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, though, she found she was smiling, even as she took in a relieved gulp of air. Coughing a little, 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...and it stood exactly where Jet knew the physical canal fed into the lake inside the indoor Rings arena.
Moreover, 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.
She would either have to go through rapids of some kind, which meant rocks and whatever else, or Jet would be going over a second waterfall pretty soon. Either way, the white water lived pretty much exactly where Jet would have expected to find the actual, physical canal of 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...maybe using the rapids themselves to that end...but Jet felt reasonably confident she could keep her bearings, more or less. If they used the turrets, which she fully expected they would, she should have ample opportunity to collect some 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 stroke 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, though; 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...that 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 on the water 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 that 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 relieved her if only because it made it less likely she was about to slam her head into a rock.
Even so, the darkness was disquieting.
Coupling that darkness with the speed of the current and 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. On the other hand, she knew the operators could change that speed, almost as easily as they could change the speed of the moving sidewalks under her feet in other parts of the Rings’ physical 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 canal itself 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 that 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, too, and even the glint of the water as 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 in that dark, hanging down over the chasm. 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, really, since bats were mostly 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 unti
l it became absolutely necessary. She would need both hands to climb out of the canal once she reached the sunlight.
Even as she thought it, she heard the change again.
More white water.
That time, Jet found she 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 had 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.
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 that someone was shooting at her.
Hurting herself had pretty much saved her, though...if only because she’d been too close to the rock walls to make a good target.
The curve had been tighter than she’d realized, and she’d already managed to get pretty close to the right side. 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 that was just an illusion created by the Rings operators, too.
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 that time, 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 white water sound grew deafening in those few seconds.
A flutter whispered by her head, and Jet looked up, waving the sword almost 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.
She would go over the waterfall.
Bats or no, she would die, now, if she didn’t stop herself.
She reached out with her free hand, grabbed at a rock, cutting her hand without slowing herself much at all and pausing only 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 now, 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 Jet had been hearing for the last minute or so. Three of the bat-like creatures gripped it 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 another 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 back against the tree’s root, refusing to let go under the onslaught of another of those winged animals, even as her stomach was crushed into the hard root. 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 from winged dinosaurs.
Shadows interrupted the light, the size of a person. Bigger, really.
Without thinking, Jet ducked into the rock wall...even as another impact 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, hiding as much of her body as she could under the shelter of the rock and 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...and thus the projectile-firing mechanism of the arena. She hadn’t really thought about the fact that the ladder was directly under the firing mechanism, and thus inaccessible to it.
Still, someone was shooting at her, and they would eventually try climbing down to get a better angle. Also, there was that whole clock-ticking thing, and the fact that Jet still hadn’t collected much in the way of points on this run.
She needed to get out of there. Now.
Gripping Black tighter in her hand, 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-laden 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, at least not too much.
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.
Despite 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 itself. 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 from nearly eye-level.
They saw her, too.
Swinging their guns in her direction, they opened fire even as she jumped from the tree to cover behind the next rock formation. One of their shots managed to help her out, by exploding one of the lizards in mid-flight, but Jet didn’t pause to gloat. Panting, she crouched behind that lava formation, only about six feet from the outcropping 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 pause 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 mainly 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 that time, either.
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 nearer to the cliff wall, where she could stand at almost her full height.
Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV) Page 52