The Nirreth watching back home had to forget Anaze might not win.
They had to forget the ending was preordained.
Anaze surfaced, gasping for air, his face flushed bright red.
He coughed out water, then began swimming again, stroking hard for the mouth of the river. He still hadn’t given up the rifle, or the band of ammunition wrapped around his shoulder. Jet saw his strokes slow, but he never stopped, only adjusted his pace to compensate for his flagging strength.
Watching him, it occurred to Jet she might not have made that swim.
Not without losing the guns, and probably her boots.
Even as she thought it, Anaze shifted vertical once more, finding the bottom with his feet.
He waded through the waters of the river mouth, panting as he slogged his way through the fast-moving current. The river remained deep where he walked, deep enough to reach past his waist, and Jet saw his muscles straining as he moved through it.
It occurred to her he’d likely shifted angles to get past the current as much as anything, in addition to resting his upper body from having done most of the work of getting him across the lake.
She didn’t notice she’d been holding her breath until the water around him started to recede. Anaze crouched down as it did, remaining mostly submerged until he’d reached where the jungle started up again, right around where the river turned smooth as glass.
A few dozen yards later, Jet saw the current begin to flow faster, filled with periodic boulders and with jungle trees and vines hanging out over the water.
She saw snakes in some of those branches, and couldn’t help thinking they likely weren’t harmless, either.
She’d already noticed a Nirreth fascination with reptiles from her own Rings runs, maybe from their history on Astet of hunting and being hunted by giant lizards themselves, or maybe from their own tenuous genetic ties to similar-looking creatures.
Either way, it wasn’t unusual to see large reptiles in most Rings runs.
Truthfully, Jet thought it was a Trazen thing, until Richter informed her that reptiles tended to boost ratings, just like water and swimming did.
Anaze didn’t begin to climb out of the river until the shadows of the overhanging trees completely obscured him from view of the sandy shores. Even then, Jet saw him move fast, disappearing into the undergrowth seconds after he raised himself up to his full height, and his booted feet hit the rocky soil.
She couldn’t help being impressed that he could move that fast, given the amount of swimming he’d just done.
The rifle remained strapped to his back, and the gun still clung to its holster on his thigh, as well as the long knife on the opposite side of his waist.
Jet saw him stumble a bit, getting out of the water, but he caught his balance and kept moving, his head and shoulders down as he peered ahead through the trees.
The outlines of the compound’s wall grew visible as he ran.
Jet’s nerves worsened as she remembered the gun turrets.
Right as she thought it, gunfire erupted in the jungle.
Anaze had the rifle in his hands in seconds.
He aimed up into the trees before Jet even made out the direction from which the shots had come. If nothing else, it convinced her that he did have some idea where he was inside the arena; he aimed at exactly the height of the gun turrets, and she saw a few dark forms fall from their sneaks after he’d squeezed off a number of rounds.
She remembered what a good shot he’d been, back at the pits, and felt her jaw harden as she watched him now, realizing he was better than he’d pretended, even back then.
She would have found that reassuring if she didn’t already know how this would end.
Instead, she waited for the other shoe to drop along with everyone else, watching as Anaze threaded his way through the maze of turrets, dropping more of the dark-clad forms as he worked his way towards the wall.
That wall was closer now, just past the line of protective fire.
She tried to make out if the guards surrounding that wall were Nirreth.
She couldn’t honestly be sure.
They were large enough to be Nirreth, and she thought she saw a tail on one, coiling behind it as it fell, but she didn’t get a good enough look at their skin beneath the uniforms.
She tried to guess how close Trazen would let Anaze get before his pullers took him down. Anaze would likely breach the walls.
They might even let him get in visual range of a significant target, to ratchet up the suspense and the emotional tension.
Laksri said Retribution runs were created mainly for psychological reasons.
They were designed to placate the Nirreth who might have moral qualms around torturing and killing a traitor outright, when they hadn’t actually witnessed the crimes for which they’d been accused.
With Retribution, Nirreth got to see the culprit caught in the act of a crime against the race, even if it wasn’t the same crime that brought them to the Retribution in the first place. In that sense, the reenactment acted as an emotional salve, erasing any lingering doubt as to the culprit’s guilt.
Therefore, unlike what Jet first assumed, Retribution wasn’t simply an excuse to put Anaze somewhere they could torture him creatively, using a colorful backdrop and nifty props. The Retribution told the Nirreth a story that assured them justice had been done.
It reinstated order, even as it provided emotional catharsis.
For the same reason, the pullers sought a delicate balance in how they let Anaze be portrayed. Just like they didn’t want to kill him too soon, before that emotional purpose had been fulfilled, they also couldn’t leave him on the playing field long enough to garner any true sympathy.
After all, this show wasn’t primarily for the military authorities, or even the Royals themselves. Retribution existed for ordinary Nirreth, watching from Earth, Astet, and the other colonies. Given that the run occurred on Astet, which created lag-time anyway, they also had the option to edit out anything out that might solicit an emotional response in favor of leniency or excessive compassion towards Anaze.
Ultimately, they would want him to appear as a kind of monster.
A mindless animal that had to be put down for the safety of their people.
Even the way his face looked through the virtual interface reflected those goals.
Jet found herself noticing they’d enhanced certain aspects of his appearance, making his eyes colder and more sunken in his head. They’d hollowed his cheeks, and done something to harden his face, making his jaw and mouth more taut and angry-seeming.
He’d probably been given coaching on how he should behave.
The longer she thought about all of it, the more Jet found herself thinking they’d want him to get close to someone important in the Shinkara.
They’d want the audience to witness Anaze acting murderously towards that person.
The whole point of making this about the Shinkara would be to enrage the watching Nirreth, possibly even to scare them into fearing for their holy rulers’ safety. They needed the pre-show to justify what would come after.
In that sense, using the Shinkara demonstrated a twisted kind of brilliance.
Jet watched as Anaze made it past the last of the gun towers.
He didn’t wait, but ran for the outside wall, pulling the wire suspension cord from his weapons belt as he ran.
Jet could tell he was still fighting exhaustion from the swim, but she found herself thinking this part must be scripted too, especially when Anaze didn’t hesitate but immediately fastened a foldable hook to the end of the cord.
Knotting it swiftly and expertly, he wound his arm back, throwing the hook and wire up to the top of the wall.
He repeated the action a few more times before the hook caught.
He tested its weight, leaning on it hard, then immediately began to climb.
Again, she wondered why he was doing this.
Why was he trying so hard? What
had they threatened him with?
Anaze reached the top of the stone wall, and immediately freed the hook, only to wrap it around a protrusion on the other side. Jet watched as he gripped the rope in his hands and dropped his weight on the opposite side of the wall.
The virtual lens followed, giving her vertigo as it rotated up to the top of the wall, so that Jet found herself looking down, watching as Anaze lowered himself, hand-over-hand, back down to the ground.
The virtual sky had darkened somewhere in that time.
The sun had been on the low end of its arc when the run started, and now Jet noticed the landscape had grown dimmer, especially now that the wall blocked the slanted rays of the setting sun. Anaze’s form grew indistinct as his feet touched the ground.
He unhooked the wire from his belt and ran from a crouch, aiming his feet for the largest of the buildings that lived behind the compound’s walls.
The silence as he ran across the manicured lawn unnerved her.
Even for a Nirreth settlement, it was way too quiet.
Jet could see on Anaze’s face that he felt it, too, even beyond the caricature they’d made of his features. His green eyes darted to the upper walls of the windowless structure ahead of him, then to the smaller buildings on either side.
Jet could almost feel him bracing himself, as if he’d already guessed what came next.
All four of the buildings behind that wall had the distinct, mushroom-like shape of a Nirreth-made structure. That basic form included a proportionally small, stalk-like base supporting a significantly larger and wider level of floors and a smooth, pearl-white and entirely featureless surface without windows.
The walls of those egg-like buildings seemed almost to glow in the dying light, the one in the center rising high enough that the rounded, reflective surfaces turned pink in the shifting colors of the setting sun.
Jet felt her breath come short.
Anaze was approaching the outstretched lip of the largest structure, which also stood slightly in front of the rest.
His head turned as he scanned the length of the foyer-type area below the outcropping, the planter-boxes of trees and flowers and the canal that ran through the center, just like the canals of similar buildings all over Green Zone Hezeret.
He broke into a jog as Jet watched.
He started to pick up speed seconds later, running on a ramp that sloped downwards, leading underground, into the building’s base.
Suddenly, Anaze skidded to a stop.
Jet didn’t understand why, not at first.
Then she saw where his eyes focused.
Anaze stared down the ramp. On that ramp stood a single form, unarmed, with hands clasped in front of her.
Jet blinked at the image of herself, bewildered.
Her being there clearly threw Anaze, too.
He stared at the virtual Jet, and Jet saw panic touch his eyes, a fear she hadn’t seen in them until that precise moment. Jet saw confusion there, a kind of disbelief, and it hit her suddenly; he was trying to decide if he was really seeing her, or if the image was some kind of trick. He couldn’t make up his mind. He couldn’t decide if they could have really grabbed her, if Trazen found some way to get her away from Laksri.
He seemed to be trying to convince himself she couldn’t be real, but the doubt that colored his eyes told Jet they’d likely messed with his head on this score more than once already.
Did they have his mother in here?
Maybe someone else from back home?
Biting her lip, Jet had to fight to keep from shouting at the virtual screen, telling him it wasn’t her.
She knew it wouldn’t do any good, but the urge grew overpowering.
She remembered how confusing that could be, even in the regular Rings. Anaze had no way of knowing what was real. Further, his mind would find reasons to believe either thing, just like hers did when she tried to decide if her brother could really be in the Green Zone.
Technically, under Nirreth law, anyone the traitor knew prior to their crimes could be considered partially culpable. That same law had seen Laksri’s childhood friend raped, tortured and killed right in front of him, during his own Retribution event. It had seen his family members dismembered and fed to lizards, including his brother, who’d been younger than Ogli, and barely knew his elder brother, who’d mostly been away at school since his birth.
Laksri hadn’t known if it was real either… not at the time.
He only learned the real body count later, after he’d been transported off-world.
The rebels told him the score after they ended his Retribution prematurely, by blowing up more than half the compound and killing an arena full of live spectators, right before they extracted him using plants they’d installed among the guards in advance.
So yeah, Jet got why Anaze would hesitate.
Even so, a part of her mind started urging him on, shoving at him, trying to get him moving. She wanted to ask Laksri what the hell this was supposed to accomplish, leaving him in there, why no one had busted him out yet, if that was the plan.
She was still fighting the bare edges of panic when the fake-Jet spoke, her voice echoing loudly inside the sense-booth.
“I thought you were going to get us out, Anaze,” it said, as if echoing Jet’s own thoughts. “I thought you and Laksri were friends. I thought this was just for show.”
Next to her, Laksri stiffened.
Jet saw Anaze’s eyes widen, too.
“Why are you still here, Anaze?” the other Jet said.
Anaze stared at the virtual Jet, then back, over his shoulder.
Briefly, he seemed to be looking right at her, as if he could see her and Laksri through the camera that followed his every move through the virtual landscape.
“Anaze?” the fake Jet said. “Anaze! How did they find out about us? How did they find out who Laksri really was?”
Laksri gripped Jet’s arm, tight enough that it felt like her bones might snap.
Jet might have jumped to her feet, but as it was, she sat there, panting, feeling a cold terror pool in her abdomen.
That part of her already understood.
Not only what had happened, but what it actually meant.
What it meant for all three of them.
Before she could take a breath, or even wrap her head around the bare minimum of their options, Laksri rose to his feet.
Still gripping her arm tightly enough to hurt, he dragged Jet up with him and out of their chairs. She let out a gasp when he dragged her through the pitch darkness of the sense-booth.
She couldn’t see at all apart from the virtual overlay, not even outlines or forms, not even Laksri himself. Her mind kicked in somewhere though, more out of habit than intention, recalling the spatial memory well enough for her to reorient around the physical contours of the room.
In seconds, they reached the door to the main corridor.
When it opened abruptly in front of them, Jet blinked, blinded by the physical light on the other side.
Extracting herself from the sense-web in the room behind her, she straightened, realizing only then that she’d been walking in a combat crouch, her hand held up in front of her face. She’d been moving like she had in the skag pits when they were under attack, like she expected to be dragged into a fist fight in an underground tunnel back in the pits.
Her jaw clenched hard enough that it ached. So much adrenaline coursed through her veins that she shook, panting as she looked up at that familiar face.
Richter stood there.
He looked at her, his mouth twisted in an expression that might have been a smile.
She saw the gun an instant later, but couldn’t make sense of that either, not even well enough to duck. When he fired, she flinched violently, sure she’d been hit, but when the pain came, it wasn’t from any bullet.
Instead, Laksri’s fingers clenched her arm, gripping her so tightly it felt like he’d broken the bones. He went down next to her when Richter fired
again, pulling Jet on top of him even as she let out a terrified shriek.
By the time she could see again, Nirreth guards surrounded them.
All six of them aimed guns at her, where she lay on Laksri’s chest.
Jet barely noticed.
She stared down at the felled Nirreth, covering his gunshot wounds desperately with her hands. She pressed down on them, remembering her field training from her Uncle Draven, but a part of her already knew it was too late.
She continued to press down, trying to stop the blood.
She saw his eyes start to glaze, already losing that strange spark of living light, the thing that all animals shared.
She pressed down harder, panting, calling his name as she fought to move his chest under her palms, fighting to keep him breathing, his heart beating, but his breaths already sounded like they’d filled with water, and her attempts to revive him only made more blood squeeze out through the holes in his chest, then through his mouth and nose.
“Laks!” she screamed. “Laks! Damn it Laks! No!”
She screamed again, louder when a hand grabbed her from behind, dragging her off the choking Nirreth. Laksri reached after feebly, his four-fingered hand covered in blood.
He looked at her, seemed to be trying to speak, but all she could see was the death in his eyes, his muscular body struggling to keep moving after the mechanism had broken.
Jet could only stand there with the rest of them, watching Laksri die.
She didn’t fight the hands that held her, didn’t spare a single glance for the people who’d killed him.
She watched Laksri die instead, not wanting him to be alone in those last minutes, even if she couldn’t really be with him.
She couldn’t stand the thought of wasting those precious seconds by giving even one of them to the people who had done this to him.
That would come later.
For now, she held Laksri’s gaze, and let him know he wasn’t alone.
Really, there was nothing else she could do.
24
The Long Run
Jet fought to keep her face totally expressionless.
She stared only at a blank wall.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 68