Jet nodded, still looking around.
She understood why they’d like this place.
The underground thing was weird, but she got this, the Green Zone itself.
She tried to be more or less amenable to Richter himself. Anything he could tell her about this place could potentially help her. She didn’t plan to buddy up to him exactly, but she didn’t want to discourage him from talking, either.
“So where are we going now?” she said.
Richter smiled. “To see the Royals, of course.”
He winked at her.
“They’d like a look at you… prior to the demonstration.”
He glanced down her body, and she got the distinct impression he was trying to get a rise out of her again.
“…Now, anyway,” he added. “Meaning, now that you’re in a relatively unsoiled state. They’ve invited us to lunch. We’re to go directly to their visitor’s compound.”
“Lunch.” Jet stared at Richter, frowning, but his expression didn't waver. “Lunch with Nirreth? What will they be serving?”
He grinned, showing his white teeth. “Not human, if that’s what worries you.”
She quirked an eyebrow, but her voice remained flat.
“It crossed my mind,” she muttered.
Richter laughed, shaking his head.
“I told you. They like to think of themselves as benign rulers these days. Eating humans is passé. Only the most gauche would dare even suggest putting human on the menu. Certainly no one in the Royals would do it, and not only because they’d probably lose an arm, given the queen’s thoughts on the subject.”
More seriously, he added with a shrug,
“The Royals, especially the queen, are pretty serious about the ban on eating humans, Jet. They’re arguing over a law right now, forbidding it in perpetuity, possibly upon pain of death. It’s already illegal here… in this Green Zone. This would be for all the colonies. And they’re not arguing about whether to institute the ban, but more the severity of the penalties.”
He smiled, tilting his head.
“They view those early days of the invasion as a bit of an embarrassment. A dark blemish, if you will, on their collective cultural history. They claim that they didn’t realize, at the time, that we-all were sentient. Of course, that’s utter nonsense… but no more nonsense than the lies humans have told themselves over the years about why we did things we did.”
Jet felt her jaw harden, but she didn’t argue.
It irritated her, his constant comparisons between the Nirreth and humans. She was well aware of her own species’ somewhat spotty track record, but it struck her as besides the point now, given everything.
Richter really did sound like a full-blown race-traitor.
She glanced around them as they walked, taking in the nearby garden that wound between two lopsided buildings.
When one of those trolley-like carriages pulled up next to them, she jumped.
She hadn’t heard a damned thing.
Laksri guided her towards the door as it opened, his fingers careful. Richter followed, pausing to say something to another Nirreth guard who flanked them. He spoke quietly enough that Jet couldn’t hear it, or even be sure which language he’d used.
Jet looked around, examining the insides of the odd vehicle.
It appeared to be made primarily of white stone, like the building they’d recently left, only the trolley was also encased in glass. A single fin below the main carriage disappeared into the tile sidewalk below her feet, like the keel of a boat.
On top, the carriage had sail-like appendages that fluttered lightly in the breeze, strengthening Jet’s association with a boat and the ocean. The sails shone a translucent white in the light of the sun, and moved slowly in the wind, like heavy cloth.
Inside the trolley, velvety padded benches formed rows on each side, deep black in color and about twice as wide as what she’d seen in the old wrecks of trains they found on tracks and in train stations near Vancouver. The glass walls made the seats appear like they floated above the ground.
“Are you going to sit?” Richter asked, making her jump.
He’d come up behind her while she stood in the doorway of the vehicle, staring around.
She turned, giving him a hard look, annoyed he’d managed to startle her.
As usual, her irritation only seemed to amuse him.
“…Sorry to interrupt a good ogle,” he added, winking. “But we’re on a timetable, pet. You’ll just have to gawk at the scenery later.”
Before she could answer, Laksri prodded her towards one of the padded benches.
Jet followed the direction of his fingers, if only to get away from Richter’s smirk. She slid down to sit on the bench as directed, settling herself near the window as Laksri sat heavily on the seat next to her.
Behind her, Richter plunked down on the window-side as well, while the other Nirreth guards sat directly in front of her. Jet couldn’t help noticing that, between them, they’d surrounded her. It might have been funny in other circumstances.
They couldn’t possibly see her as a threat, not with her barefoot and in party clothes, her wrists locked in front of her, next to all of them armed, unchained, and in military garb.
She stared out the window as the trolley glided soundlessly forward.
She’d never been inside a moving vehicle that made so little noise.
It made the cullers positively loud in comparison, and the settlement people spoke of culler ships as “shadows” that drifted down silently in the dark. Compared to the smoking and rumbling combustion engines left over from Old Earth, culler ships were quiet as death.
Jet kept her eyes focused on the window. Maybe to distract herself, she memorized every landmark she could see, and how they fit into one another.
She made a point of finding ways to distinguish buildings and streets, and even the markings she saw on signs and stones laid in the pavement. She noticed those stones cropped up mainly at intersections where two or more lines crossed, presumably marking changes in direction that sent trolleys to different parts of the city.
Trees made it difficult to see much, especially the fronts of buildings, and the exact location of entrances and exits. So many trees lined the city streets and filled the parks, Jet had to concede defeat on the actual buildings, although she didn’t stop trying to find ways to orient herself inside the larger maze of streets and canals.
“How big is it?” she asked after a few minutes more.
Her eyes never left the window.
“You know old-world Earth measurements?” Richter asked.
She shrugged. “Well enough.”
“Okay,” he said. “Then it’s roughly 90,000 acres. That’s about 140 square miles.”
Jet turned, staring at him. “What?”
“You need me to repeat that?” he grinned.
“No,” she said. Looking back at the window, she frowned, muttering. “It can’t be that big. It’s too quiet.”
“It’s quiet because it is that big,” he said, chuckling.
She shook her head, frowning as she stared out at the trees. “That’s not what I meant. No city is that big. Not even in old-world Earth. Why make a city that big, just to have it be empty?”
“I assure you, kitten,” he snorted. “It’s far from empty.”
Resting his arms on the back of the bench behind her, he shrugged.
“And if anything, my guess falls short, sweetheart. We came in on a private landing pad, remember? This is their capitol on this part of Earth… which encompasses what we used to call North America, along with some of Central America. In Old Earth, that’s United States, Canada, Mexico… all the way down to Costa Rica. They have four major spaceports here, not to mention immigration processing for anyone coming to the planet from any of their off-world colonies. Their economic hub in the West lives here, along with most of their broadcasting, planet-wide, including the Rings.”
Smiling at her, he shrugge
d.
“Think of it as kind of a Nirreth Hollywood, kitten… mixed with Washington D.C., and maybe Buckingham Palace… or Versailles. They produce most of the entertainment they fancy here. A lot of that entertainment gets exported off-world.”
He studied her face, his smirk growing more pronounced.
“Hell, didn't you hear me?” he said. “The Royals live here, pet. The ruling family. There’s another segment of the Royal family living in Africa, of course, but the Queen and the current heir to the throne live here. Earth is an important colony to the Nirreth. It’s become one of their primary residencies, since the atmosphere failed on their home world.”
She thought about that frowning.
Then something else occurred to her.
“Where are we?” she said, turning. “Which part of the country?”
“This used to be New Mexico,” he said at once. “The palace isn’t far from the outskirts of where Santa Fe used to be. If it wasn’t for the plasma bubble, projecting the blue sky and all the clouds and sun, you’d see the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to our right… and a lot of red dirt under a brown and yellow cloud from all of the leftover radiation.”
Jet turned all the way around, thrown, in spite of herself.
“The sky's not real?”
Richter laughed, shaking his head at her, his eyes showing a mock disappointment.
“Really, Jet?” he said. “Come on. You really thought there’d be blue sky and sun out here, but not on the rest of the planet? Explain that one to me.”
Seeing her frown, he chuckled.
“You can clean up the ground with a few decades of nano-scrubbing easily enough, darling, but cleaning the atmosphere’s going to take a bit more time. Even for the Nirreth’s big-brain scientists. And you keep wondering why I say we need them.”
His eyes hardened as he stared out the window, holding that peculiar look.
“We humans probably would have killed ourselves off entirely by now, Jet. Even you must realize that. You’ve studied history, haven't you? Or do you still believe rebel propaganda that the Nirreth did that to our sky and water?”
Jet didn’t answer, turning to stare back out the window.
She’d wondered about the sky, of course.
She had no idea they could project a fake sky, though.
Anyway, it sure felt real.
In a way, that blue sky, those white clouds, and the golden sun looked more real to her than the dense, toxic, low-hanging, brown cloudbanks that had covered Vancouver like a disease for her entire life.
Maybe some part of Jet just knew this was how a sky was supposed to look.
The trolley began to slow.
Jet turned her head, looking through the front window around the shoulders of the giant Nirreth in front of her. She caught a glimpse through the glass in time to see them pass through a high stone arch, surrounded by thick walls.
Jet saw symbols carved in the stone, odd chicken-scratches…
Then it was gone.
The trolley kept moving along silently, bringing them into a wide garden, with enormous, thick-trunked trees and a pond dotted with white birds.
She stared out the glass at them, amazed, nearly in awe.
She was still staring at them as the trolley rolled to a stop.
Tearing her eyes off the birds, Jet watched the doors rise, giving her a view of a tall, strangely rounded building on the other side. A pale blue in color, it shimmered in the fake sunlight, sending off rays of iridescent light like diamonds. Tall Nirreth stood on either side of a shadowed door, and Jet saw marble-white steps leading up from the circular drive, bordered on either side by flowers with large, bell-shaped blossoms and dark-green stems.
The rushing, tumbling sound of water pulled her eyes to the left.
She let out a little gasp in astonishment.
Covering one whole section of lawn, to the left of the steps leading up to the main building, stood an enormous fountain, gushing with clear water, filled with statues made of white, marble-like stone, possibly the same stone as the steps.
She gaped at it, like she had with the birds.
Stone basins rippled out from the center, shaped to look like real rocks. The water cascaded down in sheets from different-leveled pools, ending in a final basin long enough and wide enough to swim in. More than a fountain, it contained its own structure, filled with marble horses and giant marble men.
All of those figures were indisputably human.
The horses were Earth horses.
Behind the fountain rose the stone front of an apparently human-made building. Decorated with white, ribbed pillars, it housed more of those enormous, stone men, carved to look like angels or gods. Jet saw writing etched into the stone––human writing, framed by cherubic creatures and stone guards carrying lances.
The tallest figure stood in the center, a stone man on an enormous oyster shell, wearing swaths of stone cloth. Human-faced yet unreal-looking, he was flanked on either side by winged horses and more giant humans in the pools below.
It was a fountain made to instill wonder… even grandeur.
And it was human.
Even stranger, Jet could almost swear she’d seen it before.
Jet continued to stare at the fountain wordlessly as she followed Laksri’s tugging hand out of the trolley, and even after the trolley glided away, passenger-less and driverless, to return to the main city.
She wanted to wade in the pool, to get closer to those stone gods, peer into their faces.
Richter chuckled, drawing her eyes.
Despite the laugh, a harder look darkened his expression.
“Do you really recognize it, kitten?” he said. “I’ll admit, I’m surprised… and impressed. Not many at your age would know such a thing. Not anymore.”
She didn’t want to ask. She really didn’t want to ask him.
He seemed to see that in her face, too.
“It’s the Trevi fountain, love,” he said, softer. “It used to be in Rome.”
“Rome?” Jet stared, frowning. “But isn’t that––”
“On the other side of the world?” Richter smiled wryly, then shrugged. “Rome itself is gone, of course. Centuries of ruins… empires that rose and fell, most of them human.” He turned, watching her face shrewdly. “It was one of the first cities destroyed in the invasion, so you can blame the Nirreth for that one. But as you can see, our new overlords managed to preserve a few trinkets that caught their eye.”
Jet studied his face, trying to interpret the anger she saw there.
If nothing else, she’d file it away as information to think about later.
She still couldn’t figure out exactly where Richter stood with the Nirreth. Open resentment at them stealing something that had once been human, something that symbolized the pinnacle of old-world human artistry and culture… that was new.
“Don’t overthink it, sweetie,” Richter said.
Once again, he seemed to read some portion of her thoughts.
“I just don’t like seeing pretty things destroyed.” Grinning at her, he winked. “You should be thankful for that, by the way…”
Jet felt her jaw harden.
All of her interest in Richter’s mind faded in roughly the same set of seconds.
Which maybe had been his intention.
She was still staring at the fountain as they led her up the steps.
She didn’t look away until they reached the shadowed alcove before the wide double-doors, and then only because she couldn’t see it anymore.
She still heard it, however, its water thundering into the silence of the Nirreth gardens, echoing in the acoustics of the overhanging building.
10
Lunch With The Enemy
Jet sat in a wide chair at the edge of a long, oval table.
They’d cuffed one of her wrists directly to the table, without even a chain to give her any play. Since he’d locked down her left wrist, not her right, she had to assume Richter noti
ced she was left-handed as well––or one of the Nirreth, maybe, based on how she wielded her sword.
When Richter finished locking her ankles to the bottom of the chair, Jet gave the smuggler a disbelieving look.
He smiled that wan half-smile of his, unrepentant.
“Procedure, darling,” he drawled, giving her a friendly pat on the shoulder. “You’re officially an untrained pet now, even though no money has changed hands. Bought or not, you’re brand-spanking new, Green Zone property. What the Nirreth call ilezni, meaning ‘uninitiated.’ You’ll earn privileges as you go through the training, including the ability to eat without restraints, but in the meantime, you’ll be watched pretty much 24/7, especially when the Royals are around.”
Grinning at her, he straightened.
“…They don’t need you carving little tokens of your affection into the chest of one of the blue-bloods,” he added with a laugh.
Jet didn’t answer.
She tried not to rise, knowing he was still baiting her when he seated himself beside her, draping an arm over the back of her chair with an air of implied ownership.
She wondered if she might be able to stab Richter with her fork once they served food.
Unfortunately, Richter seemed to have thought of that. He seated Laksri on her right, where her free hand lived, and only supplied her with one of those soft, ladle-like spoons.
Jet sat there, back straight, watching as well-dressed Nirreth entered the room.
She still had a lot of difficulty telling them apart.
The long table where she sat lived in another round room with a high dome. This one rose easily twice as high as the reception area by the docks, however. Also, Jet was reasonably sure the roof contained an actual sunroof, letting in the actual sky––or the projected sky under the plasma dome, at any rate, since the real sky lived outside the Green Zone altogether.
Like every Nirreth building she’d seen so far, plants ringed the curved walls, along with flowers and trees. Jet even recognized a few species from Longhouse botany books, but over half she’d never seen before. Red rock boulders and cliff pieces, likely brought in from the New Mexico desert, were arranged along one wall as decoration.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 11