Ceilings stretched up roughly eighty feet, with a peak in the middle closer to a hundred. One of the artificial cliff walls rose nearly all the way to the ceiling before it shifted direction and ran in a horizontal line right under it, before climbing back down the opposite wall. Walls used different construction materials from one side to the other.
Another cliff ended a good fifteen feet above the main floor on the opposite end.
Jet knew from experience that the same fifteen feet could stretch into one hundred or even a thousand feet in VR… or worse, it could look like a short drop into a pristine lake or fast-moving river that might be tempting to risk if surrounded on all sides by opponents wielding weapons. Jet had risked a similar jump herself once, with a prehistoric Nirreth and four other opponents right on her heels.
The results had been pretty painful, but Alice arranged for her drop to be padded by the emergency controls, so she didn’t end up breaking her leg.
There was an actual pool of water in the arena, too.
The size of a small pond, it sat in a different section of the arena altogether, right near the center of the terrain and beside another section of the moveable floor.
Jet had a pretty good idea of the rate at which that floor moved, but it would still be difficult to estimate locations of the various obstacles and escape routes on any of those tracks, at least without knowing their original locations at the start of any particular program, as well as the precise instant they turned on the motorized tracks.
Maybe that was one of the things Laksri could help her with.
Glancing at him, she saw him looking at the multi-tiered structures with ladders by the nearest wall. He looked to be memorizing the layout with his eyes, too, just by the amount of staring he did at each object before turning to look at the next.
After a few minutes, he seemed to be satisfied, either by his own understanding of the layout, or with the architecture of the room itself.
He walked up to her, pulling a small cylinder out of his pocket.
He motioned towards her arm with the same hand, grunting a little.
“You will take this,” he said.
“What?” Jet said, pulling her arms back in reflex. “Take what? What is that?”
Laksri’s jaw hardened, but he met her gaze. “It is for when I sting you. It should… negate… smaller…” He struggled slightly with the English words. “…Previous problems will be less. What happened before. It is safer. For both of us.”
The odd pauses made Jet look at him more closely.
“Safer?” she said. “What problems do you mean exactly?”
Laksri exhaled in an impatient-sounding sigh.
“You know,” he said, flicking his tail sideways.
“Let’s pretend I don’t,” Jet said.
“We will be less likely to have sex,” he said, dropping any attempt to be subtle. “More clear… clarity. Self-control.” Holding up his hand, he showed her the other cylinder he held. “I will take this, too,” he added. “I can do first, if you like.”
Pausing, he looked at Jet more intently.
“I thought you would want this. After last time. It was not easy to get. Not easy safely to get. Where no one knows I have. Where no one guesses why.”
Jet nodded, thinking.
“Okay.” She motioned towards him with one hand. “You first.”
Shaking his head and blinking at her for a long beat, which she was learning was close to a Nirreth eye-roll, he pocketed the cylinder he’d pulled out for her and took the longer one, the one with more of the pale, green liquid inside.
Without preamble, he pressed the sharper end to the inside of his bare arm.
That part of his skin was a lighter blue-purple, compared to the darker, nearly black-blue of his outer arm and most of the rest of his skin. He held the cylinder near his elbow, slightly off-center to where the vein would be on a human, keeping it there until the green liquid emptied.
Jet saw his face tighten as he gave himself the injection, then smooth once the liquid must have hit his bloodstream.
He checked the cylinder to make sure it was empty, blinked to clear his vision, then motioned her over.
“You now,” he said, his voice more calm.
Jet walked up to him, still a little reluctant for some reason.
She didn’t think he was poisoning her or anything.
It never crossed her mind to doubt the drug would do anything other than what he claimed it would do. She even found it a bit touching that Laksri had thought to obtain the drug in the first place, presumably to ease her mind that something might happen if they were left alone like before.
Mixed with all of that, of course, was the part of her that wondered if he’d been planning on stinging her again soon, if he had the drug on him already. In that same breath, it occurred to her that he easily could have avoided telling her about the drug altogether, and she wouldn’t have known the difference.
It also occurred to her that he’d likely known about the drug before, yet had chosen not to suggest it that first time.
For reasons Jet couldn’t even begin to explain to herself, she wasn’t sure how she felt about any one of those things. Strangely, the existence of the drug wasn’t as much of a relief as it should have been. She closed the distance between her and Laksri without protest, however, and held out her arm, unable to argue with his logic, either.
After all, they were here to work.
Anyway, Tyra’s cracks notwithstanding, he wasn’t exactly her boyfriend.
Laksri pressed the pointed end of the smaller cylinder on the inside of Jet’s elbow and hit a button on the flat end.
Jet watched the liquid disappear, not feeling so much as a pinprick. There was only a slight pressure as the cylinder forced the drug into her vein.
Once the cylinder was empty, Jet glanced up with a shrug.
“Should I feel something?” she said. “Because I don’t.”
He frowned.
“Maybe it is taking longer on humans?” he suggested.
“Haven’t you used this before?” she said. “And it’s takes. Maybe it takes longer to work on humans.”
He inclined his head to the left, even as he blinked to acknowledge her correction of his English.
“No,” he added, unnecessarily. “I have not tried it.”
“So maybe it won’t work on me at all,” she said. “You feel something? Already, I mean?”
He nodded. “Flatter, yes. More… indif… what is this word? Not feeling pain?”
“Indifferent?” Jet said. “Like you don’t care about anything?”
His brow cleared.
“Yes,” he said. “That is it. Exactly. I feel… indifferent.”
Jet laughed, in spite of herself. Then she realized she felt a little light-headed.
“I think I’m a little spacey, actually,” she told him, in the same set of seconds.
“Is this like… indifferent?” Laksri asked.
She shook her head. “No. More like I felt when I had a few big swallows of that Nirreth beer on an empty stomach.”
Laksri frowned. “This is maybe not so good.”
Jet waved his concern away, smiling at his serious expression. “It’s fine,” she said. “You’re all indifferent, and I’m not all touchy-feelie, so I think we’re still good.”
Watching her face a bit warily, Laksri finally nodded.
“Are you ready then?” he said.
Feeling her arms tense as she remembered the drug was only the prelude to the main course, not the main course itself, Jet forced herself to nod.
“Yeah. Sure. As much as I’ll ever be.”
Laksri seemed to need to think about her response for a few more beats.
Then he walked up to her, his movements more business-like than they had been that first time, a few weeks back. Pushing up her shirt on one side, the opposite side as last time, he didn’t wait but abruptly stung her right below her ribs.
Je
t let out a short gasp as he pushed the venom into her, and looked up at his face.
She saw something in his eyes flicker, then he looked away, retracting his tail, angling it expertly to get the barb out without tearing her skin. Jet grabbed hold of his arms when the venom hit her system, but he took a step back, removing her fingers.
Again, the way he did it was matter-of-fact, businesslike.
Jet clung to him briefly, but released him at once when he stepped back.
Moving further away, he spoke without looking at her.
“Are you ready? I turn on the machine?”
Jet wrapped her arms around herself, looking around the hollow-seeming room. She found she was having difficulty focusing, but her body felt okay. Despite the added distraction of the drug, she felt oddly clear, like she had the first time. After thinking for a bit, maybe longer than she should have, weighing how she felt between Laksri and the drug, she nodded.
“Yeah. I’m good,” she said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
He gave her one last look, as if doubting her words.
Then, nodding, he motioned for her to get in the starting position.
“Wait!” she said abruptly. “We’re just going to start? Aren’t you going to tell me anything about what I should be doing differently? You said you were in the Rings yourself once, right?”
He nodded, watching her warily. “Yes.”
“When? Was it here? At this Green Zone, on Earth?”
He shook his head.
After a pause, he walked over to her, laying a hand on her arm. The contact made her shiver, but when he began thinking at her through the connection, she found she understood why he’d done it.
That time, when he answered her, he didn’t move his lips.
No. Back at Astet, he thought at her.
Your home world? she thought. They had the Rings there?
Yes.
Jet didn’t answer, but found herself remembering what Anaze told her, weeks ago, under that tree in the dark. That Laksri had gotten in trouble on his home world once, badly enough that he’d been in prison.
It is true, Laksri confirmed, again speaking through her. His fingers tightened on her arm. I was a political prisoner. You must have seen, in the skag pits, that those games are shown only from the home world?
…My home world, he amended, quieter.
So those Rings are different, Jet thought to him, a little disappointed. You won’t be able to help me out much with the course here, will you?
“I don’t know,” he said aloud, releasing her arm.
Jet found herself reacting more to the lack of the contact than she had to the news that he wouldn’t be able to help her. Again, she wondered why.
Pushing that aside, she focused back on the Rings.
She had so many more questions for him.
Like how no one recognized him, if he’d been a terrorist, and one with enough notoriety, they’d made televised sport of his torture.
Alice and Tyra both mentioned the Rings on Astet at various times.
Both of them said roughly the same things.
Only Nirreth criminals “competed” in the matches on Astet, because those matches nearly always ended in the fighter’s death. Those Rings were brutal, Tyra explained. Everything in them could maim or kill you. Ammunition rounds were all live. Sense-suits functioned to trick you, to amplify pain, and to throw you off-balance––not to help you survive.
The human version was more like a televised sport with players and points and wagers and skill-set tabulations on the so-called “stars.”
Everyone knew the big players in the Rings.
That was mainly because a lot of them came back to fight, again and again.
Jet hadn’t known this in the skag pit, of course, where they only got the random broadcast when they managed to decrypt the signal before it changed. They hadn’t gotten the secondary feeds showing the detailed maps, with all the “style points” and “Board likes” for each of the players, which would have made it far clearer the Rings functioned as a sport.
Still, sport or no, this first match was critical for an unknown fighter like Jet.
The judges might decide she was “boring” and have her “killed,” which would likely mean just booting her off the Rings, since she still had value as a human slave.
From what Anaze told her, that shame would probably be too much for the Royals to keep her as a servant to their son.
They would likely sell her off.
Then, not only would Jet be useless in whatever plans Richter had regarding the Royals, but they would no longer be able to protect her in any real way, either.
The exception would be if the Royals agreed to sell her to Richter or Laksri.
Otherwise, Jet would be taken to some random home by some random Nirreth, probably to clean during the day and take turns sleeping with different members of the household at night. From what Anaze told her, the whole family would feel free to sting her whenever they felt like it. She would be akin to the family dog… if humans regularly had sex with the family dog whenever they were bored.
Given her age and sex, it was unlikely she’d be bought by anyone who didn’t have that purpose in mind.
“Are you ready?” Laksri asked again.
Looking at the Nirreth, it hit Jet that she would bond with any Nirreth they sold her to, whether she liked them or not.
For the first time, the reality of that really sank in––enough to genuinely scare her, and to clear her head, lifting some of the effects of the venom.
“Yes.” She nodded, hands clenched. “Yes. I’m ready.”
Surprise flickered across Laksri’s face, along with a slow smile, then a more approving nod.
“Good,” he said, nodding again.
13
You’re Like Me
Working through Laksri wasn’t exactly a direct line to the human version of the Rings, but Jet did get a better idea of the psychology behind the whole thing.
She also got a better idea of the different iterations of the Rings over the years––how they differed, and how they’d stayed the same.
The Rings on Astet, as far as she could tell, had a lot of the same structures and even the same layout as the practice arena where she and Laksri now worked, but everything on Astet was larger, more spread out, so she had to calculate distances accordingly.
The other thing she learned was that Ringsmasters did scans of the players’ brains while they fought. As a part of that, controllers had a direct line into what frightened players the most, reflexes and fighting strengths, psychological stressors, startle triggers, traumatic experiences, recurrent nightmares, and so on.
In Laksri’s case, they’d discovered his weak spot was other Nirreth, specifically, Nirreth Laksri loved. The Ringmaster in his match forced him to watch his little brother get eaten by a large lizard creature with spine-like teeth, each about a foot long, He’d also seen a childhood friend, a female he’d grown up with, get raped and stung repeatedly by other Nirreth while he couldn’t get to her.
In Laksri’s case, since he’d been a prisoner, they’d actually done those things to his family and friends.
Apparently, in Nirreth society, if you were a criminal or a traitor, your whole family was implicated, along with close friends and anyone else who “should have known” and “should have put a stop to it.” Parents were the worst offenders, according to the Nirreth, since they’d raised the child into a citizen who could turn on the Royal Authority.
The whole thing made Jet sick… like actually, physically ill.
Especially images of the thing with Laksri’s little brother, which she’d turned away from by refusing to let Laksri touch her until he agreed to stop thinking about it.
Laksri showed Jet all of this with the same indifference of emotion, which made it hard to know how he really felt about it, much less whether or how to comfort him in any way. She got flashes of reaction under that that indifference, emotions that were
a lot more intense, but they felt far away, and she didn’t know what to do with those glimpses, either.
When she gripped his arm during one of those information exchanges, lost in her own reactions to what she was seeing, he carefully extricated her fingers a second time, keeping his firmer grip on her upper arm instead, so that he could continue to relay information.
By the end of him sharing his experiences in the Rings, Jet found it almost unbearable, and told him so.
Laksri didn’t answer.
Studying the flat look on his face, she fought once more to clear her mind, to view this as objectively as he seemed to. Once she had, other questions came pouring through the cracks in the venom.
How did you survive?
Others in the rebellion got me out.
How? she pressed.
He gestured vaguely. It would be difficult to go into specifics.
Feeling his avoidance, she tried to feel more off him, but again, he pushed her away, using his tail to break her concentration as if nudging her with a hand.
How is it that no one recognizes you now? she said.
Again, Laksri seemed to hesitate. After another pause, she felt him give a mental shrug, even though his body didn’t move.
They do not show our real faces in the Rings. It causes less distress to the population if we are anonymous, or portrayed as deformed or ugly or sick… especially when they harm our family and friends. In my case, my family had ties to the Royals, so it was especially important that my true identity not be known.
What about those who did know your real identity? Jet thought at him.
They think I am dead, he thought back.
But aren’t you afraid someone could recognize you?
Who? Laksri thought back.
For the first time, his thoughts held more of a bite.
They killed everyone who knew. All they could reach. They killed my family, my friends. His dark eyes met hers. All but those who were actually rebels, of course… only the innocents. And one of my sisters, who we managed to get out in time, since she was away at school. They would be looking for her, but we supplied another body in her place.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 30