She didn’t look back, or look up. Instead she followed the tug of his fingers without protest, feeling a harder knot settle into her chest.
She was going home. She was going back to Earth.
She knew without being told that Richter would be there. Richter would be there, and he had her family. He had her brother, her mother, her uncle and aunt. He would be back for her, too. She was sure of it. She knew it even apart from Trazen’s odd allusion to the same.
So she would wait. She would endure whatever she had to.
This wasn’t over.
The long run for Jet had really just begun.
~ END OF PART III ~
THE REBELLION
Alien Apocalypse Part IV
Dedicated to S.C.
Keep hope alive. Always.
It’s in the job description, damn it.
THE SLAVE
Jet stood over a sunlight-speckled pool of crystal-blue water, staring down at a vibrating reflection of herself in a long, flowing, yet somehow form-revealing dress.
Stone urns, taller than herself, stood at the four corners of the room, filled with palm trees that rose to breathtaking heights––or so they seemed to Jet, being used to the twisted scrub trees and mutated pines from outside the Green Zone. The tree trunks and branches rose up through the open slats of the slanted, wooden roof, made all the taller from being planted indoors.
Jet could feel wind on her face...it felt like real wind.
She heard birds, saw their wings expand forward and jerk back as they flitted from tree to tree in looping trails. All that motion and life lived in the background, though.
She heard people here.
They splashed in the water on the other end of the pool, chattering amongst themselves in skag languages she remembered from the pits. They sounded happy, although their voices remained subdued, almost soft-spoken. Jet wondered if, like her, they remained forever conscious of their place inside the hierarchy of this home.
Still, they didn’t seem at all afraid.
She smelled the faint whiff of smoke as some of them indulged in hand-rolled cigarettes they must have bought at the market not far from the main house. They gossiped about people whose names sounded vaguely familiar to her, although she couldn’t tie anything concrete to those names in her head...politics, sporting events, theater, other slaves who shared similar duties with her inside this house. She’d been educated in famous Nirreth names, at one point or another...she could recite bits and pieces of that knowledge even now, but her mind remained curiously blank when no one needed anything of her.
She encouraged that blankness whenever other Nirreth were present.
Trazen taught her ways to do that...ways to appear uninteresting to others of his kind.
But now, being more or less alone, she fought to think. She felt a vague urgency to try harder on this day. More of an urgency than she’d felt for what seemed like months...even years of time spent in this bland beauty with its slow-moving days and nights. Jet fought the effects of Trazen’s venom even now, trying to grasp pieces of who she was again, to remember who inhabited the body she wore.
The effort fatigued her, but she didn’t stop.
Eventually she felt tired, however, and significantly less content.
The latter told her that her efforts to get past the venom were probably working. Even so, she had only marginal success. Despite the hours that had passed since she’d last seen him, she just had too much of Trazen in her system still. While that fact alone wasn’t at all unpleasant, she couldn’t really connect to him in any real way either, which just left her blank.
Jet felt clear enough to have the occasional emotional surge.
Fear, anger, desperation, frustration...grief.
Her mind flickered over events, memory. Laksri. Anaze. Anaze’s father, Eamon Richter. She remembered seeing Laksri fall...
She would be running in the Rings that night.
The thought startled her.
She hadn’t run in the Rings in weeks...months, maybe. Even so, when the thought crossed her mind, floating between those blank spaces, it felt true.
It felt true enough that it returned to the forward part of Jet’s mind again a few minutes later, trying to become meaningful to her, perhaps out of an animalistic desire for self-presevation.
She had to survive. She didn’t know why anymore, not precisely, but the desire burned there, fierce inside her chest.
Of course, Trazen might not let her.
He might not let her survive.
He might keep her too stoned to do anything but provide an amusing spectacle for a few minutes...maybe an hour, if she was lucky, before some giant space lizard gutted her for the enjoyment of the masses. She couldn’t guess Trazen’s probable motives or actions any more now than she could before he owned her, though. Even as close as Jet had been to his mind in the last few months––in theory, at least––she didn’t feel any closer to understanding the Ringmaster himself. Everything about him was a contradiction. Everything she felt on him belied everything she’d ever been told about him...everything she knew.
Even so, she couldn’t let herself believe for even an instant that he would hesitate to dispose of her once he grew tired of her. Whatever the venom might have done to her, she couldn’t let go of that knowledge...not even for a minute.
Perhaps he’d already grown tired of her.
Perhaps that’s what this Rings match was truly about.
Even now, Trazen’s people––minus Trazen himself, of course, due to the obvious conflict of interest as her official owner––would be sitting at virtual displays, designing and refining elements of the maze they would force her to run that evening. Jet knew from Trazen’s mind that they would be laughing over pieces of it––laughing and arguing about how to make it harder, how to confuse her and spin her around, blindfolded, while things tried to kill her.
Or, perhaps, just shocked her into unconsciousness.
Whatever they did, Jet suspected the bottom line would be to humiliate her.
Trazen would instruct them to make the mammal with the sword finally and irrevocably irrelevant. They would insure that Jet no longer posed a political or social threat to any Nirreth who occupied a position of power. Jet’s status as the face of a new humanity––a humanity that might be viewed as somehow deserving of equal treatment with the Nirreth, or at least of empathy in their plight as a conquered race––would be erased.
This would be the first match Jet ran since they’d murdered Laksri.
Laksri.
His face swam in front of hers, that small smile he often wore on his dark mouth.
Jet felt his features fading already though, growing indistinct, less immediate. She fought that loss, but it confused her, too. She had to struggle against the venom to even understand her own feelings, much less what to do with them. The venom had been a blessing in some ways for that too, especially in those first few weeks, when all she could feel was anger, hatred, loss, grief, rage, desperation. There’d also been silences––indifference, coldness, wanting to die––a mental and emotional disconnect that somehow upset her more.
The venom smoothed out the edges of all that.
It made it hard to feel enough about any of it to want to do anything drastic.
Like kill herself. Or kill a bunch of them.
Or try to kill Trazen, which likely would have only gotten her killed.
Even now, she struggled to feel...about the match, about Laksri, who hurt so much to think about in those first few weeks that she swore she couldn’t breathe most of the time.
She’d been a captive through most of that, on the Nirreth home world of Astet. It had been Trazen who pulled her out, rescuing her in a sense, although she didn’t know how to feel about that, either.
She didn’t want to think about those weeks in that cell on Astet at all, really.
Some of the scars remained. She’d counted them on her skin one night, until Trazen showed u
p and stung her enough times that the exercise felt pointless.
Trazen, her new owner, didn’t want her thinking about Laksri, either.
He would push her mind off the topic each and every chance he got, whenever they were directly connected. Jet didn’t know why he cared. He’d won, hadn’t he? Laksri was in the ground. Some part of her even wondered why Trazen didn’t relish more in the pain he’d caused her by killing him.
If Trazen felt her questions though, or her doubts, he didn’t deign to respond.
As a result of these two things, Jet’s own grief and Trazen’s resistance, she had developed the habit of avoiding any thought or mention of Laksri with her mind, no matter how much that avoidance hurt. After a few weeks in the Ringmaster’s home, it felt almost as if the topic burnt her, whenever she circled close enough to touch it.
Was that love?
Jet supposed it might be.
She really didn’t have anything to compare the feeling to.
Perhaps it would be different if she had something to compare it to.
Either way, Laksri was dead. Nothing Jet thought or felt about him now would change that. Nothing about Laksri’s death would help her avoid the same fate for herself. His death contained no lessons to be learned, no insights to be gleaned for her own survival, much less the survival of anyone else Jet loved.
She still didn’t know where Richter held her family.
Trazen used that image of her brother, Biggs, to screw with her head on her last Rings run...but she had no idea where he’d gotten it. For all she knew, he hadn’t gotten it from Richter at all, but from some record the Nirreth kept of human skags that no one bothered to tell her about. Or they could have Biggs here, in some locked dungeon inside the Green Zone.
They also could have shot him in the head, before she even did the run.
The thought made her feel sick.
That sickness confused her, then brought a paradoxical lift and sharpness to her mind when she realized what it meant.
It struck her with a dim surprise that she felt the clearest she had in weeks...months, perhaps. The clearest she could remember since the Retribution match on Astet, and those horrible weeks in the interrogation cells. Her thoughts grew clearer still, every passing moment she stood there, sickeningly clear...but she still preferred that clarity, even with the pain it brought. Being able to think her own thoughts again affected everything she could see around her, the way all of it appeared, even down to watching the water lap against the edges of the white marble close to her feet, sending shimmers of light and shadow to decorate the walls.
Maybe it was the impending match.
Maybe Trazen had let her mind clear for that.
Maybe he wanted her to win, now that he owned her. Or maybe he wanted her to feel more pain when she lost. With Trazen, there was no way to know really.
Oddly, neither of those things felt wholly true, however.
She couldn’t have explained why, but she could feel that Trazen wanted her clear on this day for his own reasons...unrelated to the Rings.
Or incidental to the Rings, perhaps. Peripherally related.
Jet’s puzzlement deepened as her mind fought to think through the reasons why this might be. Winding her way through threads that still tied her to Trazen’s mind, Jet’s own thoughts fought to untangle them, like antibodies fighting off a disease even as she tried to comprehend that disease and what it wanted.
As she did, emotions started to ratchet up her heart rate and breathing.
Jet forced herself to focus on the immediate first. Physicality. The present moment. She had to start there. What was physical was immediate. Moreover, it should help with the rest.
Deliberately, Jet raised her eyes, looking around where she stood.
She knew this place.
She remembered walking these halls with Trazen. She remembered his three, long, jointed fingers pointing out rooms, speaking to her through her mind and skin, his thoughts wrapping hers like a warm blanket.
This is an atrium, Jet...you may come to this room whenever you wish. You may come to any room in my house whenever you wish, with the exception of my private work spaces, which I will show you. If you wish to go into one of those, you must ask me, Jet...do you understand?
She understood.
Looking at the room that Trazen called the atrium, she remembered something else.
The other humans called this place the baths.
It was some joke that hearkened to history, to a period in the distant past of Earth. One of the other slaves had been a history teacher back in his settlement. He was old enough to remember the world before the Nirreth. The other slaves called him “The Professor.”
Blinking, Jet stared down the length of the room, trying to focus her eyes now that they felt like hers again. She tried to assess this place, to make sense of it without Trazen’s mind filtering her own impressions.
The room appeared almost as large as the bare bones of the Rings arena.
White, marble columns lined the enormous wading and swimming pools on either side of the walls’ rectangular length. The high-ceilinged structure and its touches of artistry reminded Jet of the compound of the Nirreth Royals, which had been filled with these strange combinations of ancient human art and civilization sprinkled through with architectural touches and technological achievements from the Nirreth.
Jet recognized pieces of this room’s style from the picture books in Chiyeko’s lighthouse near Vancouver, B.C. Perhaps those were the time periods the Professor had been joking about when he named the space “the baths.”
Rubbing her face with the heel of her hand, she stared down at the water, trying to decide if any of that was important. Jet knew little of the past civilizations of her own people.
What little she did know wouldn’t help her here.
She focused on a group of maybe eight humans on the deeper end of the pool, their Nirreth-style shirts pulled up to their waists, their Nirreth-style leggings discarded as they hung their bare legs in the cool water. A few swam, back-stroking or side-stroking or simply treading water as they talked and laughed with those sitting on the pool’s edge.
They tried to befriend Jet, when Trazen first brought her here.
Well, some of them had.
The Professor had. So had a woman Jet could see now, with long brown hair, who swam with the others, laughing with a wide, full mouth.
Even with the friendly ones, Jet avoided their smiles and intrusive-feeling questions. She couldn’t have said why exactly...other than a general disinclination to get close to anyone after what had happened over the previous months. The Professor had been kind to her, though.
So had that woman.
Some approached Jet more like a rival, however.
Those ones appeared to be more focused on Trazen, and on the Nirreth and the Nirreth world in general. They seemed to sense something different in her position with Trazen too, which made their smiles appear more predatory than not. Some came at her with a jealousy that Jet could feel tangibly, on her very skin.
The sentiment might have struck her as sickly humorous if she hadn’t so clearly felt the smugness that lay behind it, a sense that the other slaves had seen this before with Trazen, and knew exactly how it would end.
Shoving the other humans from her mind, even the kinder-eyed ones, Jet let her gaze drift upwards, her ears caught by the trilling call of a bird. Brilliant blue and scarlet plumage met her eyes as wings spread, pulling the perfect creature off its perch among vines strangling white pillars that rimmed the wide pool.
Jet’s eyes followed the bird to a ficus tree standing next to one of those oddly alive-seeming pieces of furniture designed by the Nirreth. The latter might have been a chair, or perhaps a table, or even some kind of computer terminal.
The room had an undeniable grace.
The hole in the middle of the ceiling opened up to a blue arc of artifical sky...the same sky created by the dome around Green Zone Hezeret.
In reality, the sky was a darker red-brown color, Jet knew. The air outside the dome hung heavy with pollution and dust from the mountains near what used to be Santa Fe, New Mexico...in what had been the United States of America.
Jet looked up in time to see the dark shadow of a hawk circling in the blue sky above the building, one of the breeds that Laksri told her had been indigenous to this area before the humans wiped out most of their hunting grounds. According to Laksri, that happened years before the Nirreth arrived. He said Nirreth had cloned new birds from bone marrow and DNA specimens pulled from corpses mounted in human museums.
Jet knew she was distracting herself though, even now.
She felt stares on her, whispers. But despite the smug smiles and whispered conversations of the humans with whom she shared Trazen’s home, none of it made sense to her.
Trazen stung her, it was true.
She expected that, when he first pulled her out of that prisoner’s holding block on Astet.
He stung her a lot. He stung her seemingly whenever Jet saw him for more than a few minutes. She’d expected that from him as well.
Yet Trazen hadn’t made Jet his lover.
Despite what the other human slaves obviously believed, he’d never taken her in that way, not once since Jet had been here. He hadn’t done it despite ample opportunity to do so, even as early as the flight back to Earth from Astet. He hadn’t done it despite the knowing looks and even the jealousy of the other humans, who seemed to assume that Jet and Trazen did little else whenever they weren’t visible to the public eye.
He hadn’t done it despite Jet’s own willingness, despite her desperately wanting it at times. She’d asked him, more than once––more than a few times, more than a few dozen times––but he’d declined her requests.
That same venom created an empathy with the male Nirreth that could be unbearable to her at times, especially knowing what he’d done to Laksri, and possibly to Anaze, who she couldn’t help thinking of as her friend, even as her family...even now. Trazen might have killed Anaze, just like he let Richter kill Laksri.
Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV) Page 65