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 what 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 skin 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.

So this was the bomb.

Presumably, she was supposed to use this to blow up the command center.

Had they given it to her now because they’d decided she was aiming for the target, instead of the main points run, like most other newbies?

It seemed an awfully small amount of explosive, in any case... and before, hadn’t the radio guy told her she was supposed to relay coordinates for that hit?

Still wading through the water, Jet messed around with the device long enough to figure out its basic functions, and to confirm it was a detonator. She got the prongs to extend for putting into the clay, found what seemed to be a timer, and a starting sequence...

Once she got that far, she decided it was enough.

Shoving everything into the vest pockets and zipping them back up tightly, Jet began moving forward more quickly through the pipe again.

Clearly, either the Rings operators or someone with a funny sense of humor thought the bomb might come in handy. The thing had a timer on it, so Jet supposed it might be a way to mark the site of the central ship, that is, if she couldn’t get a signal out for some reason. She had to assume any radio signals she sent would be intercepted, so calling for help from the control ship wouldn’t be a great idea... even if the Base 2 guy hadn’t already told her that they couldn’t send back up.

As she thought this, the water level began to recede once more.

Within a few minutes, it was at shin-level once again.

Instead of comforting her, the change made Jet tense. She immediately suspected they were readying the terrain for a fight.

Realizing the tunnel had been quiet for too long already, Jet drew Black as she reached the next bend in the pipe, going through distances briefly in her mind to try to get a sense of how far she’d gotten according to the scale they provided on the map... assuming she could trust they’d gotten the scale right in the first place, or that they would recreate it accurately in the projection.

When she stopped long enough to listen, she could hear someone following her again.

It occurred to Jet suddenly that if she was really going to hit a Nirreth command ship, she would need at least one modern weapon... preferably Nirreth, since those were more powerful than the human varieties. Stopping long enough to examine the length of pipe where she now stood, Jet ran up to a small tributary... really just an alcove housing a backed-up spill-off drain, at least given the size of the fetid pool of water that filled the slope.

Wrinkling her nose, Jet reminded herself yet again that everything around her was virtual, that the foul piss and shit-smelling water wasn’t real, nor was the dead rat she could see floating in it, bloated and with maggots under its skin.

She forced herself to wade deeper into the pool, then to crouch in it, then to kneel, so that only her head remained above water. She kept Black clutched in her hands as the sound of Nirreth wading through the main pipe drew nearer.

Turning off her headlamp, she submerged herself entirely once she heard the first of them round the last bend, holding her breath and sinking silently into the water.

She listened underwater as their feet scraped and splashed in the pipe only a handful of feet from her head. Counting, she got the formation she was hoping to get... one Nirreth way out front, three in the middle, and one behind at a considerable lag. They always scouted one and held one of their people in reserve. They ran fast, so the distance usually made little difference in a fight, and in the event of an ambush, they could still get word back to command.

When the sounds began to recede further down the pipe, Jet raised her head as carefully and as silently as she’d lowered it, blinking and grimacing in the brackish water.

Once she had, she let her held breath out in a slow, controlled exhale.

Being equally careful with the water as she slowly rose to her feet, she peered down the length of the tunnel once she’d reached the alcove’s edge, Black’s hilt gripped tightly in her hands. Walking even more carefully into the main pipe, Jet could only hope they wouldn’t hear her splashing because of their own.

One lucky break... if these virtual Nirreth were created true to form, their keen senses of smell should be completely overwhelmed down here. Underestimating Nirreth sensory organs was one mistake that screwed up human fighters again and again in those early battles.

She’d still have to worry about the infrared.

Without her headlamp, the tunnel was pitch black for Jet herself.

Even so, her hearing felt keener than usual. From the sounds up ahead, Jet could tell that another of those gradual turns bent the pipeline about a hundred yards up. Cautiously, she sped up her pace, planting her feet on the higher curve of cement and leaping from one side of the pipe to the next. She was conscious of every rub against the soles of her boots, every creak of leather or rustle of fabric, every ripple in the water below.

Realizing suddenly how risky this maneuver really was, she also decided it was too late to turn back. When she saw the bobbing light of the tailing Nirreth up ahead, she held her breath in addition to the rest, no longer risking harder jumps, but taking long steps along one side of the cement curve.

Apart from the flickering light up ahead, Jet could still see almost nothing in the low-ceilinged pipe. The Nirreth’s headlamps pointed forward in a sharp line; she could only hope the difference in light would confuse their infrared... at least for a few seconds... if they happened to turn. It made her wonder why they held lights at all, if that was for the benefit of the projection and her game, too.

Either way, the lights didn’t help her much.

She got a segment of pipe ahead of where the last one walked, and his own, broad-shouldered outline, but that was pretty much it.

Still, maybe that was enough.

Stepping as quietly as she could, she resumed her longer leaps from one side of the pipe to the next, feeling the pressure to increase speed. When she saw the Nirreth stooping to fit his taller and bulkier body through the tunnel, she found herself grateful for that, too, realizing he was less likely to look back for the same reason.

Jet made her leaps a little longer, hurrying now.

She caught traction easily on the rough cement pipe walls at each step, unlike in the real world, where she probably would have hit a slimey or slippery-smooth segment by now. The consistency both unnerved her and gave her a small measure of confidence.

Within a handful of seconds, she found herself less than a full body-length behind him.

Then half of one.

Moving as silently as she could, Jet swung the sword right as he reached the edge of that sharper turn in the pipe. He moved his head right as she did, but she managed to compensate well enough to get him in the throat before he could let out a cry.

Even so, when he fell into the water, the sound was loud.

Louder than Jet accounted for with her half-assed plan. He fell loudly and heavily to his knees, making gasping, choking sounds as he clawed frantically at his throat. Luckily, Nirreth had the equivalent of a carotid artery in the front part of their necks as well; it didn’t occur to Jet until after she’d already dealt the blow that it might not have worked at all, at least not well enough to drop him.

She tried to catch ahold of the creature’s upper body before he could collapse forward, and it grasped at her with one clawed hand, its dark eyes pleading. Fighting a sudden, sharp, sinking feeling as she looked at a seemingly living being that didn’t want to die... Jet found herself hoping desperately that the Nirreth was just a VR projection. The idea that she might have just killed something or someone merely for sport on Nirreth national television was more than her mind could really think about, at least right then.

Forcing the thought away, Jet felt over the front of his person as his strangled breaths began to slow, as his clawed hands loosened their grip on her arms... and as the gill slits on his neck stopped moving altogether.

She managed to wrestle both a pulre and a sandblaster from the Nirreth’s shoulder strap and front holster... the sandblaster being a lot more difficult because it was bulkier and wrapped around him as he slumped forward into her.

She got it off him eventually though, and managed to sling it over her own back, well enough that she should be able to use it, even if the kickback threw her into a wall.

She patted the Nirreth over for other toys and weapons as well, even as she fought to control her own panting breaths. She found a communicator, which was close to worthless for her, given that her facility with Nargili was still pretty much nonexistent. She almost left it, then grabbed it anyway at the last minute as it occurred to her that she still might be able to pick out a few things if she could listen in on them. She found a few of those quarter-sized explosive discs that they spun sideways with deadly accuracy and pocketed those as well.

She also found a map, and it was different from hers. On it, the command ship was clearly in the harbor, and maybe only about two dozen blocks from where she stood, if she’d estimated distances correctly. She’d either have to find a way out through the sewers or else get back to the surface and swim for it.

Without really admitting it to herself, she’d already decided to go for the ship.

She was stuffing the map into one of the zip-pockets of her vest when she realized the sound of splashing ahead had stopped, and she didn’t know for how long. Just then, the radio she’d snatched from around the Nirreth’s neck sparked into life.

“Ratente?” it said. “Yilili doon ullilli di?”

Ratente must be its name. The one she’d killed.

The only other word she got out of that next bit was doon, which Jet was pretty sure meant ‘where.’ They must be past another curve in the pipe... they couldn’t see her from where they were, but they were looking for him.

Even as she thought it, Jet heard the stomping splash of feet as at least two of them began walking back towards the segment of pipe where Jet crouched over the now-dead, or nearly-dead, Nirreth, Ratente.

Feeling her heart stop somewhere in the vicinity of her throat, Jet resheathed Black, adjusted the sandblaster’s strap around her head and shoulder and pocketed the pulre.

Then she immediately jumped back up on the cement sides of the pipes, balancing briefly with one foot planted on either side before she began leaping and running... all out this time... down the pipe in the direction from which she’d come.

She’d made it most of the way back to the alcove with the stagnant pool, when she heard an exclamation from one of the Nirreth that meant they’d found the dead guard. Before she could think about diving for cover, a shockingly bright light flashed down the tunnel, so quickly that Jet barely had time to rip the pulre out of the holster on her thigh and aim it in that general direction. Thanking her lucky stars that her uncle had once shown her how to operate the stone-shaped weapon, Jet fired directly into the light, even as she leapt towards the other side of the cement pipe.

The pulre’s kickback threw her backwards as she leapt. She crashed into the far side of the pipe wall right where it curved a sharp left... and well past the alcove. Picking herself up as fast as she could with a banged skull and all of her back and arms and shoulders feeling wrenched, she half-crawled, half-walked to get around the corner and out of range of their guns.

She heard a cry and more shouts from the other end of the tunnel.

The light was extinguished somewhere in that chaos.

Panting against the wall, Jet strained her ears to listen. She knew she’d hit someone, if not several someones with the blast, even as it occurred to her that she couldn’t use the pulre again until the weapon recharged, and that the sandblaster, which still hung around her back and shoulder at an awkward angle, was only good at close range.

All it had done in this fight so far was create a gun-shaped bruise on her back when she slammed into the tunnel wall.

Jet had the quarter-sized grenades still. That was it for the next ten or twenty seconds.

Not trusting her accuracy with those, or really knowing how they were triggered even, she decided to run. She could only hope she’d make it back to the last ladder she’d seen before the rest of the Nirreth regrouped.

Even as she thought it, a hard whine filled the narrow tunnel, echoing down the cement right before a shocking blue and white flash blinded her.

Dragging herself the rest of the way down the corridor through the deeper water, Jet gasped involuntarily when the pulre blast hit, impacting the curve in the cement wall behind her and sending chunks of rock, cement and debris in both directions down the long pipe.

Jet got hit in the head, back and arms with sharp pieces of shrapnel from the pipe wall and doused in another wave of sewer water that made her lose her balance and fall face-first in the water. The same rancid-smelling water filled her mouth and nose and lungs, making her choke and cough for air.

Fighting her way back up to the cement walls of the pipe, she wobbled a bit for balance with the gun on her back, then got it arranged right and began to use to the walls to make her way even faster down the pipe, heading for the ladder and hoping like hell it was one of the real ones.

One more turn and she could see it again.

Right as she grabbed ahold of the metal bars and swung herself up on the first few rungs, she heard the echo of booted Nirreth feet through the water behind her.

Dang, they were fast.

The pulre had to be recharged by then, but she decided to wait until she really needed it.

Dragging herself up the ladder hand-over-hand before she could get her feet situated on the lower rungs, she shoved up the manhole cover at the top without even checking to see what lay beyond it. She was jerking her legs up through the opening and into the bright, overcast light of day when a second hard whine of a charging pulre echoed up from below.

Jet jumped to her feet, then leapt across the sidewalk and out of full cover without thought, right as the blue-white flame exploded against the rim of the tunnel below the street. The blast threw her forward, stumbling and sprawling into the middle of the road.

It also sent something heavy, probably the manhole cover, skimming not far above her head. She felt it fly past, even as smoke and debris filled the hole, then the air around her. Jet heard the crash as whatever-it-had-been smashed through a plate-glass window on the first floor of an office building. She watched the glass fall, dazed, as she coughed in the smoke, but then she was dragging herself back to her feet, looking around for cover before the Nirreth underground radioed in her location to the nearest culler.

Again, she almost forgot she was in a simulation as her eyes scanned the skies.

But she remembered well enough to remind herself why she was here.

She hit the talk-button on the human-made radio as she ran.

“I’ve found it,” she said, as soon as the human voice surfaced, panting as she ran down the street towards the water of Vancouver harbor. “...It’s in the harbor,” she added between breaths. She tried to remember her call sign and couldn’t. “This is Digger-something,” she said after another pause. “Do you read me, Base 2?”

“Base 2 here,” an impatient-sounding voice surfaced. “Do you have the exact coordinates of the ship’s command deck?”

Jet frowned, seeing a culler ship hovering over a building a few blocks to her left, its lines outstretched towards the ground, past where her eyes could see.

“How precise do you need?” she said into the radio. “I have a Nirreth map of the area, but it didn’t have a layout of the ship, just its location...”

“We at least need the ship’s orientation under the water, Alpha-10. We need to be able to bullseye the command deck...” The voice turned openly exasperated. “Alpha-10, you know how big these things are... this was your plan, right? The second we hit it anywhere, they’ll target our guns from all sides. We’ve only got one shot at this...”

Jet nodded, realizing she’d known that, somehow.

“Can you get inside?” the base leader asked.

Jet shrugged, giving a half-smile to no one in particular.

“I guess we’ll find out,” she told him.

JET STAYED AGAINST the larger buildings with eaves, ducking into alleys whenever they sloped in the right direction. She gradually continued to make her way to the water nearest to that odd conglomeration of sail-like tents where the old recreational cruise ships used to dock, at least according to Everest.

Stopping a few times to check the map, Jet ran into the burnt-out, underground parking structure below that tented building, seeing the cloudy gray expanse of sky peering through holes in the concrete from close-range blasts from one of the larger Nirreth ships.

From the size of the holes, that had to have come from a warrior class versus one of the cullers. Cullers were mainly relegated to clean-up, rescue and search and destroy, at least during the war itself.

Feeling another of those sinking feelings land in the pit of her stomach, Jet realized that, in truth, she was still looking at a war that had already been lost.

No ships stood at the docks of Vancouver Harbor; the few cars parked in the massive, concrete parking structure stood abandoned and dead-looking.

Instead of the cheerful crowds of humans depicted on the posters lining one of the unmarked walls, waiting in line to go on vacation, Jet saw only rats scuttling along the walls and what looked like the remains of a dead seagull.

The glass-fronted building with the rusted and smoke-stained ‘CUSTOMS’ sign over the doors looked like the blackened husk of a broken bottle at the bottom of a skag campfire.

Already, Jet glimpsed feral dogs sleeping in clusters in the dry areas of shelter on the raised concrete. She knew at night the pack would come alive, fighting for territory and food and attacking other animals and people if they caught one or two on their own.

Behind the shelter of one of the concrete pillars outside the glass-enclosed building, Jet stopped again to make sure she’d fully memorized the Nirreth map, and laid it over the human one. At the same time, she tried to orient herself in the real, physical layout of the course itself. She had no idea how much time she had left at this point, but she had a feeling she’d already been out here for more than a few hours, which meant she was running out of time... and probably without enough points to get a positive vote from the Rings Board on her overall performance.

For better or for worse, Jet had pretty much given up on going out of her way to gain points. It was too late to find the main runs now, anyway.

Knowing she’d already screwed up their strategy, she’d decided to ignore Richter’s words and bank everything on completing the task within the timeframe and thus “winning” the game. She could only hope that, even if she bombed the rest in terms of points and bonuses and the like, they might let her squeak by into the next round if she managed to complete the main objective they’d set for her character.

Which was pretty much the exact opposite of what Richter and Laksri told her to do.

But it was a little late to fix that now. She was pretty sure they’d boot her otherwise, considering how few actual kills she’d managed.

Once more envisioning the arena components in her head, she shied away from the temptation to superimpose them over either map, knowing they would be forced to adjust the scale and proportions of the projections dramatically to fit the different physical objects they required. Besides, they would have changed everything while she’d been traveling underground anyway... and then again in terms of where the ladder actually popped out onto the higher level, to better accommodate the physical course.

No, she would have to wait until she ran into one of the arena’s stationary components and map it from there. Until then, she was stuck with the projection alone, along with the two VR maps.

Checking her pockets and vest to make sure the explosive and the small disc bombs and the pulre were still where she’d left them, Jet shoved the maps back into the zippered pockets and hoisted the sandblaster back over her shoulder.

Then, her fingers resting lightly on the hilt of Black, she ventured into the darkened building, and its entryway covered in broken glass.

According to the Nirreth map, the command ship lay deep in the water just past the end of the Canada Place pier. Jet knew human vessels dotted the bottom of the harbor, too, especially closest to the city. She’d occasionally seen them while fishing out there with Anaze, and even witnessed a few Nirreth salvage operations from the inside of buildings along the shore.

She’d never actually seen a Nirreth command ship before... or a fully-intact human ship outside of movies and story books, for that matter. She hoped she could tell them apart well enough to go to the right place. She didn’t know how cold the water would be, but assumed it couldn’t be too cold, not if the alligator was any indication. She didn’t know how long she’d be able to hold her breath, either, or how toxic the water might be in the simulation.

Richter warned her they would probably make swimming a requirement in a lot of her matches, since she was registered as being able to swim, and the whole swimming thing was such a novelty for Nirreth. From what Jet could tell, the Nirreth fascination with water remained virtually endless... perhaps because their dense bodies made swimming pretty much impossible without some sort of mechanical assistance.

They seemed to view swimming the way a lot of humans viewed flying... like a magical power of some kind, or as something they all felt they should be able to do, as part of their birthright, but somehow couldn’t.

Still, the fact that they were going to make her swim in the likely dense and toxic-looking waters of a post-war Vancouver Harbor to try and find some way inside one of their own ships, seemed a bit much to Jet, at least for a first run.

Walking through the hush of the old cruise ship loading terminal, Jet passed half-burned posters of wild animals that used to live in what had been the lands far north, the ones her mother told her stories about as a kid, and where Biggs and Jet used to pretend they lived. They even had a picture of the great white bear god, like the one from which the skull Chiyeko had on her front door had come.

Some of the animals shown in the posters still existed, of course, even in Jet’s time... like the foxes that were slowly coming back as the rabbit populations increased, and the great eagles with the white heads that her mother told her used to be considered magical animals as well, spirits that lived on the totem poles and canoe heads of their ancestors.

Jet walked past the last of these kiosks and into the segment of building that led out over the water, as part of the dock itself. On that end, as with the parking structure, most of the glass was gone, letting in wet, salt-filled sea air and the smell of brine and dead fish and seagull scat. Jet walked along the dock inside the building for as long as she could, then picked her way through piles of broken glass and charred wood to reach the outside deck.

Once out there, she was scanning the water with her eyes, trying to glimpse the hint of a shape that might be the submerged command ship.

As she thought it, she realized she had to be looking at some portion of the actual water pool... meaning, in the arena itself. They would find some way to twist the images around to get her to walk where they needed her to walk and to end up where they needed her to end up, but somewhere in here, if not on the other side of that wooden pier, stood the artificial lake that formed the center of the oval-shaped Rings arena.

Jet wondered if she would simply ‘die’ if she jumped in at the wrong place... or maybe hit something on her way down. She suspected they would just bar her from jumping, however, until they had her where they needed her.

As she thought all of this, another sound came into her awareness, a bare whisper of air, discernible through the salt and sea-filled wind that chafed Jet’s face.

Her eyes jerked up.

A culler ship was descending right over her head.

The long, alive-seeming lines of its net reached down towards her like spiked tentacles, or snakes with metal heads and mouths. Another sound forced Jet to look down a second later, just in time to see a dozen or more armed Nirreth walking through the rubble of the same broken wall where Jet had left the port building.

They were headed right in her direction.

Well...  Jet had time to think. At least I know how they plan to motivate me to jump into the right part of the water without breaking my skull...

With that thought still hovering somewhere in her mind, Jet took the last sretch of dock at a full run.

... And leapt into the murky waters of Vancouver Harbor.

THE WATER SHOCKED her... mainly by not being as cold as she’d expected, or as dirty as it was in her version of Vancouver.

The water of Jet’s youth was an oily, gritty mess of various poisons... at least close to the shore. Really, it was almost a sludge in parts, until she and Biggs managed to paddle out far enough to reach the current of the sea. Choked with algae and seaweed and bits of metal and old tires and other garbage, it was considered highly dangerous by most, and their mother scolded them whenever she caught them in it, even when they brought back fish they’d caught from the float where most of the adults went out to fish, and where the water ran almost clear from the currents and its relatively greater depth.

Their mother was afraid Jet or Biggs would cut themselves on one of the old rusted hunks of metal, or accidentally swallow some of the poison in the water, or drown in the oily sludge left over from some of the crashed tankers and barge ships.

A lot of chemicals still made the water highly unsafe, too, depending on the shifting currents and temperatures and whatever else.

This water felt clean, compared to all of that... even compared to what Jet thought of as “clean” in the currents by the float she and Biggs fished from back home.

As an added bonus, the helmet she’d been wearing, that she’d forgotten she had on, slid over the front part of her face, too, providing her with transparent goggles to see, and even a small supply of oxygen. Although not enough to do much more than extend her time by maybe two or three breaths through the nose, it should triple her time underwater.

If the Nirreth had thought to give her an actual oxygen tank, she would have been totally comfortable.

As it was, she found herself staring at the eggshell-white shape that appeared in front of her under the harbor’s waves. She could only hope that she was right, and that the massive object, which appeared to be the size of an old, human sports field, was the Nirreth command ship.

She struggled to swim, to move her arms in spite of the sandblaster strapped to her back, and the bulkiness and heaviness of the vest with those explosives and detonator and the disc-weapons and the pulre. A few explosive charges made tunnels through the blue-green water only yards from where Jet swam. She knew they were likely pulre blasts, and also that the Nirreth must not be able to see her well, which confused Jet at first, given their infrared vision.

Either way, she took a last deep breath and dove under the water.

As she swam almost straight down, approaching the eggshell-white ship, Jet thought maybe she understood why the Nirreth’s infrared hadn’t helped them as they shot at her in the water. At first she’d thought maybe it’d been sloppiness on the part of the Rings operators, or even that they might have taken pity on her.

Instead, she noticed that the water was getting warmer, the closer she got to the submerged ship.

It was bathwater temperature within a few yards of the hull.

Then it grew hotter still... until it was uncomfortably hot... enough that Jet felt claustrophobic inside her clothes, even though everything but the boots was relatively light-weight and Jet had always been a good swimmer. She was used to swimming in heavy footgear, too, since that was the only way she’d ever gone in back home.

She already knew only one way existed for her to enter the white-hulled ship.

Besides, she was running out of air. She took small inhales out of the oxygen trapped in her mask, but she’d nearly run out of those, too.

She’d known since she found the explosives in her vest that she’d need them to get to the end of the game. She could feel the clock ticking on that too, even as she wondered if she could have seriously miscalculated the amount of time she’d spent out here already. She was beginning to think this was going to be her one and only jaunt into the Rings, but she had to keep trying. She would keep trying; right up until the end.

In any case, she was still alive, and still in the game, technically at least. All she could do was try to get to the end. From that perspective, her strategy got real simple.

There was no possible way she would have time to do a thorough recon of the command ship to determine a quiet way inside. There wasn’t even time to find the best place to blow a hole in the hull under however-many pounds of pressure from the harbor water.

So when she reached the heat-radiating outer hull, Jet didn’t hesitate.

Slapping the long bricks of C-4 to the smooth, egg-like outside, after ripping the plastic off it before it could melt in the hot water, she stuck the detonator on one end, set the timer, and kicked off the hull as hard as she could, feeling a low-level panic at the thought that the temperature alone might be enough to detonate the C-4.

More than that, she’d started to worry about air for real.

Thanking the God of the old world and those of the new that she’d thought to figure out that detonator device in advance, Jet ripped the trigger out of her vest pocket and decided not to wait, once she was out of range.

She scrambled a bit when she pulled it out too quickly, nearly losing her grip and seeing it disappear into the murky water, but she managed to clutch it tightly in her fingers even as she paddled as far to the side of the explosion zone as she dared to go. Making sure she was behind the first hard curve in the hull, she figured she had to risk it... before she ran out of air, or the Nirreth sent something even more deadly after her, or both.

Hoping like hell she wasn’t about to kill herself and end the match earlier than she expected, Jet closed her eyes, and hit the trigger with her thumb as she floated only a few inches away from the hot metal of the ship’s hull.

A DEAFENING RUSH of water and bubbles exploded out from the side of the ship.

The force of the water and escaping air hit her in the face even before she felt the impact concussion and heard the loud screech of metal.

Luckily, because of where she’d crouched past a curve in the white-sided ship, Jet missed most of the force of the water as it was thrown away from the hull wall.

Even so, the metal sides trembled under her hands, and Jet felt that smooth surface jerk, close enough to her skin that she flinched from the burning hot metal.

Before she could think about moving from her spot, water displacement began sucking her towards the new opening in the wall, pulling her in a sudden, hard current. Jet found herself being yanked along, banged against the hot metal of the ship, unable to do anything but go along with it. By then, she was panicking about air, so trying to kick towards the surface, but the current wouldn’t let her.

It wasn’t until that precise moment that it occurred to her that she might drown.

Possibilities flickered through her mind about how this might play out... and what she would do if whatever lived on the other side of that hole didn’t connect her to the rest of the command ship. Even if it did, they might lock it down before she got through. Moreover, if she did manage to get through, if she picked the wrong spot, she’d probably get shot for her trouble... disintegrated with a close-range sandblaster before she’d finished sucking in Nirreth air, which would be high on oxygen anyway, at least if that culler ship was any indication.

She’d probably be high as a kite for the first few minutes.

All of these things ran through Jet’s mind as she got pulled through the opening.

It sucked her in so quickly she fought to protect her head and limbs.

Even so, she cried out, using up the last of her air when her leg got smacked against a jagged piece of hull at the breach point.

Seconds later, she found herself inside and pressed flush against a wall from the flow of water. The space was already nearly full. She fumbled frantically along the smooth surface with her hand. Sliding around some protruding equipment, she moved as fast as she could, making it a few more yards before her fingers found a depression in one segment of wall. Before she had time to hope it wasn’t a closet, the sliding panels opened to let her through... again, before Jet had time to think about what might be on the other side.

That time, however, Jet managed to hold onto the wall when the water got sucked violently through the opening, at least long enough to hit the door panel a second time.

She let go of the wall the instant she had, praying the mechanism would engage... and without cutting her in half before she could get to the other side.

Right when she worried she hadn’t hit it hard enough... it began to close.

Seconds later, she was ripping off her helmet to get at the air, fighting for balance in the water filling the room almost to her waist.

She found herself choking and gasping once she had it off, leaning her weight against the nearest wall as her eyes took in this new space. The floor where she stood consisted of the lower level of a two-level room, beneath what looked like an engineering station on a catwalk. The overall space wasn’t particularly big... only a little larger than Laksri’s room.

Sucking in grateful breaths, she nearly passed out when the first big dose of oxygen hit her system. She managed to keep hold of the wall and keep her head above the water... and her mind conscious.

She even had the clarity to be grateful that she was alone.

Once she’d mostly recovered, she paddled over to the set of ladders built into the wall and dragged herself up the steps and to the dry catwalk the next level up.

With a sigh of relief, Jet realized something else.

She knew where she was again... meaning, inside the physical layout of the Rings. The pool had only one ladder to get out, which meant she now stood directly beside a stretch of moving walkway that would take her by several clusters of weapons launchers and at least two rope and hook ‘escape tricks,’ as she jokingly called them while working with Alice.

So she could expect action coming soon, but also some possible ways out.

She should also be able to predict where she’d be attacked.

Heading down the stretch of hallway that followed the dimensions of the track, she felt the faintest sensation of motion under her feet, even as she unslung the sandblaster from around her shoulders, feeling that through some wild stroke of luck, she’d finally arrived at the part of the course for which she’d actually been trained.

Hitting the door-opening panel to the left of the double doors she met at the end of that same hall, Jet fell into a combat crouch, or near to, even before the mechanism engaged and the doors began to open. When three Nirreth were waiting for her on the other side, she hit two of them in the chests with the sandblaster before either had time to raise their weapons. Then she drew her sword and pinned the third one to the wall, pressing the blade to its neck by its gills after she yelled the Nirreth word for ‘disarm!’

It dropped its weapon to the floor.

Once it had, Jet breathed a sigh of relief. Then she looked him over more carefully, trying to decide if he was real or not.

There was really no way to know.

From the cut of his uniform, she figured he was meant to be some kind of tech, likely sent to investigate and repair the breach in the hull she’d caused. Which meant there was some chance the ship didn’t yet know it was under attack.

She wondered how long it would be though, before the Nirreth cullers above the water contacted the ship below and they put two and two together with the explosion and the girl who’d jumped into the water twenty minutes earlier.

Jet found herself grateful briefly for her own rashness in not waiting to blow the hull, even as she pinned the Nirreth to the curved wall. His dark eyes widened in fear on his blue-black face, even as he began babbling at her in Nargili.

When he didn’t stop to take a breath, Jet shook her head, making the ‘enough!’ gesture she’d seen Laksri and the other Nirreth use.

“Leader,” she said in broken Nargili. “Where is leader? Big part on ship?”

Understanding leached into the technician’s eyes. It looked so real, Jet found herself having to remind herself that she was in the middle of a simulation... that the technician in front of her likely wasn’t really there.

Jet hoped so, anyway.

Remembering the Nirreth she’d already killed in the underground tunnels, and with a weapon she knew was real, Jet felt her jaw harden.

“Leader!” she said again, switching abruptly to English. “Where’s the command bridge? I know you understand me...”

When the Nirreth only made that head-inclining ‘no’ gesture, it occurred to Jet again that she was running out of time.

“Map,” she said, sawing into his neck a little that time, enough to bring a trickle of red down his neck and into the collar of his uniform shirt. “...Where is map?” she said again in Nargili.

That time, the Nirreth seemed to be thinking about how to answer.

Jet sawed Black deeper into his midnight-blue skin and he let out a strangled cry. He pointed at the far wall, babbling at her in Nargili. She didn’t understand most of it, but followed his eyes and pointing fingers to the blank surface that stood above a bank of Nirreth computers. Once she had, Jet recognized the discolored patch of wall in the center as a display terminal.

“Show me,” she said.

Keeping the sword at the Nirreth’s throat, she stepped to the side, using her hand to indicate that he... or she... was to lead the way.

After a nervous gesture of agreement, the technician began to walk, stiff-legged, towards the opposite wall. Jet jabbed the Nirreth again, which she was beginning to think was a female after all, feeling another rush of nerves around how much time she might have left to finish this thing before the clock ran down. Jet knew the judge might also subtract points if she didn’t kill the technician, or the two techs already lying on the ground with sandblaster burns in their respective chests. Jet knew how things worked; Alice made her watch enough recordings of previous matches that she got the jist of what the Board liked.

Mostly, that involved a lot of bloody kills... the bloodier the better.

Which was pretty much why they’d liked the idea of a sword-wielding human in the first place.

Jet’s eyes kept roaming to the opposite door of the small engineering room as they walked... and the several clusters of live rounds that she knew lived just on the other side.

She was already so jacked up on adrenaline that the floor might have moved under her without her noticing. It could have happened while she shot the two techs, or even in the time since.

Meaning, at any minute, something a lot deadlier might be coming at her through that door.

Aiming the sandblaster at the opening with one hand and arm, Jet kept the sword on the throat of the female tech with the other.

Jet watched as the Nirreth pulled up the schematics of the command ship on the monitor. The tech arranged the images on the screen, then pulled them into focus by hitting a number of almost-invisible... to Jet anyway... keys on the smooth console. Once the virtual reality panel sparked to life in the air in front of the monitor, Jet’s eyes left the door, long enough to take in details of the ship’s layout.

All of the labels and markings were in Nargili, but Jet found herself able to recognize a few of the symbols that went along with the words. Realizing one of those matched the only symbol in Nargili written on the map from the humans, Jet put down the sandblaster long enough to point at it, looking the Nirreth tech in the face.

“Leader?” she said, her voice a command.

The Nirreth technician nodded, her deep, black eyes wide with fear.

“Where are we?” Jet said, indicating the map, then the surrounding room. “Where is this? Show me...” She pointed at the map again, wishing she’d paid more attention in language classes with Laksri. “Show me on here... where am I now? Where are you?”

Understanding reached the Nirreth’s eyes.

Looking back at the map, she squinted slightly, as if thinking, then pointed to a section of the diagram completely on the opposite side of where the command center stood. Jet might have questioned whether the tech was telling the truth, but right next to where she pointed, a segment of the map flashed red and blinked. Jet couldn’t read the Nargili text next to the flashing light, but she figured it had to be describing the breach in the hull she’d made with the C-4.

“Okay,” Jet said. She pointed at the door she’d just come through, the one that led to the half-flooded room. “You go. In there,” she added, jabbing the sword meaningfully, to make sure the tech took her seriously. “Leave now.”

The Nirreth tech looked at Jet in open surprise.

Clearly, she’d thought Jet would kill her, so the relief Jet saw blooming in the tech’s eyes again made her hesitate, wondering if she was real after all. Forcing the thought from her mind, Jet marched her over to the door and indicated for her to hit the trigger-switch that would take her to the other side. The tech did so, and Jet stayed where she was as the Nirreth walked through. In Jet’s last look at her, the Nirreth’s face held so much gratitude that Jet found herself speaking in English before the door was all the way closed.

“Sorry,” she told her, indicating the cut on her neck.

She raised her hand in a sort of wave as the door closed and the tech raised hers reflexively in return, the expression on her dark face now holding bewilderment.

Giving a last glance at the still-displaying map to make sure she had the bulk of it committed to memory, at least the relevant bits, Jet headed for the opposite door in the long room, feeling adrenaline spike through her system. Not looking down at the two unconscious Nirreth she’d hit with the blaster, Jet sheathed Black and squared her shoulders, tightening her grip on the blaster before she got ready to hit the panel to the next segment of the ship.

She already knew this portion of the course would be a shooting match, but she had no way to transmit the coordinates of the command ship’s bridge without actually going there. As the thought repeated in her head, however, it occurred to Jet that it might not be true.

She might not need to go there at all.

Stopping in mid-motion, she hesitated, then made up her mind. Switching direction, Jet lifted her fingers to the radio on her headset instead.

“Base 2? This is Alpha-10, Digger Unit.”

“Where the hell are you?” the voice said, rising at once. “Are you inside the lizard-skin ship? Do you have the coordinates for the command deck yet?”

“Do you have me on your GPS?”

There was a pause on the other end. “We have you... are you really under the Harbor?”

“In the Harbor,” Jet corrected without thought. She recalled the scale of the Nirreth schematics, glancing at the map in rote, although she was too far away to see it clearly. She closed her eyes to get the exact details as she counted in her head.

“You have the conversion for Nirreth measurements?” Jet confirmed after a pause.

“Yes,” the human said on the other end, a note of surprise in his voice. “Get to the point, Alpha-10. Where are you going with this?”

“According to their own map, I’m exactly 421 ten-res from the command bridge, almost due ragen-le,” she said. “About sixteen degrees above the extens. Do you copy that?”

The human’s voice remained bewildered-sounding. “421 ten-res from the current position, sixteen degrees off the extens, due ragen-le,” he said. “Copy that. How deep under the water is that, Alpha-10?”

Jet closed her eyes, looking at the map in her head once more.

“Two hundred ten-res from where I stand,” she said. It occurred to her that, based on the short distance off the extens, it had to be the next deck up from where she stood. “You’ll have to punch through the hull in any case,” she added. “So it shouldn’t make much difference if you’re hitting them from above...”

“You’re sure about that, Alpha-10?” The man’s voice sounded skeptical now. “We had that target tied to your locator. If you’re wrong, we could blow a hole in a stack of water, only to have our whole base destroyed for nothing...”

“I’m not wrong,” Jet said. Her voice turned confident as she went over the map again. “Unless this whole map is fake, that’s what it says. Evacuate the base if you can, but make that shot. I’ll see if I can distract them down here if you need more time...”

The man on the other end laughed, and again, it sounded like a real laugh, not one that came from a VR projection, no matter how sophisticated. Jet found herself smiling with him, even as she rearranged her hands on the grip of the sandblaster.

“Something funny, commander?” Jet said.

“Not at all,” he said, his voice still smiling. “We hit the command center in ten minutes, Alpha-10. That will give us enough time to send up the alarm to evacuate. Hope to see you on the other side.” Pausing, he added, “Maybe you should look for a way out, in the time you have left... instead of impressing us with your ability to kill lizard-skins?” he suggested, chuckling again. “We could use you better alive than dead...”

Even as he said it, the door next to where Jet stood began to open.

“Roger that,” Jet said. “Alpha-10 out.”

Stepping backwards, Jet fired the sandblaster through the opening before the panel finished disappearing into the wall. As she did it, she stepped back, moving towards the door she’d just left. She’d barely slid out of view of the opening when the Nirreth soldiers on the other side opened fire.

Jet managed to twist out of the way of the first few rounds they aimed in her direction, but then one of the Nirreth made it through the opening. A round from his blaster got her partly in the left hip, knocking her backwards hard enough that she fell to the deck.

Without pausing to look at the wound, she fired another few volleys at the guards now standing in the entrance to the door. She fired enough times to drive them back, still kneeling on the deck. Only then did she get to her feet, moving backwards a lot faster that time, despite the agonizing pain in her hip. In her mind, Jet saw the cluster of live ammunition on the course moving closer as she fumbled backwards on the moving track.

Letting out a yell, Jet ran backwards and hit the panel next to the opposite door, stumbling into the half-flooded room and narrowly dodging a blow from the technician she’d forgotten about, who swung a long, metal tool at Jet’s head. Ducking and stumbling backwards off the ladder, Jet lost her balance and fell into the pool of water, smashing her arm against the ladder on her way down. She hit it hard enough that it immediately went numb, even as the salt water on the open wound of her hip lit it abruptly on fire.

Struggling to disentangle herself from the strap of the sandblaster, which now nearly strangled her, Jet ducked underwater when one of the approaching soldiers fired on her. She fired back up through the water at him, and managed to catch him by surprise enough to hit him in the thigh... mostly be sheer luck, given how she was fighting just to tread water.

Kicking her legs, she propelled her body backwards towards the doors leading out towards the broken hull and into Vancouver Harbor. She stared up at the six, tall Nirreth soldiers standing over the pool, along with the technician still brandishing the metal pole in the corner, snarling over her cut and bleeding neck.

When Jet reached the doors, she didn’t think.

Smashing her hand down on the panel to open the outer door, she barely had time to take a breath as she dropped the sandblaster and grabbed hold of a metal ring in the wall on one side of the opening. Holding on for dear life, two-handed, Jet felt and heard the pounding rush of water as the Harbor poured in through the opening.

She had time to hear the cries of shock from the Nirreth as the wall of water hit them in a violent wave, right before all she could hear were bubbles and pounding surf.

Jet had her eyes closed when the goggles of the helmet re-engaged, stopping the water from smashing into her face and giving her a few more mouthfuls of air, despite the force of the water, and the fact that her head felt slammed backwards into the bones of her neck.

By the time that pressure began to let up, Jet was already feeling almost desperate for air, which told her that maybe she’d been holding on longer than she’d realized, or maybe that she’d breathed in the last of the mask’s oxygen when the waves had been buffeting at her body and head. Either way, she released the metal ring as soon as it felt safe to do so, and immediately began kicking and paddling her way through the opening.

She swam into the half-broken room on the other side, with the hole blown through the outer hull showing the greener, lighter color of the sun-filtered harbor waters beyond.

Once Jet swam through that crack in the actual hull, she began kicking hard for the surface, remembering the culler ship above in time to swim for the pier itself, instead of merely aiming for the sunlight at the water’s surface.

Even then, she almost didn’t make it.

When she finally breached under the wooden pillars of the dock supporting Canada Place, Jet gasped for air, her lungs burning.

Even so, she had to suppress a yell of relief.

While she took those first, gasping breaths, she saw five or six jets of brilliant laser color light up the sky over her stretch of ocean. As they impacted the ship under the surface of Vancouver Harbor, sending a sharp rumble of vibration through the water where Jet struggled to remain afloat, a white explosion of air and water threw up a mushroom-like plume that sent out a wide ring of waves in all directions.

Unable to help herself, Jet laughed.

She laughed again as the tremors dissipated, even as the wave rose her so high under the wooden pillars that she nearly hit her head on the underside of the dock.

Laughing, choking on water, Jet hit the radio in her headset with one struggling hand.

“Did you get it?” she asked the voice on the other end. “Base 2, this is Alpha-10, Digger Unit. Did you hit the target? Were the coordinates good?”

There was a crackling of static on the other end.

Then Jet heard loud whoops of triumph and laughter through the speakers, and laughed again herself. That time, she couldn’t make herself care that it was all just a simulation.

That time, she let it feel real, just for those few seconds.

“Should I take that as a yes?” she said, grinning as she caught hold of the metal ladder leading up to a lower segment of deck, where smaller boats had once been moored. Pulling herself hand over hand to reach the wooden platform, she grinned when she heard the amused relief from the man on the other end of the line.

“Alpha-10 made it out,” he said, speaking to the others in the room. “Repeat. Alpha-10 made it out! Our little Samurai will live to fight another day... !”

Jet was still grinning as he finished, pulling herself the rest of the way onto the wooden deck and smiling at the cheers she heard on the other end of the line.

Forgetting the Rings, forgetting the course, forgetting everything but the rush of elated triumph in the moment, Jet was about to answer the man on the other end...

When abruptly, the scene around her vanished.