The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure

by JC Andrijeski

  It was hard to feel too sorry for him.

  “Please ride the horse, Jet!” Ogli said, abruptly changing his tactics. “Please! Please!”

  Jet looked at Laksri.

  “That thing will kill me, won’t it?” she said.

  Laksri frowned, folding his arms across his broad chest.

  His tail flicked in lazy circles behind his body as he approached the white horse. Catching hold of its bridle in one hand, he stared into the horse’s eyes, as if trying to communicate with it. After a pause, he released its head, rubbing a four-fingered hand over its nose. The horse bore it patiently enough, then shook its head, snorting and stomping a foot before letting out a low rumble of sound.

  Laksri glanced at me.

  His English wasn’t as good as the young prince’s.

  “Maybe not kill,” he said, blinking at her again in amusement. “But the father not like. Rings training a problem.”

  Ogli looked up at Laksri, frowning, as if he viewed his words as treason.

  When Ogli looked back at Jet, she held up her hands, as if in surrender.

  “You see, Ogli?”

  The prince seemed to realize he wasn’t going to win the battle and sighed, a trilling sound that was almost musical. He held out a hand to Jet.

  She took it, and let him lead her deeper into the barn.

  Ogli coiled his tail around her arm, too, but Jet didn’t feel any threat in the gesture.

  It actually felt affectionate… if just the slightest bit possessive.

  When she glanced at Laksri next, he was watching her again, that harder scrutiny back in his deep black eyes.

  2

  Searching For Water

  Jet didn’t manage to get free until a few hours later.

  Ogli left for his afternoon lessons and Jet bolted out of the room the instant she got permission, feeling her muscles relax as she began walking purposefully down the underground and winding corridor between two of the palace buildings.

  Despite the blue skies and high, yellow sun projected on the dome walls, the Nirreth still built their structures mainly underground.

  Jet didn’t mind.

  She was used to maneuvering underground; she’d lived underground as long as she could remember, so truthfully, she felt more secure in enclosed spaces than open ones. Most of her life she’d been navigating underground passages, so keeping her sense of direction despite multiple turns and forks didn’t pose a problem for her, either.

  Of course, the Nirreth liked to punctuate those tunnels with vast rooms, some of which were large enough that Jet got lost in the open spaces.

  Mapping tunnels also felt second-nature to Jet, so she found herself exploring whenever she got the chance.

  A few times, she got further off the main tracks than security allowed, and she’d been “collected” by guards holding weapons. Everyone assumed she just got lost, so all she really got was a scolding and a finger-wag, Nirreth style.

  Not enough to keep her from doing it again.

  Before they caught her, Jet managed to find the underground greenhouses that grew food for most of the royal compound, as well as the air-circulation machinery. She even glimpsed the machines that created the weather inside the larger dome, including sun and rain. She found it interesting that the Royals controlled that for the entire Green Zone.

  Nirreth machines remained as inscrutable to her as their weapons, so it was doubtful the information helped her much.

  She watched closely whenever she saw one of the lizard-skins operating any kind of machinery or access panel, from the most mundane to the most secure, but usually, she didn’t really get it. She watched the guards more closely than the rest, but still didn’t feel any closer to understanding how things actually worked.

  Laksri would be looking for her soon, Jet knew.

  Normally, when Ogli went to school, Jet did too.

  Sometimes that meant being hauled down to the virtual Rings, where she spent a few exhausting hours a day learning the complicated rules of the fights. Sometimes it meant language lessons. Sometimes it meant history, etiquette and so on.

  Laksri usually was the one to bring her wherever they wanted her. But Laksri hadn’t been with her when she dropped Ogli off.

  Jet didn’t wait around to see if he’d show up.

  Taking off as soon as the guards came to take Ogli away, she headed to the next level down in the complex.

  Making a few turns from memory, she continued to follow passages that sloped deeper underground instead of up towards the surface. Funnily enough, Richter himself had determined the subject of her next exploration; she’d never forgotten his questioning her about whether she could swim. Some part of her chewed over that for a few days, trying to decide what he could have meant, given what she knew about him now.

  Jet still couldn’t trust Richter––or even Anaze, who’d lied to her for the past however-many years they’d supposedly been friends––not until she understood both of them better, and knew more about their plans.

  Even so, given what Anaze told her about why they’d brought her here, she’d been forced to reframe a lot of what Richter had done and said during the time she’d spent with him on the culler ship. After all, if Richter led the rebels, most of his questions and warnings must have something to do with his real reasons for bringing her here.

  According to Anaze, Richter brought her here to help them bring down the Royals.

  Jet was all for that.

  Well, in theory, anyway.

  Jogging around the first corner, past the more populated segment of the tunnels, Jet hugged the wall as she half-ran, making sure her eyes adjusted to and checked every corner as she rounded turns. Unarmed, she didn’t know what she would do exactly if attacked, but she moved thus out of habit.

  Even the skag tunnels stopped being entirely safe for her not long after she reached puberty.

  Kids would hide in there at night, and challenge anyone who passed until they got caught by the wrong adult and were beaten, usually publicly and by their parents.

  Less commonly, adults would lie in wait in those tunnels, but when adults got caught, the punishment was generally banishment or death.

  The difference between the two usually depended on when they were caught… if it was before or after they’d managed to catch someone unawares down there… as well as whether that person was alive or dead, single or married, male or female, old or young, with child or not, and so on.

  For Jet, the real threat came from the boys.

  The adults didn’t take their attempts as seriously, so girls were usually on their own in terms of making sure nothing happened.

  Most girls did that by avoiding certain tunnels altogether, which didn’t eliminate the problem, of course, but lessened it somewhat.

  Jet didn’t like that as a solution, so she went to Mishio and her uncle Draven and asked them to teach her how to fight.

  Black came out of that request, along with lessons from her two uncles on how to use it.

  She still tried to be careful, of course. She never went looking for a fight.

  And yet, the worst of those tunnels also happened to be the only real way to get out of the skag pit without being seen by most of the adults, including Jet’s mother. Since her mother didn’t want her hanging around either Mishio or Draven or Draven’s wife, Lara, much less playing with swords, Jet risked it.

  Not risking it meant no hand-to-hand lessons with her uncle and Lara.

  To Jet, that made the risk worth it.

  Although Uncle Draven was the unofficial leader of the skags’ small fighting force, Jet found Lara actually harder to fight. Lara was faster. She was more unpredictable. Lara also knew a lot of tricks to offset the advantages men had with weight and range and so forth, things Draven just never had to learn.

  The boys that roamed those halls, looking for girls on their own, figured out quickly that Jet wasn’t the easiest quarry to corner. Thanks to two years of her uncle and aunt’s
lessons, she’d broken bones and noses during their first real attempt, when she was twelve. She stabbed an eighteen-year-old “boy” named Larks in the gut on their second attempt.

  The attacks seemed to escalate for a while after that, at least from Larks and his gang.

  Then Jet met Anaze, and they stopped.

  Like, altogether stopped, and pretty much overnight.

  Once it became known around the settlement that the two of them were friends, Jet never got so much as a threatening look, not even from Larks, who she knew hated her guts. She’d heard murmurs and warnings that he’d planned on getting her back.

  Then she met Anaze, and those rumors stopped, too.

  All of the overt hostility pretty much vanished, as soon as they were seen hanging out a few times in public areas of the pits.

  Thinking about that now, Jet found it curious.

  At the time, she figured it was simply supply and demand politics.

  Being a few years older than her, Anaze was already a hunter, and one who brought home kills. All kills required tithing of some kind, per pit custom, which meant they impacted everyone, including the parents of the boys who’d harassed her.

  The one who made the kill got to choose the families who got the tithe.

  Most just handed them to the kitchen crew who either made something for everyone or rotated. But that was a combination of custom and politeness. No one could make the hunter give their meat to anyone, not if they didn’t want to.

  For the same reason, Jet assumed those kids had been warned away from her so their families wouldn’t lose their quota of meat.

  Thinking about it now though, that rang a bit hollow.

  Even at the time, Jet wondered if that would have been enough to get them to leave her alone––especially someone like Larks, who probably didn’t care all that much about his younger brothers and sisters.

  Anyway, Larks’ parents might not have even known he’d planned to go after Jet. A ton of parents turned a blind eye to their kids’ behavior, especially in the tunnels.

  She wondered now if it was something else about Anaze that scared them.

  Like, for example, if they knew about his connection to Richter.

  Or maybe they’d known something else about Anaze––something Jet didn’t.

  It occurred to her that she’d never actually seen Anaze fight.

  They’d sparred, sure, but that was different from a real fight.

  She’d gotten a few glimpses in that one raid against the dock rebels and their friends from Stanley Park, but not enough to really know how good of a fighter Anaze really was.

  She’d mostly been looking to see if he was still standing, then focused back on her own problems when he was.

  She’d gotten impressions, nothing more.

  He seemed focused when he fought, and he didn’t back away from larger opponents, or from taking on more than one at a time. That, in itself, was pretty unusual. Most in the settlement could fight at least a little, but they weren’t warriors in the strictest sense.

  Most of those raids––the ones by Richter’s people, for example––Anaze had been out hunting. Of course, the fact that he’d missed the Richter raids now made a lot more sense, but he’d been gone for others, as well.

  She did know he’d been in the thick of things that day, maybe even more than her, and yet he came out without more than a few cuts. She’d fought to protect the animal pens and the food stores, along with Kimchee, Hawkings, and a lot of those who worked in husbandry, as well as the blacksmith, Edgar, and Lacey, the shepherd’s daughter.

  Most of those who’d been fighting over by the main entrances to the pits had lost arms, fingers, gotten stab wounds and arrows in their chests, bellies, and legs. Anaze, although he’d been in the middle of that group, came out pretty much unscathed.

  That might have been pure luck, of course.

  Jet thought so at the time.

  She’d gotten that one arrow in the shoulder, but it hadn’t hit anything serious.

  She’d been lucky. Anaze had been lucky. The settlement had been lucky.

  That’s what she’d thought at the time.

  Lucky there hadn’t been more of them. Lucky most of the good fighters happened to be within shouting distance. Lucky the raiders hadn’t brought any of those Nirreth weapons, and lucky they’d managed to beat them back without losing more than a few people in about three hours of fighting.

  Looking back on it now, Jet wondered.

  Reaching another fork in the tunnels, she took the downward passage, and now she could smell it.

  Water.

  The smell drifted up through the dark tunnel, as though from the stones.

  Even the air tasted different.

  The tiles remained that odd white color on the walls, but it seemed to Jet as though they were grayer, maybe from mold in the air from being so close to the main reservoir.

  Adding a jolt of speed to her legs, she took the last few turns at a near run, excited for some reason. Maybe because she’d half-convinced herself the reservoir might be a way out, given Richter’s questions about whether she could swim, or maybe because she’d managed to find it on her first try, primarily from noting the direction of the pipes.

  Either way, finding their centralized water source had to be a handy bit of information.

  When she turned the last corner however, Jet came to a dead stop.

  Even knowing roughly what she would find at the end of that corridor didn’t prepare her for the view her eyes met.

  A lake stretched out before her, under the dome of a rough-hewn rock cave.

  Calling it a lake even struck Jet as an undersell.

  The surface of the dark blue water receded so far in the distance, Jet couldn’t see its opposite shores. Flickering yellow and dark-green lights decorated the cave walls as far as Jet’s eyes could see, until they looked like fireflies floating on the surface, or maybe tiny boats lit with flames.

  Nearer to her, not far from the doorway, stood a number of floor-to-ceiling objects that must be computers, or some other kind of machine.

  They had the same glass-smooth, eggshell-like casings that covered the back walls of the palace, only they seemed to glow where they stood, in pulsing arcs that made Jet wonder if it was a trick of the light. The machines sank deep into the rock, both above and below, and a number of white pipes protruded from their sides that also disappeared into the cave walls, only on the horizontal axis rather than the vertical one.

  The pipes stretched wide enough for a person to crawl through, or a good-sized dog to walk upright. Given that the ceiling of the cave stood at least ten meters high, even at this lower end, the machines struck Jet as borderline intimidating.

  Their shape, which lent itself to the impression of a small group of giants looming over her, probably didn’t help. The pipes protruded almost like arms, and despite their lack of features, the cylinders themselves, with their pulsing and vertical height, somehow managed to convey life more than machine.

  Jet stared up at them for a long moment, wondering if they would have blueprints for any of these machines in the Royal Library…

  When a faint hiss behind her told her she was no longer alone.

  3

  The Choice

  Jet turned, expecting the security guards, or maybe one of the Nirreth who ran the actual machines.

  Instead, she found herself facing Laksri.

  He stood blocking the tunnel, his tail flicking behind him in smooth waves. She hadn’t quite figured out the exact moods the different tail movements signified, but something told her he was more than a little annoyed with her.

  When she saw his eyes shift from her to the tall machines, lingering on the higher set of pipes protruding from the walls, she found she was holding her breath.

  His eyes flickered back to hers a few seconds later.

  He began walking towards her.

  Jet didn’t move as she watched him do his odd, circling walk, the one
she was reasonably sure meant he’d chase her if she ran. In any case, he definitely kept himself firmly between her and the door, and Jet didn’t like her chances if she tried to get around him, particularly with his tail moving into the spaces that his body vacated.

  He reached her in a few strides, but somehow, time slowed as he walked, and she found herself looking at him.

  He was good-sized for a Nirreth, she’d discovered, now that she’d lived here for a number of weeks. All Nirreth had broad shoulders, but his were broader than most, and he moved faster than a lot of them too. She’d seen him make darting movements that made her think of a wild cat or a lizard, like the slang humans used for his kind.

  Yet she found she recognized him easier than most Nirreth, even though she’d really only known him half a day longer than the rest of them. Maybe it was the fact that she’d stabbed him with her sword within minutes of their first encounter.

  He did have that curious ring of lighter blue around his eyes.

  She happened to know that he had flecks of gold and a pale, sky blue, among other colors in his black irises. She’d only really gotten a good look at them one or two times, when she got close enough, say within a foot or two of his face, but they made his eyes appear more alive than many other Nirreth, whose eyes were generally a more solid black.

  She’d seen other variations in that time too, of course, including one Nirreth with eyes so light a blue that they appeared white in the darkness of his Nirreth skin. She’d also seen a handful of others with rings around the black irises, usually a lighter blue or a greenish color, but none the exact shade of Laksri’s.

  Most of the time, she didn’t find him particularly threatening.

  At least, not anymore.

  If only through familiarity, he’d become comfortable. Not a welcome sight, most days, but not an unwelcome one, either.

  At times like these, however, Jet remembered just how alien he was, and how little she really knew about him.