“Have to ham it up a bit, kitten. Hope you understand. They’ll want you all the more if they think you’re dangerous. That means more money for me.”
“What makes you think I wouldn’t hack off a few limbs if you gave my sword back to me?” Jet muttered back through gritted teeth.
Richter laughed aloud at that, clapping her on the shoulder.
“I’m counting on it, pet,” he grinned, winking. “I’m very much counting on that.”
They entered the next room as he spoke.
Once Jet’s eyes adjusted, she felt her breathing start to grow shallow.
The new room was a fraction of the size of the one they’d just left, also round, and rimmed with low cabinets with no doors. Inside those cabinets, Jet glimpsed materials like you’d see in a doctor’s office. Gauze, tape, metal instruments, vials, bandages, what looked like test tubes, different-sized bottles, liquid containers that might hold medicines…
None of that was what made Jet freak out.
In the center of the room stood a single, metal table.
It was like something out of her worst nightmares.
Without thinking, Jet began to struggle.
“No!” she managed through her teeth.
She caught both Laksri and Richter by surprise, and almost managed to get free.
Writhing in Richter’s grip, she jerked her body sideways and back, towards the domed room they’d just left behind. She managed to loosen Richter’s hold, but he recovered in an instant, snatching at her arm with his other hand.
Feeling like a dog on a chain, she strained with all of her might for the door, only turning to fight when they wouldn’t let go.
Kicking Richter’s shins, knees and thighs with her bare feet didn’t do much through the armor he wore, although he staggered back when she got him hard in the chest.
She aimed a kick at his head, but Laksri blocked her that time, grabbing her from the other side with his tail and then his jointed hand.
Between him and Richter, they began dragging her back towards the metal table.
Jet saw the instruments laid out on a nearby tray and let out a scream.
Throwing her whole weight sideways and back, she managed to create enough space that she kicked Richter again.
She slammed her whole leg and weight as hard as she could into his shin, then immediately kicked him again in the crotch.
Letting out a surprised, “Ahhhh,” he released her, and half-fell to one knee.
Jet whipped her body back and forth, trying to get free of Laksri, too, but the Nirreth was a lot stronger, and when she kicked him in the legs, he flinched, but didn’t loosen his hold.
She tried to get him in the crotch, like she had with Richter, but the Nirreth caught hold of her with his long arms before she could. She ended up pinned to the front of him, his strong arms around her chest, holding her tightly against his body. His arms tensed to rock, locking hers to her sides, like an iron cage.
She felt him breathing against the back of her neck.
“Sting?” Laksri asked Richter.
Its voice was a low growl.
Richter slowly climbed to his feet.
Glaring angrily at Jet, he waved Laksri off.
“No,” he said. “I need her coherent. You can sting her all you want after the demonstration, my blue-skinned friend… that’s a promise.” He glared at Jet, his brown eyes showing an open threat. “At the rate she’s going, I might let you do more than that.”
Laksri’s arms relaxed perceptibly.
It occurred to Jet, looking back, he’d already had his tail poised, the stinger unsheathed where it hung over her in a circular arc. Looking up at his elongated, feline face, Jet swore she saw disappointment in his expression.
Richter seemed to notice Jet looking, and laughed.
The laugh was harsh; clearly he hadn’t quite recovered from Jet’s well-aimed kick.
“Yeah, kitten… he wants to sting you. They all do. Remember that, before you decide to try this crap again.”
His voice was angry, but he was vertical again, motioning for Laksri to bring her over to the metal table.
Jet went back to kicking and trying to writhe free, but that time, her feet never found their mark. She couldn’t get enough leverage with the way the Nirreth held her. Her arms were useless, pinned entirely now, so her kicks fell on empty air, both behind and in front of her. She threw her weight backwards, trying to knock the Nirreth off balance, but it was like throwing her back into a rock wall.
Richter stood over her angrily once they reached the table, waiting impatiently as two other Nirreth appeared from openings in the walls.
When Jet saw them, she let out another yell, fighting harder against Laksri’s hold. The two new Nirreth wore what looked like lab coats, only they were bright yellow, and the faintly-iridescent cloth hung most of the way to their sandaled feet.
“No!” she said, panting. “No… please! Don’t let them cut me, please!”
“Is that what you’re worried about?” Richter retorted. He rolled his eyes, his voice holding disbelief. “For the love of the gods. It’s a routine examination, Jet. Would you relax?”
“Please!” she said, still trying to pry Laksri’s fingers off her. “Please. Don’t let them do this! I’m begging you, don’t let them––”
“Strap her down,” Richter told Laksri, motioning for him to translate for the lizard-skin doctors. “Tell them not to sting her either.”
Grinning down at her, Richter kept his eyes hard when he added,
“Don’t worry, kitten. They won’t hurt you. Much. They just want to make sure you’re not going to infect anyone in the Green Zone with any diseases.”
His smile turned more predatory.
“You don’t have any diseases… do you, love?”
Jet felt her panic worsen when the four Nirreth, including the female and Laksri, pinned her down and began taking off her clothes.
They cut off her shirt instead of unlocking the handcuffs, and Jet screamed, fighting the whole time they struggled to get her arms and legs locked to the metal table. Once they had her there, she screamed again, until one of the Nirreth laid a blue hand over her mouth, silencing her.
It wasn’t until she looked up that Jet realized it was Laksri.
His eyes held a strange expression, what might even have been sympathy, if she could have read such a thing in those black and indigo eyes. He kept his hand there while the others began poking and prodding at her skin, and Jet yelled out with every breath against his hard, jointed fingers.
After awhile though, she ran out of air for screaming.
Looking up, she just lay there, panting, staring at Laksri’s face as the doctors continued their work.
They took a few vials of her blood, snipped off strands of her hair and a piece of skin on her arm. They checked every inch of her skin––though for what exactly, Jet had no idea. One of them put a sticky ointment on the bruise where she’d been stung the day before. He slathered a different paste on the scrapes and cuts she’d gotten fighting the Nirreth, and from being dragged up into the culler ship by her ankle.
The medicine hurt, stinging worse than any antiseptic her mother ever put on her, but Jet only gasped, laying there without moving.
The worst part was being naked in front of Richter.
Being naked in front of the Nirreth didn’t mean a whole lot to her at that point. It bothered her, but not in the same way as having Richter’s eyes rake over her like she was a prime animal in his own personal herd.
When it was finally over, she felt exhausted, like she’d just run a marathon.
But Richter had been right.
It hadn’t hurt. Much.
When they finished, a spigot appeared over the table.
Three humans came into the room, causing Jet to stare.
All three looked female, aged roughly in their thirties, and wore clothes exactly like what the Nirreth wore, only in smaller sizes.
The Nirreth doctors stepped back as the humans approached. Laksri stepped back in the same moment, giving her a warning look before he removed his hand from her mouth.
Before Jet could even ask what the hell was going on, hot water streamed down over her, shocking, but not hot enough to hurt.
She yelped out in surprise, fighting to throw up her hands, but the bindings stopped her. Once the water switched off, the three women stepped forward. Jet realized they were carrying brushes and sponges, and that the water had soap in it. Jet winced and bit her lip as the two women bathed her, washing her hair and her body.
The Nirreth helped them to flip Jet over at one point, pinioning her wrists and ankles while they washed her back and even behind her ears.
It was humiliating, but Jet couldn’t do much about that, either.
She did what she could to block it out, humming songs in her head, imagining herself somewhere else, anywhere but here.
In the process, she tried to pretend it didn’t matter.
None of this mattered.
All that mattered was getting free.
And maybe killing Richter.
After they washed her and rinsed her a few times, heated air came from another spigot-shaped tube overhead, drying her skin. The humans disappeared back into the wall, and the Nirreth doctors reappeared. They spread more ointment on her cuts and scrapes, then taped a bandage over the cut from the stinger, after putting on more of that sticky medicine.
Jet was still lying there, when the bands around her unlocked, retracting back into the metal table.
Sitting up, she rubbed her wrists, unmoving as Richter threw her a handful of fabric.
“Put this on, kitten.”
Jet glared at him, but managed to untangle the fabric he’d handed her.
It was a pair of those form-fitting leggings the female Nirreth had been wearing in the sun dome room, and that the female human attendants had worn. With the pants, Richter had given her a long shirt, dyed olive green and decorated in gold thread.
She didn’t want to wear their clothes.
She already felt like a groomed pet, but didn’t see how she had much choice. She’d seen her old clothes cut into pieces and disappeared through a hole in the floor.
Richter uncuffed her hands long enough for the three Nirreth to put the shirt on her, then cuffed them back while they arranged it down over her hips.
Jet then had to deal with the indignity of them putting the pants on her, but she refused to let Richter see that it bothered her.
She also refused to help them in any way.
She glared at Richter instead, the entire time they pulled and tugged at the fabric to get it to line up right with her legs.
“Of course those are Nirrith kid clothes,” Richter said humorously, tilting his head as he once more assessed her with his eyes. “But they’ll work. You’ve got nice legs, Jet. A nice face, too. No way to tell that before, with all that dirt you had on you. Or in those rags you were wearing when I pulled you off the street.”
His mouth drew down in a frown as he continued to look her over.
“It should be a crime to let a beautiful woman dress like a street urchin all the time. To crouch in holes in the ground like a rodent.” He grinned a little then, meeting her gaze. “You almost look like a human being again, Jet. In fact, I’m now regretting I don’t have the money to keep you for myself…”
Jet continued to stare at him, her expression unmoving.
Finally, Richter chuckled.
That time, it even reached his eyes.
“Afraid of doctors,” he muttered, shaking his head bemusedly. “Of all the stupid things. If you want to be afraid of something, kitten, I can give you things.”
He grinned, chucking her chin with the back of his hand.
“…Still. You’ve got fight. It’s good to see down here, with so many of us mammals lying down and taking it these days. You’ll be fantastic in the Rings, Jet. That scowl alone is worth your weight. I’ll probably get double my asking price by the end of today.”
Jet refused to return his smile.
Instead she rolled her eyes, looking up at Laksri.
“Can you lead me?” she asked him pointedly. She motioned towards Richter with her head. “…Instead of him?”
That only made Richter laugh harder.
Hard enough that Jet turned, fixing him with an angry stare.
“See how easy it is, kitten?” he said, clapping Laksri on the shoulder.
His smile remained, but the humor leached out of his coffee-colored eyes, leaving them more serious than she’d ever seen him.
“Look how easy it is, kitten… to think they’ll be the ones to protect you,” he murmured, kissing her cheek.
Before Jet could reply, he leaned away, stroking the hair back from her face.
That time, she jerked from his touch, but Richter barely seemed to notice.
Turning away, he motioned to Laksri with his head, indicating for the Nirreth to bring her along as he aimed his feet for the door.
9
Artifacts
Jet stood next to another canal.
This one was outside.
Her long black hair swayed in the wind.
It was strange to have it down. Stranger still that it was so clean.
As irritating as Richter’s words had been, about how different she looked clean, Jet knew there was likely truth in his words.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a real bath, in anything but gray water and that horrible chemical soap compound they used at the settlement, that took her hair out in handfuls and made her smell bad for days afterwards.
Her hair smelled strongly of flowers now, almost cloyingly so, but nice, too. She knew it must be from the soap the human women had used.
Her skin also smelled good, different enough that she kept inhaling the scent, feeling vaguely at peace from it, in spite of herself.
She saw Nirreth staring at her as they passed, and staring at her hair.
Laksri was looking at her hair too, the one time she glanced back at him.
She guessed human hair must be a bit of a curiosity for them. She hadn’t really thought about the fact that the Nirreth had no hair on their heads until then.
They took her out of that white stone building over an hour before, and still, Jet hadn’t seen Anaze. She’d barely noticed, with her terror of that white-walled room, but Anaze remained behind, staying with the other Nirreth guards while Jet went through her examination and cleaning.
Now Anaze remained behind again, according to Richter, to go through all the same anti-viral and other quarantine checks they’d put Jet through, as well as his own “bath.”
Anaze would meet them later, Richter said, at the demonstration.
As she’d requested, only Laksri gripped her now, holding her arm in his strangely long and jointed fingers.
Richter walked on Laksri’s other side, periodically murmuring to him in a combination of English and the Nirreth’s native tongue.
Jet had wondered if Richter spoke it.
Apparently, him using Laksri to translate was mostly for show.
Jet’s hands remained cuffed in front of her, but she barely noticed.
It was strange how much harder it was to be tense and angry after being made clean and dressed in clean clothes. Being clean for the first time in months made it harder to feel the same level of anxiousness she had when they first landed. The clothes being so comfortable magnified that sense of peace; the Nirreth pants fit like a second skin, nothing like the coarse, dirt-encrusted fabric she’d worn for as long as she could remember.
Between the clothes, the smell of flowers on her skin and hair, blue sky, the warmth of the sun, the crystalline water in the canals, the birds and fish, Jet almost wondered if she’d died. Everything around her seemed unreal.
She could have died.
Maybe this was the Other Place, the one her mom and Chiyeko talked about. Maybe everything around her
existed only in her death-dream.
Oddly, her very difficulty in feeling more tense, more aggressive, more wary, created a different kind of low-level anxiety in her.
Jet glanced around the eerily quiet, wooded, park-like grounds of the Green Zone, and its dotting of oddly plant-like buildings. Nirreth walked the stone paths around her, wearing sandals and dark leggings and more colorful, flowing shirts.
Jet saw them sit on benches, stare up at trees, drink out of shiny containers, lie on the grass, and gesticulate with their tails and hands as they spoke to one another in that clipped and fast-moving tongue.
She glimpsed what might be “trolleys” on one of the larger streets, running back and forth on metal tracks. Boats floated down one of the wider canals, and she saw drones and even small planes moving soundlessly through the air.
Other than that, she saw no other forms of transportation––nothing like automobiles, or buses, or even planes big enough to carry more than one, maybe two occupants. White, fuffy clouds, and the sun, were the only big things she saw in the sky.
Overall, it was far, far quieter than anything Jet would have expected.
Once again, Richter seemed to guess some portion of her thoughts.
“Most of the major gatherings happen indoors,” he told her. “The Nirreth view nature, even the sun and sky, as worthy of contemplation. Not quite spiritual, not in the human sense, but as a means of exercising a certain measure of equanimity.”
He gave her a cynical smile.
“…What you would think of as ‘peace,’ I suppose. They’re a warlike bunch at heart, just like us humans, so they have to work for their repose.”
When Jet didn't answer, Richter motioned towards the nearby buildings.
“Anyway, so the markets, the bazaars, the political gatherings, and even festivals all happen indoors. That’s why they’re such fans of high-ceilings, open-floor plans, massive rooms filled with trees and plants, underground canals and seas, rooms with facsimiles of the sun and sky. If there’s a way to imitate nature underground, they’ll find that way.”
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 10