Rider 68

Seven years later…

Wiry muscle, tanned and weathered, lined with a tracery of small scars. Jack’s arms bunched and flexed, her body a perfect machine as she strained to turn the sail. The glider spun neatly on its axis and she held back the flutter of nervousness at the speed.

A crash in the early months of last spring when she had first attempted to get the glider off the ground imprinted itself clearly in her mind. It had resulted in the swirl of scars down her left arm where the cable for the sail had caught her before it threw her to the ground below.

It wasn’t a toy any longer, although maybe at the beginning it had started that way. Some of the men from the village had begun to carefully handcraft the lightweight frames to her specifications at around the time that Jack had begun to tinker with the technology that drove the Moorglade.

The equipment was already there; used to craft the elegant bows and other weapons. The writings that Theo had discovered in Sunhillow had helped with that, a little. But Jack knew when she touched it, when her hands first pieced it together, that it was right.

The glider had nothing on the Moorglade. Its wings spanned just under twelve feet from tip to tip in full flight. But it was fast, it had scared her just how fast it could be. Once she had worked out the mechanism to turn the glider into the ley lines, it had progressed even further than she had thought possible.

It was faster than the Moorglade at a full run and more maneuverable, although it would never have the power of the larger ship and could never carry the same weaponry. They were fast though, a lot faster than the large black antelope used for travel across the surface of the planet, at least across the open grass.

Pulling up on the sail mechanism, Jack brought the small glider to a gentle stop in the grass. Another advantage, the glider was completely silent; its smaller hum nowhere near as distinct as the Moorglade’s. As she had done for years now, her mind ticked over the military advantages. Speed, maneuverability, silence, numbers; a fleet of gliders stationed across several villages could be roused to action at the smallest provocation and arrive even before the Moorglade could. It was a perfect scout ship for a planet with vast grassland seas.

Jacob reached out his hand for her as she stepped from the glider’s platform. They had been married last year; Riddick had insisted that she wait until she was old enough to decide what she wanted. On Trieste, that would normally be thirteen. Which is when they had started to see each other under Riddick’s hard glare. Riddick hadn’t said how long Jack would have to wait but Jack waited until she was nineteen.

Jack didn’t need Jacob’s help; that was something that they both knew. It had been difficult at first but Jack would be hard pressed to say who it was harder on, although offhand she would say it had been harder on Jacob.

She was Jack fucking B. Badd and she knew exactly who she was and it wasn’t some timid village woman. After her thirteenth birthday when word got out of how she had killed a wild dog and dragged it home got out, there was no way she could ever be seen as timid. It was not to be her life, not here, not anywhere.

At fourteen, she had begun to train with the village militia after Jacob had fought with his father on her behalf. Not full time; Riddick wouldn’t allow it. Not that she got off easily. Her training with the militia was easy work compared to the training she got under Riddick. He was far harder on her than the men of the village could ever be because he knew exactly what Jack was capable of and he pushed her mercilessly.

Neither said why she trained but it was always a thought in the background as Riddick trained her not to kill antelope or wild dogs, not to fight off rogue villagers. He trained her to fight the Company. For when they came back one day; not if, but when.

She had learned to scout, to track, to stalk silently, to hunt in the dark. To hunt for days with little rest save the occasional catnap. She ate what she found, often cold, more often raw. She learned the tactics and strategy of guerrilla warfare and learned to accept the pain of a war of attrition.

After a year at Riddick’s side, she could make a slew of weapons from the resources that she found. The blades that she made tended to be lighter, smaller and more precisely made than those used by Riddick. When she was older, she would joke with him about it, about a guy’s need to have such a big weapon.

Her ability to kill, to make that final decision, became more honed, and on the eve of every birthday, he had come for her. Jacob had been startled when Riddick had first appeared in their bedroom one night but offered no argument. Jack got dressed silently, her only weapon the small one she had in her hand when she sat upright in the bed, already armed and ready to fight. For every year, Riddick had added another tooth to the necklace he had made her that first year. She wore seven now.

Jacob held her elbow and leaned in to whisper in her ear. They had spoken the night before; Jack had been worried that she would never get the sail mechanism to work properly. “It worked!” He beamed down at her.

“Fuck yeah!” Jack’s language had ceased to shock him years ago and now he just felt her excitement as she strode through the grass towards Duncan who had watched from the edge of the grass.

Jacob’s large hand caressed over her back easily before he leaned in to whisper again. “There are people here to see you.”

Jack hadn’t expected anyone. Anna was pregnant and Joanne wouldn’t leave, so of course Theo wouldn’t leave either. It was still weird for Jack to see Anna that way; it was hard not to see her as perpetually ten years old.

Anna had been married for two years now. She had waited until she was fifteen and before she had fallen in love with a boy from the nearby village everyone believed that Anna would follow in Jack’s footsteps. Even down to the shorn hair. That had caused a huge fight between Anna and her mother and nobody caught any peace about the matter for months. Joanne won that fight, sort of. Anna now wore her hair like Shazza’s, pulled into a practical tail.

Duncan and Johns had come out with her to watch the glider’s flight and stood off to the side with a group of men from the village. They were armed; they were always armed now as the quiet whispers grew.

Duncan had been fascinated with the glider even if there was very little chance he would ever get to use one. His leg had never fully healed and in the winter months he could barely walk at all. It hadn’t changed what he was however; all it changed was how he hunted. Duncan got quieter and, not unlike Riddick, deadlier. He couldn’t risk a long fight so he killed quickly, brutally. Some men from a neighbouring village had learned that lesson the hard way.

Johns never left his side. That had caused some talk in the village, about how improper it was, but nobody dared say anything for long, definitely not within earshot of Riddick or Theo. Definitely not anywhere where Duncan could hear it. No one spoke of their relationship but there was no doubt that it too was love.

Jack looked around and burst into a huge grin as she dropped Jacob’s hand and ran towards Shazza and Riddick as they stepped out of the forest.

The two women were so different in some ways, different colorings, and age. Shazza’s dark hair fell over her waist now, and there were a few grey streaks shot through it. Jack had never let her hair grow back but had kept it shorn. It was another thing, along with keeping her own name, that the villagers hadn’t understood.

Their bodies were as alike as only a mother and daughter could be. That they weren’t blood didn’t matter; their existence and experiences had molded their forms in the same hard image. Lean hard lines and wiry muscle. Female, but by no means feminine.

Jack squeezed her tight, her eyes closed as she felt Shazza’s ribs against her own. They had nearly lost Shazza the previous winter and she had only begun to regain her health but she was still thin. Jack opened her eyes to look at Riddick and closed them again, to hold Shazza tighter.

It hurt to remember. Theo had pounded on her door in the small hours of the night and, even though Jack was accustomed to being woken and instantly readying herself for action, nothing could prepare her for Theo’s news.

Shazza had been bitten by a spider, a small but venomous variety that many of the villagers had some sort of immunity to. It was different for Shazza and what would normally be an annoyance had blown into a raging fever that sent Shazza into days of delirium and hallucinations.

Joanne hadn’t thought anything could ever get that bad. Anna had been bitten as a child and suffered little more than a sniffle and an itchy bite. On the fourth day she had sent Theo to bring Jack from the small house that she shared with Jacob.

Theo had been torn between fury and concern. Riddick had left. Jack wasn’t torn at all; she was enraged, especially as she knelt beside Shazza, a woman she had come to accept as her mother, and held her hand as she burned with fever. Crying out for Riddick.

Jack hadn’t been prepared for what she had found when she found him. If she had the strength, she knew she could have killed Riddick for his abandonment but all her angry words died when she saw him. It had never occurred to her that he could cry. That anything could ever make him cry. That frightened her more than Shazza’s burning fever.

He had gotten up to leave when he saw her but she wasn’t about to let him off so easily. He hadn’t eaten or slept for days as Shazza burned with fever. Jack listened as his voice broke, that he couldn’t stay, about all the ways it would be better if he left, as he tried to convince himself. She had slapped him, hard, as tears streamed down her face, as she called him a damned coward.

Maybe that was true but Jack knew that mostly it wasn’t. Riddick loved Shazza more than he had words for, more than he could understand, and couldn’t do a damned thing for her. He couldn’t kill what hurt her, all he could do was watch, and it was killing him to hurt so much. So he had run.

‘I don’t know what to do, Jack.’

Jack hadn’t really known what to do either, once the anger had drained out of her. It was Imam’s voice that she had heard then. Riddick’s voice, in fact, the words broken and unsure at first as they knelt in the fine swirls of snow that blew across the denuded forest floor.

With the quiet that their lives became after the Company had left, Riddick had more often read from the Koran that Theo had given him. In the end, it was all that he could do, so Jack held his hand on that cold night and prayed in the forest with him. When Riddick returned, those present had made a promise to tell no one that he had left, especially not Shazza.

Jack squeezed Shazza one last time before she pulled back to cup her face in her hands. She knew that Shazza would get better; she knew that Riddick hadn’t left her side since. That he wouldn’t.

Physically, Riddick looked much the same as he had from the moment Jack had first laid eyes on him. It was daylight, so Jack couldn’t read the expression in his eyes but she knew that it was different. It hadn’t softened. There was no way Riddick could ever be called soft but it had changed. Deepened. There was a calm within him that could only be seen when you paid attention; when you knew how or what or why he had been before.

Jack could barely remember Imam; it had all been so long ago on that planet and she had only known him for a few hours. The stamp was indelible though, marked forever on all of them. Riddick most of all.

It wasn’t just that Riddick had read so thoroughly of Imam’s god either; it went deeper as though the holy man had settled over Riddick, like the dark brown robes that Riddick wore as he walked through the forest. Jack dropped her head and smiled as her arms quickly went around Riddick’s neck and she was hugged fiercely. She couldn’t imagine Imam would carry such a collection of weapons in his robes as Riddick had now.

Despite the quiet that had come over him, Riddick would always be what he was first. That he could now look at the sky and plot the path of the stars and their effects on Trieste 9 didn’t change that. He was still and always would be Riddick.

Riddick walked forward several steps with Jack at his side before he stopped and looked up at the sky. He didn’t know how he knew what he knew; there was no way to explain. In another time this would have pissed him off but now he simply accepted it for what it was. “How long before they’re ready?”

They had walked past the others and looked out over the grassland sea, following the flight of three black cranes across the sky. Far off in the distance, beyond the curve of the horizon, the Company ship was reclaimed by the earth. Like one of the standing stones in the river close to Sunhillow, its crumpled skin was now tufted with grass. Jack imagined that in a few more years it would be hard to tell that it had ever been there at all. They looked off in its direction nonetheless. When a ship came, that’s where it would be.

“I’d like to put her through a few more trial runs but it’s good to go now. Why?” Jack’s gut knotted with tension and excitement, but Riddick’s expression never changed.

“They’re coming, Jack.”

He didn’t say who; he didn’t need to. It’s what he had spent the last years training her for. The Company would come back at some point. The Company, or somebody very much like the Company. The names weren’t important. They always came. “And?”

“We ride out and meet them.”
—

“…Quiet is good for the soul, it clarifies; and shows us things we would not otherwise see. He was a prophet, and a man from the city; but he had to travel to the desert, where there was quiet, to hear the words of god…”

the end

Copyright © june 2007 xxxevilgrinxxx