Sydney Andrews – I love that line from Kes! It made me laugh while I was writing it, so I thought it might make someone else laugh. Yeah, I think action stuff isn't my forte, but hopefully I'll improve! That's an interesting point about the dynamics of Zion, I guess it's one of those things that's open to interpretation. And Kes might have it wrong, after all, she hasn't been back there for years. Morpheus and Niobe will be explaining their relationship in a later chapter (I'm giving them some screen-time), and Ghost will be in it if I feel I can write him well enough – I've only got the movies to go on, I've never played Enter the Matrix or anything – so we'll see. It might be kinda cool to give Kes an uncle to torment :) And I'm ashamed to say that I haven't finished reading The Last Exile yet, but what I read, I loved. I'm really adoring Rorie – maybe we should do a crossover with Kes and Rorie! I'm really glad you liked my Kiana and Kes conversation – there's going to be a lot of them! – and thanks for reviewing!
Bagpipes5K2 – It was kinda cruel of me to send you the chapter and not tell you what happens, wasn't it:) Thanks for reviewing!
scarstar – Thanks! It's going to be pretty important later…but I can't say anymore :) Or I could, but I won't. Btw, I've got a new MOPI story up, and I'd really love some feedback from you. As with all my stuff, I don't trust whether it's good or not, so I'd love to know your feelings on the subject…okay, enough shameless advertising. Thanks for reviewing!
Arhazivory – Yeah, I think the site's having some problems, because I couldn't upload this chapter for ages, and I'm kinda glad, because if I had, I would have missed getting your lovely review! You really hit the nail on the head with Kes and Kiana. I think you're the first person to get it actually! I'm definitely writing, so I look forward to hearing from you!
I would have updated this sooner, but the site seemed to be having some problems. But I'm here now, right? However, the next update will probably be in two weeks because I'm way too busy with art coursework at the moment – I have my exam in four weeks, and I have to do, on average, about a page of quality work a day. On top of everything else. So I'm a little stressed. But I may miraculously find the time to update next week, so keep a look out.
Onto the actual chapter!
Thanks to Bagpipes for betaing.
Chapter IX: Attack
Kes saw Kiana fall, but she couldn't do anything about it. There were too many people in between herself and Kiana, and she needed to be listening out for Morpheus' call. She knew the delicate position that they were in; they couldn't use the EMP until they were on the ground, otherwise they'd fall, but they'd never set down safely whilst covered in sentinels. In short, they were screwed. She had no idea what they'd do, but Morpheus would find a way, as he always did. Until then, she had to wait for his call to use the EMP.
Though she'd never admit it, Kes was scared. Now that the roof was breached, anything could happen.
A sentinel wrapped its tentacles around the jagged tear in the roof, and its spider-like body squatted over the ship. Numerous metal feelers reached into the ship, feeling around. Kes could see the glint of a red eye staring down at her. A tentacle swung her way.
A flash of light from a gun, and the sentinel slumped on the roof, dead weight.
"I have got to start keeping a plasma rifle under here" she muttered. Temptation overcoming her, she flicked a hanging tentacle, just to check that it was actually dead. It was, thankfully, but there were still the other few hundred to worry about.
As she ship turned, the lifeless sentinel slid off the ship's roof, to be replaced with another. We're fucked was Kes' cheerful, optimistic thought.
An electric beam from the plasma rifle zoomed past her, hitting one of sentinels. As it passed her, the cold fire from the beam was so intense that it felt like the skin on her arm was being burnt off. Kes moved around a few feet to the right, clutching her arm tightly.
"Are you okay?" she could hear her father call to her.
"Fine" she lied, biting back tears. Tears are childish, she told herself. I have to forget the pain. Pretend it isn't there.
Another huge tearing sound could be heard; a sentinel had torn up another part of the roof. More red glaring eyes could be seen, and the sound of lasers was deafening. Even if Morpheus screamed at her to switch on EMP, she wouldn't have been able to hear him.
Even more frigid air rushed in. The ship was going fast, but the sentinels had a good grip on the ship, and they weren't going to be thrown off easily. Kes had no idea how more were behind the ship, and how many more were waiting. If they blew the EMP early, the remaining sentinels, just out of EMP range, would rush in and pick them off easily.
"Kes!" Someone was screaming at her, a woman, so it had to be Elysia. "Switch on the EMP!"
"No!" she could hear Link reply. "Are you crazy?" He fired his rifle, killing a sentinel before returning to the argument. "If we blow it now, the ship'll fall!"
Internally, Kes was torn. She glanced at her father, who was wielding the gun as effectively as possible, but there were too many of them. Unless she blew the EMP, they were going to be overwhelmed.
Why did I ever take this crazy as hell job?
Her fingers hovered over the EMP switch. If she did it now…
Suddenly, a blast like a shockwave hit Kes, and the force of it chilled her to her bones. Her knuckles tightened on the Operating desk as the waves continued. When they receded, she thought the worst was over.
She was wrong.
The stop in motion was devastating, and for a moment, her body didn't register the fact that the ship was no longer moving forwards. By the time it had caught up, her stomach was flying through her throat as the ship plummeted to earth.
The ship probably only fell for a few seconds, but it felt like years to Kes. All motion ceased apart from her stomach turning and threatening to burst out of her mouth if she unclenched her jaw. Time itself seemed to stop.
Until the ship hit the ground. The effect was so sharp that Kes was thrown off her chair and onto the floor.
"Dad!" she cried as she fell, the impact rattling through her bones. Her jaw smacked the ground and she felt like someone had kicked her squarely in the middle of her face. Her already injured arm now hurt more than ever. The pain numbed her senses for a moment, and she lay there on the floor, unable to move as her nerves slowly and painfully returned.
Even though she was preoccupied with her pain, Kes could still hear something strange. It sounded like metal hail (something she had never experienced, but she knew how it was formed, simply from reading the Matrix code), but far bigger hail. As each metal thud landed on the ship, the whole structure of it shook.
Without warning the room shifted into pitch darkness. Kes looked upwards with blind eyes, looking towards the gap in the roof where the sentinel had torn through. She should have been able to see something, even if it was just the scrap yard of the sewers, but there was nothing. Only random chinks of light falling down through small gaps. From her vantage point, she could crane her neck to get a different perspective, and from her new point of view she could see that the gaps were small slits between tentacles lying haphazardly on each other.
It struck her then; the sentinels were falling down. Dead.
But how…?
"Kes? Kes, are you okay?" Her father's concerned voice brought her back to reality.
"Just peachy" Kes tried to reply, but her mouth was full of blood. Having no other alternative, she spat it out. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she sat up, feeling her father's supportive hand on her arm. "I'm fine" she tried to say convincingly. "What was that?"
"No idea" Neo replied, helping Kes to stand. He could just about see that her face and most of her shirt was covered in blood, but there was no time to worry about that. "Where is everyone?"
"I'm here" Elysia called, somewhere to the left of Kes. "And Link's next to me, I think he's unconscious"
Footsteps sounded to Kes' right, she could hear them and feel the vibrations they sent through the metal grille.
"Neo? Kes?" Trinity called from the entrance to the cockpit, blinded by the darkness of the ship.
"We're here" Kes could hear her father's deep, slightly hoarse voice say. Her mother's confident steps signalled her approach, and Kes quickly found herself cradled within her mother's protective arm.
"Not the face" Kes winced, pulling away. She could feel cool delicate fingers on her face, and she tried not to flinch.
"Is everyone alright?" Morpheus asked.
"Link's out cold, and I don't know where Kiana is" Elysia reported, the creaking of the metal grille reporting her movements.
"Kiana's over there somewhere, I saw her fall over when we still had light" Kes said, her voice sounding forlorn in the darkness.
In the darkness, some distance away from Kes, she heard a groggy groan. "What happened?" Link asked, sounding like he was in some pain.
"We don't know" Morpheus said. "Kes, did the EMP blow out?"
"Meaning, did I push it prematurely?" Kes replied with a sarcastic edge in her voice. "The answer is no; I did not push it prematurely and neither did it blow out. Whatever happened, I don't think it was a failure and it sure as hell wasn't my fault"
"Then what?" Elysia asked.
Suddenly, there was the sound of metal outside, crunching on the ground. Without anyone saying it, silence settled over the cabin, as everyone within strained to hear what was going on outside. Kes felt her father grip his rifle slightly tighter as the footsteps grew closer. The tension was so thick it could almost be seen hanging in the room, looming over them all.
Scraping against the hull. Footsteps. The shifting of metal.
The chinks of light in the roof of the hull got bigger. It was like someone was peeling off a bandage, and with each layer that was removed, more light flooded into the room. Only it wasn't layers of bandages, it was the splayed out tentacles of a sentinel, covering the gap. Kes could see that clearly now, especially the one that hung down, resting on the chair where she had been sitting. She shivered involuntarily, thinking about it.
Elysia and Neo both had their guns pointed towards the hole. No-one said anything, and if possible, the tension grew even thicker.
The gap in the roof was cleared, and it was clear that it was the work of human hands. Shadowy figures, too far back for the crew of the Neb sitting in the dark to make out, moved, and one figure climbed through and jumped down, their boots making a clanking sound and reverbing across the floor. They flicked on a slim torch, and shone it around, illuminating each face. The light finally fell on the guns, ready and waiting to be used.
"You can put that shit away, we're the rescue party"
Kes could have cried with relief. She knew the owner of the clipped, authoritative voice. It was Niobe, captain of the Logos and her aunt by adoption. Though at that moment, she could have even been Commander Lock and she would have been happy to see him.
"Christ, you took a beating" Niobe breathed incredulously as she looked around the battered remains of the Neb. "Is everyone okay?"
"Kiana's out cold on the floor somewhere" Kes said vaguely. They had landed pretty hard, and Kiana would have been in no state to hold onto something unless she miraculously regained consciousness. She could have been flung anywhere.
"Got her" Ghost said. By the uneven light from the torches, Kes could just about see that Kiana was lying face down on the floor.
Torchlight suddenly flashed in her face, and she had to squint to see anything properly.
"Kes, what happened to your face?" she heard Niobe ask as she extended a hand to help her up.
"It's not too bad" Kes replied, knowing that the usual fuss would kick up once it was clear how injured she was. Was it because of her parentage, or because she was still a kid in most people's eyes? She couldn't tell. She only knew it drove her mad.
"Come on. We ought to head back to the Logos and get you guys fixed up" Niobe ordered, starting to lead the way back through the hole in the hull. Kes followed, propelled by her parents, and Morpheus went ahead to talk to Niobe.
It was freezing outside, and even though the sewers were dim, the light hurt Kes' eyes. She hadn't realised how much she hurt. It was as though her body was screaming at her for ignoring the pain earlier.
Looking at everyone else, she could see that most had gotten off lightly compared to her. Link seemed to be okay, apart from a small cut on his head, and Elysia was much the same, only her palms were scraped raw by the fall, and she was limping. Her parents were both fine apart from a few cuts and bruises, and Morpheus wasn't visibly injured. She knew from experience that if he was injured, he certainly wouldn't show it, and worry about his crew first. Kes wished she could do the same. At the moment, she was trying to tell herself that the wetness on her face was just her eyes watering from the pain in her smashed nose.
Yeah right.
She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to keep warm, even though the movement made the burn on her arm ache even more. Most of the time, her work on the ship was boring. No getting around that. Most of the time, the monotony threatened to kill her, and she ached for something more exciting. However, whenever the exciting things came along, they usually came with a fifty-fifty chance of dying. That was why she always thought she could talk them round on the whole transfer thing – they'd let her join a ship at five. She'd survived this long. If they didn't intend for her ever to go on a ship, why was it the only home she could remember, the one she'd spent two-thirds of her life in?
Kes knew that it was likely that she'd watch her parents die sooner rather than later. She couldn't quite picture them dying of natural causes, when she was older and had lived life long enough to experience death. In many ways it was cruel, a child having to grasp the fact that her parents were probably going to die in an artificial world that she could have no part in.
When she was about seven, she had a recurring nightmare. She would dream that she woke up suddenly, in her usual bed on the ship, but instead of the grey-blue colours of the Real World, everything was tinted red. She ran through the ship, looking for someone, but everywhere was deserted. Finally, she'd gone back into her room, but instead of it being empty, it had been filled with corpses. Her parents, Morpheus, Niobe, Ghost…everyone that was connected to her in some way. In the dream she'd screamed and screamed and screamed, but when she suddenly jumped awake for real, she wouldn't utter a sound. Instead, she would sit there and shiver and stare at the wall until it was a reasonable time for her to wake up. It got so bad that she had once stayed up for almost twenty-four hours straight just to avoid sleeping. This went on for almost three months, until a newbie, Spider, had died whilst they were Inside. Somehow, seeing death, even from a distance, had cured her. She never had the nightmare again, and she never told anyone about it.
Maybe it was because every time someone died, she felt like crying with relief that it wasn't someone she loved.
Kes forced herself to move in sync with her mother's rhythmical footsteps, moving towards the Logos, knowing that there would be shelter there. Food, warmth, salvation, escape. At least this time.
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