34. Lights Out

Jack wasn't having it so easy, though it wasn't apparent to Zemma on the camera. Riddick had been rough on her, not laughing at any of her jokes, or cutting her the smallest amount of slack in their sparring. The last joke was purely so bawdy and improbable that even Riddick couldn't resist laughing at it, giving Jack a much-needed breather.

The comm. light went from red to green, catching Jack's eye. Zemma was on duty, and listening in. Jack was rather glad she had missed the joke itself. She would have been embarrassed to have Zemma know Jack could say such things… or worse, have to explain it to her later. Jack threw a quick glance and wink at the camera.

"C'mon Old Man, you don't get to rest. Bring it." Jack hoped her bravado wouldn't be read as false as she felt it. She was the one who needed a break. Riddick never seemed to tire.

"Lights, off!" He suddenly called out, pitching them into pitch black except for the soft green glow by the door, cast by the tiny comm. light. Jack dived straight sideways, hoping to miss whatever Riddick was throwing at her next, and scrambled across the floor.

Riddick's softer laugh followed her. "Not very elegant, but you moved quick enough." His voice gave only the slightest impression of being pleased.

"Fucker," Jack responded. "You're cheating. You can still see me."

"Mmm hmm." Riddick's self-satisfied tone was a little closer. Jack scrambled back on all fours.

"Stop." Riddick's voice commanded from just a few feet away now. "Use your head, Jack. I can see you, but you have to shut your trap long enough to listen for me." His voice was moving left.

Jack stood slowly, cocking her head towards where the last syllable trailed off. But heard a boot scuff ahead of her, as if he had turned back and was heading to her right now. She threw a kick where she thought he might be if he continued his slow pace that way.

Riddick caught it and threw her to the ground. "Very good. Don would have broke this…" he gave her foot a painful twist before letting her go again. "Try again." His voice was a little further away now.

Jack jumped up, with an irritated snort.

"Quiet." Riddick whispered, now behind her. Jack got her breathing under control with that stupid trick Don showed her, without even realizing at first that she'd done it.

"Better." Another whisper from the dark: he was circling behind on her left again. Jack pivoted, not letting her boots scrape on the textured flooring, and went into a defensive stance. One foot planted behind her, the other pointing forward, lightly set. She brought her hands up and resisted the urge to sigh.

She listened.

A tiny click, it could have been anything; the squeak of his leather boots, or the tiny electronic signal that Zemma had turned off the comm. Jack didn't wait to determine which, she spun around, leg shooting forward and low to catch his feet, and followed with what she hoped would be a block. He would see it coming, but maybe he would give her points for trying.

She felt the shock of her foot meeting an unmovable object. Riddick laughed again, but in a pleased sort of way, Jack thought. He tipped her over from her unbalanced position and she crashed, at least a little less painfully this time, to the floor.

"You don't mass enough to use that move on me, haven't you learned anything from Don?" His voice floated down from above her.

Jack growled, slapped the hard plastic floor with both palms, and bounced to her feet again, but the whisper of air told her he'd moved again already. "Lights. On!" She cried out, hoping to catch him blinded by the sudden change with his lenses up.

The room stayed inky and silent.

"Prick." She commented quietly, and listened carefully for his response as she took a stance.

He chuckled. Jack spun. But she knew he wasn't there already. She turned slowly, moving her feet as if she were walking in a pool of honey, slowly, careful to step without losing her balance. He would try that same sweep on her now, she thought.

A tiny scrape of rubber on plastic… his foot was sweeping towards her from behind. Jack leaped straight up in the air, one leg jack-knifing behind her and she was satisfied with the impact that caused him to blow out all the air he was holding, and propelled her forward into a head roll away from him. She bounced to her feet before she came to a stop and held her own breath, listening.

A smattering of light applause came from where she thought the door should still be. Jack held her position. Even Riddick couldn't have moved that fast after getting nailed in the solar plexus. The voice she had come to loathe floated on the darkness like a lethal fog.

"Zemma says you're late for your shift, Sir. I'll take over here."

"Fuck." Jack clapped a hand quickly over her errant mouth.

Riddick laughed again, a little more sadistically, Jack thought. "Lights, on!" She called out desperately: still no response. Jack felt a little panicky. Don had been pushing her harder and harder, and leaving bruises for every little mistake. She was dog meat, if… Jack noticed the comm. light was still on green.

"Zemma! Turn on the lights!" In the deafening hush Jack suddenly added desperately, "Please!"

Zemma's calm voice, tinny from the electronic receiver, spoke from the direction of the comm. "Don, you cheat… Jack, he locked all the lights off with a password."

"Hack it!" Jack didn't like hearing the high, frantic squeak to her voice.

"Jaaack…" Zemma's smooth, consoling tone sudden cut off as Don'sshadow manually turned off the comm. "I told you to be ready for anything, kid." His voice trailed away down the equally black corridor, leaving Jack alone.

It took a minute before Jack realized the showdown wasn't going to happen right there in the cargo hold. She made her way to the door, a few feet to the right of the tiny red glow of the comm. light. Soon she could make out the darker portal against the faint crimson shine on the walls. She stopped and held her breath, listening.

Nothing, but the sounds of the ship. "Lights, on," she tried quietly. No response. She reached for the manual controls on the immediate right of the door. The switch clicked ineffectively. Don really had shut them all down. If Zemma didn't hack the password before Riddick got there, the sadistic asshole would leave Jack to scramble around in the dark like a rat.

"Fucker," she hissed under her breath, hoping Don wasn't close enough to hear her. There was no cruel retort, no painful blow from the shadows that surrounded her completely. Jack took a hesitant step into the hall, listened again, and walked a short way, fingers trailing lightly along the wall.

She'd just gained enough confidence to stride along at nearly a normal pace when her foot caught on something and she tipped forward, sprawling to the floor. A tiny sound accompanied her collapse: the snap of a thin wire breaking under strain. Jack sat up, rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, and felt behind her.

She found it coiled around her boot; it had been stretched across the hallway where no wire should be found accidentally. More of Don's lessons on readiness. Jack yanked at the offensive little trap, and neatly sliced her hand on it.

"Mother fucker!" Jack shouted at the darkness.

Don tsk-tsk'd from entirely too close by. Jack jumped, scrambling back against the wall, clutching at her bleeding hand with the other and clenching her teeth in sheer aggravation.

"Get up, kid…" A strong hand clutched her bicep and hauled her off the floor. "You get a time out while we doctor that up. Can't have you leaving a mess on the floor someone might slip in." He started dragging her down the passageway. Jack stumbled along blindly in his wake, hoping he wouldn't run her into a doorframe for good measure.

"Zemma could have tripped on that, you know," Jack tried to sound merely accusing rather than sniveling.

"Zemma has lenses, she would have seen it; it reflects pretty brightly, actually."

Don sounded so sure of himself that Jack wanted to knock the imagined smug look off his face. Somehow she managed to keep her mouth shut about his parentage.

"You could just turn on the lights now," she tried instead.

"Nope."

Jack ground her teeth. She hated this feeling of being drug helplessly through the dark without any control. Don suddenly stopped, without letting her crash into him.

"Where are we, now?" He asked her seriously.

"How the hell should I know?" Jack was rewarded with a smack in the back of her head. "Hey!"

"Think," was all Don told her, still holding her painfully by the upper arm. His thumb seemed to be pressing right on a bruise he had left there just the other day.

Jack snorted out her nose, her teeth locked together, and considered just not answering at all, when he squeezed her arm even more agonizingly.

"Ow! Ow! Okay. Jesus…" She thought back through the steps she had taken, and those Don had led. There was a slight breeze hitting her face. "We're at the junction of the third deck corridor and the airlock to the inner corridor that leads to the ramps," she huffed out.

Don eased up on her arm. "Good." His voice was surprisingly contented. He turned her sideways and stopped her forward movement. "Step over," he reminded her before she tripped over the airlock threshold. She did and he whisked her quickly to the ramps and up to the level of the bridge and med center.

It felt strange climbing upwards without seeing where she was going but Don held her firmly and didn't walk her off the edge like she half way expected. He seemed to read her mind:

"No. I'm taking you to get that fixed, not break your damn legs in a stupid fall," he growled.

"If I hadn't cut my hand I might have fallen off these trying to get up anyway." Jack accused him.

"I wouldn't have let you," he whispered, sounding offended. He stopped her suddenly and turned her towards him. "Damn it. You're dripping everywhere. Hold still a minute."

Balancing in the dark on sloping ramp she knew had no handrails to prevent her from tipping over into a dark death, or at least severe injury, Jack had no intention of moving. She thought she might be swaying a little, dizzy from the opposing angle of her feet and head, and feeling the slight change in gravity from the bottom level to this one very keenly. She heard the sound of cloth rustling, and Don took her bleeding hand in his, wrapping it firmly with something unknown.

"All right, c'mon…" he growled, and led her forward again into the blackness. Occasionally he would ask her where they were and she was prepared with the answers. He muttered, 'good,' and a word she didn't know, but sounded reluctantly pleased with her answers so she assumed it wasn't a cuss word. When they reached what she thought must be the med center, she expected him to call on the lights, but still, he merely led her into the darkness of the room and sat her on something firm.

"How can you guys see in the dark," she asked mildly, as she heard him rustling around on what she assumed was the counter and it's accompanying drawers.

"Eh? There's enough light in here. And body heat puts out a kind of radiation that reflects off objects. It's not exactly like infared cameras, where everything is red for hot and blue for cold. Our lenses pick out every stray molecule of radiation like bluish sparks." His voice seemed more focused on her, as if he turned to face her again. "Have you ever seen those blue-white embers off a welding torch?"

"Yah."

"In too much light, it's like that… painfully bright, and tinged with purples and pinks, as if the red blood vessels in our eyes are reflecting back the light from the lens onto our corneas. Hurts like hell." He was talking so matter of fact-ly, so… conversationally, that Jack wondered who had replaced Don with this… human being.

"Gimme your hand," he said softly, right in front of her face. She heard the sound of wheels against the hard, plas flooring, and pictured him sitting on the rolling stool. He took off the cloth wrapping and gently stretched out her fingertips. Jack suppressed a groan of pain. He bent her fingers a few more times, then asked her to do it herself. She did, slowly.

"Good. None of the tendons were cut. We can seal it shut and give you shot of antibiotics and some nanos to heal it on the inside. When did you last have a tetanus shot?"

"Don't nanos take care of that?"

"Depends on the nanos. Some come packaged with it, some with antibiotics. But either way, they don't fight germs and viruses very well, they usually rebuild tissue and bone."

"I didn't know that." Jack tried not to sound snippy, since he didn't sound condescending. He was just talking as he worked on her hand. At one point he rolled away and back again, and her fingers brushed his naked torso. She jerked away, realizing he had wrapped her bleeding hand in his shirt. She had no way of noticing in the cargo hold that he had left his armor behind.

"Don't pull away," he told her as he found her hand again, and held it firmly in his. She felt the needle bite into the fleshy part of her palm below the thumb. It numbed the pain immediately, and was followed by a spray of cool mist, as he pressed the sides of her wound together to close them. "Hold still a minute," he told her, blowing on her hand till the antibiotic sealant dried.

Jack felt very strange. She wasn't attracted to Don the way she was to Riddick. He was an old man, if powerfully built. But sitting here in the dark with him, as he spoke calmly and treated her wound gently, Jack felt that same surge of trust she'd found with Riddick, and so recently with Zemma. It scared her. Her legs trembled and the need to run filled her.

Don rolled back from her, dropping his hold on her hand, just as Jack pushed herself across hard surface away from him… and almost fell off the other side.

"What's wrong…" He used that word she didn't recognize again.

"Nothing, nothing…" She tried to think of some rational excuse for her subconscious reaction to his bizarre behavior. "Why are you being so nice to me?" She blurted out.

Hypatia's voice echoed in her head, and she expected him to say 'Because the game wouldn't be any fun if you didn't have a sporting chance.' All she could hear was his deep breath and her heart pounding crazily in her ears. She waited for it.

From the doorway his voice sought her out. "I give respect to those who earn it." It sounded gruff and professional again. "You've got thirty-one more hours in the dark. No time off for that, I put enough analgesics in that shot, you wont feel it for two days." He chucked, and she could hear him walking away. "Just don't hold a drink in that hand…"

Jack experimentally ran her other hand over the palm of the injured one. She felt nothing now; it was as if the hand were missing. It was strange. She knew she wouldn't know if she was gripping anything in it or not. She made a fist, and it took feeling the clenched hand with her good one to know she had actually done it.

From further down the corridor, Don's voice echoed back cheerfully, "Don't forget: be ready for anything…."