Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV)

by JC Andrijeski

  Other points came from the accuracy of her own hits, style for hand-to-hand, and various ‘bonuses’ that could be found throughout the course...anything from weapons to armor to enhancements of speed, the ability to fly, reversal of virtual injuries, supplies...

  Jet would also be timed.

  She had four hours to make it through this initial, trial run.

  Whether they broke that up into segments or gave her a single, long stretch on one elaborate course was totally up to the Rings operator and his team.

  Jet knew four hours was still a short course, from the perspective of the pros, who sometimes spent a whole week on a particular run, sometimes with as many as three other live contestants, along with whoever they threw at them from the virtual end.

  The suit Jet wore would ensure that most of the physical sensations reached her, pleasant and unpleasant, and accurately enough that it might be difficult at times to tell a real injury from a fake one...or a real person from a fake one, for that matter. The pain would make it hard to move, either way, but the difference would be important in terms of whether it was a good idea to force her way through a broken leg, or tap out and request assistance...or even call out a willing defeat to make sure she’d walk again at some point.

  For this match, Jet didn’t need to worry about that so much.

  No one said it outright, but Jet knew that if she were seriously injured...if she let herself be seriously injured, she told herself...it was likely game over for her. It also likely meant game over in terms of a future in the Rings.

  In either case, they would call a halt to the demo match, since it was her first time. As little room for error as there was, in terms of Jet’s career, there was significantly more in terms of safeguards around her actual person.

  Or so she hoped.

  Jet knew she couldn’t think that way, though, or she’d be doomed. It was clear a lot of the Nirreth came expecting a good show, even if it was only Jet getting her costume torn off by virtual Nirreth and watching her get stung a few dozen times.

  “Remember, you are the first,” Laksri said softly. He was no longer touching her, but must have read at least some of her thoughts off her expression. “They came for this...more than your death. If you give them a good show, they will love you for it...”

  Looking up at him, Jet found herself nodding, even as an odd, and completely unwarranted flush of confidence infused her limbs.

  “Well,” she said. “...Then I guess I’ll have to give them one.”

  From the other side of where she stood, Richter smiled.

  Laksri, Richter, Anaze and Alice left her at the edge of the arena.

  Jet barely crossed the white line between the ramp and the edge of the actual play space when everything disappeared, leaving her alone. For the briefest instant, just long enough for Jet to really get a lock on her location among the arena components, she stood inside the artificial landscape, her feet on solid ground...

  Then, just as quickly, it was gone.

  Jet stood inside a flat, gray space, nothing under her feet and nothing above her head, or to either side of where she stood.

  Thankfully, the crowd disappeared, too.

  She didn’t move in the gray space, other than to check that the hilt of Black still protruded from the scabbard on her back...and to make sure she could still use her arms and legs.

  A tinny, accented voice rose, echoing around her in English. The echo was large enough that Jet had to assume it had been amplified throughout the entire stadium above.

  “Virtual settings check...” it said in a cheerful voice, like from one of the machines from Old Earth. “...Projection beginning in three minutes.”

  Jet’s heart hammered in her chest.

  It hit her again, that all of this could be over, in just a matter of minutes. She could be shuttled off to Ogli, and Richter’s ‘Plan B’ would suddenly be in effect, whether that meant her kidnapping the prince or blowing up his sleeping quarters or whatever else Richter had planned.

  She’d still be wearing the implant collar, like she was now.

  That meant, they could just throw a switch somewhere up in security and Jet’s head would be separated from her neck.

  Game over.

  Forcing that out of her mind, even as it occurred to her that her emotions may have already spiked high enough to prompt a scan from the machine, she gripped Black’s hilt tighter in her hand and tried to unsheath the blade from the scabbard. It wouldn’t move. She tried again, yanking harder, and started to panic.

  Then she remembered Alice warning her she wouldn’t have access to any weaponry until the session started.

  Forcing herself to take a handful of deep breaths, Jet recalled the map of the arena as clearly as she could, her body taut as she watched the seconds tick backwards slowly.

  One minute. She’d already burned through two, freaking out.

  Forty-five seconds.

  Thirty.

  Jet fell slowly into a crouch, almost without noticing she did it.

  Pulling up every memory of every training session she’d had with Alice, or with the old man, Mishio, back home...or with Anaze himself, back when they used to run little contests about who could do what when they were ‘bored.’ Those contests, Jet now realized, had been designed to test her abilities in this very thing. Obviously, Anaze had decided she could do it, or he never would have offered her up to his father as a candidate.

  The thought comforted her. But only a little.

  In the next second, she dismissed all of it.

  She remembered what Mishio told her, what had been true for every fight in which Jet had found herself since. He said if you had to think about a move in an actual fight, it was already too late. Only he said it in Mishio-speak.

  “Training is training time. Fight is fight time. You train while you fight, and you dead. No time to remember in a fight. You act. Hope your body remember...”

  Jet sank into her body as the memory repeated somewhere in her mind.

  She watched the clock tick down the last few seconds. Too late to learn anything new now. She knew what she knew. That was it.

  She’d find out soon enough whether it was enough.

  In that last second, Jet took a breath.

  Before it was completed, the gray walls melted in front of her eyes...

  ...and reformed into something else.

  Giant, burned-out buildings appeared in front of her, still smoking from recent fires. They rose dozens of stories, up into a flat, gray sky, which also held plumes of smoke, a red-tinted black. Their trails looked like a wound cutting through the pre-dawn light.

  Jet didn’t move for a long set of seconds. She simply stared, conscious of the terrain around her, trying to map it to what she knew of the physical course, and where she stood in relation to it. None of the structures she’d mapped made sense, given her current landscape, so apparently she was meant to walk, at least until that terrain shifted.

  She didn’t walk though, not right away.

  Instead, she scanned the skies, and the windows of the nearby buildings, trying to get a sense of what the target might entail.

  There was always a target...in every game.

  There was always a goal of some kind.

  Sometimes it was as simple as staying alive long enough for rescue by an allied ship or a group of hunters or warriors with whom one got separated. Sometimes it was reaching a village or well-fortified town or city. Sometimes it was more specific...like rescuing a teammate from enemy soldiers or a pack of wild animals, or detonating a bomb inside enemy headquarters, or kidnapping a particular leader or technician from the other side’s team.

  Clearly, from looking around, the time period was modern.

  Looking at her clothes, Jet realized those had changed, too.

  She wore a dark gray uniform with armored plating, heavy boots...but 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 in the historical records of the Nirreth invasion of Earth.

  Even as she thought it, Jet flattened her back to the segment 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 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, that 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, her old life and everyone in it. 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 that past winter 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, or 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.

  The images looked 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 that they were not.

  She could remember that in this game, 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 this, too...either they wouldn’t have them at all, 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 in her system...along with the vitamin and energy shots and whatever else the techs gave her as they handed her the sensor 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 any of her knives, or the bow and arrow she usually kept with her in case she needed to fire from cover.

  This would be a strictly hand-to-hand fighting session.

  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.

  Instead 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 themselves called them pulre, or ‘hammers’...and 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 the helmet she hadn’t realized her avatar wore sparked into life.

  “Alpha-10, Digger Unit...this is Base 2. Do you copy?”

  The voice was so human, the accent so perfect, that 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 pause, a realization that she’d missed the real fight, that it had been over before she’d been born. All of the settlement kids felt that way to some degree, like they’d been born into the world after the war had already been lost...their future already 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 was steady, though.

  “Yeah. 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 then, 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 then, a 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 it hadn’t been steaming. Her pal, 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 was back in Vancouver.

  They’d sent her back home.

  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 t
he arena itself.

  It also occurred to her that they might have given her help...VR help, that is.

  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 at all were a number of symbols written by hand next to one of the target points. The only reason that was strange was that those symbols appeared to be in Nargili.

  Why on Earth would the rebel 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 of 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 landscape continued to be the critical point.

  If she didn’t lose sight of that, it might help her bridge any gaps between reality, her memories of the real Vancouver, and the simulation.