VI. Unspoken
WS27-J was a weather satellite. It orbited a two-faced planet that had been named Janus by its human colonists. On the dayside, the climate was an even, hellish blaze. Constant convection produced minor sandstorms here and there, but the blistering sunlight beat them down again quickly. The nightside was where things became interesting. Two minor seas, countless lakes, and a system of rivers running through numerous mountain ranges, combined with ever-flowing air currents bringing warmth from the dayside, made for weather systems human minds had barely begun to comprehend.
Like its brother satellites, WS27-J was only a machine, but it got what little electronic satisfaction it could out of doing its job. Unlike its brother satellites, WS27-J was a shell program. Few humans on Janus--none of them meteorologists--knew that inside its electronic brain existed another program entirely.
MS9-J was politely called a weather satellite. It did not care that its shell was preoccupied with air currents and cloud formations. It obeyed meteorological orders from the planet below only because its military masters had programmed it to do so. MS9-J watched, not for intriguing weather patterns, but for unnatural heat signatures outside human territory.
To date, there had been only one, and that had been ruled a software error.
A machine does not get bored. But MS9-J had just enough artificial curiosity to go beyond simple human orders from simple human minds. There were no heat signatures in the wastes of the nightside. There was, however, a series of human cities that circled the day/night terminus like a string of infrared pearls. In a mind coded to search for unnatural heat, this produced the binary equivalent of fascination. So while most of its programming was occupied with fruitless mapping and remapping, a small part of MS9-J watched the cities below it like a cat watching a bird on the other side of a window.
Its orbit now took it over a small, unremarkable town, within which huddled a small, unremarkable flat. If MS9-J had cared to peer closer, it would have seen two infrared figures sitting on opposite sides of the flat's main room.
Kat stared at Imam. Imam stared at Kat. Neither spoke. After some time, the priest rose, crossed the room, and picked up a book from the shelf. He blew dust from the cover, coughed twice, and walked back to his corner. With a nudge to the lights, he opened the book and began silently reading.
Jack crouched on a back street that could have belonged on any number of marginal worlds. She had the hard-won instincts of a spacer brat, instincts that said the 'port was less than an hour away by a quick walk.
The problem was, her legs wouldn't move.
Most every living planet you've been on has birds, dammit! she lectured herself. And they all sing, too! The whistles and hoots echoing from outside the fringes of town had Jack cowering in a small alley, her arms thrown over her head, frozen like a prey animal. The sounds weren't the same as the crazed whalesong of those flying teeth, but still...
She thought of a parakeet she'd once owned, and shuddered.
Jack had seen birds with feathers, birds with fur, birds with scales, and birds that might as well have coalesced from the daylight itself. She'd seen birds with two wings and four, birds that had no wings at all, but swam through the air all the same. But what kind of bird would live on a world with no sun to sing to?
"You're a stupid idiot, you know that?" She rose to her feet shakily. "You can't even take care of yourself. Can't even walk a few measly blocks." Under her string of verbal abuse, her legs started moving. The more and louder she cursed herself, the stronger she became, until she was almost running.
Her legs took her away from the spaceport, back the way she'd come. She didn't argue with them.
Jack opened the door on a confusing scene.
Kat sat in the corner, staring across the room with a naked expression of hunger on her face. As Jack walked in, she found Imam sitting on the other side of the room, legs crossed beneath him, a book open on his lap. His lips moved soundlessly.
Doesn't he know? Jack wondered. Doesn't he know she can't--oh. Of course he knows. Imam, she thought, was displaying a remarkable lack of tact; but Jack suddenly realized there was something else to worry about.
"Where's Riddick?"
Imam set the book down with a sigh. "He is preparing the ship for launch."
"What? He was gonna leave without me?"
"He doesn't own you." That was Kat. "You can leave whenever you like. He would have let you go."
Jack thought of how scared she'd been out there, huddled close to that alley wall. He would have let me go. She remembered the terror of being trapped in that cave, just her and Imam and Carolyn against all the things that were hunting them. He would have let me go.
He would have let me go.
"Who the hell says I want him to let me go?" Jack snarled.
Getting to the spaceport wouldn't be easy, not with a slave in tow. It was just as Riddick had said: What would a priest or a teenager be doing with a sex slave? So Imam had excused himself to the bathroom to rearrange his robes, leaving Jack and Kat to wait through another awkward silence.
Jack looked at the book Imam had left on the floor. The Second Diaspora. It was a history, she supposed. Dry, boring, and probably almost unreadable. She picked it up. The pages rustled through her fingers, and Jack came to a startled understanding of what Imam had been doing.
By the time the priest returned to the room, Kat had edged her way next to Jack. The slave was stumbling through a few words at a time, revealing that she knew at least the basics of reading. "...after the disap... disappearance of the... Ch... Chi..."
"The Chivalrous," Jack supplied. She glanced up at the sound of Imam's footsteps.
A strange, dark-skinned man loomed over her. He wore long, loose leggings and a sleeveless, open mantle that had once been concealed under flowing robes. Bare arms, chest, and head gleamed in the low light. Around his waist was belted what could have been a priest's stole--if it hadn't been worn by what now looked like a mad djinn.
"You, uh... you look good," was all Jack could say.
He smiled, and the mad djinn disappeared. "Come. Mr. Riddick is waiting for us," Imam said. "He asked that we wait five hours. If you did not return by then, why..." He left the rest unspoken.