Chrysalis Young (10 page)

“That’s a great idea!”
Chrysalis said.
“Start thinking of the convention centre.”

Moments later, Amanda found herself surrounded by the main auditorium in the Horsey Centre. It was empty. She was in costume, the sword already in her hand. She got rid of the mask.
“Okay. What happens now?”

“I’m about to lift the ship off the surface,”
Chrysalis said, as though she didn’t even believe it herself.

Amanda braced herself against the nearest auditorium seat. And then noticed how solid it was. She wasn’t given time to dwell on this. The entire auditorium tilted on an angle, vibrated lots, and then tilted crazily the opposite way. Amanda struggled to stay on her feet, wishing now that she did have some extra hands.

“We’re flying!”
Chrysalis said.

The auditorium bucked mightily, determined, it seemed, to deposit Amanda in an untidy heap on the floor.
“You’re doing great,”
Amanda said.
“You were born for this.”

“Yes,”
Chrysalis agreed happily.

Now that the ship was exposed, it wasn’t long before the aliens attacked. The auditorium filled with zombies. They all turned towards her. There were no ‘bewildered.’ Freed of that concern, Amanda immediately released a bomb.

Nothing much happened. She tried again. Zero.

“Chrysalis. The bombs aren’t working,”
Amanda said.

“Busy. Please call back later,”
Chrysalis said.

“The bombs aren’t working!”
Amanda yelled.

“No need to shout,”
Chrysalis said. She checked with the minder.
“Your bombs only killed aliens when our resources were linked because they were not designed to kill aliens directly. They were only designed to kill zombies. Our resources aren’t linked anymore because the link only worked when I was killing aliens too. You can’t use my resources directly because they’re not designed for humans.”

“Yeah, okay, but the bombs should still kill zombies.”

“These aren’t zombies. These are aliens. The interface is translating them as zombies because that’s what’s in your memory,”
Chrysalis said.

“Oh, that’s truly wonderful,”
Amanda said, not really getting it at all, because she was preoccupied with staying alive just right now. She ran along the top of a row of seats, decapitating a long line of zombies. What she did get, was that she no longer had bombs for whatever reason. She released two clones and went to work. As she had expected, the clones weren’t all that effective in the confined space and she could only occasionally spare the time to redirect their activities and so she quickly lost them. This time, she didn’t hesitate and released more. She had to make up for the lack of bombs somehow.

She killed zombies throughout the Horsey Centre and it certainly made it a lot simpler without the ‘bewildered,’ although she sorely missed the bombs. For every zombie she killed, two more sprung up in their place and she quickly realised she was getting nowhere and, anyway, they had already decided this was no way to kill millions of aliens. She hacked at the zombies, increasingly uncertain about whether this was even going to work. Maybe it was the uncertainty that distracted her, or there were just simply too many of them. She found herself on the floor pinned down by two zombies. Others crowded in.

Hooked talons viciously raked down her body, leaving long red furrows and shredding her costume.

It hurt. Lots. Amanda cried out.

Worse was to come. The zombies’ heads metamorphosed to long heavy jaws with fangs, and cold eyes, and a dragon head.

The zombies around her all became winged dragons.

The dragons pinning her down drew back, their jaws opening as they readied to strike and tear her to pieces.

She was about to die.

Swamped with panic, she tried the only thing she had left. She called the sword to her other hand.

She had never used the sword with her left hand because, being right-handed, it didn’t work for her and she’d never had the time to practice with it because it had all been on-the-job training. Maybe the dragons knew this. Maybe not. Her left hand was not so tightly pinned down, although there was still hardly any movement in it.

But there was enough. She swivelled the sword, clumsy in her left hand and sliced across one of them pinning her down. The dragon roared in pain and fell back. The second dragon’s grip on her right wrist released a fraction as the dragon became distracted by its companion’s distress. Instantly she called the sword back to her right hand and cut the second dragon in two. It died, screaming.

Springing to her feet, she faced the dragons. These were not zombies, mindlessly attacking through sheer weight of numbers. They were alive, with a cold intelligence in their eyes. They worked together and looked out for each other. Unlike the zombies, they felt pain when they were wounded. She threw fireballs at them. They caught them neatly in their mouths. Several of them opened their jaws wide revealing her fireball intact and now mixing with their own fire. Just when it seemed they were about to roast her, they all froze, as though suddenly their minds were elsewhere. Or maybe it was the other dragons tightly packed around her…or the wounded dragon…

“Help,”
she said to Chrysalis.
“These are dragons, not zombies. What the freaking shit is going on?”

“The aliens are seizing control of the fighting space. Your interface.”

“They can do that?”
Amanda said. She could sense Chrysalis mentally shrugging.

“It sort of looks that way,”
Chrysalis said slowly. She sounded uncertain.
“The minder says that the aliens and us have similar technologies.”
After a brief pause she said urgently.
“You have to use your imagination. You have to make the fighting space your construction, not theirs.”

In the hiatus, the dragons had already been busily at work, replacing the Horsey Convention Centre with their own construction. Amanda found herself standing on the floor of a giant cavern, the rock roof arching high overhead. The walls dripped with fiery liquids which lit the cavern with a flickering glow. Flying through pillars and other rock formations were thousands of dragons.

Concentrate!

Amanda focused on the Horsey Centre, willing it back. Parts of the cavern dissolved into bits of the auditorium. The effort was exhausting. As hard as she tried, she could only bring parts of the auditorium back. Then, even that was denied to her. The dragons spiralling down closer to her, opened their jaws, and spat balls of fire at her. Amanda scurried behind a big rock pillar. The heat from the exploding fireballs beat at her. She could smell hair burning. Hers.

There was no way she could bring the auditorium back. She was going to have to fight on their ground. She let go the images of the auditorium and the cavern returned wholly to the dragons’ creation.

Above her, dragons alighted on the top of the pillar. She hurled fireballs at them to no effect.

If she didn’t come up with something fast, it was going to be a very short fight.

She tried something different. She couldn’t change the whole cavern but maybe she could change bits of it. She imagined an opening in the rock wall beside her, going off into the rock.

An opening appeared. Shaky at the edges, maybe, but real enough. She dashed into the opening, closing it behind her. She ran deeper into a narrow rock corridor, imagining it in front of her as she ran, and closing it off behind her. She imagined stairs going up and spiralled them back to the cavern.

Now she imagined a thin wall of rock between her and the cavern. She killed the lighting in the little chamber. She hid behind a large rock beside the thin wall and dissolved the wall. She peered around the rock into the big cavern. It was still full of dragons flying about. She crept to the opening and carefully arched her head to look along the walls around the opening. Clinging to the rock walls around the opening were about a dozen dragons. They hadn’t yet noticed the dark opening in the rock.

Amanda abruptly made the opening wider until the dragons’ rock support disappeared. The dragons fell into the opening. Before they had a chance to react, Amanda cut them to pieces.

Flying dragons hurled fireballs at her. She imagined the rock wall back again, sealing off the little chamber from the fireballs which exploded harmlessly on the other side.

Seconds later the wall to the cavern dissolved again.

Try as she might, she wasn’t able to close it. The little chamber began to shrink, pushing her out into the cavern. The dragons were seizing control again.

And they were much stronger than her. She let go of the little cavern and jumped straight out of the opening and plummeted down the rock wall, taking the dragons by surprise. Several fireballs narrowly missed her. She imagined a rock ledge with a net in the centre. She scrambled out of the net and into a new opening. Again she had caught them by surprise and got away.

The next time she encountered the dragons, they were ready for her tactics. The dragons were in a new cavern with a waterfall dropping down between two high pillars of rock, the spray from the waterfall misting through the cavern and wetting everything, making it slippery underfoot. They let her enter the cavern and then prevented her from changing anything. She quickly found herself backed up against a rock face with nowhere to go.

The only thing that saved her was that the cavern suddenly bucked and heaved and tilted on one side. Many of the dragons smashed into the rock walls and dropped, crushed. Others fell over. So did Amanda. She was lighter on her feet than them and raced away into a new opening.

“Did that help?”
Chrysalis said.

“You did that?”
Amanda said.

“Yes.”

Amanda and Chrysalis now had a powerful new tactic. When the dragons prevented Amanda from making changes, Chrysalis threw the ship around, killing or injuring many of them in the process and breaking their concentration, enabling Amanda to escape into a new opening. Amanda created rock bridges over deep chasms. Caused rockslides to kill dragons. Used the dragons’ own rivers and lakes to shield her from the fireballs and then escaped down through an opening underwater.

The battle raged through the caverns. Amanda killed many dragons. It was still not enough.

Then the dragons came up with a whole new strategy.

Amanda peeped out from under a stone arch in the cavern of the many waterfalls to find only one dragon. A dragon that had to be more than 100 metres high. It towered up in the cavern, almost reaching the rocky roof. Amanda ducked down into the now dubious shelter of the stone arch.

“Are you kidding me?”
she said.

Chrysalis rushed off to check with the minder.
“It’s not one alien. It’s millions and millions of them all formed together into one big alien dragon.”

Amanda peeked out again. Now she could see that Chrysalis was right, although it didn’t alter anything. She couldn’t even begin to think how she could fight this monster. The dragon began to hurl enormous fireballs indiscriminately about the cavern. Amanda dropped down through the rock floor beneath her.

This time she squirrelled up through the rock until she was above the dragon. She made an opening an eyeball wide. Not only was the dragon still hurling fireballs, it was also bracing itself against the rock walls of the cavern to counter any sudden movements of the ship. She imagined spikes on her feet and her forearms.

This was definitely going to be a first.

She dropped down through the roof onto the head of the dragon, digging in with the spikes on her feet. The dragon roared, shaking its head mightily, trying to dislodge her. Now the dragon could not hit her with fireballs, and it tentatively removed a clawed arm from the rock wall to swipe at her.

Chrysalis jiggled the ship. The dragon instantly braced itself again.

Amanda drove her sword straight down through the top of the dragon’s skull, all the way to its hilt.

The dragon died without a sound. As it toppled over, Amanda unimagined the spikes on her feet and flipped herself onto the top of a tall pillar as the dragon dropped away beneath her feet.

The dragon hit the floor of the cavern with a thunderous crash and broke up. The cavern became littered with the carcasses of millions of dead dragons.

“Warrior girls rock,”
Chrysalis said softly.

“Amen to that,”
Amanda said.

The next time, there were three of the monster dragons. They braced themselves against each other and against the rock and covered each other’s back with a deluge of fireballs.

Amanda darted in at floor level, spiking her way swiftly up a couple of metres to the ankle of one of the dragons. She sliced through its ankle tendons and tried to disappear back into the rock but they were faster. The rock stayed solid. Worse, a massive ledge of rock split off from the face and started to fall on her. She rolled sideways out from underneath and spiked her way up the leg of the wounded dragon, slashing at its knee tendons, narrowly avoiding vicious swipes from the dragon’s free arm.