"Jack."
I was going to have to leave soon anyway...
The thought swam up out of blackness, connected to a picture of a blonde, bespectacled man smiling. Doc Sharp always smiled, especially when the needles were going in.
"Jack."
There are some areas of space that are completely Dark.
Most nebulas are stellar nurseries, lashed with the brilliant radiation of new stars. But these are different. Sensor signals come back hopelessly garbled; probes simply disappear. The lucky few explorers who ever came out of the Dark near Lyrius talked about an enormous machine, so twisted and warped that the mind couldn't quite make sense of it; and about the way even time seemed to loop around, past and future tangling in the present. No one knows what happened in places like this, though a few legends, older than the human race itself, talk about an ancient war at the dawn of time.
The Wailing Wars started in one of these places. Because those lucky few explorers were the ones who first brought out the plague.
Black dust no longer completely obscures the grotesque lines and curves. It's huge, almost bigger than the mind can take in, but there's even more of it hidden in the ashen cloud. Like an iceberg from hell, what shows is only the tip of its warped magnificence.
Metal arms twist out like frozen screams. Huge chasms, kilometers deep and impossibly long, have been gouged with random precision as though cosmic talons have ripped across the surface of the vast relic.
And then there are the seams that don't quite match up, the mismatched half-domes, the reverse craters like comets have hit from the inside out. Gigantic girders thrust clean through each other as if the very molecules have never learned that two objects cannot occupy the same space. Someone has played divine jigsaw out here, but the pieces don't fit any more.
Dully gleaming metal hills and valleys, tranquil to the eyes until shadows resolve themselves into gaping holes; and beyond this patch of insane landscape-
The ship is almost too ugly to be true, one of many that the great shipyards at Juris Prime vomit out between their graceful government liners. Used to, anyway, before everyone finally started dying.
Merc ship.
He took cell scrapings. From the mucous membranes, from the mouth, then more invasive collections. It all happened while she was asleep, of course. That was part of the deal. Doc Sharp could have bled any number of them dry while they hibernated-but if his patients had started disappearing, a piece at a time, his clientele would have evaporated. He wasn't legal, but he did his job.
But still, sometimes it did feel like she was disappearing, a piece at a time.
"Jack, can you hear me?"
The world had fractured. All the king's horses and all the king's men had shattered into infinity.
He's a skinny man, starched gray coveralls, thinning gray hair. Around him in the merc ship's lab stand tables full of-something. If someone decided to mix biologicals with machinery, the result might look like this. Half mechanics shop, half operating room. Riveted to the walls of the laboratory are two xeno-containment tanks. Both doors have been opened. Both tanks are empty.
The man sits at one of these tables, a strange tool in his hand. He is not dissecting. He touches part of the cracker's thorax, twists the tool, and one of six disarticulated legs several meters away twitches.
"Working now?" he asks, and an antennae on another table sends a pulse of assent through the air.
The tool shifts, twists again, and a second leg moves, dislodging a bit of cracked shell. It falls to the floor with a metallic crash.
"Who the hell are you?"
The man looks up briefly-"No one in particular."-and goes back to his work.
A noise from the hatch on the other side of the room. It seems strange that this many body-machine-parts, spread out over a lab almost as large as the cargo hold, should make up a creature that doesn't seem to mass much more than a large dog. But there it is. Another cracker is squirming through the hatch, feathered antennae waving. Tiny pincers on each of its six long legs grip the floor, the walls, even the ceiling, as if gravity doesn't apply to it. A clawed tail, like a seventh appendage, wraps around a conduit pipe.
Most people don't realize it, but once caught off guard, these things are ridiculously easy to kill. A flick of the wrist, and the shiv buries itself in the head, right between where the eyes should be. If it had eyes, instead of those antennae.
Crack. Like a gunshot. It's where they get their name from. The blackened body collapses to the deck, its shell split lengthwise down the middle. Smoke curls lazily.
"Like I said. Who the hell are you?"
The man lays his tool down delicately and stands up. "If I'm not mistaken," he says in a placid voice, "you have Lyrian plague. That's what you people call it, right?"
It's a deep shame. An anger that washes everything else away, except for the urge to kill.
"Hard to keep track of all the names," he continues. "The Rift. Bloodwarp. Szaal's Scourge-I like that one. Every species reacts differently to it. You're one of the boring ones, unfortunately. Not to mention stupid."
A chitinous leg drops to the floor, skitters itself towards the main body mass on the central table. Another leg follows. A single antenna uncurls, and time-
Stops.
"That's why your species is dying: stupidity. You keep trying to cure a disease."
"Jack, you gotta wake up."
She was alive. She was alive, and that thing hadn't gotten her, and somehow, she was alive. And the man sitting hunched next to her bunk-
How many times had she scanned crowds, unconsciously looking for him? How long since they had parted ways, since she had finally given up even hoping to see him again?
"Oh, my God, Riddick, how did you-"
Sudden, cold suspicion gripped her. It was still after her. It would never stop, Rene had said. Right before he'd punched her, the bastard. "Are you... really... Riddick?"
"I've been holding your hand for the past three hours. Still feel like yourself?"
I shouldn't touch him. The thought floated through her mind, but then she remembered that it didn't matter with him, any more than it mattered with Rene. Hadn't mattered, since they'd all been together on that planet. Maybe Carolyn and the rest had been the lucky ones, after all.
"Rene called it a-"
"Faylind. I know. I followed it."
