She was wedged in a kind of crevice now, 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’d known where she was going that time.
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 teddy-bear guys, 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.
Of course, 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...but 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 now, 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 not much more than a glance. Her nerves worsened to outright fear when she realized that the ridge of rock disappeared towards the top of the cliff. If any of those teddy-bear things happened to look up at the wrong moment, 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 back 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 itself, 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 on the cliff face.
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 face, again showering her in rock shards and dust. The impact so near her face brought another mad rush of adrenaline to her limbs, jerking them into action before her mind could catch up. She had her stomach on the ledge within seconds, and swung her legs up after her...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, and her face cut up with the 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 she’d ducked out of sight by then, and hopefully out of their 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 likely have her within range; and veered to her right within seconds, trying to widen that gap.
At that point, Jet moved almost in auto-pilot, letting 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, it occurred to her that the swath of exposed underground river she’d just left lived in another crater-like formation, surrounded by black and red lava rock and dripping with prehistoric-looking ferns. That crater stood pretty much dead center of 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 above.
Something nagged at her about the set-up, but she couldn’t think what.
She found herself pausing once she reached the first house. Leaning against the mud-brick wall, she stared around, fighting to slow her heart-rate even as she reacted to the familiarity of her surroundings. It felt almost like she knew this place.
Or, not quite knew it...not in the sense of having actually been there before.
The familiarity tugged at her, however.
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 combined a near longing with a deeper feeling of dread, something that bordered on fear.
Whispers of nostalgia colored both of those things, less tangible but somehow more disturbing by how personal they felt.
For those few seconds Jet gave herself to collect her mind, she could only lean against the mud bricks, panting and nauseous. 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 in front of her.
Darkening.
Briefly, a new image replaced the old.
Jet saw people standing around her, unmistakeably human.
She gazed in shock at faces that felt almost familiar, feeling her heart pound in her chest, only the sound of wind running through the grasses and the high branches of trees reaching her ears, like a distant crash of ocean waves. The familiarity stirred something far more primal in her than mere memory. It brought up a nearly violent flood 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 people around her just stood there, silent.
Jet blinked at them, but they didn’t disappear.
She saw young faces and old, male 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 humans...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 black, brown, red, 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 story that made sense.
Jet fought to breathe, to speak to those silent people...
...When the image just as instantly vanished.
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...of whatever that had been...was difficult to shake off. Her mind intervened after a few more heart beats, 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 throw her off. He was probably trying to freeze her up, get her to run down the clock. She knew that in general, Nirreth liked using psychological games to test opponents. Some of those were expressly calculated to paralyze their targets’ minds, to throw them into some kind of confused, emotional tailspin from which they might not recover.
Jet knew all this. They’d just never done anything so weird to her before.
Usually, their attempts to unsettle her took more heavy-handed forms.
Seeing other humans beaten, eaten, molested, chained, tortured, raped. Her trainer, Alice, told her that the game pullers would keep experimenting, however, until they found something that really pushed her buttons. Laksri warned her of the same. Having that much repeat in her mind managed to pull Jet out of her paralysis, if only by reminding her where she was.
She was on Trazen’s turf. In Trazen’s mind.
Nothing was real here. Nothing.
Remembering that much got Jet moving.
She pushed off the wall of the mud-brick house, sprinting further up the hill and towards the next set of buildings, which appeared to be larger than the ones Jet had just left.
She needed to find the house with the hostage. If she could get to them, whoever they were, and haul them back to the river...meaning, if they weren’t completely immobilized, or missing crucial limbs, or excessively drugged, or insane...she could probably get them out.
She’d already decided on her exit strategy.
While the falls probably would have killed her, had she allowed herself to be swept down them before reaching the town, they struck her as her best bet, in terms of being the logical end-point to the actual run. The pullers would want a dramatic finish, so going for the safer-seeming out would probably just get her gunned down by the sniper.
Unlike in real life, Jet had learned that playing it safe could get her killed in the Rings. Like Richter always warned her, it payed to take the Rings seriously...but also to remember that, at base, the Rings were theater.
Anyway, she hadn’t seen any of those teddy bear things swim.
She would just have to take the chance that they wouldn’t run her down with some kind of boat before she made it past the falls with her prize. Chances were, she and her hostage should be in the clear if they made it that far, though.
Assuming they survived the falls themselves, of course.
Jet thought all this as she sprinted up the hill, wincing from the deafening screech of alarms as they wound higher. She unsheathed her sword before she left the shelter of the next set of structures. Coming up behind a guard, she managed to get him from behind, hacking at his neck with the blade and dropping him before he turned. She wrestled the gun off him as soon as he was down. Exhaling in relief as she threw the strap around her shoulder, she gave herself a few seconds to breathe, even as she wiped then re-sheathed the sword.
Looking around the collection of mud huts, she found herself changing direction once she felt herself reach the end of the moving platform from the second level of the arena.
She was back on the first floor.
She now had a pretty good idea where they would keep their hostage, too.
A cluster of gun turrets lived just fifty meters to her left in the physical arena, which coincided with the largest of the mud-brick structures. They would have the hostage there. Even if they didn’t, Jet could collect points from the turrets themselves. She even had some hope she’d already gotten enough to keep her average from tanking too dangerously, so now she might even be able to shove it higher.
Still, she wanted that hostage.
Running for the larger building, she shot two more guards on the way, then a third walking between the smaller houses on her approach to the back end of the house. Once she’d cleared the way, she slung the gun around her back and unsheathed Black.
Time for a bit of drama...Jet wanted some bloody kills to make the crowds go wild and win her style points with the Rings Board.
Nothing accomplished that better than a bit of blood.
Keeping the weapons turrets to her left, she skirted around their range, looking for guards around the virtual structures. The back end of the building she’d decided held her hostage had no visible windows or doors, so she crept around the outdoor patio in a crouch.
Theater, she reminded herself, as she snuck around the edge of the mud-brick and wooden house. Now that she was up close, she could see that the roofs were made up of slate-looking tiles, all the same dark red color. The slate reflected sunlight, giving the buildings a faintly Asian vibe, like something from one of Mishio’s books.
She managed to cut down four more guards before the house alarm went off.
Once it did, she sheathed Black again, pulling out the alien gun.
No reason to be quiet now. Besides, theater or not, Jet was back in range of the weapons turrets. She valued her skin more than the drama. Even if those weapons probably wouldn’t kill her outright, getting hit by one would still hurt like hell.
She rounded another corner of the building, arms tensing as she did the math, realizing that in ten more steps she’d be in direct line of at least three weapons turrets, each aiming at her from different directions. Reinforcing her grip on the thick, teddy bear gun, she continued to make her way forward, when suddenly, to her right, she saw a window.
Not only a window. It was actually open.
Still holding the gun out in front of her, she peered inside, holding her breath. She didn’t see anyone...just an empty room. Her eyes scanned the walls, trying to verify that she hadn’t missed anything, a trap of some kind, but her initial assessment remained the same.
The pullers wanted her to go inside. They’d just given her a free pass.
That meant Trazen wanted her inside, too.
She assessed the room a third time.
The space was furnished, but in a relatively sparse style. Nothing big enough for one of those things to hide behind, or even to conceal a human. Jet didn’t see any couches, or even any large tables. A giant fireplace took up most of the dividing wall between this room and the next. Pictures hung on the walls, all of them colorful, but too abstract for her to make sense of the actual images. The ceilings stretched up six meters or so, with heavy metal lamps hanging down, along with banner-type rugs that appeared hand-woven. Those, too, had been dyed dramatic colors and were covered with dark symbols...lines and lines of them, as if they’d been copied from some ancient text.
Jet located two doors, one on either side of the stone fireplace. Based on her knowledge of the arena layout, she guessed the one she wanted was on the right.
Something was wrong. She could feel it, but her overall direction remained clear.
They wanted her inside.
She made up her mind, exhaling the breath she’d held without knowing she’d held it.
Throwing a leg over the slate window sill, she slid her body through the ajar window, gripping the teddy bear gun in both hands. She aimed the gun in front of her once her feet landed silently on the wooden floor.
She didn’t wait.
Crossing the length of the wide space rapidly, she flickered her gaze to the corners, keeping the gun up, scanning the room as she checked every angle of the space she hadn’t been able to see from the window. By then, she’d more than half-expected a trap.
Nothing met her in that high-ceilinged ro
om, though.
All that happened was that Jet grew aware of how muddy and wet she was. She couldn’t help but wince at the tell-tale tracks she left on the blonde wood of the floor, like painting an arrow to where she’d gone...but there was nothing she could do about that now.
All it did was give her another reason to hurry.
As soon as the thought solidified, Jet sped her feet and legs, walking as quietly as she could but still limping from her hurt leg as she closed the gap to the right-side doorway. Opening the door and peering past it, she checked both corners again before exiting.
On the other side, she found exactly what she’d expected to find, based on her knowledge of the physical arena. A steep, wooden staircase met her eyes, leading straight up into the dark of a second floor, above the one where she now stood.
Jet began ascending carefully.
The stairs creaked and sighed softly, but she kept her pace steady.
Holding the gun out in front of her, she made it all the way to the top without hearing so much as a peep from up ahead. Even so, she waited a full beat before reaching for the handle to the solitary door on the upper floor landing.
This had been way too easy. It had to be a trap.
Panting from adrenaline, she half-expected someone to open the door before she could, to blow her away where she stood.
No one did.
She still fought to control her breathing as she reached for the old-fashioned door handle. Unlike the ones she’d seen in this virtual world up until now, it looked like something she would see at the skag pits. Round, with a crude lock in the center, it looked human.
Jet stared at it for a few seconds longer, then reached for it with her hurt hand, still gripping the alien gun in her good one.
Turning the knob as quietly as she could, she pushed the door open.
A man sat there, in the middle of the room, bound to a chair with rope.
Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV) Page 53