by Frank Lauria
PITCH BLACK
THE STORY THAT INTRODUCED
THE WORLD TO RIDDICK
A rogue comet spears an earth-bound commercial spacecraft, forcing it to plummet to the surface of an unknown planet. With the captain dead, a brave pilot performs a perilous crash landing. Other than three suns—which create perpetual light—and a slight oxygen deficiency, a search party discovers that the planet isn’t much different from Earth . . . until they stumble across a ghostly settlement littered with the human remains of geologists who mysteriously perished exactly sixty years ago. And the most horrific discovery of all: below the surface of the soil, where darkness reigns, live hungry predators with a deadly appetite.
Once every sixty years a solar eclipse darkens the skies and allows the blood-hungry creatures to escape from their underground tomb. With only hours before total blackout, everyone must unite in a race to raise the geologists’ abandoned ship before becoming a long-awaited meal . . .
PITCH BLACK
Copyright © 1999 PolyGram Holding, Inc.
Cover art copyright © 2004 Universal Studios Licensing LLLP. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
ISBN: 0-312-93509-9
Printed in the United States of America
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / February 2000
For Ellen,
who’s suspicious of dark planets . . .
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W. B. Yeats
The Second Coming
There are no dreams in cryosleep.
Nothing except the murky sludge of frozen time. Cold and gray, like dirty snow ebbing slowly into a sea of mud. A desolate place where the human soul is hostage, suspended between death and rebirth.
An icy flash of pain speared Fry’s brain. She jolted upright, eyes rolling wildly. Dimly she realized she was sprawled on the steel floor, arms and legs thrashing. She struggled to breathe against the leaden weight crushing her chest. Then her skull exploded with sound.
Alarms screamed everywhere, punctuated by the whine of ripping metal and the fiery hiss of white-hot fragments blowing through the boiling madness. All she could see were frenetic strobes of red light bouncing off the white clouds of cryogas choking the cabin. Fry tried to push herself up, but her numbed limbs folded like wet paper. As her nerves blinked awake, they began to writhe in raw agony. The world was dying around her and she was in hell.
An unbearable cold washed over her skin. Fry’s mind jump-started, jerking her vision into focus. She was naked, crawling facedown on a sheet of metallic ice. She looked up and saw the floor was tilted at a steep angle, like a sinking ship.
But this ship can’t sink, she thought dazedly. Suddenly she remembered.
She’d been in cryosleep, encased in one of four glass locker tubes in the main cabin. Now there was no main cabin. Just a shrieking chaos of shivering pain.
Belly convulsing like a flu victim, Fry groped for the handrail along the wall. When she found it, a faint spurt of energy shot through her arm. Her fingers gripped the frozen metal and she pulled herself erect. Swaying on boneless legs, she held the rail and peered through the hissing steam.
The nearest cryotube was riddled with jagged holes. Fry could see the bloodied corpse of a dead crewie through the fractured window. Lungs heaving, Fry pulled herself along the rail to the next locker. The tube was intact. Inside, struggling to awake, was Captain Merritt. Relief flooded her pounding brain. Instinctively she slapped the intercom.
“Hear me, Cap’n?” she croaked. “Fry reporting. Some kinda compromise to the hull. Holding for now but . . . goddamn I’m glad you’re alive . . .”
Merritt didn’t seem to hear. He pawed weakly at the glass.
“Gotta pull your E-release!” Fry shouted. “No! Red handle, red handle!”
Slowly, Captain Merritt reached for the release handle.
“I’ll get the warmup suits. Wait . . .”
Merritt’s mouth opened in soundless surprise as his chest blasted open, spewing blood and steaming organs against the shattered plexi. A quick, hot spatter rained across Fry’s naked skin. At the same time she heard the whine of tearing metal as fiery particles drilled through the cabin and detonated a bank of instruments on the opposite wall. A fountain of sparks showered the ceiling and another locker blew open, slamming Fry to the floor. She glanced up in time to see a naked man hurtling toward her.
Fry braced herself, but the collision punched the air from her lungs. As she tried to push the man off, he began squirming frantically. His contorted face floated over her, eyes bulging.
“Why did I fall on you?” he demanded.
Fry shook her head. “He’s dead . . . Cap’n’s dead. Christ, I was looking right at him. He just came apart.”
“I mean . . . I mean . . . chrono shows we’re twenty-two weeks out,” the man said indignantly. “So gravity isn’t supposed to lock in for another nineteen—right? I mean . . . why did I fall at all?”
“You hear me?” Fry shouted above the howling alarms. “Captain’s dead. Owens, too.”
The man seemed perplexed. He blinked sadly, as if about to weep. “Oh no. Not Owens, not . . . oh wait, wait, wait . . .” He grinned at Fry. “I’m Owens—right?”
Their eyes met and they gaped at each other like fish in strange waters.
Fry pushed Owens off of her. “Cryosleep,” she muttered, struggling to get up. “Swear to God, sloughs out brain cells.”
She helped Owens stand then stumbled into the navigation bay. The alarms were louder inside the bay. Skull pounding, she snatched two warmup suits from storage and tossed one to Owens. Still shivering, she fumbled into the plush-lined suit, zipped it up, and plopped down in front of the monitors. She slipped on a headset.
“Fifteen hundred fifty millibars dropping twenty MB per minute,” Fry said breathlessly, “Shit—we’re hemorrhaging air. Something got us good.”
Owens dropped into the pod beside her. “Just tell me we’re still in the shipping lanes,” he intoned as if praying. “Just show me those stars, all those bright, beautiful, deep space . . .”
He activated the exterior view. A large yellow planet rushed toward them, almost filling the screen.
“Jesus God!” Fry gasped. “That’s why we still have gravity.” As she watched, the ship’s antennae pylons at the side of the screen began to disintegrate in the planet’s upper atmosphere. Heart battering at her ribs, Fry lurched out of the pod and staggered along the listing passage to the flight deck, using handholds to steady herself. It was like climbing to a gallows.
“They trained you for this, right, Fry?” Owens called over the headset. “Right, Fry? FRY?”
Fry didn’t answer. She hurriedly harnessed herself into the flight pod and began running switches. For a moment she couldn’t remember, fumbling the sequence. The ship began to roll. Finally she got it right and the ship steadied, its crash shutters sliding back to reveal plasmatic cloud strata sweeping past the windscreen like floor lights in a falling elevator. Suddenly it was as hot as a blast furnace. Fry began sweating inside her suit.
Shedding big altitude, Fry noted grimly. Owens’ voice from Nav Bay cut through her thoughts.
“. . . crisis program selected Number Two of this system because planet shows at least some oxygen and more than 1
,500 millibars of pressure at surface level . . . would you SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
Abruptly, the alarms went silent. In the sudden quiet Fry realized he must have disconnected the system. She began running a new series of switches. Jettison doors closed around the ship. Fry flipped a security latch and yanked the red PURGE handle.
Instantly a series of bolts exploded in sequence around the ship’s skin, blasting away all non-essential hardware that might hinder aerodynamics, including the bulky deep space drives. But as the last section separated the ship went into a dangerous roll.
“What the . . . Was that a purge?” Owens yelled.
“Can’t get my fucking nose down . . .” Fry yelled back.
Fry saw the clouds outside spinning like a whirlpool and forced her eyes back to the panel. Fighting back the nausea, Fry threw the actuators and felt the airbrakes deploy. Slowly the ship’s roll steadied, but they were still coming in nose high—and much too fast.
Fry pulled an airbrake lever. Stuck. She pounded on it desperately. “Gonna die, gonna die, gonna die right here . . .” she chanted, punching the button over and over.
She prepped two more security switches and pulled the PURGE handle. Instantly, two cargo containers blew away from the ship. Fry hoped that by whittling away the extra weight she could correct her glide slope. But she was failing.
What else can I do? she thought wildly. What? What? What?
Then she knew. Fry began running more security switches. All of them, this time.
Back in Nav Bay, Owens had taken refuge in the familiar parameters of his job.
“. . . showing no major water bodies,” he droned calmly over the headset. “Maximum terrain 220 meters over mean surface . . . largely cinder and gypsum with some evaporite deposits.”
A metallic hiss drew Owens’ attention. He glanced back and saw the heavy jettison doors sliding shut behind him—segregating Nav Bay from the passenger compartment. It hit him like a bullet, piercing his belly with cold fear.
“Fry,” he called, trying to keep his voice steady. “What are you doing?”
But he knew what she was doing. The bitch was going to dump the passengers. She was going to send fifty people crashing to their death on some godforsaken planet. Just to save her own craven ass.
Down on the flight deck Fry flipped another security latch.
“Fry!?” Owens called anxiously. “Answer goddammit!”
“Can’t get my nose down,” she snapped. “Too much load back there.”
“You mean that ‘load’ of passengers? Is that what you mean, Fry?”
Fry pushed back the savage emotions clawing at her thoughts. There was no denying the math. Either the passengers went or they all died. Fry didn’t believe in self sacrifice for some abstract principle. That was for the glory boys playing hero. And she was determined to survive—despite Owens.
“So what, we should both go down, too?” she rasped. “Out of sheer fucking nobility? I don’t think so.”
Thick, tortured silence filled the headset. Trembling despite the warmup suit Fry checked the security latch and stiffly moved her thumb to the button that would jettison the passenger cabin. Spitting out fifty people like some unwanted wad of gum.
Deep inside the darkened passenger cabin someone stirred.
All of the eerily glowing cryolockers had nameplates. The man shaken awake by the ship’s erratic motion was called Lawrence Johns. A silver badge beside his name certified he was some sort of lawman. Johns sat up, mind swimming out of the cold, black lake of cryosleep.
Even semiconscious, Johns’ thick jaw was set in an aggressive jut, like a truculent bear coming out of hibernation. He ran a hand through his thick red hair then gingerly eased his rigid body to the plexi window.
Johns wiped the condensation mist from the window and peered out at the neon-green rows of cryolockers, glowing in the darkness like unblinking eyes. All of the others were still asleep. Except him. Johns wondered why. He’d always had a certain animal instinct that signaled danger. That instinct had kept him alive across light-years of interstellar manhunting. Then he remembered.
A clammy spasm of fear oozed through his belly as he squinted at the luminous window directly across from his. Riddick lay face up inside the tube, his eyes hidden behind black goggles. The metal bit wedged in his mouth gave him a fixed grimace, like some nightmare clown. The neon readout above his locker said: LOCKOUT PROTOCOL IN EFFECT. ABSOLUTE NO EARLY RELEASE. Riddick’s tautly muscled body remained motionless. But Johns knew he was awake. After tracking the vicious serial killer across three galaxies he could feel the bastard’s thoughts.
Awake or asleep, Riddick was still safely tucked inside the security tube, Johns told himself. The universe was safe—for now. Something hard jostled the ship, and Johns rolled off the cushion. Another blow sent him sprawling to the floor.
Across the corridor, Riddick lifted his head . . .
Fry couldn’t bring herself to pull the red handle.
As she bent over the flight panel, fingers poised and hand trembling, Owens’ frantic voice crackled in her ears. “Look, Fry, Company says we’re responsible for every single one of those . . .”
“Company’s not here, is it?” Fry shot back. She tried to breathe, but her lungs were fluttering like wings. Her eyes remained focused on the PURGE handle. “I tried everything else and I still got no horizon!”
“Well you better try everything twice cuz no way do we just flush . . .”
“If you know something I don’t, get your ass up here and take this chair, Owens.”
“When Captain went down you stepped up—like it or not.” Owen reminded, voice tight. “Now they train you for this, so . . .”
“And there wasn’t a simulated cockroach alive within fifty clicks of the simulated crash site! That’s how they train you! On a fucking simulator!”
Inside the Nav Bay, Owens unbuckled his harness. The bitch was about to do it. “Fry—don’t touch that handle!” he shouted, stumbling across the tilted floor.
Fry didn’t answer. Overcome by guilt, she stared at the red handle. Slowly, she pulled her hand away.
A huge jolt shook the ship, which began to yaw crazily back and forth, like a pendulum. Fry’s fingers went right back to the handle. An electronic readout blinked accusingly at Fry: PURGE ALL? PURGE ALL? PURGE ALL?
“I’m not dying for them . . .” she muttered through clenched teeth. Then she triggered the explosive bolts.
Nothing happened.
Nothing purged from the ship that tumbled through the roiling clouds.
“Owens!” Fry screamed. She knew what he’d done.
Owens had opened the jettison doors locally—and blocked them—defusing the bolts.
“Seventy seconds,” Owens announced calmly. “You’ve got seventy seconds to level this beast out.”
Seething with rage and guilt, Fry kicked the airbrake lever. It broke free. Two lower airbrakes deployed. The ship began shedding more speed, more heat. Miraculously, the ship started to level off—but the hellish pounding continued. Fighting G’s, Fry strained to get a stable view through the windscreen.
The ship had broken through the cloud bottoms. Fry glimpsed a barren landscape an instant before an upper airbrake sheared off and pinwheeled into the windscreen. The screen fractured into a thousand spider webs—but somehow it held. Suddenly Fry was blinded by an intense shower of light. Sunlight flared from every crack in the windscreen, flooding the cabin. It was like looking into burning diamonds. Fry averted her eyes and turned to the ground mapping display.
120 meters altitude and dropping like a fiery cannonball . . .
Still inside his cryolocker, Johns heard the rising whine of collision sirens and realized they’d hit a shitstorm. He clawed weakly at the E-release, limbs sluggish and slow. As he heaved himself erect against the crushing G forces buffeting the ship, Johns glimpsed movement through the misted window across from his.
Riddick was rising from his pod like some phosphor
escent ghost. The black goggles seemed to zoom in on Johns and hold. And he pulled his lips back in a hideously surreal smile of recognition.
A moment later reality imploded into howling chaos.
Johns was blown out of the cryotube like a champagne cork, coming to rest against the opposite wall. Opening his eyes, he wished he’d stayed inside. Not more than six feet away the hull was peeling open like a tin can.
Johns grabbed a handrail as a blast of wind and sand rushed into the cabin. Horrified he watched an entire bank of lockers tear away and go skittering along the planet floor until it abruptly sank like a stone in quicksand, sucking forty passengers down with it.
The last thing Fry saw before impact was a dark mass rushing at the windscreen.
She braced and shut her eyes as the screen exploded and wind hurricaned through the cabin.
In Nav Bay the chairs ripped from their moorings, slamming Owens against the ceiling. Upside down, Owens saw waves of dirt and debris rush over the floor like roaring floodwaters. Within moments it had almost filled the cabin.
Hammered by wind and sand, Fry opened her eyes experimentally. All she saw was a vortex of motion, of speed, of blurred debris as the ship continued to spin like a drill, burrowing deeper into the alien surface. Burrowing under, she thought blankly. Fry pivoted her chair a nanosecond before a black wall of dirt avalanched into the cockpit.
Shock and terror collided in her brain, turning her bones to jelly.
They were being buried alive.
Choking yellow dust stuffed every crevice of the ship.
Ghostly shapes floated through the gritty fog, moaning and coughing, calling out to each other in a babble of English and Arabic. Johns staggered past a headless torso, dimly aware of the warm blood running from his ears. Heart racing, he made his way to Riddick’s locker.
Empty.
Reflexively Johns fingered his holster. It wasn’t there.
No prisoner and no weapon—a terrifying combination. Johns didn’t panic. By the numbers, he told himself. The holster must have torn loose in his locker.