She could hear water.
White water, rushing and tumbling madly over rocks and gravel and dirt.
Jet looked around, but the river had to be in the forest somewhere...behind her, maybe. Too far away to use for approaching the town unseen. Too far away to give her a good landmark for the Rings arena, either. Several canals wound through the arena’s main floor; it would take at least one more landmark to help her pinpoint her exact location.
Possibly two, depending on what that other landmark was.
She didn’t have time to mess around with that, either.
Jet knew her goal, which she’d already committed to accomplishing to make up for the lag in points and clock time. She’d been forced to do that a lot, ever since she started the Rings runs really...usually because she got diverted off the points-path by something trying to kill her. Her survival instincts were a little too finely honed for her to wade easily into those frays, unlike a lot of the professional Rings runners who sought them out to maintain their averages.
Jet had always been the “avoid deadly things whenever possible” type though, meaning in real life, not the Rings per se. Given her background in the skag pits where nothing was virtual and there were no do-overs if something killed you or even just bit you with diseased teeth, it wasn’t that surprising...and some habits were hard to break, no matter how often she reminded herself that the rules of the Rings weren’t the same as the rules outside of them.
She knew Trazen was probably the real reason she struggled with the course.
Not only because he was the Rings Operator. He had his minions design runs, too. In fact, from what Richter said, the majority probably just got passed by him for approval and tweaking following design. Jet always felt Trazen’s personal stamp on her runs, however, almost as if he’d made it his mission to pull apart her strategies personally.
He hadn’t fully succeeded, not yet––at least not according to the Board, which still had her miraculously listed as undefeated––but Trazen seemed to edge her closer to that line with each subsequent run.
Shoving any thought of Trazen angrily from her mind, Jet focused back on the mud brick huts. She was supposed to free some prisoner they held, one of “hers” according to the story that accompanied this virtual world.
He held vital secrets to...something.
Truthfully, the storylines started to blur in Jet’s head a few runs back. Sometime after her fifth or sixth run, she started skimming the fine print, at least in terms of anything that couldn’t help her in a concrete way. The window dressing meant to add realism for the audience didn’t interest her all that much.
Really only the first run, where they had her fighting Nirreth in the streets of her home town of Vancouver, BC, stuck out clearly in Jet’s mind, in terms of the details. That same run also served as a sobering reminder: it was dangerous to get too bought into the storylines, much less let herself feel them as real victories and defeats. Especially when it came to re-imagining a different outcome to the war between the Nirreth and humans on Earth.
On the other hand, these pure fantasy gigs bored her on some level, which was almost worse. If there hadn’t been some actual, real danger of her being shot, she might have let her point spread slip even more. She got the sense Richter noticed, and didn’t like it much. He seemed to be grooming her as the next Ringmaster, but Jet hoped she wouldn’t be around long enough for anything like that to happen. The idea of going toe-to-toe with Trazen over his job didn’t appeal to her in the slightest. The fact that the thought confused her didn’t lessen her anger; it made it more intense.
But she couldn’t start thinking about him. Not here.
She gripped her sword, Black, tightly in one hand as she tried to decide how best to approach the alien town.
Even so, her mind betrayed her, drifting to the Ringmaster seemingly on its own.
The worst part was, she could feel the difference. Thoughts about Trazen carried something different now, and not only because she remembered how sure he’d been that they would. She believed in the power of suggestion...but Laksri hadn’t argued the point when she brought it up with him, either. Jet noticed the difference the first time she’d seen Trazen after he’d stung her, in a civilian eating establishment a few days later.
He’d been sitting with members of the Rings Board, including Al-En Mosq, and once again, he’d been draped in half-clothed human females.
He hadn’t spared Jet a glance, but she distinctly got the feeling he’d noticed her walk in, and that he’d felt her stare. She’d watched him wrap his arm around one glaze-eyed companion a heart beat later, but something about that gesture struck her as not wholly uncomplicated, either. Even so, it enraged her. Hell, she could even admit it to herself.
She’d been jealous.
More than jealous, she’d been angry.
Some part of her had actually believed his indignation while she’d been drowning in his venom. Without admitting it to herself, that same part bought his denial that he really went through a different human consort every week...whether because he killed them off, or simply due to a short sexual attention-span.
She hadn’t really let herself think about the improbability of his denial until it stared her straight in the face. And yeah, the consort had been one Jet had never seen before.
She’d looked a little like Jet herself, actually.
Meaning, more on the skag end of the spectrum than the well-fed house pets born in the Green Zone itself. She had dyed white hair, though, and larger breasts. She’d also worn some kind of cave-girl outfit that left most of her belly and legs bare, and was obviously so doped up on venom she could barely seem to remember how to put her food into her mouth when it arrived.
Laksri hadn’t been with Jet that night.
Someone must have told him that Trazen had been in attendance though, because Jet hadn’t been allowed to eat out since, not even with Laksri at her side. In fact, she’d barely left the confines of their quarters, even to eat at one of the restaurants in the Royal compound. She hadn’t been outside the gates of the Royals’ property at all.
She tried asking Laksri about that too, but he never really answered her.
Then again, Laksri hadn’t said much of anything to Jet about what Trazen had done. She had no doubt that he and Richter had their pow-wows about it, of course. She also knew Laksri had visited Anaze. He’d also visited Trazen, not long after he woke up. Jet hadn’t been privy to what occurred in any of those conversations.
Someone must have told him right off, though, about Trazen.
Laksri barely met her eyes when she first saw him awake.
She’d tried to confront him anyway, about what he’d set up with Anaze, but truthfully, she only went after him half-heartedly. Most of her reasons for storming into that recovery room the first time had been eclipsed by what happened with Trazen. She was still angry at Laks, sure. She still felt manipulated. She still strongly suspected that Laksri was running his own game, conspiring with Anaze and Richter and whoever else to do it. She knew she’d be stuck going along for the ride to Astet, and that they would likely lie to her about that, too.
But more than that, Jet was afraid.
The thing with Trazen scared her.
Not the stinging part, per se. Not even in terms of her physical safety with Trazen himself. For the first time, it really hit Jet how completely outmatched she was, in terms of being on an equal footing with the Nirreth as a race. The incident with Trazen clarified that for her in a way that nothing else had accomplished, despite all the time she’d had to consider the ramifications of the venom with Laksri in the previous months.
Moreover, it threw everything she thought she’d felt in those same months completely into question. If she could be convinced to sympathize with, even to have feelings for Trazen, given what she knew about him, how could she trust anything she felt for Laksri? Something about realizing the true depths to which she’d already given up her free will, living amo
ng the Nirreth, sank into her awareness in a way she couldn’t dislodge.
And yeah, it scared her.
So no, she didn’t really confront Laksri.
Her real problem with him now had less to do with his lying to her in any one, particular area. It didn’t even have much to do with Laksri himself...as in, as an individual...not if she was being wholly honest with herself. It had to do with what he was. It had to do with his being a Nirreth, and the fact that, for the first time maybe, Jet questioned her ability to hold her own with someone of his race. She found herself faced with the possibility that living with the Nirreth could make her over into something else, something she wouldn’t even recognize.
For his part, Laksri hadn’t seemed to want to talk to her about it, either.
When Jet saw him a few days after he woke, he’d asked after her well-being. After she answered, he’d apologized, emotionlessly, for what had been permitted to happen, both in their bedchambers and while he’d been unconscious.
Jet listened to him speak, nearly incredulous as she watched him avoid her eyes.
Truthfully, though, she felt...nothing.
She felt again as if she barely knew him.
Given what Richter told her about Anaze and Laksri’s plan to get them back to Astet, she highly doubted if she could trust either of them, even apart from the venom. She’d been summoned to see Laksri in recovery, but she had no idea if he had requested her presence there, or if someone else had arranged it. Someone like Richter, maybe, who probably knew Jet’s trust of all of them had once more been rubbed down to the bone.
Either way, even in that initial conversation, Jet could tell that Laksri knew she’d been told about him and Anaze, and their plans for going to Astet. He knew she’d somehow put together that the whole scene with the taser had been staged.
Maybe Richter told him. Or maybe Anaze had.
She supposed it didn’t really matter. They’d all become the same amorphous group to her once more, and none of them appeared to be working with her, not even indirectly.
As far as Laksri being upset about the Trazen thing, Jet couldn’t tell how real that was, either. His guard must have shown him the tapes, just like Trazen assumed they would. So Laksri must have watched the replay of Trazen stinging her multiple times. He would have seen them kissing, along with whatever else they’d done before Trazen left her alone and relatively unviolated, with an unconscious Laksri sprawled on the recovery bed next to her.
Jet learned later that Trazen tampered with the cameras, but not by shutting them off. He had his engineers hack the feed, instead, so that the guards wouldn’t stop him in the moment, but the cameras themselves would continue recording.
He got what he wanted.
The images and audio showed up in the security cache after the event, in full technicolor according to Richter, although Jet hadn’t asked to watch the replay. Trazen had more than half of the stationed guards removed just prior to the event, pulling rank to get them to comply. He managed to convince the few remaining Royal Guard to leave their posts by backing up his request with a number of false transmissions, implying that his need to speak to Jet alone constituted some kind of state emergency.
Jet found it both infuriating and borderline baffling that Trazen barely got a wrist-slap for all of this. Given the terrorist break-ins, bombings, assassinations and whatever else occurring at the Royal compound of late, she would have thought his actions warranted a few weeks in one of the stasis cells, at least.
Instead, everyone treated it more like some kind of school-boy prank.
The Ringmaster had been reprimanded for taking liberties with Prince Laksri’s companion, of course, by no less than the Queen herself. From what Jet knew, he hadn’t been punished, though. Wagging fingers hadn’t exactly rolled back time, or reversed what he’d done. Jet also couldn’t imagine why Trazen’s tampering with their security system and lying to the Royal Guard constituted more of a detail than a transgression in its own right.
Laksri still seemed barely able to meet her eyes.
He never admitted nor denied that he and Anaze set up the incident in their bedchambers. Jet asked, of course. She accused him outright, the one time they’d been alone long enough for her to really let him have it verbally. She accused him of manipulating her, of conspiring with Anaze, of playing both sides of the fence, of using her, of being a liar. She accused him of toying with her emotions, pretending to fight with Anaze. She accused him of rape...or at least of having sex with her under false pretenses. She even accused him of using her to take over the kingship, not for the cause of the humans or the rebel Nirreth, but for his own personal ambitions. She called him a fraud, a power-monger and a hypocrite. She told him he was no better than Richter...than Trazen himself.
She also told him she never wanted him touching her again. She told him that if he or Anaze or Richter tried to make her sleep with Laksri again, she’d tell the Royals and Trazen everything.
Jet said a lot of things.
She wasn’t even sure how many of them she actually meant.
She knew a lot of it was yelling at the moon...trying to convince herself that her consent still meant something to any of them...to Laksri himself, especially. Maybe she needed to hear it more from him than from Richter or Anaze, even now, and despite what she told herself about what he was. Some part of her still wanted to know her anger meant something to him, that he gave a damn, if only in some small way.
If he did, she couldn’t tell.
Laksri didn’t try to defend himself. He didn’t try to deny any of it.
He only sat there, taking it.
Later, she heard he’d instructed the Royal Guard to improve security protocols around Jet. He took other steps that seemed, on their surface at least, meant to ensure that Trazen would never get access to her again. She heard him formally revoke the Ringmaster’s right to his personal suites for any reason, even in the case of emergencies. He ordered executions to any member of the Guard who left their post due to a command given by Trazen or anyone in his employ. He also gave some kind of “no confidence” vote on Trazen to the Nirreth Parliament, which Richter later explained meant that Trazen could never again hold a sensitive position within the regime due to his flagrantly disrespectful actions towards the First Son.
The label would have to be formally revoked by the leading sovereign for that to change, and so far, the Queen hadn’t offered.
Laksri approved the sentence of Retribution for Anaze, too.
Alice and Tyra told her a few other things during her Rings practice sessions.
Like the fact that the video of her and Trazen was making the rounds as a form of lizard-skin porn. Like the fact that Laksri had supposedly imposed fines, including corporeal punishment, for anyone found with a copy of the tape in their possession.
Laksri also ordered an explicit ban on contact between Trazen and Jet, no matter what the circumstances.
When Jet asked Richter what would have happened if Trazen had raped her outright, Richter just shrugged. When she prodded him more, he admitted that the penalties would have been significantly more severe. Trazen could have been banned from living or working on Earth. He might have lost his title as Ringmaster. He certainly would have lost his role as Rings Operator. He could have been imprisoned.
Unsanctioned stinging was treated almost like an impulse-control issue, from what Jet could tell, and from what Richter explained to her afterwards. They viewed it almost outside of a Nirreth’s control to sting humans that either provoked or aroused them for whatever reason. That same social perception put it more in the blurry legal realm of “accident” mixed with “poor judgment” versus “intentional assault.”
According to Richter, sexual contact was viewed very differently. Even Nirreth took that seriously, although maybe not for the reasons it would have mattered to Jet.
In Jet’s mind, the fact that Trazen stung her multiple times should have negated that whole “accident” thing too, b
ut somehow, the Nirreth didn’t take that into account. Stinging, apparently, was stinging. No matter how many times the offending Nirreth did it, the penalties and the blasé attitude remained pretty much the same.
Which, Jet couldn’t help noting, went completely against how the Nirreth actually acted, in terms of their own understanding of the venom’s significance.
She knew Laksri took what Trazen had done seriously, whatever he thought of her.
He still barely looked at her, though, and he hadn’t let himself be alone with her for more than a few minutes at a time since that day she’d cornered him and yelled at him. She wasn’t even sure where he’d been sleeping for the past few weeks, although she’d wondered, even as she told herself she didn’t give a damn. The truth was, she did care. She’d even tried to find out once, but his Guard wasn’t talking, not on that subject at least.
Much more strangely, neither was Richter.
Between that and Jet’s reactions to seeing Trazen with his new venom accessory, Jet found she didn’t want to think about any Nirreth males, for any reason.
Again, it was her own mind and reactions that disturbed her the most. Like getting jealous of Trazen’s hood ornaments. She’d actually felt betrayed. The fact that Trazen could have crawled under her skin so quickly and thoroughly that he managed to evoke feelings of betrayal in her...that disturbed Jet more than she could let herself think about.
It angered her, too.
Truthfully, it angered her enough that she couldn’t look at Richter, Laksri, Trazen or Anaze rationally at all, at least not yet. She certainly couldn’t think through their probable motives with any semblance of objectivity, not well enough to to trust her own conclusions. She also knew she’d be lying if she said anger was her only reaction towards Laksri himself.
Or even Trazen.
Of course, that admission only made her anger worse.
Richter had been right, after all. Humans were useless against the Nirreth. Their superior technology wasn’t the issue. They could actually change the content of human minds...their very hearts. Any being who could do that, could essentially erase the will of its victims.
Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV) Page 50