A/N: So, this is actually a rewrite of a story that I had up on FF several years ago. For some reason the story was deleted from my account, and naturally I did not have the story backed up on my computer. (I know, I know. What kind of writer doesn't save a copy of their work on their computer? I was careless!) Anyway, I was so devastated about losing the story that I never went back to try and recreate it. But I love Pitch Black, and every time I watch the movie I imagine my OC inserted into the storyline. It became clear that I needed to go ahead and rewrite this story since I obviously can't seem to let it go.

I tried to keep it close to the original story I wrote, as much of it as I could remember, but I've also made some changes. For instance, the OC used to be named Aiden, but now she's named Alex. Small change, I know. Also, some of this will read close to the movie's plot, but I've also inserted more original dialogue/scenes, and will continue to do so as the story progresses.

This will be a romance, but it will be a slow build. It just wouldn't make sense otherwise. I will try to keep everyone in character as much as possible, but I'm also going to explore aspects of the character's personalities and pasts that the movie does not, so some OOCness is to be expected. Please bear with me.

Obviously, I do not have any rights to Riddick or Pitch Black. Loathe as I am to admit that.


Chapter One: The Crash


There were Chasers roaming the docking port.

Alex pulled her hood tight over her head and kept her face down, trying not to draw attention to herself as she waited in line to board the Hunter Gratzner, her vessel to freedom.

Chasers were hired investigators, little better than mercs except that they were paid better and were only ever hired to bring people in alive. They were instantly recognizable by their white uniforms, and the tranquilizer guns they carried. Chasers were known to be tough, tenacious, and absolutely ruthless in the pursuit of their targets. They were there looking for her.

Alex had been on the run for a little less than a week. Her escape from the Institute had been a fluke. A brainless tech had accidentally exposed a deadly virus and the lab's hardwired safety protocols had kicked in, commencing a system-wide decontamination. The entire place had gone up in flames, and only Alex had made it out alive.

Of course she had survived. That's what he had modified her to do.

Dr. Farren, her adoptive father and her torturer. The man who had taken her in after her parents had died, had been kind, indulgent, understanding, and whom she had loved dearly. The man who had betrayed her, and who had turned her into a science experiment.

A Chaser walked past Alex's elbow and it was all she could do not to cringe away from him. She reminded herself that they were looking for a girl with long brown hair and bright green eyes. She had chopped her hair off to just above her shoulders, and with her hood up and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses over her eyes she looked just different enough for them to pass her by without a second glance. Her baggy clothes also helped to disguise her and made her look more like an adolescent boy than the petite girl that she was.

She clutched her boarding pass in her fist and breathed out in relief when the Chaser moved on. Her ticket onto the Hunter Gratzner had been another fluke. She'd been without money when she left the Institute, and everything stuffed into the bag over her shoulder had simply been stolen over the past week. The ticket had been in the pocket of a pair of cargo pants that she had taken off someone's clothesline. It had been washed with the pants and was crumpled and flaking, but still intact. She had seen it as a beacon of hope, a means of escape to somewhere she might be safe from Dr. Farren's reach.

When she approached the entrance to the ship she held the boarding pass out to a smiling crewmember. He had dark hair, a friendly face, and twinkling, earnest eyes. His flight suit had the name OWENS stitched onto the right breast. He took the ticket, didn't even bat an eye at its crinkled appearance, stamped it and handed it back.

"Happy travels," he said.

Alex nodded, cast one more nervous look at the Chasers still scouring the dock, and boarded the ship.


The problem with cryo-sleep was that it was never intended for someone like Alex. In fairness, someone like Alex had never existed before, so there wasn't really a precedent.

She sighed and looked out through the Plexiglas of her cryo-chamber to the other passengers all sleeping deeply within their own pods. She had been drifting in and out of sleep for the past several weeks. She didn't know how much time was left on this journey, but she couldn't stay cooped up any longer. She pulled the release handle inside her chamber and stepped out as soon as the glass front lifted.

Alex stretched her arms above her head and looked around the dark cabin. There were around fifty occupied cryo-chambers onboard, their occupants all asleep and rocking gently as the ship sped through space. She looked at the passengers closest to her.

A man and a woman in prospector gear. An older man and three younger boys decked out in the traditional Chrislam garb. An impish young boy, maybe twelve or thirteen years old and seemingly alone. A cop with curly red-blond hair.

Alex paused in front of the chamber situated directly across from the cop. This one held a beast of a man. He was tall, heavily muscled, with tanned skin and a shaved head. His features were masculine and well-defined, and even without the chains, the blindfold, and the bit in his mouth, this man would have looked like danger incarnate. Everything about him seemed threatening, though Alex couldn't immediately identify why this was. She read the words LOCKOUT PROTOCOL: NO EARLY RELEASE on the glass front of his chamber.

She frowned as she looked at his restraints. Those cuffs and that metal bit couldn't be comfortable, even in sleep. She had had enough experience with restraints and felt a wash of sympathy for the man, even if it was obvious that he was a criminal.

She shivered as memories of her time with Dr. Farren in the Institute came unbidden to her mind. She had been little better than a prisoner there herself.

The worst part for Alex was that she also had many happy memories with the doctor. He had been wonderful to her when she was young, just like her own father. That had made his cruelty all the more painful.

It had happened shortly before her 18th birthday. Alex had noticed the doctor's tracking stare any time she was in the same room with him. He would watch her strangely, almost calculatingly. She didn't understand it, not at first.

And then one morning she had woken from a deep, sluggish sleep to find that she wasn't in her room, but strapped to a metal table, completely naked, as techs in pristine white scrubs and face masks applied a stinking, burning paste over her body from the neck down. The paste, commonly used for surgical prep and elective cosmetic procedures, permanently removed body hair, and it had felt like acid on her skin. She had screamed but no one had cared.

They rolled her into a brightly lit room and placed a needle in her arm. She woke up hours later without her womb, and only a small line of stitches to show where it had once been. Just like that, her dreams of having a family, children of her own, was stripped away from her. She cried, she begged the techs to just tell her why. But no one answered her and eventually she was left alone in that bright, cold room with nothing but her own tortured thoughts for company.

But this was nothing compared to what followed.

Dr. Farren and his associates had been developing a formula meant to cure all human diseases. It was to be the crowning achievement in the entire history of medicine, and now seemed possible through the use of splicing.

Found on a lonely planet in the Moori star system some twenty years previously was a funny little creature called a Krytaur. This pea-sized creature had the most complex immune system of any hitherto known species in existence, and was seemingly impervious to disease. Dr. Farren had believed that the Krytaur's DNA could be used to produce the same immune capabilities in human patients.

But that didn't prove to be the case. All of his human trials ended in the deaths of his volunteers. Horrible, painful deaths. Dr. Farren hadn't given up, and finally developed a formula that he believed would work (hormones were the key to perfecting the formula—the reason behind Alex's unwilling hysterectomy), but by that time funding for his research had been cut completely.

His ambition couldn't be stoppered. Not when he had a perfectly healthy test subject living right under his own roof.

He spliced Alex's DNA with that of the Krytaur, but the results were far from expected. Instead of simply amplifying her immune system, her DNA completely mutated. Instead of merely being able to fight off disease, her body's regenerative capabilities were magnified to astounding levels. She healed, almost instantly, from any injury. Her body could regrow entire limbs, organs, even her eyes.

Dr. Farren subjected Alex to countless excruciating experiments to test the limits of her regeneration. She was cut, torn apart, eviscerated, burned, frozen, stabbed, shot, dismembered, drowned, even submerged in a vat of acid. Each time, no matter how little was left of her, she always reformed, always healed completely.

Most astonishing, however, was the fact that her body regenerated so quickly that she stopped aging altogether. In the ten years that Alex was trapped inside the Institute, her body did not age a bit. Dr. Farren had, unknowingly, discovered the secret to immortality. The only problem was that even after ten years of testing the same formula on other subjects, experimenting on Alex herself, and even trying to turn Alex's blood into a serum of its own, her astonishing results couldn't be replicated. None of the other test subjects survived the splicing, and Dr. Farren couldn't identify what it was about Alex that had allowed her to survive in the first place. It was a mystery that she had no intention of letting him solve now.

That's why the doctor had hired a team of Chasers, sparing no expense to retrieve her. Without her, he had no hope of ever replicating the strange mutation in her DNA. Without her, his life's work was all for naught.

Alex shook her head violently, as if that could dispel the memories from her mind. She wouldn't dwell on the pain from her past; she was making a new life for herself, a better future. Although for Alex, who was seemingly incapable of dying, the future seemed far more scary and uncertain without the promise of an end.

She ran a hand through her short brown hair and glanced back up at the chained man, only to gasp and take an involuntary step backward.

He was awake.

Though he was blindfolded and his back still reclined against the seat of his cryo-chamber, it was obvious that the man was not sleeping. His head was angled slightly toward her, alertness apparent in his coiling muscles. There was no way that he could see her through the blindfold, she knew, but somehow it seemed like he was staring right at her.

No one else should have been awake.

Startled, Alex started to back away toward her own chamber when the ship suddenly lurched as if something had collided with them.

"What the hell," she muttered, straightening. Flashing red lights came on overhead accompanied by a dull alarm. The ship lurched again and she fell against the chained man's cryo-chamber.

She pushed herself up, her hands splayed on the glass, and saw the man shift ever-so-slightly within the chamber. The hairs on the nape of her neck raised.

Alex wanted to move back, to put distance between herself and the man, and lock herself back into her own cryo-chamber, but the ship continued to buck and dip and it was all she could do to hold herself upright against the prisoner's chamber. Her hands squeaked against the glass, and she nearly fell over when the ship listed severely toward the back. As she righted herself she could have sworn she saw the ghost of a smirk cross the muscled man's lips, but it was difficult to tell with the bit wedged between his teeth.

She tried again to stumble her way back to her own chamber where she might at least find a little stability, but again she was stopped, this time by the body that flew out of its cryo-chamber and directly into her.

The man's body crashed into her, smashing her back against the criminal's cryo-chamber. Her head hit the glass with a painful thwack, and a second later both the man and Alex fell onto the floor. Her chin grated against the metal floor, but the scrape healed before it could even bleed.

"I'm awake," the man said, astonished and confused. "Why am I awake?"

Alex rolled onto her side and saw it was the cop. He blinked owlishly at her for a moment before he seemed to notice the flashing red lights and the blaring alarm.

"Something's gone wrong," she said, pointing out the obvious. "There was a big jolt, like we hit something, then the alarm went off."

"How long've you been up?"

"Since just before you," she hedged. Alex wanted to believe the cop was on the straight and narrow, but she couldn't place her faith in that. There were plenty of dirty cops and politicians willing to look the other way on the Institute's payroll, otherwise they would have been shut down long ago.

The cop pushed up to his feet, wobbled a moment on his unsteady legs, and then reached out a hand to help Alex stand. His blue eyes flew up to the prisoner's cryo-chamber in alarm, but then relaxed slightly when he saw the muscular man still bound inside. Alex saw the other passengers begin to rouse in their chambers; apparently cryo-sleep had been turned off as the system prioritized energy use into other areas.

Suddenly the ship impacted with something terribly and an enormous hole ripped into the hull. The back of the passenger cabin tore away from the ship, bouncing, skittering, and crashing into the surface of the planet they had collided with. Alex squinted against the bright, burning yellow light that flooded the cabin, and just had time to grab onto the side of the closest cryo-chamber—the criminal's chamber—before she could be sucked out the back and thrown into the smoldering wreckage.

She clutched at the chamber and watched in horror as row after row of cryo-lockers were torn from the cabin, some 40-odd chambers in all, and crashed into the planet, disintegrating out of sight. 40 chambers, 40 lives, gone in an instant.

The ship continued to skid and grind against the planet's surface, but it was losing momentum. Finally it halted altogether in a jarring, crashing stop that sent everything left within the cabin to toss and topple over. Alex had to roll swiftly to the side to avoid being crushed by the prisoner's cryo-chamber when it listed and then fell forward. She heard glass shatter, but a sudden tangle of loose wires fell on top of her and it took several moments for her to pull herself out of them.

When she was standing again, the first thing Alex noticed was the thick yellow dust that permeated the air. She coughed and lifted the collar of her shirt over her nose and mouth, trying not to breath it in. It couldn't hurt her, not really, but she didn't like the sensation of it coating her throat.

The second thing Alex noticed immediately following the crash, was the sound of voices calling out in both English and what she guessed to be Arabic. She could see shifting shadows amongst the debris that had once been the passenger cabin—or part of the passenger cabin. The gaping hole in the hull revealed bright, unnaturally yellow light and what appeared to be the scorched, sun-baked surface of an unknown planet.

The third thing she noticed was the empty cryo-locker next to her. The very same locker that the hulking, blindfolded prisoner had occupied only minutes before. She couldn't help the sudden shiver that raced up her spine, but she wasn't the only person to notice the man's absence. The cop was standing next to her then, his eyes darting from the empty chamber to the jungle of debris all around them. His hand drifted to his belt, but his gun holster was alarmingly empty.

"Did you see where he went," the cop asked Alex.

She shook her head. Whoever that muscular man was, he had been as swift and silent as a predator to have escaped without either Alex or the cop noticing him.

The cop ducked away from her then, his eyes sweeping over the ground as he carefully picked his way through the fallen cryo-chambers and broken pieces of the ship. Alex followed behind him, not really worried about her safety, but concerned about what carnage might await her eyes as she ventured further into the crash.

Just up ahead she saw the light of a cutting torch as the wild-haired prospector woman tried to open a jammed cryo-chamber. As Alex approached, the plexi gave way and the impish boy she had noticed earlier rolled out from within, looking unscathed and strangely unafraid.

"I guess something went wrong, huh," the boy said.

"Understatement," Alex said, reaching down a hand to help the kid up.

"Whoa," the kid said, surveying the enormous crack in the hull. "Where the hell are we?"

"We're alive," the prospector woman said in a thick accent. "That's really all that matters at this point." The woman was looking pointedly toward the missing section of the hull where the other lockers would have been.

"A few more minutes and we all would have been sucked out," Alex said, confirming the thoughts she could read on the other woman's face. "We're the lucky ones, I guess."

"I'm not sure how this all went down, but I can be grateful for that," the woman said, and then lifted the cutting torch in her hand. "We should maybe see if anyone else needs help getting out."

Alex nodded and followed her through the mess of debris, overturned equipment, and dangling wires. It was lucky that it was daylight outside because all power seemed to have been cut within the passenger cabin, and navigating this chaos would be downright hazardous in the dark. As it was, the other survivors they encountered were already stumbling about, disoriented and coughing from the yellow dust.

Alex saw the cop reemerge from the storage deck below the cabin, pushing the recaptured prisoner ahead of him with the butt of his recovered gun. She wasn't sure what had gone down between them, but the cop was breathing heavily and there was a nasty red mark around his neck. The prisoner, who was even larger than Alex had first believed, walked casually, seemingly uncaring that he had been restrained again. The cop halted the prisoner suddenly and chained him to a nearby bulkhead. He checked the strength of the metal pillar before ripping the goggles off the prisoner's eyes and replacing it with the torn and dirtied blindfold. He went to place the bit back into the man's mouth when Alex approached.

She wasn't sure why she did it, but she asked, "Is that really necessary? Is he going to chew his way through the bulkhead?"

The cop whirled to face her. His expression was annoyed at first, but as he looked her up and down, the look softened to something unfamiliar that made her stomach squirm. "With Riddick every precaution is necessary." He pulled the bit tight, making the man, Riddick, appear to be grimacing.

"It just seems inhumane," Alex persisted. She noticed Riddick cock his head slightly at the sound of her voice.

"The words 'Riddick' and 'humane' don't belong in the same sentence," the cop said. He came to stand before her. "Name's Johns."

"Alex," she said in return, and turned away from the man chained to the bulkhead. She indicated the prospector woman that was now helping one of the young Chrislams out of an overturned chamber. "We're looking around for any other survivors that might be trapped in the rubble."

Johns nodded and wandered off in the opposite direction. "I'll check the front, see if any crewies survived. Might be able to get some answers about this shit storm we're in."

Alex watched him go and tried not to look back toward Riddick.


When the man impaled to the seat began to scream, Alex fled the cabin. She had recognized him as the smiling man that had taken her ticket and wished her happy travels all those weeks ago. His raw suffering had been too much to bear and she had needed to escape.

Outside she was momentarily blinded by light. It was much brighter than she had been expecting, and she wished suddenly for the sunglasses she had packed away in her bag. She would need to go searching for her bag soon anyway. It should be tucked away somewhere below the passenger cabin. She hadn't brought enough stuff to warrant a storage container of her own.

She blinked as her eyes adjusted, much more quickly than any normal human's would have, and she looked up to see exactly why the light was so bright. Instead of a single burning sun in the sky, there were two. One blazing yellow, the other orange.

The other survivors filed out behind her, all cursing as they shielded their eyes. The sound of the man's screams could still be heard from within, and Alex wrapped her arms around herself, trying to block out the noise.

"It's a might bright out here," the prospector woman said, coming up on Alex's side. Alex noticed for the first time that the woman was both beautiful, in that strange wild way, and seemed to radiate confidence and strength. The woman held out a hand. "Shazza. This is Zeke." She indicated the dark-skinned man on her other side. This man had wide, untamed eyes, and seemed to have some aboriginal blood. He nodded, but didn't smile.

"Alex," she said, shaking Shazza's hand. The other survivors moved forward then, introducing themselves to the group in turn.

There was the boy—Jack—that Shazza had saved from the jammed locker. The older Chrislam man, Imam, and his three acolytes, Hassan, Suleiman, and the youngest, Ali. A paunchy man with a pretentious air about him who introduced himself as Paris P. Ogilvie. Johns the cop. And finally Carolyn Fry, the captain of the ship who wandered out only after the screams from within had ceased.

After the introductions everyone gathered around Fry, giving thanks for her handling of the crash. They all believed their survival was entirely dependent on her skills as a pilot. Fry seemed uncomfortable with their gratitude, but took it in silence.

The Chrislams all fell to their knees, each facing a different direction since they had no way of knowing where New Mecca lay, and began to pray.

Johns was fiddling with his compass, but the needle kept spinning rudderlessly. He snapped it closed and turned to Fry. "We had thought to form a search party to find other survivors, but then we saw this." He indicated the burning trench the ship had carved into the planet's surface and the smoldering wreckage jutting up from the ground for what looked like a mile, at least, behind them.

"Little chance anyone could walk away from that," Shazza said.

Alex shifted uncomfortably. She would have survived that, but no one knew about her abnormal abilities, and she wanted to keep it that way. Keeping a low profile was her best strategy for freedom, and revealing that she was pretty much immune to dying in any capacity was the exact opposite of low profile.

"Anyone having trouble breathing? Aside from me?" Paris wheezed.

"Like I just ran, or something," Jack agreed.

"Feel one lung short, all of us," Shazza said.

"Of course I tend toward the asthmatic. And with all this dust. . . " Paris waved a hand, indicating the yellow dust swirling in the air.

Alex frowned. She wasn't having any trouble breathing. Right after the crash she had been a little out of breath, but she had chalked that up to left over adrenaline. Perhaps she had already acclimated to the planet's environment. That seemed to make sense, especially considering she was also the only person that wasn't pouring sweat already, despite the fact that she was wearing long sleeves and a hooded jacket. Her internal temperature must have adjusted already.

"What the bloody hell happened anyways?" Zeke said.

Fry considered him a moment before saying, "Something knocked us off-lane. Maybe a rogue comet. Maybe we'll never know. Auto-pilot didn't have the authority to adjust for something like that, so it just kept us on path until the collision."

"Well, I for one, am thoroughly fucking grateful. This beast wasn't made to land like this. But cripes, you rode it down." Shazza gestured to the others. "Only reason we're alive is because of you."

Fry looked uncomfortable again.

"So, is someone coming for us? Or are we all just going to die of exposure or dehydration or sunstroke or maybe something even worse?" Jack looked around at everyone's shocked and perturbed expressions. "You don't have to worry about scaring me or anything."

"You're the one scaring us," Alex said with a smile. "You're pretty morbid, huh?"

Jack grinned back, seeming to think 'morbid' was a compliment. "Yeah, but it could be a long time before someone finds us here. What about food until then? Will we have to resort to cannibalism to survive?"

"We'll start with him," Alex whispered conspiratorially, pointing discreetly at Paris, who was dabbing sweat from his brow with a silk handkerchief. Jack laughed.

"Some rather pressing concerns do come to mind," Paris said.

"What's our next step?" Alex asked Fry. She had no way of telling the time, or whether the sun was waxing or waning in the sky, but she figured it would probably be in everyone's best interest to gather supplies and secure shelter before nightfall. Deserts were frigidly cold at night, after all.

"We need water, food," Shazza said.

"Oxygen," Paris said.

"Be nice if we could get this ship back up and running. Or at least enough to send out a distress beacon," Johns said.

Alex shifted from foot to foot. Logically she knew that figuring out a way to find rescue was their best chance for getting off this planet, but she also knew that by this time Dr. Farren was sure to have placed a bounty on her head, which meant she would have both Chasers and mercs after her. If they had been knocked very far off the shipping lane then the chances of being rescued by anyone but mercs was very slim. She might be able to heal from any injury, but Alex was no fighter. It wouldn't take much effort for someone to restrain her.

"We'll deal with one problem at a time," Fry said, her voice ringing with authority. "There are pressure suits inside the main cabin. I saw the locker was still intact when I passed through. The suits have liquid oxygen canisters inside. Everyone, start ripping them out. Use sparingly; we have no idea how long we'll be here or how long it will take to acclimate, so we need them to last."

"Leave it to us," Shazza said, indicating herself and Zeke. "We'll make some adjustments. Try to get them modified for quick hits instead of extended release." Zeke nodded and the two of them turned and headed back into the ship.

"Great. Now, we need water more than we need food. The ship had a store, but with the crash there's no way to know whether the water has been contaminated. I need as many people searching the wreckage, containers and all, for anything we can drink. Food is our next priority. I'm going to check the ship's water supply now."

"I'll help you with that," Alex said. "If I can find my bag, I had some bottled water and food bars inside. It's not much." She shrugged.

"Any little bit helps," Fry said, nodding appreciatively before turning to the others. "Start checking the containers first. Any spare supplies would have been stored in those."

The other survivors, except for Johns, turned and filed off toward the large metal cargo hold that had partially embedded into the ground upon impact. Fry headed toward the ship with Alex on her heels and Johns only a few steps behind. She wasn't sure why, but Alex didn't like having the cop behind her. She had a paranoid suspicion that his eyes were on her, following her movement.

Fry stopped inside the main cabin and jutted her chin toward the spot where Riddick was secured to the bulkhead. "What about him?"

"Big evil?" Johns came up on Alex's right side, standing close enough for his arm to brush against her shoulder.

"Are we supposed to just keep him locked up forever?" Fry cast an annoyed look to Johns.

"Be my choice," Johns answered, seeming not to notice Fry's disapproving look or Alex moving to put more space between them. "Already escaped once from the max slam facility on—"

"I don't need his life story," Fry said.

"Is he really that dangerous," Alex asked. She was intrigued despite herself. It wasn't everyday that you met someone that could resist the pull of cryo-sleep. He had been awake and aware of her staring at him before the crash, and Alex couldn't help but be curious about him.

"Only around humans." Johns smirked at her.

Alex frowned and stared at Riddick. He wasn't paying his audience any attention. Rather, he had his head turned toward the bulkhead, his mouth on the metal. For an absurd moment Alex thought he really was trying to chew his way through the bit and the bulkhead.

She stepped closer to the prisoner. "What are you doing?" She didn't realize she had addressed the question to Riddick himself until he turned his head toward her. She caught a flash of silver through a rip in his blindfold. His lips were wet around the bit and a drop of water dripped from his chin.

Water.

"Oh, shit," Fry said.

Suddenly Fry, Johns, and Alex were running. Johns snatched up an emergency light. They dodged dangling wires, jumped over broken cryo-chambers, and skidded around fallen debris until they reached a set of rungs bolted into the side of the hull. They scaled them quickly, Johns leading with the light and Alex bringing up the rear.

They crawled through the dusty, dank superstructure to reach the ship's water cistern. Johns handed back the light and wrenched open the crank-hatch.

Their faces all fell. Fry lowered the light; they didn't need it. There were gaping holes in the side of the cistern, sunlight shafting inside the near empty tank in dusty wedges.

"We lost all the water," Fry said. "There would have been enough to sustain us for a few months, if we were careful."

"Just mud at the bottom," Johns said, staring down the cistern's interior. "This damn dust."

"We'll figure something out," Alex said, feeling the strange need to comfort Fry. She wasn't sure if she believed her own words or not.


The cargo hold sat apart from the main body of the ship. Alex, Fry, and Johns made their way inside, following the echo of voices through the dark corridor lined with access doors to containers.

They found the others cramped inside a particularly full container. There were Tiffany chairs stacked to the ceiling, bronze eagle lecterns, oriental umbrellas, Neo-Egyptian castings, paintings in gilt frames, a Wooten desk, and one enormous gold sarcophagus. It was around the latter that everyone was gathered.

Johns whistled. "King Tut's tomb. . ." No one was sure whether he was being sarcastic or not.

Paris sniffed. "You'd be surprised what all of this will fetch in the Taurus system."

Johns swayed suddenly, and a slightly sick look came over his face. Alex reached out a hand to help steady him. He nodded at her brusquely and pulled back.

"You okay," she asked.

He waved her off. "Little swamp flu from the Conga system. Never shook it with all the cryo-sleep." He stepped toward the sarcophagus and looked inside it. "What have we here?"

Alex followed and saw that the entire sarcophagus was filled with bottles of alcohol.

"Sherry. Vintage Port. Glenfiddich. Bicardi 151," Paris said proudly.

"Booze," Fry said incredulously. "That's what you have to drink? There was nothing else?"

"We can keep checking," Jack said. "But no luck so far."

"Booze?" Paris looked affronted. "200-year-old single-malt scotch is to 'booze' as foie gras is to 'duck guts'."

Johns snapped the cap on a bottle of amber liquid. "I'll toast to that."

"I'll need a receipt for that," Paris said hurriedly. "For all of these."

"Top of my list," Fry said with an eyeroll.

Alex lifted a dusty bottle of vodka from the sarcophagus and frowned as she rolled it in her hands. She wasn't actually thirsty yet, and didn't have to worry about dehydrating to death. If she went long enough without water it would become uncomfortable, and she would steadily become weaker, but she wouldn't die. The same could not be said for the others. They had maybe a week before dehydration would set in. Less if they consumed all this alcohol.

"I don't suppose you can drink this."

Fry's voice snapped Alex's attention away from the bottle in her hand. She looked up to see Imam and his acolytes standing in the doorway. The younger Chrislams watched everyone drinking with something like envy on their faces.

"One of the Christian habits we did not adopt, I'm afraid. We'll simply have to wait," Imam said.

"Wait for what?" Johns took a long swig from the bottle. "There's no water. You understand that, don't you?"

Imam smiled and shook his head. "All deserts have water, somewhere. God shall lead us there."

Johns and Fry both snorted at this.

"You better hope he's right," Alex said to them. "If we don't find water then everyone will die. All of this alcohol is actually less than useful to us. It might wet your tongue, but it's only going to dehydrate you faster."

Paris didn't seem to like her 'less than useful' comment. He twirled on the spot and stalked out of the container, muttering something about boorish ingrates.

Alex placed the vodka back into the sarcophagus. She ran her hand through her hair and sighed. "I'm going to look for my bag."

She walked out of the cargo hold and headed back to the ship. When she entered the main cabin, she knew immediately that something was wrong.

Alex cast her eyes around the wreckage, but she couldn't see anything amiss. It slowly dawned on her that it wasn't what she was seeing that was wrong; it was what she wasn't seeing. Or rather who she wasn't seeing.

At the base of the bulkhead laid a cutting torch and a mangled scrap of metal that might have once been a pair of handcuffs.

Riddick had escaped. Again.


A/N: There it is, the first chapter of the newly rewritten Fear the Dark. The next chapter will include a one-on-one Riddick x Alex interaction, and some more slight deviation from the movie sequence.

Also, I know that this chapter probably raises some questions about Alex's past and the things done to her. Please be patient. Most of these questions will probably be answered in future chapters as more of her past is revealed.