Jack [2]

Chapter 2

The glider’s wings snapped in the breeze that had kicked up. The horsemen dismounted and held onto the reins of their mounts, pulling the beasts back slightly across the grass towards one of their number that stood away from the strange circle and held the reins of the gathered horses, murmuring quiet words to them and soothing them as much as he could.

Bucking under a gust, the glider trembled as though it would take off on its own and Jack tightened her fist on the handhold. “I’ll stay with her,” Shazza said from around the wing as she and Jack got the glider turned around, facing back the way they had come. If they were to get out in a hurry, Jack didn’t want to have to take the time and distance to turn her; she wanted to be able to get in and run.

“‘Kay,” Jack said as she let go of her side of the glider, casting a glance at Riddick and Duncan, who stood at the edge of the flattened grass, looking at the drop ship. “I won’t be long,” she added, knowing that Shazza wanted to join them.

The rest of the men stood in a rough semi-circle with the drop ship in the middle. Squat, ugly and utilitarian, it crushed the grass beneath it and threw up broken divots of earth at all its sharp points. The shark-like point of its nose dug into the earth and its back end blotted out the sun when they got too close.

The ship bore no name, just a series of numbers painted on its side in weathered dark red paint. Even in that it was utilitarian. Riddick and Duncan had seen hundreds, possibly thousands, of them over the years and every one of them looked alike.

Stepping into the circle of crushed grass, Riddick moved along the side of the ship, not quite touching its sides. Just close enough to feel the small bit of residual heat from the ship’s entry. Behind him, Duncan limped, eyeing the numbers along the side of the ship.

“Four nineteen,” Duncan said, reading off the freighter ID number.

“Don’t mean much on its own,” Riddick said quietly, slowing down to let the other man catch up. By themselves the numbers meant next to nothing. The first group of three numbers corresponded to a larger ship in the fleet but as the drop ships were so many, there had to be a way to tie them to a particular unit, a particular freighter.

“Better on its own than not,” Duncan reached the tail of the ship and stopped to rest, leaning almost reluctantly against its skin. Riding a horse meant that he didn’t have to walk, or try to run, but it took a toll on him, especially after he had first dismounted.

Both men turned as Jack came around the side. If not for the telltale shadow, they wouldn’t have seen her until she was right on top of them. It made Riddick smile, knowing that she had gotten so close and that even he didn’t make her. They’d been playing that game for years.

“Nobody on that side. Anything?” she asked, pointing as she ducked under the tail of the ship, one hand resting on the metal as she came around.

“Registry number.”

“Doesn’t mean anything by itself,” Duncan added, for her benefit.

“By itself,” she said, underlining the missing explanation. Her expression sharpened as she focused on Duncan. “So it means something in addition to…?”

Riddick huffed at her questioning, continuing to walk around the ship, looking for the hatch. “In addition to the code that says where it came from.”

“How could we get that?” she asked, falling in neatly beside Riddick as they moved to the other side of the ship.

“Don’t think we can, or should,” Duncan answered for Riddick. “Johns could probably get a call out but there’s a good chance the codes’ve been changed. It’s the first thing I would have done. That, and if the Company is sending ships here, they’d probably pick up on anything we tried to get out.”

“Guess that rules that out.”

“Better off staying quiet about it. If we have to get a call out at some point, advertising that we can do it is pretty stupid.” Riddick stopped a few feet from the hatch opening and leaned his head almost gingerly against the hull. Listening.

“Anybody home?” Jack whispered, right behind Riddick.

The sound of the wind and the nickering of the horses was all they heard for a couple of minutes as Riddick listened. Even though Duncan was behind her and she couldn’t see him, she knew he listened too. Resting a hand on the blade strapped to her hip, she closed her eyes and tried to pick out what she knew Riddick and Duncan would be able to hear. Hearing nothing but the same wind and horses she had heard before, she remained quiet. If either of the two men heard something she couldn’t, she didn’t want to advertise. And she didn’t want to interrupt.

Waiting made her itch and she strained for stillness. Riddick was always telling her to be patient, to wait. It used to drive her crazy. She waited to move, to act, but he always told her to wait, and watch. It made her itch. She waited.

It seemed to take forever but Riddick finally crept forward, not saying anything, not making a sound. There was a recessed access panel to the left of the hatch and he eyed it carefully, running first a fingertip and then a knife tip along a seam between the keypad and the casing. Jack moved towards him but Duncan tapped her arm, pointed at the doorway and shook his head. It pleased her that he didn’t try to pull her behind him but that had never been his style. She stayed back from the entryway.

No one spoke.

The click seemed loud in the silence and the three of them took a step back, falling into a wary crouch, ready to fight if anything came out. There was a barely audible hiss of air as the pocketed door retracted into the wall of the ship. Tense, they waited for any sound, a sign that there was anything inside, but nothing came.

Riddick held up his hand, displaying the blade he held against his palm and then he slipped inside without a sound. Beside her, Duncan reached out for her arm but he didn’t move ahead of her into the ship. They just waited. A metallic double tap from Riddick’s blade came from within, echoing, and only then did Duncan move toward the hatch. Just as they got to the doorway he stepped to the side and let her step up onto the slanted, corrugated floor of the drop ship.

Once inside, she turned and reached for Duncan’s arm and, wrist to wrist, pulled him up into the ship. A tap on his arm and she let go, moving further into the dark after Riddick.

The inside was cool, almost cold. For years, the only ship she had been in was the Moorglade, and with its organic lines and warm wood, it was nothing like the inside of the Company ship.

‘Great, Jack, you’re giving yourself the willies,’ she thought. It was dumb but that was exactly how the ship felt. It wasn’t just the temperature that raised goosebumps along her arms. The ship felt eerie and alien. Wrong. Didn’t belong.

When she had first run, all those years ago, she had moved from ship to ship without giving much thought to where she was, never mind to the ships themselves. She had never felt this way on Theo’s ship, ‘The Odyssey’. Not even on the ‘Hunter-Gratzner’ and if ever there was a doomed ship, it was her. Back then, a ship was a ship was a ship.

In that, the Company ship held a jarring sense of familiarity. Up ahead of her in the dim, Riddick crouched and, with the tip of a blade, opened a small metal crate below one of the seats. She was curious but his silence held her back. The air behind her felt cold and her skin crawled. There had been people there, once.

‘Seven.’

There were six seats on either side of the ship but only seven of them had their straps loosened. The rest were tightly secured and she didn’t think anyone would go to the trouble of making the straps so neat if they were landing in a hurry.

“The horsemen are searching the grass now, trying to see where they might have gone,” Duncan said as he came up behind Jack, eyeing the seats.

“Seven,” Jack mouthed.

“Why only seven?” she pressed on quietly, not really expecting an answer.

Duncan smiled at her, his hand on her shoulder, “Would more be better?” and then he was past, looking at the contents of the box Riddick had pulled out.

“More’d make sense. Wouldn’t they want more than seven?”

“Not if it’s the right seven. Anything?” he asked Riddick, who harrumphed by way of an answer. Feeling certain that nothing in the box would result in an alarm or an explosion, Riddick dumped the contents out onto the floor of the ship, stopping them from rolling away with his boot.

“Nothing. Not a fucking thing,” he finally got out as he got to his feet and looked around the empty space.

Jack wondered at what he saw, and how he saw it differently than she did. ‘A whole lot of purple is how,’ she thought, as she dropped to the ground and took a closer look at what Riddick had abandoned. There was nothing personal in the crate; it looked like a generic care kit. A selection of MRE’s and other items that would belong in any hygiene pack. Nothing of value. Nothing the soldiers apparently thought worth the bother of bringing with them. Nothing they sought to secure, which could be said about the ship itself.

“These guys aren’t coming back here, are they?” she said, more to herself than anything.

“Don’t look like it.” Riddick made a last circle of the interior of the ship, poking here and there with the tip of his knife without conviction.

Behind him, Duncan followed and made his own examination. It had the feel of a routine well practiced rather than something he expected to see results from. Old habits.

Up on her feet, Jack moved toward the hatch, keeping to the side of the doorway until she was sure that there was nothing outside. That too had the feeling of rote.

The air outside was almost painfully bright and she raised a hand to shade her eyes. She could feel the weight of Riddick behind her but she didn’t drop down, just stood at the lip of the hatch and looked out across the grass. At the rocks where the drop cable snaked off between jutting boulders.

Only when her eyes had adjusted did she hop down into the smashed grass. Riddick followed, Duncan just behind. She didn’t turn to wait for them but expected that they would follow.

“Why would they just drop it here, with no way for a larger ship to get it back?” she asked, pointing toward the thick cable.

“Weren’t planning on getting it back.” Duncan limped toward the tow cable, resting a foot on it as he eyed down its length until it disappeared into a nest of broken stone. Even partially retracted, it extended quite a ways.

From their previous encounter with the Company drop ships, Jack knew that a larger ship wouldn’t risk getting close to Trieste 9, or face getting pulled into her atmosphere where the electromagnetic pulse generated from the planet’s surface would cripple any ship that remained in orbit.

“Why would they do that? I mean, couldn’t they just drop them here and take the drop ship with them? Wouldn’t that make more sense?” Jack was into the large broken boulders now, following the thick cable. It didn’t make sense to her. Wouldn’t stealth have been better?

“They probably don’t care that we know,” Riddick said as he caught up to her, looking here and there amongst the stones. “That, or they were in one hell of a hurry.”

“Everyone would have heard if the Company stayed around long enough to retrieve the ship. Not the first time that’s been done.” Both Riddick and Jack looked over at Duncan as he picked his way through the rocks. Riddick had his own experiences with the Company but Duncan was Company and had been for years. At Bishop’s side he had taken part in countless Company wars. If anyone was familiar with their tactics, it was him.

“That they dropped it here?” Duncan continued when he had caught up, “they don’t really care if anyone spots the drop ship. The men are already on the ground.”

“They got help.” Riddick stood at the place where the grass ran out, where it no longer forced its way through the shattered stone that led into the mountains.

That made sense to her. She felt cold as she looked out into the rocks. That too was familiar. It felt like the canyon on the hammerhead planet. The wind off the grass sea whispered and echoed as it moved down through the stones, making it hard to tell if what she heard was the wind or something else.

A perfect place to hide. Like Riddick, Jack didn’t trust luck. There were no coincidences, no accidents, so she knew that he was right, she felt it. The Company soldiers had help, someone that knew the terrain, knew the best places to hide, go to ground.

It had been a long seven years but the last time that the Company had made a run at them, they had also found allies on Trieste 9.

‘Not everybody loves this place like I do. Like we do,’ she thought, knowing that the others were thinking along the same lines. In the last battle, not all of the raiders had been wiped out. Not for lack of an effort but they had slipped away through the forest, to bide their time.

“They could be anywhere in there. There’s no way we could find them if they didn’t want to be found.” Duncan picked up a stone and skipped it out over the ravine. “We’re going to have to send trackers in after them.”

A small tilt of the head was all that they got from Riddick as he looked out into the unforgiving terrain. Jack got it; she wanted to head out after the soldiers. In her head she ran through all the reasons that Riddick, or Duncan for that matter, would give her for why they should stay put.

‘Wait, watch,’ Riddick would say. Duncan would say that it was too easy to just walk right in, that it would be expected and so likely a trap. And yet all of them stood at the edge of the rocks and looked because that was human nature, their nature.

It was work for her to pull her eyes away, past the downed ship to the horsemen that circled out in the grass, looking for tracks. At Shazza, who stood by the glider and stared back at her.

Without turning back to ask Duncan and Riddick, she decided. “We can send half the horsemen into the rocks to start tracking the soldiers but we need to get back to Sunhillow, to get the Moorglade ready if the Company ships come back.” Waited out a long heartbeat and then turned to find both Duncan and Riddick watching her.

The silence felt like forever and then Riddick walked silently across the stones. A quick nod shared between the two men and they were all walking back out into the grass.

It was the first time that she had given Riddick something that felt like an order. It felt good. Comfortable. Right.

The hand on her shoulder was brief, just a light touch and then it was gone. Riddick.

‘How the fuck does he always seem to know?’ she wondered. In the years of training that she had endured under Riddick, he had given her a hell of a lot of orders. Some whispered, some shouted. And some of them he didn’t even put voice to at all. When she got those, Riddick always let her know in some small way that she did right. After a while, Riddick had to tell her less and less what had to be done. She acted and expected that he would follow. But she had never voiced it as an order before.

It wasn’t like the Moorglade, where she was a captain. Even then, she gave directions, not so much orders. ‘What does that make me here, off the Moorglade? Some sort of fucking general?’ It didn’t seem as funny as she thought it would.

Shielding her eyes against the sun’s glare, she looked out, seeking one rider in particular. ‘There.’ Jacob was at the head of a group of riders who had circled far around the drop ship and were coming back in her direction. She raised her arm and waved at him, smiling when he answered with one of his own. Breaking into a short run, she hopped over boulders until she stood close against the warm side of the horse. Out of habit she reached out first for the animal’s bridle and then scratched a spot between its eyes. Letting go, she rested a hand on Jacob’s calf as she looked up at him.

“There’s no one inside,” he said simply, tilting his chin towards the ship. It was obvious. If there had been someone inside, they would be pinned out on the grass.

“Think they went down into the rocks.” Her hand tightened slightly and the horse nickered, sensing the tension. “We think they had to have help.”

In the saddle, Jacob nodded, taking his eyes off her and looking out into the stones. “That’s not good.”

‘A master of understatement,’ she smirked a little, looking down at the grass. He had picked up her manner of speaking in the years that they had been together. While they spoke, four other riders separated and came up behind Jacob, staying quiet to mind their business as best they could, given the circumstances.

“Don’t worry. We’ll head out and track them as far as we can.” Jacob looked over his shoulder and nodded at one of the men next to him. “If Luke can’t find them in there, no one can.” Leaning over, Jacob ran a hand over Jack’s shaved head. “Be back before you get a chance to miss me.”

It was something she had said to him frequently, before leaving on her hunting trips with Riddick, so she grinned at their shared joke. “Be back before dark if you can. Those rocks are a bad place to be.” Looking out at the stones, she suppressed the cold chill at the thought of the horsemen, of Jacob, trapped in the canyons. For the second time, it made her think of the hammerhead planet.

It was hard to watch the horsemen pick their way through the rocks and Jack turned away. To find Riddick watching her. Saying nothing, of course. She knew that he wouldn’t, feelings weren’t his thing, but he would stay close to her until Jacob came back. Still, it was hard and the sooner she was on the move, doing something, the sooner the feeling would be pushed into the background.

“Let’s get back,” she said as she set off across the grass toward the glider.

“I’m going back with you.” Riddick fell in beside her, walking close on her left side. She didn’t like other people so close to her, even now, but Riddick was always the exception. Every so often his elbow would brush her arm but neither of them separated.

Up ahead, Duncan and Theo were horsed, their mounts circling anxiously as their riders tried to hold them still. The remaining riders gathered behind them and waited for word.

Riddick came up behind Shazza and murmured something in her ear, after which Shazza ducked under the wing and broke into a run, vaulting gracefully onto the back of the horse Riddick had rode in on.”You mean to say you’re coming back with me on the glider?” Jack asked.

“I mean to say.” With that, Riddick gripped one of the handholds and waited for Jack to take her place at the opposite wing.

“I wasn’t even sure this thing would take me and Shazza, but you?” Jack whispered, as much as the wind would allow.

“Good time to find out, don’t you think?”

They both broke into a run, Jack keeping pace easily with Riddick. In no time, the glider rose above the grass and still they ran.

“You just don’t want to get on that horse again,” she said with a snort as she leaped aboard, Riddick right behind her.

“Not something I was ever suited for,” he said, close to her ear as they both found their places. The glider dipped heavily into the grass and Jack sucked in a breath, fearing that the plane would bottom out completely, but she fought to rise above. Behind her, Riddick reached for the strap that controlled the wing’s flaps, as Shazza had done. He’d been watching. Of course he’d been.

Jack could ride. Not as well as Shazza and definitely not as well as Jacob or the others, but she could ride. Which didn’t mean that she liked to. What she liked was the feel of a ship beneath her. The Odyssey. The Moorglade. Even the gliders. Something she had some control of. ‘Always got to be the captain,’ she thought.

“We close to a ley line?” he raised his voice above the wind and pressed against her back to make sure she heard him.

Pointing with her chin, she indicated a spot a short distance from the other riders. The paths of energy ran all over the surface of Trieste 9. They created the electromagnetic pulse that made most conventional forms of technology useless planetside, kept ships out of their sky, and made it necessary for the drop ships in the first place. It was the force that, along with the Rider – Riddick – drove the Moorglade. Jack knew that it would, in all likelihood, drive the gliders as well, but she had only ever tried it solo and for very short distances.

‘It’s a day for first,’ she thought as she looked across the greass to where she knew the ley line ran.

“Why don’t we open this bitch up and see what she’ll do?”

“Holy men allowed to say bitch?” she shouted back at him, the wind ripping the words from her.

Like so many of the things Riddick said, it was seductive in its own strange way. It spoke to something she had wanted to do but hadn’t yet. Why resist what she had wanted to do in the first place?

Mindful of the horsemen, Jack pulled the glider in a gentle arc that would take them into the path of the ley line.

The air changed first. An electrified tingle that raised all of the short hairs on her arms, leaving her feeling invigorated. Alive. Her body suffused with cool, grass-scented air that made her feel at once miles above and still tied to the earth. A part of it. A part of everything. The science behind it was something that she and Theo had looked into for years but Theo said it best. When it came right down to it, sometimes a thing was just meant to be believed. That believing it was understanding it, no matter how many other ways she tried to see.

The glider’s wings picked up a little higher above the grass. Felt lighter. Felt stronger. And no doubt about it, it was faster.

Behind her, Riddick laughed and let up on the straps that slowed the craft’s speed. Let the wind and the power of the earth take them where she would take them. Even in the Moorglade, that was the hardest moment for her. That last second before she simply trusted. It was only a second. She always let go. Gave over. They both hooted as the glider flew free, soaring faster and faster along the line of power until she could scarcely catch her breath.

They easily overtook the horses and still she knew it wasn’t as fast as the Moorglade. But it felt faster. Closer to the earth, more exposed, it felt faster than anything she had ever experienced. It was pure speed and power. And it was hers. Her doing.

‘Slowing this down is going to be a real bitch.’