It was that or she’d end up being sold, or worse.
Even reminding herself why she needed to win felt more like a ticking clock hanging over her head than a real motivation. She heard that same clock beating pretty much in time to her heart––a beat that seemed to keep accelerating under her ribs the closer she got to the end of the long tunnel. Light shone at the end of that long track, just like the mythical death-land her mother taught her about. Jet found herself hoping feverishly that Biggs and her mother wouldn’t pick tonight of all nights to try and pick up the pirated feed from the Nirreth towers.
Even so, Jet knew they would. Just like she would have, if their positions were reversed and one of them had disappeared.
The stamping grew louder, until it seemed to be compressing the skin, hair and bone around Jet’s head, throbbing behind her ears and drowning out the imaginary clock it replaced.
“Big crowd out there,” Jet muttered. “Is that usual? For a beginner, I mean...I thought these were kind of nothing matches, right?”
She felt Laksri hedging before he even opened his mouth.
“It is the first match with a female,” he admitted after a too-long pause. “They are hoping for a good show...”
“They’re hoping for a bloodbath,” Richter snorted from his other side.
Anaze and Laksri both glared at him, but Richter never took his eyes off hers.
“...But you’re not going to give it to them, are you, kitten?” he said, laying a hand on her shoulder. “You’re not. Remember everything we told you...and get your head on straight! You look like a rabbit approaching the den of a wolf. You know all of this. Don’t panic on us now and blow everything. You need to walk out there like you own the place...”
For some reason, Richter was the person whose words snapped Jet out.
They took her out of the bad place, anyway, long enough for her head to clear, and for her to hear the logic in what he’d said. After letting that logic sink in, she nodded, taking a few deliberate, deep breaths in an attempt to slow down her heart. Shaking out her hands and arms as she walked, she forced her head up, a psychological trick more than anything, and did her best to block out all of the sounds around and above her, as well as the up and down oscillations of her own mind.
None of that would help her now, anyway.
Richter was right. If she walked in there like a frightened animal, it really was over. Richter and Laksri promised to pull her if she got axed, to get her out of the Green Zone before the inevitable fallout if she bombed her first match...or the Royals tried to sell her.
But it hit Jet suddenly, brutally, what that really meant.
It meant this fight was over...for Jet, at least.
She’d go back to the skag pits, try to eke out an existence for herself and Biggs and her mom while she waited for something to change, anything to change. She’d go back to being totally helpless and unaware of anything that might actually change things for the people she cared about...everyone she loved. She’d be at the mercy of people like Richter instead, and whoever he chose to replace her in their next attempt to destabilize the Royals.
There were other, more confusing ramifications that she couldn’t let herself think about, not now, anyway. Thoughts around Anaze and Laksri that she couldn’t disentangle well enough to make sense of them...like the fact that she’d probably never see either of them again.
Even taking the two of them out of it, the idea of going back home, knowing what she knew now, was almost unbearable. The other possibilities appealed to her even less...recruiting foot soldiers for Richter’s twisted war, or worse, living on some rebel settlement, playing games with the other settlers to help keep up their cover. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she realized there would be no going home...not really.
Beside, Richter would never risk just cutting her loose.
If he thought she might spill the beans about who and what he was to the other skags, much less information about his ties to the Nirreth rebels, Richter might just kill her. More likely, though, he’d just disappear her into the ranks of one of his campgrounds of loyals, and she’d never see her own family again. She’d end up fishwife to one of his lieutenants, living in some backwater and birthing rebel babies, like Anaze’s mom.
Laksri’s tail wound around her, even as Anaze sidled up between Jet and his father.
“...They’re not only here hoping you’ll die,” Anaze said, giving his father another irritated stare. “...You belong to the Royals. They know that, and the Royals haven’t entered a fighter in a few months, so that makes you interesting. Most of them also know about you and the sword-fighting thing, so they came here to see that, too...”
Shrugging a little, he motioned towards her body with a grin.
“...Some also came to see a woman fight in a skin-tight costume. Just like they might do back home.”
Jet rolled her eyes a little, but knocked into him playfully with her shoulder without thinking, like she would’ve done back at the skag pit, before all this. He gave her a surprised look, then grinned, bumping her back with his own shoulder.
“There’s the Jet I know,” he joked, smiling. “I was wondering if she was still there, under the black catsuit and all that make up. You look like a raccoon, by the way...” he added, motioning towards her eyes with another grin.
Laksri gave a snorting laugh, loosening his hold on her slightly.
Only Richter’s eyes remained as hard as flint.
“You think you can put on a bit of a show for these blue-skins without getting yourself killed, you do it,” he advised, his coffee-colored eyes still trained on the growing patch of light up ahead, his strides steady and purposeful. “Remember, we need you to make it to that fifth fight.” Leaning closer to her ear, he added in a lower voice, barely perceptible even with his lips against her skin, “No fifth fight, no tenth fight...do the math, kitten and keep your head in the game. I expect this match to go by the numbers...”
“...So you wait until the last week to train me,” she retorted, giving him a harder look.
But something in her expression seemed to please him, because for the first time, his lightened. He chuckled in return, right before he clapped her on the back in a friendly way.
“That’s right, kitten,” he grinned. “You get to show us how good you really are.” His eyes went serious once more before he said, “What are your priorities?”
“Points,” she said promptly. “Especially in the first hour.”
“Do you try to win?”
Jet rolled her eyes a little, not answering.
“Do you try to win?” Richter said, his voice a harder growl.
“No,” she said.
Staring at her for another beat, he grunted. “Good. Remember that, kitten. No one wins the first match...you’re better off staying where the points are. You want to do well, but you’re still a rookie. Don’t get ambitious. Everyone who gets ambitious their first match get slaughtered...and if you try to win, it will take you away from the points. Understand?”
Jet nodded, internally rolling her eyes, but not really in anger.
Instead, her nerves had come back.
Anyway, they’d already explained to her why they waited so long to brief her on the Rings. Jet knew she still didn’t know everything. In fact, she was fairly sure that...as always...Richter told her only the bare minimum.
But she knew more, and that wasn’t nothing.
Whatever their final plan was, it required her getting through the first five preliminary matches. For one thing, it wasn’t until then that she’d lose the GPS tracker they’d implanted into her neck during that initial examination they did on her in that creepy, underground lab when she disembarked from the culler ship.
Richter hadn’t told her about the implant then, of course...but Jet found out not long after, while washing her hair in the shower and feeling the hard bump on the back of her neck. She’d freaked a little, hopping out of the shower half-covere
d in soap suds and shampoo to make Anaze look at the spot on her neck. Wearing nothing but a towel, she’d pulled her hair back so he could see the lump she’d fingered, sure she had some kind of mutating cancer from the Nirreth medicine and food.
When Anaze explained the meaning of the lump, and what the implant actually did, Jet had been furious.
Anaze assured her the device would only remain there for as long as it took the Nirreth command leaders to trust her.
Of course, at the time, Jet hadn’t expected that trust to require her to publicly take a Nirreth mate, or spend months entertaining Prince Ogli.
Really, she’d thought it would be enough, her volunteering for the Rings, and then enduring the daily training and humiliation with Alice without actually trying to kill someone. Especially considering they’d dragged her off the street and sold her like a dog.
Anyway, Richter wanted Jet to be a longshot in the Rings, that much she knew.
He wanted the bloodthirsty crowds and the small girl with too much make-up and the tight, all-black sense-suit and the long, Japanese-style sword. Richter wanted a distraction, partly to test run for the real night, which –– assuming all went as planned –– should be in exactly twenty weeks’ time, if they scheduled her to fight every other week.
If they thought too much of Jet’s chances, they’d throw a harder program at her.
Richter also informed her that they’d received intelligence that Ogli planned to buck tradition and buy Jet outright if she got booted from the Rings.
He would have enough money to outbid Laksri and Richter’s fortunes, even if they pooled them together, along with probably every credit scraped up by every member of the rebellion on both sides of the racial divide. Richter explained all of this to Jet casually enough, but she got the point –– the plan would change drastically if that happened, and not in any way to her advantage. Richter assured her he could ‘work with it,’ but Jet didn’t find his assurances all that reassuring. Given what it would mean for her if they didn’t manage to get her out of the palace, she found the prospect made her sick enough that she couldn’t think about it for long.
Laksri didn’t much like that plan either.
His fingers tightened on her arm, reminding her of that fact. He could obviously still feel a good chunk of her thoughts.
“You will win,” he told her again, pulling her closer.
“Richter says I shouldn’t win,” Jet replied, trying to keep her voice light.
“In that sense, yes...he is correct. But you will win a place in the Rings. Remember that.”
“I will win,” Jet repeated, a near mantra under her breath.
They reached the boundaries of the low rectangle of light. Jet blinked up in confusion, starting to slow her steps until Richter gripped her harder, forcing her to speed up so that she reached the light moving with long, more confident-seeming strides.
The second she hit the edge of that opening, the crowd beyond the corridor began to yell. She heard Nirreth voices mainly, a few yells and growls at first, then what could have been human voices, too.
The sound swelled as more and more of them saw her appear on the screens, until the Nirreth howls grew deafening. It sounded like she was about to walk into a jungle filled with wild animals...and more like one of the Rings’ VR projections than anything real.
Jet continued to walk up the triangle-shaped ramp, fighting disbelief and keeping her legs moving from the prodding of Laksri’s hand and tail, seemingly more than by the power of her own muscles and mind. On her other side, Richter had released her.
Anaze moved so that the two of them walked abreast.
However, when Jet saw herself on the high monitor, only she and Laksri appeared on the wall-sized image, moving together in a near-synchronicity...one that was likely aided by the venom. It didn’t occur to Jet until she saw them both up there, that this maneuver had probably been planned by Richter and Laksri as well, down to their near-matching outfits and the dark blue kohl eyeliner she wore along with the mascara that faintly sparkled, almost as if between them her makeup had been designed to match Laksri’s eyes and skin.
Next to a muscular, unsmiling Laksri, Jet herself looked more fierce suddenly, but also a lot smaller. She couldn’t help wondering if that had been deliberate, too, and if so, what they were going for exactly, in terms of the overall impression. At this point, she was beginning to think Anaze was right, that Richter planned pretty much everything he did, no matter how innocent or even boorish it seemed from the outside.
Laksri’s fingers abruptly squeezed her arm.
“Not in here,” he said in her ear.
But she’d already felt the same thought through his skin, and remembered less than a heartbeat after what it meant.
Fear hit her in the next set of breaths, as she grew once more conscious of the fact that they would be scanning her mind randomly as part of this event. The deepest of those scans happened a week ago, apparently, during her last, so-called ‘medical exam.’ Laksri also said they wouldn’t get a lot of actual thoughts, more her overall mental state, but they’d still cautioned her repeatedly to be careful, all through the match.
Even now, she had to be careful.
They would mostly be looking for key words, as well as fears, signs of aggression––anything that spiked her emotions too high or too low––which was part of the reason Laksri insisted on stinging her that morning. He’d wanted to help her moderate that part of her presentation to the Board, in addition to assisting with any last minute memorizations, since the venom should help lock those into her mind, too.
Given how spacey she felt on the venom at times, Jet had been surprised to note that it didn’t slow her reflexes any, not if Laksri stung her the normal way. They also had a way of pushing out the venom in a denser stream that could paralyze a human’s whole body, of course...which had been closer to what he’d done to her that first time on the culler ship.
Laksri told her that the normal sting should, if anything, speed her reflexes...not slow them.
The paralysis came from some kind of overload of Nirrith adrenaline, or the equivalent of adrenaline in their system. The venom itself didn’t produce those effects, but instead gave her that clarity that helped with memory and movement.
In effect, Laksri said, the venom sped up certain processes in her nervous system...so much so that the brain had trouble keeping up, in terms of reacting verbally and translating that know-how into conscious thoughts.
Most of what she retained fell into the category of the subconscious as a result.
So it seemed like her thinking processes slowed down, but it was only in contrast to the muscle and sense memory that went with the venom.
If nothing else, on the venom, Jet tended not to startle too easily, or overreact to false stimuli in the Rings programs. Even so, something about being on the venom in the real Rings, in front of all of these people, made Jet nervous...enough that she was kind of glad that most of the more obvious effects had already begun to wear off by then.
“You’ll be fine,” Laksri told her again.
He kissed her neck as he said it, and Jet realized that they must still be up on the main screen because the crowd once more erupted into sound––yells and long, trilling cries from Nirreth throats, and what sounded like a high burst of whistles.
Most of all, Jet heard pounding feet and a heavier thumping sound that she realized must be the hard smack of their tails against the low walls that stood behind each concentric circle of benches. Her heart once more rose to her throat, even as she remembered Laksri and Richter’s words to her the night before.
“But how do I know they didn’t pick up any information about who I am...who I really am...in that scan they did?” she’d asked, once they told her what had been done to her.
“They did pick it up,” Richter said, matter-of-fact.
As that was pretty much the last thing Jet expected him to say, she fell silent briefly, staring first at him, then
at Laksri. They’d been in that garden underneath the water processing plant, alone but for birds in the trees and fish in the canals winding through the room between the gently weaving paths and bridges.
“And?” she said, a beat later. “Why aren’t I in a prison cell? For that matter...why aren’t you?”
Richter chuckled. “Don’t worry, kitten, we had the tapes pulled. We replaced them with the initial scans in the relevant parts.”
“So why the hell couldn’t you have just told me what was going on earlier?” she demanded. “Why wait for the scans at all, if you’re just going to doctor them anyway?”
“Because,” Richter explained patiently. “We needed your training in the Rings to remain intact. Laksri and two techs we have working for us went over those scans with a fine-toothed comb. Luckily, you’re pretty focused when you train...we were able to keep just about everything in terms of the time you spent working out in the Rings with Alice.”
He smiled at her in that infuriating way he had.
“...A few good cuts and snips while you worried about Laks and I turning on you, and a few internal monologue rants against Anaze, and we were in business. We’re just lucky Ogli didn’t sting you that day he got frisky in the barn. Although, come to think of it, I’m sure I––”
“––could have worked with it, I know,” Jet muttered. “Funny how whenever you say that, it does not reassure me.”
“Nice touch about you actually wanting the big blue, by the way,” Richter added with another grin, that one a touch harder. “We’re lucky they cut out all intimate material as a matter of policy anyway...at least the physical parts...but we were able to use a lot of your time together to really sell the whole interspecies thing, since you actually have feelings for the big guy.”
Jet felt her jaw tighten, but she didn’t look away from him.
Still, some of the anger she felt must have shown on her face, because Richter laughed aloud.
“Don’t worry, kitten,” he chuckled. “Your secret’s safe with me. Anyway, I never would have agreed to the coupling in the first place if I hadn’t seen the two of you flirting before all of this. I had to know you could be convincing, stung or not, or the others would have picked up on it.” He shrugged, his eyes shrewd once more. “Didn’t Laks tell you they can see in infrared? It’s how he talked me into letting him approach you.”
Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV) Page 29
