Trouble [4]

A shape moved on the console. Honed predatory instincts eons old kicked in and Riddick tracked the movement. A tight cluster of passengers in the finest clothes they had left one of the large freighters further down the tarmac, followed by another smaller group of ship’s techs in overalls, clipboards in hand. The techs slowed and then stopped before the merc ship, conferring with each other silently on the monitor. Disturbing nothing, Riddick was on his feet, blade out and concealed against his thigh, his robe swept clear of the sweep of his arm.

From the side of the ship, his ghost-girl watched. Arms crossed over her chest, she leaned nonchalantly against the grey side of the ship, unseen to all but him, not a care in the world. Through the ship, she looked right at him, not at those that moved slowly outside the ship.

Muscles taut, Riddick leaned over the console, eyes darting between the space-struck passengers outside and the slender rags and camo clad figure of Jack. Only one image was real. Only one image mattered. Unwilling to toss aside instinct completely in favor of the apparition he had dreamed up to see him through, he stayed stock still, watching them both.

Prepared to kill anyone that threatened his position within the ship. Already two steps ahead, he thought of what he would do with the body, of how he would get out of the airfield, knowing that he didn’t have what he needed to take the merc ship immediately. Of how he might get back and what the fallout of a messy kill aboard the ship would be. If he would have to abandon taking the merc ship altogether in favor of something else. He thought further ahead, to the medical attention he knew he would need and couldn’t get where he was.

All the planning was unnecessary as the gawkers shuffled on, the techs behind them, still checking things off on their clipboards. Against the outside of the ship, Jack adjusted the battered goggles on her head and cracked a smirk as she looked at him.

‘Fucking smartass,’ he thought, grinning. Even as his ghost-girl, she was Jack through and through. Fearless when it came to him.

Devoid of passersby, the monitors now delivered the same bland scene as before. Bored techs shuffled back and forth across the dark tarmac outside. Occasionally a group of passengers would leave a ship or bustle back to one. Purchases in tow, they clung to the pools of electric light, hopping from one bright spot to the next until they were safely back at whatever decrepit trawler they came in on. For the most part they ignored everything else around them, as though to notice was to be noticed.

Watching the console carefully, Riddick scanned the entire tarmac and only when he felt secure that no one was going to try to take the ship did he reclaim his seat. He knew that he should leave, that there was no way to know how long he had before the merc showed up again, but couldn’t, not without finding out more about the man that hunted him.

Back he went through the logs. Routine entries. Stops for fuel and supplies. The obligatory contacts with the Merc Guild, necessary to hold onto the contract. Back further. From a solitary crew of one, the records grew to include other members and their scattered thoughts as one by one they were let go, dropped on planets and spaceports. The other mercs meant nothing to him and Riddick ignored those records. They were filler for what he really wanted: more information about Granger himself.

For a while there was next to nothing, desultory entries that did little more than sign off on a fuel shipment, as though Granger couldn’t bring himself to say a word more than absolutely necessary. Then, as Riddick continued to move backwards through the logs, he found something.

‘Louise.’

First a single name and then the scene played out in reverse, sterile and hollow, once Riddick accessed Granger’s personal logs. First Granger denied it had happened, then he was sorry. Heartbroken. Destroyed at the revelation of her death by lung cancer, that he should have been there and wasn’t, that she had been dying for a while and he wasn’t there because he was out somewhere hunting convicts. That if he’d chosen to live somewhere else, closer to the Guild, she could have gotten care in time. Reading only of love last.

Never having had a great love in his life, Riddick didn’t understand the depth of the emotion, the pain of the loss. He could see it, he knew that he could use it, but he didn’t understand it. What he did have was a ghost-girl that he clung on to with the force of life itself, summoned out of the depth of need. Maybe he understood after all.

In any case, he continued to read Granger’s logs, scanning ever backward until Louise was evident but not ever present. While Granger had been far from home, his wife had died of cancer. Riddick skimmed over the details but he put together that Granger hadn’t been there and shortly after that, he had ditched his crew and taken a contract on one of the most dangerous convicts in the known universe.

It was crazy but it wasn’t new to Riddick. There had been times in Slam when he had seen convicts give up, just lose everything that made them want to live. Instead of killing themselves outright, they’d go toe to toe with something or someone they had no chance of defeating. They’d get shiv’ed or shot up by the guards, swim out past their depth and drown. Jump fence when there was no chance that they could make it. Whatever it took, it didn’t matter, as long as they ended up dead. He’d never been that bad off but he knew how they got there, he’d watched it happen plenty of times. Like now, it was from the sidelines, where he examined it coldly.

Crazy would have been easier. No matter how crazy Johns got at the end, he had wanted to live and Riddick could always use that against him. Dealing with someone that not only wasn’t afraid to die but wanted to die was a different thing entirely. In that scenario, Riddick wasn’t a threat anymore. Riddick offered death. If the merc no longer feared death there weren’t a whole lot of threats left.

Moving quickly made his head spin, made everything hurt, and so he dropped to his knees slowly, eyes closed, waiting for the ship to stop moving. Making one last check beneath the neat console, looking for any other surveillance devices. He didn’t expect any; while mercs had no problem stripping a convict of any dignity he had left, they were particular about their own. He checked because it was a habit to check. Nothing.

As carefully as he had entered the ship’s logs, Riddick got out of the system, covering his tracks as he went. Backtracking completely, he stood and took a last look around the cockpit to ensure that everything was exactly as it had been when he had entered and then made his way to the rear of the ship.

Bolted at the side of the hatchway opening for quick access, the battered med kit was Riddick’s next stop. Equipped with supplied for gun shot wounds, knife wounds and lacerations. The med kit on any merc ship had more than adequate supplies to handle these types of wounds. Anything more could be handled by cryo freeze and a jump to the nearest station or starship. Or the merc would make his last trip out of the airlock. Riddick pawed carefully through bags of sterile bandages and instant suture tapes, noting the bottle of pain medication on the way.

At the bottom of the kit was a rudimentary hand held medical scanner. Lacking nanotechnology, it was no match for the larger machines used on military freighters, or in slam for that matter, but it could assess a medical situation and at least tell him what he had. It would have to do. Uncapping one end of the scanner, Riddick pressed the needle tip against the skin and watched as the tiny bulb at the end filled with blood. The needle retracted and, on instinct, he sucked the pad of his thumb, pressing his tongue against it until it stopped bleeding.

‘Massive viral infection of undetermined origin.’

‘No shit.’

The small screen quickly filled with possible viruses and their associated symptoms, unable to definitively name a single source. Given the amount of time Riddick had spent crawling through the filth and waste of Decarra 12′s sewer, to say nothing of the swamp beyond the walls, it wasn’t an unexpected diagnosis. There was no way to know how many bugs he had picked up.

There was an odd feeling of pride at carrying around so many viruses that would likely kill another man, and living to tell about it. Being in slam, living hard, on the run, had exposed him to so many dangerous organisms that he supposed he had picked up enough immunity that whatever he had didn’t kill him outright. It gave him hope that he could fight off the infection eventually, although it did nothing for how miserable it made him at the moment. And it made the antibiotics that he had pilfered earlier all but useless.

There were no bottles of pills amongst the bandages in any case and, from his reconnaissance of the town, what few drugs existed were so valuable that it was too much of a risk to steal them if he didn’t absolutely have to. In any case he needed to stay clear, sharp. Once he started taking more drugs, there was no telling what effect they would have on him, or how they would interact with what he had already taken. He wasn’t willing to take that risk, at least not yet.

Along with the expected diagnosis of a viral infection, the scanner offered the completely useless prescription of a massive dosage of antivirals, which the kit didn’t have. Or a scheduled session with a military grade nanomedical scanner, which the ship didn’t have.

‘Not gonna happen.’

Riddick cut off the scanner before it could helpfully send on his information to any nearby military medical stations and then pocketed the scanner as well. It had his blood, his DNA, stored within and, until he could be absolutely sure that he could return to the merc ship, he would have to hold onto it. Given its place at the very bottom of the med kit, he didn’t think it would be missed. It was time to go.

Standing in the deeper shadows at the side of the hatch, Riddick hit the switch and waited for the ramp to descend. Before the walkway was even halfway down, he had already scanned the area in front of the ship to see if he faced a threat from that direction. The pools of light that illuminated the space outside the big freighters only made the surrounding darkness all the deeper and Riddick used it to his advantage, slipping out of the hatchway and down onto the tarmac below. The hatch raised silently, clicking shut. From the skin of the ship, Riddick raised his goggles and peered out into the black, watching for any sign that he had been spotted leaving. Jack was nowhere to be seen.

‘…possible hallucinations…’

As certain as Riddick was that Jack wasn’t real, he was certain that she was there, that she was his figment, not something cooked up by a virus. Still, he looked for her, doubt gnawing at him that once he had read that he was prone to hallucinations, that Jack would disappear. She was gone and something tugged inside him.

Feeling hollow, he forced himself forward. Across the tarmac and into the throng that had gathered at the edge of the airfield. The market was loud with sellers shouting out prices and passengers from the ships haggling to either side. The knot of passengers in the middle of the street moved slowly but offered the densest cover and he wove his way through. Men pulled carts laden with bolts of cloth, crates of MRE’s, weapons and even livestock through the middle passage and he stood aside to let them pass.

From beneath the edge of his hood, he scanned the crowd for a sign of Granger. Twice, at least, the merc had spotted him. Once outside the bar. The other in the crowded marketplace. Riddick planned on making his way slowly through one and towards the other, trolling for the merc. He itched to make for the rooftops, where he could see. Kept to the ground. What hid the merc from him also hid him from the merc. Unlike the trip out to the ship, in the rain, on the roof now, he would be exposed.

The crowd grew thick, the voices both louder and indistinguishable. Cold wracked through him and he shuddered. Disoriented in the jostling crowd. Feeling like a coward, he fought the urge to drop to his knees and crawl to the side of the throng. He wouldn’t do it, he refused to succumb. It didn’t change how he felt. The night air closed around him, no longer an ally. Refusing to drop, refusing to shove, he took another step and then another. An all too brief clearing up ahead as two merchants held the pedestrians at bay. A heavy cart stopped all traffic as it trundled out into the middle of the street.

As he stood still, waiting with the others, Riddick breathed as deeply as his congested lungs would allow. The near-panic from the crowd dissipating even as those around him swore at the merchants to hurry up and clear the street. When the laden cart moved past, Riddick bled into the mob once more, heading for the bar

Riddick knew that he could go back to the ship and just wait but he didn’t like the odds. Too many things could go wrong. The merc could yell out, or fire his weapon, either of which could bring the port guards running, to say nothing of any military ships in the area. There would be a body to get rid of, something that was easier said than done. Just as Riddick now trolled for the merc, hoping to pull him out into the open, Riddick knew that Granger would do the same. Had done the same, or Riddick might not have seen him at all. The merc wanted to be found.

The merchant stalls thinned as the light from the sharply delineated pots of light from the spaceport faded into darkness. As sure as an electric fence, tourists stepped towards the dividing line between belonging and visiting. Stopped, peered beyond, and backed away. Leaving Riddick alone as he walked into the shadows along near-deserted storefronts. He reached out for the telltale itch from behind, the warning that he was being followed, and felt nothing.

If Granger was here, he was ahead. But where? Up onto the boardwalk and beneath the eaves of the building, Riddick waited beside a metal rain barrel. With a sigh, he looked back along the street from where he had come, not wanting to go back through the crowded market if it could be avoided. To his right, at the end of the block of buildings, the bar stood on its own, the only lit windows other than the market. In the expanse between, the street was all but deserted. He melted into the black as a group of drunken men staggered out of the bar, pushing and shouting at each other.

From the darkness, he scanned the street again, looking for a sign of movement, of anything that was off. Across the street, a shape flickered and Riddick was on the move before he fully registered what it was. Not the merc. Jack. Just seeing her again made his chest feel funny. Not just a hallucination. The girl didn’t turn to look at him, just sauntered down the middle of the boardwalk, kicking an imaginary stone out of her way as she did. Riddick followed her without fail, disappearing around the corner of a building.

‘Granger.’

© copyright September 2009 xxxevilgrinxxx