Rorye led the way again. Johns took the rear. Riddick was guarded in between them.

The trio marched down the empty corridors. Lacroix had gone on the ship-wide comm and told the crew not to interfere with Johns and Rorye. They had encountered only one crewman, who quickly backed against the wall with his hands raised. Johns kept his gun on the man until they rounded a corner.

The Admiral's Yacht, an appropriate if uninspired name, stood waiting in the hangar when they arrived. It was small, obviously the admiral himself traveled alone, but it had a sleek, predatory countenance that spoke of speed and evasive abilities. Johns liked it.

Again, there was no crew in sight. The large bay door was already open, and a thin force-field was all that kept the air from rushing out into empty space.

Johns looked over the yacht a moment longer before turning to Riddick. "You first."

Riddick ignored Johns' command to enter the yacht.

Some alarm triggered in Johns' drugged brain a split second before he found himself floating in midair. The gravity had been cut. He tried to turn his gun on Riddick, but every movement sent him spinning wildly. Rorye wasn't having any better luck.

Riddick calmly flew/floated to the Admiral's Yacht, which had been magnetically sealed to the metal deck. He took a small communicator from his pocket - Johns hadn't bothered searching him; bad move - and spoke a single word, "Now."

The communicator had allowed Lacroix to track their movements in the ship via the sensors on a shuttle outside the ship. When he saw that they were in the hangar, he'd ordered two crewmen to manually cut the artificial gravity. He waited for his son's signal that he was in position before implementing the next stage. Outside the hangar, Lacroix blew out two power conduits. The rest was up to Riddick now.

Inside the hangar, Johns realized that Riddick wasn't moving. He wasn't trying to stop them or kill them. He just lounged against the side of the yacht facing away from the bay door. Another alarm went off in Johns' head a split second before the lights went out and sent Johns to hell.

Lacroix had blown the power conduits to the hangar. No matter what kind of computerized crap Johns had pulled, it wouldn't matter without power. The transparent barrier of the force-field blinked out of existence. The air in the hangar was sucked out along with an unlucky Rorye, who had been close to the door.

Riddick grabbed Johns by the collar before he could be hurtled into space. Johns clutched Riddick's fist in desperation. While some air remained, Riddick growled, "Don't mess with my family, Johnsy-boy. You don't like what happens."

Johns couldn't protest as Riddick sank his teeth into the vein of his neck for a quick taste. Then the air was gone. Johns' lungs squeezed painfully in a futile attempt for oxygen. The void of space pulled at his body in ways it wasn't built to withstand. The fragile flesh of his eyes was the first to give. A mix of blood and the vitreous fluids of his eyes floated around Johns' head in a grisly halo. His ear drums were the next to give in and bleed into space. Johns mouth and face were contorted in such a manner that Riddick thought he might be trying to scream, but there was no air to push past his vocal chords, and no one could hear in a vacuum anyway.

The entire process took less than two seconds. Riddick watched it all with gruesome fascination before giving Johns' body a shove out to join Rorye. The two bodies twitched with residual neural energy, but Riddick knew they were dead.

He shrank back down against the yacht where he'd braced himself from the outgoing atmosphere. His eyes and ears were burning and straining against the pressure of being in a vacuum. He wished he'd gotten his goggles back from Jack; they might have helped a little.

With a hand tight over his eyes to keep them in place, Riddick felt his way to the yacht's hatch. They'd chosen the yacht instead of a basic shuttle because it had a small airlock. He got in and sagged with relief as the pressure around his body eased considerably. He floated to the cockpit and powered up the yacht for a quick trip out and up to Shuttle Bay 1, which still had power and gravity.

Once there, he headed out for Main Engineering and the computer controls. That quick bite of Johns' blood had been bitter and vile for Riddick to swallow, but swallow he had. For the next hour or so, that blood - tainted though it was - would give Riddick Johns' knowledge, including his short-term memory which held the new access codes. Riddick sat at the computer, sorting through the information in his head and on the screen.

He had planned it well enough: kill Johns and Rorye, and make sure to get a taste of Johns so he could figure out how to fix the computers. Lacroix had actually come up with the whole gravity/force-field thing. Riddick had just figured to promise them a shuttle and kill them both on the way to it. Lacroix wanted it his way though. He'd said they would expect something of that nature and would be prepared for it, but they would never suspect what had been in store for them. Riddick had to hand it to his father, he was one twisted bastard when it came to strategy - that being meant fondly, of course - but what else does one expect from a 2,400 year-old Roman general?

Riddick shook his head as he thought about Johns. He'd had potential, that one, but Johns was mortal, fallible, fragile...just like the rest. To be sure, his loss was a waste of possibilities, but Riddick's overall thought was a happy if selfish one.

At least the game ended with a bang, he thought. Like he'd told Jack, Johns had gotten boring to play with, especially after the morphine started. Riddick had been ready to walk away without so much as a parting shot. Johns' little stunt let him end things with a bit of a flourish, and with Riddick as the indisputable winner. He'd been playing cat-and-mouse with authority since the day he was brought across. He had never really lost, but he hated when he had to walk away. It didn't seem sportsman-like.

Riddick slowly worked his way into the computer, moving through lockouts, blockouts, and traps to repair the damage Johns had done. A hand laid itself on his shoulder. Riddick had sensed her enter the room. "Hey, Angel-girl. What's up?"

"Lacroix's decided not to give us a shuttle," she said. "There's so much damage, he's going to dock at Station Solaris IV for extensive repairs. He said it's three weeks from here, and when we get there, we can get a ride to Aristotle's."

She wanted to say something more, he was sure of it. He knew her too well not to note the slight quiver in her voice and the barest fluttering tremble in the hand on his shoulder. He punched in the final codes on the computer and stood to give his sister a hard hug.

It was all she needed to start crying. "I'm scared, Richie...Everything's so new, and I'm so...out of date...At least on that planet, I knew how to survive...here I...I..."

He waited for it. She always started with one thing, then roared about something else when she was upset like this. He didn't have to wait long.

She sucked in her tears, shoved him away, and slapped him hard. The resounding crack of her hand to his cheek echoed in the tiny chamber. "Don't you ever scare me like that again, you bastard! You could have been sucked out into space with them! They could have shot you! Then where would you be? You know we don't have sensors on the ship yet and shuttle sensors aren't sensitive enough to pick out one dead body in cold space."

How did she know what modern shuttles are capable of? he thought with a cocked brow.

She read his face perfectly. "Lacroix told me. Just to frighten me, I'm sure."

Riddick shook his head. He wouldn't put it past Lacroix to pull shit like that just for kicks. He had an odd sense of humor sometimes.

He pulled Angela into another embrace. "It's alright, Angel-girl. We're together now. We're family, and nothing can separate that."

THE END