Jet didn’t catch much of the rest of it.
She didn’t realize how much she’d tuned out the “Voice of the Rings,” or his translator, until Metzet stopped speaking.
After a pause, Laksri squeezed her arm lightly in his fingers.
“He asked,” Laksri murmured softly, obviously repeating the question for the machine. “…If you can agree to these conditions, and accept the honor of promotion to the status of full contestant, as the Board has decreed…”
Looking up at Laksri’s face, Jet saw the answer she was supposed to give in his eyes, along with a more subtle thread of nerves.
Feeling her heartbeat quicken under that stare, Jet answered without thought, giving the only answer left to give at that point.
“I accept,” Jet said, in Nargili, facing Metzet. “…And I thank you very much for this incredible honor,” she added in the same language, letting enthusiasm reach her voice, along with a smile.
She bowed formally to the Board in exactly the way Alice taught her, just two days earlier, which now felt closer to two years.
“Thank you,” she said again. “Honorable members of the Board, you have granted me my highest and fondest wish.”
When she came up from the full bow, the stadium finally erupted.
Another round of deafening cheers and yells and pounding tails shook the ground under Jet’s feet and forced a wider smile to her lips.
She met the gaze of the Honorable Metzet, and that time, he was smiling, too, his lips quirked in that half-lift as his head inclined in acceptance of her words and the bow that accompanied them.
The rest of the Board seemed pacified as well, watching her with grudging approval.
A few even flicking their tails sideways in that gesture of friendliness Jet had seen other Nirreth do when they wanted to indicate acceptance.
When Jet glanced at that female Nirreth who had been watching her before, the woman’s eyes remained thoughtful, despite the faint smile on her lips. Jet was still watching her face when the female Nirreth bowed her head in Jet’s direction, a sign of respect, but also one that could be acknowledging her as an opponent.
Something in the gesture made Jet nervous all over again, even as it occurred to her that the female definitely knew she was hiding more than a photographic memory and a few tricks with her sword.
Pushing it out of her mind and off her face, Jet turned to the crowd, grinning widely.
While they continued to cheer, she unsheathed Black, holding up the sword. With it, she held up both arms outstretched in the old human sign of victory.
Whether or not they knew what it meant, the Nirreth in the crowd loved it.
The cheers and pounding of tails and feet shook the stadium walls, even as Jet’s diminutive form once more filled the giant monitors.
23
Debriefing
The reaction Jet didn’t expect was Richter’s.
He smiled and clapped her on the shoulder with the rest of them in the changing area under the stadium seats.
He laughed along with Nirreth and human reporters as Jet answered their questions about what had been the scariest part of nearly being eaten by an alligator (“Its teeth,” Jet told them jokingly, which made them all laugh and swish their tails in approval), and what worried her most about trying to detonate a hole in the side of the Nirreth command ship, (“Drowning,” she replied, just as easily, once more delighting the Nirreth reporters).
She managed to hold onto her smile through most of their barrage of questions, but her muscles and the wounds had started to throb by the time they took her through the blow-by-blow to the end of the four-hour course, including every element of her thought process as she advanced through each subsequent segment and obstacle.
Richter didn’t say a word while the Rings physicians looked at her, either.
He merely stood there, watching as they smeared a thick gel on the wound on her hip after they cleaned it, applying more of the same to the cut under her hairline.
They gave her a number of shots (“for no infections,” Laksri informed her), and checked her eyes, ears, head, and even her teeth before pronouncing her intact.
They put a different gel on her shoulder where she’d wrenched it. That one sent a wave of luxurious heat through her skin, seemingly down to the bones, making Jet’s whole body feel so relaxed and loose she had trouble lifting her arms.
Richter waited patiently with the others while she showered, washing all the make-up and remaining gunk out of her hair and off her skin.
He waited while she dressed afterwards, throwing on one of the “outside” outfits Alice brought, so Jet could ditch the sense-suit following the match.
Richter even offered to take them all out to dinner after they’d debriefed.
He smiled at her as he said it, even as he led them to a conference room they’d already swept for wires and other listening devices inside the underground gardens. They’d met in the same garden two days earlier, so Jet only nodded back, barely hearing him.
But once Jet walked into the room and Richter closed the door behind her, he turned on her, grabbing her upper arms in both hands and glaring into her face.
Before she could recover enough to pull back, he shook her, hard enough to rattle her teeth.
“Just what the hell did you think you were doing in there?”
“W-w-what?”
“You heard me!” He shook her again, hard enough to disorient her, forcing her to clutch at his wrists. “Why did you do it? Are you trying to get us all killed?”
Laksri immediately appeared at Jet’s side, his tail lashing dangerously at Richter, his teeth close to bared. When Richter gave her another rough shake, Laksri inserted himself between them as soon as Jet wrenched free of Richter’s grasp.
“Stay out of this, Laks,” Richter warned darkly, glaring up at the tall Nirreth. “She royally screwed us, and you damned well know it…”
Laksri’s eyes only grew harder.
Eventually Richter backed down, still glaring at Jet even as he ran a hand through his brown hair, pacing in front of her, tugging at the gold streak of color on the back of his head, his jaw clenched.
“Well?” he said. “What the hell happened?”
“What happened?” Jet burst out in an incredulous laugh.
Still more surprised at his reaction than angry, she felt her jaw harden as she stared at him, feeling strangely defensive.
“What do you mean, what happened?” she said, taking another step back. “No one told me there was a whole other underground level to the course! No one told me I’d have to fight a twenty-foot alligator in my home city, within minutes of escaping a culler… or that I’d nearly drown.”
She clenched her jaw at the rage that rose to Richter’s expression.
“What the hell do you think happened? I was trying to stay alive in there! When I realized I blew it on the points by going underground, I figured I had to win the course, or I’d never make it to round two!”
“We told you not to win it!” Richter shouted.
“Yeah!” Jet shouted back, just as angrily. “You also told me to impress them! To get as many points as I could! To give them a good show! I screwed up the points part, so I was trying to compensate with the rest of it!”
“A show?” Richter stared at her, raising his voice above hers. “Compensate? I meant wave the sword around a bit! Let your costume get ripped so they saw some skin. Get at least one, good, bloody kill…”
“I did that!” Jet said, shouting back at him.
“You treated it like a damned military op!” Richter snarled.
He stepped forward so fast, Laksri once more inserted himself between them, placing a warning hand against Richter’s chest.
The human barely noticed, craning his head around Laksri to glare at Jet.
“…You have half of them thinking you’ve got formal military training, do you know that? I’ve already been called in for interrogations around where exactly w
e found you… who your known relatives and associates are back in that underground dung heap in Canada you crawled out of…”
Jet paled, looking between Richter and then Anaze.
The latter stood off a few paces by a low table, listening, his arms folded.
Anaze’s narrow features were set in a kind of impenetrable mask, his eyes on hers as if he were trying to think of something to say, although whether in her defense or to back up his father, Jet couldn’t tell.
In any case, he didn’t look angry, like Richter did. His expression held something closer to worry, along with a faint thread of sympathy.
Replaying Richter’s words, Jet felt her fingers clench into fists.
“You have had some training,” Richter said, staring at her as if a sudden understanding just reached him.
He gave Anaze a near-threatening stare, then looked back at Jet.
“Who?” he demanded. “Who was it?”
“I don’t have training,” Jet said, irritated, but she stared at the floor anyway, her arms crossed as her chest tightened.
“Don’t lie to me, kitten!” Richter growled. “Whoever it is, you’ve made them a target. We’ll be able to relocate them, if you give me a name…”
Jet shook her head angrily, but exhaled after his words penetrated.
“My uncle,” she said reluctantly. “Draven. And his wife, Lara. But they didn’t train me. Not like that. They taught me things to keep me alive.”
“Whatever they did, it was enough,” Richter grunted, his eyes still furious where they trained briefly on Anaze. He looked back at Jet, his face taut. “Gods almighty, girl. Don’t you realize that no human or Nirreth has ever won the Rings at their first match? Not once? Didn’t you think this might put you a bit in the spotlight, pulling a stunt like this?”
Jet could only stare at him.
“Never?” she said, closing her mouth with a snap. “How is that possible? I mean… they didn’t even shoot at me that much.”
Richter gave a humorless laugh.
Anaze spoke up before he could, bringing Jet’s eyes back to his narrow face.
“You have to understand, Jet,” he said, making a gesture with one hand that bordered on apologetic. “They calibrate the matches for the individual players. That actually cushions things a bit. Because you’re the first female human who’s ever run a match––”
“What about Tyra?” Jet said, interrupting.
“She hasn’t done first fight yet,” Laksri said. “She runs her first match next week. One from today. Understand?”
But Jet continued to stare between them.
“They ran me before Tyra?” she said. “Why?”
In addition to being about four inches taller than Jet, and twice as muscular, Tyra could actually fight. Jet had watched her often enough in the training arena that she’d had more than a few daydreams of hand-to-hand combat between her and Tyra in the Rings… and not the fun kind.
Most involved Jet getting beaten to a bloody pulp, being stuck in a blind alley with Tyra, minus Black, and with no way out. No matter how much she might like Tyra as a person, Jet had zero illusions about who would come out alive in that scenario. They’d developed a sort of comradely rapport in the past few weeks, but Jet knew Tyra was dead serious about having a long-term career in the Rings.
For the same reason, Jet knew exactly who would come out ahead, and who would get their ass handed to them, in a real one-on-one match between them.
Laksri only shrugged at her question.
“We think dates were changed,” he said. “Maybe by one in Ogli’s camp. Maybe by Prince Ogli. The change happens not long after we present you and I. In public, together. Maybe someone want this match sooner… so I not help you so much in the Rings.”
Jet felt her jaw clench.
She only understood about half of that, but shook her head anyway.
“No,” she said. “Why would the Royals want to cause their own candidate to bomb? Wouldn’t that be embarrassing for them?”
She looked around at the three of them, frowning. When no one answered, she went on in a sharper voice.
“Anyway, if what Anaze said is right, that was a really easy course. I mean, if they thought I was some dumb, helpless female, then it’s just a matter of them underestimating me, right? So how does that hurt us?”
Thinking about this, Jet frowned, realizing something else.
“…Yeah,” she muttered to herself. “Tyra’s not going to thank me for that. They’ll assume she’ll do better than me, once they see her.”
Richter made an irritated sound, one that approximated one of Laksri’s snorts.
“You still don’t get it, kitten,” he said. “Photographic memory or no, I’m beginning to think you’re missing a few crucial pieces upstairs…”
Jet was about to snap back at him, but Anaze stepped forward, holding up a hand before she could speak.
“The thing is, Jet,” Anaze said. “That wasn’t an easy course. It was supposed to be, but it wasn’t… and we weren’t the only ones who noticed. We went along with it, pretending it was, and joking that we warned them, that you might surprise them, but everyone knows they threw a difficult course at you, one that was all about the objective and not a points-based challenge, and that you made a fool out of them. They knew you’d be forced to go after the objective because they didn’t give you the usual, point-based runs, not until the very end. They were thinking you wouldn’t get that far.”
“But why?” Jet said, dumbfounded. “Why would they do that? Did Olgi pay them off or something, so he could keep me as a pet?”
“Possible, yes,” Laksri said, inclining his head to the right. “But we do not think so.” He motioned at Anaze and Richter. “Maybe this is too elaborate for Olgi. Unless someone advises him. We think maybe they do this to embarrass Royals… crush their owned human player in first match. Maybe because they don’t agree with the queen’s policy about humans. Maybe this is supposed to show you inferior. Maybe for some other reason…”
Jet thought about this, then faced Richter again.
“So, how is any of this my fault, exactly?” she said.
“Now we have both sides looking at us,” Anaze explained, once more speaking for his father. “Whoever rigged your match, and now the Royals, too, are asking questions about who you are, what your background is, Jet. The idea was to make them trust you, to give them reason to invite you deeper into their world. We wanted to make you a star who would increase their prestige and make them money in the Rings’ gambling pools.”
He shrugged apologetically, motioning towards her as he continued.
“…Now you have a few million sets of eyes on you, Jet. And we have no idea how many of those are friendly, and how many know more than they’re saying. Even more critical for our purposes, those Nirreth who were cheering from the stands weren’t cheering for your owners, Jet, as is the normal thing with these matches. They were cheering for you. They saw you as dangerous and exciting… in a way different than is usual for the Rings.”
Reddening, Anaze glanced at his father before turning back to face her, his expression gravely serious.
“I thought you were amazing, Jet… just brilliant. But my father’s not wrong. You really did act more like a soldier than some skag from the pits who’d been dressed up and handed a sword. It’s unfortunate, really, that they chose to put your first match in the context of a modern battle against the Nirreth themselves. It made it all a little too real in a lot of their eyes.”
He glanced at his father again before adding,
“I think my father’s also worried this might change the minds of some Nirreth towards the occupation. If they start seeing humans as heroes and freedom fighters, instead of trained monkeys, it could cause a lot of unrest.”
It took another second for that part to sink in.
When it did, Jet felt her jaw drop.
“What?” She stared around at them in disbelief. “You’re telling me that
it’s better for them to see us as slaves? What the hell is the matter with you? Isn’t that exactly what we’re supposed to want? For more Nirreth to desire freedom and equality for all of us?”
“Yes,” Laksri said, his voice hard.
He glared at Richter, in a way that made it clear that they’d already had this argument, and likely more than once.
“It could cause them to target us. To target you, Jet,” Anaze explained. “Too soon, I mean. Before we’re ready. We wanted you to have a big fan base, but not a political fan base. The idea was to put you in a position to be well-liked across the different factions. A unifying force, not a divisive one. The last thing we wanted was their media to tag you as some kind of sword-wielding revolutionary…”
Jet frowned.
She looked at Richter, who appeared to have calmed down some, but who still stared at her with those coffee-colored eyes, as if he didn’t trust her any more than the Board did.
When he caught Jet looking at him, he averted his gaze.
“You’ll need to take her out tonight, Laks,” he said, coming out of his stance and looking at the tall Nirreth. “Sting her a few times, if you can manage it without losing your cool. Get her looking like sex to the rest of them…”
Jet saw Anaze’s jaw clench, but he wouldn’t look at her, either. Folding his arms, he stared at the floor as his father went on speaking to the dark-skinned Nirreth.
“Whatever you do, don’t let anyone else sting her,” Richter warned. “They’re liable to try, even without permission. No matter how much they offer you, don’t let any of them get her alone, not even for a few minutes.”
Laksri gave Jet a forbidding look, as if promising with his eyes that he never would have let that happen anyway, regardless of Richter’s words.
But Jet scarcely noticed.
She was staring at Richter instead.
“I don’t suppose I get a vote in any of this?” she said. “…As usual?”
“No, kitten… you don’t.” Richter gave her a cold look. “I think you’ve clearly got a bit too much freedom already, given what you chose to do with the latitude you were given.”
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 41
