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

by JC Andrijeski

  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, so she knew it was pacing her over that same, narrow outcropping of roof. She also knew the lines that whipped through the air could likely slip under the eaves, but that they couldn’t go through it, 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 her aunt and uncle could be believed.

  Connecting that idea briefly to Laksri in her head, 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...or both of her legs or arms...which would make it virtually (and literally) impossible to fight, even if in reality her body remained totally intact.

  Jet made that mistake once, in one of her later practice sessions with Alice after she’d started using her memory of the track 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 and 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.

  Remembering again why she was here, Jet realized 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 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 she released and killed whatever lived in that underground cage, 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, too.

  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. Finally, she just 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.

  THE COMMAND CENTER

  Under the virtual Vancouver street, everything was pitch black, just as Jet remembered it from the real sewers. The feeble light from her helmet spread a kind of 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 in whichever direction she aimed her head.

  Unsheathing Black, which she’d put back in the scabbard so she could climb down the ladder two-handed, she ventured forward into the tunnel in the direction that the map indicated lay towards 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, too, 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 that 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 and the two traps in the floor.

  None of it mapped right, and she felt nothing to explain why.

  Finally, after she’d gone thirty or so paces, the truth hit her.

  She’d actually climbed down. She was on a second, lower level.

  Which meant there was a whole segment of the arena Jet hadn’t mapped in any way, or connected to the map that ran along the surface.

  Leaning over without slowing her pace, she touched the rough wall of the cement sewer tunnel, pulling her fingers away at the feeling of slime and moss.

  She could be anywhere, though.

  The sense suit could make her feel those same sensations, even if nothing but air greeted her fingers in reality. The actual terrain could be a long, rectangular or square room, filled with the occasional ladder to the surface, but with no way of knowing which was real and which fake.

  Her boots splashed through water at the bottom of the pipe, and again Jet had to remind herself that w
hat she was looking at wasn’t real, despite the detail down to the human graffiti tags filled with images and words she almost recognized.

  She was about to risk trying one of the ladders up to the surface, when she heard a loud splashing and thrashing sound up ahead in the passage. Gripping Black more tightly, using both hands, Jet moved forward, trying to make no noise. She could see the bend up ahead in the tunnel now, and knew the splashing thing lay beyond that bend.

  The sound echoed up the pipe walls again. Whatever it was, it sounded heavy. It also sounded low to the ground, like maybe it had been injured.

  A growling noise echoed down the cement pipe, and Jet froze.

  Briefly, she tried to place if she’d ever heard it before.

  Whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t human.

  It didn’t sound Nirreth, either.

  Glancing up the ladder, Jet considered climbing it, wondering if she should risk what might be on the other side. Whatever lay beyond that bend, it might come for her if she made noise opening the hatch, anyway. On the ground, at least she had her sword.

  Weighing the risks back and forth in her mind, Jet decided the ladder was a trap.

  Walking past it, she gripped Black’s hilt tighter in her hand and made her way cautiously towards the bend. She would at least see what she was dealing with. Then she’d know whether running back to the ladder or fighting the thing on the ground was the smarter idea.

  Climbing up the cement pipe carefully with her boots, she walked on the dry part of the curve to keep from making noise. Turning her head to shine the head lamp on the relevant segment of pipe as soon as she was close enough, she came to a stuttering stop, balanced on the side of pipe with one hand touching the wall over her head.

  The fingers of her other hand clutched the hilt of Black as she stared down at the bottom of the pipe and the foot or so of water that filled it.

  An animal stared back at her with black, reflecting eyes.

  It was big. Bigger than Jet expected.

  Before she could ID the thing with any confidence, it opened its flat, triangular-shaped jaws, making a growling, hissing sound through two rows of brilliant white teeth. The teeth looked too long for its mouth...and its body had to be over twenty feet long, from the end of its nose to the half-curled tail that ran up the pipe wall on one side.

  Realizing she had no idea if it was real or not, Jet leapt back without thinking, that time landing in the water at the bottom of the pipe with a splash. By the time she regained her balance, the creature had already lunged in her direction, too fast for her to be able to even think about running, much less making it to the ladder before it caught up with her.

  Facing off with the thing, she fought to think through how best to defend herself, even as the name of the beast came unbidden to her mind.

  Alligator.

  They were new in the Vancouver area.

  Jet’s mother told her they never ventured so far north before, not until sometime in the past twenty or so years, when the monsoons got hot enough and the southern part of the United States dry enough that the reptiles began lake and river hopping to follow the water.

  Jet had even seen one or two in the wild, mainly in the estuaries and river mouths, as well as one she ran into at closer quarters...a baby she’d found floating in the monsoon-filled remnants of what had once been a recreational swimming pool, overgrown with poisonous water plants that looked a bit like orchids, and choked with lilies and mosquito spawn as well as a number of smaller fish and amphibians too contaminated to risk eating.

  The biggest one Jet had ever seen in the wild hadn’t even been half the size of the monster she faced now. Staring at the small, black, gold-rimmed eyes, she couldn’t help wondering if it had been genetically modified in some way...or simply exaggerated in the virtual projection.

  When it lunged at her the next time, Jet found herself swinging Black at its head, hitting hard scales with the sharp edge without really making a dent. She managed to drive it back a foot or two in mid-lunge, but that was about it.

  When it lunged the third time, Jet swung at it again, hitting it harder that time, and driving it back the same amount of space it had gained.

  She tried to decide if she could distract it long enough to make a run for the ladder, when the reptile jerked it’s body in a whip-like arc, it tail coming off the side of the pipe and smacking her in the side of the head. It couldn’t hit her full-strength, since the pipe was too narrow for it to come all the way around, but the blow still threw her into the pipe wall.

  Jet slashed at the thing’s head again, right after it scrabbled forward on its stubby, clawed legs to make up the distance after she’d fallen. Using her hands, including the one clutching Black’s hilt, Jet dragged herself to her feet, still holding the sword out in front of her.

  The lizard moved faster than Jet would have imagined, given its size. She just managed to drive it back another few feet, her peripheral vision now watching the tail, when she heard another noise coming down from the segment of tunnel behind her.

  That sound was a lot more familiar.

  Heavy, booted feet were coming straight for her. The culler ship had sent an extraction team once they figured out where Jet had gone.

  Realizing she was out of time, no matter which way she opted to go, Jet made up her mind.

  From the echo in the pipe, she could guess she had maybe five minutes before the Nirreth were upon her. Then she’d be dealing with modern weapons instead of claws and teeth. Moving before she could lose her nerve, she leapt up over the alligator’s head, dodging the snapping jaws by jerking up and to the right the instant she saw it lunge, so that it was already in motion and couldn’t correct for Jet’s change in direction. The creature had expected her to step back again, so she managed to get past it before it could turn its head, and then it was trapped by the narrow width of the pipe.

  Jet landed half on the monster’s back, having no where else to go. Turning swiftly around, she planted one foot on either side of the creature’s body, just behind the thick front arms....then twisted the grip of the sword in an arc with her hand.

  She gripped it with all of her strength before plunging the blade straight down, into the neck of the monster, two-handed.

  The giant body began thrashing the instant Jet had it pinned to the water and mud at the bottom of the pipe.

  It knocked her off-balance but she managed to maintain her grip on the sword, half-kneeling on its thick neck as she reinforced her grip and twisted the blade, her hands slick now with sweat and filthy water and the creature’s blood.

  When it paused its thrashing, she pulled the blade out, that time plunging it straight back in through the middle of its triangular-shaped head.

  After a few heavier, slower jerks of its long body, the lizard grew still.

  Right when Jet let out a sigh of relief that it was finally dead, another hard thrash of its body and limbs threw her off. Again, she slammed into the concrete wall, her breath leaving her in a whoosh that made her chest explode in pain.

  As she lay there, unable to move, she felt the current of water grow stronger around her.

  The Rings operators were flooding the tunnel.

  Hearing the footsteps echoing louder in the tall pipe, she scrabbled to her feet in the slippery, sewage-smelling water, still gasping against the pain, her free hand clutching her chest. Without checking the alligator to determine if it was alive, she fought her way over its body and wrestled the sword out of the bone of its skull. Just as quickly, she climbed back in the direction of its tail, then leapt to the drier curve of the pipe as soon as it was in range.

  But she missed getting her traction right that time, and lost her balance.

  She fell back into the bottom of the pipe, landing on her hands and knees and making enough noise that she winced. Pausing only to dunk the blade briefly in the now, rapidly-rising water, she waded past the end of the alligator’s tail, moving as quickly as she could and using the scaly ski
n as leverage.

  Once she’d cleared the animal altogether, she began wading in earnest through the brackish stream as fast as she could, and as quietly as possible. She bit her lip against the smell, reminding herself again that none of this was real.

  By then, the water had risen nearly to her knees, and Jet found herself hoping it would drive the Nirreth soldiers back. If they had been real Nirreth, it probably would have, but under the circumstances, Jet couldn’t afford to wait to find out.

  Instead she half-waded and half-jogged through the current, and took the first fork in the tunnels that she came to, choosing the one that led her deeper in the direction that she already wanted to go.

  Also, the pipe was smaller and it would be harder for the Nirreth to follow, at least at any speed.

  Unfortunately, that also meant it filled up with water quicker.

  While that would provide an additional deterrent to the Nirreth, it might also get her killed.

  Jet hadn’t seen anything about points in the projection when she killed the alligator, so she had to assume she was in completely blind too, no way of knowing if she was off-course, or racking point counts or not. She was still pretty sure she’d stumbled onto a real, honest-to-goodness, underground level, so the best she really had to go on was the VR map they’d given her. All of her prep on the terrain with Laksri and Alice was pretty much useless down here.

  Wading faster through the rising water, and aware suddenly of how much noise she was making with the splashing and her boots echoing on the pipes, she felt over her person again, looking for a weapon she might have missed.

  She stopped when she found a small mechanical device, again attached inside her vest, in a smaller pocket she could have sworn had been empty the first tine she checked. The device was so flat in shape it could have been a part of the shielding in the armor, but still, she was reasonably sure she wouldn’t have missed it.

  Jet also found a set of dense, flattened bricks of some kind of clay on the other side of her vest. Unlike the device itself, she recognized that right off. Her uncle showed her something similar once, when they were getting ready to help the nearest skag town build a new longhouse after their previous one got hit by raiders. The clay was a kind of explosive, extremely powerful, her uncle said, and relatively stable, given its punch.