Rider 15

Ch 15

Bishop watched Duncan from a distance as the man pored over computer files and scribbled notes to himself in a small worn book that he carried with him. Duncan knew he was there; he could be blindfolded, and he would know. Bishop had almost completely given up as far as the attempt to unsettle him went; it just couldn’t be done, not for any lack of trying. Duncan kept his head down because what he looked at interested him. Bishop also knew that he would wait until Bishop said something, or made some noise to give himself away. It was a strange game to play, especially after all this time, but one neither man seemed willing to put an end to.

He took another sip from his teacup and stepped across the threshold into the dimly lit room and only when he had taken a seat opposite Duncan did the other man look up. Duncan’s smile was a wisp of fog that appeared and was gone; his expression once again blank and cold, his eyes hard and grey. Bishop smiled inwardly at the other mans silence, as Duncan waited for him to speak, to ask what he had come here to ask. Duncan was a hunt that never ended.

“You are certain.” It was barely a question, merely an invitation. He knew that Duncan was certain; about the hunt, about the location. The small details would fall into place when their time came.

Duncan nodded once, nearly imperceptibly before he reached out and clicked the computer screen off, which left the two men with only the palest light to see by. Of the two, Bishop was the hunter, but Duncan was the predator. The one hunted because it was what he did. The other hunted because it was what he was.
—

The star map was a pale copy of the magnificent one from the ancient book that rested on the desk in front of him; ‘Tales of the House of Olias.’ Theo had taken years just to decipher the small amount of text that he had, and years after that to understand its meaning. It was a treasure equal to any he had ever read about in any book, as a child or otherwise. Much of the book was unreadable, and would probably stay that way; its references impossible to put into context. He hoped that would change when he finally reached Trieste Nine, that it would be clear once he saw with his own eyes.

He had recognized the map as a star map the moment he had first laid eyes on it however; he had charted his own courses for so many years before that, it could not be missed. It was a map of the stars in the night sky, from the planet itself. He spent countless hours, years, resentfully crouched over a computer console at every spare moment, in an effort to create an image from space. That would have taken him a lot longer to do by hand, and unfortunately it had to be done by computer, or it would probably not be done in his lifetime. Once the image was reversed however, he could then create a star map of the stars that were around Trieste Nine, and therefore a map to the planet itself, once he could decode the text from other parts of the book, or his map could be thousands of years out of date, essentially useless. Years went by as he deciphered the ancient text to understand what was in the sky around Trieste Nine, so that he would know where to find it, when the time came.

The chart itself was complete finally and as he looked down at his own private charts, he realized that he was afraid. He was so close that he could reach out and touch Trieste Nine; she wouldn’t just be a wish, a dream, on a chart he had deciphered from an ancient text. She would be real; the pale blue veil of the nebula would part and reveal her for a moment, and everything he had dreamed of for so many years would come true. He walked the corridor slowly towards the bridge; every step seemed to take forever. Why was he afraid?
—

“Theopoulis had left nearly everything intact at his home on Helion, or at least he left it to look that way.” Bishop tented his fingers before his eyes as he carefully listened to every word from Duncan, as the man described how he came to be sure about the target’s whereabouts. Where Bishop was still, intent and focused, Duncan looked relaxed, almost bored. His feet, crossed at the ankles, rested on the small table in front of him, and his head rested heavily into his interlaced fingers behind his head. Anyone that walked in would get the impression of laziness, of sloppiness. And they would be wrong of course. Bishop could also play a waiting game, and had learned that with Duncan he would wait anyway; if he wanted to know what the other man knew he would have to wait for it.

Duncan loved this, to make Bishop wait. The strain of the other man’s stillness could very nearly be heard. He knew Bishop was intelligent, of that there could be no doubt, but Duncan knew that he had spent a good deal of his time in the hunt for things which he had already compartmentalized. The mercs he hunted were generally not very creative although they often possessed a crude animal cunning, and the beasts were just that, beasts.

This Theopoulis was no mere beast; this wasn’t some canned hunt which would end up with another head on Bishops’ wall or another confirmed kill. He had respect for the man as a hunter. There was no doubt that if a cold clinical eye and a steady hard were needed, Bishop was the deadliest hunter there was. Duncan preferred to get into the mind of those he hunted, to become a part of them. He didn’t feel the need to distance himself.

After he had taken the time to carefully break Theopoulis’ code, with some help from some of those secretaries that Bishop thought so little of, Duncan knew that Theopoulis was a different sort of merc altogether. It had taken longer than he had expected to break the code, and it took even longer to decipher the meaning. It was Theopoulis’ bookshelves that gave the man away.

When he finally spoke, Duncan related a tale about computer codes and sloppy passwords. Bishop would expect nothing better from a merc, and Duncan would reveal too much of his own methods if he told Bishop the truth. He had stood in Theopoulis’ dusty front room, the computers already taken down the back steps to the trunk of his vehicle. He was sure that he would find things of value on the computers, but once he saw the row upon row of bookshelves he knew that what he found on the computers would not give him nearly as much insight to the man as what he found there, in the man’s front room.

The small house was cluttered, but it wasn’t messy. It wasn’t the ‘nest’ that a lot of mercs seemed to like to inhabit. Clearly Theopoulis was a man that wanted something more out of life, which made him interesting. Then there were the books themselves. Duncan had seen a lot of things in his life but even he hadn’t seen so many books in the same place at the same time before. It was an expensive hobby, and the other artifacts weren’t cheap either.

Theopoulis had a love for the sea, and for the freedom it brought. A quick scan of the titles alone was enough to make that plain to Duncan. He had pulled a few titles down from the shelves, and opened them at the spaces where Theopoulis had marked their pages. Clearly these books weren’t of vital importance to him, or he would not have left them. Either that or he hadn’t planned his desertion ahead of time. As Duncan padded silently through the house he wondered whether Theopoulis just took the opportunity when it came. Clearly the man lived two lives; to those Duncan had already questioned within the Merc’s Guild, Theopoulis was cold and impersonal, but quite clearly Theopoulis was something else as well. Duncan smiled at that thought, as he lifted the book from the bedside table, ‘aren’t we all’.
—

Shazza watched Theo as he crossed the bridge nearly in a daze, a sheaf of paper held carefully to his chest. He had allowed Jack to pilot the ship until the Odyssey had reached one of the strange blank spots on the charts. Shazza watched from across the bridge as Theo carefully laid down the sheaf of paper he had carried on top of the other charts. The silence on the bridge spoke more questions than any amount of words ever could. Shazza walked across to join Riddick, who already stood behind Theo, unnerved by the man’s silence. Jack watched from the other side of the table as Theo spread the charts he had brought across the bare space in the one below it and made the picture whole again.

As they stood around the table, Riddick thought back to another time and another place, as he stood with Shazza and Jack and Imam. ‘Blue sun, blue water’. He had thought of Imam more frequently over the past few days, and had gotten up a little earlier to read from the Koran that Theo had given him. Riddick didn’t know what he had expected to find when he had started; Imam was dead, he would never come back, and yet he still heard his voice so clearly sometimes that he expected to turn and see the other man there.

Jack disappeared from view, only to reappear beside him; she had ducked under the table to stand beside him. He didn’t say anything but pulled her close; his hand caressed once over the stubble at the nape of her neck before he rested it on her back and they both leaned in to wait for Theo to speak.

“I’m pretty sure it’s here.” Theo spoke so quietly that Riddick had to strain to hear him; he spoke as though to himself. His hands spread over the charts, as though he needed to feel it, not just see it, as his hands settled on a mid sized planet in the center of a bare patch.

“Pretty sure?” On another day, Riddick’s flat dead voice from the grave would have frightened Theo, or anyone else for that matter, senseless. Today was not that day, and Theo just nodded absently as he stood and ran his hand through his hair. He seemed almost puzzled to be surrounded by Riddick, Shazza and Jack and smiled when he realized that for a few moments there, nothing else had existed.

Theo took a deep breath, not sure where to take the conversation next. He looked around the table at the faces of his shipmates; at Riddick’s hard protective glare, at Shazza’s concern, and Jack’s excitement, and settled for honesty. He looked right at Riddick as he spoke, after all, Riddick would be the one that would kill him if he got it all terribly wrong. “All of this is new to me.” He looked quickly at the faces of the two women again before he settled on Riddick once more. “I have a pretty good idea that the planet there is Trieste Nine, but I can’t be sure.” Theo turned to look back at the charts again. He wanted it to be Trieste Nine, but wanting wasn’t the same as being.

Riddick couldn’t help but notice Theo’s turmoil, his every emotion broadcast so clearly. He knew what it was to want something so badly that for one brief moment it pushed everything else away, until all you could see was that one beautiful thing that made everything else make sense. He dropped his gaze from Shazza, unsettled and unsure of how long he had simply stared at her as that thought crossed his mind.

“We’ll find out when we get there, Captain, let’s take her in.”

Theo grinned back at him and strode across the bridge to the captain’s seat; on his way past Jack he pointed at the co-pilot’s seat. Theo dropped his head and grinned all the wider at Jack’s excited whoop when she brushed past him to buckle into the co-pilot’s seat.

Shazza still burned inside after the long look Riddick had given her; there was no way to know what it was that he thought at that moment, but she had the feeling that he had thought of her. No man had ever looked at her like that. She wasn’t even sure if Riddick was aware of it, but she would never forget it.

They both buckled into seats behind the two pilots and Shazza took Riddick’s hand when he offered it. They glanced at each other and quickly looked down again; the feeling was still too raw and not clearly understood.

The planet was a pale blue and green orb that filled the screen as Theo neared high orbit. He was so enthralled with the vision in front of him that Jack had to reach out and pull on his sleeve, which made Riddick growl behind her. Theo looked down to see what had startled Jack and felt his throat close up in a jolt of fear.

“What the hell is going on, Theo?” Riddick had asked Theo, but it was Jack that answered. “All of the readouts just went haywire; I think we’re shutting everything down?” Jack looked across at Theo as she spoke; her voice shook with fear as the seriousness of the situation settled upon her. ‘Would there be another crash?’

Riddick eased up on Shazza’s hand when he realized how hard he gripped her, and he pulled forward to speak to Theo in a hard cold voice. “Pull us the fuck out of orbit, now.”

Theo didn’t like the idea that he would have to say no to Riddick, but there was no other choice, not anymore. “I can’t do that Riddick, the controls are fried. Something in the atmosphere, some sort of electromagnetic interference. If I pull out of orbit, we’ll get pulled in eventually, and we have no power, and no real way to fix it unless we put her down somewhere.”

Jack swallowed past the lump that threatened to choke her. “Can you do that Theo? Land without power?”

Her eyes pleaded with him silently, and Theo could feel Riddick’s eyes as they bored holes into the back of his skull. Theo was afraid to look at Shazza. “I can land her. I’ll try to put her down somewhere away from anywhere populated, just in case.” Theo’s hand shook as he settled his hand on the wheel, and started the descent.

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