HELLO BEAUTIFUL

Ch 9

Jack fidgeted with the buckle of her harness. She had tapped her toe against the console until she had annoyed even herself with her nervousness and forced herself to stop. She had told Shazza to fuck off when told to go lock herself in her room, but she was afraid, there was no other word for it, but to pace back and forth in her room while she waited for news of Riddick, of Shazza, was not an option.

Shazza’s fingertip stroked a pattern along the thin grey line that ran along the outside of the switch that would activate the weapons. To Jack it was as though all of her focus was on that one spot, while she waited for the light that would show that the small docking craft had landed. They had both watched as it left the other ship and drifted over; it all looked so serene; it was hard to believe that they waited to blow the large merc ship out of the sky.

Jack tilted her head for a moment as she watched and tried to feel something, anything, for the people in the ship across from them and found that she couldn’t. She was glad they were about to die, she knew that was wrong, but things were not the same out here, not anymore. They would kill Riddick or take him back to Slam, if they caught him; she didn’t want to think about what would happen to herself and Shazza; that was a dark place full of terror in her mind and she quickly slammed the door shut before any of the past could leak out. She waited and watched with Shazza for the green light.
—

Theo couldn’t see or hear Riddick behind him, but he could feel him, and it made all of the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He wanted to turn around and walk backwards, just so that he could keep Riddick in his sights, but he wouldn’t do that; he had to trust that Riddick wanted out of this as much as he did. It didn’t stop the fear; Theo thought to himself that Riddick was probably the scariest person he had ever encountered, and right now, no matter how it started out, Riddick had his back. So he fought the urge to turn around.

What little light there was filtered faintly through the grate ceiling, and made it easy to take positions at either end of the loading bay, not quite across from each other. From their chosen positions they could cover the entire bay; the only place that would offer any viable cover for whoever landed was whatever ship they flew in on.

Riddick held his position as they passed the first of four pillars that ran up through the bay’s ceiling and continued above them. He had to give Theo credit; fear or no fear, the man had held his ground; he had held it together and continued to the other side of the bay, to a pillar opposite his own. He crouched down and watched the bay below through the scope; he didn’t need to look to know that Theo did the same. While he waited, he thought of Shazza.

At first he just thought about whether she would be able to fire on the other ship, if she could kill that easily. He heard her hard voice in his head, and saw her covered in blood as she killed one of Theo’s men to defend Jack, to defend both of them. He knew she would be more than able to fire on the ship; she would do whatever it took, not just for her own survival but for all of them. For those she cared about. It was a strange thing to think, that she might really care about him; did she really feel something for him? Could anyone? He didn’t really think that was possible, but then again, he didn’t think he’d ever set up a triangulation of fire with a merc either. There was a time when he just would have killed whoever he had to kill and be done with it. Something in him had changed.

Thoughts of Shazza. It was strange for him that thoughts of a woman would clarify things; that was unexpected. Usually he bought a woman’s company so he wouldn’t think for a while; so he wouldn’t think about a life constantly lived on the run, or a life spent in Slam. It took the edge off everything for a short while, just a while, and then he ran again. He had never really seen it as comfort, and had definitely never known how much he wanted that before now. A life where he didn’t have to run. He had never spent more than a day at the most with the same woman. What if he hurt her? He swallowed as he heard Imam’s voice in his head again; something he said while he sat beside him in the crash ship at the very beginning. ‘You are a good man, Mr Riddick.’ It wasn’t how he thought of himself; he wondered if Shazza would ever think of him as a good man.

His thoughts went still again at the sounds of the boarding party as they came through the first set of large doors into the bay. The first door would close behind them, and only then would the second door open and the ship would pull in. Both Theo and Riddick took one more glance at the other, if a betrayal was in the cards, it would be now. The second door had just started to open when the ship lurched suddenly and they had to hang on to anything they could grab as the ship righted herself. Riddick looked over at Theo as he found his position again. He had fully expected Theo to take the opportunity to turn the gun on him, but he hadn’t. Like Riddick, he had his weapon again trained on the ship below. The two men crossed glances; Theo nodded slightly and went back to his scope, to watch the ship below as its hatch opened.
—

The other ship moved faster than she would have expected; all Shazza could think is that they had somehow read the weapons signature as she flicked the switch on the console. Still, it was so fast. All she could do was roll the ship out of the way of the oncoming missile. To Jack’s great credit she didn’t scream; Shazza didn’t think she could handle that if she did. Jack just watched, her face drained of color and her fingers dug into the arms of her chair, as Shazza pulled the ship around and slammed two missiles right where Theo had told her to.

Jack had expected an explosion, and had thought she had prepared herself for it, she had steeled herself for noise, but what she had never expected was the lack of it. If there was noise it was in a range she couldn’t hear; this was something felt, a surge of power that seemed to roll over the ship. The feel of the pulse made her heart seem to almost change its rhythm, and it was hard to breathe. She had shut her eyes against the shrapnel she expected to fly at them, but opened them again, warily, to watch the ship in front of them almost crumple in on itself. Weird fire that boiled and bubbled like lava seemed to eat the other ship from the inside out. There was a small series of explosions then, as the other ship disintegrated right before their eyes. Shazza and Jack stared in shock at the destruction of the larger ship. Later they would think about the people who had died but at the moment all they could do was stare at the strange sight of the other ship being destroyed.

Shazza had seen this once before, but it still amazed her, and she had never seen it so close; it had never been at her hand. She fisted her hands in her lap and refused to give in to the shakes. She looked over at Jack and almost in one voice the two women muttered ‘fuck’ under their breath. To sit here and just watch the other ship implode had left them both awe-struck.

Shazza shook her head and pulled free from the buckles that held her in the pilot’s seat; she couldn’t sit still anymore, she had to do something, or she would be rooted there forever. She located the controls for the ship’s alarm system and told Jack to set it off if anything else approached the ship. Then she headed for the loading bay, after a quick stop at the weapons locker.
—

The pulse and the pressure wave was felt by those in the loading bay as well, and the four men that jumped out of the hatch of the landed ship instinctively flattened themselves alongside their ship when it hit. Riddick and Theo watched in silence as the men scanned the area around them, their eyes cut left and right, but as of yet they hadn’t looked up. That wouldn’t last, not once the unsettled feel of the implosion passed. The men would be even more desperate to secure the Odyssey, as they now had no ship to return to, and desperation made people dangerous. Riddick watched as two of the men slowly peeled from the side of the ship and crossed out into the bay towards the doorway into the Odyssey itself. One man covered while the other moved at a low crouch. They hid behind the pillars, and they didn’t look up. They should have. Riddick squeezed off a quick burst that killed one of the mercs and mortally wounded the other; he left him to scream below, the sound would unsettle the other two men that hadn’t moved out from the protective cover of the side of their ship yet.

Theo watched as the other two men backed up along the side of their ship to the wall that ran along the side. They hadn’t looked up before but they were now, and it wouldn’t be long before Theo and Riddick were spotted; they were both wide open up there, if the two men on the ground decided to strafe the ceiling. For all they knew, more men lay in wait inside the boarding ship.

Riddick waited until Theo glanced at him before he gave him the signal that he would go down to the floor of the docking bay. It wasn’t something he really wanted to do, it meant he had to put more trust in Theo than he really wanted to give the man, but he did it anyway. He didn’t trust completely; he slid like a malevolent shadow along the grate ceiling and soundlessly descended over the edge of a railing on the opposite side of the bay from Theo. It would be difficult for Theo to shoot him from where he was. If he intended to, and Riddick didn’t really think he intended to, not anymore.

Riddick watched as the two armed men stalked carefully along the opposite wall of the loading bay, they used the same technique as the two men below; one man advanced while the other covered. He watched as the men eased ever closer to Theo’s hidey hole behind the pillar; soon they would be within sight of each other. Stealth would be needed now; the men had only heard one set of shots, they may assume there were more gunmen, but they didn’t know for sure. Another burst of fire, from either Riddick or Theo, would make it plain as day. Riddick pulled his shiv from its hiding place at his back and crept alongside the boarding ship. He listened at the hatch first but heard nothing; it didn’t feel empty however, and Riddick trusted that more. The last dying screams of the man he had shot covered whatever sound Riddick made as he entered the small ship. It still appeared empty, but he knew better; by now he could smell the fear, the air was thick with the acrid odor of it. The fifth merc started to yell before Riddick had even laid a hand on him; he yelled for help, but no help would ever come for him.

His yells turned to screams soon enough. Riddick could have killed him silently as he pulled him out of the ship to the floor of the docking bay but, like the screams of the man who lay dead below the pillar, he knew the power they would have to terrify the two mercs that were left. It took a long time to die from an abdominal wound; a man could bleed for hours. Riddick didn’t require anywhere near that time, so he cut deeper, a vicious slash that spilled the mans’ guts to the floor and left him to scream in a high pitched panicked sound that served its purpose.

One of the two gunmen that remained made a run for the doorway, across the open ground and directly in Theo’s line of fire. A quick bark of gunshots echoed across the bay, and the merc fell dead in a disorganized heap, a pool of blood formed beneath him. Riddick glanced up quickly and noted that Theo had already moved on after he had fired. He wondered what sort of training the man had, it was clear he had some sort of military training; a lot of people would have stayed put. One merc left, and he was nearly at the doorway.
—

Shazza heard the gunfire and froze, her entire body at war with itself. It flew against everything in human nature to run towards that sound; she actually had to look down to watch her feet as they continued towards the doorway to the bay, as if she couldn’t believe they did it. From the outside, it was easy to see that the panel was set to ‘lockout’, not from the outside, but from the inside. Did she really want to go in there? Another burst of gunfire followed by the sounds of screams had her hands move with a will of their own to the control panel, her weapon at the ready as the door to the loading bay slid open.
—

Riddick growled deep in his throat, and anyone that watched would have been terrified to watch his lips pull back from his teeth like an animal’s, in a snarl. Possibilities raced through his mind about who opened the doorway. Did the mercs have some other way in? Was this some stunt of Theo’s; did he rig the door to open? The thought that pulled at him the hardest was ‘Shazza’. Her name, her smell, everything about her was a scream in his mind, every protective possessive instinct he had thought long dead, if existent at all, had him run for that door; the last merc could not be allowed to reach that door. The merc looked back and saw Riddick, low to the ground as he ran for him. There wasn’t enough money in the world to face that; the merc ran flat out for the doorway just as it slid all of the way open.

Riddick watched her as she stood perfectly still, her weapon raised, and blew the merc’s head clean off. Shazza. Where fear for her had screamed before, there was a strange sort of wonder now; he reached out to touch her hair and her ran his fingertips over her shoulder just to prove to himself that she was real. She had come back here. For him. Her hands shook a little, and he reached out and took the weapon from her and stopped her hands as she tried to wipe whatever was on them, off. It wouldn’t wipe off, he knew. It never did. He raised the weapon just a little, just to be at the ready, and stood in front of Shazza as Theo came down from his spot in the ceiling. He shot the screaming merc dead as he walked by without a second thought and continued on towards Shazza and Riddick.

The two men stood for a moment and looked at each other, the wariness was still there, maybe it would always be there, but it was less. The two men nodded to each other imperceptibly, and Riddick would have grinned at the idea that he had just paid any sort of respect to a merc, but he was interrupted by the blare of an alarm. Shazza’s face fell as she spun towards the bridge, Riddick wasn’t ready to let her go yet, but did when she screamed Jack’s name. He was a step behind her when she jumped down the three steps to the bridge, her hair a wild mane behind her. Jack stood framed against the front shield, her face taut with both fright and resolve, her hands she held in front of her and twisted in each other. Behind her, three ships approached.

Copyright © September 2006 xxxevilgrinxxx