J.M.J.

Under the Gun

by "Matrix Refugee"

Author's Note: This was originally meant to be a much longer chapter, but I decided to divide it up so I wouldn't be keeping you all in the dark (There's maybe a couple more chapters to go after this one). Ash is on his way to Zion, but even then he'll still have a long way to go. Plus, I decided to make this a real "Fanimatrix" fic and include cameo appearances of other characters from another ship....

But first, a few words of thanks to all my reviewers:

To GeekGurl: Hope you're enjoying reading this as much as I enjoy writing it!

To Oshika Kogo: Sorry it took a little while to get back to this: This next chapter wasn't easy to write, as you'll see in a minute...

To GeneticallyElvenGryffindor: Ain't "Under the Gun" one of the coolest songs ever? I sing it under my breath when I'm doing boring things like housework (Sure helps me plan the next part of this story!). Good luck with the talent competition!

To la tolteca: Thanks for the suggestions! You'll find that at least one of them was a case of "Great Minds Think Alike", particularly regarding just who that lone Agent sneaking up on Ash was...

WARNING: Contains character death, or at rather my idea of what happened to a character from "Matrix 1" who didn't appear in "Reloaded", also some mild hurt/comfort, but I think you've all seen that coming. Also, in the middle of the chapter, the Point of View shifts from Ash's to Ref's as Ref tells him about her ordeal in the Chateau. I'll flag it with a horizontal line (---) so you'll know where to expect the shift.

Disclaimer:

See chapter 1


Chapter 7 -- Red King

"You thought that you could escape from your purpose, Mr. Ash?" the lone Agent said, approaching me and pausing about five feet away. "You were made to help maintain order in this world. But it appears that you have chosen to aid in create dis-order in an otherwise orderly universe."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I shot back. Of course I knew, but I wasn't about to let on. If you lie to someone who's part of a system that has lied to you, is it really a lie?

Then I noticed something really different about this Agent, something that set him apart from every other Agent I'd seen so far: he didn't have that hearing-aid like communications earpiece in his right ear.

"Oh yes, Mr. Ash, you do know," the Agent replied, stepping closer to me. "You've seen it. You've seen the 'reality' beyond this. You've seen far too much, and we both know what happens to the man who's seen too much."

He came right up to me, just a hand's-breadth of space between us, looking me in the face. I was just leaninng into the phone when he reached out to me....

And stuck his hand into my chest. I felt a searing pain shoot out of the "wound". I looked down to see something like oil or like black blood oozing over my chest, down my torso, creeping up my shoulders.

I wrenched myself free and crouched into the phone, hoping I could escape...

By some stroke of luck, I made it. Next thing I knew, Jack was hauling me out of my chair and dragging me across the deck. The ship jolted and rocked. Wires and shards of torn metal fell from the ceiling along with clouds of sparks.

Something reared up in front of us, a machine like a nightmare octopus the size of an ox, a cluster of red eye-sensors in the middle of the thing's blunt head glowed at us malevolently as it gathered its metal tentacles to strike.

The ship shook from stem to stern. Something like a lightning flash lit up the deck. The metal squid-thing crashed to the decking, the light dying in its eyes.

"What the hell happened?" I demanded.

"Squiddies came out of nowhere," Sand said, picking her way over the wreckage to help us, armed with some weapon that looked like a cross between a nail gun and an overgrown electric drill with the muzzle of a giant tazer.

"Tank was goin' nuts trying to get you out of the Matrix," Jack said. "Right when you picked up on the hardline, they breached the hull."

"Where's Ref?" I asked.

"I had Zara help her down to the sick bay," Sand said. "She took a horrible hit in there."

"I know...." I said.

"Oh God, no!" Jack cried. I whirled round, half-expecting that squiddie to be not as dead as we'd hoped. Jack leaned over the darkened console. "Tank, fella, don't you be hurt."

I heard movement and a strip of light came down the ship's ladder from the cockpit above us. For a split second, I flinched, as if it might be another enemy, but I soon saw Trinity's face behind the light as she stepped off the ladder. She approahced the half-circle of monitors and held the light over her head.

Tank lay sprawled over the keyboards, face down. Two metal tentacles attached to another dead squiddie jutted from a gaping wound in his back. Sand approached and reached under his neck, clearly feeling for a pulse. But when she looked up at us, we all knew his had stopped permanently.

"He's gone," she said, confirming it. Jack put his arm about her, letting her hide her eyes in his neck. Trinity set the lamp on the console and turned her face away, hiding the tears I knew were in her eyes. At least Tank died fighting like a man...

Someone else could be heard climbing down the ship's ladder. Morpheus joined the circle around the console. "A distress signal has been sent out: the nearest ship, the Osiris has picked it up and will be here in twenty minutes," he informed us. He fell silent as his gaze fell on Tank's body.

"Sir, would you wish to be alone with him?" Sand asked, recovering from her momentary outburst.

"Yes," he replied, a slight waver in his calm tone. "I would appreciate that." He turned to me. "Ash, go see about Ref's injuries. She will want to see you."

"Yessir," I said. He didn't have to tell me twice.

Sand accompanied me to the sickbay. Ref lay on an operating table-like structure, under a pale blue overhead light, but there clearly wasn't enough power on the ship to run the monitoring equipment on the wall behind her. Zara sat perched on top of a short metal cabinet, keeping watch, but clearly disgusted with this "thankless" job: as soon as she saw me enter, she got up and went out without a word.

"Is she all right?" I asked Sand.

"She took a bad hit in there," Sand replied. "She's suffering mild VDT."

"VDT?" I asked.

"Virtual Damage Trauma," Sand replied. "The assault left her avatar injured, and since the avatar is a projection of her mental image of herself, she's got a lot of pain upstairs."

"Is there anything I can do?" I asked.

"Not really till the Osiris can give us a tow," Sand said. "Right now, just sit with her, keep her talking."

I sat down on top of the cabinet as Sand stepped out. Ref turned her face to me and opened her eyes. She smiled faintly, but that faded. "I'm sorry," she said.

I took her hand in mine, rubbing it gently with my thumb."Hey, it's all right," I said. "You couldn't have seen that coming."

"I know... but I feel like it cost us... and now I'm paying for it with my pain."

"No, no, don't think that, Ref," I said. "You did what you thought you had to do, but other stuff got in the way."

I reached down to put my free hand on her shoulder. She slid out from under my touch, wincing. "It wasn't that kind of touch," I said, reassuringly, not that I've ever been long on reassurance.

"I know," she said.

After a few minutes, Trinity came in, accompanied by a tall, dark-skinned, vigorous young man with close-cropped black hair, accompanied by a slender young Asian woman with her long hair tied back, really pretty, but I got the feeling she was with the young fella, if you get my drift.

"Ref, Ash, this is Captain Thaddeus of the Osiris and his first mate Ju'e," Trinity said. "They've come to help bring Ref onto the Osiris while they tow the Neb back to Zion."

"So you're the newly-unplugged potential who managed to jack out without the assistance of an operator," Thaddeus said to me, impressed but not awed.

"The line was open and I ducked through," I said.

Ju'e smiled. "You have tenacity: we need people like that."

Jack, Sand and a short kid in his late teens approached carrying a stretcher. They helped Ref onto the stretcher, then carried her out into the corridor. I got up and followed them out and down to a large access hatch in the side of the ship that stood open and across a metal catwalk into the Osiris. I looked back to survey the damage to the Nebuchadnezzer: those squiddies had cut most of the top off the ship and they'd cut a hole in the side of the ship right about where the mess deck was.

Once on board the Osiris, Sand had Ref brought to the sickbay, where she and Gia, the medic on the Osiris, set to work patching Ref up: taping electrodes to her skin to monitor her temp, blood pressure and heart rate, taping electrodes to her skull to monitor her brain waves, inserting some kind of IVs into the jacks on her arms. I stayed put the whole time, watching from a tall metal stool in one corner. As soon as the others had gone, I pulled the stool closer to the table where she lay.

Ref looked up at me. "Are you going to ask me?" she said.

"Ask you what?" I asked.

She sniffed, trying to make it sound like a laugh, but it came out sounding a lot more like a sob. "Ask me what happened in there."

"Not if you'd rather not discuss it," I said.

"I gotta get it off my chest," she said. She paused, collecting her thoughts....


I don't know how it started [Ref began]. I followed Mr. Fragonard the curator into the office and we started discussing how I was going to pay for the sword. Next thing I knew, Cain and Abel, those two dark little guys that work for Armand had barged into the room.

"Party's over," Cain announced. "There's a gent who wants to help pay for the little lady's letter-opener."

Armand stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. Hard. He turned back to me, then jerked his thumb at Mr. Frangonard and said to Cain and Abel, "All right, bind him."

Fragonard tried to bolt for the door, but Cain grabbed him and punched him under the jaw. Abel helped Cain tie him up with a lamp cord, then they shoved him into a corner. I tried calling Tank for an exit, but all I got was static and a couple words from Tank, something like "computer... hardline." I realized the computer was connected to the hardline, and there was a microphone attached to it. I started reaching for it, but Cain got wise to me and started ripping the modem out of the tower. I managed to rip one of my derringers out of my boot, but Abel jumped me.

I didn't come to until I felt someone holding a flame under my ear. I jerked awake to find myself lying bound hand and foot and lying on the floor of Armand's office. Abel stood at my feet, covering me with a drawn pistol, while Cain crouched beside me, holding a match which he snuffed out between his fingers. He stood up and flicked the dead match into the fireplace. "She's all yours, boss," he said, stepping back.

Armand stepped into my sight range and waved his flunkies off. "Let her alone, mes enfants, I have important things to discuss with my guest." They went into the next room. He stood there looking down at me. "So you thought you could outbid me on that artifact: a most imprudent gesture on your part, mar cher."

"Look, what do you want with that old thing?" I asked.

He gave me one of those smug smiles of his -- mind you, the guy's got a whole repertoire of them -- with so much condescention that I could have slapped him if part of me wasn't scared, and the other part wasn't infatuated with him. "That is not for you to know, ma petite," he said, as if I were still twelve years old.

"Then take it, just let me out of here," I said.

He chuckled deep in his throat. "You think you can buy your freedom so easily? You joke with me, ma fille." He knelt over me. "And those who joke with me end up paying for their impudence."

"What do you want with me?" I demanded.

The smile turned snakish. "I think you already know what it is which I desire, for it is the same thing which you desire," he said. "You want an end to this fighting, this hiding like a rat in a hole, fighting a war which you know you cannot win."

"I chose the truth."

"The truth," he said, in an oily murmur. "Your 'truth' is a nightmare from which you and your deluded companions cannot awaken on your own. But I can free you from it."

The world changed around us. The walls and the floor and the furnishings of his study vanished. I found myself lying on the mossy ground in a shaded nook of a park-like garden.

I pulled myself into a sitting posture. On a small hillock, under the shadow of a spreading oak tree a couple lay embraced on a silk quilt of purple and red, the remains of a picnic meal spread on the grass to one side. I realized the man was a younger-looking version of Armand, his face a trifle less care-worn and the look in his eyes gentler. And the woman he lay with... was me...

He knew. He knew what I had thought of him when I was still blinded by the Matrix.

"This which you see can be yours if you do but one thing," said a voice -- Armand's voice -- very close to me. I looked to see the Armand I knew kneeling beside my head, looking at me. "Surrender to the why of your existence. Release this death-grip on your nightmares."

I closed my eyes and shook my head. "No... No... stop screwing with my head."

" 'Screwing with your head'? Hah! You know you have wanted this since you ceased to be a child."

Not only did he know, but he'd taken notice.

His voice continued. "I saw how you gazed at me when you were young. At that time, it was but a schoolgirl's sheep's-eyes gaze at an attractive older man, but now that look has ripened along with the young woman who cast these gazes at me."

He turned slightly, leaning over me, taking my chin in his hand and turning my face to look up into his. "And for all the protests you may mouth, your eyes betray the truth within you. You hunger for this world you rejected. You hunger for the very world you despise. Why else do you come back here so often? Why else do you take relics of this world back to your own? Why?" He chuckled deep in his throat, a sound that made my blood run cold. He leaned over me, hovering over my body, his eyes looking down into mine. "Because you are still a part of it. Flee as fast as you can, the reality is that you would much prefer that which you once rejected. I can free you from your nightmares, but you must pay the price."

I looked up at him poised over me, and I could feel the lust flowing from him in waves. There was little I could do to defend myself.

I ground my jaws for a moment, then spat in his face.

"Very well then, if you will not give it, then it must be taken..."

...I won't tell you the rest... except that the whole time, everything around me started breaking down into the code. I thought I was dying... but then through the hum of the code, I could hear your voice in the next room, Ash...


Ref fell silent, her story finished. She turned her face away from mine almost as if she were ashamed to look at me. But I reached down and turned it back to mine as gently as I could.

"Ref, don't blame yourself," I said. "I'm to blame for not going in that room with you."

"You'd be outnumbered just as I was. You'd have gotten yourself killed for sure, and he still would have had his way with me," she said. "...I guess it's a case of 'Be careful what you wish for: you may not like what you get'."

"Don't put it that way," I said, and even I could hear the pleading tone in my voice.

"I know... but he was right."

"Don't you believe it."

She looked right at me. "He was right on one count: that there was a time when I wanted him. But I made choices to put that behind me."

I listened to her but I didn't. She was still dazed from her ordeal and her words sounded like someone with a fever so high it made them mad as a March Hare till it came down. She was trying to make sense of it all, settling it all in her head.

She wasn't saying it in so many words, but I knew, just from listening between the lines, she was blaming herself for what had happened.

"It's wierd...." she said. "The Matrix code is green, but the code that he was made of was red. I don't know why that would be so, unless it's because he's from the older version of the Matrix."

My mind had started to wander. My dad had taught us kids to play chess, which was why my ears had pricked up over the chess puzzle in "Through the Looking Glass", which had clued me in when Trinity had dropped those hints that had lead to my unplugging. I think my mind was trying to make sense of it all as well, using those chess themes...

Trinity had been the "Red Queen" to my "White Pawn", and the Agents had been using me as a pawn in a bid to capture her, but somehow the table had been turned: The Oracle had said I'd crossed two brooks in my quest for the truth and that I had six brooks ahead of me. That meant I had to get to the eighth square, which would turn a pawn into a queen, giving it the ability to move in any direction. By checkmating the White Queen (Armand the Frenchman's wife), I'd crossed the eighth brook and been given the power to see the Matrix as it is and to bend it as I needed to.

But what about Ref? Obviously she was a pawn who'd become a queen. But apparantly her game had ended for the moment, since she'd had to sacrifice herself even in the act of checkmating (Yeah, I'm aware of the connotation: I may be old-fashioned, but I ain't naive) the Red King.

We were both starting to sound a little like the crazy detective. Maybe he'd had some similar horrible experience inside the Matrix.

Or maybe he'd been unplugged and reality had just gotten to be too much for him. Part of me felt that same way. But only part.

To be continued....