Rider 2

Shazza hadn’t really wanted to sleep at the time; she just knew how badly she needed to. Everything was too much all of a sudden and she felt wrung dry; she would have curled up in a corner somewhere and cried if she thought she had the energy for it. Or the privacy. Exhaustion was a state that had passed her by a day ago. She ran on fumes. She had tossed and turned at first, but Riddick had curled up behind her and held her close; he caressed over her side and she finally fell asleep with the feel of his heartbeat against her back and the fan of his breath against her neck. She had slept heavily without dreams at first, too tired to do anything else.

After a few hours had passed, she had finally dreamt of Riddick. A strange dream where he stood on the edge of a vast grassland as a storm broke. In his hand he held a length of heavy rope as he looked out at the tall grass that whipped in a hard wind. His face was filled with determination and a strange calm, as though he was exactly where he belonged. It was an odd dream to have; she had expected horrific nightmares about the crash and the creatures. Zeke.

Zeke was gone forever. That they hadn’t been married didn’t change the pain that twisted inside her at the thought of him ripped apart and left forever on the planet they had left. She looked hard for guilt, and had done so from the moment that Riddick had first touched her, but didn’t find any, no matter how much she searched for it. She closed her eyes and thought of Zeke, the dearest friend she had ever known.

Zeke had a hell of a sense of humour and in the life they both had chosen to live that was as necessary as shelter, food or water some days. Shazza remembered a time when they had once come back to an encampment they had built on some world forgotten now. They had walked a line out to see what was in the area and when they had returned some creature had gotten into their encampment and eaten everything it could find and scattered her underwear, of all things, all over the place. She had been pissed off enough to spit when Zeke’s laughter had rolled out over the camp and she turned on him but he caught her hands easily. “You’ve seen those big bloody bear things, Shazza, and what does he come in here and go after?” Zeke let go of her hands and lumbered in a circle in an imitation of the fierce bear like creatures they had seen before and, as pissed off as she was, she had to admit that the image of them playing with her underwear was pretty funny. “You gotta take your laughs and your happiness where you find them, Shazza; you don’t get much bloody choice in it.” As her dreams turned again to Riddick, she knew Zeke would never judge her for it.

“Shazza, you have to wake up, Shazza.” Jack knelt by her side and shook her gently by the shoulder; the look on Jack’s face had her get up immediately, even if she wasn’t quite awake yet. Shazza ran the heels of her hands quickly over her eyes to get the sleep out of them before she strode across the short distance of the ship to stand behind Riddick, who didn’t say anything right away. He pointed out across the sky to a small shape to their right. He didn’t look relieved to see them.

Riddick looked over at her and answered the question she never asked. “It’s mercs.” She just sat in the co pilots’ seat and nodded her head once before she pulled her hair into a ponytail. They had spoken about this before she had gone to sleep, about who they would likely come across out here on a ghost lane. A lot of ships would be like the Hunter-Gratzner, with their crew in cryo where they would be no help to them. There was a chance that they could be picked up by a liner that ran between Helion Prime and Tangiers but neither of them really held out much hope for that; it would have caused a lot of trouble for Riddick anyway. That left salvagers, settlers, and mercs.

“I want you to have this.” Riddick continued to watch the other ship’s course and didn’t look up at her as he handed Shazza the shiv. It was smaller than the one he carried and it looked as though it had been carefully and expertly chipped from some sort of dark bone. She held it comfortably in her hand and realized two things at once; that it had been made from the bones of the hammerhead creatures on the planet they had just left and that he had made it just for her. It fit in her hand perfectly.

She said her thanks silently as she slipped the blade inside her sleeve at the wrist; she caught his eye once as he glanced at her and knew he approved. If she had made her thanks heard, it would have made him uncomfortable, and it wasn’t until the blade was hidden that he took a short quick breath and looked at her again before he cut the lights on the skiff. They had talked about scenarios once they ran into another ship, and now was the time to put it into practice. They moved out to hide against the cargo bins away from the rear hatch of the skiff and waited in the dark. Now there was only the quiet ping of the emergency beacon as the skiff floated dead in space.

~o~

“That things’ fuckin ancient, Theo; I say we blow the goddamned tub out of the sky for target practice.”

The Odyssey was a mid class star jumper that at one time looked and sold as state of the art; or it would have if Nicodemous Theopoulis was in the business of paying, which he wasn’t. He was a thief, a good one, an appellation he wasn’t in the least ashamed of. Theo, and all the gods help the man who called him anything else, looked back at Andreas. A look was all it took with most people but Andreas wasn’t that smart; a regular big shirt, small hat kind of guy. Every crew needed someone stupid enough to simply do as they were told and most of the time Andreas fit that bill nicely but he had developed an unhealthy love for explosions that would have to be dealt with at some point. Just because a ship took the ghost lanes didn’t mean they didn’t have things to steal, ships to salvage, people to sell, in fact, they often had more to offer than the heavier shipping lanes and at far less risk. When people took a ghost lane, they often took everything they had with them and they often took it in nice untraceable credits.

Theo turned in his chair to give Andreas a hard look, a look that said in no uncertain terms; ‘I am measuring your worth to me, and if I find you lacking, it’s YOU that I blow into space.’ “Fortunately, Andreas, you don’t get to say what happens here. Take Tyler with you and get a cable around the thing and bring it into the docking bay so we can get a look at what we’ve got before we go throwing it back into the drink.” He turned back to watch the console and let Andreas know he was dismissed. He sighed deeply when he realized that Andreas still stood there. Brother or no brother, Andreas wouldn’t see the other side of this journey if he didn’t wise up. His voice had the sharp bite of sarcasm when he spoke again. “You’re still here, Andreas.”

He let out a sigh at the tiny voiced ‘oh’ and went back to the charts before him as he plotted a course out past the edge of the galaxy. It was a hobby of his to plot courses that way; he didn’t have to, especially not on the Odyssey, which had every modern convenience. He could have simply punched in the sector of space and looked for a little while.

He had been a merc for as long as he could remember, like his father before him. It was his father that insisted he bring Andreas into the business; even his father knew Andreas wasn’t smart enough to do much else. He had heard tales from his father about life out on the edge since he was a child, and tales of one system, and one planet, in particular. It had taken on the gilt edged faded glory of a tale from centuries ago, about pirates and buried treasure, and all of the other stories Theo had loved to read as a child. That he still secretly loved to read. Theo was a merc, but in his heart he was a pirate, and the planet he sought was the mother-lode.

Trieste Nine.

Copyright © august 2006 xxxevilgrinxxx