Chapter Text
“Lights on,” murmurs Carolyn Fry.
For the usual breathless, gut-twisting moment, she waits for nothing to happen--for the panels to remain dark, for the eclipse to plunge her world into blackness, for the eyeless shrieking monsters to descend and tear her apart.
Then the moment passes. The lights of the skiff flicker into life, a long ribbon of yellow-green unspooling towards the cockpit. Fry breathes again. No monsters.
(This time, anyway, drawls the voice in the back of her head that sounds like Johns. There’s always tomorrow.)
Lighted docking bay into lighted skiff, with no darkness in between. Setting her palms to the wheels of her chair, Fry rolls up the ramp. It’s a small craft, not designed for long voyages or for handicapped pilots. She makes the best of both shortcomings. Maneuvering in the tight space, she slaps the controls to seal the hatch behind her. She twists around to collect a handful of ration bars and a flask from the bulkhead, and tosses them forward onto the passenger seat. Lastly she clips the wheelchair to the lockdown clamps she had installed for that purpose.
All settled and secure. Fry slides to the deck and drags herself into the cockpit. Teeth gritted, she hauls her lower half after herself into the pilot’s chair and buckles in.
(The dead bounty hunter whispers: How much do you weigh now, Carolyn?)
The short trip exhausted her. She tires easily these days. She waits to catch her breath, fingers knotting in her sweaty golden hair. When she can speak evenly, she toggles the communicator and announces, “Pilot Caroline Owens speaking. Personal craft Sunrise requesting clearance to depart, destination Rhadamanthys.” She enters the necessary registrations.
The Quorum Station dispatcher replies in a hiss of static. “Pilot Owens, you are cleared to depart.” The approved launch vectors appear on her screen. “Enjoy Rhadamanthys.”
“Thank you.”
A tremor rattles through the skiff as the docking clamps release it. Fry’s fingers dance over the array. All systems online. The engines roars to ember life. The skiff wavers into the air. She cranks the gear back. Like a slow bullet, the skiff shoots over the pocked hulls of the ships still in dock and into starry fields.
Fry keeps her eyes on the myriad flickering displays. She avoids looking past them into the blackness of space. Once away from the station, she eases into one of the safe, well-traveled interstellar shipping lanes. Only then does she switch control to the skiff’s computer and relax.
The trip to Rhadamanthys should take a little more than a week, Earth calendar. Two pilots could split the watches. One pilot, flying solo, could crawl back to the fold-out bunk, lash in, and drop into cryosleep. For Fry, neither is an option. Too much can go wrong in open space, even in a dreary shipping lane. She remembers. The little sleep she takes will be right here in the pilot’s chair, her useless legs crumpled in front of her, tubes and wires and pills to keep her running.
For an hour or so, she watches the displays. She retrieves one of the ration bars from the passenger seat and chews off a corner.
“Caroline Owens” is an alias, a bastardization of her given name paired with her former partner’s surname. An easy keystroke error, if anyone asks. That was for peace of mind. Legally, the skiff is licensed under her real name. The only people who would recognize it are her employers, the New Oslo Shipping Corps--or rather, their lawyers--and they won’t be interested in her whereabouts as long as she remains in contact. Which she will, more or less.
She hadn’t been off that nightmare planet more than a week, still in Decima Station’s intensive care unit, when legal proceedings began. A lot of property had been destroyed in the Hunter-Gratzner’s crash. None of the cargo was terribly valuable on its own, but pooled together, it added up to a substantial investment. All of it gone up in cinders or strewn across a hundred miles of bleached wasteland.
Not to mention the ship itself.
Not to mention the passengers who had died.
(Don’t you touch that handle, Fry! --Johns’s voice in her mind, mimicking the dying gasp of the real Owens.)
She hadn’t, she hadn’t sacrificed their lives to save her own--
(Not for lack of trying, though, Carolyn. --Johns himself.)
There was insurance for such situations, but the insurance companies were reluctant to pay. They wanted a scapegoat. Docking Pilot Carolyn Fry was the sole survivor of the Hunter-Gratzner’s three-man crew and therefore shouldered a triple share of the blame. From her hospital bed she recorded file after file, documenting the circumstances of the ship’s journey, the fatal encounter with the rogue comet, the crash, while men in white coats told her that the damage to her spinal cord was irreparable. While they fitted her with a wheelchair to accommodate her paralyzed legs, she recounted for the lawyers every detail--
(You’re not that stupid.)
--every relevant detail of the efforts she and Owens had made to save ship, lives, and cargo in the wake of the captain’s death. The scout ship that had rescued her went back to salvage what data remained in the Hunter-Gratzner’s systems, to see if it corroborated her account. Fry didn’t envy the crew of that ship what else they would have discovered: the mummifying corpses of the dead they’d had no time to bury. Perhaps there would be no bodies. That planet was hungry.
The thought of the hellish place--its blinding, years-long days and its soul-shattering black nights--sends a shiver down Fry’s spine. She switches displays, calling up the data she downloaded from the station terminals before departure. Rows of glowing text fill in the darkness. Fry settles back in her seat, twisting the wrapper of the ration bar shut. She can’t stomach its contents.
The logs list the planet as M6-117. Her searches turn up mostly scientific journals. Supposedly, it possesses rare crystal deposits deep underground, as well as vast stores of salt in its withered seas. Except for one ill-funded geological expedition, whose broadcasts mysteriously ceased after a year on the surface, few have shown interest in proving the planet’s theoretical value.
(Can’t call it a mystery anymore, now can they? Wonder what makes a man so chary of hell.)
A single tabloid piece, decades old, dubbed it “Hades.” She doesn’t bother including that in her search terms. A hundred other planets, moons, and radiation-spewing stars have been slapped with that name.
Fry’s story sounded like hysterical ravings to the ship that picked her up. She can’t blame them for thinking she was out of her mind. Truthfully, she was: crazy with a fear that wouldn’t end (and hasn’t still), feverish, faint from hunger, weak from blood loss. When they delivered her to Decima Station’s medical wing, though, her ravings matched up with the report from the crew of an antique emergency skiff that had blasted off from M6-117 and tumbled into the shipping lanes, only a week before.
A blinking banner at the top of the display warns her of incoming correspondence. The NOSCorp lawyers. Fry flags it to view later and returns to her research.
That antique skiff carried three survivors from Hades. Fry has spent the past six months looking for them. Information is sparse. They filed no reports, conducted no interviews. Rumors place the imam--him whose faith had kept him steadfast when human hearts failed and human minds broke under the strain--on his way to New Mecca again, continuing the hajj that the Hunter-Gratzner’s crash had interrupted.
(I can’t see as how he’ll find himself any closer to his God than he came in that stinking hellhole.)
Some of the reports mention his disciple. That must be Jack. The imam’s own boys died screaming on Hades. Whether it’s Jack disguised again or Jack truly converted, Fry can’t begin to guess. In either case, the company of the patient imam can only be good for the skittish, maladjusted adolescent. Fry has left them vague messages in public data filters, not having a full name or contact for either of them, but apparently a holy man on his hajj spends little time in computer terminals.
It’s the third survivor she wants. Zeke Ogilvie, the initial report named him--another amalgamation of stolen names--but Fry knows who he is.
With a few keystrokes, she pulls up the public records on Richard B. Riddick: escaped convict, murderer.
His face fills the display. Without goggles, he looks strangely naked. The digital image has captured him with eyes averted, probably pained by the recorder’s light. He wears the smile that has little to do with normal humor and usually precedes something horrible. Fry smooths her hands over her stomach, clasping them over the knot of stitches and scar tissue there. The last time she saw Riddick, his face had been wet with rain, growing smaller as Death ripped them apart.
DECEASED blinks in large red type, just under the posting of the most recent bounty (fulfilled by William J. Johns, status: unclaimed) but it wasn’t Riddick whom Death had seized that night.
There is no information on him other than judicial reports and bounty postings. Fry finds an approximate birthdate and a probable star of origin, but beyond that, nothing. Then the first bounty, posted before he was eighteen years old. From that point on, the record contains only criminal charges, successful and failed arrests, and prison sentences, all incomplete.
No wonder he doesn’t count himself among the human race.
Fry closes the file (DECEASED DECEASED DECEASED) and opens the message from the NOSCorp lawyers. They don’t remark on her leaving Quorum. They demand an updated accounting of the maintenance that was done and not done on the Hunter-Gratzner before its departure to the Tangiers system. They want some contradiction, some flaw that they could use to make the accident her fault.
There isn’t much they could bleed an independently contracted pilot for, but they can put her in debt for a good long while. Not that there’s much work offered to a paraplegic pilot afraid of the dark. The important thing to NOSCorp is that “pilot error” invalidates a good number of insurance claims.
When Fry learned which way the wind blew, she took all her savings and bought this skiff, the Sunrise, even before the hospital let her roll up and down the hall unescorted. From now until the day the New Oslo Shipping Corps repossesses it, she is as free as a small ship and a wheelchair can make her. She only has a little time, but she’ll make the most of it. She is capable of whatever is necessary to survive.
(Johns: And tell me, Carolyn, what is so goddamn necessary about nosing after that sonuvabitch? Do you think he’ll be happy to see you? You were such great pals before.)
“I saved his fucking life,” Fry mutters, goaded beyond the point of endurance. “I nearly died for him.”
(Maybe you didn’t notice, but gratitude and fair play aren’t exactly in Riddick’s vocabulary. You forget how he turned on me?)
“You had it coming, you unbelievable asshole. Jack was the only one who cried for you and she didn’t know any better. Riddick told me what you’d planned for her.”
(And if he’d been a good dog, I’d be alive and you’d be a goddamn tap dancer right now. You’d have done the same if they weren’t all watching. You, me, and Riddick, Carolyn--we’ve got bad hearts. You know it.)
“Shut your trap, Johns,” she snaps.
The voice that has haunted her since that week of solitary hell falls silent, for now.
Fry closes all the displays, except for those that monitor the skiff’s systems and the interstellar traffic. There is too much blackness past the hull, clawing at the seams, and the yellow-green light isn’t enough to keep it at bay.
But she knows a man who can see in the dark. All she needs is to find him, and the monsters will scatter.