to the edge of the cliff, when a shot rang out, seemingly after a chunk of rock exploded in front of her, kicking up dust and shards that cut her face.
Jet nearly lost her grip.
Gasping, she didn’t look down, but yanked herself up the last body length, throwing her weight up to the ledge.
She did it fast––faster than she normally would have, but another shot hit the cliff not far from her, showering her in more rock shards and dust.
The impact being so near her face brought up another mad rush of adrenaline, jerking her limbs into motion before her mind could catch up.
She had her stomach on the ledge in seconds.
She swung her legs up after… right before she rolled.
She remembered the shape and basic angle of the moving platform right before she would have rolled off the edge––falling a good fifty meters and probably breaking something she needed, if she didn’t kill herself outright.
She managed to stay in the area of the platform though, even with dust blinding her eyes and making her cough, her face cut up from glass-like shards of rock.
She crawled to her feet right as a siren went off below.
More shots kicked up dust at the edge of the cliff, but Jet had ducked out of sight by then, and hopefully out of range.
She didn’t wait to find that out for sure.
Turning, she ran down the grassy slope, the one that began just past the edge of the rock cliff. She felt the faint wobble of the moving platform before the VR projection synched with her sense-suit, but she only tracked the difference long enough to get a sense of the location of the next set of gun-turrets.
She tried to map how soon they would have her in range; and veered to her right, trying to widen that gap.
At that point, Jet moved almost in auto-pilot.
She let her training do the work for her, even as she tried to think ahead, to decide what came next.
She could see the first of the mud-brick houses.
Looking around as she ran, she glanced back at the swath of exposed underground river, realizing only then that it formed another crater-like formation, surrounded by black and red lava rock, dripping with prehistoric-looking ferns.
That crater lived pretty much dead center to the town, making it nearly invisible until one got high enough to look past the ridge of cliff to the water below.
The location of the river’s opening, below the field and surrounded by those mud-brick buildings, also explained why Jet hadn’t been able to see it from the forest.
Something nagged at her about the set-up, but she couldn’t think what.
She didn’t stop to rest until she reached the first house. Leaning against the mud-brick wall, she stared around, gasping, fighting to slow her heart-rate even as she reacted to the familiarity of her surroundings.
It felt almost like she knew this place.
Jet wondered if she’d come across something like it in one of her training sessions, but no concrete images came to mind, just that overall feeling. The feeling itself was overly intense for a training exercise, anyway; something about this place evoked a deep longing in her, combined with a sinking feeling of dread.
Whispers of nostalgia colored both of those things, less tangible but somehow more disturbing by how personal they felt.
For those few seconds Jet took to collect herself, she could only lean against the mud bricks, panting and nauseated. She’d just decided to move on, to run for the next set of huts, when the scene in front of her flickered.
The image warped, changing.
Darkening.
Briefly, a new image replaced the old.
Jet saw people standing around her.
They were unmistakably human.
Jet gazed around in shock, taking in faces that felt almost familiar.
Her heart pounded in her chest. Wind rippled the grasses, waving the high branches of trees, like a distant crash of ocean waves, but those people didn’t move, didn’t stop looking at her.
The familiarity of them stirred something far more primal than mere memory.
It brought up a wave of emotion that threatened tears, that made her feel for a moment that she stood in a real place, on real ground, with a real sky overhead and real people and animals untainted by centuries upon centuries of war and death and the world and its inhabitants being eroded away.
The humans around her just stood there, as silent as her.
Jet blinked at them, but they didn’t disappear.
She saw young faces and old, mal
e and female, dark-skinned and light. Nirreth stood among them too, she realized in shock. She saw other beings in different forms, ones she didn’t know, but the ones that stood out most sharply were human next to their dark-skinned…
Cousins.
Nirreth and human… they were something to one another.
Relatives.
Friends, even.
Jet’s mind couldn’t wrap around it, couldn’t make sense of it.
She saw almond-shaped and round eyes. Dark and light irises. Square faces and thin. Broad lips and narrow. Freckled and tanned and beige and blue-black skin. Blond hair beside shades of brown, red, black, gray, midnight blue… even hairless scalps with patterned skin.
What shocked Jet’s heart, however, was that feeling of sameness.
They felt like family. Like her family, but also encompassing a wider bond, something far more ancient.
One man, in particular, with dark brown eyes, a sharp-featured face and full mouth, looked at her with so much emotion locked behind his eyes that their meeting cut Jet’s breath. She had no concrete way to make sense of any of what she felt when she looked at him, to give it a label or a story that made sense.
Jet fought to breathe, to speak to those silent people…
When the image vanished.
12
Toy Surprise
It took Jet a few seconds to pull herself back together.
In those seconds, her heart pounded, her hands shook, her knees trembled.
Jet had never been one to let emotion get the better of her, but something about that flash of diversion, of insight, of memory or hallucination––whatever the hell that had been––was difficult to shake off. Her mind intervened, seeking an explanation that would allow her to move forward, to let it all go, to dismiss what she’d felt.
It found only one.
Trazen.
Trazen was behind this.
He must have compiled that image, thrown it at her and manipulated her emotions through the suit to knock her off-balance.
He was probably trying to freeze her up, get her to run down the clock.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 57