Something about realizing the true depths to which she’d already given up her free will, living among the Nirreth, sank into her awareness in a way she couldn’t dislodge.
And yeah, it scared her.
So no, she didn’t really confront Laksri.
Her real problem with him now had less to do with any one lie in particular. It didn’t even have much to do with Laksri himself, not if she was being wholly honest with herself.
It had to do with his race.
It had to do with what he was.
It had to do with his being a Nirreth, and the fact that, for the first time maybe, Jet questioned her ability to hold her own with someone of his race.
She could disappear here. She could really disappear, become someone she didn’t recognize.
For his part, Laksri didn’t seem to want to talk to her about it, either.
When Jet saw him a few days after he woke, he’d asked after her well-being. After she answered, he’d apologized, emotionlessly, for what had been permitted to happen, both in their bedchambers and while he’d been unconscious.
Jet listened to him speak, nearly incredulous as she watched him avoid her eyes.
Truthfully, though, she felt… nothing.
She felt again as if she barely knew him.
Given what Richter told her about Anaze and Laksri’s plan to get them back to Astet, she highly doubted she could trust either of them, even apart from the venom.
She’d been summoned to see Laksri in recovery, but she had no idea if he requested her presence there, or if someone else arranged it. Someone like Richter, maybe, who probably knew Jet’s trust of all of them had been rubbed down to the bone.
Either way, even in that initial conversation, Jet could tell Laksri knew she’d been told about him and Anaze, and their plans for going to Astet. He knew she’d somehow put together that the whole scene with the taser had been staged.
Maybe Richter told him. Or maybe Anaze had.
She supposed it didn’t really matter.
They’d all become the same amorphous group to her once more, and none of them appeared to be working with her, not even indirectly.
As far as Laksri being upset about the Trazen thing, Jet couldn’t tell how real that was, either. His guard must have shown him the tapes, just like Trazen assumed they would. So Laksri must have watched the replay of Trazen stinging her multiple times. He would have seen them kiss, along with whatever else they’d done before Trazen left her alone and relatively unviolated, with an unconscious Laksri sprawled on the recovery bed behind her.
Jet learned later Trazen tampered with the cameras, but not by shutting them off.
He had his engineers hack the feed, so the guards wouldn’t stop him in the moment, but the cameras themselves would continue recording.
He got what he wanted.
The images and audio showed up in the security cache after the event, in full technicolor according to Richter, although Jet hadn’t asked to watch the replay.
Trazen had more than half of the stationed guards removed just prior to the event, pulling rank to get them to comply. He managed to convince the few remaining Royal Guard to leave their posts by backing up his request with a number of false transmissions, implying his need to speak to Jet alone constituted some kind of state emergency.
Jet found it both infuriating and borderline baffling Trazen barely got a wrist-slap for all of this. Given the terrorist break-ins, bombings, assassinations, and whatever else occurring at the royal compound of late, she would have thought his actions warranted a few weeks in one of the stasis cells, at least.
Instead, everyone treated it more like some kind of school-boy prank.
The Ringmaster had been reprimanded for taking liberties with Prince Laksri’s companion, of course, by no less than the Queen herself. From what Jet knew, he hadn’t been punished, though. Wagging fingers hadn’t exactly rolled back time, or reversed what he’d done.
Jet also couldn’t imagine why Trazen’s tampering with their security system and lying to the Royal Guard constituted more of a detail than a transgression in its own right.
Laksri still seemed barely able to meet her eyes.
He never admitted nor denied that he and Anaze set up the incident in their bedchambers.
Jet asked, of course. She accused him outright, the one time they’d been alone long enough for her to really let him have it verbally.
She accused him of manipulating her, of conspiring with Anaze, of playing both sides of the fence, of using her, of being a liar. She accused him of toying with her emotions, pretending to fight with Anaze. She accused him of rape… or at least having sex with her under false pretenses. She even accused him of using her to take over the kingship, not for the cause of the humans or rebel Nirreth, but for his own personal ambitions.
She called him a fraud, a power-monger, and a hypocrite.
She told him he was no better than Richter… than Trazen himself.
She also told him she never wanted him touching her again.
She told him that if he or Anaze or Richter tried to make her sleep with Laksri again, she’d tell the Royals and Trazen everything.
Jet said a lot of things.
She wasn’t even sure how many of them she actually meant, or believed.
She knew a lot of it was her yelling at the moon, trying to convince herself her consent still meant something to any of them––to Laksri himself, especially.
Maybe she needed to hear it more from him than from Richter or Anaze, even now, and despite what she told herself about what he was. Some part of her still wanted to know her anger meant something to him, that he gave a damn.
If he did, she couldn’t tell.
Laksri didn’t try to defend himself. He didn’t deny any of it.
He only sat there, taking it.
Later, she heard he’d instructed the Royal Guard to improve security protocols around Jet. He took other steps that seemed, on their surface at least, meant to ensure that Trazen would never get access to her again.
She heard him formally revoke the Ringmaster’s right to his personal suites for any reason, even in the case of emergencies. He ordered executions to any member of the Guard who left their post due to a command given by Trazen or anyone in his employ.
He also gave some kind of “no confidence” vote on Trazen to the Nirreth Parliament, which Richter later explained meant that Trazen could never again hold a sensitive position within the regime due to his flagrantly disrespectful actions towards the First Son.
The label would have to be formally revoked by the leading sovereign for that to change, and so far, the Queen hadn’t offered.
Laksri also approved the sentence of Retribution for Anaze.
Alice and Tyra told her a few things during her practice sessions, too.
Like how the video of her and Trazen was making the rounds as a form of lizard-skin porn. Like the fact that Laksri imposed fines, including corporeal punishment, for anyone found with a copy of the recording in their possession.
Laksri also ordered an explicit ban on contact between Trazen and Jet, no matter what the circumstances.
When Jet asked Richter what would have happened if Trazen had raped her outright, Richter just shrugged.
When she prodded him more, he admitted that the penalties would have been significantly more severe.
Unsanctioned stinging was treated almost like an impulse-control issue, from what Jet could tell, and from what Richter explained to her afterwards. They viewed it almost outside of a Nirreth’s control to sting humans that either provoked or aroused them for whatever reason.
That same social perception put it more in the blurry legal realm of “accident” mixed with “poor judgment” versus “intentional assault.”
According to Richter, sexual contact was viewed very differently.
In Jet’s mind, the fact that Trazen stung her multiple times also should have negated that whole “accident” thing, but
somehow, the Nirreth didn’t take that into account. Stinging, apparently, was stinging. No matter how many times the offending Nirreth did it, the penalties and the blasé attitude remained pretty much the same.
Which, Jet couldn’t help noting, went completely against how the Nirreth actually acted, in terms of their own understanding of the venom’s significance.
She knew Laksri took what Trazen had done seriously, whatever he thought of her.
He still barely looked at her, though, and he hadn’t let himself be alone with her for more than a few minutes at a time since that day she’d cornered him and yelled at him.
Jet wasn’t even sure where he’d been sleeping for the past few weeks, although she’d wondered, even as she told herself she didn’t give a damn.
The truth was, she did care. She’d even tried to find out once, but his Guard wasn’t talking, not on that subject, at least.
Much more strangely, neither was Richter.
Between that and Jet’s reactions to seeing Trazen with his new venom accessory, Jet found she didn’t want to think about any Nirreth males, for any reason.
Again, it was her own mind and reactions that disturbed her the most. Like getting jealous of Trazen’s hood ornaments. She’d actually felt betrayed. The fact that Trazen could have crawled under her skin so quickly and thoroughly that he managed to evoke feelings of betrayal in her––that disturbed Jet the most.
It angered her, too.
Truthfully, it angered her enough that she couldn’t look at Richter, Laksri, Trazen, or Anaze rationally at all, at least not yet.
She certainly couldn’t think through their probable motives with any semblance of objectivity, not well enough to trust her own conclusions. She also knew she’d be lying if she said anger was her only reaction towards Laksri himself.
Or even Trazen.
Of course, that admission only made her anger worse.
Richter had been right, after all.
Humans were powerless against the Nirreth.
Their superior technology wasn’t the issue. They could actually change the content of human minds… their very hearts.
Any being who could do that, could essentially erase the free will of its victims.
The idea scared Jet more than she could think about.
10
Water
Shoving both Trazen and Laksri out of her mind for what felt like the hundredth time, Jet clenched her jaw, sweeping the sword in a quick arc, then twirling it in a neat circle at her side.
The gesture constituted more of a nervous tic than anything.
It was one the crowd went crazy for, apparently, each and every time Jet did it.
Anaze told her that.
Forcing Anaze’s face out of her mind as well, she twirled the sword again.
It might distract the crowd from her stalling, at least, and from her head not being in the game as much as it should.
As she finished that twirl and sheathed the sword, Jet began to run.
She aimed for those houses in the valley, but continued to think through options as she bolted between vines and trees.
She counted at least six of those black-clad soldiers following her, not twenty minutes earlier. They were pretty hard to miss, with long, jointed arms, knees that bent the wrong way and shoulders that rose from high in the middle of their backs.
They would probably look like insects, given the shape of their bodies, except for the thick brown fur covering the parts of their skin not covered in body armor.
Their only hairless part consisted of their nearly featureless faces.
Those round faces and blank, lidless eyes made them look oddly like teddy bears, especially next to their dark fur.
Truthfully, they kind of creeped her out.
Especially the black lips that made them appear always to be smiling.
She needed to finish this damned thing.
She needed to finish this.
Pushing everything else from her mind, she used the cluster of trees as cover, skirting the outside edges of the sloping field.
The idea of breaking cover didn’t appeal to her at all, given the rifle-like guns the mutant teddy-bears wielded. At least one in their army could shoot straight. He’d already come close to tagging her… twice… each time from sniper hides more than fifty meters from where she stood.
The first time, Jet was saved by dumb luck. She’d decided to switch directions in mid-crawl, and he missed her when she flipped back around.
The second time, she’d been saved by timing, too.
That time, the explosion she’d set to blow her way out of that cave obscured her well enough for Jet to hide in the smoke and debris.
The bomb must have detonated a second before he fired.
She ducked violently in the blast and the bullet only grazed her head.
It still came close enough to a kill shot to scare her, once she realized what the blood on her scalp was from.
It didn’t help that Jet had no idea if the sniper packed live rounds or virtual ones. She strongly suspected he was a real guy, given how good he was, but one of the ops controllers could be running his program by hand.
Either way, Jet didn’t want to break cover.
They’d designed this part of the run so she’d have to break cover, but she didn’t want to.
She wondered if she’d missed something. If she had, she didn’t have time to figure out what it was. It crossed her mind she might really lose this one.
She could lose her ranking entirely, along with her current undefeated title, right when she needed them most. She had to pull her head together, remember what would happen if she went back to being a nobody, with nothing to offer Richter or Laksri or any of them.
At the thought, she stopped dead in the undergrowth, breathing hard as she looked around. She gave herself one more minute to think. Something nagged at her. Some detail niggled the back of her mind, fighting to signal its significance. Still standing at the edge of the ring of trees overlooking the hill down to the mud brick village, Jet frowned.
Then, out of nowhere, it came to her.
Water.
She’d heard water.
She’d dismissed it at the time. Now it occurred to her that she’d been thinking about the water as if this terrain actually existed, as if its boundaries had a physical component beyond the props. She’d also been thinking in terms of real-world odds, of probable physical attributes of that river, based on her experience of rivers in the real world.
She’d been thinking that river had the same likelihoods and physical constraints as it would in the physical world.
But Jet wasn’t in the physical world. She was in the Rings.
She needed to assess the terrain from that perspective.
So far, she hadn’t been faced with any out-and-out suicide options.
Undefeated or not, she wasn’t high enough yet in the rankings or lifetime points that they could start throwing unwinnables at her.
Her gambling-addicted fans would revolt, if not riot.
Besides, it remained in the Rings operators’ best interest to get her high enough in the rankings that they could pit her against real-world challengers.
That was where the real bang for buck lived with popular contestants, according to Richter. Once they could pair her against other champions, a human female––the first human female to run in the Rings––their viewership would skyrocket.
According to Richter, a lot of Rings fans only watched her now to get an idea of how she would do when she reached that level. They watched her like a horse being groomed for a big race, so they could decide whether or not they wanted to bet on her when that time came.
Mostly, she was still riding the fumes of her early surprise wins, and the possibility that she might make a viable candidate at all. The novelty factor wouldn’t help her if she crashed and burned before she got to the upper levels of the game.
The real appeal of the Rings remained, at heart, in b
lood sport.
There had to be a way to win this.
She’d pushed her luck, letting the clock run down so far, spending too much time screwing around with that bridge and the cave and trying to second-guess her favorite sniper.
Really, she’d been trying too hard to outsmart Trazen.
All of that went through her mind surprisingly fast.
Turning around, she began vaulting up the hill.
She aimed her feet carefully, heading in the direction of the thickest part of the jungle and the sound of that running water. Now that she’d shifted her perspective back to align with the Rings versus real life, Jet felt certain the river would be her ticket inside.
The Nirreth loved seeing humans swim. The Rings operators, or “pullers,” usually included at least one stint in the water for each Jet’s runs.
The stream might go underground.
Or, more likely, it wound around to the other side of the wood, surfacing somewhere below the town. Jet couldn’t see the terrain on the other end of the slope, but the town edged closer to the forest on that side. Maybe close enough that she wouldn’t have to break cover for more than a quick sprint uphill to the nearest buildings.
Either way, the river would allow her to lose her sniper long enough to get clear.
Well, unless Trazen really did want her out of the running; in which case, Jet was basically screwed no matter what she did.
Using the trees, still conscious that the sniper might be out there, Jet followed the sound of running water. The sound got louder the longer she ran, until pretty soon the roar of foam and a crashing whitewater grew so loud she felt certain it couldn’t only be a river.
Even if it sloped steeply downhill, filled with rapids, the sound echoed too much, and made too much noise.
No, it had to be a waterfall.
She still couldn’t see anything, which confused her at first.
Finally, when the sound of crashing water echoed so loudly, Jet felt like she must be standing right on top of it, she glimpsed the broad flow of white and green foam through the trees. The rocks under her feet vibrated by the time she got a second look through the dense array of boulders, leaves, and branches obscuring her path.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 55