A convict who’d accosted a prominent citizen on Veriel III and had suffered the misfortune of having to kill him when his prey had protested at the imposition gestured at the carnage as he came over.
“Mercenaries. Some guards here, too, but it can’t be all of them. At least, I don’t think so.” He made a face. “I ain’t about to count the total body parts and divide by the number of guards.”
“Take a couple of the boys and pay the guard dorm a visit. Check their individual slots.” The Guv nodded past the man. “Back in the living quarters. And be careful or you’re liable to get yourselves shot on sight.” He spat at the bloodstained floor. “Prison regs died along with everyone else in here.”
A voice interrupted their exchange. “Guards ain’t there.”
Both convicts turned. The big man was holding a fleximage, a portion of which had been enlarged. It showed a dark outline, ominous and massive. While Riddick explained, the Guv and other convicts crowded around for a better look.
“Looks like the boss and the guards figured out Necromongers are coming.”
“Necromongers?” someone asked.
Riddick glanced in the convict’s direction. “The ones who’ve been taking out and shutting down worlds. Helion Prime was the most recent.” When the questioner didn’t react, the big man explained in terms a convict could understand. “Think thousands of mercs all dedicated to bringing you back dead or alive. Then forget the ‘or alive.’” This time the man nodded comprehendingly.
“Looks like the back-up plan was to clean the bank, ghost the mercs, and break wide through the tube. Anybody comes here checking up afterwards would reasonably assume the mercs were responsible.” He held up a shortshell launcher. Smoke still wafted from its barrel. “But one merc got off a shot with this party-crasher here and took out the sled.” He smiled thinly. “Wish I coulda seen the looks on their faces when the guards found their getaway baby buggy all busted to hell.
“So they rigged the door so no one could follow, and took off on foot. And now they plan to jack that ship in the hangar and leave everyone else here to die.”
More impressed than afraid, Toombs found himself gaping at his former prisoner. “How come you know all this shit? You wasn’t even here.”
Riddick favored the mercenary with a particularly disgusted look. “Cuz it was my plan.”
In the tunnel, the slam boss and five remaining guards jogged methodically onward, their boots pounding rhythmically against the hard, compacted surface underfoot. Striking a rail, one man stumbled and, cursing, picked up the pace as he adjusted the gear that provided a flow of supplementary oxygen to his lungs. Douruba was having a harder time of it than his men. He was older, and not in as good a shape. A word to the overly energetic guard now leading the way slowed the younger man down.
“Stay together,” he admonished them.
One of the other survivors frowned at his superior. “Why?” He glanced back in the direction of the prison. “Even if any of those half heads could figure out what happened, they can’t follow us.” He grinned as he ran. “Doors are jammed good. They can’t get into the tunnel.”
The slam boss nodded curtly. “You remember that last drop-off? The big man with the goggles? Keep moving. Stay together.” Reaching up, he scratched his nose and lengthened his own stride, inspired—or maybe troubled—by his own words. “Damn supplementation units didn’t provide nearly enough oxygen to complement an atmosphere that was largely nitrogen and argon,” he muttered under his breath. He nudged the guide lever on his own unit to maximum flow.
Within the control room, exactly the kind of confusion and aimlessness that the slam boss had envisioned held sway. A few of the prisoners smashed and kicked anything intact they came across, futilely taking out years of anger and frustration on inanimate objects. Under the direction of the Guv, a semiorganized group was struggling to pry open the doors that led to the transport tunnel. Built to withstand everything from a major earth tremor to direct hits by heavy ordnance, the doors refused to cooperate. Nothing they found to attack the doors with was tougher than the doors themselves.
Kyra, meanwhile, was watching Riddick. The big man was seated in a chair, actively working a section of surviving instrumentation. She was pretty sure he wasn’t dialing up the latest entertainment vid. That anything at all remained functional in the control room was something of a minor miracle in itself. That anything had survived that might prove useful was almost too much to hope for.
Something deep underfoot went ca-thunk. The floor trembled. Men raging at machines turned to look up from their festival of destruction. Those working on the tunnel doors halted their fruitless efforts to turn and stare.
The floor heaved. Not buckling, but rising. The small earthquake was machine generated. Ascending on its massive, solid screws, the battered control room began to drive toward the surface. Reluctantly at first, but with gathering efficiency, eased along by Riddick’s demanding touch. As he worked the controls, Kyra walked over to stand next to him, her attention on his face. She nodded to herself.
“I know that look.” He said nothing, busy at the instrumentation. “I don’t like it. I don’t like what it implies.”
He spoke without looking up at her. “Plenty of choices. Don’t have to follow.”
“Yeah, right,” she muttered. “Like I’m gonna stay here.”
Between picking up what they could of the terse conversation and combining it with what Riddick was doing, even the slowest-witted prisoner soon had a pretty good idea of the big man’s intention. Realization provoked disbelief, and debate.
“He’s out of his mind,” one man declared without hesitation. “Won’t last five minutes out there.”
His companion was staring out a port as the control room surfaced. It was still pitch-black outside— for a little while. “Five minutes?” He nodded at the vista of blackened, blasted lava; a twisted maze of extruded volcanic rock that could alternately trip, trap, or cut a man to shreds. “Sixty seconds in the sun will light you up like a match. You don’t tan out there— you combust.”
The prisoner behind him was nodding vigorously. “Traditional twenty-mile buffer zone. That’s thirty klicks to the hangar. Then you got to find a way in— if you still got water in you.”
“What is it?” another man was saying over and over. “What’s he thinking?”
As he stared outside, the first convict was shaking his head: slowly and with conviction. “Thirty klicks. Over that terrain. Even if it was dead flat and covered in grass—”
“Don’t talk about grass,” another convict growled despondently.
“It’d still be a tough slog,” the first man finished. “And me, I ain’t no runner.”
“Better alive in here than fried out there,” someone else declaimed fervently.
Riddick was busy collecting guns from the floor, as indifferent to the discussion as he was to the identity of the weapons’ former owners. Muscular arms almost full, he started to turn, hesitated, bent, and added a bag of nuts to the accumulated arsenal.
Trying to muster his own courage as much as that of his compatriots, the Guv gestured first at the blasted landscape outside, then at a surviving instrument. “Check out the chronograph. The terminator line’s moving in the right direction—toward the hangar, more or less. We travel with it, stay behind the night and in front of the day. In the tolerable zone.” Out of ideas, he turned to Riddick.
Black goggles surveyed the suddenly attentive convicts. “Gonna be one speed: mine. Anybody wants to tippy-toe their way is on their own. If you can’t keep up, don’t step up. You’ll just die.” He nodded toward the man who had indicated a preference for remaining behind. Clearly, his opinion was not an isolated one. “Dog that stays in its doghouse doesn’t get many chances at freedom.”
With that he started forward, brushing past Kyra. Her conflicted expression was almost as tormented as the terrain outside.
They had to blow a window. Designed to withstand the in
credible extremes of temperature and the howling winds to which Crematoria was subjected, it could not simply be kicked out. Fortunately, one thing they now had plenty of was ammunition. Once some fringing, shattered shards of clinging acrylic was cleared, Riddick stepped through.
And out onto the surface of Crematoria.
No smooth-surfaced walkway or tunnel underfoot here. No comforting, protective walls. Nothing but black lava—mostly solidified ropy pahoehoe, with a sprinkling of dangerously sharp a’a.
Fuck geology, Riddick mused as he started forward without pausing. The bleak, blackened surface was something to be got over, to be crossed, to survive—not to be analyzed.
He was followed by three of the convicts; their mouths set, their expressions intense, their arms full of weaponry. Every man and woman dies someday, they all knew, and they were of a mind to do it fighting for their freedom rather than squatting in a hole in the ground waiting to be fed and toyed with like mice at the bottom of a well. If nothing else, they might get a chance to take one of their malevolent tormentors with them.
If they could catch up to the guards, or get to the hangar before them.
Another window got blown out. Kyra always did prefer to make her own way. Stepping through the new gap, she advanced to stand close to Riddick. As close as he ever let anyone, that is.
“I’m really not expecting this to work out, okay? Just looks like a cool way to check out.” She offered up a wan smile. “I was getting kinda bored with the lifestyle, you know?”
“Just one rule this time.” Digging through the gear he had scavenged, he tossed her an oxygen unit. “Stay out of the light.”
She nodded knowingly. “Kinda reverses things, don’t it?”
“Till I get my payday,” voice interrupted.
It was Toombs. Weapon in hand, grinning unpleasantly, he stepped outside. A couple of the convicts thought about intervening, but hesitated. Whatever they might think of the big man, this was his business to settle, not theirs. And the mercenary had already demonstrated a disquieting ability not only to survive, but to thrive. Which was one way of saying he was a helluva quick shot.
“Technically speaking,” the mercenary went on, losing the grin, “you’re still my prisoner.”
Riddick made no attempt to bring one of the guns he carried to bear. With black goggles between his eyes, and those of everyone around him, it was impossible to tell where they were focused. The same ambiguity did not apply to his words.
“Don’t move.”
Toombs took umbrage. Maybe the present situation wasn’t quite what he would have preferred, but he was damned if he was going to put up with that kind of shit from a lousy prisoner.
“Me don’t move? What is this, Reverso World? You’re forgetting the totality of the reality, man. You don’t move.”
The big man didn’t—but not because the mercenary had voiced an order. “Better adjust that attitude if you want to have a chance of getting out of this. And whatever you do, do not point that weapon at me.”
Toombs’s face twisted as if it had suddenly turned to putty. It might have been working toward another grin. No one would ever know, because as soon as the muzzle of the gun he was holding started to come up, something big, superfast, and nasty slammed into him fang first from behind.
Convicts blanched and backed away as the hellhound ripped into the mercenary. With the mad strength of the damned, Toombs somehow managed to wrench his gun around and fire. It blew a hole through his attacker, but by that time the beast was already crunching the mercenary’s throat in its jaws. Man and monster died together, alien blood and human blood mixing indiscriminately on the black rock of a world foreign to both and beloved by neither.
In less than a minute, Toombs lay motionless, his life seeping out onto the rocks. Atop him, the hellhound was still breathing in short, shuddering gasps despite the gaping wound in its torso. Moving close, Riddick happened to notice the tag on the beast’s ear. Number Five. Thrash. He bent over the dying animal.
Anxiously, the Guv was eyeing the predawn sky. Was the dark drape of the heavens a fragment brighter than just a few seconds ago? Or just a figment brighter? The distinction was crucial.
“Riddick,” he muttered uneasily, “we’d better get moving.”
Still staring down at the dying hellhound, the big man straightened. His words were directed to the animal before him, not the men beside him.
“I know how it feels.”
Then he turned and, without a look back, started off into the rocks.
They ran as fast as they could, which is to say, as fast as the landscape would allow. There was no direct route straight through the congealed lava, no convenient path connecting the nerve center of the prison compound with the distant promise of the hangar. It had never occurred to the designers and the builders of the complex to construct such a route because it was impossible to envision anyone foolish enough to try and make use of it, even in an emergency. Anyone planning a jog across the open surface of Crematoria would have to be disturbed, deranged, mentally addled.
Or Riddick.
Being in prison often damages the mind but frequently improves the body. Diet may suck, but overeating is rarely a concern. So the fugitives stayed together pretty well as they made their way through the twisted, bizarre hoodoo towers and frozen cataracts of black stone. No one fell behind. No one dared to. It was unspoken but understood by all that if someone fell and twisted an ankle, or proved unable to maintain the pace, they were on their own. There would be no improvised stretchers, no willing carriers, to help them along. Even if any of the convicts were inclined to help a comrade in such a situation, everyone knew there would not be enough time. Better one should perish than two more trying to help him.
And all the while, they were being pursued. Not by something as mundane as guards or even hellhounds, but by a danger infinitely more threatening. Implacable, remorseless, and lethal. Dawn.
Hints of it began to show themselves back the way they had come; flecks of illumination, suggestions of sunshine. Innocent enough in themselves, but in reality the advance scouts of an approaching Hell. Survival depended on their remaining within the terminator as they ran on; within that tiny stripe of tolerability that divided Crematoria’s fading, freezing night from its namesake approaching day. Meanwhile, the planet continued its slow but steady rotation, stalking them with a pursuing sun.
Mere thoughts of what was advancing steadily behind them were sufficient to keep them from freezing. That, and the heat of their own bodies as they burned calories to keep running. And always out in front, Riddick leading, searching, scanning with glittering eyes that could see better in the continuing dark than any instrument. Eyes that saw only the immediate future, backed by a mind sharply focused on the moment, and not the morrow.
While the dawn, normally a bringer of life but on Crematoria a burning, fiery angel of death, continued to gain on them.
The thing about the man leading them, was that nothing seemed to slow him down. If the fissure yawning ahead was too wide to jump, he angled left or right until it narrowed sufficiently. If the hill ahead was too steep or too slick with volcanic glass to climb, he would race around it. Where they might have stopped to argue and discuss, he just kept going. For men who had spent much of their lives leading others, it was a relief for a change to follow someone else. Especially someone who clearly knew what he was doing. They knew without having to discuss it what would happen if he did not. So they sucked oxygen and water from their respective suit units and sent to their legs the energy that normally would have been spent on complaining.
They had a bad moment when the big man seemed to have vanished into thin air. Anxiety rising, they searched their immediate surroundings in vain. There was no sight of him to right or left. As for straight ahead, that was blocked by an impossible rock face.
On top of which Riddick stood, waiting when he said he wouldn’t wait. He continued to wait for them to scramble up to join him. No place t
o fall here, each of them knew. No time to slide back down and try again. No one looked downward, not because they feared the heights they were scaling, but because none of them wanted to see a place where they could never set foot again, and still live.
First one, then another, then Kyra and another, until almost all of them, panting hard, had joined the big man at the top. Slowed by his size, the Guv was last up, but he made it. As he did so, he shot a relieved look behind him. Something was tickling his shoulders, his upper spine, the back of his neck. Something persistent and creeping. It was the glow of the coming dawn. A rivulet of sweat coursed down his cheek.
He knew it would only be the first of many.
XIV
The escapees were not the only life-forms pantingly venting carbon dioxide into the thin atmosphere of Crematoria. Spread out within the transport tunnel, the fleeing guards were double-timing it up a rise, flanking the now useless sled rails. The ascent brought the tunnel, and those within, nearer to the actual surface.
It was the guard Anatoli who, after stepping around an unexpected headless body lying between the sled rails, noted the mole hole. Spaced along major and minor transport tunnels alike, capped with tough, heat-resistant alloy, these shafts allowed engineers and service techs to carry out the occasional quick and easy manual check of the terrain above the conduits. There was no reason to bother with one now, of course, but . . .
Anatoli hadn’t survived as a prison guard for as long as he had without taking every precaution in his work, even when precaution seemed superfluous. Now he slowed slightly, frowning at the shaft. No real reason to bother with it, of course. No reason except that years of experience had told him that the best way to keep one’s head on one’s shoulders was to use it when everyone else was ignoring theirs. Besides, carrying out a quick check couldn’t hurt anything, and those were the best, most reassuring kind to make.
The Chronicles of Riddick Page 19