A perceptible vibration was the only thing to break the illusion.
That vibration seemed to start inside her very bones. A harness locked her upper body to the chair in six coarse bands, holding her shoulders, chest, waist, belly, thighs and calves to the dark red material.
All of her muscles tensed as she looked out the curved view screen above her.
For now, that view remained relatively benign.
It had barely changed since the ship lifted off the platform.
She could see the blue sky of the dome of the Green Zone.
She’d been told that a door would open in that dome, giving her a view of the real sky.
She would see Earth as it actually was again, if only for a few minutes, or possibly seconds. It would be the first time Jet had seen it since she’d been culled from the streets of Vancouver almost a year ago.
When she looked down, the view made her instantly dizzy.
She watched the buildings around the landing platform shrink rapidly beneath her feet. From the wide, concave view port, it felt like she dangled in space, suspended in the air by nothing more than the harness.
Jet looked up again, gritting her teeth against the vibration, which seemed to grow more intense as the seconds passed.
Next to her, Laksri sat strapped to a similar chair.
She couldn’t see rivets or bolts at the base of his chair, either, or a seam distinguishing the chair’s metal from that of the bulkheads. It was as if all of the ship had been made of a single sheet of metal. The only breaks Jet saw came from the curved panes of the view ports.
They were leaving. She was leaving Earth.
Gripping the armrests of the chair, Jet stared up, feeling again like an animal in a cage, even though she sat strapped into a seat on the bridge with the prince himself, not even in the human quarters with Richter, much less in a cell on one of the lower decks, like Anaze.
She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until she started getting light-headed. Letting the air out in a slow exhale, she glanced at Laksri and found the Nirreth watching her, his dark eyes expressionless.
No, not quite expressionless.
She found herself reluctant to try and read the emotion she could see there, lost somewhere between the lighter blue flecks of color in his irises.
“Are you all right?” he said in English.
When she didn’t answer right away, he paused, gauging her face. His eyes turned slightly more cautious.
“The ship is safe, Jet,” he said.
She let out a short laugh, half nerves, half dark humor.
His stone-like eyes reflected a faint puzzlement, but she didn’t try to explain.
Forcing her gaze off his long-featured face, she stared back up at the view.
She could see the sky changing now.
A thin line erupted in the blue, and began to swiftly widen.
Through the protective shell of the Green Zone dome, a yellow sky appeared, the clouds so high they seemed to be outside the atmosphere entirely.
She watched that higher sky grow larger, even as it hit her that, dirty or not, the real sky carried something that didn’t exist inside the dome. It had a weight to it that the dome sky lacked, as if the presence of the world itself lived somewhere behind that high swath of air and clouds, poisonous or not.
Even a sick, dying presence generated more real feeling in Jet than a beautiful illusion.
She found herself relaxing somehow, seeing that view.
When she glanced at Laksri that time, he stared up at the same sky, his long face expressionless. Even so, she swore she saw something relax in his eyes as he continued to look up. She wondered what it meant, when a flicker of relief brightened in his dark irises, right before he spoke, surprising her.
“It is better, isn’t it?” he said. “A real sky?”
Jet flinched, startled.
That he would mirror the exact sentiment she’d been feeling unnerved her, although she couldn’t have said why.
“Yeah,” she said, her words coming through numb lips. “Yeah, it is.”
“I have missed the real world.” He glanced at her, his dark eyes piercing. “We will not have to live without it forever, Jet.” His words sounded like a promise. “You will not. Neither will your family.”
Jet’s jaw hardened slightly, but she only nodded.
She didn’t really understand what Laksri meant for her to understand from that, but the emotion behind his words managed to confuse her, then anger her, when she realized she wanted to believe what he’d said.
She wanted to believe him.
Or maybe she just wanted to believe she wasn’t entirely on her own in this.
Before she could think through her emotions well enough to come to any conclusion, her chair began to vibrate more strongly. Her fingers clenched the arms, hurting her hand where she’d cut it in the Rings.
Even as it occurred to her that she was about to leave the planet of her birth, that she might never return, she felt a dramatic drop, one that hit her in the belly.
She gasped, caught off guard, and looked at Laksri again.
He’d already been watching her when she turned.
That time, she found his expression even more difficult to read.
She sensed some complexity of emotion, what might have been conflict, but she couldn’t understand it well enough to trust it.
Looking away from him a second time, Jet gazed up through the view port.
The hole in the sky had already grown bigger. Jet could feel the ship moving under her, but that first jolt that dropped her stomach didn’t repeat. Instead, a pressure sank her back, head and legs hard into the chair, tightening the air around her body.
She knew the last part might be an illusion.
She’d been told the Nirreth had artificial gravity in all of their interstellar transports, and that everything would be pressurized, so she shouldn’t feel much once they broke atmo.
In the same instant, it occurred to her that she must be looking at monitors, not actual view ports. As soon as the thought struck her, she felt dumb for not realizing it before.
Of course they were monitors.
Richter told her that most humans freaked out during their first trip off-world. Most had to be sedated. Something to do with leaving their home planet, or maybe a fear of dying in space. Most of them had never even been in a ship before.
Truthfully, Jet’s own feet lost their connection to Earth only twice before now.
The second time had been when Richter picked her up in his culler.
The first time had been when her Uncle Draven took her on a ride in a helicopter, back when she was a kid.
Draven and some of his war buddies pieced the thing together from scraps they found around Vancouver following the war, ignoring the ban on humans owning air vehicles. Jet’s mother had a fit when she heard he’d taken Jet up. She ranted about them being shot down by cullers and ground-to-air missiles and whatever else.
Thinking about it now, at nineteen versus fourteen, Jet wondered if her mom had been right.
Her uncle’s helicopter only survived a few months. The Nirreth caught it on radar one night and shot it out of the sky, with two of her uncle’s friends in it.
Thinking about Uncle Draven only confused Jet more, though.
For all she knew, they’d killed him by now, because of her.
Flinching at the thought, she steeled herself as the viewscreen above showed them passing through that doorway in the sky. Then all Jet could see was the wider, darker, yellow sky of the planet above the Green Zone.
That didn’t last for long, either.
That wider curve remained visible only for a few minutes before it started changing color. Sparks lit up around the monitor’s image. Within seconds, it looked as if the outer hull of the ship had caught on fire. The ship’s acceleration seemed to increase the further they got from the surface of the planet.
Within a few seconds, those tongues
of flame had dissipated, too.
Once it had, the night sky erupted into view.
Jet found herself surrounded by a cool, silent, motionless sea of dark.
Diamond-like stars of all colors filled her view.
She’d never seen so many stars in her life.
She’d never dreamed so many could exist beyond that canopy of clouds and pollution she’d endured since she’d been old enough to look up. In some parts of that sky, stars clustered together so densely they formed smoky, pinprick clouds, shimmering in a black backdrop of space. Everything looked so sharp, so detailed, it bewildered her.
Jet blinked, turning her head to try and take it all in, shifting her focus gradually across the screen. It all moved too quickly for her to see even a fraction of it.
Gradually, she felt that tightness in her chest let go.
It left a strange blankness in its wake.
When she glanced at Laksri, she saw his features had relaxed.
It occurred to her for the first time that he’d done this before.
In fact, he’d done it numerous times, given that he’d been born on Astet. She didn’t even know how old Laksri was, she realized, not in Earth years. She didn’t know how old he’d been when he’d been forced into his own Retribution match.
He’d mentioned in passing that he’d worked as a pilot and a trader in the years following his escape, before eventually making his way to Earth.
She hadn’t really thought about what that meant until now.
Jet felt her mouth purse.
Her eyes never left his strangely feline features.
He really was the First Son. He’d grown up Nirreth royalty, whatever he’d allowed himself to become in the years since. He’d been raised in a protected bubble that told him his life meant more than the average Nirreth’s.
He’d been groomed to be their future king.
Most would have just followed the party line.
Most would have just waited for the day the Empire got handed to them on a silver platter.
That meant something, didn’t it? That Laksri wasn’t someone who could just smile and accept whatever the world handed him?
Eventually he must have felt her stare.
He turned his head, returning her gaze. Wary at first, his eyes reflected a faint surprise after he spent a few seconds studying her expression.
“What?” he said. “What are you thinking about, Jet?”
She couldn’t answer at first. When she looked back at the stars, she found herself speaking, almost before she knew she meant to.
“Why didn’t you?” she said.
“Why didn’t I what?”
“Play along,” she said. “Why didn’t you just let them make you king?”
When she glanced at him that time, he frowned.
“I told you why––” he began.
But she cut him off, shaking her head.
“You didn’t tell me,” she said. “Not really. Not the whole truth.”
She turned, studying his face more openly.
“What was it, Laksri? What made the sheltered, pampered, First Son of the Royals start to give a damn? Why would you care about regular Nirreth, when you only saw them from behind the Royal Guard? How could you have an opinion about what happened in the colonies, when you’d never even seen them?”
Seeing the harder look coming over Laksri’s face, Jet felt her jaw tighten.
She didn’t back down.
“What happened, Laks?” she pressed. “Something must have happened.”
The Nirreth looked away.
Jet thought he might answer her, if she waited long enough.
But he didn’t.
16
Finally Seen
Jet stood at one end of their quarters.
She watched, silent, as Laksri sat on the low bed against one wall.
At some point following take off, the belts had come off the chairs where they both sat.
Jet found herself rising to her feet on wobbly legs, looking around at a circular arc of monitors showing a dizzying view of the night sky above and below their feet.
Eerily silent, the observation tower housing the two of them stood above the cockpit, meaning the level filled with Nirreth sitting at terminals who actually piloted the ship.
Staring down through the transparent floor at the bustling activity of those half-dozen Nirreth, Jet felt lost in unreality around where they were.
She’d looked at the ship from the port dock before they left.
She’d looked at pictures of it, too, mostly via public records in the Nirreth information network accessible through most Green Zone terminals.
Even so, she had trouble orienting herself in the thing, even with her usual facility with anything spatial.
She also had trouble acknowledging the space travel part as truly real.
Part of the problem lay in the moving parts of the ship itself, meaning the odd rippling rotation it embodied as it flew, which, while helping to maintain the illusion of planetary gravity, gave it a strangely animalistic look.
From the vids Jet had seen, the rotation of ship-parts made the thing look like it crawled through the emptiness of space, with two sides moving like giant flippers and the main body of the ship undulating between them.
Despite the fact that it looked alive while it moved, the ship’s motions looked more stilted and precise than any animal, insect, bird, or fish Jet had ever seen. No matter how many times they explained what it did, she couldn’t quite wrap her head around it, at least not in a way that made sense, meaning, as a working mechanism in her head.
When the grav-belt kicked in, what had felt like “up” while parked on the space port now felt like “sideways.” The chair Jet had been strapped into suddenly appeared to be facing forward instead of up. She hadn’t even noticed when that change took place; at one point, she simply noticed it had changed.
Not long after, Laksri unlocked himself from his chair.
He regained his feet, tested his balance for a few seconds, then turned to her.
His expression remained placid, irritatingly unfazed.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You can get up.”
She must have hesitated, because the look in his dark eyes sharpened.
“Do you need my help?” he said.
She shook her head before she’d even tested the locks.
Luckily, she’d been able to figure out the mechanism fairly easily, even conscious of Laksri’s eyes on her while she did it.
He watched until she had every one of the belts unlocked.
He also waited while she shakily regained her feet. He pretended to look at the observation monitors whenever she glanced at him, but Jet suspected he’d done that out of some sense of Nirreth politeness, since she could feel his attention on her anyway.
He didn’t approach her, or try to touch her.
He didn’t move even when her knees buckled.
She grabbed for the chair’s arms instead of him, catching herself before she would have fallen to the deck. Her legs continued to wobble as she straightened slowly back to her feet.
The ground felt solid that time, though, like a real floor.
Well, more or less.
When she turned to look at him, Laksri watched her openly.
He didn’t say anything, or move from his spot on the floor, and eventually, Jet began walking… carefully… to the hatch that led to the main ship’s corridor.
She expected Laksri to follow her out, but he didn’t, not at first.
When she’d glanced back, in puzzlement as much as anything, his dark eyes remained riveted to the view of the stars, his expression bordering on pensive.
She didn’t wait for him to look at her again.
She left him there instead, figuring maybe he needed to be alone––or maybe he’d decided she needed the same.
Whatever his motives, she hadn’t seen him again until she made her way to his quarters.
He s
till hadn’t spoken to her.
She’d spent the last however-many minutes and hours exploring the ship. She’d even gotten food at one point, and a cup of murak, the Nirreth answer to coffee.
Her explorations didn’t illuminate much.
Well, they illuminated one thing: it was highly unlikely Jet would get anywhere near Anaze during this flight.
Her attempts to go down to talk to him hit an unambiguous brick wall.
Not only did the guards tell her bluntly that she couldn’t access that part of the ship, but they also informed Jet she had already broken security protocols––which required a formal report––for even asking the question.
Eventually, she made her way back to her and Laksri’s quarters.
Unlike with Anaze’s cell, the Nirreth guards seemed perfectly happy to assist her in finding those. She practically got an escort when she asked for a tour of the other areas of the ship, as well.
Eventually, though, she ran out of ship.
Jet arranged her weight on the dense mattress, feeling her muscles tense.
Laksri still hadn’t really looked at her.
Jet started to gear herself up, turning over words in her mind to try and break the silence, when he abruptly disappeared into a hole in the wall, what she assumed must lead to the washroom. He did it without uttering a word, without even glancing at her, his expression unreadable as his tail gave a few nervous-seeming lashes behind his back.
Sighing, Jet leaned back on the mattress, resigning herself to wait.
When Laksri came out, about a half-hour later, looking like he’d washed, and wearing a different shirt and looser pants, he still avoided her eyes.
She considered trying to talk to him again, then decided to wait until he looked a little less braced for impact.
Anyway, it occurred to her that she could use a shower, too.
She followed his lead, entering the washroom not long after he left it. Once inside, she did probably the same general things he had done: took a shower, brushed her teeth, used the toilet, rubbed a lotion-like substance into her skin and hair.
When she came out, wearing a loose shirt and pants even baggier than his, Laksri had already stretched out on the one bed.
Rather than sleeping, he held a portable monitor in front of his eyes, his other, muscular arm curled back behind his head. She watched his eyes scan images, or maybe text. She watched him for a probably a minute or two, tug-of-warring back and forth in her mind before she walked around to the other side of the bed.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 60
