Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV)

by JC Andrijeski

  The sound of running water pulled her eyes quickly to the left. Unlike the canals, this wasn't the sound of a creek, or even a river. It sounded like a torrential downpour instead, like white-water rapids, or a snowmelt-fed waterfall.

  Once Jet turned, she couldn't help but gape a little in astonishment.

  Pushing out from one wall in the drive...really a good section of the garden itself...stood a fountain so large that it seemed like it had been made for people at a scale of two or three times the Nirreth themselves. The wide pool stretched out from an actual, human-made building of stone, the rounded edge of the pool ending not far from the front door to the Nirreth structure, and only a dozen yards from the driveway and the trolley door.

  More than a fountain, it was its own structure, filled with marble men and horses at least five times the size of an actual person...but again, all apparently human made, not Nirreth in origin. Behind the fountain itself stood the stone front of the human-made building, with white, ribbed pillars and decorated with more of those enormous, marble people carved to look like gods.

  At the very height of the building that framed the fountain itself, Jet saw writing etched into the stone, and that was human writing, too. Next to it stood flying cherubic creatures and what looked like stone guards carrying lances. The stone statues of people embedded in the building's walls only appeared smaller next to the tallest god in the middle, who graced the apex of the fountain itself inside what looked like an enormous, marble oyster shell. He stood bearded and barely clothed in swaths of stone cloth, human-faced yet unreal-looking, and flanked on either side by winged horses and more giant humans in the pools below.

  Stone basins rippled out from that center, shaped to look like real rocks but made of more of that white marble. The water cascaded down in sheets from different-leveled pools, ending in a final basin long enough and wide enough to swim in, and bordered by more white stone.

  The mere size of it was enough to be awe-inspiring, even without the stoic faces of the god in the center and those human faces to either side.

  It was a fountain made to instill wonder...even grandeur.

  Despite the immensity of the thing, Jet could almost swear she'd seen it before.

  The fountain and the building behind it reminded Jet of fading picture books that the old woman, Chiyeko, kept in her round, stone house that used to be a lighthouse by the sound. The books housed some text, but mainly pictures of old-world Earth, and some of its wonders across the sea, in the other continents. Jet continued to stare at the fountain wordlessly as she followed Laksri's tugging hand out of the trolley, and even after the trolley glided away, passenger-less and driverless, to return to the main city. She couldn't tear her eyes off it really. She almost wanted to wade in the pool, to get closer to those stone gods, peer into their faces.

  Richter chuckled a little then, drawing her eyes.

  Jet was surprised to see a harder look in his expression once more.

  “Do you really recognize it, kitten?” he mused. “I'll admit, I'm surprised...and impressed. Not many at your age would recognize such a thing. Not anymore.”

  She didn't really want to ask him, but couldn't seem to help herself.

  “What is it?”

  “It's the Trevi fountain, love,” he said, matter-of-fact. “It used to be in Rome.”

  “Rome?” Jet felt herself frown. “But isn't that...”

  “On the other side of the world?” Richter said, smiling wryly. He shrugged. “More or less. Rome itself is gone, of course...filled with even more ruins than it was before the Nirreth came. It was one of the cities destroyed in the invasion...so you can blame them for that one. But as you can see, the Nirreth managed to preserve a few trinkets that caught their eye.”

  Jet studied his face, trying to interpret the anger she saw there.

  If nothing else, she'd file it away as information to think about later. She still couldn't figure out exactly how he felt about the Nirreth, really. At times, he seemed to be practically chummy with them. At others, he acted like this was all just a business proposition for him. At still others, he'd tried to sell her on the idea that cooperation was the way to save the human race...and even that the Nirreth had saved humanity from itself in some sense.

  Now this. Open resentment at them stealing something that had once been human, something that symbolized the pinnacle of old-world human artistry and culture.

  “Don't overthink it, sweetie,” Richter said. Once again, he seemed to have read some portion of her thoughts in her expression. “I just don't like seeing pretty things destroyed.” Grinning at her, he winked. “You should be thankful for that, by the way...”

  Jet felt her jaw harden. All of her interest in Richter's mind faded in roughly the same set of seconds, which maybe had been his intention.

  But that last part didn't occur to her until later.

  She was still staring at the fountain as they led her up the steps. She didn't look away until they reached the shadowed alcove before the wide double-doors, and then only because she couldn't see it anymore.

  She still heard it, however, its water thundering into the silence of the Nirreth gardens, and echoing in the acoustics of the overhanging building.

  Jet now sat in a wide chair at the edge of a long, oval table.

  Laksri sat on one side of her and Richter on the other side. They'd cuffed one of her wrists directly to the table itself, without even a chain to give her any play. Since he'd locked down her left wrist, not her right, she had to assume that Richter had noticed she was left-handed as well. Or one of the Nirreth maybe, based on how she wielded her sword. When he finished locking her ankles to the bottom of the chair, Jet gave Richter a disbelieving look.

  He smiled that wan half-smile of his, unrepentant.

  “Procedure, darling,” he said, giving her a friendly pat on the shoulder. “You're officially an untrained pet now, love, even though no money has changed hands with a specific owner. Bought or not, you're brand-spanking new Green Zone property...what the Nirreth call ilezni...meaning 'uninitiated'. You'll earn privileges as you go through the training, including the ability to eat without restraints, but in the meantime, you'll be watched pretty much 24/7, especially when the Royals are around...” Grinning at her, he straightened.

  “...Wait until you get a look at your sleeping quarters,” he added with a laugh.

  Jet couldn't think of a good reply to any of this, so she simply sat there, fuming, watching him with full-blown hatred as he seated himself beside her, draping an arm casually over the back of her chair with an air of implied ownership.

  She wondered if she might be able to stab Richter with her fork when they actually served her food, but he seemed to have thought of that, as well...seating Laksri on her right side, where her free hand lived, and only supplying her with one of those soft, ladle-like spoons.

  Jet sat there, perfectly straight, watching as more of those well-dressed Nirreth entered the room. She still had a lot of difficulty telling them apart.

  The long table where she sat was situated in another of those round rooms with the high sun domes. This one, however, was about twice as large as the reception area near the landing docks, and the sunroof above seemed to be letting in the actual sky...or the projected sky under the plasma dome at any rate, the same one Jet had seen while walking outside the buildings.

  Like most of the other Nirreth buildings, plants ringed the curved walls, along with flowers and bushes of a variety of species, only some of which Jet recognized from their longhouse botany books. She also saw clusters of boulders and red rocks that might have been brought in from the New Mexico cliffs themselves before being decontaminated and set up as decoration.

  Of course, the room also had its own winding canal, this one wider than most Jet had seen and nearly splitting the middle of the room, with a series of decorative bridges over it at evenly spaced points.

  Unlike any other room Jet had seen since arriving at the Green Zone, this
one also had birds. Songbirds of various kinds clustered in the branches of the trees of the Nirreth's homemade bosque, and Jet could have sworn she'd seen a roadrunner darting across the floor at one point, even though the re-created environment didn't match the sandy-colored desert bird at all, even with the blue feathers she saw in its wings and tail. She saw a few larger birds as well, raptors tethered to high perches. One of them was eating a small mammal of some kind, what might have been a rabbit, or maybe a ground hog.

  Jet wondered again how there could be so many birds in this room, yet none in the wider dome of the Green Zone. She considered asking Richter about this again, when he nudged her, pointing with his head towards the arched entryway through which the Nirreth were now gradually filling the room.

  “You see that short one?” he said in a murmur. “That's Olgi. He's the son of the Royals. He should be the king here one day. Not just in the West, but on all of Earth. He's the oldest of the offspring in the direct line to their highest throne...” His eyes followed the smaller Nirreth across the floor. “...It's another reason the West is so important to them, Jet. It's likely to be the next seat of power on Earth as a whole, which means over a good portion of the off-world colonies themselves.”

  Jet followed the younger Nirreth with her eyes, curious in spite of herself. She'd never seen anything but an adult Nirreth before.

  “How old is he?” she asked.

  “Dunno exactly,” Richter shrugged. “But from the looks of him, I'd guess around nine or ten of our years.” At Jet's astonished look, he smiled. “...They age a bit faster than us...physically anyway. Reach their full height at about eleven or twelve.”

  “And what about non-physically?” Jet said, frowning a bit.

  Richter shrugged, smiling a little.

  He didn't answer her, though.

  Jet continued to watch as the young Nirreth wandered the room. None of the adult Nirreth seemed to pay much attention to him, and the boy ended up in front of the trees, looking up at the raptors in their high perches. Jet was still watching when he bent down, picking something up that crouched in the bushes. Whatever it was, it had brown fur.

  “What is that?” she muttered, squinting at it.

  Richter smiled, following her gaze. “Otter, I think.”

  “Otter?” Jet gaped at him. “You mean one of ours?”

  “Sure,” Richter said. He waved a hand around the wider room, dismissive. “Whole damned place is a big zoological park, Jet,” he explained. “They've tamed the ones they can, built cages for the ones they can't. I think the otter must be the boy's pet...it seems to know him.”

  Jet's gaze returned to the young Nirreth.

  She watched him laugh as he tossed the otter playfully into the canal. It immediately did a flip in the water, splashing him with his tail. The boy was leaning down to splash the otter back, when an adult Nirreth, what looked like a male, grabbed Ogli by the arm and leaned his mouth down to the boy's head, whispering something, his cat-like face holding a fierce expression.

  “Busted,” Richter said, smiling at Jet. “Guess even the Royals get their spankings.”

  Jet didn't answer. She watched the young Nirreth answer the adult with a series of hand gestures and words, as if explaining himself, but she couldn't really make much sense of it. She was so busy watching him and the otter that continued to try to entice him into a game from the canal, that she didn't see the adult Nirreth approach the table from the other side.

  Jet jumped when the thing spoke, and not only because it spoke perfect English.

  “...This is her? The skag you were bragging about?”

  Jet turned her head, staring up at the large male with his hands planted on the table across from them. Like the others had, he looked her over like she was a slab of prime meat.

  “She's awfully skinny,” the Nirreth commented. “Are you sure she can fight?”

  Richter laughed. “Of course I'm sure...she even got a chunk out of Laksri here, while we were bringing her on board. And he's the best I've got, in terms of hand-to-hand.” He thumped Laksri on the shoulder good-naturedly, using the hand attached to the arm that he still had slung over the back of Jet's chair. “...They fight hungry in the frontier, don't you know that, Tebbs? Not like the fat fucks you have waving swords around here...”

  The tall Nirreth, the one Richter called Tebbs, squinted at the bandage on Laksri's shoulder, as if trying to assess if it was real.

  “...You really think she's trainable for protection?” he said finally, eyeing the expression on Jet's face. “She looks pretty pissed off, Richter.”

  “She just hates me,” Richter said, laughing. “They're all trainable. You should know that by now, Tebbs.”

  The Nirreth grunted, as if conceding the point.

  “Well, you're asking too much...” he said shortly. “...She's way overpriced.”

  Richter waved him off though, interrupting before he could go on. “No. Don't even think about trying to hammer me down now. I won't discuss price with anyone but your mistress...and I won't even talk to her until after the demonstration.”

  Tebbs hissed a little at that, but seemed to concede that point, too.

  “Fine,” he said. “But she is still overpriced. It'll take four months just to get her up to a reasonable weight. We can't broadcast fights with girl skeletons fighting full-grown mammals...no matter how good they look with a sword...”

  He sniffed the air a little then, as if trying to catch a whiff of Jet herself.

  “...Nice hair, though,” he admitted.

  Richter rolled his eyes, glancing at Jet. “She's underpriced, and you know it, you cheap bastard,” he laughed. “Wait and see. Your mistress will agree to it without blinking. Especially after she sees the demonstration...” He smiled up at the Nirreth. “...And it's not just her hair that's nice, Tebbes. Ask Laksri here. He's got a crush on her already.”

  Tebbs dismissed this with a hand gesture. Making another soft hissing noise then, he glanced around the room and straightened, as if the conversation had lost interest for him.

  “We will talk after,” he said to Richter. It didn't sound like a question.

  “Until then,” Richter said cheerfully, leaning back in his seat.

  Looking at him, Jet could only think how much she hated him.

  That he could pal around with the lizard-skins so happily...that he could talk casually about 'training' human beings like they were dogs that just needed a good beating, implying that she would be useful for more than that, as well. What really got to her, though, was his assumption that she'd do whatever it was he wanted to make his sale of her a success.

  Whatever this demonstration was, Jet intended to make sure she disappointed him. If that meant sitting in the middle of an arena, letting some Nirreth in a toga take swings at her with a club until she was black and blue and bloody, then so be it.

  Whatever happened, she swore to herself, she wouldn't fight.

  Not for him. Not even if they killed her.

  DEMONSTRATION

  Jet hadn't known what she expected exactly, but it wasn't this.

  When Richter went on and on about his 'demonstration,' Jet had envisioned a dirt and sand arena of some kind...maybe even a cage where they'd throw her her sword, Black, or tie it to her wrist or something. She'd expected them to threaten her, to maybe chain her other wrist behind her back while they threw multiple opponents at her. She expected something theatrical, possibly with costumes, or even with her fighting naked. Anything to make the contest more dramatic-seeming, and to give the Nirreth something to bet on.

  She hadn't expected this.

  There was no prelude really, no preparation. Jet stood in the middle of the same room where they'd fed her lunch, next to a long canal cut into the middle of the floor and surrounded by a ring of Nirreth who looked more suited to a cocktail party then a ring match...at least any kind of ring match Jet had ever seen back home, much less the overblown events they showed on the Nirreth broadcasts
back at the compound.

  Her lunch sat heavily in her stomach, making her feel slightly nauseous, and more inclined to a nap than a fight for her life...much less a fight for a bunch of overdressed lizard-skins' entertainment.

  Jet suspected the nausea was at least partly adrenaline and nerves; the food had been good, and tasted clean enough...cleaner than what she usually ate in the settlement. On the other hand, she still wasn't sure what that food had been exactly, or even if the main course had been meat at all. The thought either way didn't reassure her. If it hadn't been meat, then what had it been? And if it had been meat, given that so many of the animals were contaminated, at least where she was from, she had to wonder if it would make her sick, too.

  It reassured her even less when she considered alternatives to animal meat.

  Whatever Richter told her about the Nirreth not eating humans anymore, Jet wasn't wholly convinced. Besides which, Richter could easily be lying and Jet wouldn't know the difference. For that matter, the Nirreth could be lying to him. She didn't speak Nirreth, and none of them had any reason to tell her the truth even if she could understand them.

  Richter stood with his thick legs slightly apart, almost comically short next to the Nirreth that loomed on either side of him. His eyes were hawk-like as they studied her face, as if he were trying to decide what Jet might do before she did it.

  “You ready, love?” he called out from the circle of onlookers.

  Jet gave him an incredulous look. “Ready for what?”

  “To earn your keep,” he said, smiling.

  When one of the well-dressed Nirreth said something to him, Richter waited for Laksri to translate, then nodded.