“You have a good time at the ball, kitten,” he advised. “Maybe I’ll see you around. For now, if you’ll excuse me… I’ve got work to do with the grownups.”
Giving her a mock bow, he stepped back, presumably to allow her and Laksri to pass.
“You must love it here, Richter,” she observed. “So few humans around to remind you what you are.” Walking by him slowly, she turned to add, “…So many rocks to hide under.”
He surprised her, chuckling at her words.
“Oh, and you’d know all about hiding in dark holes, wouldn’t you, girl?” His coffee-colored eyes darted to Laksri. “I imagine Laks here must like that about you. Must be just like being with a girl from home, eh Laks? Minus the blue skin and the nasty habit of trying to kill their mates after they consummate…”
Seeing Jet’s eyes widen, right before she glanced at Laksri, Richter grinned wider. That time, it even touched his eyes.
“Come now, pet. You must have wondered. Why it is so many Nirreth males tend to seek out other-worlders for their beds?”
Jet bit her lip. She had wondered, of course.
Richter must have seen something on her face. His smile grew harder.
“Didn’t he tell you, kitten?” he jeered. “Female Nirreth are pretty much immune to venom after the first sting, from a particular male anyway. Their own venom is more powerful, too. A lot of the time the males end up being the submissive ones in their little get-togethers.” His smile grew hard. “It’s not easy to make a female Nirreth your full-time bitch. Unlike the females of some other species I could mention––”
Laksri gave a low hiss, his tail lashing warningly.
Richter went on like he didn’t notice.
“…Really, female Nirreth have a pretty low tolerance for the males of the species just in general,” he added, giving Laksri a portion of that smile. “Once they get what they want from them, the female Nirreth generally kick their asses out. Oh, sure… they might remain visibly together for alliances or whatever else, but that’s all just for show. The females tend to do their own thing until they want to breed. Once they have their babies, they go back to pretending the males are little more than the occasional nuisance…”
Richter gave Jet a direct look, lifting his eyebrow.
“Nowhere near as easy to get sex out of them, love,” he added. “Much less all of that intoxicating trust and adoration. I hear it’s like a drug, getting that, after generations of nothing but scorn from the females of their own kind. Is that true, Laks?”
The growl in Laksri’s throat deepened.
Richter chuckled, but Jet still felt most of his attention on her. She could feel him looking for a reaction, so she just stared at him, refusing to give him one.
Still, his words echoed somewhere in her mind.
When Richter didn’t break her stare after a few seconds more, Jet looked away, shifting her gaze to the room’s large bay window, even as she used it as an excuse to walk away. A few paces later, standing in front of the glass, she let her eyes drift up, taking in that dramatic green and red sky, realizing again just how dead it looked.
She waited until she knew Richter had moved away.
Glancing over her shoulder only then, she watched him approach another cluster of entering Nirreth. He said something jokingly to one in Nargili, slapping the same Nirreth on the shoulder.
Laksri came up beside her.
Asking a silent question with his hand on her arm, he coiled his tail around her waist after she answered, guiding her past Richter and his schmoozing and shady deals, moving them deeper into the common room’s football-field-sized lounge.
When Jet glanced back over her shoulder, minutes later, Richter was gone.
Remembering that exchange now, Jet frowned.
It struck her, not for the first time, that Richter seemed to feel betrayed by her.
Given what he’d done to her, pretty much from the first moment they’d met––much less all those years before, when he stole food and equipment from the skag pits, gouged them on medicines and infiltrated her with his own son––the thought should have been laughable.
It should have been, but somehow, Jet couldn’t find the humor in it.
20
House Pet
Jet refocused on the dead-looking sky, looking at it above the arena this time, instead of through the windows of the residency common room.
She studied the dark greens and reds streaking the underside of low clouds, trying to make sense of the shadows and light. Unlike the indoor arena of the Rings back home, this stadium didn’t have a roof, so she could see mountains in the distance, just below those low-hanging clouds.
The sky was real, according to Laksri, not one of those artificial domes.
Even so, here on Astet, even the Nirreth didn’t really go outside.
Some of that had to do with the atmosphere.
Some had to do with the giant lizards that still lived on this side of the world. They hunted in packs, according to Laksri, and went after Nirreth even when they rode in motorized vehicles.
Jet had been specifically warned against leaving the Royal residence for any reason, and not only because of lethal lizards and the low oxygen count.
There might be fewer Nirreth on Astet as compared to the Green Zones on Earth, but according to Laksri, the Nirreth who remained had a slightly less multi-cultural outlook. She’d been warned that most hadn’t seen many humans, at least not in the flesh. Since that meant they’d only seen humans on television, and those images were hyper-sexualized, their perceptions of her would be pretty distorted.
Jet’s long hair would intensify that response.
Even when they weren’t being sexualized, humans depicted in the news and even Nirreth movies often showed them as either criminals or terrorists, which didn’t exactly help. Jet’s celebrity status in the Rings pretty much guaranteed that her presence would cause a stir, given how rarely they got to meet celebrities of any kind out here.
The combination of the above factors meant Jet would likely be touched, stroked, prodded, stared at, followed around and probably stung, if anyone got close enough to do any one of those things.
Laksri told her outright she’d likely be raped, if any males caught her alone.
Despite his words, Laksri tried to make her comfortable behind several layers of security, and under quasi-house arrest.
He upped the oxygen levels in their shared rooms, but to human, not to Nirreth levels, which meant he likely wasn’t getting as much as he would have liked.
He also gave her a box of those blood-enhancement pills, in case she needed them and he wasn’t around. Jet pocketed the box, unable to hide her gratitude. Truthfully, the idea of not having enough air scared the hell out of her.
For that, and a multitude of other reasons, she didn’t feel safe here.
It occurred to her already that they might have been lured out here.
As much as Anaze and Laksri thought they’d arranged for the Retribution to take place, others might have decided to capitalize on their being here, possibly even to pull another coup. Given the reality of Nirreth politics, this whole thing might just be an excuse to assassinate every one of them.
She wished she at least knew what Laksri, Anaze… and Richter… had planned.
She wished she knew what Trazen was up to, too.
She knew from Laksri that he and Anaze thought they had some means of getting Anaze out of this alive. She had no idea what that was, and couldn’t help being skeptical, given Trazen was the one running the Retribution. If they’d made a deal with the Queen or one of her allies, Jet couldn’t really wrap her head around a plan that didn’t include Trazen being neutralized, if not killed outright.
She still had trouble thinking about them murdering Trazen.
On top of all that, there was the reason they’d wanted to come to Astet in the first place. Laksri, Anaze––and presumably Richter––were still targeting specific Nirreth here, on Ast
et, to wipe out any record of Laksri’s past.
Laksri hadn’t come out and said it, but at least part of the reason he’d ordered the entire party of the First Son to remain isolated had to do with fears around him being recognized.
Jet still didn’t really understand how at least one Nirreth hadn’t recognized Laksri already. They’d televised the coronation. Laks was all over the news in the time since, including for her Rings matches. Laks claimed they changed his face for the televised Retribution, since he was of Royal blood, but it still struck her as weird.
Someone should have figured out who he was by now.
At the thought, Jet swallowed, feeling her throat tighten.
They still weren’t telling her everything.
She found herself turning over Trazen’s words, what he’d said to her before he stung her, when he’d told he he’d been asked to act as architect for the Retribution. Had Richter, Laksri and Anaze lured Trazen out here to assassinate him?
Clearly, Trazen himself seemed to think that was a possibility.
Either way, Laksri seemed confident they would get Anaze out alive. Which could only mean they had something dramatic planned for the Retribution itself––presuming they hadn’t gotten Anaze out already, meaning prior to the run starting.
No one survived Retribution… not if it played out to its logical conclusion.
Retribution wasn’t designed to be survived.
Getting him out mid-run was the only thing left.
Jet settled on that for a temporary explanation, knowing she still might be wrong.
For now, it was the only thing that made sense: stage a big revolutionary hit with Laksri and Richter’s rebels, bust Anaze out of the cells or out of the arena, and in the process, kill a previously-ID’d list of Nirreth prisoners and guards who might know Laksri.
Maybe they’d even free a few of Laksri’s old rebel buddies at the same time, give them a ride back to their comrades on the colony worlds.
For some reason, nothing in the pictures Jet’s mind painted reassured her at all.
Truthfully, it made her feel sick.
Jet found herself struggling with the stress of just having to sit there, watching and waiting for this thing go down. She wasn’t used to playing the spectator.
Her nerves worsened as the venom wore off.
Around that time, more Nirreth began filing into the back end of the Royals’ secure booth, most of them stopping to stare and murmur about her, but none approaching her directly. They sat behind her instead, in rows separated by a glass partition that left her in near-silence, even with the door standing open between the two segments.
With that first group of Nirreth came another human, one Jet didn’t know.
Tall, over 1.8 meters in height, she had long, blond hair, and looked to be in her early to mid-twenties. Unlike the giant woman Jet had seen training in the Green Zone back on Earth, this woman was slim, with wide, deer-shaped blue eyes and a perfectly-shaped oval face to go with an athletic but strategically curved figure.
That wasn’t the main reason Jet stared, though.
Truthfully, the woman didn’t look quite real.
Her pale, perfect skin and light, round eyes reminded Jet of those old films they used to show back at the skag settlement, of humans that looked more like living dolls than real people. This woman certainly didn’t look like any of the people Jet grew up with, who earned their muscles the hard way and never managed to scrounge enough protein to grow anywhere near to this woman’s height.
Most skags had black or brown hair and almond-shaped eyes, too, which made sense, as just about all came ethnically from roughly the same stock, a random mixture of Native American, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, African-American, Latino, South Pacific Islander, and white that had morphed into an ethnicity of its own.
This woman looked like she’d been created in a test tube.
She didn’t even look like one of Trazen’s “consorts,” who tended to have dyed hair and light eyes that Jet always assumed came from enhancement surgery. A few might have had other kinds of surgeries, too, but something about them still struck Jet as being like her. Maybe it was the expressions on their faces, maybe just their overall body type.
Whatever it was, something about them remained lean, feral––no matter how well fed they became from Green Zone food, or how soft their muscles grew from Green Zone pampering.
This woman looked like something else.
Like the human version of a baby T-Rex.
Jet continued to stare at the strange-looking woman as she hung on the arm of a young, muscular Nirreth who kept knocking over things on the food and drink tray with his tail. From his movements and facial expression, they’d spent some time indulging in venom before they got here. They’d probably imbibed more than a little alcohol, too.
Jet didn’t recognize the young Nirreth, but he must be a member of the Royal family, or he wouldn’t be sharing their box. He looked darker though, like the Nirreth who lived here, on Astet, rather than those on Earth.
She glanced up at one of the dead-eye cameras as she thought it, and frowned.
She felt Trazen there.
That probably explained the real source of her feeling like eyes followed her every move. The knowledge that Trazen worked close by, probably in the ops center right above where she sat, vibrated her nerves more than it should have.
Trazen would have heard all about her and Laksri by now, just like Richter had.
The fact that Laksri and Jet spent most of the trip to Astet in their quarters hadn’t gone unnoticed by anyone, least of all by the Ringmaster, Jet suspected.
She already wondered if she’d end up having to be the one to determine Trazen’s real motives in coming to Astet.
She already suspected he’d let himself be lured here.
She wondered if she could learn more, given their venom connection.
The one time her mind toyed with the idea in the vicinity of Laksri, however, the Nirreth prince just about burst a blood vessel. They’d argued for a good thirty minutes, most of it via the venom bond since Laksri hadn’t wanted either of them to speak of it openly.
Venom bond or no, he’d sworn at her, made accusations, threatened her. He’d done everything but pin her down and make her promise not to go near Trazen again.
Laksri lost his temper completely in the first five seconds of that conversation, his face a distorted mask in his efforts to impress upon Jet what a terrible idea he thought that was. He wanted her to promise not to try and collect any intelligence on the Ringmaster––using any method, much less by attempting to use Trazen’s own venom against him.
Laksri didn’t want her anywhere near Trazen.
Further, the idea of Jet doing anything to strengthen the venom connection between her and the Ringmaster angered him to the point of complete irrationality, especially when he was under the influence of venom himself. He told her the second she opened to Trazen willingly, she’d never be free of him. Never.
He would always have a hold on her, as long as both of them remained alive.
Jet didn’t miss the implication there, in terms of Laksri and herself.
She also found it interesting he was only bringing that up now.
Further, Laksri seemed to truly believe that once Jet allowed that bond to form, Trazen would simply kill her. He might wait until he had sex with her. He might wait until the timing would benefit him politically, or at least not harm him.
But he would kill her in the end.
When Jet asked why Trazen would do that, Laksri lashed his tail even more angrily.
According to him, there were a lot of political advantages to killing her, from the point of view of someone like Trazen. If the Ringmaster killed her, especially if he did it slow and sexualized her death, it would erase the “Samurai” myth of Jet in one fell swoop.
Jet’s image would collapse as a symbol of human freedom and fighting spirit. She would be reduced to an a
nimal, useful for sex and easily disposed of afterwards.
Oh, there might be some clucking of tongues and shaking of heads, but no one would scream too loudly, or even hold Trazen fully responsible.
In the minds of most Nirreth, she’d be reduced to an animal.
A house pet, broken by a careless owner.
It would also make Laksri look weak.
It would give the splinter group among the Royals an opening, if only by causing the populace to doubt him. They wouldn’t trust a prince who couldn’t protect his own companion from an encroaching male, no matter how it happened.
The fear in Laksri’s eyes as he explained all of this told Jet how serious he was.
He really did believe Trazen would kill her. By the end of their argument, Laksri even started listing names of Trazen’s previous consorts, showing her images in her head of what had happened to them, the condition of their bodies after they’d been found.
After that, Jet kept her thoughts of Trazen to herself, and far away from Laksri.
Still, she didn’t blow him off.
She’d known Trazen was, at heart, a murderer.
His standing in the Rings alone attested to that, even apart from how he maneuvered politically. She’d suspected Trazen’s interest in her had always been political. She’d never thought about it quite the way Laksri explained it, but she assumed he was like the rest of them, and just saw her as a pawn on the board, not an actual person.
Before he stung her, Jet even thought his sexual interest was fake.
She assumed Trazen only pretended interest in her to rattle Laksri, maybe to rattle Richter, too. She figured it was nothing more than a power play, Trazen wanting to show he could take her away from the other male.
The problem was, when Trazen actually stung her, none of those things she thought she knew about him rang true.
The idea that he might torture her, rape her, then just bleed her out, as some political message as to the worthlessness of humans, flat-out terrified her, but she almost couldn’t make herself believe it.
The fact that he’d convinced her he was something other than what he was, scared her more than anything. It also angered her to the point of sheer irrationality.
The Complete Alien Apocalypse Series (Parts I-IV Plus Bonus Novella): An Apocalyptic, Romantic, Science Fiction, Alien Invasion Adventure Page 65
