He hit the very end of the transformer, which promptly exploded in a shower of sparks. The fence-line lit up in the same set of seconds, flashing visible briefly, a bright, reddish-orange. Then the segment of the fence to the left of the transformer pole flashed white, right before it faded to a dull nothing.
Anaze didn’t wait.
Jet probably would have thrown a branch at the thing, just to make sure, but he didn’t do that, either. It occurred to her again that no one expected to survive Retribution. The reasons Jet used caution in the Rings weren’t really relevant here.
The image shifted around her, following Anaze as he ran through the jungle, faster that time, the rifle still in his hands. It amazed her that he didn’t show any fear, much less panic on his narrow face. His eyes looked concentrated, focused entirely on where he placed his feet, and on putting distance between himself and the fence he’d just broken. He still moved at an evenly-paced run as he touched the headset in his ear a second time.
“I’m through,” he said, only slightly out of breath.
“Yeah,” the voice said, sounding irritated. “We noticed.”
“You said time was a factor.”
“I didn’t tell you to commit suicide,” the other muttered. “Not yet, anyway.”
“Where now?” Anaze said, without missing a beat. “You said you could guide me from here. I’m running...” He paused, glancing right and then left, as if calculating something in his head. “...almost due south-west. There’s a slope, and I can see mountains on my left...”
It occurred to Jet that Anaze had figured out he was on Earth. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have used Earth reference points. She wondered if he knew exactly where he was on Earth.
For some reason, looking at him, she suspected he did.
“I’m waiting,” he said, still running, still without seeming to be overly short of breath. “Time is a factor, right? They’ll have deployed by now.”
“Keep going that way,” the voice cut in. “You’ll reach a lake in another ten clicks. Move fast, lieutenant. They’re on their way. It won’t take them long to pick up your heat signature.”
“What then? At the lake?” Anaze pressed.
“Swim,” the other said promptly. “Your next check point is on the other side, at the mouth of the river. If you get there fast enough, the water might even shield you from their heat sensors.”
Anaze didn’t answer, but dropped his hand from the headset.
He increased his pace though, Jet noticed, making the landscape blur slightly as he ran and leapt through the dense trees. He slowed only when he had to wind his way around trunks and other debris, or change direction to make his way through dense underbrush. He didn’t alter his basic course however, and Jet noticed his strides remained controlled, no matter how fast he went.
He’d done this before, she realized.
Meaning, he’d been in the field, even beyond what she’d seen at the skag pits. The thought hit at her somehow, and made her wonder again how much she really knew about Anaze.
She heard culler ships overhead, even as she thought it.
Not cullers. Something else.
Ships appeared in the sky, of a type Jet had never seen before, not even in vids.
She watched Anaze look up briefly, right before he began running faster.
The ships were pretty far west from the line he ran, maybe too far for their sensors to pick him up, but he didn’t seem to want to take any chances. The same understanding made Jet realize how big the ships must be, for them to be so loud at that distance. Whatever protected the Shinkara, they weren’t equipped like the Royal Guard, or even the Nirreth military.
Jet seemed to remember something about that too, but the specifics eluded her when she tried to recall what her tutors had told her.
Her damned audio memory never worked as well as the visual kind.
Anaze disappeared as she thought it, diving through a hole in the middle of the dense greenery. It confused Jet until she heard a loud splash and found herself on the other side as the virtual image altered, showing her a deep, clear-watered lake, blue-tinted from the artificial sky and large enough that she could only just make out the opposite shore.
Anaze swam hard across the lake’s surface, using breast stroke, like Jet had in her last run; only he likely did it to minimize the chances of being seen from the air, since he wouldn’t splash as much with that stroke. He’d sheathed the rifle at some point while he ran, and Jet could see the drag on him from the weapons, his arms straining as he pulled himself through the water.
He was a strong swimmer, but even she could see that he would be exhausted by the time he reached the other side. She couldn’t help thinking that couldn’t be an accident.
They would probably hit him hard when he got there.
She tried to remember what rimmed the lake inside the physical arena, and how long the lake was, in terms of actual size. Of course, they could easily shift the virtual view to force Anaze to swim in circles, moving it again and again so that he exhausted himself trying to reach the opposite shore. Even so, Jet couldn’t help believing that knowing the true layout might give her some idea of what he’d been facing when they finally let him out.
Then again, Anaze didn’t have Jet’s memory for spatial layouts.
Pushing that out of her mind, she tugged on that part of her that retained the image of the Retribution arena, reforming it behind her eyes and doing her best to overlay it on the virtual landscape. She knew she could do the same with the monitor inside the sense-cubicle, but tried to do it herself instead, if only to occupy her mind.
The side of the real lake where it made the most sense to have Anaze land lay on the furthest shore from where she sat, opposite the main door to the walled arena.
That side housed a platform that led to a series of ladders, as well as several clusters of gun turrets. Eventually it led up a ramp that would bring him to the second floor. A rope swing hung from one of those poles, a possible escape route, if Anaze remembered it.
Jet had to remind herself again that he couldn’t win this.
She wished like hell she knew when and how Richter and Laksri intended to get him out.
At the thought, she remembered Trazen, and the fact that he’d designed this run.
That meant he’d also chosen the Shinkara as a target.
For some reason, the realization puzzled her, forcing her to again try to align in her head what Laksri told her about Trazen, what she felt off him that day in the recovery room and what she’d seen from the Ringmaster since.
It seemed like it took hours for Anaze to cross the lake.
Jet felt exhausted just watching him. The silence felt debilitating.
A few times, he disappeared under the waves as one of those ships cruised overhead, presumably so the water might disguise his heat signature. Jet didn’t know if it worked or if they were just attempting to drive him faster to the shore, but they never shot at him from the sky while he swam. She watched the ships hover over the water, wondering how accurate the images might be. Each looked the size of one of those livestock barns that filled the Royal Gardens, big enough to swallow three culler ships, easy. She watched one float silently over the lake, its shadow darkening the blue-tinted waters as it slowed. It paused longest where Anaze had entered the water before accelerating back over the trees.
She got the point of some of this.
Trazen was, if nothing else, an artist with the suspense aspect of the Rings. If he started off guns blazing, it would gut that tension too soon.
The Nirreth watching back home had to forget Anaze might not win this, too.
Anaze surfaced moments later, gasping for air, his face flushed bright red. He coughed out water, then began swimming again, stroking hard for the river mouth at the nearer shore. He still hadn’t given up the rifle, or the band of ammunition wrapped around his shoulder. Jet saw his strokes slow, but he never stopped, only adjusted his pace to compensate for his
flagging strength. Watching him now, it occurred to Jet that she might not have made that swim.
Not without losing the guns, at least, and probably her boots.
Even as she thought it, Anaze shifted vertical once more, finding the bottom with his feet. He waded through the edge of the river mouth, panting as he slogged his way through the fast-moving current. The river remained deep where he walked, deep enough to reach past his waist, and Jet saw his muscles straining as he moved through it.
It occurred to her that he likely shifted angles to get past the current as much as anything, in addition to resting his upper body from having done most of the work of getting him across the lake. She realized she was holding her breath only when the water level started to recede around him. Anaze crouched down as it did, remaining mostly submerged until he’d reached where the jungle started up again, right around where the river mouth turned back into river.
Jet saw the current begin to flow faster there, filled with periodic boulders and with jungle trees and vines hanging out over the water. She saw snakes in some of those branches, too, and couldn’t help thinking that those likely weren’t harmless, either.
She’d already noticed a Nirreth fascination with reptiles from her own Rings runs, maybe from their history on Astet of hunting and being hunted by giant lizards themselves...or maybe from their own tenuous genetic ties to the same.
Either way, it wasn’t unusual to see large reptiles in most Rings runs.
Truthfully, Jet thought it was a Trazen thing at first, until Richter informed her that reptiles tended to boost ratings, just like water and swimming did.
Anaze didn’t begin to climb out of the lake until the shadows of the overhanging trees completely obscured him from view of the sandy shores. Even then, Jet saw him move fast, disappearing into the undergrowth seconds after he raised himself up to his full height and his booted feet hit the rocky soil. She couldn’t help being impressed that he could move that fast, given the amount of swimming he’d just done.
The rifle remained strapped to his back, too, and the gun still clung to its holster on his thigh, as well as the long knife on the opposite side of his waist. Jet saw him stumble a little, getting out, but he caught his balance and kept moving, his head and shoulders down as he peered ahead through the trees.
Jet saw the outlines of the compound’s wall, right as Anaze seemed to.
Her nerves worsened as she remembered the weapons turrets.
Even as she thought it, gunfire erupted in the jungle.
Anaze had the rifle in his hands in seconds.
He aimed up into the trees before Jet even made out the direction from which the shots had come. If nothing else, it convinced her that he did have some idea of where he was in the arena; he aimed at exactly the height of the gun turrets, and she saw a few dark forms fall from their sneaks after he’d squeezed off a number of well-aimed bullets. She remembered what a good shot he’d been, back at the pits, and felt her jaw harden as she watched him now, realizing he was better than he’d pretended, even back then.
She would have found that more reassuring if she didn’t already know how this would end. Instead, she waited for the other shoe to drop along with everyone else, watching as Anaze threaded his way through the maze of turrets, dropping more of the dark-clad forms as he worked his way towards a wall she could now see just past the line of protective fire.
She tried to make out if the guards surrounding that wall were Nirreth.
She couldn’t honestly be sure. They were large enough to be Nirreth, and she thought she saw a tail on one, coiling behind it as it fell, but she didn’t get a good enough look at their skin beneath the uniforms they wore.
She tried to guess how close Trazen would let Anaze get before his pullers took him down. Anaze would likely breach the walls. They might even let him get in close, visual range of a significant target, to ratchet up the suspense and the emotional tension.
Laksri told her that Retribution runs were created mainly for psychological reasons.
They were designed to placate the Nirreth who might have moral qualms around torturing and killing a traitor outright, when they hadn’t actually witnessed the crimes for which they’d been accused. With the Retribution, Nirreth got to see the culprit caught in the act of a crime against the race, even if it wasn’t the same crime that brought them to the Retribution in the first place. In that sense, the reenactment acted as an emotional salve, erasing any lingering doubt as to the culprit’s guilt.
Therefore, unlike what Jet first assumed, Retribution wasn’t simply an excuse to put Anaze somewhere where they could torture him creatively, using a colorful backdrop and nifty props. The Retribution told the Nirreth a story that assured them that justice had been executed.
It reinstated order inside their mental and emotional worlds.
For the same reason, the pullers played a delicate balance in how they let Anaze be portrayed. Just like they didn’t want to kill him too soon, before that emotional purpose had been fulfilled, they also couldn’t leave him on the playing field long enough to garner any true sympathy. After all, this show wasn’t primarily for the military authorities, or even the Royals themselves. The Retribution existed for the ordinary Nirreth, watching from Earth and wherever else. Given that the run occurred on Astet and they had the lag-time anyway, they also had the option to edit out anything out that might solicit an emotional response in favor of leniency or excessive compassion towards Anaze.
Ultimately, they would want him to appear as a kind of monster, a mindless animal that had to be put down to ensure the safety of their people, even their way of life.
Even the way his face looked through the virtual interface reflected those goals.
Jet found herself noticing that they’d enhanced certain aspects of his appearance, making his eyes colder and more sunken in his head. They’d hollowed his cheeks too, and done something to harden his face, making his jaw and mouth more taut and angry-seeming.
She suspected he’d been given coaching as to how he should behave, as well.
The longer she thought about all of this, the more Jet found herself thinking they’d want him to get close to someone important in the Shinkara.
They’d want the audience to witness Anaze acting murderously towards that person. The whole point of making this about the Shinkara would be to enrage the watching Nirreth, possibly even to scare them into fearing for their holy rulers’ safety. They needed the preshow to justify what would come after, to form the basis of that group catharsis.
In that sense, using the Shinkara demonstrated a twisted kind of brilliance.
Jet watched as Anaze made it past the last of the gun towers.
He didn’t wait, but ran for the outside wall, pulling the wire suspension cord from his weapons belt as he ran. Jet could tell he was still fighting exhaustion from the swim, but she found herself thinking this part must be scripted, too, especially when Anaze didn’t hesitate but immediately fastened a foldable hook to the end of the cord. Knotting it swiftly and expertly, he wound his arm back at once, throwing the hook and wire up towards the top of the wall.
He repeated the action a few more times before the hook caught on one corner of the upper ledge. He tested its weight, leaning on it hard, then immediately began to climb.
Again, she wondered why he was doing this.
Why was he trying so hard? What had they threatened him with?
Anaze reached the top of the stone wall and immediately freed the hook, only to wrap it around a protrusion on the other side. Jet watched as he gripped the rope in his hands and dropped his weight on the opposite side of the wall as the virtual lens followed, giving her vertigo briefly as it rotated up to join him at the top of the wall, so that Jet found herself looking down, watching as Anaze lowered himself, hand-over-hand, back down to the ground.
The virtual sky had darkened somewhere in that time.
The sun had been on the low end of its arc when the run started, and
now Jet noticed that the landscape had grown dimmer, especially now that the wall blocked the slanted rays of the setting sun. Anaze’s form grew more indistinct as his feet touched the ground inside the compound. He unhooked the wire from his belt and ran from a crouch, aiming his feet for the largest of the buildings that lived behind the compound’s walls.
The silence as he ran across the manicured lawn unnerved her.
Even for a Nirreth settlement, it was way too quiet.
The lack of sound felt ominous. Jet could see on Anaze’s face that he felt it, too, even beyond the caricature they’d made of his features. His green eyes darted to the upper walls of the windowless structure ahead of him, then to the smaller buildings on either side.
Jet could almost feel him bracing himself, as if he’d already guessed what came next.
All four of the buildings behind that wall had that distinct, mushroom-like shape of a Nirreth-made structure. That basic form included a proportionally small, stalk-like base supporting a significantly larger and wider level of floors and a smooth, pearl-white and entirely featureless surface without windows. The walls of those egg-like buildings seemed almost to glow in the dying light, the one in the center rising high enough that the rounded, reflective surfaces turned pink in the shifting colors of the setting sun.
Jet felt her breath come short as Anaze approached the outstretched lip of the largest structure, which also stood slightly in front of the rest.
Anaze’s head turned as he scanned the length of the foyer-type area below the outcropping, the planter-boxes of trees and flowers and the canal that ran through the center, just like the canals that ran through the foyers of similar buildings all over Green Zone Hezeret.
He broke into a jog as Jet watched. He started to pick up speed seconds later, running down a ramp that sloped downwards, leading underground, into the base of the building itself.
Suddenly, Anaze skidded to a stop.
Jet didn’t understand why, not at first.
Then she saw where Anaze’s eyes focused. He stared down the ramp, the same one that led into the bowels of the mushroom-shaped building. On that ramp stood a single form, unarmed, with hands clasped in front of her.
Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV) Page 63