Richter could never be allowed to truly lead the humans.
Anaze made that clear, from day one.
He told Laksri things, showed him things… things the Nirreth could not unsee.
Jet glimpsed impressions of the same, flashes darting past her eyes that made her flinch, that brought a rush of bile to her throat.
Richter couldn’t be in charge.
Anaze would kill his father himself, before he let that happen.
On that, Laksri and Anaze remained absolutely on the same page.
Truthfully, they’d been on the same page about most things, at least until the last few months. At least until Jet got culled from the broken streets of Vancouver, and she came on board swinging, cutting Laksri across the chest with her sword.
Jet complicated things.
She complicated things even before Richter decided she would be the one to play figurehead to a new humanity. In climbing the charts of the Rings, Jet succeeded beyond their wildest hopes. She’d almost been too good, good enough to scare some of the Nirreth higher-ups with her quasi-military approach to the matches.
Previously, they’d only hoped she could stay in the running, build a decent ranking, be able to hold her own against the tougher runs long enough to make it to the next level.
They’d hoped she might build some good will with the Royals, so that Laksri might approach them with his true pedigree.
They wanted Jet to win the Nirreth over with her pluck and how she looked in a sense-suit; they never guessed in a million years that she’d win them over from pure fighting ability. They hadn’t expected her to break records on runs, much less graduate to full sponsored status after her very first trial.
From the beginning, the plan had been to elevate her through the Rings until she would make a believable human mate for the Royal First Son.
Richter originated that part of the plan, along with getting Laksri in the door with the Royals themselves, as Jet’s bodyguard. Richter had the idea in his head about Laksri and Jet early. He watched her in that demonstration like someone just handed him a solid-gold trophy.
That very day, Richter pulled the two of them aside, announcing he had a way to accelerate things, to bring them all the alliance they sought, potentially without bloodshed.
Even then, Jet complicated things.
Richter tried too hard to control her.
He wanted too badly to own her, and seemed to have his own ideas about how to use her, even beyond what he’d bothered to share with Laksri and his son.
She complicated things for Laksri.
She complicated things for Laksri the moment she landed in that culler ship.
He knew he was in trouble when she went after him with her sword, drawing it even before they had her inside the cargo bay. He found himself wanting to sting her––wanting to do more than sting her, even in those first few minutes.
She complicated things when he realized he wasn’t the only one looking at Jet that way.
She complicated things when he and Anaze argued about Laksri stinging her… then about Laksri trying to seduce her. She complicated things when Anaze started altering plans because he hated the fact that he’d put them together.
And yes, she complicated things by becoming the darling of the Rings, the most popular player since they first allowed human contestants. Already one of the most recognizable human faces in the Nirreth world, Jet would only grow more visible once they started running her in challenge matches and the betting on her started for real.
Jet’s face already decorated advertisements, virtual billboards, news reports.
She had swiftly become the new face of the Rings, literally and figuratively.
Her string of wins, from that very first run where she blew up a Nirreth command ship to the most recent one, where she’d faced her own brother in that mud-brick castle, made it virtually impossible for fans of the Rings to dismiss her as just another mammal.
Some muttered her presence had already become a revolutionary icon.
They accused her of politicizing the Rings, of deliberately turning herself into a symbol. They accused pro-human factions of capitalizing on her popularity.
None of that was entirely untrue.
Jet managed to turn her persona in the Rings into a factor all of its own, one they hadn’t designed into the game. For the same reason, Richter would never let Jet get too far out of his control. He grew more and more proprietary over everything she did, everything she became. More and more, he tried to isolate her from Laksri and Anaze.
At the very least, he tried to manipulate how she saw them.
Even so, Laksri suspected that Anaze’s surprise at seeing Jet with him on the floor of their quarters hadn’t been wholly feigned.
Whatever Anaze said when the two of them discussed strategy alone, he didn’t take it well, seeing her and Laksri together.
It might have made the whole play-act more convincing, but it strained things with the two of them. Neither admitted it openly, but Jet complicated things, above and beyond how Richter used her to play them against one another.
She complicated things with Trazen.
A sharper pain hit Jet at the thought.
Her memories mixed with Laksri’s, the emotions he’d felt upon seeing her impressions of the Ringmaster. Before, seeing the recordings of Trazen stinging her, over and over while he’d been unconscious, Laksri had been angry.
After feeling Jet’s side of the incident, the connection she’d felt with the other Nirreth, that anger turned into a completely irrational jealousy.
He wanted to kill him.
Even before, he’d wanted to kill Trazen for what he’d done.
So much so, he hadn’t been able to leave his quarters for days after he woke.
He’d forced himself to remain indoors rather than hunting the other Nirreth down, cutting the beating heart out of his chest. Like Trazen said to Jet at the time, Laksri knew the time wasn’t right. It could destroy everything he and Anaze had been trying to do.
Yet he couldn’t trust himself not to kill Trazen, not to try, at least.
Richter tried to play Laks around Trazen, too.
He taunted Laksri for losing Jet’s trust, for leaving her vulnerable to the Ringmaster by screwing around with Jet in the first place, turning his relationship with Jet into some kind of challenge for the other Nirreth.
He blamed Laks for trying to manipulate Jet into being loyal to him.
Richter thought Laksri was simply using Jet.
He thought Jet was Laksri’s means of controlling Richter, perhaps even the Nirreth fans who adored her more with every match.
If Richter had known how Laksri really felt, or how much things had changed for him after the first time he’d stung her, Jet would be in even more danger than she was already.
For now, Laksri could only try to keep Richter in the dark.
He wouldn’t let Richter touch her, no matter what the human intended once they reached Astet. Laksri already knew Richter had his own reasons for wanting to go there––reasons that had nothing to do with wiping out Laksri’s old torturers in the Rings.
Richter’s interest lay in his own version of the past, his own twisted ideas of the future.
When Jet opened her eyes next, her head throbbed.
She felt as if a giant hand squeezed her skull with metal fingers.
Rubbing her eyes, she tried to blank out her mind, if only to give it a rest. When she tried to stop the words, she got pictures instead, and more of those more tactile impressions, sensations that brought the heat back to her cheeks.
She found herself wondering just how many times they’d…
But the thoughts around Trazen stayed with her, too, making her headache worse.
Laksri’s jealousy felt real enough, but she felt the sense of ownership there, too.
She felt a little sick at the thought, a kind of worry that started somewhere in her gut and worked its way up to her throbbing head. T
he number of plans and counter plans and lies made it difficult to pull everything apart. From what she’d seen in Laksri, they’d all been lying to her, pretty much from day one.
She even understood why. Their reasons made sense to her, even as another part of her wondered how much that stemmed from the venom, from being inside Laksri’s mind.
She wanted him to come back. She needed to talk to him.
It seemed like only a few seconds passed before he did.
The door opened and he stood there, breathing harder than usual, as if he’d heard her and run the whole way back.
She saw a glassy look in his eyes that told her the effects of the venom hadn’t entirely left his system, either. His chest still moved more visibly than normal as he crossed the threshold of their quarters, his eyes still on hers as the door slid shut behind him. His tail coiled behind him in a languorous arc, and she felt desire on him before he’d even touched her.
Crossing the room to the bed, he crawled over it to her, pulling her down under him before he lay on her.
Before she could decide if that was such a great idea, either, he stung her, wiping the question entirely from her mind. When she asked him to sting her again, a few seconds later, he barely waited for her to get the words out.
The flood of information didn’t abate, even after everything he’d told her the night before… even when he started kissing her again. It was as if it left off, right where she’d last seen him, even as it filled her in on everything that happened since.
She saw him on the bridge.
She saw him discussing the Retribution match with Trazen, his anger at the other Nirreth, his inability to even look at him, at least not for more than a few seconds at a time.
She felt Trazen’s eyes on his, equally angry, obviously aware of the venom in Laksri’s expression, the glassiness of his eyes.
She saw Trazen staring at him through the monitor, eyes cold, colder than she’d ever seen them. She saw Laksri in the cells, too, talking to Anaze, fighting with Anaze, telling him what he’d done, using the language they’d worked out between them, before Anaze even brought Laksri to Richter, telling Richter who he really was.
Jet felt a shiver of nerves, wondering…
But Richter wasn’t there. They’d made sure of it.
Richter would travel on a different ship.
Trazen didn’t travel with them, either.
Laksri spoke to him via transmission.
The thought of both of them being far away echoed somewhere, reassuring her, even as the worry in her continued to vibrate, somewhere equally far from her conscious mind. She didn’t feel any dishonesty in Laksri now, but the worry wouldn’t abate.
Something in what he’d told her didn’t feel right.
Something was wrong.
She saw it in Trazen’s eyes, in the silence from Richter, in what she felt as they approached the Retribution.
Laksri felt her worry, and the images that came with it.
He tried to understand, to find out what she felt, what she picked up on, what it meant, but she didn’t know what caused it.
Something was wrong.
The feeling echoed, even as she grew distracted by his skin and hands. She let him pull her back into that space, but the feeling still wouldn’t leave her.
Something was wrong.
18
The Dark Side
The landing was strange, if only because Jet didn’t see any of it.
Unlike the take-off, which entailed a fair bit of ceremony and pomp in front of cameras and standing crowds and with her and Laksri wearing ceremonial clothes and the Royal Guard holding the queen’s banners, the landing entailed…
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing and no one greeted them on the other side.
Jet didn’t know if the ceremonials on Earth occurred because the First Son had been leaving the physical seat of power and control on Earth, or if it had more to do with the lack of a major media presence on Astet.
Whatever the reason, no one waited for them when they touched down.
No one came out to greet them, either.
They’d traversed the length of the connecting tunnel between the ship and the enclosed hangar before the reality of that silence truly sank in. Realizing no one would be popping out with a microphone after all, or trying to touch her or Laksri, Jet felt herself start to relax.
When the corridor opened up on a giant room filled with working Nirreth, none of whom spared them much more than a glance, she finally exhaled a full breath.
The hangar alone looked like a ghost city of sorts, like one of those bombed-out human metros that stood empty on Earth following the war. Dozens of Nirreth still walked the hangar’s floors, and drove small vehicles from one end of the cavernous space to the other, but compared to the thousands that must have worked here at one time, it appeared nearly empty.
Jet guessed the hangar was built to house a hundred times more ships and people than it currently did.
Perhaps a thousand times as many.
The remaining ships and workers only served to emphasize the emptiness.
She didn’t have long to look at it though, or imagine what it must have been like during the peak of Astet’s civilization.
Guards ushered Jet and Laksri into an elevator, and it promptly sank them down into the lower levels of the structure.
According to Laksri, most of the Royal Guard had beaten them down to the planet, leaving the ship an hour earlier to scout the hangars and the rest of the route, including Jet and Laksri’s assigned quarters.
As Jet walked into that glass elevator, she also got her only glimpse of Anaze.
She hadn’t seen him since he attacked Laksri in their room.
In those few seconds while the massive glass elevator sank down to the ground floor, she couldn’t help but stare at him. Five guards surrounded Anaze, but apparently they didn’t see him as much of a threat, since none physically restrained him apart from the chains.
From Anaze’s expression, he was obviously under the influence of venom.
Given his prisoner status, he probably hadn’t been venom-free the entire trip.
It struck her to wonder how he managed to keep his thoughts and memories from them while he was under the influence. She knew there had to be some way, or Richter, Laksri and herself would have been arrested months ago, but she couldn’t understand how he did it.
She could block some of her more private thoughts under the effects of a few stings––even from Laksri, with whom she shared more than just venom––but no way could she have maintained that for days and weeks of continuous stinging.
From his expression, Anaze didn’t have a clue where he was.
He appeared only about half-conscious, so sick with venom, he probably couldn’t take a breath without asking permission of his Nirreth guards.
She would have to ask Laksri.
Not here, though.
Laksri already hinted Anaze had specialized training of some kind. Jet wanted specifics. More to the point, she wanted to know if she could be trained the same way.
As she continued to stare at Anaze, it struck Jet that he didn’t look dissimilar to how she’d first seen him at the Green Zone.
That time, it was Richter who ordered his Nirreth guards to abuse him.
Jet knew he’d done it to convince Jet and whoever else that Anaze was just some skag he picked up outside the dome, not anyone he knew, and certainly not his son.
She wondered now if Richter had more than one objective with that, however.
Maybe Richter also wanted to know if his son might be hiding anything from him, like the true nature of his relationship to Laksri. Knowing Richter, he would think nothing of having his pet Nirreth sting the crap out of his own son for intel.
Knowing Richter, he wouldn’t think twice.
The thought sickened her a little.
Maybe more than a little.
Anaze had looked almost as bad then as he
did now. He’d been surrounded by guards, like now, doped on venom, covered in bruises. He looked thinner to her this time, even though he’d spent months in the Green Zone, eating well––unlike those years he’d spent living with her in the skag pits, toughing it out with the half-poisoned food they scrounged from the ground and water, and hunted with bows, swords, traps, snares, and fishing lines.
For the first time, that really hit her, too.
Anaze had put himself through that hell in those skag pits––for years.
He’d lived outside the comforts of both Richter’s people and the Green Zones, all so he could try and recruit her and others to his cause.
She even understood now, why he told her so little.
Back then, Jet had been too steeped in the ignorance of the skags. To her, the Nirreth were boogeymen, vicious animals that would try to eat her, or would cut her up and experiment on her if they caught her in one of their nets.
Jet’s first night in the Green Zone, when Anaze talked to her out by that fountain, Anaze told Jet he couldn’t have convinced her of the truth of things, not on his own, not without her seeing the Green Zones for herself. Even to try would give her too many reasons to suspect him, and to distrust anything he said.
The simplest and most effective solution also took the longest.
Jet needed to see it for herself.
Anaze, Richter, Laksri––they needed her to come to the Green Zone, and reach her own conclusions about the situation there, and the true nature of the relationship between humans and Nirreth. According to Laksri, Anaze had been confident Jet would come around, once she saw it all for herself.
Anaze hadn’t expected her to take one as a lover, however.
He’d known it might be necessary to pretend some kind of arrangement with Laksri, but he’d never expected her to do it for real.
Jet continued to study Anaze’s face, trying to wrap her head around all of the information Laksri had given her, mixed with the things Anaze told her himself.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 63
