He cursed colorfully but silently, blaming himself, the military, the planet, the creatures and even Shadow for this mess. he glanced up, noting the progress of the sunset, and cursed that, too. They'd need Shadow, or the military would have her, and Jack was insisting that she go with them, so she wouldn't be found. He'd simply shot back that Shadow could take care of herself, that she'd survived seventy years of this hellhole, that she could effectively vanish in plain sight, that she could probably stalk and kill anything. Jack just set her jaw and got that stubborn look in her eyes that Riddick knew even he couldn't argue with. So he'd stormed off, cursing God, fate, and the universe, to find her.
"Where the fuck is Shadow?" he growled at Ailina.
She just looked up at him, her eyes a hundred years old. "She's down there."
"Why the fuck did she not come back?"
"The military man came and tried to order her on to his ship by pointing a gun at me. But he didn't realize how fast she was in human form, because she moved fast enough to take the bullet that was meant for me, and then she tackled him through the mound. I don't know what happened after that. But I know he's dead, and the hatchlings didn't attack her, so they must be hers. I know she changed too, I could hear it, and smell it."
"If she doesn't get her unnatural ass out of there, I'll either drag her by the horns or leave her here. What was she thinking, starting shit when an entire goddamn shipful of soldiers is down here?"
"I don't know," Ailina said. "But it was so hard for her. I hope it will be easier, when she comes back."
"Fuck no, it won't," he said. "It'll be pitch black. She'll be in her element. I wouldn't want to come out, if I were her. She'll forget about us, go up and fight and fuck and whatever else it is those unnatural eyeless bastards do." She will be free, he thought, and that's enough to make a person or a creature throw away any life.
Alina said, "We have to get Marie, and go to the ship."
"There's another person here? Just how many people were on your godforsaken ship?" Riddick asked.
"Many," she replied calmly. "They are all dead. I am alive only because of what I am. Marie is badly infected. I can smell it spreading in her blood, but there is nothing I can do for her. I cannot even make a sound in her presence, it hurts her too much. But I will not leave her to die. I will not reach that level."
She talks like she's a hundred years old, Riddick thought bleakly. Just another little crippled kid her parents gave up, donated to science. It happened to mutations, failed genetically engineered humans and cripples.
"I can take you to the ship. We need to be away from here." Those impossible, innocent eyes stared out at him. For a moment he debated on just leaving her here, leaving Marie, Shadow, Alina, and telling Jack they were dead. They would all die. It wasn't entirely a lie.
But some things had changed since he'd been here last. Jack had convinced him to come here and stop further destruction from happening. And Jack had convinced him to save lives, even though she was afraid of Shadow. He'd never understood that. Why save the life of someone you didn't need, let alone someone who was a danger to you?
He said, "Show me your ship."
That was all it took. She stood up slowly and looked warily at the sky, before picking up her crutches and hobbling away. She didn't seem to bend in the right places, like a bird, with little to no knees and no sideways hip movement. She hobbled slowly across the sand, trying to stay out of the shadows, and reluctantly, he followed her.
She was careful to stay in the light, though it seemed to disorient her. He could tell that when she stepped in to darkness, she breathed a sigh of relief. Her actions were more precise and assured, her body a little straighter, her head held a little higher. This world had bright suns, but they were going down. So why should that much light affect someone? There could be conditions that made someone highly photosensitive, and then again, she was a government experiment. She smelled strange, with an earthy bitterness more akin to reptile scent than human, but there were plenty of genetic freaks out there. She could be a mix of anything. And because of that, she was dangerous no matter her weakness.
She had rounded the spires, going the opposite direction from either ship, hurrying as fast as she could, when they heard the first of the sounds. Eerie, desperate whistles rose up on the thin air, and in the silences between them, the hiss of Alina's breather seemed nearly deafening. She hurried faster, looking nearly comical as she hobbled like a bird across the bleached grey sand. But there was nothing comical about their situation, so instead she looked desperate as she tripped and stumbled and tumbled onward. As the sun dimmed, she moved faster and faster, but still it wasn't fast enough. Eventually she gave up and dropped to hands and knees, tucked her garment over her mouth and nose to protect from flying sand, planted her hands on the ground, and shoved herself forward. She'd apparently been doing this for a long time, because her arms could propel her forward faster than her legs.
Eventually they came to an outcrop of eroded black stone, and Alina scrambled on to it. Somehow she could bend while climbing, and made even faster time than she had on the ground. She scrambled upward, fingers and toes finding every crack and cranny that she could. Riddick simply ran around it.
The ship lay against the outcrop, in near complete darkness. Its forward section was completely destroyed, but part of the passenger cabin was still intact. It was from this section that the scent of something alive was coming, so Riddick started toward it, pulling up his goggles so he could see better. The door was smashed in and there was sand on the floor, and he had to edge around twisted hunks of debris to get inside. Scrabbling behind him and Alina's peculiar earthy scent came to him, telling him she'd made it over the outcrop.
"Where is she?" he demanded.
She didn't respond, only slid past him in to the darkness. He followed her through the mess of the ship, watching the unnatural way she twisted and bent to avoid sharp debris. Her legs might be wooden, but the rest of her was downright catlike, almost seeming to slide and flow past things. She dropped to hands and knees again and skated along the floor until she came to a collapsed door at the end of a corridor. She wormed her way beneath it where it had fallen against the frame and left a small gap, but he hoisted himself over it and peered around.
They were in a small storage compartment, and there was something twitching against one wall, something he was unable to register as human. This ship had been full of muties, he guessed. And they'd come in at a dangerous angle and crashed. Alina might not know who had survived. There was far more dangerous than this little broken empath out there, and those dangers could have slipped out of the ship while she was recovering. There were three types of muties, he'd found-the submissive types that people could easily own, the ones who would rather fade in to complete obscuirty, and the ones that were like birds of prey, aloof and more alien than he'd ever been. There were no leader muties, though he'd seen packs of the latter.
She seemed almost normal, with a soft, round face and a headful of dark curls. Her blue eyes were oddly still, but as he bent closer, he noticed an unnatural sheen to them, and realized that they were made of glass, the old fashioned way. She was of average height, slim but soft, with skin that would have been a rich golden color if not for her ghostly pallor. But her hands were strange, long and narrow and unusually flexible, with thin, spidery fingers. Her body was encased in something resembling a soft blue tracksuit, but the shirt had been cut away at her right side, where he could see ragged bandages under the torn cloth.
"I'm afraid she has reverted," Alina said. The mutie clacked her teeth and flailed one spidery hand out, and he caught an almost metallic glint before Alina went flying, and she tucked it away.
The tiny empath picked herself up and looked at him, imploring mutely.
"She's somewhat of a shifter," Alina said. "Not as advanced as Shadow. She can change some basic parts of her physical appearance. Right now she's in as close as she can be to a wild state, but she's too weak to change." She stayed well away from the ageless mutie's clawed hands as she spoke.
Riddick sighed, bent down, and struck her across the face. marie slumped, and he hoisted her over one shoulder before turning and leaving without a backward glance. Alina would follow him, or she would not. She was the one that wanted off of this rock, and Marie wouldn't come quietly willingly.
He stepped out of the ship and in to deepening twilight. He lifted his head and scented the air, finding half-familiar bitter scents and the smells of panic and death and something almost like blood but less metallic, which he'd never wanted to figure out. The scents touched half-awake parts of his mind like a wind blowing through trees, but it was gone in an eye-blink, hovering in that place where neither darkness nor light holds sway, retreating in to the shadows. Alina scrambled out of the wreck behind him.
"I wish I could fly," she said.
"No, you don't," he replied. He bent and scooped her up as well, hoisting her over his other shoulder, and set off at a run, his eyes tracking the shadows ceaselessly. The first wave of hatchlings was stirring, he could smell their bloodshed already, but the spires hadn't broken yet. The sunset was a brilliant orange fire which would be painful even to human eyes, and it stained the rings of the bigger planet like colored glass. The other, smaller world would stay out of sight possibly through the entire eclipse, because by the time it began its circuit, it would be pitch black.
He rounded the set of spires where he'd found Alina, giving them a wide berth. Hatchlings were stirring just outside the hole Shadow had made, in the long shadow of the artificial outcroppings.
He felt it almost before he heard it, a crackling force shattering the air. He dove sideways, taking Marie and Alina down with him in a cloud of sand and fine gravel. A piercing whistle broke through the eerie ambience at the same moment as the hollow popping of machine guns, and the sand exploded with bullets.
"Shit!" he muttered, and with feeling. His day just couldn't get any better.
He flung Marie over his back and pushed Alina ahead. "Stay in the shadows," he said. "If you can scent out the ship, get there." She was gone, scrambling away, and he was running, low to the ground, straight toward the nearest flock of hatchlings. They boiled against the light, shrieking their high, ringing call. He dove to the ground, sliding beneath their outstretched talons. They hissed, strangely agitated, their wings stirring clouds of sand around him. He let it cover him, hoping it would help mask the heat of his and Marie's bodies. She was a little cooler than most humans, but still warm enough to glow on an infrared sensor. He'd never got up close enough to feel how warm a "shadow" to use Marie's wording, was, but Marie herself had been pretty cool as well. Hopefully, there would be enough time-
Something exploded from the ground in front of them, shrieking. Discord assaulted Riddick's ears and rang against his bones. He'd never heard them make this sound, at least not that he remembered. It grated along his spine and pummeled his eardrums, it rang sourceless echoes through his head in a sonic barrage strong enough to blind like light, and it sent hatchlings boiling up in to the air, scattering like windblown leaves. The eerie warbling hiss-scream came again, seeming to come from every direction at once, and layered with powerful low frequencies that cut at the inside of Riddick's head like knives. Still, he held still, half-buried by sand, knowing that to move was to die. The sound had seemed to knock Marie out again. He hadn't intended to put her under for long, but you could never tell when you punched someone in the face. He knew she was still alive-or at least she had been a few seconds ago. He could hear her blood pumping then, but now he could hear nothing but distortions.
Gunshots blew apart the spires in front of them. He chanced a glance upward through slitted eyes and could see a massive shadow-hued body, swaying slowly. It stretched upward, twisting this way and that, and then with a kick of its powerful legs, it launched itself in to the air. A bullet tracked a red path down its side, but with the size of this thing, that would only piss it off more. It chirped and chittered, sounding damn near like a small bird, and suddenly the entire area boiled with shadows, most of them fairly young, a good deal of them hatchlings. He spotted a few the size he remembered them, and a lot of smaller versions of the same thing, still growing up. Perhaps this had been its anthill, and these were its few latest clutches.
He squinted harder at the big one, noticing that it was favoring its right wing, and saw the strained tissues around the deep gash there. It wasn't bleeding much now, but from the amount of damage it looked like it must have sustained, he couldn't understand how. He'd seen these things spray blood as inefficiently as any human.
An explosion of hot light lit up the area, and Riddick slammed his eyes shut against the glare. A line of advancing shadows fell, screaming. Their numbers had been thick enough to shade most of them, but the casualties were still noticeable. Some were merely dazed, others were barely impaired, but the ones in the direct line of fire would never rise again. He couldn't see the big one, or hear it whistling.
Then something was looming over him, and he looked up to find only eyeless grey skin, an elongated face, a mouth full of bright teeth. It was bending down, its tail coiled behind it, its spindly hands reaching for him. His first reflex was to whip a knife out, but it swung its head aside and whistled, a long, low, descending third. He lashed toward it again, but it twitched aside again. Its hand was on his arm, hauling him upward. He wrenched back violently, Marie tumbling from his grasp. Awake again, the woman scrabbled in the sand, hissing with pain.
Then the wind shifted and scent hit him full on. The smell of cold, of darkness, of the open sky, of rage. The strange hot scent of blood. The harsh tang of desperation.
His hands opened and dropped to his sides. He was standing amid a mass of hunger-crazed killing machines and none of them touched him. He was facing one, and it was making no move to attack him.
"Shadow," he whispered.
She hauled Marie up by her collar and hissed at him. Her tail snaked out to wrap around the girl, underside first so the abrasions might be lessened, and sank down.
He put a hand on one shoulder, felt the cool, hard skin and the power beneath it. He glanced back toward Shadow's face, but it could show no expression. Clumsily, he hoisted himself up and leaned in to her body, clinging on to the ridge of bone guarding the base of her neck. It was no frill, more like a pebbled ring. He felt her wings strain, felt her body shift as she gathered power in to the spring action joints in her legs. She flapped once, twice, and nothing happened. She flapped a third time, sand swirling around them, and Riddick gritted his eyes shut to avoid flying grains. Her body shuddered with the strain of lifting two humans in a light atmosphere. Her wings flapped again, and they skidded forward, hatchlings scattering in all directions. A lean, bony shape rose to confront her, but a hissing blast of sound sent it ricocheting backwards. Again she flapped, and let go the gathering power in her joints, and they were rushing upward, her massive downstrokes stirring the sand in to clouds thicker than smoke.
From the outside, a takeoff might look smooth, effortless, a graceful curve up and away from the earth. But taking off itself was rough and dangerous, wind rattling around them in unpredictable eddies, sand catching in wing grooves and joints, other flyers to avoid colliding with. Gusts both natural and created buffeted them as they rose, and bullets, sand and injured bodies created unforeseen obstacles as Shadow ascended. He tried to cling to bones and not muscles, to avoid straining tissues already pushed to their limits. There was nothing but rushing wind, beating wings, the flex and pull of their movements, the bowstring tension of Shadow's body, his hands locked to her neck ridge hard enough to hurt, but his body was numb and cold and full of sand. The air was full of an endless cycle of whoops and shrieks and whistles, clashing bodies, bullets biting in to flesh and stone.
Another tracer round blew apart an outcrop. Riddick could see the ghost of the light on the other side of it, and then the stone was gone, and it was dark again, the afterimage burning his eyes. Creatures fell, their death songs oddly eerie, roasting alive. Shadow whistled, something he could swear sounded like a battle cry. They rose with her, flapping around her. A shudder ran the length of her body and suddenly she went vertical, shooting almost straight upward. The sun was long gone, but Riddick could see everything. There were others, smaller than her, cswirling below her, fighting.
Fighting over what? he wondered. Food? Each other?
One broke away from the group and shot toward her, but she wheeled away. He stretched his arms forward and locked them around her body, right above the shoulder bones, on the ridge he'd been holding on to and hooked his hands beneath it. He could feel their bodies dragging at her maneuverability, knew she was trying to create a diversion and get away, and knew they were chasing her. He didn't even ask why.
Something metallic came streaking out of the darkness, firing down in to the group below. They scattered and Shadow drifted downward in a dizzying spiral, as if she'd been hit. The ground rushed closer, and Riddick felt as if he could feel the world rotating beneath them. She flared her wings at the last second, nearly shaking Riddick loose with the power of it, and yanked her tail up so that Marie's body was against her side, he guessed to try to avoid snapping her neck. She let Marie fall back again as she leveled out, her wings flapping at the minimum it would take to sustain their altitude. He could feel her muscles trembling with exhaustion, but she unerringly winged her way in the direction of his ship. He could see it now, a speck on the sand, and he'd hoped Jack had had the presence of mind to get her ass inside and biolock it. It wouldn't stop them forever, but she could put up a fight.
Shadow banked sharply away from the ship suddenly, losing altitude in a slow spiral. She hissed deep in her body, reminding Riddick eerily of a rattler's warning except deeper and much slower. She went in to a shallow dive, righting herself in a spray of sand and flapping wings and landing behind a dune. She collapsed forward, dropping Marie in to the sand, and Riddick slid off her back, glancing around. A towering column of flame lit up the night sky, and Shadow shrank away, pressing herself as close as she could in to the dune's shadow. A shivering discord shattered the ominous silence, rattling Riddick's bones and splitting his sight in to a thousand fragments of the same view from different angles. He shut his eyes and fought off the effect, reasserting his own will and perceptions.
From behind him came the sound of something cracking and breaking, things sliding and grinding, and a single soft, barely-restrained whistle. He could hear someone scrabbling in the sand, and he turned to see Shadow in human form, naked on hands and knees with her hair splayed in the sand, trembling. There was blood in her hair and blood on the sand, and her face was obscured by thick black hair.
He grabbed a handful of it and yanked upward. Her ribs were marred with long white slashes, her body all hard angles. There wasn't a single soft edge on her. Even her breasts weren't soft, and her cheekbones practically looked like handles. Her eyes had slitted pupils, and were a red so dark it was nearly black. The effect of them in darkness was completely different than their effect in light.
She stared at him dully, her breathing ragged. "Don't mistake me," she whispered. "I may be weak, but you can not simply take what you want from me."
"It's not your body I want, Shadow. I don't give a damn. If I want to assert dominance over you, I don't need to do it that way. Why are we not at the ship, and where did you leave your clothes?"
"there are spare changes back at the settlement, but we can't get there," she said, "and there's watchers at your ship. They have not taken it. It is not the ship they want. It is you, and through you, me. They've already seen us interact. You'll have to leave me here, I will come to you soon. I'll be in form. Try not to stab me."
He let out a bark of humorless laughter. This couldn't get any better. "Oh, don't worry yourself about me," he said sarcastically. "What do you intend to do with Marie? Eat her?"
"I already ate my fill, or did Alina not tell you? If she'll weigh you down, I'll mark her and leave her here for now, unless you can think of something better." They both knew there was no real option. If Shadow's mark didn't protect Marie in her weakened state, nothing would.
"What if they find her?" he asked. "They might be able to find us."
"She's only a side curiosity to them, probably," Shadow said, sitting up. "They're not looking for her specifically. She won't remember who we are or where to find us. Go kill whoever you need to kill. Get to your ship and your woman."
Riddick restrained himself from snapping that Jack wasn't "his" woman. It wouldn't accomplish anything. Shadow was simply trying to throw barbs, and there was no point in letting her. She could look for his weaknesses all she wanted, she wasn't going to find any. he turned on his heel and slipped in to the shadows, away from the light of the still burning impromptu pyre. He left Shadow, naked in the sand, and a dying woman he didn't know at all, debating on telling jack they were dead when he got to her. But she'd look at him and know he was lying. It wasn't that she could sniff out when he was lying, though one of these days she might figure it out. It was that she'd know they weren't dead, not yet. Sometimes he wondered about her sense of smell.
He paused, knowing there were infrared imagers and night vision goggles and probably a goddamned target tracking array holding down the entire area. He could hear, somewhere, the sound of mass wings approaching. Without thinking he dropped in to the sand, listening closely, but they passed this area, spreading out.
They were circling, he thought. They were actually forming a perimeter.
I'm being hunted. ...
He raised his head, something icy and predatory filling his senses. Slowly he rose out of the sand, peering in to the darkness. He could see them, feel something twinging faintly against his bones. He heard the sound he'd heard Shadow make-a long, stuttering warble-whoop-whoop!-whooooop!, and then they were bounding forward, some skimming and some actually running. Still others were flying, some strange disjointed semi-gridlike pattern that tickled at his memory for a second, before he realized what he was seeing.
They're evading the tracker system, he thought. They are deliberately scrambling it. Could they literally feel the radiation the sensors bounced off the area to map it?
A few of them broke formation, flapping desperately downward, before their wings were shredded by gunshots. They hit the ground screaming, causing more of their brethren to fall on them. For a moment as bullets rained down on them, they hopped this way and that as if to try and evade the fire, before succumbing to their desperation, darting in to tear off a piece of the previously fallen, and catching bullets too.
There was an instant of silence and complete stillness, and then the area erupted with gunfire and blowing sand. Riddick took a guess at what was coming and dove in to the sand, burying as much of his body as he could before the area was torn apart with a blast of discord. Low frequencies battered his body, tearing at his insides. He gritted his teeth and clamped down on his senses, bracing himself for the high frequencies. They came screaming out of the darkness, clawing at the inside of his skull. He forced his senses to obey his commands, to hear and see what was real, but there was blood leaking from his ears and nose, and he didn't know how much longer he'd have his hearing. He didn't bother trying to cram anything in to his ears. These weren't sounds that ears could block out or control. These were sense-bending, ear-shattering sounds that could cause most creatures' internal organs to rupture. He peered up through stinging eyes, saw only a line of them in the distance, and knew they were projecting inward. He was on the edge of the sonic explosions-there was one perched on a rock beside him, others farther away, but none directly in line with him. Had he been less lucky, the sound might have killed him, or done some irreparable damage.
The gunfire slowed, stuttering, and finally stopped. Some of the fliers broke formation to attack the bodies, both human and shadow, lying in the sand. The sound abated, and Riddick rose cautiously. They were beginning to cluster in groups, feeding on the dead, paying him no mind. They were stupid to have no lights, he thought, to think they could mask themselves. These creatures could smell blood through dry air a mile away. But they were flawed-if they had ever been intelligent, it was restricted only to hunting. Normally he wouldn't have called a good hunting instinct flawed, but they seemed to have nothing else, no caution, no self control.
He stepped around the body of the one that had sat on the rock beside him. It was massive, maybe even bigger than Shadow. He could have made decent sleeping quarters from its bones, with room for the few things he owned and a little fire in the far end, enough room to stretch without getting burned, and even room enough to rebuild some of his usual supplies.
He set off across the sand, knowing there was no point in trying to conceal himself. If any humans had survived, they had retreated. And for all he knew, shadows could taste vibrations like snakes could. So he ran, this time conserving his energy, knowing that if the ship was safe he could eat something and replenish, but if it wasn't, he'd have only what was left to run on. He debated finding out if creature was edible, but he wasn't going to stoop to that unless he was desperate.
The military unit assigned here had failed even further. Their soldiers guarding the ship had been the same watching for Riddick. The ship sat, untouched, amid the thick of the bodies. These creatures seemed too desperate to go for the harder prey, but Riddick wasn't taking any chances. He slipped silently behind a row of dunes, now out of sight of both ship and creatures, and crept in to deeper and deeper silence. He knew why they hadn't touched the ship. They thought it would be too tempting for him, they thought he'd expect them to break in to it.
They thought he'd have gne straight for it.
They thought he'd gone soft.
He reached the ship, sitting lifeless and silent in the dark. As he aproached, an exterior floodlight came on and spun to focus on him.
"Jack!" he yelled, knowing that if anyone was around, they had seen him. "Turn the damned thing off!" But of course, she couldn't hear him.
He broke in to a run, vaulted on to the ramp, lunged toward the hatch controls. Something screamed in the darkness, the doors hissed open, and there was a wave of desperate, hopeless, bleak sound behind him that would have chilled the blood of any lesser creature. It was the iciest sound he had ever heard, and its hellish desolation knew no end.
His momentum carried him in to the ship, the echoing, discordant shriek following on his heels. He didn't stop to figure out if he had made a mistake. All he knew was that there seemed to be no single more desolate place in the universe. Slams might have been violent, cold, hateful hellholes of desolation, but they had people, people had reasons, and reasons could be manipulated.
Here there was nothing. Not the fury of space or the darkest recesses of humanity, only a race left to destroy itself.
The door hissed shut behind him. He smelled something cold, reptilian, and a lisping voice in the darkness: "You shouldn't have come."
"Alina," he asked, his voice deceptively soft, "what have you done?"
"I haven't done a thing. There is no power here, and we are surrounded. Would you rather be hunter or hunted?"
"Cut the bullshit," he snapped. "Where's Jack?"
"Here." Another soft voice in the darkness. He turned and could see her outline glowing; in his vision, the room was cast in dark silver-blue. He was in the ship's cargo hold, supplies stacked in tightly-netted crates against one wall, metal and parts scattered on the floor.
"Riddick, we need someone on the outside," Jack said.
He decided to tell her the truth. "We have someone on the outside," he retorted. "Shadow is still out there, and as in as right a mind as she was when I found her. She's taken two bullets, though."
"Where is Marie?"
"Alive, hopefully, somewhere. I left her to Shadow."
"That may not be the best-"
"Fuck the best decision," he snapped. "She is probably a dead woman, anyway, her blood is tainted. And if you haven't noticed, there's an army of what might as fucking well be undead out there, and no goddamned lights in here. Whose brilliant idea was it to flip the main switch?"
"The man we killed," Alina replied calmly. "Don't worry, we left his body outside as a diversion."
A creature after my own heart, he thought sarcastically, but didn't voice it. "Oh and in case you didn't know, I think Shadow is ... in season, if you will. So I suggest we say fuck her, fuck this planet, reboot and leave. Again. For the last time. If their commander is even faintly intelligent, he'll fall back and get the hell out of here and pretend it never happened. If not, he's dead. Shadow's as hardheaded as they come. She'll live."
"But she should be able to go home," Alina said. "We should give that to her, at least."
"I should be able to, does it look like I'm going home anytime soon? The universe isn't fair, God's a bastard, and the faster you learn that, the longer you'll live."
He turned and left them there. Let them do whatever they would.
A/N: I don't know what I think of this chapter. Let me know. Reviews are always appreciated.