Jack Chapter 4, a pitch black / riddick fanfic

Thanks for this chapter go out to Ayabie who helped kick my butt up in the air. It was stuck but good and really needed it! Feedback on reviews and thank yous are below this chapter. I apologize for having taken so long to get this out to you. Lots of excuses of course and as valid as they are, it's still six shades of suck and I apologize. I'll not do so again...I hope...if I do, feel free to kick my butt :)

Jack 4

Earth: Company Headquarters

Rubber-soled shoes padded softly outside his office door. Nothing moved on the top floor that he didn't know about. In part this was due to the security measures that his predecessor Bishop had left in place but he was not content to leave it at that.

He wasn't so arrogant that he openly thought he could improve on Bishop's existing security. After all, Bishop had taken years to set up his surveillance network, his Byzantine system of informants, devices and files.

With his death seven years ago, Bishop had left a power vacuum and there had been a hard-fought battle among the top predators in the Company's elite Mercenary Guild department for the coveted office. Of the list of people that had been considered for the position, Alistair Thorne, as one of Bishop's assistants at the time, hadn't been anywhere near the top of the list. Agents had come out of the woodwork for the directorate. Agents with far more experience, more pull. Far more qualified. But he had fought. And won.

Taking a page from Bishop's playbook, he had been willing to play dirty. Very dirty. It was that cutthroat approach before he had even secured the position that not only assured his ascension but differentiated him from Bishop himself. Once his place was secured, Thorne had used and expanded on those systems. Quiet. Unrelenting.

On his computer console he watched as his secretary stood outside the office door. A young woman named Marjorie. In her arms she shuffled a stainless steel case awkwardly as she adjusted her skirt, tucking a folded destination slip between her elbow and the case.

She knocked to announce her presence. At his desk Thorne smirked, his thin lips pulled into an unflattering pale gash, as she looked around the barren hallway, growing ill at ease with the continued wait. Another moment he gave her, until she raised her hand to knock again, and he relented, keying the intercom, "Come in".

Outside, Marjorie exhaled and depressed the door handle, letting the door swing in silently across the carpeted floor, stepping into the cool office. In complete silence, he let her cross the room, not looking up from the meaningless papers he had on his desk. The casual cruelties of his predecessor didn't come naturally to him but it wasn't through a lack of application. Bishop's methods were simple and ensured that those beneath him were fearful and so easier to control. It was easier when, due to access to those systems of security, he knew exactly what his staff thought of him, how they spoke about him when they believed he couldn't hear them.

From surveillance he had learned that the young woman in front of him found him to be attractive, although cruel, smug and, in her own words, a bit of a bastard. He didn't care; it only helped in keeping them at a distance, fuelling his anger and, in a circular fashion, allowing him to continue Bishop's practice in casual viciousness.

It would have been easy to remove these problems when his position was assured and he knew that Bishop was notorious for churning through female office staff. At getting rid of anyone that vexed him. Thorne had admired many things about the other man but that hadn't been one of them; he thought it showed weakness, to say nothing of displaying the very surveillance at work that brought the comments to light. Rather than resort to petty displays that showed his hand, Thorne chose to bide his time and listen.

When Marjorie carefully placed the stainless steel case on the edge of the desk, careful not to have it click too solidly against the expanse of marble, he glanced up, regarding her as barely an afterthought.

"Coffee," he said, and turned back to the papers as though she had never been there at all.

"Yes, sir," she said, turning on a heel and recrossing the room, stopping at the door. "Anything else, sir?"

Not looking up, he answered, "Nothing else, just coffee."

When she was gone, Thorne set aside the papers hadn't been doing much of anything with, already bored with the charade, and returning to his computer console. Even in the most secure office in the building, Thorne ran through several redundant layers of identification procedures to ensure his identity. The last step involved a retinal scanner and he remained stock still as a piercingly bright light crawled slowly across the surface of his eye. It itched and he flexed his toes, pressing them against the leather uppers of his shoes to the point of pain in order to take his mind off the procedure. Once over, he screwed his eyes shut, seeing bright spots for a few seconds before his vision cleared. The scanning device retracted back into its housing, the hazel iris on the screen flickering with flares of light as his identity was confirmed.

The screen went black briefly and then a single file folder appeared. It looked no different than any of the thousands he had to deal with on a regular basis. The difference being that it was something he was not supposed to have. In truth he believed that if it came out that the information was in his possession he would disappear shortly after. He didn't want to think too much about what would happen after that. Under Bishop, he had filled out the paperwork that had sent Company employees to max security prison sites, never to be seen again, for much less.

Seven years ago, he had manned a communication console in a secure room down the hall from where he sat now when a call had come in from the technical officer of a downed freighter on the farthest reaches of the Company's empire.

It had been late and everyone else was gone. Alone, he had leaned in close as the voice came through, grainy and cut with rhythmic static, hard to hear despite the best communication equipment that money could buy. There hadn't been much time and the caller had sounded desperate. A decision had to be made quick, had to be made right then and there, and he had made that call, sending a troop transport to Trieste 9.

If Bishop had lived he would have backed Thorne's play without question. After all, he had done exactly what had been demanded: put the full weight of the Company behind whatever action his superior took. It had been done that way for years.

But Bishop hadn't survived. Hadn't survived and in fact had failed catastrophically. Agents were willing to fight for his seat but the man's failure was something they wanted no part of. That he, Bishop's assistant at the time, had ended up with the prize? The stink of failure lingered but no one dared make the accusation publicly and so it festered just below the surface. To do so would stain anyone involved, all the way up to the head of the Company. It would blight Bishop's memory and from there, everything he had ever touched and no one wanted that history to be public, that open for dissection.

For the Company to protect itself, Bishop's failure had become his failure. And so became his obsession, an obsession he wasn't supposed to acknowledge. So he had bide his time, collecting everything that could be known about the Company's failure on Trieste 9. It wasn't only the planet but Bishop's failure to take it that had caught him in its gravity.

Even the failure was a failure. Bishop had lost but beyond that, he hadn't managed to do what any other Company executive would have done. He hadn't been around to erase the fact that he had failed.

Such losses were for all intents and purposes quite rare. Hundreds of settlements had fallen to the ever-expanding Company. For the most part there had been little to no resistance at all. In the past, worlds that had stood against the Company had been wiped clean and yet Trieste 9 remained, defiant. And further, it hadn't remained solely a local matter. If it had? If it had, Thorne wouldn't be keying in the code for the package his secretary had brought. A long string of numbers and then there was a pause while he waited for another scan which he hated but endured, and finally the case clicked open.

There wasn't much inside. A data disc with the latest secure file from a personally dispatched deep space surveillance fleet, heavily secured in an inner case that only he had the code for. Getting the information in a hard copy meant that it was already out of date, he knew, if only by a matter of days, as flash communication was transferred ship to ship by those he knew were in his pocket. Receiving communication through the Company's communication centre would mean opening the whole operation up to any Company eyes that cared to look and he wasn't ready to do that just yet. It was a trade off he was willing to risk in order to present his superiors with a fait accompli. To stand at the head of the table and present the whole package in a stunning briefing that would, in one fell swoop, clear his name and Bishop's both and secure his future in a way that would be irrefutable.

It was about more than just Trieste 9. Much more.

Just the thought alone had him close his eyes, feeling his low belly tense in a near-sexual rush. Exhaling, he opened his eyes and made a quick check of the surveillance outside in the hallway, certain that his own office, swept daily for devices, was secure. Only then did he remove the disc from its secure case and drop it into the reader, the whisper click the only sound in the room.

At the generic prompt that appeared, he tapped in the final simple code: "419".

Static crackled once and then cut cleanly to the hard-lined face of an anonymous soldier wearing the black uniform of a Company intelligence officer. It bore no insignia, no name, and Thorne knew that if he asked, none would be forthcoming. The intelligence officer would deflect or refuse to answer. Or simply lie, which was more likely. In any case, the name wasn't important. Only the information mattered.

The nameless face crisply recited a series of numbers broken into chunks that Thorne entered into a star map as the officer spoke, bringing up a section of space close to the Trieste system, where the ship, known between them only by the appellation "419", hung silent in hyperspace.

To the side of the officer, a series of captured images from the "419"'s surveillance array tiled downward neatly and Thorne clicked on several of them as the officer continued to speak. The Trieste system was a vast expanse of planets strung along the outward edge of the volatile P59 Nebula. Existing within the cloud's influence, the space between planets was treacherous as were several of the planets themselves. The planets that "419" had examined thus far were so unstable that no responsible commander would send his men down to the surface. Gaseous giants, hunks of frozen ice and other worlds that could put a description to hell made up many of them. About Trieste 9 itself, what little information Thorne had managed to extract from the signals sent before Bishop's freighter went down had kept him from repeating his predecessor's mistake: He didn't send another ship into the orbit, high or otherwise, of Trieste 9.

What drove the electromagnetic pulse was something of a mystery in itself. Unable to make detailed scans of the planet from space because of the interference, there was no way to discover what power the planet drew on or how to counteract. Landing a science team without being able to ensure their safety meant that he couldn't ascertain from the planet's surface what powered it either. In any case, this was an area for the scientific division long afterwards; it didn't much concern him save for the fact that it prevented an all out open invasion.

What did matter to him was that the pulse was precisely timed in twenty-four minute cycles. The electromagnetic pulse never dissipated entirely but there was the briefest of windows where it was theoretically possible to get a signal out. During his last communication he had ordered the "419" to make a quick and quiet pass of Trieste 9, staying out of the world's gravity well, and send down a drop ship with a crew of men with equipment that would serve as a link to the ship in hyperspace.

The anonymous officer looked down at a pad he had in his hands and drily ran off another series of coordinates which Thorne tapped into his keyboard, bringing up the location in space where the "419" had stopped long enough to drop its cargo. Another series of surveillance captures, grainy and heavily jagged with interference, replaced the previous set on the right side of the intelligence officer. Leaning forward and squinting, Thorne picked out a single bright outline, realizing that it was the horizon of Trieste 9, backlit by a star, before the image jagged and corroded as he scrolled through the series.

"The soldiers waited at the drop site until a window opened and reported on their immediate surroundings. We were unable to lock on while they were transmitting due to jamming so we have no way to know where they've gone beyond the initial drop point. There has been no contact with the team since the drop."

Inhaling sharply through his nose, Thorne bit back his questions, knowing that the recording couldn't answer him, instead scribbling shorthand notes onto a small pad of flash paper that he kept for just this purpose.

'Duncan Warfield?'

One of the foremost questions in his mind was the location of Bishop's right hand man, Duncan Warfield. The merc-hunter's fate was unknown, as were a great many other things that Thorne would need to know if he were to be successful. There had been no contact with Warfield since Bishop's freighter had entered the Trieste system. He could very well be as dead as Bishop but, having met Warfield, Thorne doubted it and he hoped that the seven specialists he had dispatched would be able to contact the merc.

The question itself bothered him, the uncertainty of not knowing where Warfield was or even if he was alive. For all Thorne knew, Warfield could have been part of the contingent of Company soldiers that he knew had managed to be taken from the planet surface and simply not reported in but it had him wonder nonetheless and he worried over it like a missing tooth.

It was of course entirely possible that the merc-killer had no way of sending a signal out from the surface. That the radio equipment that had called in the strike had been destroyed beyond repair and that a signal was as impossible for him as it was for the special operations team to send out. Having read the man's file, Thorne knew that it was a possibility that he had gone to ground once Bishop was dead and that the specialists would find him, living rough and waiting for rescue. It was even possible that he had managed to escape with the very few Company soldiers that had been airlifted off-world when a military freighter went AWOL and rescued the remainder of their unit, against orders that demanded they leave. The last was possible but unlikely as Thorne knew that he would find a way to make contact.

All of these questions flitted through his mind even as the nameless officer recited the credentials of those that had been dropped on Trieste 9. Impressive records with various special operations teams; he had no doubt that they would be successful. There was no way they could be anything else. It was the not knowing, the not being one hundred percent sure, that troubled him. Having access to a man like Warfield, who had not only served beside Bishop for years, but who had been planet-side during the invasion and witnessed what happened, then and since, was invaluable. The intelligence alone made the expense worth it but the idea of bringing back Warfield and having a man of his calibre stand beside him as he briefed the board?

Frustrated with his inability to influence events on the ground, he shook his head and pushed his chair back away from the desk, getting to his feet so quickly that he nearly toppled the chair. 'This is why Bishop stayed out in the field,' he thought. In all likelihood, at his age Bishop should have remained in the office and delegated, he should have retired, but at this moment, Thorne understood completely why his predecessor had not. In an already highly secretive organization, the additional layers in his division only served to separate him further from the action. That he couldn't tell anyone about it didn't help.

"We continue to reconnoitre the Trieste system with an eye toward scooping any and all signals in or out of T9 ," the officer continued. "And we will continue to forward any and all intelligence we receive through established dark channels."

At the floor length window that ran the length of the room behind his desk, Thorne stopped his anxious pacing and clasped his hands behind his back, watching a paler, washed out version of the officer reciting his notes in the window's reflection.

Onscreen, the images disappeared and the dimensions shifted, making the officer seem to grow in size as he looked at his notes and back into the screen. Just the thought of a pause and Thorne gazed intently at the reflection of the screen in the window, feeling his belly tighten once more.

"Lastly, on our pass to deliver the operatives, our sensors picked up a broken signal hidden in a distortion field within the nebula itself. Unable to lock onto the signal or determine a location with any accuracy, we dropped the payload and circled back to do a grid by grid search."

At the window, Thorne turned towards the console as the officer brought up another display screen. Not an image this time, just a garbled sound that could mean almost anything. Or nothing. Without full awareness of his actions, Thorne had crossed back to his desk, pulling his chair clear out of the way and leaning in to replay the recording. Eyes closed, he drew on the many years that he had sat in a darkened room down the hall and listened to calls from the Company's freighters. The patterns of human speech were absent but he hadn't expected that in any case, but it was habit to rule it out. It wasn't a simple radio signal.

Reaching out, he rewound the section again, adjusting the volume as much as he dared. The currents and eddies of the nebula wreaked havoc on the signal, distorting and looping the small fragment in on itself. If he were to run it through the Company's signal intelligence division, there was a chance that enough of the signal could be deciphered to state what it was, or wasn't, within the bounds of known science. But Thorne didn't need it because, as distorted as the sound was, he was fairly certain that he knew what made it. Returning the volume to normal, he allowed the recording to continue, waiting for a confirmation.

"Our technicians have attempted to decipher the signal but have failed to clarify it's origin with any certainty. We have, as yet, been unable to secure a location but we do believe that it is a destroyer class military freighter. Unaccounted for."

With that, the anonymous officer set his papers down and reached out to shut off the connection from his side. For several moments after, Thorne remained stock still at his console. Not because he was expecting more but because the import of the agent's last words made it hard to trust that his legs wouldn't give out if he tried to stand or walk.

Inhaling sharply, he let his lungs fill near painfully with air as he stood to his full height, closing his eyes and setting his thoughts in order. It was no sure thing. From the distorted snippet the "419" had captured, the freighter could be as close as a thousand kilometres or as far as thousands of light years, there was no way to tell, given the distortions from the nebula, but it didn't matter. The unaccounted for freighter had become something of a ghost story amongst the Company's military contingent, with quiet whispers of sightings and actions taken.

No one from the Company had authorized a retrieval of the downed soldiers on Trieste 9. No one was supposed to survive to talk about it as failure was not an option. Failures weren't a matter for a commission in the Company; they were disavowed, eradicated. That soldiers were left for dead meant little against the image of a military machine that was never to be beaten. When the freighter had returned to T9 to retrieve a handful of wounded soldiers, they had not only disobeyed a direct order to pull back and let the soldiers be wiped out rather than have the defeat known. They had opened the door for that defeat to become public knowledge.

From the amount of time that Thorne had spent listening in to the conversations of officers, soldiers and intelligence operatives, both before he took Bishop's position and afterwards, he was well aware that military men – despite all Company laws to the contrary – put their units above the Company. But it was one thing to see it on a small scale, such as the petty favouritism bestowed on those with whom you served, and another to break free from the Company in the name of that unit. To turn against the Company entirely and start up a competing mercenary force that were little more than pirates. That someone with the decorated history of Lt. Col. Jane Adams had done so was staggering. That she continued to evade capture was intolerable.

Finding Duncan Warfield and retaking Trieste 9 had been a part of his plan to present his superiors with an end to Bishop's defeat, but it wasn't the whole of the plan. Thorne wanted to stitch the entire affair up in one neat package and present it, delivering Trieste 9 and the hunted fugitive Lt. Col. Jane Adams, preferably alive, as well as her warship, to the board.

The intelligence officer had made a point of not naming the freighter but it was unnecessary. They had found the Decatur.

Insane Kitty: I do love that "fine", it's such a stubborn headed thing to say :)

Hidden Relevance: Thanks so much, HR!

Yep, log in if you wish, it's wordpress so it's very easy :) If it weren't for filtering out a hella amount of spam, I'd completely open up the comments and it wouldn't be an issue :)

I've never been able to 'get' Kyra. She always seemed like someone else entirely to me. I got what the writers were trying to do but it just doesn't say "Jack" to me. I picture this Jack, my Jack, as not that different from the Jack in Pitch Black. Older, stronger and more confident, but essentially the same person.

Sensual is a word that really sums up Riddick for me. He has this undercurrent of sensuality no matter who he's around, male or female. I addressed the difference about what he felt when it came to Jack in Rider. With others, Riddick always keeps a part of himself in reserve. Partly because, as you've said, he's more internal by nature, but also in part due to an insecurity in himself, where he doesn't know if others will accept him as he is. So, rather than get shunned, he keeps it to himself. With Jack though, he's never had to do that. Jack got him from moment one and he feels safe being himself around her, because she'll never judge him the way some others might judge him. Jack is safe because in his mind, she's NOT someone he can fuck with, literally or figuratively, so he can let his guard down.

It gets to one of the prime drives for me writing the whole kit and caboodle. Riddick wasn't written to be a guy. The original Riddick was a female convict that saw herself in Jack. It was when it went to movie form that Riddick went from female to male, but there's still something terribly female about the character and the way he interacts with the world around him.

I get how hard it is for 'shippers though, because in this story, despite their clear if 'familial' affection, there is no relationship beyond a deep friendship. I think it's also weird for some because, as I've been told, Riddick/Shazza is such an odd pairing that when it comes up in a fic where Jack (and in this case a mature Jack) is present, there's almost this question about whether she'll jump ship (LOL!) and it will become Riddick/Jack (it never does :D)

You have hit on something here, about Jacob being something of an afterthought. While he wasn't an actual afterthought, he doesn't have the importance to Jack that her 'family' does. Jacob tries to get her, but I don't think he'd ever be able to understand her enough to really have Jack notice him beyond the friendship they have (which is weird that they married, but I don't think Jack is the sort to take that seriously).

phew!
Leave a long review, get a long review!
Thanks for reading and enjoying!

NJRD:

(ch 1)

*runs over and tackles Nuria in a fierce squish*
You have no idea how happy it makes me that you're here, reading!

Of course you would be the one to pick up on that subtle her side instead of her standing at his side. This whole story is about handing the reins to Jack, so yep :)

It's been really hard for Riddick to open up, taking years, but you're absolutely right: he shows it in small gestures.

That image, damn, I know. I dreamt of that image for weeks before I could get it down on paper, and it's still stuck in my brain. He's not comfortable up there but fuck me if he doesn't look GOOD up there!

(ch 2)

You've got me grinning like a fool! this has really made my morning :D

Jack's only 20 now and the men that she's being pressed to lead are like gods to her, so it's been hard for her not to defer to them, but they both want her to lead, so like so many things she's done, she's trying. She'll get better at giving orders, hahahah.

I like that you've picked up on that about the Jacob/Jack thing. I know that it's expected that when people marry, especially in ficland, they're all supposed to be all moony eyed over each other but Jack married basically because it was easier than not being married. Yep, that's distant. She still loves him, but it's not a dependent sort of love. He's a friend, but she doesn't need him, you know. And there are things about her that he could never understand, you're right.

Riddick makes a good dad, hahahha! He'll let Jack go her own way but he's watching carefully the whole while. Duncan will become really important later on :(

Saismaat: thanks so much for the review! The cold sucks, and real life is even worse, blech!

I think there may be a couple of moments there where it seems they're getting a lot of talk in there, given the time and space but I think it may be a matter of me not getting the distances right. I'll go back and see what I can tighten in any case. I'm starting to think that I should draw a map :)

The horses can cut through the forest, so it's faster for them; the river is open and she's able to fly over it, but it's a long way around. It was a subtle copy of the closing chapters of "Rider", where Riddick, Shazza and the others cut through the forest and onto Sunhillow while Jack took the Moorglade along the river, the long way around, and met up with them just in time to turn the battle. I wanted something to equal that initial fear she had of taking the Moorglade over the waterfall, as that is something that she repeated often with the ship, and turning the glider in such a way (a way that left her scarred after a fall - end of Rider - seemed to be just the thing).

I really like that you've caught Riddick being very much an earth-creature while Jack is something different. They can be similar in so many ways and then you have something like that. Their intimacy has always been something I've loved. They're not paired in this story obviously, but there's always that connection, where he can be something with Jack that he can't be with anyone else.

I'm glad you picked up on the manipulation too! That was something I was going for :)

I haven't seen Avatar yet, but I think that this sort of story fits so well with the style of fantasy/adventure that I can pick out moments in quite a few movies. The airship scenes in one of the Mummy movies or even in one of the Mad Max movies. Someone once mentioned the Hyperion books. The Moorglade doesn't really look or behave like any of those (think sentient fish-ship), but the feel is the same, I think. Avatar is out on disc now so I'll likely watch it at some point and then be 'oh yeah'-ing :)

snorks, wrestling with an angel - Jack's no angel, that's for sure!

I'm working on chapter 4 (had a real life crazy moment here too which had my husband at home all week...can't write a dratted thing then!) so hopefully it won't be too much longer. I hope everything settles down on your end!

Thanks to everyone that is reading and reviewing and thanks to everyone that is reading and not reviewing :D I hope that you continue to enjoy! Drop me a line...