Four: Phase Two

"I told you, Kaz--it's the only way to get him off-world without arousing suspicion." Riddick wasn't sure if the younger man was stalling for medical reasons, or because he privately objected to the procedure. Which wasn't likely, since that was how he'd tracked Kaz down to begin with--his contacts pointed him to Vegas, where Kaz was THE man to go to for gender-benders, working out of the Monarch hotel.

Okay, so he hadn't actually confided this part of his scheme to Roy...which he could chalk up to short-term memory loss on Roy's part...besides, it really was the perfect escape plan, short of 'jacking another shuttle. He'd snagged first class bogus ID's for both of them, and he was anxious to see the end product of his planning.

Two days had never been a longer eternity, not even doing hard time. By the time Kaz reluctantly announced that the replicant might survive further pharmacological enhancement, Riddick was taut as razor wire. As he watched Kax prepare the necessary drugs, Riddick quizzed him relentlessly.

"This is gonna work, right? It's undetectable?"

"Is it perfect? No. An MRI is gonna show skeletal anomalies, unless you want to lie low for a year while the underlying structure changes. But off-world passport controls does a fast gene read--and what you see is what you get."

"They said you were the best at this. How many times have you done it?"

"Once," Kaz said absently.

"What?" Riddick roared. "What about those broads in Vegas? They told me you were the king of the goddamned Strip!"

Kaz went scarlet. "I meant...I've only done it once. Myself. Me, personally."

Riddick was scowling at him. "How many times have you done it as a doctor?" he growled.

"A few hundred by now," Kaz said, waving a hand dismissively. His cheeks were still pink. "Hell, one of my regulars goes back and forth every other month, and I've been doing him for...about three years. I've been specializing in this exclusively for almost four years, and you get a lot of gender-benders in Vegas."

"And it's completely reversible?"

"Yes!" His answer was so heartfelt that Riddick chuckled in spite of himself. "Look, I tried it once because I thought it would help me understand my patients better, and other stupid reasons. I don't--I didn't--look, let's just get this done, if you're sure that's what you want."

Riddick watched the younger man, whose hands weren't quite steady as he drew the dose out of the ampule he held. "You really don't want to do this, do you? Is it a bad idea medically? You said he's stable."

"Yeah, for now he is, but his physiology...look, I had no idea how difficult this was going to be, Riddick. I thought, hell, knock the toxins out of his system and rejuv him and he'd be back on line PDQ. This has taken days longer than I was expecting, and I swear to God, I don't know what side effects the Regrestrogen process is going to have in conjunction with all the other crap I've pumped into him."

Having Roy undergo a sex change was the perfect disguise to get him off-world, and Riddick had congratulated himself for thinking of it. He'd even acquired a passport for "Henroietta Betancourt-Braddock". "If we don't do it, he's liable to wind up with blade runners on his ass again. I can't let that happen."

"As long as you understand there's a real risk," Kaz looked worriedly at him, all wide-eyed, hypospray in his hand. "Because if anything goes wrong, rejuv is not an option. Call it too much of a good thing. Rejuv drugs work to purge aging cells and essentially reset the body's clock to its peak. The drugs we're using for the change are doing some pretty drastic things on an even deeper lever. We're talking chromosomes, here. Combining the two would potentially retard cell regeneration and kick off a lot of problems I don't know how to go about fixing. Hopefully, we won't need anything. Roy's holding his own."

"Then do it."

Biting his lip, Kaz lined up the pneumatic hypo and pressed the dispenser. "That's it. We're committed."

"Hell," said Riddick, dead pan. "I've been committed plenty of times. What's one more?" But his gaze went to the man lying on the table, and he reached out to take Batty's lax hand.

While he stood there, the fugitive found himself closer to prayer than he'd been in decades. The nuns had tried to beat God into him for years at the orphanage; when they'd finally given up and fed him into the social services system, he'd gladly given God up for dead. Of course, the bastard wouldn't leave him alone; whatever Power controlled the universe loved to fuck with him--usually, Riddick fucked back, but right now, a cosmic "Come on, give me a break!" echoed in the depths of his being.

No. No begging. It wouldn't do any good. Either Roy makes it, or-- "When is something going to happen?" Riddick demanded. "How do we know it's working?"

"It's working. And when that--" He pointed to one of the readouts "--gets down to 100 exactly, he gets the next shot. Patience, Riddick. It's not instantaneous!"

For a guy who barely came up to his chin, Riddick thought the medico had a lot of grit. Kaz had been occupying a penthouse suite in Vegas when Riddick tracked him down, surrounded by beautiful people who were availing themselves of his services. Most of the suite was being used as an illicit clinic; the bellhop he'd bribed confided that most of the hotel's top two floors were occupied by Kaz's patients at any given time. A biohazard disposal service was a routine vendor of theirs. So the little twerp must be pretty good at what he does... "It doesn't look like anything's happening!"

Kaz pointed at one of the graphs on the display. "That's happening. This is a three-part procedure, and nothing visible should happen until midway through stage two. What this is doing...it enables us to unlock the cells, but we have to wait for it to multiply itself for all the cells."

"Like turning off a burglar alarm."

"Good analogy. That's exactly right, except that this system is going to take a lot longer to disarm. Then we use the genetic equivalent of a skeleton key to unlock the female chromosome, and we turn the knob that'll open the door and let us in. In the bad old days, gender reassignment involved surgical butchery and it was a one-way ticket. It was crude. It lacked finesse." Kaz was gesturing with more animation than Riddick expected. "The Regrestrogen process changed all that. We can alter an individual's gender at the chromosomal level by exploiting the genetic fact that all embryos begin as female--"

And on, and on... Riddick was willing to exploit it, he just didn't feel a need to hear all the hows and whys. He nodded as Kaz emphasized a point. Kaz was starting to look better and better. He'd tried the process once? Bet he was a cute little lady...like--who the hell does he remind me of? The pheromones Kaz gave off were mostly nervous, but every once in a while, Riddick kept getting a whiff of something else, like maybe, just maybe, Kaz was checking him out. Either I'm dreaming, or he's too closeted to show it.

"Look at it as a physiological yin-yang," Kaz said earnestly. "Everything male corresponds to something female, but the hormones the embryo received during fetal development destined it to develop as male. We can reprogram the structure of DNA to reverse the process and let the double-X chromosome dominate."

"What was it like?" Maybe I can rattle him a little, see what makes him tick.

Kaz stopped in mid-sentence. "What?"

"What was it like...seeing how the other half lives. Being a woman. Tell me about it. Did you enjoy it?" Maybe I should do him and get it out of my system so I won't be all distracted when Roy comes out of it.

He hadn't expected Kaz to go pale at the question, but the rogue medico was staring at him. Each freckle stood out sharply on his thin, angular face. "Sometimes." His hazel eyes flitted away to the display, not looking at Riddick, and there was a sudden quivering tension in his slight form. "I got used to seeing a girl in the mirror, and going into the women's restroom, and putting on makeup. But I never did get used to having tits. I always felt top-heavy. I had one menstrual cycle--" A blush crept onto his face "--and it completely freaked me out. It's one thing to read about what normal is in a textbook--it's something else when you're the one bleeding and cramping. I was terrified..." He stopped, his face scarlet, freckles obliterated by pink.

"Why'd you do it?" Riddick was curious. He couldn't imagine wanting to be other than what he was...he privately admitted that that was the primary reason he hadn't told Roy the whole plan. It's a good plan, he defended himself, but there's no fucking way I'd let anyone do it to me. So I've gotta wonder, does this shrimp have more guts than me, or is he just a freak?

"Well, there was this girl. And she was hot. Really, really hot." Kaz smiled at the memory of the hot girl. "I got to know her, and I found out she was a lesbian. And I thought, what the hell..."

Riddick raised an eyebrow. Okay, so that's how he really swings. "Did it work?"

"Nah. It turned out I wasn't her type."

Kaz still had rosy pink cheeks, but he seemed more relaxed, and Riddick ventured another question. "Did you try making it with a guy, as a girl?"

"I'm not going to talk about that." His tone went cold, sounding angry.

"I need to know!" Riddick wanted to shake the other man. "For Roy's sake..."

"You don't need to know about that!" Kaz snapped, his voice higher than usual. "You don't!" He shook his head violently. "Roy's okay. Just let me alone for a while, okay?" He spun on his heel, and Riddick followed his progress toward the locker room with a puzzled scowl. He wasn't scenting anger--the pheromones Kaz was giving off were rich with fear.