Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV)

by JC Andrijeski

  Seeing the two of them together, in Laksri’s mind, through Laksri’s memories, spun Jet’s mind off its axis. It changed everything she thought she understood about the two of them, much less the relationship between them. It colored every interaction she’d witnessed since she first landed on the deck of that culler ship over Vancouver.

  Anaze had seen how Richter ran the fiefdoms he scratched out of the skag pits and the roving bands of human ex-military. He’d seen Richter recruit from the hamster cages on the polluted edges of Nirreth industry, worsening their living conditions deliberately so they’d be grateful and loyal when he finally deigned to pull them out. He’d done the same to the skags, Jet saw, stealing as much as he could get away with, starving them out and making them desperate before he approached any of their fighters with an offer to deal.

  Anaze warned Laksri that Richter wasn’t entirely stable. According to Anaze, Richter never got over the war, despite what he pretended. Anaze believed Richter would never be content with anything less than the complete annihilation of the Nirreth species.

  Laksri had come up with the idea of offering a partnership to Richter.

  He pretended Anaze was only a contact, some boy who’d proven useful following a raid. Astutely, both Anaze and Laksri saw that it was a perspective to which Richter would relate. It was how he viewed people, as tools.

  Jet gripped her hair in one hand, fighting her way through the flood of information, through Laksri’s memories, which felt so close, so visceral, she had trouble distinguishing them from her own. She could see them, hear them, even smell them.

  Anaze and Laksri, meeting late at night behind the Trevi fountain, where Anaze had taken Jet that first night she spent in the Green Zone. Anaze and Laksri arguing about how much to tell Jet, what they could tell her, without Richter figuring out what she knew. Anaze and Laksri meeting hurriedly in the lower gardens as the bombs fell that night, deciding what to do, what to tell Richter, knowing he would want to use Jet...

  She learned things about Richter, too, and how he always seemed to know what she was thinking. It turned out, Richter had something on her, some kind of device, something he’d put on her when she’d first been culled. He’d been screwing with her, pretending he could all but read her mind, when he really read her thoughts off a machine.

  Another stupid ploy to exert power over her, to keep her on a leash.

  In addition to the added surveillance, Richter did it for the same reason he did most things with people he wanted to control. He did it to throw her off-balance, to make her doubt herself, convince her how transparent she was to his superior intellect.

  But the whole thing was all a cheat. Whatever it was, whatever device Richter used to see into Jet’s mind, it felt similar to the implants the Nirreth put on her when she’d first entered the Green Zone. Anaze and Laksri had been trying to figure out how they might remove it.

  Training accident in the Rings? Could they get it “found” in a casual scan, maybe at one of the medical facilities? They couldn’t risk having Richter picked up by the Royal Guard. They couldn’t trust what he might do, if really cornered. He appeared almost like an animal in Jet’s mind, and she realized she was seeing Richter the way Laksri himself saw him. As a dangerous animal, nothing like Anaze, or Jet herself...

  Jet’s head pounded harder, making it difficult to think.

  Richter had put a surveillance device on her.

  Whatever it was, it tracked some aspect of her thoughts. It also kept tabs on her emotions. Laksri seemed to believe that Richter had unusually finely-tuned powers of observation and perception anyway, at least for a mammal. The device gave him a leg-up on that skill, like an artificial boost. Laksri and Anaze still thought they could train Jet to hide things from Richter; they could use the venom to teach her the rest, but they needed to get that device off her first.

  They wanted to remove it in a way that wouldn’t make Richter suspicious...

  Another memory swirled around her head, a realization.

  Reaching behind her shoulder, she winced the instant her fingers touched the back of her neck. A thick and painful crust of blood remained there, throbbing at the base of her skull. She probed the cut despite the pain, even as it occurred to her that it would leave a permanent scar. She had a vague memory of Laksri with a knife, determined to get it out of her. He’d been so tired of lying to her, of not being able to ask her opinion on things that mattered.

  All because Richter...

  Jet’s mind blurred, even as the memory of pain worsened.

  Laksri said Richter might know what he’d done, but maybe they could find a way to excuse that, too. Make it about sex, or about him noticing it while she slept...have Laksri accuse Trazen of putting it there while he had Jet doped up on venom, or the Royal Guard or one of their spies.

  Richter might not believe it. Laksri seemed to think he probably wouldn’t. On the other hand, he seemed to think that would be true no matter what they did to get rid of it.

  Richter didn’t trust anyone...least of all, the people he thought he needed.

  Laksri seemed to think Richter already suspected something between him and Anaze. Laksri didn’t know the extent of Richter’s suspicions, but he’d caught Richter staring between them a few times, as if trying to make up his mind. He watched all three of them, too closely for them to be able to fool him forever. He watched them openly...especially her. He seemed obsessed with her, with what she might do. He thought he understood what Laksri wanted, and he barely counted Anaze at all.

  Jet was the one who worried him.

  Richter didn’t understand her, didn’t know what she wanted. It had been his idea to pull her family, “in case they needed the leverage.” Anaze tried to talk him out of it. Laksri did, too, but they let it happen anyway.

  Jet felt her heart constrict as she remembered.

  Trazen had been telling the truth. Richter had her family.

  He had Biggs. Her mom. Her aunt and uncle.

  She fought to breathe, clutching her chest as her vision started to gray.

  Richter had her family.

  He wanted something from her, even beyond what Laksri told her. Richter’s exact plans for Jet eluded Laksri and Anaze, too. She saw them arguing about it, Anaze and Laksri, in a soundproof booth in one of the underground parks. Anaze had been shouting about it, pacing back and forth, so angry his skin turned dark red, his eyes flashing with a fire that Laksri watched warily, wondering again just how complicated things would get, with Jet in the middle of all three of them...

  Richter could never be allowed to truly lead the humans.

  Anaze made that clear, from day one. He’d told Laksri things, shown him things...things that 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 point, 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. Until she came on board swinging, then 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 had 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 gotten the idea in his head about Laksri and Jet early. He’d 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 that he had a way to accelerate things, to bring them all the alliance they sought, and 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 him from the moment she landed in that storage bay of the culler ship. He knew he was in trouble when she went after him with that sword, drawing it even before they had her on board, and he found himself wanting to sting her...wanting to do more than that, even then. 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 human star they’d had 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 even muttered that 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.

  In fact, 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 her 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 own 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 compartment 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 himself had said to her at the time, Laksri knew the time wasn’t right for such a thing, that it could destroy everything he and Anaze had been trying to do. Yet he couldn’t trust himself not to kill him...to not try, at least.

  Richter tried to play him around that, 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 Laksri 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 twisted ideas of the future.

  When Jet opened her eyes next, her head throbbed.

  She felt as if a giant hand squeezed her skull in metal fingers that wrapped around each side of her head. 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’d 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. The 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 of that stemmed from the venom, too.

  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 yet, either. His chest still moved more visibly than normal as he crossed the threshhold 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 had 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 expre
ssion, the glassiness of his eyes. She saw Trazen staring at him through the monitor, his 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 had 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 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, in the back of her mind, 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 him, 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 approaching with the Retribution.

  Laksri felt her worry, and the images that came with it.

  He tried to understand, to find out what she’d picked up on, what it meant, but she couldn’t tell him that, either.

  Still, the feeling echoed, even as he grew distracted once more by her skin and her hands. She let him pull her back into that space, but the feeling still wouldn’t quite leave her.

  It wouldn’t leave her.

  THE PLANET ASTET

  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 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.