The Chronicles of Riddick (22 page)

Pounding, digging forcefully against the cliff, Riddick’s legs provided just enough additional thrust to carry him and his burden back up to the top of the mountain. Almost before they lost the last of their forward momentum, he had dropped her and was disengaging himself from the cable. All the banshees of hell were howling in his ears when he threw himself down and forward.

Just in time for the leading edge of the thermal front to reach the crest of the mountain and blast over it.

Rolling hard, he and Kyra tumbled downslope, farther into the shade and safety of the back of the mountain. When they both finally came to a stop, scratched and dirty, she was the first one to sit up. That in itself being unusual, she quickly saw the reason why.

Steam was pouring off Riddick as he rose, staggering slightly. He had been exposed for less than a minute—but it had been a minute in the devil’s own sauna. Black ash that had adhered to his skin in places had actually helped to protect him. As for those areas not protected by ash or clothing, boots or goggles, it was fortunate his ancestry was not exclusively Caucasoid. There was just enough melanin in his skin to have saved him from a serious, if widely scattered, burn. He gave silent thanks to favorable genetics.

Nearby, Kyra was staring at him. A look passed between them. Then she shrugged,
Hey, I woulda
made it,
and without another word, started down.

XV

I
t had been a long time since the Guv had done any running, and it was finally starting to take its toll. Not that what he and his companion were doing at the moment could exactly be called running. It was more akin to slipping, sliding, stumbling, and praying you didn’t fall flat on your ass and, worse, break something you might need later. Like a femur.

The ground underfoot was as broken and nasty as a slam guard’s heart. Barefoot, their feet would have been cut to shreds in minutes by the planes and blades of volcanic glass. Here and there the two men encountered shallow depressions in which falling ash had accumulated and compacted. Grateful for these softer patches, they tried to move along them, hop-scotching their way steadily forward.

Though they’d made pretty good time since abandoning the top of the mountain that now loomed behind them, they were starting to run out of gas. Impetus to keep going came from the knowledge that though they were still in shade, it wouldn’t be long before the steadily rising sun put in its inevitable soul-sucking appearance above the ragged peak. Thought of what would happen to them when that happened was enough to keep legs moving and brains focused.

Looking up, the Guv saw something that provided yet another shot of the adrenaline he thought had all been used up. The stone pillar that marked the location of the underground hangar was just ahead, jutting above the last rise. The entrance to the hangar itself couldn’t be more than five hundred meters off.

“Almost there,” he gasped, lips cracked from the heat and lack of water.

“Almost,” the other convict wheezed. “One more hill. Just one more fucking hill.”

Practically on hands and knees, the two men started up the final rise, slipping and scrabbling on the maddeningly slick, glassy surface. The crest was ten meters away. Then seven. Then three . . .

Something grabbed the Guv’s ankle.

Shocked, stunned, he whipped around and looked down, mixed exclamation and curse rising in his throat. At the sight of who was holding him, he stifled the incipient shout aborning.

“Dead mouth,” Riddick said warningly.

He did not have to put finger to lips. The words were enough. Laying flat against the surface of the rise, the Guv fought to still his breathing. Nearby, his companion was panting hard. Making absolutely no noise, Riddick slid up alongside the other man and placed a hand over his mouth to muffle the labored breathing. Taking the hint, the convict nodded tersely and strove for absolute silence.

At first there was nothing, the thermal wind having moved on past the far sides of the valley, its perpetual thunder a distant memory now. Then a hint of something. Something new and not natural. A low, ominous thrumming.

Motioning for the Guv and the other convict to stay where they were, Riddick snaked his way to the top of the rise. Unable to restrain her curiosity, or to sit still, Kyra wormed up beside him. What she saw took away what little breath she still had.

They were not alone.

Engines humming, an imposing black warship hovered over the landing strip that had been hewn from Crematoria’s surface. Below and nearby gleamed the hangar doors, still in shade. They were shut tight. In front of them, foot soldiers in battle gear busied themselves like so many black ants; checking, inspecting, appraising, searching. Pulling on their leashes, lensing Necros were actively scanning every meter of building and ground. In the midst of them and clearly in charge was a figure Riddick recognized from his holiday on Helion Prime: the Necromonger commander called Vaako.

Next to him, Kyra queried in the softest whisper possible, “And those would be . . . ?”

“Necromongers,” Riddick told her.

She turned back to the view below. “So that’s what they look like. Creepy bastards, aren’t they?”

“That’s the idea,” he rumbled quietly.

She made a face. “Shit. I
hate
not being the bad guys.”

In the midst of the inspection, one of the lensors suddenly turned away from the ground it had been scrutinizing, its head angling toward a nearby rise. It stood like that for a moment. Not entirely human, not wholly machine, indicator lights on its head and sides winking to show that it was alive. Or more properly, functioning. Then it signaled. In response, several soldiers stopped what they were doing and trotted off in the direction of the indicated slope, weapons held at the ready.

It was not good. The escapees now found themselves caught between the advancing and wary Necromonger troops and the rising sun behind. If they went forward, without cover, the soldiers would mow them down in seconds. If they tried to retreat and find a place to hide, the ascending sun would soon poach them just as effectively.

Kyra saw it and lay figuring the odds. So did the Guv and his companion, who had crawled up alongside her. At least if they all charged together, they might catch a soldier or two mentally napping. The trick would be to take down the squad advancing toward them and get close in to the hangar before other troops realized what was happening and could bring heavy weapons to bear. She licked her lips. Not because they were dry, but in anticipation. If there was anything she hated, it was sitting and waiting. Once you let the other guy take the initiative, you’ve lost half the battle already.

“Figure one minute to get inside that hangar.” She glanced back over her shoulder. The soldiers might change course, but the sun would not. “We gonna do this or not?”

Lying on the ground, it was immediately apparent what Riddick was going to do. It was plain to see: it just didn’t make any sense. To all intents and purposes, he was relaxing, popping nuts from a bag he carried into his mouth.

“Wait.”

The convict flattened out on already too-hot volcanic rock alongside the Guv hissed at him. “What am I waitin’ for? To turn into freakin’ charcoal?”

Riddick glanced in his direction, not raising his voice. Hardly ever raising his voice. “Just wait.”

Kyra glared at the convict. Frustrated and frightened, the man looked to the Guv for direction. The Guv said nothing; just kissed his battered, scarred wedding ring for whatever luck it might hold, and— waited. There was nothing else to do. They would all hang together or, as the ancient saying went, they would surely hang separately.

There was a faraway look in his eyes, and when he spoke it was as if he was trying to speed his words, at least, on their way to someplace off this world. Someplace better.

“Her name was Ellen,” he murmured reminiscently, his tone haunted. “I never really forgot. And we lived on Helion Prime.”

Riddick nodded once, understanding. He usually did understand: he just rarely found any reason to show that he did.

On the other side of the rise, the squad of soldiers had begun moving upslope in the direction indicated by the suspicious lensor. A noise made them halt, and turn. Behind them, the hangar doors were rumbling open. Anticipating that others of their number had made it inside and were operating the relevant instrumentation, they paused only out of curiosity. In a moment, they would resume their climb.

Except that the figures who appeared in the open portal wore no body armor, wore nothing common to Necromonger society, wore no insignia of any rank. In fact, the only thing they wore besides strange uniforms were expressions of utter bewilderment. In this they were matched by more than one of the now flabbergasted soldiers.

Then someone let off a shot, and looks of confusion were obscured by the sound and fury of concentrated gunfire.

On the other side of the rise, Riddick finished the last of the nuts, cast a thoughtful glance in the direction of the rising sun, matched the number of shots fired to the number of seconds expired, and finally turned, unlimbering his own weapons as he did so.

“
Now
we get nitty-gritty,” he said to Kyra. He might also have winked, but if so, it was hidden by those omnipresent goggles. Leading his army of three, he started over the top of the rise.

Recently trapped between the advancing soldiers and the rising sun, the escaped convicts now closed a trap of their own, catching the startled Necromongers between a screaming charge from the far side of the rise and the concentrated firepower that was being unleashed on the squad by the sharp-shooting slam guards. While the soldiers were more heavily armed, their body armor restricted their movements, and the guards had the advantage of good cover inside the hangar.

None of which mattered to Riddick, who advanced as methodically as a tank on rails; shooting and slashing, cutting down anything that got in his way as he made a straight line for the hangar. Eyes blazing with glee at again being granted an opportunity to hit out at something, anything, Kyra buzzed around him like a frigate around a dreadnought, putting down anything in armor that threatened the big man’s progress. Those soldiers who did not go down immediately before that relentless double assault were picked off by the Guv and his buddy, bringing up the rear. Given the lethal efficiency being displayed by the big man and small woman, their workload was relatively light.

In such close quarters, the heavy rifles carried by the Necromongers were of little use. By the time they realized it and started going for sidearms and ceremonial blades, it was inevitably too late.

Floating around the perimeter of the intense hand-to-hand firefight, Vaako bided his time. Ignoring everything else, focusing his attention, he kept his gaze trained on the big man in the center of the clash. Take out the command and control center of the enemy, he knew, and opposition would collapse. That was as true of small-scale combat as it was for operations involving entire fleets.

He was not the only one whose attention was devoted to Riddick’s steady advance. On the far side of the runway, a singular figure had appeared. Robes of office hanging limp around him in the rising heat, the Purifier tracked the big man’s advance toward the hangar. His gaze was steady, his thoughts aligned. He knew what he must do. But everything depended on the outcome of the battle he was observing. Different consequences, he knew, generated different reactions.

Their attention concentrated on the source of the heaviest gunfire, reinforcements had allowed the soldiers to push the guards deeper and deeper into the hangar. One by one the guards went down; cursing their awful luck, lamenting a wondrous opportunity lost, and more or less wondering what the hell had gone wrong. Too busy shooting and reloading, none of them had time to lament what their bizarre assailants were doing on an out-of-the-way, godawful sump pit of a world like Crematoria, or what kind of ultimate objective was important enough to have brought them there. Had there been time to talk, they might even have cooperated, might have struck a deal with the remorseless men in armor who were shooting them down. But that’s what happens when weapons go off before mouths. Bullets are not susceptible to reason, and it’s hard to make one’s arguments heard above the sound of gunfire.

As Riddick well knew.

Then only the slam boss himself was left. Trapped inside the hangar, all of his men dead, he took a last sorrowful look at the case containing the currency that was intended to pay off arriving mercenaries. Better it had been packed with explosives. For a moment, he thought of wrenching it open and flinging its contents at the troops who were closing in around him. Then he realized it might as well be full of colored paper. You could reason with cops, for example—but not with fanatics.

What the hell. Sometimes, no matter how hard you tried, things just didn’t fucking work out.

Gun blazing, he burst from his hiding place, yelling defiance as he made a break straight for the merc ship. Unfortunately, there were far too many soldiers in his way. He went down, riddled and dead, his thoughts still on what he might have done with the stolen money. As a last dying dream, it wasn’t bad.

And all the while as the battle raged, albeit reduced in intensity due to the continuous shrinkage in the number of combatants, Crematoria’s sun continued its inexorable rise.

Led by Riddick, Kyra and the Guv reached the near edge of the runway. Amazed that they had actually made it this far, the Guv offered an evaluation that emerged as a war cry.

“We might goddamn well do this!”

To an outsider, it looked as if they actually might. But an outsider would probably not have seen Vaako, who had positioned himself advantageously to unleash a personal withering crossfire on the three survivors. Sighting in carefully on Riddick, he fired his weapon.

In the split second between the time the commander’s finger tightened on the trigger of his rifle and the burst he let loose crossed the intervening space, Riddick moved. Just missing, the powerful blast from the heavy weapon slammed into the runway and blew him right off his feet, sending him tumbling hard to the ground. Seeing the fugitives go down, a pair of pursuing soldiers accelerated, closing for the kill.

Only to be intercepted by Kyra, howling defiance. Harried by the ferocious little harridan, they were forced to postpone the coup de grace to deal with her first. Letting them think they were forcing her backward, she continued to fend them off, leading them in the opposite direction, away from the two men lying on the ground—one dead, the other dazed.

There was another, however, who was not distracted. Rising and racing forward, Vaako rapidly closed the distance between himself and the big man. He could feel his quarry’s neck beneath his fingers, could anticipate the cracking of bones, could. . . .

Something slammed into him hard from behind. Surprised, he fought and rolled. The man who had knocked him down was nothing more than a convict, a lesser specimen of the human species. His expression as he fought with the Necromonger commander was an odd mix of resignation and determination, with just an inexplicable hint of amusement—as if death had been his companion for so long he had come to regard it as a companion and not an enemy.