I. Primacy
The Constitution of the Confederated Human Worlds was drafted at the first Orion Convention, according to the few history books I bothered with in slam. And the second amendment to this illustrious document outlines colonial law. The Right of Primacy, to get right down to it.
The first group of stakeholders to survive for ten consecutive years on an untried world are granted all rights—including charter and government—to that planet, its resources, and its orbital space. Moons and other natural satellites, too. They say "group of stakeholders" because they don't figure just one or two people can manage a stake on an alien world. But they never figured on me.
Richard B. Riddick, a Prime? Never happen.
It's simple to get preliminary confirmation, if far from easy—a decade of killing off photophobic flying teeth could never be considered easy. See, every starship, from two-seaters to luxury passenger liners to cheap rentals, is required to carry a bone sampling kit in its medical supplies. Since skeletal tissue is constantly being broken down and reformed, a human skeleton is never more than ten years old. Spend a decade on any planet, and the mineral content of your bones, from surface to marrow, will match the particular isotopic signature of that planet.
Send in a sample of bone tissue, and if you pass, a bunch of nice young men and women wearing nice dark suits come to confirm that the DNA from the sample is really yours. The handy thing about this part is that a Prospective Prime—prospectors, they're called—can't be brought in under any warrant.
The process is practically foolproof. Never been successfully counterfeited, though a few prospectors have had to go on the run after trying to fake it.
Top it all off—once your Primacy gets confirmed, any criminal record you may have gets completely erased; the proverbial clean slate.
Bibbity-bobbity-boo, you're a new person.
The Orion Congress figures ten years of hard labor and bare survival to be sufficient punishment for any crime—since two years fighting for your life in a penal colony isn't enough.
Ten years of freedom. Ten years building a life of your own with the only woman you ever needed. Ten years of fucking paradise. As long as you don't mind the local wildlife. But it's only been nine years, and I'm still the most wanted man in human space, and now I have to give up my shot at Primacy. Because I can't let her die.
We were nearly done clearing the planet, Jack and me. Only one last hive to go. That monster should have been dead, as many times as it had been shot. Fucking lying there in the triple sunlight, smoldering like all the rest. But Jack stepped too close, and it opened her chest like a chainsaw.
Now all that's standing between Jack and the long dark is a bunch of clumsy stitches, a mummy's worth of bandages, and a cryo tank. If she doesn't make it—then what? Another notch in my belt? Fuck that.
Once I locked Jack in one of the Nightfall's twin cryo tubes, I went back to the bombed-open cavern where she'd been wounded, and I used the last of our precious stash of flash-bang grenades. They threw the surviving monsters, hiding just inside collapsed tunnels and sheltering under overhangs, into a mindless riot; but that was the point. They go nuts, and they fly right out into the light they're hiding from. Crispy critters. That, and they're easier to hit when they're too crazed to figure out what you're aiming at.
It felt like I was avenging Jack's death. They call the economy-sized tubes on the ship coffins. I've programmed the Nightfall's autopilot for Janus. It's the only place I can think of that's safe. And Imam's there.
Now I'm lying in this cheap excuse for a cryo tube, and for the first time I can remember, I wish for the oblivion of cold sleep.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………
He was looking for something.
Through chamber after chamber of the empty hive that they'd converted to their home, Riddick hunted frantically, all the while knowing that Something Else, far under the earth, was hunting him in turn.
He'd lost something important, but he didn't even know what it was. Not large, that much he knew—small enough to bundle in his arms. The ground rumbled, and cracks began to form under Riddick's feet.
Inside the tiny cryo tube, Riddick's eyes fluttered open sightlessly. His mouth formed a name.
"Jack."