“Are you really ordering me to take you back there, Jet?” Anaze’s voice sounded conflicted. “I promised them I’d get you out. I promised I’d make sure you were safe...”
“Ordering?” Replaying his choice of words, Jet’s eyes widened, and suddenly she found she understood. “If I give you an order, then you have to take me back?”
“Yes, but––”
Jet was already smiling. “No but. Take me back. Right now.” Seeing the frustration on his face, she sighed, wrapping her arms around her bent knees. “Listen to me. I know the compound, Anaze. I know the compound...and I can swim. Do you know anyone else who can say that?”
“I can,” he said, smiling humorlessly.
She shook her head. “You don’t know it like I do. You were on house arrest most of the time you were there. Ogli let me go wherever I wanted. I know those canals like the back of my hand...I considered using them to try and escape more than once.” She gave him a wry smile. “Anyway, if you can do it, you should be going back anyway. Not babysitting me.”
Anaze’s frown deepened. Still staring at her face, he touched his ear.
“Did you get that?” he said.
There was a silence while he listened to whoever was on the other end. Then Anaze exhaled, dropping her gaze. “Fine. Yup. Got it.”
Without saying a word to Jet, he rose to his feet, walking to an intercom panel set directly into the forward bulkhead. Pressing an indentation made for a larger finger than his, he spoke loudly to be heard over the sound of the wind rattling through the hold.
Jet couldn’t hear much over that same wind, but she caught the tail end.
“...Do it. I got the confirm,” he said. “Yes. This comes from both.”
Taking his thumb off the wall, he gave Jet a grim look, his green eyes studying hers as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be angry at her or not.
He still stood there as the culler began to bank, making a sharp, graceful turn in the air.
Within seconds, they were heading back the way they had come.
THE DARK
The pilot set down the culler just outside the main wall that circled the outer perimeter of the Palace grounds. Jet didn’t wait. Jumping down out of the open cargo door, she landed on the grass in her boots before the ship even finished powering down.
The airship was quiet. Not soundless to her, since she’d spent most of her life being trained to listen for them in the sky––but she knew there was still a good chance no one would have heard them land, not even if they stood just on the other side of that wall.
Heading towards the place where she knew a doorway lived, Jet strode across the lawn, feeling jazzed up once more on adrenaline and nerves. She’d gotten rid of the sense-suit on the flight back, changing into civilian clothes that Anaze lent her.
Now she wore only dark-green combat pants and a black tank top as well as her boots and Black’s scabbard. She also had a human gun strapped to her thigh and a pulre in a pouch on a shoulder holster. Anaze gave her a boot holster for a hunting knife too, and a smaller flip-knife for her back pocket. Between her clothes and that long look at a real sky, for the first time in months, Jet felt like herself again...meaning the Jet she remembered from the skag pits.
Only better armed. And cleaner.
And maybe a little less naive.
She walked swiftly through the grass, her strides heavy and sure, Anaze following behind her, a human automatic rifle slung over one shoulder. As they walked, the sky vibrated with the soft, high whine of decelerating engines.
Before she reached the wall, silence had returned to the clearing, and the trees just on the other side of the wall rustled in a gust of wind.
Then she heard it. Gunfire.
Most of it was distant still, and behind them, but Jet could hear some coming from the other side of the wall in front of them, too.
Something about having just been dropped into a combat zone––a real one, not in the virtual fantasy of the Rings––still struck Jet as borderline surreal.
When she got to where the door lived in the wall, she found it already open. Someone appeared to have broken the scanning mechanism too, since not only did the door stay open, the pale lights rimming the outer edges of the door had gone totally dark.
Even so, she hesitated, staring at the opening.
“Do you have a stick or something?” she asked Anaze, holding out a hand when he drew up alongside her. “We should make sure.”
“Don’t bother,” Anaze said, taking his hand off the earpiece of his headset. “It’s down. I just confirmed.”
“I’d rather check,” she said stubbornly. “In case someone inside noticed. We don’t know how long it’s been since your pals came this way.”
Sighing, Anaze walked through the opening in front of her, then looked back over his shoulder with a grin.
“Satisfied?” he said.
“That you’re an idiot?” she said. “Yes. Very.”
Shaking his head, Anaze smiled, winking at her. “You are definitely your uncle’s niece. And you’re aunt’s, for that matter.”
Jet grunted, then followed him through the door.
That was another thing Anaze told her as they’d left the Green Zone.
Jet’s Uncle Draven and Aunt Lara were now card-carrying members of Richter’s rebellion. Apparently, the smaller factions had all joined up with Richter in the last four or five months since Laksri’s official assassination. Richter even put Draven in charge of one of the battalions he had taking down the hamster cages––what they called the Nirreth-run work camps that lived about 100 kilometers south of Jet’s skag pit.
Once on the other side of the wall, Jet looked around the field with a few turns of her head. Anaze, having reached that side first, pointed, and Jet aimed her feet and eyes for the cluster of humans and Nirreth she could now see watching them from the edge of the field. They stood just under a strand of trees with the sun at their backs, so Jet couldn’t see any of their faces at first. She looked up instead, gauging the height of the trees, looking at the sky beyond them.
It was strange to see the high, crystal blue of the Green Zone dome after being outside of it, however briefly.
It was stranger still to hear the distant impact concussion from bombs falling on some other part of the city, along with peppered bursts of automatic gunfire.
She reached the waiting party under the trees only to discover she knew none of the Nirreth or humans standing there. Well, not at first glance.
At her second pass through faces and bodies, Jet spotted Tyra, who grinned at her as soon as Jet and her locked eyes. Tyra cradled a black, Nirreth-looking gun against her chest that looked half her height and maybe a third of her weight.
Still grinning, she nodded to Jet with an upward tilt of her chin.
“Hey there, Samurai Girl,” she joked.
“Heya, Tyra.” Jet continued to scan through faces, feeling herself stiffen at the number of unfamiliar eyes on her. “Who’s in charge here?”
Tyra snorted, rolling her eyes.
“Depends on who you ask,” she said. “You know how boys are.”
As she spoke, she aimed a finger across the field, where Jet could see the back end of a large, old-fashioned-looking, human-style wooden building with a stone foundation. At the bare edges of the structure, Jet saw shadows moving, what looked like part of a crowd of humans and Nirreth standing around the entrance to the biggest of the two barns.
The entrance itself was out of sight at this angle.
Jet remembered the barn well.
She’d been there many times with Ogli, the original First Son––or the first one Jet ever met personally, anyway. Ogli had only been eleven years old and the barn had been one of his absolute favorite place in the world.
The space inside those giant wooden doors was filled with Earth animals the last time Jet ventured in, mostly those breeds that had been domesticated in some fashion by humans. Horses made up a bulk of th
e stalls, in every breed and color under the sun, but cows lived there too, along with sheep, goats, rabbits, pigs, llamas, camels, reindeer, geese, ducks and chickens. They’d even had a small Indian elephant at the very back named Rupee-Ji who’d loved green bananas.
Motioning for Anaze to follow, Jet walked towards the barn, keeping to the back end so they wouldn’t be seen. She’d only gone about a dozen paces when she realized all of them were following her, not only Anaze, which she supposed made sense.
Anaze had called ahead; Tyra and the others must have been waiting for them.
After she’d been walking a few minutes more, Jet could hear raised voices. She felt her jaw harden slightly when she realized that at least some of the people standing there were arguing, both in Nargili and in English, with a number of different accents thrown into the mix.
The bulk of them appeared to be standing right outside the barn doors, making a rough circle around a handful of individuals in the center, who did most of the talking.
None of them seemed to have noticed Jet and the others approach.
She reached the edge of the crowd, Anaze and Tyra on either side of her. Swiftly, the rest of the small group that had been waiting for her on the other side of that wall surrounded her, hiding her from view in a way that had to be deliberate.
Because of that, only a few people in the crowd even noticed her.
It probably didn’t hurt that Jet had her hair down; from the sides it mostly obscured her face, especially as the wind continued to coil around the barn and its stables, blowing her hair into her mouth and eyes.
The few who did recognize her stared, but didn’t say anything. They looked away at a nudge or glare from one of Jet’s guards and no one spoke to her directly. No one attempted to interrupt the handful of humans and Nirreths at the center of that circle, either.
Jet still couldn’t see past the Nirreth and human bodies in front of her well enough to get a look at who the people in the center were. She could hear them well enough, though. Most of the crowd around her were Nirreth; they tended to fall silent in a way that humans couldn’t normally pull off in a crowd that size.
“This is stupid,” a voice said loudly, drawing eyes, including Jet’s.
Jet knew that voice, even before she saw his face.
Richter stood there, his arms folded over a black armored vest, balancing the stock of an automatic rifle against his hip. He didn’t seem to have noticed Jet’s approach either.
“You won’t resolve this now...either of you,” he continued, his voice openly impatient. “I say we send in Tyra. She volunteered. She swims well enough for this...and she can fight. I think the fighting part’s going to be more critical, when push comes to shove.”
“She didn’t live in the Palace,” another voice said, glaring at Richter.
Jet knew that voice too, and recognized Alice’s profile even before she heard her.
“...She doesn’t know it well enough,” Alice added, her accent coming out thicker. “We need someone who knows the palace. Well enough to get around without being seen.”
“Is there another slave like that?” Richter said, swiveling his head to stare at Alice directly. “We don’t have the luxury of sending someone in there who has no training. You know as well as I do that we don’t have enough humans in here who can fight. To find one who knows the palace, too? Forget it. Hell, I would go before I’d send in some slave who’s never shot a gun––”
“You know who we have,” another voice growled, cutting him off in clipped English. That accent was decidedly different than Alice’s, and the voice made Jet jump. “It makes sense. You all know it makes sense. More than Tyra. More than you, Richter. We need someone small to get through the duct openings. Why are you all pretending––”
“We can’t even discuss that yet,” Richter cut in, raising a hand. “Not yet.”
Jet was still reacting to that other voice. She looked for its owner, trying to glimpse him through the crowd. Hearing him had been a shock, but the amount of relief that coursed through her when she saw Trazen’s profile startled her, in spite of herself.
He was alive. He made it out of that mess in one piece.
Before she could wrap her head around her own reactions to that fact, another, much more heavily-accented voice spoke in English, from Richter’s other side.
“We’re not sending Jet in there,” it said.
Jet felt herself stiffen, recognizing that voice, too.
Moreover, Tyra’s comments made a lot more sense now, Jet thought grimly. Putting her hands on her hips, she just stood there, watching as Trazen glared at Laksri.
“Don’t start again, you two––” Richter began, sounding almost weary.
“Why do you insist on pretending she is not the most qualified for this?” Trazen growled, ignoring both of them. His voice grew quieter, but somehow more dangerous. “She knows it. It is why she offered to come back. You all know it, too...you are simply used to treating her as a pawn.” Trazen slammed his tail angrily against the barn wall, making a number of the humans jump. “She volunteered! She wants to go! She is coming here...even now!”
“Which I never would have okayed, had I known!” Laksri snapped, giving Richter a death stare, presumably for telling Anaze that he could bring Jet back. “She should have been sent away. To her family!” Turning he hissed at Trazen. “She wants that, too. You know she does! She has spoken of little else, since––”
“She asked to go!” Trazen snapped, slamming his tail harder against the building, shaking the nearby door. “What part of you is not hearing that? She knows the grounds. She can fight. Let her make up her own damned mind! Or are you such a child you cannot admit that we need her for this?”
“This is not your call, Ringmaster...” Laksri growled in warning.
But Trazen went on as if Laksri hadn’t spoken.
“...You do not have to send her alone. No one said anything about sending her alone!” He motioned at Laksri aggressively with one jointed hand. “Send Tyra with her. And Anaze...he swims well. We all saw it at the Retribution. She would do better not to be alone. We will still have plenty at the gate, even if we send ten with her. She does not have to retrieve the stone, just let the rest of us inside––”
But Laksri cut him off again.
“No!” he hissed. “And do not play her champion in this, Trazen! If you gave a damn about her at all, you would not want her to do this, either.” Laksri’s voice turned openly accusing. “You would not offer her up like some sacrificial animal...”
Trazen’s eyes narrowed to slits. Jet heard the more muscular Nirreth growl for real that time, his tail lashing behind him in angrier slashes through the air.
“Bite your tongue...Prince,” he said, his voice low. “I don’t give a damn who you are. You do not want to have that discussion with me, I promise you.”
“She is not going in there!” Laksri said, raising his voice as he slammed his own tail against his side of the barn wall, making the other door shake. “I am the authority here! I forbid it! We will send Tyra. And Anaze, if he returns here. Neither of them is recognizable to anyone inside the compound...they will blend as slaves. Jet will remain with us at the gate. She is too important for this and you know it!”
But Jet had heard enough.
Feeling her hands clench into fists at her sides, she began to push through the crowd. As soon as she started to move, the Nirreth on either side of her, along with Tyra and Anaze, walked with her towards the inner circle. Once she made it through the last row of humans and Nirreth making up that denser crowd, she entered the clearing where Richter, Alice, Trazen and Laksri stood, along with a handful of other Nirreth and humans Jet didn’t know.
She did see a woman standing there though, and blinked, realizing she recognized her, too.
Patricia Thorne. She’d been a political advisor to the Nirreth under the last Queen. Jet almost didn’t recognize her here, wearing form-fitting dark pants and a long shirt, mo
re human than Nirreth in design. Jet mostly remembered seeing her with a drink in her hand, wearing expensive Nirreth clothes in the compound of the Royals.
Jerking her eyes off the woman’s face, Jet turned to find Laksri and Trazen staring at her. Both of their tails moved behind them, but Laksri mostly looked angry whereas there was something more cautious in how Trazen looked at her.
Glancing between the two of them, she exhaled, putting her hands on her hips.
“I’m going in,” she said, sparing Alice a glance. “It’s stupid to argue...and I’m guessing we don’t have much time. I’m assuming you need to breach the compound before the reinforcements get here...both from off-world and from the other Green Zones?”
Richter let out a low chuckle.
Jet turned to stare at him, incredulous. Still, something in his eyes almost caused her to smile back. Was that affection she saw there? Relief? She still hadn’t been able to pinpoint the emotion when Richter shook his head, his thick arms folded in front of his chest.
She found she couldn’t take her eyes off him though.
She remembered Anaze saying his father was brilliant...he also called him the consummate actor. Jet found herself wondering if this was the real Richter, or some new guise, something she’d never seen before. Now that he wasn’t playing slave trader but rebel leader, she had no idea what that might look like.
Richter was still smiling when he looked back at Trazen and Laksri.
“She’s right,” he said, blunt. “We don’t have time for this. She’s ready to go...more ready than anyone else we’ve got. We need to send her. Let her pick the team.” His coffee-colored eyes grew sharper as he focused on Laksri in particular. “I hear what you’re saying, Laks, about needing her out here. But that’s a moot point if we don’t get control over this compound before Isreti’s ‘The Old Way’ champions have time to regroup...”
Laksri was staring at Jet when she glanced his way.
She felt Trazen’s eyes on her, too, but didn’t look at him.
Almost instinctively, she made sure to focus on Laksri alone. Looking him over, she realized he was reacting with pure emotion. He was angry, but it was more than that.
Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV) Page 84