“Successful?” Jet said. She stared at him, speechless. Fighting not to speak, she lost the battle a few second later. “You see it as a bonus that they had my brother on there? What’s next, Richter? Saving my mother from a gang rape?”
“That’s not the personal connection I meant, kitten,” Richter said, lifting an eyebrow.
Jet felt her anger grow colder, even as she saw Laksri turn, his long face growing stone-still as he stared at Richter, his lips thinned in a near growl. He didn’t move, however, or make an audible sound from where he stood by the wall.
“They think he’s toying with you, kitten,” Richter added. “Winding you up through the passionate venom-connection between you. To them it’s borderline foreplay...so yes, it adds to things. Hell, from the way you two are acting, I’m beginning to think they’re not wrong...”
That time, Lakrsi did growl, but Richter barely spared him a glance.
“Did you really think Trazen wouldn’t capitalize on that?” the rebel leader said disparagingly. “That he would waste any opportunity to whip up the crowd? Grow up, Jet.”
“Grow up?” She felt her jaw harden to granite. “Are you serious?”
“It wasn’t your real brother,” Richter said, shrugging.
Jet bit her lip again, then met his gaze.
“How the hell would you know that?” she said, speaking before she let herself think about her own words. “Something you’re not telling me, Richter?”
She saw Laksri react to that, too, starting faintly before he stared at her. Jet found herself wishing she hadn’t said it when she saw him frown, right before he turned that penetrating stare on Richter. Before she could try to soften her words, Richter broke the silence.
“It wasn’t him,” Richter said, letting his hands fall to the armrests with an irritated eye-roll. “We were on the outside, remember? We have views to both the regular arena and the virtual. It wasn’t Biggs, Jet.”
“Trazen had to get the image from somewhere.”
“They have records of you, kitten,” Richter said, his voice edging back into impatience. “They created security profiles, remember? Trazen has access to all of that as Ringmaster and more. He probably knows more about your family than you do, Jet. Hell, he probably knows more than I do.” His voice still irritated, he raised his hand in another dismissive gesture. “You’re making too much of this, kitten. The Nirreth love their families, too. He did it for the emotional tug, nothing more. It was a cheap ploy, but an effective one. Trazen had every Nirreth in the stadium on their feet with that little stunt...”
“Really?” she spat, hands shaking. “I got applause because Trazen threatened to kill my family? Well, why didn’t you say so? That makes it all better...”
“Jet,” he said, giving her a warning stare. “It’s fine. Now relax.”
She bit back another retort, wincing in pain and glancing at one of the attendants when they jerked the last of the sense-suit off her ankles. She winced again when another of them started probing the cut on her leg, cleaning it with a hot, wet cloth.
“The guy’s a psychopath,” she muttered in English, glancing again at Laksri. “You’re the ones who’ve been telling me that all along.” Still fighting a colder anger that seemed to come from under her very skin, Jet struggled to control herself, looking between the two of them. “Are you both really going to pretend this is just some dramatic twist to boost viewership before I start taking challenge matches?”
“I’m not going to pretend anything, Jet,” Richter said. He rose abruptly to his feet, his face darkening with an anger that now matched hers. “Now shut up, you dumb little girl...this instant. If you don’t, I’ll have Laks here sting you until you can control yourself!”
Jet’s whole body tensed.
First with shock, then with something else.
Anger. But more than that, really. Hatred didn’t even cover it.
Staring up at him, she let him see the open challenge in her eyes.
More than that, she let him see her willingness to take him on. Really take him on, whatever the consequences. No matter what it cost her in the end.
She held Richter’s gaze, and he seemed to see that difference in her, too. He didn’t back down, but she saw understanding bleed into those coffee-brown irises, which suddenly looked colder than she’d ever seen them. They faced one another down, her and Richter, and for the first time, Jet found herself thinking that they’d finally really seen one another.
Feeling the danger behind that knowledge, she made herself be the first one to look away. Forcing herself to swallow, she stared down at the floor, fighting to make her face into an expression that Richter would be less likely to see as a threat. Still, she couldn’t unsee what she’d seen. She might have known, somewhere, what Richter really was, but having it confirmed was something else.
Whatever he told himself, she was nothing to him.
All that mattered to Richter was his cause...his vengeance or idealism or however he termed it inside his own head. Everything he did was in service of that one thing. Everything. He valued it over his own life. Over Jet’s life. Over her family’s. Over his own family’s...over Anaze. She wondered if there was anything Richter wouldn’t do to get what he wanted.
“Get out of here,” she said, in a low voice. “Both of you.”
There was a silence.
In it, Richter straightened, stepping back from where Jet sat.
Staring at her warily for a few beats, he paused only to glance at Laksri.
The Nirreth had already taken his weight off the wall. Without looking at either of them, Laksri walked to the door, his tail coiled behind his back, almost as if he’d tensed all of the muscles in the sinewy appendage, preventing it from moving. Jet couldn’t tell anything about his state of mind from the expression on his face, nor did she really care. Laksri had already disappeared through the door’s opening when Richter looked at her, his coffee-colored eyes holding something closer to wariness now.
His expression had changed again, growing almost worried.
“Look, kitten...” he began.
“I mean it, Richter.” She kept her voice flat, not letting herself look at him. “Just go. Please. We’ll talk about it in training, like Laks said.”
She didn’t watch him go.
Wincing as the woman took the top half of the sense suit down over her shoulder, on the same side where Jet banged it against the jagged wall of that underground canal, she trained her eyes on the floor. When the pain worsened, she only gritted her teeth, glancing briefly at the bruise already darkening her flesh as the attendant yanked the material down, exposing the tank top sweated to Jet’s chest and back. The other female attendant still knelt on the floor under the bench, swiping Jet’s foot with some kind of antiseptic as she continued to clean it. The medicine didn’t sting so much as burn, clenching Jet’s jaw hard enough to hurt her face.
She heard the door close behind Richter’s retreating form, but she didn’t watch that, either.
It wasn’t until both of them were completely gone that Jet’s eyes closed. A tightness in her chest felt like it slowly strangled her. She couldn’t breathe, but she couldn’t seem to let it go, either.
They’d taken her brother.
They’d taken Biggs.
She didn’t know who had him...but she knew without a doubt that someone had him, and probably the rest of her family, too.
She also knew something else.
Before this was over, she might have to kill Richter.
THE JOURNEY TO ASTET
Jet sat on a padded chair that appeared to have been made out of the same heavy piece of metal as the deck floor on which it lived.
Despite the speed they were currently traveling, her physical body barely moved apart from a perceptible vibration that seemed to start inside her very bones. A harness locked her upper body to the chair in six coarse bands, holding her shoulders, chest, waist, belly, thighs and calves to the dark red material.
<
br /> All of her muscles tensed as she looked out the curved view screen above her.
For now, that view remained relatively benign.
It had barely changed since the ship lifted off the platform.
She could see the blue sky of the dome of the Green Zone.
She’d been told that a door would open in that dome pretty soon, giving them a view of the real sky of Earth for a few minutes, or possibly seconds. It would be the first time Jet had seen it since she’d been culled from the streets of Vancouver over half a year ago. When she looked down, the view made her instantly dizzy as she saw the buildings around the landing platform shrinking rapidly beneath her feet. From the wide, concave view port, it felt like she dangled in space, suspended in the air by nothing more than the harness.
Jet looked up again, gritting her teeth against the vibration, which seemed to grow more intense as the seconds passed.
Next to her, Laksri sat strapped to a similar chair.
She couldn’t see rivets or bolts at the base of his chair, either...or even a seam, distinguishing the chair’s metal from that of the deck or bulkheads. It was as if all of the ship had been made of a single sheet of metal. The only breaks Jet could see came from the curved panes of the view ports themselves.
They were leaving. She was leaving Earth.
Gripping the armrests of the chair, Jet stared up, feeling again like an animal in a cage, even though she sat strapped into a seat on the bridge with the prince himself, not even in the human quarters with Richter, much less in a cell on one of the lower decks, like Anaze. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until she started getting light-headed. Letting the air out in a slow exhale, she glanced at Laksri and found the Nirreth watching her, his dark eyes expressionless.
No, not quite expressionless.
She found herself reluctant to try and read the emotion she could see there, lost somewhere between the lighter blue flecks of color in his irises.
“Are you all right?” he said in English.
When she didn’t answer right away, he paused, gauging her face. His eyes turned slightly more cautious.
“The ship is safe, Jet,” he said.
She let out a short laugh, half nerves and half dark humor.
His stone-like eyes reflected a faint puzzlement, but she didn’t try to explain.
Forcing her gaze off his long-featured face, she stared back up at the view.
She could see the sky changing now. A thin line erupted in the blue, and began to swiftly widen. Through the protective shell of the Green Zone dome, a yellow sky appeared, the clouds so high they seemed to be outside the atmosphere entirely. She watched that higher sky grow larger, even as it hit her that, dirty or not, the real sky carried something that didn’t exist inside the dome. It had a weight to it that the dome lacked, as if the presence of the world itself lived somewhere behind that high swath of air and clouds, poisonous or not. Even a sick, dying presence generated more real feeling in Jet than a beautiful illusion.
She found herself relaxing somehow, seeing that view.
When she glanced at Laksri that time, he stared up at the same view, his long face nearly expressionless. Even so, she found herself seeing something relax in his face as he continued to look up. She wondered what it meant, when a flicker of relief brightened in his eyes, right before he spoke, surprising her.
“It is better, isn’t it?” he said. “A real sky?”
Jet jumped, startled. That he would mirror the exact sentiment she’d been feeling unnerved her, although she couldn’t have said why exactly.
“Yeah,” she said, her words coming through numb lips. “Yeah, it is.”
“I have missed the real world,” he said. He glanced at her, his dark eyes piercing. “We will not have to live without it forever, Jet.” His words sounded like a promise. “You will not. Neither will your family.”
Jet felt her jaw harden slightly, but only nodded.
She didn’t really understand what Laksri meant for her to understand from that, but the emotion behind his words managed to confuse her, then anger her, when she realized she wanted to believe what he’d said. She wanted to believe him...or maybe just believe she wasn’t entirely on her own in this.
Before she could think through her emotions well enough to come to any conclusions, her chair began to vibrate more strongly. Her fingers clenched the chair’s arms, hurting her hand where she’d cut it in the Rings. Even as it occurred to her that she was about to leave the planet of her birth, that she might never return, she felt a dramatic drop, one that hit her in the belly, like the sensation of a free-fall.
She gasped, caught off guard, then looked at Laksri again.
He’d been watching her already when she turned.
That time, she found his expression even more difficult to read. She sensed some complexity of emotion, what might have been conflict, but she couldn’t understand it well enough to trust it.
Looking away from him a second time, Jet gazed up through the view port. The hole in the sky had already grown bigger. Jet could feel the ship moving under her still, but that first jolt that dropped her stomach didn’t repeat. Instead, a pressure sank her back, head and legs hard into the chair, tightening the air around her body. She knew the last part might be an illusion. She’d been told the Nirreth had artificial gravity in all of their interstellar transports, and that everything would be pressurized, so she shouldn’t feel much once they broke atmo.
In the same instant, it occurred to her that she must be looking at monitors, not actual view ports. As soon as the thought struck her, she felt a bit dumb for not realizing it before.
Of course they were monitors.
Richter told her that most humans freaked out during their first trip off-world. Most had to be sedated. Something to do with leaving their home planet, or maybe a fear of dying in space. Most of them had never even been in a ship before.
Truthfully, Jet’s own feet lost their connection to Earth only twice before now.
The second time had been when Richter picked her up in his culler.
The first time had been when her Uncle Draven took her on a ride in a helicopter, back when she was a kid. Draven and some of his ex-war buddies pieced the thing together from scraps they found around Vancouver following the war, ignoring the ban on humans owning air vehicles. Jet’s mother had a fit when she heard he’d taken Jet up. She ranted about them being shot down by cullers and ground-to-air missiles and whatever else.
Thinking about it now, at nineteen versus fourteen, Jet wondered if she was right.
Her uncle’s helicopter only survived a few months. The Nirreth caught it on radar one night and shot it out of the sky, with two of her uncle’s friends in it.
Thinking about Uncle Draven only confused Jet more, though. For all she knew, they’d killed him by now, because of her.
Feeling herself flinch at the thought, she steeled herself as the viewscreen above showed them passing through that doorway in the sky. Then all Jet could see was the wider, darker yellow sky of the planet above the Green Zone.
That didn’t last for long, either.
Jet saw that wider curve only for a few minutes before it started changing color. Sparks lit up around the monitor’s image. Within seconds, it looked as if the outer hull of the ship had caught on fire. The ship’s acceleration seemed to increase the further they got from the surface of the planet. Within a few seconds, those tongues of flame had dissipated, too.
Once it had, the night sky erupted into view.
Jet found herself surrounded by a cool, silent, and motionless ocean of dark.
Diamond-like stars of all colors filled her view.
She’d never seen so many stars in her life. She’d never dreamed so many could exist beyond that canopy of clouds and pollution she’d endured since she’d been old enough to look up. In some parts of that sky, stars clustered together so densely they formed smoky, pinprick clouds, shimmering in a black backdrop. Everything l
ooked so sharp, so definite to her suddenly. Jet blinked against details so varied she had to turn her head, shifting her focus gradually across the screen to take everything in.
Gradually, she felt that tightness in her chest let go.
It left a strange blankness in its wake.
When she glanced at Laksri, she saw his features had relaxed as well.
It occurred to her for the first time that he’d done this before. In fact, he’d done it numerous times, given that he’d been born on Astet. She didn’t even know how old Laksri was, she realized, not in Earth years. She didn’t know how old he’d been when he’d been forced into his own Retribution match. He’d mentioned in passing that he’d worked as a pilot and a trader in the years following his escape before eventually making his way to Earth. She hadn’t really thought about what that meant until now, though.
Jet felt her mouth purse. Her eyes never left his strangely feline features.
He really was the First Son. He’d grown up Nirreth royalty, whatever he’d allowed himself to become in the years since. He’d been raised in a protected bubble that told him his life meant more than the average Nirreth’s. He’d been groomed to be their future king.
Most would have just followed the party line. Most would have just waited for the day the Empire got handed to them on a silver platter.
That meant something, didn’t it? That Laksri wasn’t someone who could just smile and accept whatever the world had given him?
Eventually he must have felt her stare.
He turned his head, returning her gaze. Wary at first, his eyes reflected a faint surprise after he spent a few seconds studying her expression.
“What?” he said. “What are you thinking about, Jet?”
She couldn’t answer at first. When she looked back at the stars that time, though, she found herself speaking, almost before she knew she meant to.
Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV) Page 55