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

by JC Andrijeski

  Even so, Jet wanted him. She’d begged him...more than once.

  The memory made her grimace.

  Even so, the fact that Trazen hadn’t done anything to her sexually struck her as exceedingly odd. Her mind slid around the reality of that lack in confusion, even as she felt the pull of his venom, of that part of her that wanted Trazen still. She felt hurt at his refusal, even now...maybe more so now that she could feel her own emotions clearly.

  He hadn’t wanted her. She didn’t know why he hadn’t.

  She’d felt desire on him, more than once. She felt that desire as far back as the first time he’d stung her, in the recovery room of the Royal Palace.

  Turning over her memories of the last few months, Jet also realized that Trazen hadn’t spent so much as five minutes in her presence where he didn’t have some specific purpose in mind. That purpose had never been intimate. In Jet’s memories, Trazen’s behavior with her never felt anything more or less than completely businesslike.

  Usually, that purpose involved him stinging her repeatedly––sometimes as many as five or six times in a row. He often followed those stings with lectures of varying length via the venom, giving Jet news of current events as they unfolded outside the walls of his house.

  He spoke to Jet in a matter-of-fact way, politely declining any requests she made for something more intimate from him. He never beat her. He never hurt her in any way at all, although she’d expected that, too. Whether his words pertained to the Royals or the Rings or those events occurring behind the scenes, he’d been nothing but patient and polite.

  He also told her a lot, she found herself thinking now...including in areas where Laksri and Richter never bothered to educate her before.

  Jet didn’t understand why Trazen told her all of these things.

  She definitely didn’t understand why he told her so much after stinging her, when Jet would be almost incapable of forgetting what he’d said. Given the effects of the venom on human memory, he clearly wanted her to remember all of it, but she couldn’t for the life of her understand why. Wanting to please him because of the venom, and in spite of her hurt at his refusals, Jet she did her best to understand everything he told her.

  She tried to remember it all, too, since he obviously wanted her to.

  Her mind grew full with names and faces and facts as a result.

  He shared the different players of the Nirreth political sphere with her, touching her arms or shoulders or hands to transmit the information from his own memory. He told her who allied with who and which were gaining power, either formally or informally due to their ties to the new First Son, a Nirreth named Isreti who Trazen seemed to think was some kind of ideological fanatic, with a near-religious following.

  Trazen told her a lot about that group.

  He told her what they believed.

  Most of it seemed to hearken back to a quasi-mythological view of the Nirreth “good old days,” when they only enslaved inferior races and ate them. According to Trazen, the society that Isreti and his followers wanted to build required maintaining a strict hierarchy among the Nirreth themselves, with rigidly enforced roles between the castes and clans.

  Trazen seemed to think most of it was ridiculous, a made up story that had little basis in historical fact. When Jet tried to press him about this, however, he backed off, evaded, pushing her emotions away, his mind growing curiously blank in the gaps that followed.

  After Trazen subjected Jet to these discourses––for what could be anything from fifteen minutes to several hours––he would brief her on the news that pertained more directly to Jet’s own situation. He would tell her what he thought she should expect, in terms of the new Royals’ views of her returning to the Rings. He told her in detail how they viewed Trazen himself and how that might impact her, especially if he were to fall out of favor.

  He told her dispassionately that his falling out of favor would always be a risk, but it didn’t appear to be a very large one at the moment, as he’d ingratiated himself with the new Royals by being the one to assist in Richter’s killing of Laksri.

  Trazen told Jet details of discussions that had occurred behind closed doors, about the meaning of Jet’s prior relations with Laksri, the likelihood that she would be subjected to more interrogations by the Royal police or even the military board, the status of inquiries into Richter’s whereabouts and that of the other human rebels. Trazen also told her––sometimes in minute detail and by showing her maps––news of the human encampments and skag pits the Nirreth military had destroyed in their ongoing efforts to root out the rebels.

  According to Trazen, the search was not going well, at least from the perspective of the Nirreth military. Many of Isreti’s fanatics felt that more drastic steps were required.

  Trazen told her that things might grow more openly violent soon.

  Whatever Trazen himself believed regarding these different developments, he didn’t really say. He also didn’t tell Jet anything about his own relationship to Richter, or even if such a relationship existed.

  The whole thing puzzled Jet...now that she was clear enough to think about it.

  It puzzled her a lot.

  Trazen spoke to her without looking at her most of those times, without seeming to acknowledge her as an entity different than the furniture or the clothes she wore or the paintings or birds that decorated whatever room the two of them happened to inhabit.

  On Astet, Jet spent hours she could not count inside interrogation cells being questioned by Nirreth in the new Royal Police. They had beaten her just about every night during that time. They’d stung her, beaten her––

  Jet pushed the memories out of her mind, wincing again.

  It was disconcerting to think that Trazen had rescued her from that. At the time, she’d expected more of the same from him.

  But that more never came.

  He didn’t even share a bed with her, not even to sleep.

  She tried to make sense of what had happened on Astet, but so far, her mind came up blank on that, too. Why had Richter killed Laksri? Wasn’t he planning on using Laksri to influence the government of the Nirreth? What changed? What could possibly have changed so much, that Laksri would no longer be of use to him?

  Had Richter known Isreti would be taking down the Queen? Had he realized he couldn’t stop that from happening, and taken the opportunity to wipe out Laksri personally?

  It was the only explanation that made sense to Jet at all.

  “Honorable friend?” a voice queried.

  The voice made her jump, a finger of presence in that silence.

  Well, not silence––the birds continued to sing, only a little louder than the humans who hung their bare legs in the pool a dozen meters away.

  Jet just wasn’t used to people speaking to her. No one but Trazen spoke to her, at least not in the last few weeks. Most of the others who lived in Trazen’s house, Nirreth and human, ignored her now, treating her like an eccentric part of the landscape.

  Jet turned her head.

  She found a Nirreth female standing there, watching her expectantly. A faint smile touched the female’s deep-black lips, reflected in the shimmers of her stone-like eyes. The expression contained the usual Nirreth subtlety. Jet probably wouldn’t have even seen it before living around them, and being stung by them.

  “You are ready for the Rings match, Jet Tetsuo, honorable friend of the Nirreth?” the female said, folding her three-fingered hands together.

  Jet hesitated.

  Glancing down at the floor, she focused briefly on the clock embedded there in the stone. Once she’d concentrated on the space long enough for it to appear, she looked at the time, and nodded. She had wasted over an hour standing her, staring at the reflecting pools, trying to dig her mind out of the venom.

  Her life was being scraped away, bit by bit, like a piece of volcanic rock rubbed, chipped and cracked into flakes and grains of sand. Jet didn’t know what month it was, or what season lived outs
ide the artificial blue skies of the Green Zone dome. She didn’t know where Trazen’s house stood in relation to the map of the Green Zone as a whole.

  She didn’t know why Trazen hadn’t hurt her yet.

  All of this crossed her mind, but she had no idea how fast or how slow.

  “I am ready,” she said simply, when it finished.

  The female Nirreth inclined her head.

  “Drink this,” the blue-skinned female said, her voice soothing, reassuring.

  She handed a glass container to Jet, who took it wordlessly.

  The liquid inside was a pale green, the color of new leaves.

  It never once occurred to Jet to argue with the Nirreth’s instructions.

  Still smiling that faint, Nirreth smile, the female watched Jet uncap the bottle, then take a few long swallows from the narrow lip.

  She stood patiently as Jet drank the whole thing down to the bottom.

  When Jet had finished, the female Nirreth bowed lower, right before turning to walk out of the room, her long, three-fingered hands once more clutched in front of her elaborately-embroidered tunic. Her broad feet moved silently over the stone tiles, a darker blue than the leggings she wore, which more closely matched a lighter version of that domed sky.

  Jet let her mind fall back into that familiar static as she followed the Nirreth to the front end of the house. She still held the empty glass container in her hand.

  She already knew one of those sailboat-like transports would be waiting for her outside.

  Without thinking about it clearly, she fell back into her silent disguise as a slave.

  She did it even knowing that Trazen would approve.

  Jet’s mind continued to clear...enough that she started to have emotional reactions.

  Real ones.

  Reactions that leapt into her with no warning, jolting her awake and jerking her heart rate through the roof, spiking adrenaline through her blood without giving her mind anything concrete on which to grasp. Those reactions came intensely enough that she felt like an entirely different person in what felt like a few hours...before she could remember enough to even make sense of the transition. She went from zombie, venom-drunk Jet to this more wide awake version quicker than she’d ever transitioned out of the venom, even with Laksri.

  Even under high levels of stress.

  Some of those changes were borderline comforting...reminding Jet of who she was...who she used to be...how she normally thought about things.

  Some were downright terrifying as she realized how long she’d been out of it.

  Most of the latter reactions felt like a panicked animal response...a lot closer to full-blown terror and fear-of-death than anything approaching reason.

  By the time she arrived at the Rings stadium, Jet’s hands were shaking. She was having trouble breathing. She struggled to focus on what was being said around her.

  She clutched a glass container in one hand. It was empty now.

  That fact didn’t strike Jet as significant until some time later.

  Panic continued to rise and fall in her mind...like a delayed reaction...but Jet was getting better at surfing those currents with every passing minute. Even so, she kept hearing gunshots in some part of her mind, along with screams.

  She wondered how long she’d been dream-walking exactly. She wondered if some part of her had been broken all this time, ever since she’d seen Laksri gunned down on Astet. The cracks and fissures in her mind could have been covered over in venom all this time, hidden in Jet’s drugged psyche like imperfections smoothed over by a new coat of paint.

  She’d still been staring out the window of the trolley-like transport when the sailboat-shaped vehicle began to slow.

  Once more, the panic started, and that sharper clarity.

  Jet focused out the window and saw a large crowd waiting for her by the back entrance to the stadium doors. The sliding door had scarcely begun to disappear into the opposite wall of the trolley’s frame, when hands caught hold of her, pulling her out of the vehicle.

  Most of those hands belonged to Nirreth.

  All were surprisingly gentle.

  Trazen’s people. Security.

  She knew them...each and every face and body...without being able to pinpoint the exact time or place she’d met a single one of them.

  They held her firmly in their hands, guiding her out of the trolley and onto the sidewalk, surrounding her with their bulk, tails lashing in a low threat at the pressing crowds. They led her off the sidewalk without opening their ranks, bringing her up a grassy ramp leading to the Rings player’s gates at the back end of the stadium. The crowd pressed up against her and her entourage at once, some human, but most Nirreth and well-dressed.

  Media. Fans. Even a few officials.

  Jet saw a number of them holding recording devices and microphones as they shouted her name loudly, eager, human-like grins on their midnight blue faces. Jet saw actual humans, too, some of them also holding cameras and microphones and shouting to get her attention. A less-coherent shout went up from the crowd that pressed against a second set of ropes as soon as they saw her, one that soon congealed into a word Jet recognized. The implications of hearing it now, after everything that had happened to her, completely dazed her.

  She stopped dead when she first heard it, staring around to assure herself that the voices were real, that they weren’t like the gunshots or the screams.

  They were actually happening.

  They weren’t just in her head.

  Briefly, Trazen’s people let her stop on the upward-sloping ramp. They clustered around her protectively, giving her friendly looks like she’d known them all of her life.

  Nirreth security guards for the Rings stood there too, Jet noticed, holding up thick, muscular arms in front of the security ropes, lashing their tails in warning to the fans and the media representatives standing there. Jet could barely make out the faces beyond their broad backs and thick arms, blinded by the lights and deafened by the chants.

  “SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI!” they screamed.

  Jet stared at the thickest part of the crowd, lost in the waves of emotion she could see in faces, and in the shouts, screams and chants that grew louder when they saw her face turned in their direction.

  “SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI!”

  Tails thumped into walls, feet pounded into the sidewalk. Human hands clapped as mouths shrieked her name, then took up the chant with everyone else.

  The chant beat into her skull, bleeding up from the ground and the soles of her feet to travel up her legs, reaching a hotter area of her belly, something Jet hadn’t felt in weeks, months maybe...maybe longer...in any case, not since she’d seen Laksri die right in front of her.

  “SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI!”

  Jet held up a fist, even as her handlers attempted to pull her back from the surging and increasingly emotional crowd. When the screams turned ecstatic, the crowd began to shove forward into the ropes and the security, violently that time.

  Trazen’s people caught hold of her again, their fear reaching her through their jointed fingers. They began to guide her firmly past the mob, pulling and pushing at her with careful hands, their faces visibly worried even past the dark inscrutability of their Nirreth bone structure and midnight blue skin.

  The crowd went crazy when Jet’s fist went up.

  Shouting her name and lunging harder agains the ropes, the Nirreth and the humans alike stomped their feet harder, shrieking her name and yelling out, even as those in the background continued their deeper, more rhythmic chant.

  Jet didn’t know most of those faces.

  She didn’t know them even as well as the Nirreth guards and security personnel who guided her towards the back end of the stadium...yet somehow, in all that surging emotion and those shining eyes, whipping tails and stomping feet, she felt like she did know them.

  She felt like she knew every one of them.

  She raised her fist higher, letting out a warrior
-like call.

  The crowd screamed louder in response.

  “SAMURAI! SAMURAI! SAMURAI...”

  The thumping and those three syllables followed Jet all the way inside.

  Even the heavy clang of the metal doors that closed behind her, leaving her in the relative quiet of the corridor leading to the changing and preparation rooms for the match, didn’t manage to cut off their voices and stomping feet entirely.

  She was a slave, it was true. She might remain a slave for the rest of her life. But breaking something wasn’t really having it. It was just breaking it.

  The thought comforted Jet somehow, although she couldn’t have said why.

  More than that, it reminded her.

  It reminded her of who she was. Of who she always would be.

  No matter how much of her they tried to take away.

  THE MEETING

  Jet sat on the bench in the dressing room beneath the arena.

  She was still panting, still fighting the adrenaline out of her body.

  Blood ran down one side of her face.

  She winced in reflex as the human attendant below her wiped a cold cloth over a cut on her thigh. They’d cut the sense-suit half off her to get to the worst of her injuries. She could feel bruises all along the side of her torso. Her jaw hurt, one of the toes on her left foot felt broken. Her arm got burned pretty seriously by that crazy flamethrower thing waiting for her outside the final run of the match...the goal of which had been, of all things, a rabbit.

  Jet just sat there, feeling her heartbeat finally start to slow.

  Grinning from ear to ear.

  Damn, she was out of shape, though. She’d have to get on that right away. It hadn’t even occurred to her before the run how soft her body had gotten from weeks of doing practically nothing but wander around Trazen’s house in dresses and stretchy pants.

  She supposed that was probably a good thing, or it might have scared her.

  She knew they’d likely thrown her in that way on purpose, maybe to give the run some added drama. Even so, Jet found herself thinking she must have been more stoned on venom than she realized to walk in there cold like that, so totally unprepared.