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

by JC Andrijeski

  She took it, and let him lead her deeper into the barn. Ogli coiled his tail around her arm, too, but Jet didn’t feel any threat in the gesture.

  It actually felt affectionate...if just the slightest bit possessive.

  When she glanced at Laksri next, he was watching her again, that harder scrutiny back in his deep black eyes.

  Jet didn’t manage to get free until a few hours later.

  Ogli left for his afternoon lessons and Jet bolted out of the room the instant she got permission, feeling her muscles relax as she began walking purposefully down the underground and winding corridor between two of the palace buildings. Despite the blue skies and high, yellow sun projected on the dome walls, the Nirreth still built their structures mainly underground.

  Jet didn’t mind. She was used to maneuvering underground; she’d lived underground as long as she could remember, so truthfully, she felt more secure in enclosed spaces than open ones. Most of her life she’d been navigating underground passages, so keeping her sense of direction despite multiple turns and forks didn’t pose a problem for her, either.

  Of course, the Nirreth liked to punctuate those tunnels with vast rooms, some of which were large enough that Jet lost herself in the open spaces.

  Mapping tunnels also felt second-nature to Jet, so she found herself exploring whenever she got the chance. A few times, she got further off the main tracks than security allowed, and she’d been ‘collected’ by guards holding weapons. Everyone assumed she just got lost, so all she really got was a scolding and a finger-wag, Nirreth style.

  Not enough to keep her from doing it again.

  Before they caught her, Jet managed to find the underground greenhouses that grew food for most of the royal compound, as well as the air-circulation machinery. She even glimpsed the machines that created the weather inside the larger dome, including sun and rain. She found it interesting that the Royals controlled that for the Green Zone, as well.

  Nirreth machines remained as inscrutable to her as their weapons, so it was doubtful the information helped her much. She watched closely whenever she saw one of the lizard skins operating any kind of machinery or access panel, from the most mundane to the most secure, but usually, she didn’t really get it. She watched the guards more closely than the rest, but still didn’t feel any closer to understanding how things actually worked.

  Laksri would be looking for her soon, Jet knew.

  Normally, when Ogli went to school, Jet did too. Sometimes that meant being hauled down to the virtual Rings, where she spent a few exhausting hours a day learning the complicated rules of the fights. Sometimes it meant language lessons. Sometimes it meant history, etiquette and so on.

  Laksri usually was the one to bring her wherever they wanted her. But Laksri hadn’t been with her when she dropped Ogli off.

  Jet didn’t wait around to see if he’d show up.

  Taking off as soon as the guards came to take Ogli away, she headed to the next level down in the complex. Making a few turns from memory, she continued to follow passages that sloped deeper underground instead of up towards the surface. Funnily enough, Richter himself had determined the subject of her next exploration; she’d never forgotten his questioning her about whether she could swim. Some part of her chewed over that for a few days, trying to decide what he could have meant, given what she knew about him now.

  Jet still didn’t think for a second that she could trust Richter...or even Anaze, who’d lied to her for the past five years they’d supposedly been friends. Even so, given what Anaze told her about why they’d brought her here, she’d been forced to reframe a lot of what Richter had done and said during the time she’d spent with him on the culler ship. After all, if Richter really worked for some kind of rebellion, then most of his questions and warnings must have something to do with his real reasons for bringing her here.

  According to Anaze, Richter brought her here to help them bring down the Royals.

  Jet was all for that...in theory, anyway.

  Jogging around the first corner, past the more populated segment of the tunnels, Jet found herself hugging the wall as she half-ran, making sure her eyes adjusted to and checked every corner as she rounded turns. Unarmed, she didn’t know what she would do exactly if attacked, but she moved thus out of habit.

  Even the skag tunnels stopped being entirely safe for her not long after she reached puberty.

  Kids would hide in there at night, and challenge anyone who passed until they got caught by the wrong adult and were beaten, usually publicly and by their parents.

  Less commonly, adults would lie in wait in those tunnels too, but when adults got caught, the punishment was generally banishment or death. The difference between the two usually depended on when they were caught...if it was before or after they’d managed to catch someone unawares down there...as well as whether that person was alive or dead, single or married, male or female, old or young, with child or not, and so on.

  For Jet, the real threat was the boys.

  The adults didn’t take their attempts as seriously, and girls were usually on their own in terms of making sure nothing happened. Most girls did that by avoiding certain tunnels altogether, which didn’t eliminate the problem, of course, but lessened it somewhat.

  Jet didn’t like that as a solution, so she went to Mishio and her uncle Draven and asked them to teach her how to fight instead.

  Black came out of that request, along with lessons from her two uncles on how to use it.

  She still tried to be careful, of course...but the worst of those tunnels also happened to be the only real way to get out of the skag pit without being seen by most of the adults, including Jet’s mother. Since her mother didn’t want her hanging around either Mishio or Draven or Draven’s wife, Lara, much less playing with swords, Jet risked that tunnel, too.

  Not risking it meant no hand-to-hand lessons with her uncle and Lara, either, so it seemed worth it.

  Although Uncle Draven was the unofficial leader of the skags’ small fighting force, Jet found that Lara was actually harder to fight, if only because she was so fast. Lara also knew a lot of tricks to offset the advantages men had with weight and range and so forth, things Draven just never had to learn.

  The boys that roamed those halls, looking for girls on their own, figured out quickly that Jet wasn’t the easiest quarry to corner. Thanks to two years of her uncle and aunt’s lessons, she’d broken bones and noses during their first real attempt, when she was twelve. She actually stabbed an eighteen-year-old ‘boy’ named Larks when she was thirteen.

  The attacks seemed to escalate for awhile after that, at least from Larks and his gang...then Jet met Anaze, and they stopped.

  Like, altogether stopped, and pretty much overnight.

  Once it became known around the settlement that the two of them were friends, Jet never even got so much as a threatening look, not even from Larks, although she knew he hated her. She’d heard murmurs and warnings that he’d planned on getting her back...then she met Anaze and those stopped, too. All of the overt hostility pretty much vanished, as soon as they were seen hanging out a few times in public areas of the pits.

  Thinking about it now, Jet found that curious.

  At the time, she figured it was simply supply and demand politics.

  Being a few years older than her, Anaze was already a hunter, and one who brought home kills. All kills required tithing of some kind, per pit custom...which meant they impacted everyone, including the parents of the boys who’d harassed her.

  The one who made the kill got to choose the families who got the tithe. Most just handed them to the kitchen crew who either made something for everyone or rotated, but that was a combination of custom and mere politeness...no one could make the hunter give their meat to anyone, if they didn’t want to.

  So really, Jet assumed those kids had been warned away from her so their families wouldn’t lose their quota of meat.

  Thinking about it now though, that rang a bi
t hollow.

  Even at the time, Jet wondered if that would have been enough to get them to leave her alone...especially someone like Larks, who probably didn’t care all that much about his younger brothers and sisters. Anyway, his parents might not have even known he’d planned to go after Jet; a lot of parents turned a blind eye to their kids’ behavior, especially in the tunnels.

  She wondered now if it had been something else about Anaze that scared them.

  Like, for example, if they knew about his connection to Richter.

  Or maybe they’d known something else about Anaze that Jet didn’t.

  It occurred to her in the past few weeks that she’d never actually seen Anaze fight, not really. They’d sparred, sure, but that was different than a real fight. She’d gotten a few flashes in that one raid against the dock rebels and their friends from Stanley Park, but not enough to really know how good of a fighter he really was.

  She’d mostly been looking to see if he was still standing, then focused back on her own problems when he was. She’d gotten impressions, nothing more. He seemed focused when he fought, and he didn’t back away from larger opponents, or from taking on more than one at a time. That, in itself, was pretty unusual. Most in the settlement could fight at least a little, but they weren’t warriors in the strictest sense.

  Most of those raids...the ones by Richter’s people, for example...Anaze had been out hunting. Of course, the fact that he’d missed the Richter raids now made a lot more sense, but he’d been gone for others, as well.

  She did know he’d been in the thick of things that day, maybe even more than her...and yet he came out without more than a few cuts. She’d fought to protect the animal pens and the food stores, along with Kimchee, Hawkings and a lot of those who worked in husbandry, as well as the blacksmith, Edgar and Lacey, the shepherd’s daughter.

  Most of those who’d been fighting over by the main entrances to the pits had lost arms, fingers, gotten stab wounds and arrows in their chests and bellies and legs. Anaze, although he’d been in the middle of that group, came out pretty much intact.

  That might have been pure luck, of course.

  Jet thought so at the time.

  She’d gotten that one arrow in the shoulder, but it hadn’t hit anything serious. She’d been lucky, Anaze had been lucky...the settlement had been lucky. Lucky there hadn’t been more of them. Lucky most of the good fighters happened to be within shouting distance. Lucky the raiders hadn’t brought any of those Nirreth weapons, and lucky that they’d managed to beat them back without losing more than a few people in about three hours of fighting.

  Looking back on it now, though, Jet wondered.

  Reaching another fork in the tunnels, Jet took the downward passage again, and now she could smell it. Water.

  The smell drifted up through the dark tunnel as though from the stones themselves.

  Even the air tasted different.

  The tiles remained that odd white color on the walls, but it seemed to Jet as though they were grayer, maybe from mold in the air from being so close to the main reservoir.

  Adding a jolt of speed to her legs, she took the last few turns at a near run, excited for some reason. Maybe because she’d half-convinced herself the reservoir might be a way out, given Richter’s questions about whether she could swim...or maybe because she’d managed to find it on her first try, and primarily from paying attention to the direction in which the pipes all seemed to lead. Either way, finding their centralized water source had to be a handy bit of information.

  When she turned the last corner however, Jet found herself coming to a dead stop.

  Even knowing roughly what she would find at the end of that corridor didn’t prepare her for the view her eyes met.

  A lake stretched out before her, under the dome of a rough-hewn rock cave.

  Calling it a lake even struck Jet as an undersell...the surface of the dark blue water receded so far in the distance, Jet couldn’t see its opposite shores. Flickering, yellow and dark-green lights decorated the cave walls as far as Jet’s eyes could see, until they looked like fireflies floating on the surface, or maybe tiny boats lit with flames.

  Nearer to her, and to the doorway itself, stood a number of floor-to-ceiling objects that must be computers...or some other kind of machine. They had those same, glass-smooth, eggshell-like casings that covered the back walls of the palace itself, only they seemed to glow where they stood, in pulsing arcs that made Jet wonder if it was a trick of the light. The machines sank deep into the rock, both above and below, and a number of white pipes protruded from their sides that also disappeared into the cave walls, only on the horizontal axis rather than the vertical one.

  The pipes stretched wide enough for a person to crawl through, or a good-sized dog to walk through upright. Given that the ceiling of the cave stood at least ten meters high, even at this lower end, the machines struck Jet as somewhat intimidating.

  Their shape, which lent itself to the impression of a small group of giants looming over her, probably didn’t help. The pipes protruded almost like arms, and despite their lack of features, the cylinders themselves, with their pulsing and vertical height, somehow managed to convey life more than machine.

  Jet stared up at them for a long moment, wondering if they would have blueprints for any of these machines in the Royal Library, when a faint hiss behind her told her she was no longer alone.

  Jet turned, expecting the security guards, she supposed, or maybe one of the Nirreth who ran the actual machines.

  Instead, she found herself facing Laksri.

  He stood blocking the tunnel, his tail flickering behind him in smooth waves. She hadn’t quite figured out the exact moods the different tail movements signified, but something told her he was more than a little annoyed with her.

  When she saw his eyes shift from her to the tall machines, lingering on the higher set of pipes protruding from the walls, she found she was holding her breath.

  His eyes flickered back to hers a few seconds later.

  He began walking towards her.

  Jet didn’t move as she watched him do his odd, circling walk, the one she was reasonably sure meant he’d chase her if she ran. In any case, he definitely kept himself firmly between her and the door, and Jet didn’t like her chances if she tried to get around him, particularly with his tail moving into the spaces that his body vacated.

  He reached her in a few strides, but somehow, time slowed as he walked, and she found herself looking at him.

  He was good-sized for a Nirreth, she’d discovered, now that she’d lived here for a number of weeks. All Nirreth had broad shoulders, but his were broader than most, and he moved faster than a lot of them too...often with darting movements that made her think of a wild cat or perhaps a lizard, like the slang the humans had for his kind.

  Yet she found she recognized him the easiest of the other Nirreth, even though she’d really only known him half a day longer than the rest. Maybe it was the fact that she’d stabbed him with her sword within minutes of their first encounter.

  He did have that curious ring of lighter blue around his eyes.

  She happened to know that he had flecks of gold and a pale, sky blue, among other colors in his black irises, as well. She’d only really gotten a good look at them one or two times, when she got close enough, say within a foot or two of his face, but they made his eyes appear more alive than many other Nirreth, whose eyes were generally a more solid black.

  She’d seen other variations in that time too, of course, including one Nirreth with eyes so light a blue that they appeared white in the darkness of his Nirreth skin. She’d also seen at least one other one with a ring around the black irises, usually a lighter blue or a greenish color, but none the exact shade of Laksri’s.

  Most of the time, she didn’t find him particularly threatening...at least not anymore.

  If only through familiarity, he’d become comfortable. Not a welcome sight, most days, but not an unwelcome one, eith
er. At times like these, however, Jet remembered just how alien he was, and how little she really knew about him.

  “You are here,” he said, his tail making another deceptively lazy arc towards the open space to the right of where he walked.

  He stood only a handful of yards away from her now, and Jet found herself stiffening, if not quite dropping into an actual fighting stance. She watched him make another lazy line in front of her, effectively crossing her line of sight to the door.

  “...Why is it?” Laksri said, his black eyes fixed on hers. “Are you lost, friend of the Palace, and of Prince Ogli...?”

  Jet felt her jaw harden.

  Whatever Laksri wanted of her, and whatever made him follow her here, she felt quite sure he knew very well that she wasn’t ‘lost.’

  For the same reason, she didn’t bother to answer, but folded her arms. Bolting clearly wasn’t an option, considering how quickly he could catch her and sting her with his tail. She didn’t have a weapon, so that left her with few alternatives.

  “What do you want?” she said, when he stopped walking.

  “There is moment...for talking.” He blinked with that faint twitch of his mouth that Jet had learned meant amusement. He gestured up at the cave walls, and then at the cylindrical machines now behind him and to his right.

  “You pick this?” he said. “For talking?”

  Jet had also learned to translate most of his broken English.

  Most of it.

  “Do you mean did I pick this place deliberately in order to talk to you?” Jet said, her voice faintly incredulous. “No. What do you want, Laksri?”

  “Fortuitous,” he said, bowing slightly. “It is a good place.”

  “You’re saying they don’t have surveillance down here?” Jet said, again a little incredulous.

  “Surveillance everywhere,” Laksri said, motioning impatiently with one thick claw. He blinked at her again, tilting his large head sideways. He wore a thick cloth around his head, as many of the male Nirreth did, especially the guards. It wasn’t quite a turban...more like a thick, black scarf without the ties at the back. “...Not where it is. But when...”