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

by JC Andrijeski

  Isreti would have been all over the design of this thing.

  Trazen warned her about all of these possibilities.

  He’d given her countless scenarios for how this might play out, some of the buttons the Rings Operators might try to push, both in the crowd and in her. He’d reminded her, again and again, usually through the venom, that this wouldn’t be a real Rings match.

  It wouldn’t be a real challenge match, either.

  Isreti meant to use Bukka to kill her.

  For the same reason, a lot of what Trazen said reminded Jet of things Laksri told her about Retribution on Astet, which was basically a public execution.

  Like Retribution, Trazen said they’d want it to be an overwhelming victory, so there would be no question as to who deserved the win. He said they might want to see Jet run for a while, to play the role of prey, so there was more emotional satisfaction in her death.

  Similarly, Isreti would want her to appear as weak as possible.

  He would want her to be as unsympathetic as possible, too––so Trazen warned her they might force her into horrible, no-win, or ethically-difficult choices.

  Like having to kill a Nirreth child to save her own life.

  Like forcing Anaze to attack the Shinkara in his Retribution on Astet, Isreti would want to see Jet do something most Nirreth would consider vile, reprehensible, morally disgusting, even treasonous.

  Isreti would want her to get some boos and hisses before her death.

  Trazen talked over those possibilities with her a lot over the past few weeks.

  He’d talked about it even more since the night of Tyra’s party.

  Most of that was couched in regular training sessions, usually in the moments after he stung her, but before he left her in the training arena alone.

  One of those times, he’d kissed her.

  It caught her off guard, reminding her that he’d been drugged before, that he no longer had the serum that counteracted his venom.

  She’d felt a rush of desire off him after he stung her the second time.

  Then, before she could turn away, or walk over to where Alice waited for her, Trazen wrapped his tail around her again and pulled her roughly against his chest. He stung her a third time, then kissed her, using his tongue.

  He’d kissed her again, caressing her neck and back with his hand.

  Then he’d seemed embarrassed and let her go.

  Maybe to cover over what he’d done, he told her more about what she might expect during the match, still holding her arms.

  Then he stung her a fourth time and kissed her again.

  That time, the desire on him cut her breath, flushing her skin. She also felt a very clear physical reaction on him when he crushed her more tightly against his body. His hardness pressed into her, making her gasp, until she was begging him through the venom, even though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do that again.

  When she tried to touch him there, arching her back and pressing into him, sliding her hand down the front of his pants, he released her, but not before he let out a heavy growl.

  When he released her, he just walked away.

  He hadn’t even looked back.

  Jet hadn’t had much time to wonder how she felt about that, either.

  Before she’d caught her breath or leveled her mind, Tyra’s laugh rang out over the arena floor. Flushing, Jet had turned, wiping her reaction to Trazen’s unexpected public display off her face. When Alice made a disparaging remark about Jet’s new “boyfriend,” Jet pushed it out of her mind entirely, forcing her concentration back on the training.

  Luckily, Alice seemed to feel the same way following her initial crack.

  She hadn’t brought up Trazen again for the rest of that session.

  Still, it had been a really good kiss.

  Even better than the ones Jet remembered from the recovery room, the only time Trazen had kissed her before… and she’d thought those were pretty damned good at the time.

  She’d lost control with him again, badly enough that it hurt when he pushed her away, depressing and embarrassing her and bringing up a near grief, something akin to futility. She still remembered the feeling of him pressing into her. She remembered telling him how badly she wanted him inside her, and not only his tongue.

  She remembered the way he’d reacted to what she’d said.

  Her mind returned to those kisses and stolen touches more than a few times in the days and nights following, especially when she’d been lying alone in her sleeping chambers, wondering about Trazen and where he slept.

  By then, she already knew it wasn’t in his own house, much less his own bed.

  She hadn’t been able to concentrate on Trazen, though… not like that.

  Like everything in her life apart from the challenge match, Trazen was something she couldn’t afford to get distracted by. Trazen’s lessons had to overshadow whatever was going on between them personally, if only because she felt the emotional punch behind his worry for her, his fear for her life.

  She felt that worry even more urgently the next time he stung her.

  His attempts to get Tyra involved in her challenge match had fallen completely flat, which seemed to stress Trazen out more. Isreti wanted the challenge to be with Jet and Bukka only. He didn’t seem to care about the money offered to include Tyra.

  Trazen told Jet that during those same negotiations, Isreti confided in him that they already had a follow up match planned for Tyra, for the day of his official coronation as King.

  Isreti told Trazen the loser of that match would be eaten at the formal banquet following the event.

  The new order of the Nirreth would have officially begun.

  The information shocked Jet.

  In fact, Trazen telling her that story about Isreti might have been the single thing that finally drove home the reality of what he and Richter had been telling her.

  Isreti wasn’t just a fanatic, or a lunatic, or even a psychopath.

  He wasn’t only a demagogue, or a narcissist.

  He was all those things.

  He was also a racist, genocidal monster.

  He was serious about re-establishing what he saw as the “natural order” of things between the Nirreth and other races.

  The idea of Tyra being served up as Isreti’s first dinner as King made her physically ill.

  It also made it easier to shelve the topic of Trazen and his kisses, no matter how good they were. To his credit, Trazen seemed obsessively focused on keeping her alive, too. He briefed her later that same night, talking to her by the pool at his house through the remnants of the venom. He gripped her arm with one hand and answered her questions and instructed her for probably three hours before leaving her alone.

  Not long after that, he’d left his house.

  Those same lessons ran through Jet’s mind now, almost like a kind of mantra.

  He’d told her that, in order to survive long enough, she would have to avoid the big fight Isreti’s controllers would be leading her towards.

  He said she would need to avoid it for as long as she could––long enough for the rest of their plan to be put into effect.

  Trazen also told her that the Operators knew her well enough by now that she would have to work hard to avoid it. He said they would play on her own psychology. They would try and lead her through the run at the exact speed and route they wanted, using everything they knew about her from her previous runs.

  Essentially, Trazen told her to think about what she would normally do, and do the opposite. He wanted her to go against her natural instincts, in each and every instance, even if it struck her as crazy… or immoral… or even suicidal.

  He warned her she might have to break the rules to stay alive.

  He didn’t seem to think she would make it if she tried to work the run like a normal competitor. He didn’t pull any punches in telling her that, either.

  He told her, flat-out, she would die if she tried to win.

 
; He didn’t even want her to try.

  He wanted her to stall, hide, run, and only fight to pull herself away from the direction they seemed to be leading her. He estimated a minimum of one hour for Richter to fulfill his part of things, assuming he didn’t double-cross them.

  That meant she should expect to have to stall for up to two.

  All of that made sense to Jet at the time, as he’d been running her through what Isreti would do, how he would want this to play out for the audience… the pure spectacle of the thing.

  Even at the beginning, Jet had planned to turn around, to run in the opposite direction she could feel them aiming her. She’d at least intended to turn right instead of her usual instinct to go left, especially if running backwards wasn’t available to her.

  By now, Jet’s eyes had more or less adjusted to the dark.

  She could make out the bare outline of her environment, even though scarcely enough light existed to see more than a few yards in any direction.

  Really, she couldn’t see much of anything apart from vague shapes, but it was enough to get the gist. Staring up at a flat wall of green that stretched ahead of her in a nearly straight line, she craned her head and neck around, looking behind her, as well.

  More leaves and small branches rustled as she stared, like bones clicking together.

  The corridor didn’t go far behind her at all.

  It appeared to end only a few meters past where she stood.

  She couldn’t go that way.

  She had thought she was in the woods when she first looked around. The darkness confused her, that rustle of leaves and branches. The dark clouds. The stars.

  The combination made her think she was in a dense forest on a moonless night.

  But she wasn’t.

  Looking up at those high hedge walls, their nearly perfect lines, their dense, impenetrable form, Jet found she knew exactly where she was. She’d seen something like this before, in one of Chiyeko’s picture books back in the pits.

  She was in a maze.

  17

  The Maze

  Wind gusted down on her, freezing cold, catching her breath.

  Jet looked up, feeling snow in the air, at least the bare beginnings of it.

  Moving forward into the hedge maze, she stopped only long enough to put her hand up against one of the topiary walls, feeling along it, trying to get a sense of its density. Still experimenting, she thrust her whole arm inside, trying to feel if she could force her way through, if need be.

  When her gloved hand closed over a thicker branch towards the middle––

  ––it shocked her. Hard.

  Hard enough to make her teeth snap together in a violent clench. Hard enough to hurt her bones, to make her fingers clamp down on the branch before letting go.

  Letting out a shocked cry, low and torn away from her lips by the cold wind, Jet looked at her hand in the dark, clenching and unclenching her gloved fingers.

  She needed to know, though.

  Using her teeth so she wouldn’t have to sheath Black, the pulled the glove off her hand. It crossed her mind that she already might have broken the rules by doing so, but she did it anyway, thrusting her hand back inside the hedge wall.

  She gripped the branch deliberately that time.

  It shocked her again.

  It wasn’t as hard that time, though. Jet still gritted her teeth at the initial jolt of pain, but she could bear it. After a few more seconds, the pain seemed to worsen and she let go again, gasping, feeling like her hand had gone numb.

  Pulling her arm and hand out of the topiary, she clenched it a few times to get the feeling back. After a few more seconds, she took off her other glove too, shoving both of them in her pockets.

  She began to walk cautiously down the aisle between the manicured hedges, her breath pluming out in front of her, the sword held tightly in both hands. Within a few more minutes of walking, her fingers were blue with cold, even more numb than they had been from the electric shock from the hedge. Jet clenched and unclenched both hands around the hilt of Black and fought to ignore it as she continued to walk.

  Eventually, though, she had to concede defeat and fished her gloves out of her pocket.

  As soon as she put them back on, heating sensors inside the gloves ignited, creating sparks of feeling in the skin and muscle of her hands. The contrast made her gasp; it also made her wonder if the virtual cold might actually give her frostbite in real life, if she tried to go without gloves in here for too long.

  Well, at least now she knew.

  She glanced up at the thought, her gloved hands gripping the sword’s hilt.

  Snow cascaded down around her now, in increasingly large puffs. The snowfall deadened sound, and made it even harder to see as flakes caught on her cheeks and eyelashes, making her blink and rub her face.

  The snowfall grew thicker as she continued to walk, until her booted feet were shuffling through a few inches at the bottom of the maze.

  Jet reached the end of the first row and nearly walked into the hedge.

  Visibility was so bad now, she had to look in both directions, squinting through the snow and the pitch black to try and see which way lay open.

  After a few more seconds of panting out plumes of steam and trying to see in the now-starless night, she realized she could go in either direction. Her mind wanted her to go left, so she swung her body towards the right and began walking through the deepening snow.

  She reached the end of that leg of the maze, and went right again, even though it felt like going backwards now… or perhaps in a giant circle.

  The snow was up to her shins by then.

  Jet could feel sweat trickling down her back under the sense-suit from the effort of slogging through the cold and snow. It felt like she’d been out here for an hour already, but her internal clock told her it was more like fifteen or twenty minutes.

  She stopped in the middle of the next intersection, which gave her two options again.

  The wind kicked up, blinding her, making her cough even as she tightened her grip on the sword, panting as she tried to listen through the dark.

  Even so, she was puzzled.

  Why was nothing happening in here?

  This couldn’t be a very entertaining run for the spectators to watch––Jet lost in a nighttime maze in the snow, messing around with gloves and frostbite while she fumbled in the dark. Even as she thought it, a voice drifted towards her out of the next gust of wind.

  High-pitched, buffeted by the icy air, but even so, Jet recognized it.

  “Jet!” her mother called. “Jet! Help us!”

  The voice hit her like a punch in the gut.

  Jet turned, facing back the way she’d come, in the direction of the voice.

  Her breath caught, making her head pound, even more than the buffeting gusts of snow.

  She hadn’t heard her mother’s voice in so long.

  The shock of it nearly brought tears to her eyes, even as a part of her flushed in fury at the blatant manipulation she knew lay behind it. Trazen’s words echoed just beyond the feeling that rose in her at the thought of seeing her mother. She heard his voice, his thoughts, in a more practical, harder, more survival-oriented part of her mind.

  They’ll do anything they can to get you to go the way they want, he warned her, holding her arm as they sat by that pool. They’ll push any button, Jet. They’ll be merciless about this… utterly and completely merciless. You have to prepare yourself. You have to harden yourself, if necessary. Use your mind only, not your heart… no matter how much it hurts, Jet.

  She’d been watching his face as he finished, feeling the grief in him, the knowing behind his own words.

  She couldn’t help wondering if it came from him time in the Rings.

  He’d answered her, although she hadn’t really aimed the question at him deliberately.

  Yes, he’d thought at her. Yes, Jet. The runs got increasingly difficult for me towards the end. In the lead up to becoming
the next Ringmaster.

  Why did you do it? she’d thought at him.

  There was a pause before he’d answered.

  Then he’d spoken aloud.

  “It was my job, Jet.”

  She could feel he meant more than the Rings.

  She felt glimpses of the Shinkara in that, in them wanting him placed somewhere influential. They’d groomed him to be Ringmaster. He couldn’t fail them. He’s promised them he could do it, no matter what sacrifices that entailed.

  He’d trained for it, studied for it, worked for it.

  She felt devotion in that. Loyalty.

  Something about it touched her, in a way that surprised her at the time.

  Why the thing with Biggs? she’d asked him, using the venom again. Why did you use my brother in that run with the captive? The one before Astet?

  He gave her a direct look, that grief still heavy in his eyes.

  I needed you to come to me, Jet, he thought at her. You avoided me after I stung you. Even more than you had before. Even with how much of me you saw, how much of my real self I let you see. He shrugged. I needed you to come to me.

  Jet stared at him.

  Then she let out a barking laugh.

  You meant for me to attack you in that Control Room? she thought back, still amused. Then why did you look so surprised when I busted in there with my sword?

  He smiled at that, tilting his head to the side, a Nirreth’s “no.”

  I hadn’t expected that, no, he thought at her, still smiling.

  Stroking her arm with the fingers of one hand, he chuckled, shaking his head.

  Truthfully, I thought you’d come at me after you’d left the arena…at the restaurant following the match, maybe. I’d intended to be there, to follow you, to make it easy for you. I knew you might think I really had your brother.

  Glancing up, he gave her an apologetic look.

  I didn’t have a lot of time, Jet. I needed to touch you, to warn you about Richter having your family. You wouldn’t come near me, he repeated. Even with how much of me you saw.

  That time, she heard a faint question in his mind.

  Because of that, she corrected him. I avoided you because of that, Trazen.