She refused to look at the Nirreth sitting at the table across from her, or to give him the satisfaction of reacting to the eyes she felt boring into her through the one-way window, a window that lived on that same featureless wall.
She didn’t glance over when he gave a low hiss, or flinch when her peripheral vision caught the threatening dart of his tail from behind the low bench.
She’d already spent a night fending off beings like him.
Pretty much exactly like him.
The venom still coursed through her, confusing her mind, but she remembered where she was now. She knew exactly where they’d taken her, even though she couldn’t remember the goal they’d given her on this run.
She was in the Rings.
She hadn’t seen it before.
She only recently came to understand.
She might not remember the virtual goal, the one that would make the crowds cheer wildly when she attained it, but the rules felt the same.
They wanted to break her.
Richter. Trazen. All of them.
They would turn her into one of those blank-eyed house pets, erase everything Jet was. It wasn’t a short run, like the ones she’d done on Earth. She’d stumbled into Richter’s game now, the long run… the run for the ultimate prize of all.
Maybe they’d been playing this game since the first time Richter saw her, in that restaurant following her debut match.
She suspected it started before that, though, when he’d decided to design a run the Nirreth themselves couldn’t beat.
She was one of the game pieces now.
And really, it didn’t matter if she made it all the way through this or not. At the end of every chess match, most of the pieces were already off the board.
Maybe it always would have come to this.
Jet understood now, though.
She finally knew what she was doing here, why her mother and father decided to have her in a world where she’d been born a slave.
She’d come here to beat this thing, these people.
That understanding now comprised the whole of Jet’s existence. All that crap about who became king or queen, prince or rook, slave or pawn, what the “New Order” of Nirreth and humans would look like in the end… that all just felt like window dressing.
Jet had come here to stop Richter.
She’d come to stop Richter from the making the world his.
She’d come to stop Trazen, who likely worked for Richter by now.
Richter seemed to know Jet’s true role from the beginning. Maybe Laksri and Anaze did too, even as they told themselves they’d found a way to compromise with the devil for the greater good. Maybe they’d known Jet would come, at some point.
Jet, or someone like her.
Maybe they’d been waiting for her, biding their time and keeping the devil on his leash.
Or maybe it was simply Jet’s turn.
One more pawn for the rook, before she got forced off the board.
She didn’t know what they’d done with Laksri’s body.
She didn’t know where Anaze was, either.
Richter would squirm out of this, the way he squirmed out of everything. His expertise in the long run centered on convincing other people to do his dirty work for him. He skulked off when they got killed, until he could find someone else to rope into his game, willingly or not.
But Laksri must have really pissed him off.
Laksri, Richter killed personally.
Fighting a tightening in her throat, Jet looked at the camera embedded in the wall, knowing it would be recording infrared images, as well as those within the visible light spectrum for humans. Possibly it would record her in those other spectrums, as well––a kind of Nirreth lie detector, it would pick up more than just the standard yes and no.
It would pick up Jet’s anger. Her frustration.
Her hatred.
It would pick up her arousal, too.
It might not know what caused those things, not precisely. But it would know what was there. It would record that knowing.
She still stared at that camera when the Nirreth caught hold of her wrist.
“Mammal!” he snapped. “Answer me! Or I will give you back to the guards!”
Jet let her eyes travel slowly back to his.
“Answer what, sir?”
He paused, as if the look on her face startled him.
Whatever he saw in that single pass of his gaze, it brought a curl to his dark lips, a frown that touched the rest of his expression.
“Do you really think you can succeed in this?” he said. “This game of yours, of using silence? Of pretending ignorance?”
“Ignorance about what, sir?” she said politely.
“We know you work for them,” he snapped. “For the traitor, Laksri! For the rebel slave, Anaze! You are one of their treasonous followers!”
When Jet said nothing, he let out a low hiss.
“You pretend ignorance of this, too?”
Making her voice pleasant, she laid her hands flat on the table.
“My ownership papers should all be in order, sir,” she said. “I belong to the Royal family. I run for our Queen and her exalted family in the glorious Rings, imagined and enacted by the grace of the Royal Bloodline and their servants most loyal among the––”
“Stop!” he snapped, slamming the table with a palm. “Be silent!”
She fell obediently silent, watching him.
The Nirreth’s tail lashed in another of those hard arcs.
His dark eyes didn’t move, but she saw something in them, something that indicated her words managed to jab at him, despite the faint smile that now colored his lips.
“What do they offer you?” he said, watching her sagely.
“What does who offer me, sir?”
“Is it wealth? Freedom? Or do you just like the prince’s personal attentions?”
He let his eyes wander down her body, which was entirely without clothes, bruised from her first night in the cells under the compound on Astet.
“…It seems you suit our kind quite well, Jet Tetsuo.”
“I do not understand the question,” she said politely, unflinching under his stare.
“Is being consort to the First Son really such a prize for you, mammal?” His eyes flickered down her body a second time, even as the motions of his tail grew more sinuous. “Why would this mean anything to you, given what you are?”
“Why would I not be honored by such a position, honorable Guard to the Retribution?” she said. “Any mammal of my standing would, of course, be honored, if only––”
But he lost patience before she could finish.
“Silence! You will be silent! Now!”
She obeyed, and his mouth curled into another of those angry frowns. She could almost see him thinking this was pointless, that he would sting her, that he would speak to her through the venom, no matter how clouded it might be from his guards.
Before he could act on that, the door to her left opened, causing him to turn.
Jet continued to stare straight ahead.
She didn’t move her eyes in that direction until the familiarity of the new voice caused her head to shift on its own, causing her to stare up at the tall Nirreth who stood there.
“That is enough,” he said coldly.
Jet blinked, staring uncomprehendingly at Trazen.
“She will come with me now,” Trazen added, his eyes matching his voice.
“You do not have the authority––” the other Nirreth snapped angrily.
“I do have it.” Trazen held a flattened monitor towards the guard to support his words, his dark eyes unmoving, not looking at Jet where she sat on the metal bench.
She watched him anyway, her mind still shifting slowly through the haze of too much venom, from too many different Nirreth.
She saw the Ringmaster’s arms flex below the short-sleeved tunic, his mouth harden as he watched the other Nirreth read the screen he’d just
handed him.
As if growing impatient with the other male’s inability to draw his own conclusions, Trazen exhaled in an irritated sigh.
“It is plain,” he said in clipped Nargili. “Our beloved Queen is overthrown. The new First Son, soon to be king, has given this mammal to me, as reward for leading this operation, and bringing the traitors to justice.”
For the first time, Trazen’s gold-flecked eyes met Jet’s.
They held so little emotion, they appeared to be dead.
“She will come with me now,” he added. “Back to Earth. Our First Son and soon-to-be king would like to witness this mammal’s re-training and assimilation personally. She is a star of the Rings, after all.”
The Astet guard frowned at him.
Staring up from the bench, he lashed his tail in an angry arc behind his back. Seemingly unable to come up with a good argument, he handed the monitor back to Trazen.
“Take her,” he hissed, his Nargili holding a stronger accent. “Take her, then. We have no need for her here. And send my regards to the new King.”
Trazen nodded, folding the monitor back to its smaller size and clamping it around his muscular wrist.
He didn’t look at her as he addressed the other Nirreth politely.
“Have you managed to find either of them?” Trazen said. “The human, Richter, or his boy?”
The guard gave him an irritated look.
“No,” he said. “We made the deal with the father, to let the boy go. He left within an hour of his part in this.”
“But you put trackers on them, surely?” Trazen said.
Jet frowned, looking between the two of them.
Why would Trazen ask about this in front of her?
Even as she thought it, she glanced at the tall Nirreth and found his eyes on her, a warning to be silent in his gold-rimmed eyes.
“We did,” the guard acknowledged, bowing to Trazen, although the reluctance in the gesture remained apparent. “We did as you asked, Honorable Ringmaster Trazen.”
“Good,” Trazen said, giving a more friendly flick of his tail.
With scarcely a beat of pause, he looked at Jet, his dark eyes holding an overt command.
“Up, mammal.” He motioned sharply with a hand. “We are leaving.”
Jet stared at him, feeling her jaw harden.
At her hesitation, Trazen’s eyes grew cold, as hard as stones.
“Now,” he said, his voice holding an open threat. “You belong to me now. You might as well learn this early, Jet. I do not like having to ask anything twice.”
Jet felt her jaw harden more, until it hurt her face.
Even so, she rose slowly and deliberately to her feet, not bothering to hide her lack of clothes from his eyes, either. She barely saw him glance at her, though, other than a sharp look down her form, as if to assess whether she could move under her own power.
“Come,” he said, his voice more cordial.
Jet walked towards him, deliberately slow, not taking her eyes off his face, or his tail. She half-expected him to sting her as soon as she got close, but he didn’t do that, either. Instead, he caught hold of her by the back of the neck, and held her there, firmly.
Looking at the guard, he gave a short bow of his head, flicking his tail a last time, a near salute.
“I thank you again,” he said.
He waited for the other to bow back, then turned, steering Jet towards the door.
She didn’t look back, or look up.
She followed the tug of his fingers without protest, feeling a harder knot settle into her chest.
She was going home. She was going back to Earth.
She knew without being told that Richter would be there.
Richter would be there, and he had her family.
He had her brother, her mother, her uncle and aunt. He would be back for her, too. She was sure of it. She knew it even apart from Trazen’s odd allusion to the same.
She would wait. She would endure whatever she had to.
This wasn’t over.
The long run for Jet had only just begun.
~ END OF PART III ~
Copyright © 2014 by JC Andrijeski
Published by White Sun Press
Cover Art & Design by Damonza (2014)
www.damonza.com
Ebook Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an official vendor for the work and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
Dedicated to S.C.
Keep hope alive. Always.
It’s in the job description, damn it.
1
Slave Girl
Jet stood over a sunlight-speckled pool of crystal-blue water
She stared down at a vibrating reflection of herself in a long, flowing, yet somehow form-revealing dress.
Stone urns, taller than herself, stood at the four corners of the room, filled with palm trees that rose to breathtaking heights.
They looked like paintings to Jet, even after all this time; her mind remained used to the twisted scrub trees and mutated pines from outside the dome walls. These tree trunks and branches rose up through the open slats of the slanted, wooden roof, made all the taller from being planted indoors.
Jet could feel wind on her face.
It felt like real wind.
She heard birds, saw their wings expand forward and jerk back as they flitted from tree to tree in looping trails. All that motion and life lived in the background, though.
She heard people here.
They splashed in the water on the other end of the pool, chattering amongst themselves in skag languages she remembered from the pits. They sounded happy, although their voices remained subdued, soft-spoken. Jet wondered if, like her, they remained forever conscious of their place inside the hierarchy of this home.
Still, they didn’t seem afraid.
She caught the faint whiff of sweet-smelling smoke as some of them indulged in hand-rolled cigarettes they must have bought at the market not far from the main house.
They gossiped about people whose names sounded vaguely familiar, although she couldn’t tie anything concrete to those names in her head… politics, sporting events, theater, other slaves who shared similar duties with her inside this house.
She’d been educated in famous Nirreth names, at one point or another.
She could recite bits and pieces of that knowledge even now, but her mind remained curiously blank when no one needed anything of her.
She encouraged that blankness whenever other Nirreth were present.
Trazen taught her ways to do that… ways to appear uninteresting to others of his kind.
But now, being more or less alone, she fought to think.
She felt a vague urgency to try harder on this day. More of an urgency than she’d felt for what seemed like months, even years of time spent in this bland beauty with its slow-moving days and nights. Jet fought the effects of Trazen’s venom even now, trying to grasp pieces of who she was, to remember who inhabited the body she wore.
The effort fatigued her, but she didn’t stop.
Eventually she felt tired.
She also felt significantly less content.
The latter told her that her efforts to get past the venom were probably working. She had only marginal success. Despite the hours that passed since she’d last seen him, she just had too much of Trazen in her system still.
While that fact alone wasn’t at all unpleasant, she couldn’t really connect to him in any real way either, which just left her blank.
Jet felt clear enough to have the occasional emotional surge.
Fear, anger, desperation, frustration… grief.
Her mind flickered over events, memory. Laksri. Anaze. Anaze’s father…
Richter. Eamon Richter.
She remembered seeing Laksri fall.
She would be running in the Rings that night.
The thought startled her.
She hadn’t run in the Rings in weeks. Months, maybe. Even so, when the thought crossed her mind, floating between those blank spaces, it felt true.
She would run the Rings tonight.
It felt true enough that it returned to the forward part of Jet’s mind a few minutes later, trying to become meaningful to her, perhaps out of an animalistic desire for self-preservation.
She had to survive. She didn’t even know why anymore, not precisely, but the desire burned there, fierce inside her chest.
Of course, Trazen might not let her.
He might not let her survive.
He might keep her too stoned to do anything but provide an amusing spectacle for a few minutes… maybe an hour, if she was lucky, before some giant space lizard gutted her.
She couldn’t guess Trazen’s probable motives or actions any more now than she could before he owned her. Even as close as Jet had been to his mind in the last few months––in theory, at least––she didn’t feel any closer to understanding the Ringmaster himself.
Everything about him was a contradiction.
Everything she felt on him belied everything she’d ever been told about him.
She knew nothing about him. Nothing at all.
Even so, she couldn’t let herself believe for an instant that he would hesitate to dispose of her, once he grew tired of her. Whatever the venom might have done to her mind, she couldn’t let go of that knowledge… not even for a minute.
Perhaps he’d already grown tired of her.
Perhaps that’s what this Rings match was about.
Even now, Trazen’s people––minus Trazen himself, of course, due to the obvious conflict of interest as her owner––would be sitting at virtual displays, designing and refining elements of the maze they would force her to run.
Jet knew from Trazen’s mind they would be laughing over pieces of it––laughing and arguing about how to make it harder, how to confuse her and spin her around, blindfolded, while things tried to kill her.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 69