She’d learned he could be managed easier if she didn’t think too closely about the fact that his parents could order her death if she so much as sneezed on the kid.
Deciding not to think about that… today at least… Jet pushed back by refusing to meet the kid’s gaze. She stared in the direction of the main palace, letting her eyes roam over the several acres of gardens spread below the round-walled structure.
Unlike the front of the building, which had a nearly human-like facade, the back of the complex and much of the gardens were pure alien.
It looked more like the brief tour Jet had gotten of the rest of the Green Zone.
This whole end of the structure had the same smooth texture that reminded her of eggshells, and the oddly-shaped designs that appeared ready to topple from their upper-story weight. The edge of the building extended past its base like a giant, flat mushroom, only one the size of a football stadium. Canals cut through the terrace below that flat expanse of roof, dotted by alien-looking trees and a number of glass-enclosed cages housing birds and different breeds of small mammals.
Whether most of those mammals were clones of previously-extinct Earth species or something from the Nirreth home world, Jet couldn’t always tell for sure.
She wondered idly if she could come up with an excuse that might allow her to retreat into the Royal Library––one of the few chambers in this underground lizard hole that Jet truly loved. Situated high in the dome of the main complex, it boasted a skylight the size of a swimming pool that let in blue sky and sun from its curved apex down to the edges of the main dome. From its shape, it could almost be an old-style cathedral in some city of Old Earth.
Stained glass windows curved down three of the rounded walls, interspersed with wide bookshelves made of wood that filled most of the twenty or thirty-meter-high spaces in between, like rays of the sun.
The actual furniture inside had been done up in a human-looking style, in that it reminded Jet of pictures she’d seen of libraries in books. Carved, stone statues stood in alcoves accented with colored lights, some depicting humans and some Nirreth, but all in the same white stone that looked almost like china. Despite the human touches, it still felt like a Nirreth room, but in the ways Jet had grudgingly begun to appreciate.
Meaning, birds filled the high dome as well, darting in and out of small holes near the top of the skylight and roosting on plants and trees that grew out of the walls above the windows and bookshelves. Flowers grew down those same walls, as well as a tree-shaped stone fountain carved in some kind of dark blue stone with designs cut in what might have been real gold, including gold leaves and leaves of a light-green stone so smooth it looked like glass.
Jet found the room profoundly still, and almost eerily beautiful.
Of course, her feelings since she’d gotten to the Royal Palace couldn’t help be mixed.
Everything she experienced here, good and bad… but especially the good… seemed to bring up the same confused anger mixed with guilt and pleasure and then more anger. Inevitably she said yes to whatever new indulgence they threw her way. At first she’d done it in order to keep up her strength and to appear to be going along, but now, she had to admit her feelings were already growing somewhat confused.
It struck her at times, how easy it was to become used to hot water and soft blankets and green grass and a blue sky.
All of it was too easy, really.
The seemingly endless supply of food, the room she shared with Anaze with the giant beds with pillows and silk sheets, the high-pressure showers with clean water, the endless supply of drinking water and clean vegetables.
It had only been a few weeks, and already Jet donned clean clothes every morning without thinking about it too much, and sat at a table with Laksri and Ogli while servants filled their plates with more food in a single sit-down meal than Jet got in the skag pits over the course of several days––twice, since Nirreth ate two of those a day.
Still, her primary way of looking at this change still came to her in terms of survival.
For the most part, she could just shunt all of her emotional reactions aside and take these things for what they were, without over-thinking it. Even so, in the quieter parts of her day, or if something happened that really pissed her off, the conflict festered somewhere in the back of Jet’s mind.
Unfortunately, it also forced her to remember some of the arguments she and Richter had when he’d first brought her here. Arguments about how the planet got as messed up as it did, for example, and whether humans really did need the Nirreth, if they wanted to survive as a species, on this planet, at least.
But that was a circular argument, too.
After all, the Nirreth weren’t cleaning up the planet, either.
Instead, they’d walled themselves off in these artificial environments, and pretty much let the rest of the world, including the vast majority of the human population, remain in the poisonous, over-polluted mess outside their theme-park sanctuaries.
According to Richter, it had been worse before the Nirreth arrived, but that hadn’t been the version of history Jet learned while growing up in the skag pits with her brother and mother.
Still, Richter seemed to believe it.
Jet didn’t know why she was so sure about that, but she would have bet on it. He’d meant that thing he said about humans needing the Nirreth.
Which of course brought her back to what Anaze told her about Richter.
Not just about him being a rebel, but him being their leader, and moreover, him running multiple fictions in order to infiltrate the Green Zones in the first place. Even more than the Nirreth Royals, Jet supposed she was an employee of Richter now, too.
She’d agreed to let them use her.
She’d agreed to let them use her access to the royal family, in whatever way might help the cause, whatever that ended up looking like.
Jet now also knew, via Anaze, that Richter didn’t have anything to do with those “rebels” who hung out by the old docks and beaches near the skag pit south of Vancouver… that young, angry, gang-like bunch of thieves and work camp escapees that took half of their new “recruits” and sold them to the Nirreth for slaves in the Green Zones.
Richter was different, according to Anaze.
He told her Richter’s people consisted mainly of ex-army, and the lean, hunter-looking mountain types from the Canadian Rockies all the way up north as far as Alaska. Jet knew which group Anaze meant, but she hadn’t dealt with them much personally. She’d only seen a handful of them at any particular time, too, and most wore masks.
She still wanted to know more about Richter’s plans.
She wanted to know a lot more about his end-point vision, too.
She knew he meant it when he said humans needed the Nirreth. But what did he mean by that, exactly? Did Richter mean that humans needed Laksri and the other Nirreth rebels? Did he mean humans needed Nirreth tech, to clean up the air and water and make the Earth livable again? Or did he really think humans could just move into the Green Zones, and all live as one big happy family under the fake blue sky, part of the new utopian society that he and Laksri planned to build?
Jet had no idea which, if any, of these things he’d meant.
Richter and Laksri’s partnership nagged at her, too.
She knew she probably watched the Nirreth as closely as he watched her.
Not to make sure he didn’t “give them away,” like Laksri did with her, but to try and figure out how to feel about him.
Less than two weeks ago, she’d pretty much hated all Nirreth.
Now, she didn’t really know how to feel about them as a group, much less in terms of individuals.
The only thing she did know for certain was that Richter had been right. No one in the skag pits knew the first thing about the Nirreth, not really. All those rumors she’d heard growing up consisted of little more than a bunch of tall tales and myths.
Not that the Nirreth weren’t frightening… they were.
But the things that horrified Jet most were more mundane than the boogeyman variety.
Humans in the skag pits knew nothing about the Green Zones, either.
Jet honestly couldn’t decide if that was a bad thing or a good one.
She still couldn’t draw lines between what Richter told her that day and what Anaze explained under the trees behind the Trevi fountain that night.
She would have just asked him herself, but she hadn’t seen Richter since the demonstration.
She assumed he’d left the Green Zone altogether… maybe to hang with his mystery rebels in the Canadian Rockies, or to cull more skag girls to seed in some other Green Zone. Maybe to fight some other portion of his war.
She had no idea, because she hadn’t gotten a chance to ask Laksri or Anaze those questions, either. She’d barely gotten any time alone with Anaze, even though they shared a room… and really, a bed, since they’d only been supplied with one and it was big enough to sleep four normal-sized humans.
She got a lot more time alone with Laksri, but that time didn’t do her any good, either.
Whenever she tried to ask him anything, even something relatively innocuous, the seven-foot lizard-skin put a finger to his deep black lips, giving her a warning look. She’d tried mouthing words to him in English, to see if he might respond––or even take her somewhere they might talk safely––but he only looked at her blankly.
Jet was still turning this over in her head, along with mulling ideas that might get her out of babysitting duty for at least part of the afternoon, when the boy stomped his foot furiously in the red clay dirt.
Jet watched the dust rise from his sandaled, broad-clawed feet.
The stables happened to be one of the few places in the Green Zone, at least of those Jet had seen, where the natural red clay, red rock and red dust of New Mexico showed plainly through the artificial landscape.
Of course, Jet hadn’t seen much outside of the Palace, so couldn’t really comment on the rest of the city, but on most of the Palace grounds, green plants, sparkling white stone and thickly sodded lawns covered over every inch of the natural landscape.
Jet wondered if the Nirreth engineered the rest of the city in the same way.
It had appeared so to her, in her brief view from the windows of the trolley that brought her inside the Palace gates, but from what she’d been told since, she’d only seen a fraction of the overall Green Zone.
In fact, Richter pretty much dragged her straight here from his culler ship.
The city itself was supposed to be something like 90,000 acres, so around 140 square miles. Jet couldn’t quite wrap her head around a city of that size, not when she actually looked at a map. It was more like a colony than a city.
Which, again, made sense.
“Jet!” the boy said, louder. “Jet! Look at me! Right now!”
Once more, she refused to turn.
“JET!” the boy demanded, stamping his foot harder.
More clouds of red dust rose from under his long, broad feet.
Pretending she hadn’t heard him––just like she threatened to do when he’d yelled incessantly at her the day before––Jet continued to gaze out the fifteen-meter-high wooden doorway, watching sunlight catch hold of the red dust as the beams filtered through the rafters. Jet, along with Laksri and Ogli, stood in one of the ten or so warehouse-sized, manure-smelling barns that formed a sort of zoological stable on the grounds of the Royal Palace.
Ogli was nine years old.
He also happened to be heir to the Nirreth throne and oldest son of the Royals, which meant he would someday rule not only all of Earth, but several of the moons around Jupiter, the smaller Mars colony, and the vast majority of worlds colonized by the Nirreth outside Jet’s immediate solar system.
Since the Nirreth’s own planet had become unlivable due to some solar event that cooked the surface of their world, the royal family had chosen Earth as the new primary base for the Nirreth’s leading caste.
She now lived in Green Zone Hezeret, Jet learned.
Laksri told her Hezeret was basically the capitol of Nirreth Earth, in the same way that Earth functioned basically as the new capitol of the Nirreth empire.
Jet also found out from Laksri that Hezeret literally meant “Red Sun” in the Nirreth language of Nargili, presumably in reference to the red cliffs and rocks of what had once been called New Mexico, in the United States of Old Earth.
This particular stable housed domestic animals from Old Earth human farms.
It also happened to be one of Ogli’s favorite places, which Jet found a bit baffling.
The kid could watch a T-Rex eat a zebra if he wanted, pretty much any time he felt like it. He could even stand next to one of those giant, leaf-eating dinosaurs the size of a building, or watch a tiger fight with a lion, or watch either a cheetah chase down a gazelle, or a lion hunt one of those bearded elk with the twenty-six-point antlers.
But no.
Ogli preferred to hang out with a bunch of cows and goats and rabbits.
He didn’t even want to pet or touch them; he simply wanted to watch every move they made, for as much time as he was allowed between lessons and meals.
Jet wondered if Ogli had some unusually intense interest in animal behavioral patterns, to make him watch them so closely. Or perhaps they had animals a lot like dinosaurs on their home world, and the wild rabbit with the giant ears who thumped his hind foot every time Ogli got near it––when it wasn’t trying to cram its body into the space under its wooden sleeping perch to make itself invisible––maybe that was the true exotic creature to Ogli.
Either way, Jet couldn’t help thinking the Nirreth really were different.
Truthfully, though, Jet was beginning to realize they were nowhere near as different as she would have liked. The similarities unnerved her more, maybe because she was a lot more comfortable with her version of the mythologized Nirreth than she’d realized.
Like now, watching Ogli stare at the animals filling the stalls lining the right side of the barn. Something about the spark in his eyes as he looked from one to the other reminded her of her brother Biggs, when he’d been a few years younger. Biggs got that same look on his face when he approached animals, especially if he thought they might be dangerous.
Here, the danger was harder to detect.
For one thing, all of the animals were locked inside very solid-looking pens. For another, these weren’t what Jet would consider highly dangerous pets.
Different colors and types of horses stood with their heads in or out of stall windows in a long row. The horses came in pretty much every shape, height and variety, so Jet had to assume at least some must have been shipped here from other parts of the world.
From spending a few hours in this exact barn each day for the past two weeks, Jet learned to differentiate between them, and even their names. She gave them nicknames if she didn’t see their stalls labeled.
She found them strangely familiar creatures, compared to the others, and in spite of the fact that she’d seen no living horses before arriving in the Nirreth city.
Some of the horses appeared so different from one another, they could have been a separate species. One of the black horses had a delicate, triangle-shaped head, large, liquid eyes, an arched neck and constantly prancing feet. Another stood taller than the rest and seemed to be all legs. One, Anaze called a “piebald” during his only trip to accompany them to the pens. That one looked sturdy and a bit tough compared the others, so Jet supposed it made sense that Anaze would gravitate towards it. Another had a long face, a thick neck, a very full mane and a tail that dragged the ground.
That one, Jet nicknamed “Clouds” when she couldn’t find a name for it.
The colors of their coats alone fascinated Jet, even without the variation in body type, head size, musculature, hair length and so forth.
Then there were the monsters like the one in front of her now, which seemed to be muscled all over. �
�The Percheron,” as he was called, stood a good three heads taller than the next in size of the penned horses. Pure white in color, with a dark gray mane and tail, it looked like he could pull a train car if hitched to one… or maybe a small house.
The only thing larger than him in that particular barn was a young elephant that lived in a stall at the far end.
Of course, the other barns had bigger animals, even apart from the dinosaurs, including a number of much larger elephants, as well as rhinoceroses and large flightless birds. Jet had also been told that at one of the coastal Green Zones, further south, they had a giant sea pen filled with mammals so large that they could swallow the largest elephant in one mouthful.
According to Ogli, who seemed to view himself as a sort of expert on the topic, the largest of these sea mammals even surpassed the dinosaurs in size.
Jet didn’t believe him, of course, but she found the thought curious.
The pens directly opposite the Percheron housed a variety of other traditional human farm animals, including dairy cows in different colors and sizes, goats, a woollier animal that Anaze called a “llama,” along with sheep, geese, chickens, ducks.
At the end, the open pen across from the elephant housed a massive, pink sow and her litter of pink baby pigs.
Until she got here, Jet hadn’t believed pigs could really be that bright color of pink. She’d assumed that to be a fairy tale, something they did in picture books to amuse children.
Then again, most of the animals she’d seen since her arrival in the Green Zone struck her as make-believe creatures.
In another of the barns, great cats of different colors and patterns stalked in cages next to wolves, eagles on perches, mammals in water tanks that built elaborate houses out of wood, minks and squirrels, lynxes and snakes, bats and swans. In another, still larger of those enormous warehouses lived camels, striped horses, gazelles, hippopotamuses in tanks, a beautiful animal labeled “okapi” in one pen that Jet really liked, water buffalo with rubbery skin, and a larger, woolly buffalo called a “bison.”
Jet also glimpsed an animal in one of the fields so tall and thin-necked that it had to be what Chiyeko described to her once as a giraffe.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 19