These are Works in Progress…

Everybody needs a place to test things out. This one’s mine.

I mean, I’ve had a lot of blogs in the past, but I wanted to take it all in-house because eventually they all went away — don’t even get me started on what happened to LiveJournal, you can read about it elsewhere on here — and so I’ve stopped trusting that any of them will stick around. This webspace, however, is something I’ve had since 2003. Why not make the most of it?

So this is where I will post new chapters (and revised chapters) of fan fiction while they’re still in flux, before they get added to the archive itself. And this is where readers can leave me comments, questions, and suggestions while the chapters are still being solidified. This only applies to fan fiction; the commercial materials I’m working on won’t appear here.

Song of Many ’Verses, Chapter 2

Title: Song of Many ’Verses
Author: Ardath Rekha
Chapter: 2/?
Fandom: Pitch Black (2000); The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004)
Rating: M
Warnings: Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language, violence
Category: Het
Pairing: Riddick/Jack
Summary: Even a blessing from the god of the Necromongers can’t quite stop some Lords’ mutinous impulses building against some of Riddick’s reforms. Two weeks in, things come to a head.
Disclaimer: The characters and events of Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury are not mine, but belong to Universal Studios. I just wish I were in charge of their fates. No money is being made off of this. I’m writing strictly for love of the story.
Feedback: Absolutely, the more the better! Shred me, whip me, beat me, make me feel grammatical! I post “rough,” so I can always use the help. 😉

2.
The Mutineer and the Mermaid Queen

Every few months, someone shows up claiming that they know exactly how my “tricks” work. They think they’re going to make a name for themselves proving it. None of them have ever been ready for the discovery that they aren’t tricks at all, and that everything happening on my stage is real.

—Minnie Sulis, Introduction, Magic Is Real, 2075

U1c.27358
2075.02.18
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, Earth

“You shouldn’t be in here right now, you know.”

In the mirror, Howard smirked and leaned against the dressing room door frame. “Are you about to reveal a set of breasts I haven’t seen?”

Min laughed, touching up her lipstick. “You never know. It could happen.”

She’d made stranger things appear, after all…

“Not today, though.” His eyebrows went up. “This is a family-friendly performance.”

“Yech.”

“Speaking of family,” he continued, grinning, “I hear some of yours is in the audience tonight.”

Now there was a depressing thought. “My cousins, mostly.”

Unfortunately, none of them were Wittiers.

“Reunion afterwards?” He seemed oblivious to how unpleasant a thought that was for her.

“Maybe,” she hedged. “You want to meet them?”

Howard pretended to swoon, pressing his hand to his heart. “She’s finally introducing me to her family…”

Oh. So it was like that.

Min rose from her chair, aware that she only had a few minutes left to get ready. Not the best time to deal with Howard’s insecurities. She winked at him as she settled her top hat on her head and picked up the rhinestone-encrusted wand that had rested next to it.

Okay, some parts of my act are just props…

“Does that mean you’ll introduce me to yours?” she asked him, keeping her expression light and teasing as she approached him.

His smile died. “They’re a bunch of holy-roller nutcases who’ll probably think you’re a witch. Why would you ever want to get to know them?”

“I am a witch,” she laughed, reaching up to stroke his cheek. “But you’re not the only one with a horror show for a family.”

“Mizz Sulis?” The assistant stage manager appeared in the dressing room doorway, just in time to prevent Howard Collins from possibly disarranging her hair and lipstick. “Five minutes to curtain.”

“Thank you, Emily.” Not that she wanted to dodge one of Howard’s kisses, but reapplying her makeup to make sure she looked family-friendly wasn’t high on her list of ways to spend those last five minutes.

He smiled, understanding that it was time for her preshow routine. “See you after the show, babe.”

“They’re going to come swarming in here, you know,” she told him with a deliberate shudder.

“I wouldn’t miss it.” He winked and left the room.

“That makes one of us,” she muttered. Some of her cousins were perfectly lovely, especially the ones on her father’s side, but Joren always creeped her out—

Don’t think about them right now. It’s time to prepare.

She turned toward the lighted mirror, beginning to take a slow, deep breath—

And gasped instead.

Behind her and to her right, reflected in the mirror, stood a young woman. Tall and slender, in her late teens or early twenties, she had shoulder-length blonde hair, enormous green eyes, and an angular, elfin face and wore a strange, tight gown made of what looked like blue-green scales.

Min whirled, how did you get in here poised on her lips.

The room was empty.


U1
2522.11.29
G. Long. 127.1° G. Lat. -27.1°
Mirach System

Jack opened her eyes and took a deep breath, feeling like it had been hours since her last.

“Shit.”

At least, Lucy said from somewhere above her, she only saw you.

There was that. “She’s got a lot of power. More than I was expecting. Still only two ’verses wide in her five-shape, though.”

As you were, once. The man. I sensed that he is important to our search.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that was Howard Collins. Kyra’s ‘pa.’” Jack frowned, recalling everything she’d overheard. “Seemed pretty anti-religion for someone who’d end up a New Christy Pilgrim.”

It appears that they both changed their minds about religion at some point. She repudiated her power, as well.

“Something big has to have happened to push them that way,” Jack reflected. “Probably something traumatic.”

It was her third time observing Minnie Sulis; she’d already determined that Kyra’s mother had had an arsenal of esper abilities. About the only thing that Minnie hadn’t been able to do yet was cross more than one threshold between ’verses.

And that is what we must learn more about, Lucy agreed. What happened during the months she wouldn’t write about in her books.

Jack glanced over at the three books, resting on “her” table by “her” couch. The tomes had been fascinating, the diary astonishingly helpful for honing some of her own abilities, but they had left her certain that something critically important had occurred and been left out of them—or possibly, in the case of Minnie’s diary, torn out of it—something that had derailed Minnie’s life and might even have provoked her cousin Joren’s heinous acts. Something she needed to know more about before she tried to bring Kyra back.

“Damn.” Jack climbed to her feet and stretched. “I was really hoping we could bring her back soon. Still too many variables in play…”

It will not be long.

“Feels like it’s long already. How much time has elapsed?”

In U1, it’s less than a minute after you sat down to begin.

“…the hell? How come I’m so hungry?” Jack had been sure she’d missed lunch somehow.

For you, it’s been six hours.

“Even for my shell?”

Your six-shape and your shell are linked, even when they seem separated. You lived six hours in that minute.

Jack grimaced even as her stomach rumbled a complaint. “Good to know. That means I have to limit how long I visit anywhere in the past.”

If we decide on a long journey, storing your shell in the Core Chamber will be enough. The rays will keep it replenished.

Fortunately, the ridiculous fourteen-person banquet that had been wheeled in for breakfast had plenty of leftovers, apparently only a few minutes older than when she’d gotten up from the table. Jack found herself digging into them hungrily. “So I’ll stay fed and rested in there, and hang out with a few hundred of your brothers and sisters.”

She’d have to figure out just where she’d put her “shell” in there. The Core Chamber was pretty crowded since she and Dame Vaako had orchestrated the relocation of all of the Moribund’s captured apeirochorons into it. And Jack’s head had felt a little crowded as hundreds of new Apeiros woke from their torpid states and became curious about her.

“Maybe that’s where we should do all of this,” Jack continued after a moment, after swallowing down some food. “Am I gonna get sleepy six hours early today?”

Audrey Hepburn MacNamera, I have watched you pull all-night movie marathons with your roommate Janice on dozens of occasions in the last year and a half. And other all-night activities that I have no wish to describe, even more often. You will be just fine in that regard.

That startled a laugh out of her, fortunately while her mouth was empty. “Did you just trot out my full name like my mom?”

Yes. And yes, I must concede that your circadian rhythms have advanced six hours. It is something none of us have known until now. Only three of us exist outside of the apeirochorons, and none of us have engaged in this kind of travel before. The Quintessa Corporation has strictly limited our movements to a linear progression in time. And our bodies—

“You live thousands, maybe even millions, of years. It’s not like you’re gonna notice all that much if that clock speeds up by a few hours.”

This is true. Lucy’s n-shape flickered on the edge of her vision. Jack wondered if there would ever come a day when her regular, three-dimensional eyes could see her sister and understand what she was looking at.

“So. Now what? Another run through that timeline?” She poured a glass of mint tea from the ornate berrad she’d acquired, reminding herself not to be surprised that it was still hot. The hours might have passed for her, but not for it.

Soon. Not yet. Did I understand correctly that Joren Kirshbaum was attending the performance that night?

“Yeah.” Jack rose and walked over to the small pile of books on her couch. “She signed this one ‘all my love,’” she continued, flipping to the front pages of Magic Isn’t Real, “but I heard her thinking about how creepy he was. I want to know more about that. What they really were to each other. Hey, is Joren Kirshbaum still alive? It’s been four centuries.”

Yes. Like the others of his cursed lineage, he is connected to the ’verse you like to call Hell.

“So he’s been out there this whole time,” Jack mused. “By now he has to have figured out what his ‘inventions’ are really doing to the multiverse.”

I doubt he cares.

“Yeah, that tracks. I still want to know how it all started.” Taking the book with her, she sat back down by her glass of tea and took a sip.

Jack had spent much of the last two weeks, since her… wedding… reading all three of the books written by Minnie Sulis, née Minerva Kirshbaum-Wittier, and trying to find just the right ’verse in the U1 “cluster” from which to extract an alternate version of Kyra. The more she dug into the Kirshbaum family history—something that was shrouded from the public in her time, but which Minnie had been intimately connected to—the more she became certain that she needed a ’verse where most of the events that had led to the Quintessa Corporation’s founding had transpired, enough that Kyra would still have the innate control over apeirochorons that all Kirshbaums apparently possessed. After several days, she and Lucy had settled on one that mirrored U1’s timeline almost exactly until Kyra was roughly six years old, chosen because it branched off when, for a variety of different possible reasons, she never left Old Earth.

Riddick had been busy with his own things for much of that time, making the most of his new control over the Armada and his new “insider” standing among the Necromongers. She mostly saw him at night, when he returned to her side voracious for—

There was a knock on the suite’s outer door. It opened and Lola leaned in. “Dame Riddick?”

Oh really, now? Lucy sounded amused from somewhere above her.

“We’ve had this discussion, Lola. I’m still Jack.” She smiled to take any possible rebuke out of her words. People were awfully hung up on her rank these days. But it bugged her, more than a little, that her own name seemed to be vanishing behind the cloak of his… even if it was good camouflage. The more she became Dame Riddick, the less people seemed to care who “Jack B. Badd” might have been before then, and the more thoroughly the trail back to Audrey MacNamera remained broken.

That was a good thing… wasn’t it?

“Trying to set a mood, actually,” Lola replied with a grimace. “Your Lord Husband has requested your presence in the throne room. I think the raiding parties are returning.”

Jack groaned. At least, she thought, they’d waited to come back until after she’d finished setting up the new quarters over in Eden. Hopefully there would be enough beds. And, hopefully, the Ennead Kids had gotten enough practice with the new …choreography… she’d given them. “At least I managed to get lunch in first…”

“Lunch?” Lola looked confused. “We just finished breakfast half an hour ago.”

Damn it. That was right. “Six and a half hours ago for me. Astral projecting is some weird shit.”

She drained her glass of tea and then stood up.

Lola moved to her side as she emerged from the suite. In another moment, several other people had fallen into a kind of formation around her.

All queens had entourages, Dame Vaako had told her when she’d uncharacteristically complained about it all. Audrey MacNamera loved being surrounded by people, but even she needed moments when she could sneak away on her own. The Dame’s comment had made her think of the morning, right before she’d met the Apeiros for the first time, when she’d told Takama that she didn’t want to be a queen… and Takama’s response.

A mermaid doesn’t need to be a queen to raise a tsunami, she thought as she led the way to the throne room. But if she is a queen, can she raise a supernova? ’Cause I might need to today.


“You got something on your mind, Vaako. What is it?”

The Lord turned to look Riddick’s way, unease on his face. It seemed like all of the would-be Firsts were still struggling to comprehend the fact that he could hear their thoughts when he chose to. Not that he’d needed to this time. Vaako’s body language was practically screaming at him.

“I imagine it is the same concern that I have,” Toal said when the silence began to drag out. “These raiding parties are accustomed to being able to take… certain liberties… with captives who have been identified as ‘breeders.’ Even now that everyone is to be converted, I worry, and I think he does too, that the liberties may still be taken by those who have chosen not to understand the reasoning behind the changes.”

It was almost like listening to one of Jack’s memories of General Toal talking. “For their sakes, I hope they didn’t.”

“And if they did?” Scales asked.

“You’ve seen what I did to the last crew who pulled that shit. Your god won’t mind. Seemed awfully entertained, even, last time.”

The three men shared uneasy glances.

“You got a specific raiding party in mind?” Riddick asked. “Some Lord who thinks he ain’t gonna die before his ‘due time’ no matter what he does?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Vaako finally said. “I assume you remember Lord Navok. From the night when you killed Lord Breslin in the Greensleeves Stew.”

“Lord Navok.” Yeah, he remembered.

“This is part of the Necromonger Way. Do you really think you can change us? Will you die trying?”

He’d wanted a good excuse to take the fucker out ever since then. But he didn’t much like what finally having that excuse meant. “We’ll see if he makes it through the day. Gotta admit, though, I didn’t know the name of the guy whose head I cut off ’til just now.”

“He was not especially missed,” Toal admitted, his lips twitching with suppressed amusement.

“And Navok?”

“An effective if unimaginative commander,” Vaako volunteered. “Profligate with his troops’ lives. He attained his rank in large part because the sixth Lord Marshal liked his company. They shared many philosophical stances.”

“Like killin’ kids? And fuckin’ ‘breeders?’”

The uneasy look passed through the three men again.

“Yes,” Scales said. “We have been hearing whispers, since you took your wife… your human wife… that Navok intends to challenge you on ideological grounds. For not converting. For keeping a human woman but refusing to allow anyone else to. For closing the stews… and for ending the killing of children.”

“You think Jack’s human?” He wasn’t entirely sure what she was anymore. Or what he was, for that matter.

Toal shook his head. “We know better. We have seen. Perhaps if more saw what she is capable of, it would help—”

“I can’t just broadcast what she is and does to the whole ’verse,” he snapped. “I’m protecting her.”

“And we wish to help you do so,” Vaako said. “But none of us know what you are protecting her from.

Everything. Fuckin’ everything. He didn’t even know where to begin. Sometimes it seemed like there was nobody out there who didn’t want a piece of his wife. And he sure as fuck couldn’t tell them that one of the things he was protecting her from most of all was their own god.

She is in no danger from me, the Moribund spoke up in his head. I cannot eat her now that she has hatched into her six-shape. If that is what you think I still wish to do.

And yet he could still feel the creature’s hatred and resent­ment… of her.

“You’ll know soon enough,” he told the men in the meantime. “An’ she might be about to make that show you want, anyway, if the raiding parties brought any kids back with ’em.”

“There will be several,” Vaako told him. “I have spies on all four ships. Which is how we know that you will need to make an example of Lord Navok.”

“You really didn’t have to dance around that topic, you know.” Riddick felt a smile tugging at his lips. “Been wantin’ an excuse to ghost that fucker for a year now. You could’ve just said ‘Merry Christmas.’”

“He will have a plan,” Scales said, frowning. “Accomplices.”

“Sounds like a party.”

“Your Jack could end up in the middle of it,” Toal pointed out.

He kept the pang of worry that sparked in him off of his face. They’d gone over every parameter; she’d be fine. “Guess she’ll definitely get a chance to show off what she can do, then.”

He was curious to see what it would be, himself. If nothing else, the girl was inventive.

And she was so much else, too.


Instructions had been sent to have all four raiding parties, and all of their prisoners, brought to the throne room one group at a time, with Lord Navok’s party last. The floor itself had been cleared for them, all of the usual onlookers retreating to the upper level and side corridors. Dame Vaako, however, had staked out a convenient spot so that she could fall in with the Dame Riddick when she made her entrance.

Jack, as the girl still insisted friends call her—and Dame Vaako was relieved to still number among those—turned a sweet smile on her as she joined the group. “Good morning, Chantesa!”

“Good morning, Jack.” She glanced over Jack’s shoulder at the girl’s bodyguard. “Lola.”

“Dame Vaako.” Lola nodded at her. The former police woman was slowly thawing toward her, but took her duties far too seriously to ever be completely friendly.

Good, Dame Vaako thought. Today of all days, she needs to be as alert as possible.

Jack blinked and looked at her. “Why? What’s wrong?”

Of course. The girl could read thoughts. That made things a little simpler. She concentrated on her mental words, hoping she could communicate as clearly as possible the things she dared not say out loud. My husband believes that one of the other Lords intends to stage a coup today. She visualized Lord Navok in her head, including his main lieutenants in the image.

“Well, that’ll keep things interesting,” Jack murmured, before humming a few bars of melody.

Around and behind her, the nine performers in her entourage picked up the tune for a few more bars. Jack nodded, looking satisfied. Beside her, Lola looked more alert than ever, poised for battle.

“Where are your two other friends?” Dame Vaako asked. “Vanessa and Poly?”

“Making final preparations for the kids,” Jack told her as they approached the throne. “Which is good because they’ll be out of harm’s way. You want to duck and cover with them?”

It wasn’t even a little tempting. “When not at my husband’s side, my place is by yours.”

That earned her another of the girl’s sweet smiles.

“Things will probably get hairy,” Lola warned both of them.

“Sooner or later, an example’s going to have to be made,” Jack sighed. “Guess we’re all better off if it’s sooner, right? So we can get back to business.”

Lola shrugged, her gaze turning to Dame Vaako. “Are you armed?”

“I have a weapon or two on me,” she said, feeling a little smug… but a little worried. Her weapons were most effective as surprises, in close quarters.

Lola reached into a pocket and drew out a small sidearm. “Ever fired one of these?”

“I haven’t,” Dame Vaako admitted. “It looks like a miniature version of the guns our troops carry into battle.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Lola told her, putting it into her hand. “It can’t actually do a Necromonger any lasting harm, but it packs a punch and will at least knock one across the room.”

“Thank you.” No matter how chilly Lola’s expressions toward her might be, Dame Vaako reflected, arming her like this was a huge step.

Even as Jack and her entourage finished arraying themselves on one side of the throne, the soldiers in the hall came to attention. The heavy bootsteps of the Lord Marshal and his three top commanders sounded on the stairs behind the throne. They came into view, the commanders moving to the opposite side of the seat of power even as the Riddick positioned himself in front of it. Her husband caught her eye, a question on his face. Had she warned Jack?

She nodded and gave him a small smile. All would be well. The girl would be protected.

He looked relieved but gave her an admonishing look, cautioning her not to be too confident.

“Bring in the first group of raiders,” Riddick commanded his soldiers. “Lord Vosloo’s ship.”

In a moment, Vosloo and his platoon entered, accompanied by twice as many captives. Only a few of them looked the worse for wear, most of them men who had undoubtedly tried to go down swinging. There were half a dozen children among them… and a baby.

Jack moved forward to stand next to Riddick. “Before I take custody of the children, who are their parents? And who’s the baby’s mother?”

She’d played the right card; as cowed as the prisoners might have been, they were willing to speak up once their children were in play. Jack beckoned them to her, speaking softly with them for a few minutes. Strangely, even though the conversation should have been audible from a few feet away, Dame Vaako couldn’t catch any of it. From the looks on the faces of other nearby courtiers, including her husband on the far side of the throne, no one else could, either. Riddick, she noticed, seemed to have no trouble following what was happening.

After a moment, all of the parents filed back to join the other captives, except for one woman who remained by Jack’s side.

“My Lord Marshal,” Jack said, her speech suddenly formal, with the polish of many rehearsals, as she turned to Riddick. “I beg a favor of you. Until this woman’s child is weaned, I ask that she remain unconverted and in my care along with her baby. Will you let me claim her as mine?”

Even before Riddick could answer, though, Dame Vaako felt it: her god approved.

“Of course, Dame Riddick.” There was a hint of amusement on the Lord Marshal’s face.

“Thank you, my Lord,” Jack said, dropping in a formal curtsey before the throne. Then she gathered the children, leading them, and the mother with her baby, back behind the throne and through the doors to the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead. Strangely, Dame Vaako thought she caught a glimpse of …trees and birds?… through the doors as they passed between them.

“You’ve done well, Lord Vosloo,” Riddick said. “Followed all my commands. What reward would you like?”

Lord Vosloo stepped forward, his expression both pleased and carefully formal. “I wish to be elevated from Captain of the Green Viper to Commodore of a flotilla.”

Riddick’s smile widened. “Sure. You’ve demonstrated your command skills. We’ll discuss which captains you want under your command after the show’s over. And who else on your crew has earned rewards and promotions.”

The captives were marched out of the throne room by Purifiers who had been standing by. Vosloo and his crew climbed the stairs to one of the upper levels.

I hope he’s really on our side, Dame Vaako found herself thinking. Outward obedience wasn’t always mirrored by inward motives; hers hardly ever had been, after all.

“He is,” Jack murmured, coming to stand beside her again. “The next two crews are, too.”

“How do you know that?” she whispered back, but all the girl did was smile and tap her finger against her temple a few times.

She was right, though. The next two presentations played out similarly, although thankfully there were no more babies and only four more children. Lord Jianming wished, as his reward, captaincy of a larger and more powerful ship in the fleet, while Lord Gurn asked for permission to retire from his captaincy and join the Elder Ranks aboard the Basilica. Riddick seemed unsurprised by their requests and already prepared to accommodate them. And then there was only one raiding party left to see to.

During the prior audiences, there had been noise throughout the room, whispers and bits of chatter and gossip. Everything became still and silent as Lord Navok entered the throne room with his crew and captives.

It wasn’t absolute silence. More than one of the captive women was crying. Several of them had clearly been badly used. There were no children among them, and no men. Just more than a dozen brutalized women. All of them, Dame Vaako noticed, clad in tattered blues and greens.

The message wasn’t even particularly subtle. Lord Navok’s raiders had brought back nothing but “breeders,” all of whom had been dressed as effigies of Jack and then abused accordingly.

“Hmmm,” was all Riddick said for a moment as he surveyed the group. There was no sign that the message bothered him. “Looks like someone didn’t quite do his job to spec.”

Navok frowned. That was his cue to take offense. “I have been Captain of the Widowmaker for two decades. I know exactly how to do my job.”

“Yeah,” Riddick said, the barest hint of a smirk touching the corner of his mouth. “But see, your job changed a little, and it sounds like you didn’t understand your new instructions. Do you need them explained to you again, Navok?”

No Lord. No Captain. No Commander. No title whatsoever. It was both a threat and an insult, and masterfully delivered. In the last two weeks, it had grown easier and easier for Dame Vaako to admit just how good Riddick was at being Lord Marshal.

“I don’t need your heresies explained, Riddick,” Navok replied, trying to return the insult with the more familiar phrasing. But, Dame Vaako knew, that wouldn’t really work. Riddick, like his wife, preferred no title at all. If Lord Navok had been hoping to goad him into a rage, calling him by the name he liked better was hardly the way to do it.

“Ain’t heresies if your god’s in favor of ’em.” Riddick was smiling now. That, Dame Vaako reflected, was when he was at his most dangerous. “And he is. Ask him.”

Navok scoffed. “You are not one of us. How would you know what our god wishes?”

He can’t hear you, can he? Dame Vaako found herself asking Tokoloshe.

It is not that he cannot hear me, her god replied, filling her with the awed delight she felt whenever He spoke directly to her. He has chosen not to listen.

What slime!

It will all resolve itself shortly. There was a hint of anticipation in Tokoloshe’s “voice.”

“I know that until thirty-one years ago, the Necromonger Way didn’t involve killin’ kids,” Riddick was saying, that dangerous smile still on his face. “Seems like a lot of heresies proliferated after that. I’m just cleanin’ it all up. So lemme ask you this, Navok. Are you a heretic?”

“You pollute that throne, you and that breeder whore, and you dare call me a heretic?”

Riddick’s eyes narrowed, but Jack started laughing. The look that Navok turned her way was one of pure hatred.

It’s about to happen, Dame Vaako realized. In a moment, whether or not the Lord Marshal rose to Navok’s bait, the mutinous Lord would either have to attack or bend his knee. And Navok wouldn’t bend.

“It’ll be okay,” Jack whispered, giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze.

“You know, I haven’t actually fucked her on the throne yet,” Riddick said in a musing tone. “Great suggestion, though. Bit hard to do without drawin’ an audi­ence—”

With a roar of outrage, Navok grabbed a spear from a nearby guard and launched himself at Riddick.

Navok’s platoon went on the attack as well. Scattered throughout the great hall, other Necromonger soldiers, apparently on his side, moved to join the fray.

Not enough. Not nearly enough. If Lord Navok had thought that he had popular sentiment on his side, he had been wrong.

But, Dame Vaako thought with a chill, there were still enough to do some damage. And several of them were coming right at Jack’s entour­age… and her with them.

“Showtime,” Jack said, her voice calm.

“Thought you’d never ask,” the leader of the Ennead Kids, Antonio, murmured.

And all nine of them vanished, as did Lola.

A strange, swift pandemonium followed. Spears disappeared from mutineers’ hands only to sprout from their chests. Courtiers who had found themselves in harm’s way vanished, reappearing seconds later in safer parts of the room, staring wildly about in confusion. In moments, only Navok himself was left of the mutineers, facing off against Riddick.

I am being feasted well today, Tokoloshe murmured in Dame Vaako’s head as she watched the combatants.

None of them went to the Underverse, did they? she asked her god. Few people would be less deserving of that reward, she thought, than those mutineers.

Not a one. They will fall forever.

Riddick was toying with Navok, letting him almost get the upper hand before turning his moves against him.

“I don’t want to kill you now, Navok,” Riddick said as they circled.

“The more fool you, then,” Navok grated, lunging forward.

Riddick dodged easily, leaving a cut from his blade on Navok’s cheek. “That ain’t what I meant. See, you got some atonin’ to do before you go. You need to live out everything you put those ladies through on your flight back here. Where’s the fun in killin’ you quick?”

“Breeders are not ‘ladies,’” Navok snarled. “They are nothing!”

He launched his spear at Riddick and spun to the side. Riddick dodged the shaft easily but—

Dame Vaako heard several of the other Ladies of the Armada scream as Navok lunged right at her, backhanding her aside. As she sprawled to the ground, tucking and rolling as best she could, he grabbed hold of Jack, pulling her against him and putting a knife to her throat.

“Just like this warm breeder whore you call a Dame is nothing!”

Regaining her footing, Dame Vaako pulled out the tiny gun Lola had given her, but then groaned. It wouldn’t do harm to a Necromonger, although it might knock Navok across the room, but how badly would it hurt Jack? She would have to use one of her hidden blades in­stead—

“You know,” Jack said, as if there was no knife pressed against her skin. “If you wanted me to warm you up, you could’ve just asked.”

“Another word out of you and I’ll cut your filthy breeder throat!”

“You will never leave this hall alive,” Vaako growled. Toal and Scales, meanwhile, were circling, trying to get behind Navok. “And you will never see the Underverse.”

“Worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd…” Jack drawled, calling Navok’s bluff.

Dame Vaako heard her voice join the chorus of screams as Navok slashed his knife across Jack’s throat—

And nothing happened. Although she could have sworn the knife had bitten in deep, there was no blood. No wound. As if either the knife, or Jack, was a hologram that the other had passed through.

The tiniest flinch had rolled through Riddick’s body. He was, Dame Vaako realized, deliberately holding himself back from charging at Navok. Now he folded his arms, watching the two of them with a small, amused smile on his face, showing no sign of the tension he had to be feeling. “When exactly did you infect Lola and the Ennead Kids with Threshold Syndrome, anyway?” he asked Jack, almost as if they were alone.

“End of last week,” Jack said. “You got anything you want to say to this asshole?”

Navok still had the girl in his grasp, staring between her and Riddick in confusion and growing horror. He was trying to stab and slash at Jack, but his blade kept passing through her without leaving even a mark, like a holo-prop. Around Dame Vaako, awed murmurs were spreading.

“Nah,” Riddick told her, his dangerous smile back. “He’s still gettin’ off way too easy. But I wanna see this.”

Jack grimaced. “As you wish…”

The knife—definitely not a hologram—clattered to the floor as Navok abruptly clutched at his head. No longer holding Jack against him, he staggered back, dropped to his knees, and screamed. And kept screaming. His open mouth seemed to glow as if his head was full of red-hot coals—

It was. Fire was consuming him from the inside. Within seconds, Navok’s screams cut off, his whole body locking up for an instant before he collapsed to the floor, the fire inside him now devouring all of him.

Jack shuddered and walked over to Riddick. He put his arm around her and she leaned her head against his shoulder. “That,” she told him in a pained voice, “was a whole lot worse than I thought it would be.”

“I won’t put you in that kind of position again, Jack, I—”

“Not that part.” Jack gestured at the disintegrating ashes that had once been Lord Navok. “That part. I hate killing.”

But you do it so well. Why did Dame Vaako have the sense that Tokoloshe was mocking Jack?

“How did you do that?” Toal asked, staring at her in awe.

“There’s a ’verse where Mirach’s core is right here instead of a light-hour away,” Jack said, staring at the ashes. “I just needed one hydrogen atom from there. Shit. Sometimes I think maybe the Quantifiers are right.”

“Not even a little,” Riddick murmured to the girl in his arms. “Just hold on a few more minutes. We’re almost done with the show.”

They had known, Dame Vaako realized. Even before she or her husband had tried to warn them, they’d known that there would be a mutiny against them this day. And they had used it to deliver a warning of their own.

And, it dawned on her, to test the fidelity of the subjects who had grown closest to them in the last two weeks. Including her and her husband.

“Next time you want to get all theatrical,” Jack grumbled, “we’d better be doing a musical comedy.”

Song of Many ’Verses, Chapter 1

Title: Song of Many ’Verses
Author: Ardath Rekha
Chapter: 1/?
Fandom: Pitch Black (2000); The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004)
Rating: M
Warnings: Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language
Category: Het
Pairing: Riddick/Jack
Summary: Three men, from different worlds and with different motives, cross paths on the hunt for Audrey MacNamera… alias Jack B. Badd.
Disclaimer: The characters and events of Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury are not mine, but belong to Universal Studios. I just wish I were in charge of their fates. No money is being made off of this. I’m writing strictly for love of the story.
Feedback: Absolutely, the more the better! Shred me, whip me, beat me, make me feel grammatical! I post “rough,” so I can always use the help. 😉

1.
The Wreck of the Santa Clara

There was a storm brewing miles out over the Caldera as John MacNamera approached the Tailwind Tavern. If he was lucky, he thought, it might wait to strike the base until after his launch window. But luck was suddenly treating him as a passing acquaintance, at best. After the last several hours, he wondered if it had deserted him altogether.

The inside of the pilots’ dive bar did nothing to ease that feeling.

The place was only a third of the way occupied, during what—for most bars around Caldera Base, at least—was Happy Hour and the busiest time of day. In the Tailwind Tavern, it felt more like Last Call was approaching. The bartender was wiping down the counter, carefully cleaning around a man who appeared to be taking a nap by his half-filled drink. Further down the bar, two women eyed him with suspicion. One table held a group of men playing a card game. Aside from a few lone drinkers, most with dinners in front of them, the place was empty. Toward the back, a lone diner was barely visible in one of the booths.

He took a deep breath and walked back to the booth and the man he was supposed to meet.

“Mazigh?” he asked as he approached. It was an odd name; Lady Shirah had told him to pronounce it as if he was saying Mazeer, with a hint of something guttural at the end of the r. The seated diner inclined his head in a nod and gestured for MacNamera to join him.

He sat down across the booth from his contact, studying the pilot.

Mazigh appeared to be in his late thirties. His close-cropped black hair was threaded with silver, his olive skin unwrinkled except at the corners of his eyes and mouth. His features, like his name, seemed to point to an Old Moroccan heritage. He was almost absurdly good-looking, enough that MacNamera had to wonder why he was scraping by out in this corner of nowhere and not starring in adventure vids coming out of New Hollywood. His daugh­ter—

It was hard to even think of her without something catching his heart in its fist and squeezing.

His daughter would probably have watched every vid, multiple times over, starring a man who looked like this guy. At least, so said the girl’s mother, who seemed worried that Audrey had come back from her time away more than a little strange. Her definition of “strange” made him wish, once again, that he’d never left Audrey on Deckard’s World in the first place.

“Would you like something to eat?” Mazigh asked. He had a tagine of fragrant stew in front of him, half eaten, beside a glass of something that smelled strongly of mint but not at all of alcohol.

MacNamera shook his head. “I’m fine, thank you.”

In truth, he had no appetite at all. He probably ought to eat something, but the thought of food was repulsive at the moment. His mind was too utterly consumed by the worries that the last day’s worth of messages had brought him.

Mazigh, he realized, was studying him every bit as intently as he had been studying the man. “Tell me about your daughter,” the pilot finally said. “What has happened to her, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Not exactly. She was back with her mother on Deckard’s World, going to college, and suddenly she disappeared. Her mom says she left one message, telling her to take her younger daughter and go into hiding. Audrey said something in the message about someone from the last time she’d been missing coming back—”

“This is not the first time your daughter has disappeared?” Mazigh leaned forward, his eyes—just a shade or two lighter green than Audrey’s, MacNamera noticed—intent.

“No. It isn’t.” He gritted his teeth. Before “M” and the Lady Shirah had directed him to this contact, his own attempts to recruit help had been an abject failure.

“This the same daughter who went missin’ six or so years ago and was gone for nearly two years?” one pilot had asked. “I remember you stakin’ out every transport that came in, that whole time, in case she was on board. Turned out she’d never even left Deckard’s World. Why you goin’ kitin’ after her this time?” He and his friends had laughed and had gone back to ignoring MacNamera in favor of watching a jai alai vid.

“She disappeared a month before her thirteenth birthday and was missing for twenty-two months. Her mother knows very little about what happened to her during that time, but this time, she went offworld. Booked passage to New Queensland on a ship called the Santa Clara. It vanished one Star Jump into its route.”

At the mention of Star Jumps, the other man’s eyes cut over to his.

“A long jump?” he asked with odd intensity.

MacNamera shook his head. “They weren’t even half a day out from the system.”

“And no contact since? No beacon check-ins?”

“It came out of the jump fine, checked in with that beacon, and never checked in with the next, the one that would have led into the second jump.” MacNamera felt his stomach twisting again at the thought of all the things that might have happened, might be happening.

“Whatever happened occurred in U1 space, then,” Mazigh mused. “I may see why I was recommended to you.”

“You came highly recommended,” MacNamera replied, still a little confused about that. “Both by the investigator on Deckard’s World who contacted me after Audrey disappeared, and by Lady Shirah.”

That made Mazigh blink; apparently he found that as surprising as MacNamera had. “This investigator. What’s his name?”

“Didn’t tell me more than an initial. M. Audrey’s mother told me he’s been assigned to her case for years, ever since she reappeared. I’ve never been able to find out much about him, and I have tried. He’s Federacy, but that’s all I know.”

Mazigh’s frown had deepened. He lifted his glass of—was that mint tea?—and took a thoughtful sip. Then he seemed to come to a decision. “Do you have a picture of your daughter?”

MacNamera pulled out his comm, opening it to the image he’d been looking at all too often since the news had come and turning it toward Mazigh. A young woman’s face appeared on the screen, beautiful if he did say so himself, with enormous green eyes, prominent cheekbones, a pixie-pointed chin and a quirky smile, dark blonde hair flowing to her shoulders. Audrey in her first college yearbook photo. He could still see the tiny maker of mud-pies and catcher of fireflies hidden behind the newly-adult face.

Six years ago, after coming out of cryo and learning that his daughter had become a missing person not long after he’d left Deckard’s World, he had been terrified that she’d been on her way to Furya. Even Lady Shirah’s promise to intercept and hide the girl if she arrived, before the Quantifiers could learn she was there, hadn’t eased his anxiety. The new situation was even more petrifying.

Mazigh’s breath hitched for a second. “This ‘M’ asked you to come to me, specifically? As did Lady Shirah.”

“Yes.”

The man nodded. “I understand now. I will, of course, help you. No one’s child should be alone in the ghost lanes.”

Mazigh gestured to the barkeep; a moment later, he was settling his check as his food was packed up for him.

“You are licensed to fly a Star Jumper?” MacNamera asked, aware that somehow everything had just sped up.

Mazigh nodded and slipped his payment card back into a small wallet, taking another card out and offering it to MacNamera.

It was a pilot’s license, identifying him as Yedder Mazigh, born in New Casablanca on Tangiers Prime, rated to fly most military and commercial craft.

Retired military. Like I was, before…

He shut that down, shut all of it down. There wasn’t all that much he regretted about the last six and a half years of his life, except how they had impacted Audrey… and, apparently, were still impacting her. But he couldn’t think about it without it starting to tear him to pieces.

“What’s your price?” he asked as he gave Mazigh back his license.

The pilot shrugged, slipping the license back into his wallet and pocketing it. “I’m sure your offer is a fair one. Shall we go? I presume you already have a ship.”

Feeling a little stunned, MacNamera nodded, rising as Mazigh rose. They were, he realized, exactly the same height. “A Dassault Z-437. Can you fly one?”

“I can, and I have.” Mazigh led him toward the exit. “It’s a good choice for a rescue mission.”

“You need to stop and get anything?” MacNamera asked, still trying to figure out how things had turned around so quickly.

Mazigh nodded at the bartender, who fetched a duffel bag from behind the counter and handed it to him. “I have everything I need in here.” He said something to the bartender in another language, one MacNamera didn’t recognize, and got a reply in the same language. “No need for us to delay further. My affairs are in order.”

The man, MacNamera soon discovered, was not especially talkative. The walk back to Caldera Base, less than half a mile away, was silent, but gave him a chance to observe his new companion. Mazigh moved like a trained soldier.

“Where’d you serve?” he asked as they neared the entrance to the base.

“Tangiers Space Service,” Mazigh said. “Sol Track Protective Division.”

A combat pilot, MacNamera thought. Still young enough to be serving. Can’t even be forty yet. “Why’d you leave?”

“L-4 injury,” Mazigh said after a tiny pause. “It healed, but not before I got so sick of being behind a desk that I resigned my commission. I piloted commercial ships for a few years after that. They said I was fit enough.”

People at the base seemed to know and like Mazigh, something that eased MacNamera’s nerves a little more, although it made him wonder why they had never crossed paths before. Nothing could ease his nerves completely. Every time he thought of his daughter, they jangled again until he wanted to scream at the top of his lungs. But it only took an hour for everything to be settled and for them to be given a launch window. Lady Shirah had been true to her word and had smoothed the way for him with Federacy Command; he had already been placed on emergency leave and his Lieutenant was prepared to take over.

As they approached the Z-437’s ramp, though, Mazigh turned to him with a serious look.

“You do understand, I assume, that in a moment I will become the captain of this ship,” the man said.

That brought MacNamera up short. “And?”

“And in spite of your rank, you will be required to follow my orders. So I want to be clear that I will not issue orders all that often, but when I do it is because they are necessary. For your safety, and mine, and your daughter’s when we find her. The law, however, will require you to follow them when I do. I want there to be no misunderstanding.”

“Fair enough.” It was something he hadn’t thought about in his headlong rush to save his little girl—an adult now, yes, but barely—but he really should have.

Gotta do what I gotta do.

Prior to liftoff, he was surprised to see that Mazigh checked the engine area and, in particular, the Star Jump drive, resting his hand on it for a moment with an odd gesture and murmuring something under his breath. But that, he ultimately decided, was the only non-textbook thing about the pilot.

Launch was uneventful, Furya’s usually stormy skies seeming almost cooperative and the storm over the Caldera still distant. They cryo-slept in their seats on the way to the Santa Clara’s last known position, skipping over the week it took to get there. MacNamera was glad of the cryo; a week of fretting about his daughter’s fate might have driven him mad.

The space between the end of the Santa Clara’s first Star Jump and the start of the second was vast, covering fifty million kilometers in each direction. Mazigh began running a sensor sweep of the region immediately. MacNamera found it difficult to sit still, so close to answers and yet still unable to grasp them.

“So,” he observed after a while, trying to fill the silence before it could unhinge him, “your name… doesn’t sound very Arabic.”

“It’s not,” Mazigh answered, his mouth quirking slightly. “It’s Tamazight. Or, as most of your people would say, Berber.”

Huh. There was an oblique rebuke in there somewhere, he thought. “What’s it mean?”

“It was gifted to me by a good friend of my family. ‘Yedder’ means ‘he will live.’ And ‘Mazigh’ is an auspicious surname among my people. It means ‘he is free.’”

“The whole name was a gift?”

Mazigh smiled, turning back to his controls. “The most important part of it was. What do you know of the circumstances of your daughter’s first disappearance?”

MacNamera groaned, leaning back in his seat. “Truth is, not much at all. Last time she just dropped out of sight. Her mother thought she’d run away, but… when she came back…”

“Was something unusual about her return?” Mazigh seemed focused on the scans he was running, but MacNamera had the odd feeling that the man was paying closer attention than he seemed to be.

“Yeah. It turned out that she’d been in WitSec for most or all of the time she was missing. Nobody could get her tell them where she’d been or what had happened. One of the conditions of her return was that she could never talk about any of it at all. And once a week, a Federacy operative came to the door to escort her to a rendezvous with her ‘handler,’ who her mother never once got to see herself. That ‘M’ guy.”

“An extraordinary situation for a child her age to find herself in,” Mazigh said after a moment. “Is there much espionage, or organized crime, on Deckard’s World?”

“I never knew of any, but that isn’t my field anyway.” MacNamera let out another gusty sigh. “Do you think the first disappearance and this one are connected? Something from back then showing up, like she said?”

“Possibly. You said she told your ex-wife to go into hiding with her younger sister—”

“I never said she was my ex-wife,” MacNamera snapped, frowning. Who was this guy?

Mazigh smiled at him, shaking his head. “You didn’t have to. You referred to her as ‘her mother,’ not your wife, every time you have mentioned her. And this little sister… you have not referred to her as your daughter, either. A half-sister from another marriage, I presume?”

Well, damn. He’d gotten all suspicious for a moment over a good deduction. Just because Mazigh seemed more committed to the mission than he ought to be…

“Apparently, your daughter was afraid for their safety as well as her own when she disappeared. Did this ‘M’ say whether she used her own name, or a false name, when she boarded the Santa Clara?” Mazigh continued running scans as he spoke.

“Her own name,” MacNamera said, seeing where Mazigh was going. “She was laying a trail, wasn’t she? Trying to draw someone away from Deckard’s World. Away from her mom and sister.”

“It would appear so. That suggests a genuine threat, one probably connected to her prior missing time. Are you sure that she wasn’t offworld during that period?”

“Nobody’s sure of anything,” MacNamera grumbled. “Her mom told me she insisted that if she ever talked about anything that had happened while she was gone, people could end up dead, and that if everybody kept trying to get her to talk, she might get disappeared again. She never wavered from that once.”

“Interesting. And she was how old, again?”

“A month shy of thirteen when she disappeared. Almost fifteen when she came back.”

“Kids that age are very rarely good at keeping secrets,” Mazigh mused. “Except for the truly important ones.”

Maybe it was meant as a reassuring statement, but MacNamera was only feeling worse with each passing moment. If whoever had driven Audrey into WitSec had found her, and was dangerous enough to force her headlong flight off-planet—

“I have something,” Mazigh said. “A distress beacon. Very weak, but…” He began flipping switches and plotting a course.

It took another hour to reach the beacon. MacNamera’s heart pounded in his ears the whole time.

“Oh fuck,” he breathed, as the Santa Clara finally came into view.

The vessel drifted in the darkness, barely visible, no lights illuminating it. If its bulk hadn’t blocked out the stars behind it, they might not have seen it at all. As they approached and their lights touched it, a gaping breach in its hull became glaringly obvious.

My little girl…

“Tislilel…” Mazigh murmured, before maneuvering the Z-437 closer. Once in range, he deployed multiple tethers and brought their airlock within a few meters of the jagged rent in the hull.

“Let’s suit up,” he told MacNamera. The combination of determination and dread in his face was confusing, as if he was the one expecting to find the body of his own daughter within.

All power was out within the Santa Clara. There was no artificial gravity, and the only light came from their suits. The ship, it appeared, had still had at least partial power when it had begun to depressurize; bulkhead doors had closed around the breach, but one of them had only closed 90% of the way. There was no more pressure differential on the other side to prevent them from reopening now, but very little appeared to have been blown into space.

They found half a dozen corpses behind one of the bulkhead doors, floating and frozen, all shot in the chest with energy pulses.

None of the dead were Audrey.

Two of the bodies appeared to belong to an elderly couple, matching wedding rings on their gnarled and frozen hands. The other four were children.

“What kind of mon­sters…?” MacNamera heard himself gasping. He had seen far worse things, but the murder of children was something he could never possibly become inured to. Mazigh, he noticed, had bowed his head and had his fists clenched tightly.

“Come,” the pilot said after a moment. “We must see the rest of the ship.”

They spent hours quartering every level but found no more bodies. Mazigh was able to restore the artificial gravity when they passed through the engine room… and seemed oddly disturbed by the apparent removal of the Star Jump drive.

“Pirates?” MacNamera asked Mazigh as they reached the flight deck. That thought filled him with new terror. His daughter was young and beautiful enough that he feared the uses such criminals might be making of her. It was a struggle not to imagine it…

“Doubtful,” Mazigh said, shining his light around. “Pirates would not have murdered the children unless they had also murdered everyone else. The horrible truth is that for pirates in the trafficking business, children are primary targets. I’ve rescued enough to know. If whoever did this had any intention of trafficking your daughter or the others, they would have done the same with the children. This is something different.”

MacNamera watched as, turning away, Mazigh began reactivating the flight deck’s emergency power systems.

“The batteries are nearly drained, but there should be enough to let us see the ship’s final hours—”

“Good,” a strange, raspy voice said from the doorway. “Let’s take a look at what happened.”

MacNamera was impressed to see that Mazigh was an even faster draw than he was.

“Easy, guys,” the stranger said, his hands moving away from his sides, fingers spreading to show they were empty. “Easy. I’m here lookin’ for answers, too. You salvagers?”

“No,” Mazigh said. “You?”

“Nah. Name’s Toombs. I’m lookin’ for someone who was on this ship. What the fuck happened to it?”

MacNamera started to put his gun away until he noticed that Mazigh had gone completely still.

“Alexander Toombs?” Mazigh asked, danger suddenly in his voice.

“Y’heard of me?” It was hard to make out much detail of the man’s face through his pressure suit, but he seemed to be smiling. “I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be. Give me one good reason not to shoot you right now, merc.” The tight fury in Mazigh’s voice was alarming.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. What’d I do to you?”

“Not to me,” Mazigh said, keeping his gun trained on Toombs as he walked closer. “Tell us who you are looking for on this ship, and perhaps I won’t shoot you.”

“Nobody impor­tant—”

“Say. Her. Name.” Mazigh cocked the gun.

Her name?

“Fine! Fine. You win. A girl named Audrey Mac­Namera—”

MacNamera brought his gun back up and joined Mazigh in aiming at Toombs. “What do you want with my daughter?”

Toombs froze, staring at him. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he drawled. “Colonel John MacNamera in the flesh? They let you come lookin’ for your girl this time?”

“You very likely will be,” Mazigh spat. “Are you the one she was fleeing?”

“Prob’ly,” Toombs admitted.

“Why?” MacNamera demanded. “She’s barely more than a kid!

Toombs looked over at him. “You got no idea where your kid was six years ago, do ya? Or who she was with.”

“She was in WitSec,” MacNamera growled. “I’m pretty sure interfering with someone under Federacy protection is enough of a crime that we could turn you in for a bounty if we wanted.”

For whatever reason, what he’d said made Toombs bray with laughter. “WitSec? That’s a good one. I’m bettin’ that fakin’ bein’ in WitSec is an even bigger crime. Gotta say, your little Jack B. Badd has skills.”

Jack B. Badd??? How did this man know his childhood nickname? Dear God, did Audrey use it as an alias?

He’d told her so many bedtime stories about a boy with that name…

“More than you know,” Mazigh was saying to Toombs as he confiscated the other man’s sidearm.

…the fuck…?

“Do I know you from somewhere?” Toombs asked him.

“Doubtful.” Mazigh backed up to the control panel, keeping his gun trained on Toombs. “Understand that whatever fate Audrey met on this vessel will be yours as well.”

What the fuck, MacNamera found himself thinking, is going on here?

The screen flickered to life in front of them as Mazigh activated its controls. In a moment, a mosaic of images spread out, most of them entirely still. “I have begun the playback two hours before the feeds end. Now… I am deactivating any feeds that aren’t picking up any motion, until something appears on them.”

In a moment, only the feed from the flight deck itself was live, where a single crew member was killing time tossing wadded up papers at a miniature basketball hoop.

“Looks like whatever happened, it was during the night cycle,” Toombs observed.

“Lo, the Master of the Obvious speaks,” Mazigh grumbled. His gun hadn’t wavered.

Another feed flickered to life as a young woman, dark blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, emerged from behind a door and entered a corri­dor—

“Audrey,” MacNamera breathed. Near him, Mazigh murmured that strange word again. What the fuck was a tislilel?

His daughter looked around the corridor, walked over to a posted map, and then set off down the hallway. The feed followed her from camera to camera as she went. When she arrived at the galley, she read the “Closed Until 6:00 AM Standard” sign before sighing and walking over to a touch screen. A moment later she started down the corridor again.

They watched as she located vending machines and, taking a card from the bulky money belt under her Deckard Tech U sweatshirt, purchased an array of junk food that she carried to a nearby lounge. There were people in the lounge, but they had apparently been so still and quiet that the motion recorders on those camera feeds had lost track of them. Audrey settled onto a seat against one of the blank picture windows that looked out on the nothingness of Star Jump space, eating her junk food as she gazed out at it.

Odd. It almost seemed as if she could see something through the window. She looked more attentive than someone staring out at nothing.

A man walked over to her and tried to make conversation. MacNamera found himself bristling; the guy was almost twice her age. But apparently he didn’t get anywhere and retreated a moment later, his body language almost screaming discomfort. Audrey didn’t start laughing until he and his friends had left the lounge.

Ten more minutes passed, and then the empty window filled with darkness as the Santa Clara returned to normal space. A moment later, Audrey leaned forward, frowning…

…and then leapt out of the window seat and ran for the comm panel. Even as she grabbed at it, the ship rocked violently. Suddenly dozens of the feeds were active.

The shipwide pandemonium made it difficult to follow what happened next. They caught glimpses from a few cameras of Audrey trying to reach the escape pods, and—

“Well, fuck me,” Toombs gasped.

“Pass,” Mazigh replied, but both men followed his gaze to one of the steadier feeds.

Men in strange armor were climbing through the hull breach. As MacNamera watched, they spread throughout the ship, gathering up all the passengers and crew at gunpoint and forcing them back through the breach. One emerged from a darkened corridor where no cameras worked, propelling Audrey forward, his hand clamped onto the back of her neck. She looked frightened but unharmed.

“Who are these people?” MacNamera grated out.

“Necromongers,” Toombs answered. “And you’re never gonna believe who their boss is these days.”

A final Necromonger emerged from the darkness, returning to the breach carrying a smallish box trailing wires.

Baraka,” Mazigh muttered. “What do they want with the Isomorph Drive?”

“Hey,” MacNamera growled. “Focus. This is about my daughter.”

“As is that,” Mazigh said, half to himself.

“What are they going to do to my girl?” MacNamera demanded of Toombs.

“Guess that’ll depend on her old friend,” Toombs said, shaking his head. “’Bout a year ago, word is the old Lord Marshal of the Necromongers got hisself assassinated by none other than Richard B. Riddick. He’s in charge of them now.”

Some of the tension left Mazigh’s frame. “Then she may be safe.

“What?” Who was this guy? “You even know who Riddick is?” MacNamera knew all too well; He’d had to redesign half a dozen security systems because of the man.

“Your daughter,” Toombs drawled, “ran with Riddick for a while back when she was missin’. They were friends. Maybe more than.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” MacNamera demanded, even as he saw Mazigh nodding.

“She was one of three survivors of the Hunter-Gratzner crash,” Mazigh told him. “Riddick was another. He protected her in its aftermath and attempted to see her to safety.”

“Attempted?” Toombs demanded. “He broke her out of a hospital and took her and another girl with him to Shakti Four—what the fuck is so funny, guy?”

“She never went to Shakti Four,” Mazigh chuckled. “And Riddick didn’t break her out of the hospital. She broke out on her own.”

Enough, MacNamera thought, was enough. He turned his gun away from Toombs and pointed it at Mazigh.

“Okay, enough of this shit. Who are you and how do you think you know my daughter?”

Toombs snickered, looking both amused by this turn of events and curious, himself, as to the answer.

Mazigh glanced uneasily at the mercenary. “It’s a fair question, but I can’t give you answers in front of this man. He isn’t cleared to know them.”

MacNamera aimed for the spot directly between Mazigh’s eyes. At the very least, it would shatter the man’s face plate if he fired. “You’d better rethink your position or you’ll be taking everything you know into the black.”

For a moment, Mazigh looked affronted. He gave Toombs a weighing glance and then sighed. “Very well. On your head be it. I met your daughter five and a half years ago. On Tangiers Prime.”

“Tangiers Prime?” Toombs practically exploded. “No fuckin’ way! I was on Tangiers Prime and—”

“And she was one step ahead of you the whole time,” Mazigh said. “She and Kyra Wittier-Collins.”

Kyra Wittier-Collins? The Black Fox of Canaan Mountain? His little girl had been palling around with Big Evil and the Black Fox?

“They had stowed away on the Scarlet Matador,” Mazigh continued.

“Son of a shit,” Toombs griped. “Stowed away? No wonder we couldn’t find them among the passen­gers…

MacNamera had heard of the Scarlet Matador. This was not getting better. “Didn’t everybody die on that ship? Some kind of exotic pathogen?”

“That’s the official story,” Mazigh told him, “but no. Only eighteen people among the passengers and crew died. Your daughter, and Kyra, saved everyone else. There was no pathogen. It was a Level Five Incident.”

A Level Five Incident? His daughter had Threshold Syndrome?

What… the fuck… had happened six years ago?

“Who are you?” MacNamera demanded again.

Mazigh glanced uneasily at Toombs again before giving him a rueful smile. “The name you know me by, Yedder Mazigh, was gifted to me by your daughter when she saved my life one final time. She made the ID you examined, and which I have been using for the last five and a half years. My real name is Colonel Gavin Brahim Tomlin Meziane, and yes, I know that’s a mouthful. You may call me Tomlin, as she preferred to.”

Toombs was staring at him, open-mouthed. “Ain’t you supposed to be dead?”

“Indeed.” Mazigh’s gun stayed pointed at Toombs as he walked forward toward MacNamera, once more indifferent to the gun aimed at him. “Your daughter, among my people, is a beloved hero. She and Kyra saved hundreds of lives five and a half years ago, including mine. I owe her my life several times over. You have nothing to fear from me. I only seek to repay any portion of my debt to her that I can.”

MacNamera lowered his gun, stunned. “And how are you gonna do that?”

“If the Necromonger Armada has her, then that’s where we will go.”

“What?” Toombs practically yelled. “Are you crazy?”

“I told you before, Toombs, you will share Audrey’s fate, whatever it is. As will I. I owe her my life, and much more than that. There is no way to truly repay the debt I owe her. For her,” Mazigh—no, Tomlin—said, locking eyes with MacNamera, “I would storm the gates of Hell itself. I will go there with you now.”

For the first time since he’d gotten word of Audrey’s second disappearance, John MacNamera felt a stirring of real hope.

“Just fuckin’ great,” Toombs grumbled, ruining a perfectly good Heroic Moment. “Held at gunpoint by a pair of suicidal do-gooders.

Tomlin rolled his eyes, shook his head, and then grinned at MacNamera. “Let’s go rescue your daughter.”

The Changeling Game, Afterword

Title: The Changeling Game (Formerly Identity Theft)
Author: Ardath Rekha
Chapter: 98/98
Fandom: Pitch Black (2000); The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004)
Rating: X
Warnings: Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language, strong sexual content
Category: Het
Pairing: Riddick/Jack
Summary: Afterword: Notes and Acknowledgments
Disclaimer: The characters and events of Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury are not mine, but belong to Universal Studios. I just wish I were in charge of their fates. No money is being made off of this. I’m writing strictly for love of the story.
Feedback: Absolutely, the more the better! Shred me, whip me, beat me, make me feel grammatical! I post “rough,” so I can always use the help. 😉

Afterword

This has been a really wild journey for me, with a whole lot of twists and turns along the way. Thank you to everybody who decided to accompany me on it.

Some twenty-plus-year-old backstory first…

This story began on the Rhiana Griffith Fan Club as an act of rebellion… and self-therapy of a sort.

A lot of fans of Pitch Black, and its ensemble cast, felt our places in the fandom got subsumed when one of the cast members, Vin Diesel, rocketed to stardom a year later behind the wheel of a muscle car. Within a matter of months, virtually all the Pitch Black fansites converted into Vin Diesel fansites to stay relevant in his exploding fandom, and the rest of the cast, and their fans, became afterthoughts within a community that had been a lot more egalitarian when I first discovered it.

I got pulled into co-modding one of those “Vin” sites by some fans of the stories I was writing; later, when its webmistress decided to step down and wanted to name me as her successor—right, ironically, as I was planning on stepping away from Vin fandom and focusing on creating a site for Rhiana Griffith/Jack fans—I put aside those plans and took over running Art of Vin Diesel, prioritizing an already existing community over the one I’d wanted to create. As much as I love all the friends I made on AoVD, that decision became one of my biggest regrets.

I still wonder, from time to time, whether it would have made a significant enough difference if the site I finally began building a bit over a year later had come into existence then, if Universal Pictures would have dared treat Griffith so shabbily if her fanbase had been more visible at the time. Thanks to my position of running one of the “big” Vin fan sites of the period, I ended up privy to a lot of the insider gossip about what had happened behind the scenes during Chronicles of Riddick preproduction, something that really soured me on Hollywood, Universal, the nascent “Riddick franchise,” and even Vin himself for a while.

Although there was no question at all that he was reprising his role, and Keith David was handed his part back, Rhiana was forced to re-audition for her part and, even after she won it hands-down and planning was already beginning for her to travel to the northern hemisphere for shooting, it was subsequently taken from her before contracts could be signed and given to another actress. The news of the casting change slowly leaked out as fans learned that a character named Kyra, who might or might not be connected to Jack, was being played by Alexa Davalos rather than Rhiana Griffith.

Most of us knew Davalos, at that point, as the chronically underdressed electrokinetic thief from the TV show Angel, where she’d been portrayed as a sexpot and had displayed a lot of over-the-top combat moves, and the idea that those were the characteristics that might have recommended her as a continuation of Jack didn’t sit well at all with much of Jack’s existing fanbase. Plus the two actresses looked and sounded absolutely nothing like each other. We held out hope that maybe Kyra was an unrelated character, or that the casting change had been necessary because Rhiana hadn’t been interested in reprising the part, until the news broke in October 2003 that Rhiana had been forced to audition for that very role only to be denied it.

When backroom chatter indicated that she’d lost the role in part because Vin had used up all of his producer-level influence with Universal securing Judy Dench and Colm Feore for the film, and hadn’t saved any of it to help defend Rhiana’s right to reprise her character, I was done. I wanted out of Vin fandom and away from all the gossip about a movie I’d gone from anticipating to dreading. It took me another five months to get my partners at AoVD to let me go, though, and that only finally happened when I got so fed up that I told them they had 48 hours to find a new webmistress or I was pulling the plug on the whole site; in the meantime, I built the Rhiana Griffith Fan Club and finally decamped to it with other Rhiana fans who wanted to focus on nurturing her career in the face of that major setback instead of continuing to invest in a fandom where we were clearly unwanted afterthoughts.

After the film came out, to combat a lot of the actual depression Jack fans were feeling on RGFC over how she had been drastically altered (almost none of the hallmark personality traits she’d displayed in the first film still existed), repudiated (the whole “Jack is dead” speech felt like a slap in the face to many of us), used as little more than a MacGuffin, and then killed off, I posted a writing challenge which I called the “CoR AU” challenge: write stories in which, in spite of everything we saw on the screen, Kyra turned out not to be Jack after all.

That was honestly easier than it ought to have been. In spite of the insistence of major players in the production that Kyra was a continuation of Jack, they had done a whole lot to sabotage their own claims. They had cast a woman who looked and sounded nothing like the original Jack performance—there is literally no facial feature that Alexa and Rhiana have in common (aside from having all of the ones you’d expect on any human face), and Alexa’s voice is more like Fry’s than any other female character in the first film—and then, in addition to giving her a completely unrealistic and improbable sketch of a backstory to try to explain all the changes, they made her blow her lines every time she tried to do a callback to the first film. Then, at the eleventh hour—possibly as a sop to Rhiana fans—they actually cast Rhiana, as Jack, in the anime short The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, something that had an effect of disconnecting Jack and Kyra further for us rather than “bridging the gap.”

So we decided we were going to write all the ways that Kyra didn’t have to be Jack, and could still turn out not to be Jack in spite of everything that had been seen onscreen. Some among us held out hope that maybe it could even influence sequel plans if the stories were plausible and popular enough, although it quickly became clear that the film was tanking too hard at the box office for those sequels (at least, as they were originally envisioned) to happen anyway.

My challenge had a few rules, but the two most important ones, which I brought to this story, were: first, we would treat what had been seen on the screen itself as incontrovertible (what people said, what people did, etc.) even if we were allowed to twist what those moments had meant around and could ignore all of the “rules” that tie-in materials imposed, and second, we would never make Kyra into a villain. A lot of us, definitely including me, were struggling hard with the impulse to blame Alexa Davalos for what had happened (thanks so much, Western Internalized Misogyny!) and we’d decided that it was important to portray her Kyra sympathetically to counter that, even if we couldn’t accept her as a continuation of Jack.

That was the environment in which I began writing a story I initially called Identity Theft, trying to reach for positivity in the midst of the free-floating negativity we were dealing with and trying to find a way past. I floated a lot of ideas of how Kyra could turn out not to be Jack during that period of time, but this was probably the most complicated; most of the rest were one-offs.

But by early-mid 2006, I was vanishing from fandom, and although I continued to maintain the RGFC, and even ran tech for my friends who had taken over AoVD, my writing slowed to a halt. Mostly that was because I was back in college, working on completing a degree, and the Honors program was so demanding that virtually everything I was reading and writing had to be of an academic nature.

Aside from a crazy plot bunny in ’07 that resulted in the first few chapters of Falling Angels (a story that actually borrows a few themes and ideas that I either used, or planned to use, in this tale, since I wasn’t sure I would ever expand on its original 16 chapters) and a later intense bout of writing that resulted from watching the film Prometheus right after taking a graduate course on Middle Eastern Epics and Assyriology (and yes, I will get back to writing Forbidden Gifts soon, I swear…), my unfinished stories got shelved. Meanwhile, the sites slowly went quiet as first Undergrad and then Grad School sucked away all of my free time, while fandom moved from stand-alone sites to social media platforms.

Although Rhiana has never gained the high acting profile her fans were wishing for (in part, selfishly, so we would have more pictures of her to use to create fan art and “book covers” for our stories), she has had a wonderfully successful and happy life. She’s an internationally renowned fine artist whose works have had numerous gallery showings and been sold to collectors around the world, she has a Master’s degree and is a licensed art therapist who uses the creative process to help children work through traumas and behavioral issues, and she’s raising a wonderful daughter.

All of that is stuff that a Hollywood career could have nixed, and God knows, after “Me Too,” I think she may even have dodged a bullet, but part of me still resents that the decision of whether to reprise her character was taken from her, and that the doors such an opportunity would have opened got slammed in her face instead. It still chafes me that Hollywood (then and now) has a habit of treating women (real and fictional) like Kleenex—disposable, replaceable, and indistinguishable—and treating Vin’s fans as too busy thinking between their legs to care who or what else is on the screen as long as he’s front and center on it.

Those mindsets, in my opinion (aside from the fact that they were trying to sell fans of The Fast and the Furious and xXx on a space fantasy at the expense of many of the original Pitch Black/Riddick fans), is a big part of why The Chronicles of Riddick did poorly enough at the box office that Universal shelved the planned sequels until Vin, himself, ransomed the franchise back from them by agreeing to reprise the role of Dominic Toretto. That was the character they had wanted the whole time. And, honestly, Vin’s Riddick portrayals outside of the one in Pitch Black have left me cold, seeming less like the original Riddick than “Vin Diesel is Dominic Toretto/Xander Cage as Riddick.” I’ve tried to bring back the Riddick I actually found compelling in my “CoR AU” stories, instead.

During the height of the COVID epidemic, while I was recovering from Long Covid and didn’t have the strength or energy for a day job, I decided I needed to figure out what to do with the websites I was still, more or less, maintaining, but which had fallen into extreme disrepair. I officially still own the AoVD domain name and webspace, along with RGFC and my own website, but it had been so long since I’d done much with them. I had been in the middle of earning a PhD when COVID essentially killed it, even if it spared me, and hadn’t had time to read or write anything unrelated to my aborted dissertation in years.

When I mentioned to some friends from fandom days that I was thinking of shutting the sites down completely, they convinced me instead to keep them and to at least try to revive the portions of them that had been about the communities that had been built and the works of art (visual or fictive) that had been created. Bringing that back is still a long-term project, hampered by my own schedule (a full-time job + residual Long Covid damage = not much free time, and my own writing gets first dibs on that) and the fact that most of the others who could help me have little time of their own to volunteer anymore. I decided to test out the feasibility of it all with my own webspace, which was by far the smallest of the three, and my own art and stories. In the process, several of my writing muses woke up and demanded attention again.

It wasn’t long before this particular muse took over and began running me ragged. That said, once I complete this story arc and finish my other incomplete works, I doubt I’ll have any further contributions to the “Riddick’verse.” Not unless they bring the Jack who inspired me in the first place—Rhiana’s Jack—back somehow, which I gave up hope of long ago.

 

The Evolution of the Story

During the first few months that I was writing Identity Theft, as it was originally called, it had a much smaller scope. It was going to be, simply, a tale about Jack going to a psychiatric facility for treatment, encountering a “Riddick fan” there and, after the two bonded and shared stories, discovering that her friend Kyra had begun to over-identify with her run with Riddick. The two were going to escape together from the facility, and after Kyra was injured (gaining the scar next to her hip prominently displayed in some scenes in CoR), Jack would spend the entirety of her recuperation telling her such detailed accounts of the events of Pitch Black and Dark Fury that they became, in Kyra’s head, something she’d personally experienced. Then the two separated, with Jack returning home and discovering that the unpleasant circumstances she’d fled were the lead-up to the birth of the baby sister she’d always wanted (yes, that plot point really was 20 years in the making). Kyra, meanwhile, by overidentifying as Jack, would get caught by mercs hoping to use her as a stalking-horse for finding Riddick; when they realized she had no connection to him in spite of her beliefs to the contrary, they’d slave her out as she had claimed in the film.

Things got more elaborate the deeper I went, though, because I began planning out the sequel I wanted to write, covering what happened once Riddick and Jack were reunited on the Basilica, and my plan for Song of Many ’Verses, and the galaxy-shaking mystery driving its plot, was born. That included having Jack develop a connection to multiple universes, and that she and Kyra would already have connected to a separate ’verse during their run together.

I should put a shout-out to Christopher Stasheff here, because there’s a moment in his novel A Company of Stars that inspired me: a grizzled space captain, helping a theatrical company pick out a ship to buy for their interstellar touring itinerary, reacts in horror to one of the ships, pointing to its hull’s unique “crinkled” finish as evidence that it got trapped between universes at some point and barely made it back. The idea of Jack and Kyra being on board a ship that something like that happened to, and that left them straddling two universes and struggling to survive in both, inspired the whole second act of my planned story… even if my writing time went away almost completely before I could actually get to it.

Most of the events that have occurred in the …holy shit… 97 chapters are things I originally planned out in ’04 and ’05, believe it or not, but two areas that definitely got significantly more development as I picked the story back up were the time Jack and Kyra spent on Tangiers Prime and how/why Jack transformed, after her return to Deckard’s World, into the fearful and distrusting person we met in the opening chapters even as she simultaneously developed powers on the same level with any of the major players of Chronicles. I also realized I needed a whole lot more space to develop the mystery of the Apeiros, who hadn’t yet been introduced when I stopped writing in 2006, and—oops, spoilers, can’t tell you what else yet… but a lot of what happened on Tangiers Prime figures heavily in future events of Song of Many ’Verses, and I realized I needed to set more of it up before returning to the “frame story” if I wanted the eventual outcomes to feel naturalistic and earned. I guess I’ll talk more about those elements in that fic’s afterword.

But I sure as hell didn’t expect it to turn into a 400K+ word monster. That’s blowing my mind a little. Still, I’ve loved every second of writing it.

 

Names, Places, and Canonicity

So here are the rules I follow in this story: If it happened onscreen in the Director’s Cuts of Pitch Black or the Chronicles of Riddick, or onscreen in The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, it’s canon and I won’t contradict it. Everything else is optional. Everything.

The makers of the Chronicles of Riddick set that in motion by retconning TF out of the extended materials connected to Pitch Black, which had included elements such as Jack originally being named Audrey (and described, in the tie-in novelization, as looking exactly like Rhiana had in her prior film, 15 Amore) along with a general lack of supernatural elements even if Riddick himself may have come across as a little preternatural. Riddick, meanwhile, had multiple contradictory backstories depending on which tie-in you consulted, all of which were then swept aside for the Furyan backstory. If they can cherry-pick, so can I.

So Jack’s “real name” remains Audrey, Kyra has her own new backstory and lineage that has nothing to do with any of the tie-ins, and the Lord Marshal gets to keep his “Zhylaw” name but the B in Riddick’s name now stands for “Booker” instead of the WTFery of “Bruno.” If you see something that contradicts what you “know” about the franchise canon, it’s very likely something that never made it onto the screen in the first place and only has legitimacy through tie-ins that the majority of filmgoers have never seen. (Those tie-ins can enrich a fan’s experience of a film, yes… if the studio continues to honor them…) And whatever Furya is due to appear on the movie screens sometime in 2025 will have nothing in common, in all likelihood, with the one I’m depicting in The Changeling Game and Song of Many ’Verses.

I decided, shortly after I picked the story back up, that it needed a new title. Identity Theft had been appropriate when I wrote the first few chapters, and it was a smaller-scope story involving a mentally unbalanced girl overidentifying with Jack, to the point where she accidentally set herself up for the worst possible fate that might have awaited Jack herself. As the story grew in scope, and as I became increasingly charmed by the Kyra I was writing and the sister-bond she and Jack were developing, it didn’t fit nearly as well. I began to think about a title that would be better suited to a story about a pair of girls with multiple identities and personas, and an identity that wasn’t necessarily tied to either one of them. I went through a bunch of possibilities and decided that this one worked best for the course the story was taking, and its themes of protean identities, shared aliases, and reunions being upended when they’re with someone who either is no longer the person everyone expected, or never was that person to begin with. So Identity Theft became The Changeling Game in July of 2024.

Some of the locations in the story are tied into canonicity, while others are my own creations. The Hunter-Gratzner was “en route to the Tangiers system” according to Owens in Pitch Black, and many of the early tie-in materials made references to planets and events in that system that connected to Riddick. I went with a similar naming structure as planets in the Helion system apparently use in CoR, with the main in-system colony world being “Prime” rather than numbered. At the same time, I decided to play with hints that other naming systems are frequently used, especially since I had already named Audrey’s home planet “Deckard’s World” before I began exploring naming conventions. And, since CoR portrayed “New Mecca” as a stop on a rail line at one point (or at least a transit station serving as a shelter during the invasion), along with having the locals insist that their world was extremely multicultural, it became an ethnic suburb of Helion Prime’s big city, which I named New Athens in keeping with the idea that naming the star Helion (as opposed to, say, Shams, شمس, which is the Arabic word for the sun) pointed to a Greek base for the colony. So I’ve had a lot of fun playing with place-names throughout the story, and most of them have specific meanings and significance. The two moons over U1’s version of Tangiers Prime, for instance, are named Qamar (قمر, Arabic for “moon”) and Taziri (ⵜⴰⵣⵉⵔⵉ, Tamazight for “full moon”).

I actually put together an appendix of all the names, places, dates, and vocabulary in this monster-story, but the damn thing is ginormous and nearly novel length itself. It even has an hour-by-hour (in places) timeline I constructed to keep track of what happened when (a total necessity when your characters hang out on a planet with 44-hour days but you’re trying to keep track of how much your main character is actually aging and when her next birthday would be, OMG). I definitely need all of the references to keep things straight, and had to go back and fix a few things once I’d put it together. Maybe after both stories are concluded, I’ll put it up, too, as a tie-in. (If I put it up now, there’d be way too many spoilers for Song in it.)

 

Soundtrack

Wouldn’t you know it, I had a whole playlist of music that I listened to, and connected to, as I was writing this. A kind of soundtrack formed for me. It originally started with the song “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran, which back in ’04 was about Audrey shrugging off her wild adventures and returning home to her family with no intention of leaving Deckard’s World again (although she ended up being far less “ordinary” upon her return than I’d originally planned!) and developed from there. So here are key tracks (and links to where you can listen to them on YouTube) that influenced me and helped me set the right mood as I was writing:

  1. “Lorretine” by Clan of Xymox – A kind of all-purpose theme melody for the story. Especially with the beginning suggesting something rising up out of the darkness, and the end effect that makes me think of a celestial body arcing away and escaping.
  2. “In the Shadows” by Amy Stroup – I have a tendency to visualize Riddick carrying an unconscious Jack into the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead (no, I will never treat “Deads” as a real word) during the opening bars, meditating over her and delving into her mind, and envisioning a variety of moments from the story as the song unfolds. There’s a moment right before the final chorus that makes me imagine the Scarlet Matador making its final descent into the phantom waters of New Marrakesh.
  3. “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer, as performed by (of all things) the Riverdale Cast – I know, I know, but somehow this became the “escape from the hospital” theme for me, maybe due to the frenetic synth pulses, and also a song about sister-bonding (I have an even more improbable song about sister-bonding here, too, LOL) and the connection that begins to be forged between Jack and Kyra during their run together… symbolized by the way Ashleigh Murray and Camila Mendes weave their voices together in this rendition.
  4. “Salt in the Rainbow” by Duran Duran – yeah, this is one of three Duran Duran tunes in the list. The song never made it onto any of their studio albums after bootleggers got hold of this early cut, so it didn’t get smoothed out and shined up the way a lot of their materials do, but I love Nick Rhodes’s synth work on it and it fits into the shining moment where things are going really well for Jack and Kyra, their bond is strengthening, and the power building between the two of them feels like something that can take on anything. When I went back to get the link, I found other, more “polished” versions, but this one, with the chorus of “we are forever,” is the one that inspired me.
  5. “Thank You” Led Zeppelin, version performed by Duran Duran – In my head this is, instead of a love song from a man to a woman, somehow another sister-bonding song for the story. The opening sounds made me visualize Megaluna hanging over the King Tide in Chapter 23, making the waters glitter, and the moment when Jack realizes that her bond with Kyra has transcended friendship and the two of them have become sisters. It’s an odd choice, I know, but it helped me get into the right mindset for writing a lot of their adventures together.
  6. “Time For Flight” by Baby Alpaca – I listened to this a lot as I was writing and developing the Tomlin plot: this man who was going to listen to, and mentor, Jack and Kyra as they explored their burgeoning powers, before suddenly realizing, “shit, the story needs him to get killed off, doesn’t it?”
  7. “The Beginning of the End” by Klergy (featuring Valerie Broussard) – There’s a line in the song that’s especially telling: “reckless behavior / is looking at a man like he was a savior,” which is pretty on-the-nose. The bombast and drums right around the 1:30 mark make me imagine the Ennead Kids performing at the Helion Prime spaceport with Eve Logan as their captive audience, while Jack and Kyra slip past her. The frenetic strings building up around the 2:40 mark make me visualize Jack and Kyra racing through the darkness to Othman Tower before the Battle of Othman Plaza. And the closing beat right before the final “the end?” The New Marrakesh Spaceport Explosion. I see it so clearly every time, with the final note revealing the devastation that followed. It’s so vivid for me. (And yes, I know it’s also a song associated with Riverdale, but I actually only heard it when part of it was used in an episode of Lucifer.)
  8. “Trenched” by Tipper – In my head, I call this song “The Sebby Dance.” There may also be some portions of it that make me think of the Apeiros.
  9. “Guyane: V. Lullaby” by Aram Khachaturian (performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi) – This is the theme of New Marrakesh itself, for me. Neeme Järvi’s version is by far the most beautiful I have ever heard.
  10. “Radiance” by Peter Boyer (performed by the London Symphony Orchestra) – This is, to me, “The Love Theme of Ewan and Tizzy.” I always visualize, as the piece’s final strains spread out, the moment when the two of them are sitting on Elsewhere’s beach together, eyes locked and hands resting on each other’s cheeks.
  11. “Somewhere in Paradise” by Karen Lawrence – This is Ewan and Tizzy’s “Goodbye” theme. The lyrics are so on the nose.
  12. “Waves” by Dean Lewis – If there’s a song that better nails the adolescent struggle of veering between one’s childhood self and one’s new adult mindset, I can’t think of it at the moment. Both Jack and Kyra have multiple moments when they wish they could reach back to their more innocent selves and chart a different course, along with moments in which they wish their more adult versions of themselves would stop flitting off and stick around already. I tended to listen to it more when I was writing about the moments leading up to their separation, something neither of them wanted and both dreaded, but that they couldn’t figure out a way to prevent.
  13. “Echorus” by Philip Glass (performed by Jennifer Koh, Jaime Laredo, Vinay Parameswaran, and the Curtis 20/21 Ensemble) – In my head this is called “Marianne Goes Home,” and reflects Jack’s mental state as she attempts to hold herself together after the New Casablanca Spaceport Explosion.
  14. “Piano Concert in D-Flat Major: II. Andante con anima” by Aram Khachaturian (performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi) – This is the “Theme of the Apeiros.” Try not to find it a little spooky. I dare you.
  15. “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran – Audrey returns home and tries to take up a life as a normal girl again. Harder than it looks, of course. There were some specific lines in the song that connected really well early on, but became even more fitting as the story grew in scope: “Here beside the news / Of holy war and holy need / Ours is just a little sorrowed talk,” which felt like it related to her putting aside her past with Riddick to focus on the more deadly threat of the Necromongers. There’s also a bit at the end where a background singer sings: “Any world / Is my world / Every World / Is my world,” which is oddly on the nose for a character who can move between universes, so the song became even apt as the scope of the story grew.

Thank you again, everyone, for reading and accompanying me on this adventure. I hope you like the next leg of the journey, too!

—Ardath Rekha, January 26, 2025

The Changeling Game, Chapter 97

Title: The Changeling Game (Formerly Identity Theft)
Author: Ardath Rekha
Chapter: 97/98
Fandom: Pitch Black (2000); The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004)
Rating: X
Warnings: Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language, strong sexual content
Category: Het
Pairing: Riddick/Jack
Summary: Jack B. Badd gets married, and goes to war.
Disclaimer: The characters and events of Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury are not mine, but belong to Universal Studios. I just wish I were in charge of their fates. No money is being made off of this. I’m writing strictly for love of the story.
Feedback: Absolutely, the more the better! Shred me, whip me, beat me, make me feel grammatical! I post “rough,” so I can always use the help. 😉

97.
The Rise of Dame Riddick

“It’s okay,” Kyra told Jack as they sat by the stream, watching Elodie play. “I understand. He was yours first, anyway.”

Somehow that just made Jack feel even more guilty.

“You understand, huh?” Jack asked. “I’m not sure I do yet. I’m getting married in the morning and part of me is like… what the hell just happened here?”

Kyra laughed and shook her head. “It’s not that complicated. He’s like me. Mostly stays away from connections to other people, but when one forms… it’s everything.

Jack had to admit that made sense. “Still…”

“I’m not upset, Jack. I barely knew him. Most of what I thought I knew came from you, so…” She shrugged. “It was more a bond with you than him. In reality, I only really knew him for about a day.”

“I’m not all that far ahead of you, though. Realtime, not just thinking about him or imagining him, I’ve known him for maybe two weeks.”

“Longer than you actually knew either of your other Great Crushes, though,” Kyra pointed out, a wicked sparkle in her eyes.

“Hey! Not fair,” Jack laughed. “It’s just… all really fast.”

“It’s been building for centuries.” Kyra looked out across the woodland field.

It was, Jack knew, a place that neither of them had ever been or imagined. But her new, extended senses had allowed her to bring them there, to the rustic cabin where Michael was hiding her mother and little sister. They stood on the other side of a threshold, unseen observers with no actual physicality, but it was comforting to see that Elodie was safe and well.

“I remember Joren,” Kyra continued after a reflective moment. “He talked, a lot, about the importance of doing great things for humanity. You ever notice how great things are hardly ever good things? He set this all in motion. And now here we are, four hundred-some-odd years later, and time’s running out. Everything’s fast now. Or, at least, out there it is.”

“And in here? How are you holding up?” It was something she worried about, even if the Apeiros kept telling her that Kyra was safe and even beginning to thrive in their care.

“I’m a mind without a body,” Kyra said with a smile. “Time moves differently for me, maybe. I’m not really sure.”

“I’m working on that,” Jack sighed. “Gotta get the parameters just right to call up just the right ’verse…”

“For a body?” Kyra might not really have one at the moment, but she could still raise an imaginary eyebrow. “What are the parameters you’re using?”

“Well, it’s gotta be you,” Jack told her. “I mean, one of your analogues in the U1 cluster, same genetics, same overall string vibrations, so you still have a connection to the Kirshbaum mojo. I couldn’t access those until now, but now… I’m looking for a stream where you are physically healthy, and roughly the same age you were when you died, but somehow don’t have a four-shape or five-shape attached to your shell anymore.”

“So me, but brain-dead?” Kyra asked. “Got it. Can I add a parameter?”

“Absolutely.”

“A me who never went through the shit I did. Physically, I mean. I know all your schooling, and that book you love so much, talk about how virginity is a social construct, but I want mine the fuck back so I can ‘lose’ it on my terms. If you’re shopping for a Kyra body out in the multiverse, find me one where that’s true.”

“I think I can do that,” Jack said after a moment’s thought. It was a complicated order, but not impossible. Maybe a Kyra who had never actually left Earth? “Are you asking the Apeiros for some selective editing of your memories?”

“We’ve talked about it, yeah,” Kyra said. “I want to know what happened to me, but I don’t want to remember it happening. It’s funny, though. They say that kind of stuff spreads out into other memories, too… we’ve been experimenting with how it would affect them. Haven’t quite hit on the right combo yet, if you need me to still be… well, me.

“Don’t know I’d want you to be anybody else,” Jack told her, wishing that they could hug for real rather than just simulate it in the non-physical world of the mind.

Kyra must have caught the wish. “One day soon. There’ll be nothing the two of us can’t take down together.”

They’d get to put that to the test soon, Jack was about to say, when she felt a mouth against the skin of her throat.

“Gotta go,” she told her sister. “He’s waking up. I’ll come back soon, I promise.”

“Enjoy,” Kyra said, a hint of wistfulness in her voice before she vanished. The cabin and Elodie faded away as well.

Jack opened her eyes.

She was surrounded by darkness. Riddick’s world. She could vaguely make out the vaulted ceiling of their bedroom above her. The Lord Marshal’s bed chamber was luxurious, with a plush mattress and silky sheets—apparently neither Riddick nor the man he’d ousted had extended their asceticism to their sleeping arrangements—but those sheets had been pushed to the side hours earlier. Riddick had been voracious in the wake of her hatching, maybe because he’d perceived it instead as her near-death. It appeared his ardor was returning.

He was nuzzling her throat, his hands moving over her skin. She tilted her head back, giving him better access, and began stroking his shoulders and arms. His shields were still too strong for her to pick up much of what he was thinking and feeling, but she was picking up a sense that he needed to reassure himself, yet again, that she was unharmed and hadn’t been taken from him.

She could definitely help with that.

It only took a few gentle nudges to get him to bring his mouth to hers. The hunger in his kiss was almost intimidating, but she could feel that same shadow of loss and grief behind it. He needed to know that she was safe, and safely his. That he hadn’t lost everything and everyone.

Shifting her position a little, she reached down and guided him inside her, tangling her legs with his. He groaned into her mouth as he filled her. For a moment, he went still, buried in her and holding her close.

He broke the kiss, lifting his head a little so she could see the mercury gleam of his eyes. “Jack… need you to promise me…”

Uh oh… She kept her thought shielded from him, though, reaching up to stroke his cheek. “Promise you?”

“Promise you’ll stay…”

The future shattered around them, infinite tiny variations on things to come. For an instant, in one fragment, she glimpsed him holding her hand, pain and nascent grief in his face as he hovered above her. “Fuck, Jack, why’d it have to be you…?”

It was a glimpse through the eye of the needle, she realized, her first glimpse of what might lie on the other side. If they threaded the needle successfully, managing to follow the one path that could have a future on the other side, that might be what waited for them.

Can’t look that far ahead, she warned herself. We’re all dead if we don’t thread the needle. Whatever’s on the other side will be a better fate than that, any­way…

But Riddick was still waiting for her. For her promise. What promise could she safely give him, knowing what was to come?

“I’ll always be with you,” she murmured, and felt him flinch.


It took a long time to soothe him, and she wasn’t sure she really did. By the time they were spent, “morning” had arrived on the Basilica and the sounds of activity in the corridor outside their rooms had begun to filter in. Riddick rose, hints of agitation still swirling around him, and disappeared into the massive bathroom for a few moments before emerging again, showered and dressed. He kissed her hungrily, gazing down at her with an expression that suggested he was struggling against the impulse to demand another promise from her, before his customary deadpan and smirk settled into place.

“I’m gonna go make sure everything’s ready,” he told her. “Don’t sleep in too long.”

“I’ll get up,” she laughed, hoping she didn’t sound nervous, “soon as I can remember how to walk.”

That got a genuine chuckle out of him. He was gone a moment later, his armor still piled on his desk in the outer room.

Well, at least he no longer feels like he has to have it on all the time, right? She sat up in bed, groaning. “Lucy? You around?”

I am here, sister.

“Is he okay? He doesn’t let me hear what he’s thinking.”

He believes you were in danger of death yesterday. It didn’t help that he had only just experienced Kyra’s death from her perspective, courtesy of my brother’s minions.

“Oh.” That definitely explained his need to hold onto her so tightly. His need for promises. Maybe it even explained this wedding business…

Are you uncertain? There was a hint of worry in Lucy’s mental voice.

“I dunno—” Jack stopped herself, struggling not to laugh. “I mean, I guess that means I am uncertain. You said that marrying him has no effect on the outcome of the war. Are you sure about that? He seems to need it a whole lot.

She climbed out of bed as she talked to her sister, padding into the bathroom. She would shower, clear her head, maybe catch up with Vanessa, Poly, and Lola for a little while—

There was something different about the rooms, she suddenly thought as she turned on the water for her shower head.

I have studied the streams. Marrying him neither prevents nor ensures the successful “threading” of the “needle,” as you have taken to thinking of it. Bringing Kyra back supersedes it in every way.

“It doesn’t even affect his commitment to the plan?”

It does not.

“So,” Jack concluded after a moment as she washed her hair, “I’m not doing it for the whole multiverse-saving thing. I’m doing it because he needs it.”

This is where I grow concerned, little sister. What do you need?

“Shit. I don’t know,” Jack groaned, leaning her head back into the water stream to rinse her hair. “A quiet life. Quieter. I wanted to study sociology and linguistics at Khair Eddine University, maybe even—”

She couldn’t talk about that, couldn’t think about that, didn’t dare articulate it.

“…teach one or both of those subjects one day, myself,” she continued after a pause spent soaping up. “Go exploring. Find new people and new creatures and get to know them. Watch Elodie grow up and make sure she can do and be anything she wants. Talk to my cats. Be one of Toal’s independent operatives. Run around the galaxy with Kyra. Rescue Riddick back after all the times he rescued me. None of it really fits together anyway.”

Is that last one what you’re trying to do now?

“Maybe. I don’t know. I love him…” She turned into the water stream again, rinsing off. “It just still feels really fast. But last night and this morning, I could also feel how… scared of losing me he is. I don’t know what to do about that.”

Except for binding yourself to him in this way.

“I guess.” Jack reached for the water valve and stopped, frowning. “I keep having this weird feeling that something’s watching me. I mean, aside from you.”

You are six-dimensional now, Lucy reminded her. You had noticed before that this ship is straddling two thresholds and exists in three ’verses. There was one you couldn’t touch before now, but now you can.

That was right; the activities of the last few days had pushed that to the side. Jack focused, concentrating on her strange new awarenesses, and put her hand into the stream of water still flowing from the shower. It was touching her, flowing in U1… but where else? She let her senses follow the water…

…and, with a delighted gasp, let her body follow.

It was, and wasn’t, the same room. She found herself hopping as she crossed the threshold, her feet coming down on wet, mossy turf that raised the ground level by a few inches. The walls of the shower room still surrounded her, but—

She was in a garden.

Around her, in a semi-orderly tangle, bushes and vines grew, blossoms adorning them. One bush rustled and a small head poked out, black eyes like shining beads peering at her. A mouse? Something buzzed past and she turned her head, focusing on a little bird, its plumage brilliant yellow, that passed fearlessly close to her and darted through the shower stream.

Other birds perched in the area, watching her with suspicion and looking with longing at the stream of water.

What is this place? Jack asked Lucy as she stepped aside. Immediately a dozen birds mobbed the artificial waterfall, flapping their wings as they bathed beneath it.

As I understand it, the Moribund attempted to make the Tenth Crusade straddle the entire U1 cluster, but he did not have the strength. He did, however, manage to connect the ship to both U1 and what I suppose you might call U1-a. His test of that connection was to release the plants and animals that had been stored for the ship’s arrival at Delubrum, but only in U1-a. The entire ship is naturalized by them… but, again, only in this ’verse. As his minions grow more connected to him, they begin to be able to see it. Most of them take it as proof of the existence of their Underverse.

Jack left her shower running for the birds and ventured back into the large bathroom area. A huge hummock of vegetation marked the location of the statue she’d evicted from U1. Some of its leaves were browning.

“Shit, when I moved the statues partly into Wonderland, I froze the plants growing on them here, didn’t I?”

They will recover.

“Are all the ships in the Armada like this?”

The ones manufactured with the construction equipment that had been on board the Tenth Crusade, yes. The rest exist only in U1. If you do, indeed, need to hide children from those who were too enthused by Zhylaw’s crusade against them, you could do so here.

Aside from the frostbite she’d inadvertently inflicted on a few of the vines, the place seemed almost Edenic. “Is there food here?”

Many of the plants that were sown throughout the ship were intended for agriculture. And there are many of the original food synthesis machines here. My brother removed them from U1 altogether, once he wished his minions to become raiders who relied on the resources they plundered rather than things they could make for themselves. I have discussed this with him, and he has agreed to permit humans to occupy this ’verse. Human children, anyway.

“Why couldn’t I come here before?” Jack focused for a moment, by the table she had claimed as her own, and pulled her towel and comb through from U1.

It is part of the U1 cluster. A minor variant upon the world you know. To consciously navigate the variants within a universe’s flow cluster, you must have a six-shape, not just a five-shape, or you will get lost. The way a handful of the Demons did, to their misfortune, when they were exposed to so-called Kirshbaum rays.

Jack nodded, setting the comb back down in U1 and walking over to the closet she had taken over. She could feel the subtle differences between the two versions of the ’verse, and was certain she could tell them apart and move between them… but if the Demons had only been two ’verses wide when they encountered the “K-rays,” they might have swiftly vanished from their originating ’verse and been unable to find their way back from one of its variants.

“This is important, isn’t it?” she asked Lucy. “Being able to feel the different streams in the cluster. I’m gonna need to make sure that the main U1 stream stays on the course that’ll let us thread the needle.”

Yes. And you will need to pay attention to which courses of action unravel the variants in the stream. And they are unraveling.

“Already?”

Since the day the first apeirochoron was made. Whole branches of the cluster died that day, and most of the branches created since then have been increasingly limited in how they could form. Joren Kirshbaum stole infinity from the multiverse and locked it into a box.

“More like Pandora’s box than I realized,” Jack muttered, drawing her chosen outfit from U1 to…

Fuck it. Eden it is.

She hadn’t put names on many of the ’verses she had access to, but if the shoe fit…

There were abundant signs that the plants and animals had adjusted their habits to deal with the way that things were moved around, and doors were opened and closed, in the suite. Jack was amused to realize that the mattress and sheets currently on the bed must have been looted in the centuries since; in Eden, the bedframe was empty and filled with a raspberry patch… and what appeared to be a small cherry tree.

A few of the raspberries were ripe and hadn’t yet been eaten by wildlife. They tasted wonderful.

“I’m gonna need to set aside some time to explore this whole place,” she told Lucy. “Find those food machines you men­tioned… make sure they work… and make sure there are good places for any kids the Necros bring back to use as rooms. That are actually comfortable. Can’t have them sleeping on raspberry patches.”

Do not get too distracted by the children. The battle will soon be joined.

“I know.” She sighed. “I need to get back to U1, don’t I?”

Perhaps not quite yet.

“Why not?”

Come with me.

She could see Lucy, almost, her eyes catching glimpses of a shadow here, a leg there, the sparkle of eyes…

“Okay,” Jack said, following her out of the suite.

“Weird,” she heard Nichelle of the Ennead Kids say on the other side of the threshold. “Did you just see that door open and close on its own?”

“Oh, like you don’ already know we livin’ on a haunted ship,” Malik retorted with a snort.

Jack found herself struggling to contain her laughter, wondering if they might hear her across the threshold.

You like them a great deal, Lucy observed.

“You bet I do. Wish I’d had friends like them when I was back in school in Settlement Point.”

You were very lonely then.

“Yeah. I keep wishing I’d just said fuck it to all the overcautious bullshit and brought Kyra back there with me. Maybe when MilitAIre caught me out, his plans for keeping me safe and my secrets hidden could’ve included her. And then she’d never have gotten hurt again. Let alone killed.”

Perhaps not. But then what would have drawn Riddick into battle against Zhylaw, to break his power? This war cannot be won without Riddick, because it cannot be won without the Necromongers and the Furyans standing together against the Demons of the Darkness.

“I hate it when the best possible outcome is so fucking brutal,” Jack muttered.

When the war is won, all possible outcomes will be able to manifest again. Every possibility will play out in some ’verse. The sorrow will be balanced by the joy. For every ’verse where something has gone wrong, there will be another where it has gone right. The true nature of infinity will unfold again, there will always be one more ’verse where things can go a different way.

“That what we’re fighting for?”

Part of it.

It was an alluring thought. If she succeeded in threading the needle, following the one path that could break the power of the Kirshbaum dynasty and annihilate the substance used to make apeirochorons, wherever it was found… worlds could bloom again. Other possibilities could unfold. A girl named Audrey MacNamera could grow up somewhere peaceful, maybe follow a dream of scholarship to a beautiful new world and the arms of—

“There is always one more ’verse,” she whispered to herself. It was as close as she could come to a promise.

Lucy, she realized, was leading her toward the throne room.

“Is that what the afterlife really is?” she found herself asking after a moment. “Our four-shapes, or five- or six-shapes, disconnect from our shells and connect up with all the other ’verses we exist in? We get the chance to live out our days in other ways?”

Perhaps. Or perhaps, in time, you become aware enough of those other lives that your consciousness moves past them to the shape that is formed by their totality, and you hatch into the next shape yet.

“Is that what happened to you and the other Apeiros?”

Yes. And no. We are still bounded by shells. Most of us. Shirah surrendered her shell centuries ago and is carried in the shells of her children. They bear her name in turn. She does not feed on them the way—

Lucy stopped, and Jack could swear she saw a shiver pass over her sister’s n-shape.

“The way the Moribund pulls energy from the Necromongers?”

Yes. She feeds her children power, instead, and strengthens them so that they can bear and wield it. Those who can wield the most are candidates to become the next Lord or Lady Shirah, and have their four-shapes merged with her six-shape to continue on with her forever.

“So it’s symbiotic instead of parasitic?” Jack nodded. She remembered Lucy calling Michael a lightbearer, and the power he’d blasted into her to save her life had felt strangely intimate. “When the Apeiros aboard the Scarlet Matador died, what did she do to us? You said something, a while back, about seeding yourselves into others at death. Is that what she did?”

Yes. And no. Her six-shape was trapped inside the apeirochoron. No part of herself could escape, except the …“esper”… part that each of us has, that can use the wiring and communication system embedded in each box to reach out to each other and stay in contact. The part we used to make contact with you, when we felt you moving ships during your great battle. All that she could do was hatch you into your five-shapes by making the ship straddle two ’verses… and whisper into your minds a little at her end, hoping some of you would hear her and understand. As you and Kyra did. As the smallest of the others on board, Lailah, Abdul, and Farida, now do. Those three were still so close to their own hatchings that they are learning quickly. Had my sister been free of her box when she died, she could have seeded all of you with far more power than that.

The throne room, as Jack followed Lucy into it, had been transformed. The writhing ugliness that she had seen when she’d been brought before Riddick, with its spiked pillars and statues depicting suffering, was hidden beneath heaps of vegetation. Vines climbed from level to level, garlanding the formerly stark room with blossoms. Birds and insects flew between the flowers.

“Does the Moribund like how the ship looks on this side?” Jack found herself gasping. “Because it’s beautiful.

He does. And he is aware that you have paid him a compliment and is… disgruntled about it.

“So that’s really all there is to it?” she heard Riddick asking. It pulled her away from her questions about the Moribund as she focused on him instead.

He was sitting on the throne, his three top officers standing near him. Vaako, Toal, and Scales, she recalled. Toal looked like a younger and slimmer version of his father. All three men seemed to have relaxed around Riddick, some of the formality they’d shown him previously falling away.

“That’s as much as any Lord Marshal has ever done or said, yes,” Toal said, smiling. “There are no vows, either way, other than the promise to keep her as your own until Underverse Come.”

“My older brother was preparing to get married when the Armada arrived on Sunna Prime,” Scales told the group, grinning. “After seeing what he had to deal with, getting ready for that—hall rentals! Meal tastings! Picking out invitations and arguing over which guests would sit where, ye gods!—I am rather glad that it’s so much simpler here.”

“Simpler, yeah,” Riddick mused. “But is it strong enough?”

“What man could ever take her from you?” Vaako asked, frowning and cocking his head.

“I can think of three,” Riddick grumbled.

“Who?” Toal bristled on his behalf.

“First,” Riddick said after a moment, “her father. John MacNamera. Doubt he’d take kindly to his daughter bein’ involved with someone like me. Second, her C.O.”

Toal started, looking surprised.

“Yeah,” Riddick continued, nodding at Toal, “she has a C.O. His name is Michael. He’s a ‘Furyan Warrior’ like me, too, and there’s pretty much nothin’ she wouldn’t do for him if he asked, let alone commanded. And third… and this is the real kicker… if true love actually exists, then hers is named Ewan.”

Vaako was the one who seemed most discomfited by that.

“He ever comes knockin’, she’s probably gone.” Riddick rubbed his temples for a moment before he continued. “Ain’t nothin’ I can do about any of ’em, either. Raise a hand against one of ’em and I lose her even faster. Girl’s way too forgiving a lot of the time, but that’d be beyond her limits. So if any of you were starting to think of ways to do me a favor, you put it out of your mind right now. She’d know.”

Both Toal and Scales deflated a little in response. Jack felt some tension leave her body when they did.

Was he right?

If her father showed up, and demanded that she leave Riddick’s bed, would she? If Michael showed up and told her that being Riddick’s wife compromised her mission objectives, could he order her to break things off with him? And if Ewan—

She still couldn’t let herself think about Ewan. Not here. Not now.

I am going to thread the needle. I have to thread the needle. Everybody dies if I don’t. That’s my only mission. That’s my only goal. The rest, all of it, is something that has to be gained or lost for that pur­pose…

But, she decided, it didn’t have to be the only thing she did. As long as it didn’t compromise that mission, she could be Dame Riddick, be the touchstone he needed. Even if it didn’t help her mission, it would help him…

…and it was, she decided, what she wanted to do. She might have fallen in love with more than one man—four, if she was being honest—but he was the first she’d ever felt that way about. And maybe, once he felt more secure about their connection, the wall between them would finally come down.

So you are decided now, Lucy said after a moment.

They were walking back to the suite, Jack realized. Exactly when she’d left the throne room was hard to recall, because she had been so lost in thought.

“I am, yeah.” She focused on the hallway, empty in U1, and isomorphed back into it, leaving Eden behind for the moment. “So let’s go get ready for this wedding.”


The dress she’d chosen was the most vibrant thing she could find, made of the same odd, scaled hide that most Necromonger clothing was constructed from but in vivid shades of blue and green instead of the black that almost all of them wore. Part of her was tempted to think of it as her “mermaid dress,” but she found herself shying away from that phrase. It belonged to another part of her life that she couldn’t linger on now.

Lola, Vanessa, and Poly had all dressed up as well, shunning black for colors that subtly suggested their human status. The Ennead Kids, who had somehow taken the bits and pieces of discarded clothing and jewelry from the tables and assembled them into high-end versions of the outfits they’d worn when she’d first seen them, were eager to get things started. They preceded her into the throne room and started performing an a cappella wedding march as they entered the great hall.

If you’re really doing this, the Moribund grumbled, I suppose I will have to make my minions aware.

I’m really doing it. And what I said before is still true. You grew a beautiful garden on the other side of the threshold.

I’m sure the larvae you bring on board the ship will enjoy it, he grumped. It was, she decided, as close to a thank-you for the compliment as she could expect from him.

Riddick had risen to his feet and was standing in front of the throne. His three would-be Firsts had moved to stand at the sides of the dais. Courtiers were hurrying into the room from all directions, newly aware that something important was about to happen. From the corner of her eye, Jack spotted a familiar flutter of white on the upper level.

The gang’s all here. Let’s get this done. She gave Riddick her most dazzling smile—and even her cousins had been forced to admit it was a good one—and crossed the floor, climbing the steps to stand beside him and take his hand.

Antonio and the other Ennead Kids were making everyone clear a space in front of the throne.

“This one’s for you, Jack B. Badd!” He called out as the crowd calmed.

She could feel the shock throughout the room as the Ennead Kids began to perform. How long had it been since anything of the kind had happened in the Basilica? Had anything like it ever happened there?

Nine voices wove together to build a stunning, vibrant tune as the group broke into coordinated dance moves, spinning and flipping without a single missed beat or sour note. Jack could feel Lucy’s fascination, and even the Moribund himself observing with curiosity and reluctant admiration.

“Jackie, don’t you know,” Antonio sang, “you’re up in his soul…”

She knew the tune intimately, and knew they’d chosen it on purpose. It went in a different direction, though… startling her as it painted an accurate picture of just what she was even doing on the Basilica.

“Thread the needle, Jackie!
We know you’ll find the way…”

Did you tell them about that? she asked Lucy, stunned.

I did. Surprise!

More of this would not be entirely amiss among my servants, the Moribund grudgingly admitted.

The song concluded with a flourish, the entire troupe bowing down before the throne, before her and Riddick. He looked positively energized as he stepped forward and addressed the room. Whatever misgivings he might have seemed to have been set aside.

“Got a few announcements to make to all of you,” he told the room. “First up, new instructions for all ships goin’ out on raids from now on. You already know that nobody’s bein’ brought back as a ‘breeder’ anymore. Nobody’s bein’ cut out as ‘useless,’ either. Everyone’s a convert except kids. But here’s the new rule where babies an’ kids are concerned. You bring ’em back. Alive. And once you do that, you bring ’em here. And you give ’em to her.

He pointed at Jack, smirking.

“What will she do with them?” called out one of the lords, looking entirely too scandalized for someone wearing tiny skulls for decoration.

“Ain’t your concern,” Riddick said, his grin widening dangerously. Maybe he was hoping that man, in particular, would raise a fuss and could be smacked down.

The man seemed to know it, too, deflating.

“Who is she?” someone else called from the crowd.

“Glad you asked,” Riddick told them, taking her hand. “I present to you: Dame Riddick. She will stand by my side from now ’til Underverse Come. And you are all to treat anything she says as comin’ from me.

And apparently, that really was all there was to it.

The Ennead Kids began another song a moment later as various Lords and Dames of the Armada approached the throne to formally present themselves to Jack. Within a minute or two, Dame Vaako appeared at her side, putting an arm around her and introducing her to many of them, murmuring small asides to her about them as well. Riddick, after a weighing glance, allowed it, smiling and shaking his head. Jack focused on pairing names with faces and memorizing them, getting a sense of the minds behind each.

Those who had risen to the level of Lord or Dame, she realized, were the members of the Armada who needed less supervision and correction from the Quasi-Dead or the Moribund himself, naturally inclined to follow the path he had set before them. Those most inclined to resist his will were buried in the lower ranks, weighted down by telepathic soporifics. A very few among the highest-ranking, most of them older officers, could see a little way into Eden.

“Here she comes now,” Riddick suddenly growled beside her. “You ready for this?”

“Guess I’d better be,” Jack answered him, taking a deep breath.

Walking toward her, flanked by two guards, was a familiar figure dressed in white. Jack took in the white hair, the imperious posture, the elegant veil and white dress that her mother would have said was meant to upstage a bride at her wed­ding—

Yeah, good luck with that.

—and the hidden darkness masked by her whiter-than-white outward appearance.

Irena Kirshbaum, emissary of the Quintessa Corporation, approached the throne under guard and laden down by chains made of kirshbaumium. As their gazes met, Jack watched Irena’s eyes fill with confused recognition.

Game on, Jack thought as the two of them locked eyes.

The woman’s breath hitched. Then she squared her shoulders and stepped forward, offering her hand to Jack. This time, when they made contact, it was she who flinched, maybe sensing the dizzying number of ’verses that Jack was connected to.

“Aereon of the ‘Elemental race,’” Riddick drawled, his formal words undercut by the irony lacing his tone, “allow me to introduce my wife, Dame Riddick.”

It was all Jack could do to control the sudden urge to smirk as Irena Kirshbaum’s eyes widened, just a little, with imperfectly concealed horror. Had she even realized who she’d attempted to murder just the day before? Or that she had ensured the destruction of her family dynasty by doing so?

Instead, she gave “Aereon” her sunniest and most guileless smile, pure innocence—pure theater but who would ever know—as if they were new friends meeting for the first time instead of the deadliest of enemies.

Game fucking on, Demon of the Darkness.

For a moment, she even felt the barest hint of the Moribund’s gleeful approval.

 

The story will continue in
Song of Many ’Verses

The Changeling Game, Chapter 96

Title: The Changeling Game (Formerly Identity Theft)
Author: Ardath Rekha
Chapter: 96/?
Fandom: Pitch Black (2000); The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004)
Rating: X
Warnings: Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language
Category: Het
Pairing: Riddick/Jack
Summary: Riddick fights to save Jack’s life, only to find the game turned inexplicably on its head as the newly-“hatched” Jack appears.
Disclaimer: The characters and events of Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury are not mine, but belong to Universal Studios. I just wish I were in charge of their fates. No money is being made off of this. I’m writing strictly for love of the story.
Feedback: Absolutely, the more the better! Shred me, whip me, beat me, make me feel grammatical! I post “rough,” so I can always use the help. 😉

96.
Let No Creature Put Asunder

Where is she? Riddick demanded from Lucy as he ran. He was aware of footsteps in pursuit of his; from the sound of it, Vaako wasn’t far behind. He heard Toal and Scales fall in as he passed them. The trio of would-be Firsts, insisting on following him into whatever crisis he was dealing with. Damn it.

She is near the engine room of the Tenth Crusade, but not in it, Lucy told him.

Near but not in. Practically on top of the Moribund’s lair but not inside it. Still closer than he liked.

What have you done to her? he demanded, letting both Apeiros hear him. He was nearly there…

We have done nothing. This was set in motion by someone else.

“Riddick!” Officer Lola was running towards him along the very route he planned to take. “Jack is in—”

“Trouble, yeah. Got the memo.” Sometimes he thought it ought to be the girl’s slogan. He charged past Lola; she fell in with the others behind him. Hang on, Jack! I’m coming!

“What can we do to help?” Vaako called from behind him. They were passing the Tenth Crusade plaque. Nearly there… nearly—

He saw Dame Vaako first, lying on the floor of what looked like some kind of control room, sobbing. Past her, through a steelglass panel—

“Fuck!”

Jack had her back to him. She was holding something against her chest with one arm. Her other hand was extended, palm forward, toward an open reactor core.

Riddick jumped over Dame Vaako’s prone body and started punching buttons on the control panel, calling up every shutdown procedure he could remember. And he could remember a hell of a lot of them.

“Jack!” None of the codes were working yet. He tried to keep his voice calm, reassuring. How does she get into all of these messes? “I’m gonna get you out of there!”

“This is my fault,” A female voice hiccupped behind him.

“What the fuck did you do, Dame Vaako?” He spared a glance back at her. Her husband had his arms around her and was frowning in confusion.

“It wasn’t her,” Jack rasped from the other side of the glass. The last time he’d heard her voice sound like that, he’d thought she was mourning Johns’ death when she was really preparing herself for her own.

“What happened, Chantesa?” Vaako murmured, stroking his wife’s wet cheek. Scales frowned at them and looked away, moving past them to examine the control panel. Toal moved to another of the panels and began calling up readings.

“It just started all on its own,” the Dame sobbed, leaning her head against her husband’s shoulder. “The controls have always been dead before now.”

What the fuck? What was that woman doing, skulking around in the bowels of the Basilica? She was lucky the Moribund hadn’t eaten her.

“I tried to find an emergency failsafe,” she continued, her voice still hitching but increasingly coherent, “but there’s nothing…

She looked genuinely devastated, but she’d run—and tried to run—so many games in the last year that it was impossible for him to believe her tears were real. “Things,” he growled at her, “don’t just start all on their own.”

“I was right next to her when they did,” Lola told him, forcing open a cabinet to the side. Behind it, winking lights and meters worked quietly to destroy his universe. “She never touched anything until she started trying to turn the system back off.”

“These readings make no sense,” he heard Toal murmuring to Scales. “Only two thirds of the radiation monitors in the room are registering anything. The others aren’t dead—they seem to be working—but it’s as if there’s a wall up.”

A wall. Jack was isomorphing the radiation away from herself before it could touch her.

Clever girl, brilliant girl… No wonder she wasn’t trying to talk to them. She would need all her focus to do something like that. But how long would she be able to keep it up before she ran out of stamina…?

He had to figure out a way to get her out of there before then.

Something flickered in the corner of his eye, a familiar shape he couldn’t look at long. Lucy was inside the core chamber with Jack, almost visible, racing across the room and up the core pillar—

“What in God’s name is that?” Vaako shouted behind him.

Riddick tried to follow her movements with his eyes, tried to see what she was doing, but his visual cortex wouldn’t cooperate. Was she going to try to rescue Jack? Was there a way to reclose the core from inside the chamber?

But the Apeiros seemed to simply be perching on it.

What the fuck is going on? Lucy? Moribund? You said Jack wouldn’t die!

She won’t. We are busy right now.

Did that fucking thing just shush him?

I have just about had enough of your shit—

“You and me both,” Jack said on the other side of the glass. For a moment he thought she was agreeing with him. She took several long, deep breaths while around him everyone entered random commands on various panels to try to rescue her. “Better be right about this…”

He watched in horror as she dropped the hand that she’d been holding up.

“Jack, no!” he heard himself—and Lola, and Dame Vaako—shouting.

“Hell,” Toal said beside him. “Those sensors that weren’t picking up radiation all just spiked. Whatever wall was up just—”

On the other side of the glass, Jack, her hair blowing back as if a gust of wind had struck her, reached forward toward the pillar, and toward Lucy. One dark, glittering leg stretched out from the mind-breaking form above the unshielded core, touching Jack’s fingertip and making Riddick think, for a second, of a fucked-up version of a famous painting on the ceiling of Old Earth’s Sistine Chapel, and then—

“Fuck!” Riddick slammed his hands against the glass, not understanding what he was seeing.

Aside from the unshielded core, the inner chamber was empty.

Jack and Lucy had vanished.

“How is this possible?” Scales gasped beside him.

How the fuck in­deed…? Riddick turned around, fists clenched, and stared down at Dame Vaako. “Why… the fuck… were you down here with Jack?”

The normally imperious woman wiped at her eyes, leaning against her husband. “She… she was looking for a book. Written by, uh… Minnie something? One of a set of three, and she had the other two. I…” She sniffled, closing her eyes for a moment. New tears spilled out when she opened them back up. “I used to use this place as a retreat, when I was first brought here.”

She rose unsteadily to her feet and walked over to the glass, pointing.

“I would go in there to commune with our god. Sometimes I brought books with me, too…”

In one corner of the room, where she was pointing, a small lamp glowed beside several pillows, a blanket, and a scattered pile of books.

Not as empty as I thought…

“The book she wanted was one I’d brought here. So we came down here to get it.” She closed her eyes again, leaning her forehead against the steelglass. “I don’t understand what happened, how it happened, but… I think it is my fault, Riddick… Tokoloshe said I’d made a mistake and been be­trayed…”

“Tokoloshe?”

“Our god,” she half-whimpered.

The Moribund was talking to a human? Riddick could have sworn the fucker hated all of humanity. Aside from maybe the Quasi-Dead. And he had let her give him a name? A delimiter?

Not important right now. “So what mistake did you make?”

Dame Vaako swallowed before turning to look at him. “I visited the Elemental witch today. She was struggling to do even simple things with those chains on and I… I…”

Fuckin’ hell. “You thought you’d ask her guards to unchain her.”

She nodded.

“Because what trouble could a sweet little old lady who walks through fuckin’ walls like they’re not even there get up to?” He didn’t even realize he was moving until his hand was wrapped around the Dame’s neck and he slammed her back against the wall. “I had those chains on her for a reason!”

“For God’s sake, Riddick—” Lola started.

“Lord Vaako,” he growled, cutting her off, “give me one good reason why I shouldn’t snap Chantesa’s neck right now.”

“Because,” Vaako said quietly, “I love her.”

Well, fuck.

“Sounds like a damn good reason to me,” Jack said from somewhere behind him. “Please let go of my friend, Riddick.”

The hand that had been gripping Dame Vaako’s throat suddenly felt numb and weightless. The woman, no longer pinned to the wall, crumpled to the floor, gasping and coughing. Vaako dropped to her side, gathering her into his arms, even before Riddick could make himself turn around. The others, he was aware, were staring, dumbfounded, at—

Jack. Standing in the outer doorway as if she’d never been trapped in a reactor, looking perfectly normal. She was still holding a large book in one hand.

“How are you here?” Toal asked her while he was still struggling to find words. “How are you alive? We all saw you trapped inside the core chamber.”

“The core isn’t lethal,” she said with a ready smile, as if the soldier had asked her how she’d trained for one of her half-marathons. “I guess I needed its energy boost to be able to hatch into my—hey! Easy there, big guy!”

Riddick had his arms wrapped around her, holding her to him in an embrace that was almost rib-crackingly tight. In that moment, he didn’t know if he’d ever manage to let go again, but he had just enough self-control left to keep from squeezing too hard. He was shaking and wasn’t sure if he could find a way to make that stop.

“Don’t ever scare me like that again,” he whispered, wishing he had her alone in his room. He needed to explore every inch of her to be sure she was—

“No promises,” she murmured.

Fuck! He pulled back, staring down into her face.

Her smile was wry and apologetic. “I know what’s going on now. What’s really going on. This is a war, and I’m gonna have to do some scary shit to help us win it.”

“What war do you speak of?” Vaako asked, still kneeling beside his wife.

Jack shrugged. “The war against the Demons—”

“—of the Darkness,” Dame Vaako gasped. “I remember them from my dreams. Dreams Tokoloshe would send me.”

Toal, Scales, Vaako, and Lola all had looks on their faces as though they were trying to recall similar dreams of their own, struggling with a kind of déjà vu.

“Yeah,” Jack continued, seemingly unsurprised by their reactions. “It’s almost time to take them on. Speaking of which, someone should really order a security lockdown of the shuttles in the starboard bay in the next few minutes. All of them, really, but probably those first. There’s just no telling who might start crawling around in one of them.”

Scales gave Riddick a confused and inquiring look.

“Hell if I know what she means,” he growled, every bit as confused, “but go see to it.”

“My Lord,” Scales said with a nod, and hurried out of the room.

“Been meaning to ask why nobody around here uses comms,” he found himself growling. “Somethin’ against them?”

“The Quasi-Dead are our comms,” Toal said after giving him a quizzical look. “Instantaneous across the light years, unlike the delayed systems used by this upstart Federacy. And the closer we are to the Basilica, the more clearly we can feel our god’s will. What else is needed?”

“Oh, I dunno…” Exasperation flooded through Riddick. I’m supposed to turn a zombie horde into an actual army? “Tactical updates. Warnings about enemy movements. Fuckin’ small talk with friends. You really don’t do any of that shit?”

“If it’s important to us, we pray.” Toal’s voice had taken on a patient tone Riddick remembered from his grade school days. “And if it’s important to Him, He answers.”

Lord and Dame Vaako nodded in solemn agreement. Lola, he was glad to see, was on Team What The Fuck right along with him, concealing her bafflement behind a mostly-convincing deadpan. It was getting tempting to introduce the lot of them to their god right that moment.

“To be fair,” Jack said, “it is a communication method almost nobody outside of the Armada can eavesdrop on. Or steal.”

She slipped out of the loosened circle of his arms and walked over to the control panel, entering commands on its main console. On the other side of the window, the pillar containing the core began to close and lower itself down toward the floor.

“You know how to work the panel?” he asked, surprised.

“I do now, yeah.” She pressed several more controls as the pillar vanished into the floor, and Riddick heard a series of heavy bolts draw back in the metal shield door. It swung slowly open.

“Is that safe?” Lola asked behind him. “That room was just irradi­ated—”

“With ‘Kirshbaum rays,’” Jack said, turning around and smiling. “Totally harmless to baseline humans, might even make some of you hatch into your five-shapes, if you hang out in them long enough.”

“I thought this was a nuclear reactor,” Dame Vaako said in a soft voice.

“Oh, it’s designed like one, sure.” Jack grinned. “Kirshbaum barely understood what he had here or what it was doing. He just figured out how to make it do what he wanted, filed a patent, and slapped his name on it. Riddick, where are the apeirochorons the Moribund’s been collecting?”

“How did you—?” He hadn’t told her about that part of the deal; he’d remember if he had.

Figure it out later, he told himself.

“There’s a storage room near here. They’re inside.” What did she want with them?

“Good. Once your guest of honor is tucked away again, we need to bring them here and get them into the chamber. Their occupants are going torpid.”

“Sorry,” Lola cut in. “What are you two talking about?”

“It’s a long story,” Jack said even as Riddick drew a breath. “I’m still piecing it all together. Got a whole lot of new stuff in my head.”

She’d only been gone a minute or two. What the fuck…? “Where did you go, Jack? When you vanished from the core containment chamber. Where were you?”

“At first it wasn’t a where,” she told him. “It was a when. About four hundred-twenty years ago in this very room. I got to see how everything began. Went a few other places after that.”

“Time travel?” Lola asked. “You’re talking about time travel here.”

Jack shrugged. “I can move in six dimensions now, and time’s the fourth. Just gotta be careful with that one. It’s where most of the bifurcations happen. When they can, anymore.”

There was a weird, ominous note in her words. He opened his mouth to ask—

“My Lord.” A Necromonger soldier had appeared in the doorway. “Commander Scales reports that the Elemental, Aereon, has been captured while attempting to steal and launch one of the shuttles in the starboard bay. He is returning her to her assigned quarters and wanted me to tell you that he’s having the chains put back on her.”

Jack knew. Huh. He spared her a quizzical glance before answering the soldier. “Tell him thank you, and good work.”

“Yes, My Lord.” The man bowed and departed.

“Comms. I’m tellin’ you.” He looked around at the others. “That could have been a comm call, not some soldier walkin’ across the whole ship to talk to me.”

“If you accepted our god into your heart,” Dame Vaako said with pious solemnity, “He would be your ‘comms.’”

That how it works, Moribund? You carryin’ messages for your Armada?

He could feel the creature’s offended outrage. They are my servants. I inform them of how to serve me. I am no courier they can whistle for at will.

Seems like you have a more personal connection to Dame Vaako here.

Apparently, it was possible to growl telepathically. Jack looked like she was suppressing laughter.

“I suddenly feel as though,” Toal said, “anointed by our god or not, He finds you quite—”

“—annoying,” the Vaakos joined him in saying.

Now that was just spooky. But he guessed it proved their point. Might also explain a little why Dame Vaako could pull some of the stunts she has, if the Moribund’s made a favorite pet of her… heh. Creature’s Pet.

Fortunately, the Moribund apparently hadn’t heard that last bit.

“We should probably get back to the newer parts of the Basilica,” Jack said, audibly still struggling not to laugh. “Chantesa, would you like any of your old things from inside the chamber? It’s going to start being closed up most of the time soon.”

“I would.” Dame Vaako climbed to her feet. The expression she turned on Jack seemed genuinely warm. “Thank you.”

Vaako glanced between the two women, looking as surprised as Riddick felt. Whatever had happened, it seemed like the Dame and Jack genuinely considered each other friends.

Shouldn’t be so surprised, I guess. Jack’ll make friends with anything that’ll let her. Even eldritch horrors and Lady Mac­Beth…

Lord Vaako ended up carrying the small lamp and a pile of books, while Dame Vaako carried pillows and blankets as they left the bowels of the Tenth Crusade for the rest of the Basilica.

“You never told me about your retreat,” Vaako murmured to his wife as they brought up the group’s rear.

“I didn’t need a retreat,” Dame Vaako answered, “after you saved me from Lord Vath.”

“So you did need saving, but not from a heretic.”

“Not a heretic, no,” Dame Vaako told him, her voice dropping. “Just a monster.”

“Ah.” Vaako was silent for a moment as they walked. “Had you told me that, at the time, I might have fought twice as hard for your sake.”

“I didn’t know that about you back then, or I would have.”

Beside Riddick, Jack had a pleased smile on her face.

The Vaakos turned off at the hallway to their quarters, Toal formally excusing himself a moment later. Riddick found himself surprised—and then wondering why he was at all surprised—when he saw the tables of discards set up outside his suite, the Ennead Kids picking through their contents while discussing dance moves and rehearsing snatches of song.

They were supposed to be a surprise, though. He glanced over at Jack.

“They did try to be discreet,” she told him, still looking amused and not at all like someone who had almost been killed just a short while before. “But I think you forgot I’d hear their thoughts even if I couldn’t hear them singing. Thank you, though. It’s really good to see them again. And get to know them better, the way I always wanted to.”

“Gonna need a moment alone with Jack,” he grumbled to Lola as they reached the doors to his—well, his and Jack’s—suite.

“Yes, Sir. I’ll be near if you need me.”

Sir. I’m a fuckin’ Sir As if “my Lord” and “my Liege” hadn’t already been bad enough…

Things had changed inside the suite, too, he saw. Someone—undoubtedly Jack—had set up the outer room as a lounge. His desk was unmolested, his armor still piled on its top, but it was surrounded by groupings of chairs, tables, lamps, and sofas, different areas for conversation and even dining. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, it looked fuckin’ cozy. Especially with the torture statue and the gruesome wall hangings long gone.

He could already see the spot that Jack had begun to nest in: one of the fancy teapots he’d seen in her memories of New Marrakesh sat on a low table beside an ornate, matching glass. The chaise next to it had a throw blanket draped across its bottom and two books leaning against its side. It was positioned to give its occupant a clear view of the room and everyone in it.

“So,” he made himself say in a calm voice, “what have you been up to since I went off, aside from… hatching?”

Jack walked over to the chaise and put her new book down with the other two. “And aside from the mess outside? Reading, mostly. Minnie Sulis’s autobiographies. I knew something was up with them, but I kept forgetting that she wasn’t just a Kirshbaum, but Joren Kirshbaum’s first cousin. I think—and maybe her diary will confirm it—I think she was the one who figured out how to access other ’verses. She had a lot of power.”

“And now your big mystery’s solved?” The whole time, he thought, the Apeiros had been suppressing her ability to put the clues together, but not his when he watched her memories. Aside from the blank spaces in those memories that he hadn’t been able to see into, either.

“Yeah. Got a plan, too, of a kind… it’s gonna take a lot of work, and more time than I’d like, but I can see a way through it.” She turned to him, a wry smile on her face. “They were right, though. Before my hatching, when I couldn’t understand what’s really needed, much less do it yet… there was no way I would have been able to be patient. Now, though—”

“This plan,” he found himself growling. “You gonna live through it?”

“All the way to the end,” she told him. “I have to.”

“And after?”

She shrugged.

God damn it… “You don’t have plans for after?”

“I can’t see that far,” she told him. “All the alternate pathways collapse to that point. On the other side, everything opens back out again. I don’t know where we’ll end up after that.”

Why did he suddenly feel like he was losing her? Like he’d already lost her, somehow? She was right in front of him, and yet—

“So,” she broke in on his thoughts, “Is the position of ‘Dame Riddick’ still one you want me to fill? ’Cause I’m in.”

An even mixture of confusion and relief flowed over him. He crossed the remaining distance between them and pulled her into his arms for a devouring kiss. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried talking about this at all.

They’d have to talk eventually, he silently admitted as he carried her into the bedroom to begin the inch-by-inch exploration of her body he’d wanted to conduct since she’d first reappeared. These ’verse-shaking matters were things that couldn’t be left unarticulated. But for the moment, he needed to forget that words existed, that worlds existed… that anything existed except her, the taste of her mouth and skin and most sensitive flesh… the exquisite feeling of being buried deep inside her… the way her body clutched at his as he brought her to her re­lease… and the pure trust in her face, eyes, and mind as he lost himself in her.

He’d already had too much taken from him, almost everything. He couldn’t lose her, too.

As much as he’d managed to be a lone wolf for years, he realized as he shuddered against her and emptied himself within her depths, he couldn’t be that anymore. He’d let every ’verse in creation fall before he allowed anything to take her away from him again.

The Changeling Game, Chapter 95

Title: The Changeling Game (Formerly Identity Theft)
Author: Ardath Rekha
Chapter: 95/?
Fandom: Pitch Black (2000); The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004)
Rating: X
Warnings: Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language, graphic violence/gore, death
Category: Het
Pairing: Riddick/Jack
Summary: Trapped with a reactor core, Jack has only one way to survive: a metamorphosis that may save many more lives than just her own.
Disclaimer: The characters and events of Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury are not mine, but belong to Universal Studios. I just wish I were in charge of their fates. No money is being made off of this. I’m writing strictly for love of the story.
Feedback: Absolutely, the more the better! Shred me, whip me, beat me, make me feel grammatical! I post “rough,” so I can always use the help. 😉

95.
Across the Threshold and Beyond the Veil

Hang on, Jack! I’m coming!

Riddick’s voice echoed in her head as the clock counted down. He wouldn’t get there in time. She already knew that.

Behind her, she could hear Chantesa sobbing in earnest. She couldn’t look back. Couldn’t say anything else to try to comfort the woman. In a few more seconds, the shielding in front of her would open.

I’ve done this with sound waves. I can do it with radiation, too, she told herself. I hope.

Jack focused on seeing the room on the other side of the threshold. The countdown was in progress over there, too; there was no escape.

Here I go… she thought, taking a deep breath and holding one hand, the hand not clutching Minnie’s diary to her chest, in front of her to delineate the boundary she wanted to create. A boundary between death and life. She had no idea how long she would be able to maintain it once she started.

I really should’ve eaten something before I came down here…

If all went well, though, she’d only have to hold out for a few minutes until the others figured out how to shut the system down.

And how often does all go well around here…?

She felt the moment when the first crack in the shielding appeared, felt the first high-energy rays racing toward her… and felt them shifting into Elsewhere as they struck the barrier she was maintaining.

“Fuck!” she heard Riddick shouting behind her. “Jack! I’m gonna get you out of there! What the fuck did you do, Dame Vaako?”

“It wasn’t her,” Jack managed to grate out, trying not to break her focus. Nobody on the other side of the glass would be able to tell what she was doing.

It is time, Audrey, Lucy said from somewhere near her.

Time for what? she asked, feeling the way that the rays were bombarding her boundary and wondering just how much longer she had to keep it in place.

Your hatching. You must let go and let it happen.

Okay, I know they don’t have chemistry and physics classes where you come from and all, Jack pointed out, but you have to know how much damage ionizing radiation would do to my body. I drop this barrier and I’m dead.

No. This isn’t ionizing radiation.

“It just started all on its own,” Dame Vaako was sobbing. “The controls have always been dead before now. I tried to find an emergency failsafe but there’s no­thing…”

“Things don’t just start all on their own,” Riddick growled.

“I was right next to her when they did,” Jack heard Lola saying. “She never touched anything until she started trying to turn the system back off.”

Damn it, it was getting harder and harder to concen­trate…

You don’t need to. The energy it’s emitting is safe. Good. Necessary. See?

Lucy skittered through the room, her n-shape almost clearly visible, and climbed up the side of the pillar.

“What in God’s name is that?” she heard Lord Vaako shout behind her.

Trust me, little sister. Your six-shape awaits you, and the answers you need. It is time. Let go, and let it touch you.

You will not die this day, the Moribund grumbled, sounding disappointed.

Or any day soon? Radiation poisoning can take a while! I could’ve sworn this was someone trying to kill me, Jack said to them, trying to will herself to let go of the barrier. She couldn’t. She was too scared to drop it.

It was. It does not know that it offered you life instead of death.

Life? In here?

Little creature, I wish I was there in your place.

“You and me both,” Jack muttered. She took a deep breath. And then another. And another. What she was about to do still scared the fuck out of her. “Better be right about this…”

She dropped her hand.

Something warm touched her, filled her, blowing her hair gently back from her face.

“Jack, no!” she heard multiple voices shouting at her from beyond the glass—

The room fragmented, reshaping into multiple iterations of itself, all visible to her. One hundred-sixty different versions of the same space, all at once, shifting out of each other’s way as she tried to take them all in. She could feel each frequency, could sense each distinct flavor of the same energy flowing through the isomorphic spaces…

She was in all of them, all at once. All of their ’verses were part of her. Her five-shape had just expanded to—

Your six-shape. Welcome, sister.

“What is this?” she asked, still feeling the energies flowing, dancing around her, penetrating her skin and somehow making her grow even more.

This is how we were fed, when we were still caged. The emissions closely replicate those that fed us when we were preparing to hatch.

“You were caged here? How?”

It is time. She must know. If she is not strong enough to know now, she never will be. Show her, ‘Lucy.’ Show her where our names come from.

Come with me, Audrey.

She lifted her hand again, in hundreds—thousands—millions of ’verses, and Lucy’s delicate, clawed tarsus touched her finger—

The door to the control room stood open. All was still and quiet. The pillar containing the core had retracted.

“Time to feed the beast!” a strange voice called.

Jack walked through the door. On its other side, a man in his late fifties, dressed in an odd uniform, was slipping a bookmark into his thick novel and setting it aside. A younger man, his clothes obviously expensive, stood in the doorway out to the hall. Neither one seemed aware of her.

“Got a funny turn of phrase there, Chap,” the older man said. “We’re just chargin’ up the Isomorph Drive, aren’t we?” He had an accent Jack had never once heard in her travels.

“If you’d met Dr. Kirshbaum, Stefan, you’d call the thing a ‘beast,’ too.” Chap—

—Chapman Marshal? Was Jack looking at Chapman Marshal? He had been dead for more than four centuries—

—walked over to a vacant seat by the control panel and touched several buttons. Behind Jack, the heavy steel door began closing.

“Core containment protocols activated,” Stefan said, pressing some buttons of his own. Jack watched each combination, committing all of them to memory. “You know, the system is something that can be fully automated. You don’t have to come down for every Jump.”

“I don’t trust it. It was feeding the damned thing way too often for my liking.”

Stefan frowned at the erstwhile king of Delubrum. “It’s an Isomorph Drive. It needs a constant energy supply during Star Jumps, doesn’t it?”

“You have no idea what it is.” Marshal lifted a book he was carrying—the same one, Jack realized, that she still held—and waved it. “Min didn’t either. Thank God Joren was in charge of the expedition and not her.”

Stefan shook his head and looked away at the control panel. “Readings indicate a deficit. It’s been getting charged on schedule, hasn’t it?”

Marshal shrugged. “It gets enough to eat. It is time for our next Star Jump, though. You can feed it as much as it wants.”

On the other side of the steelglass, the core had risen from the floor once more and was unshielding.

“K waves rising to Jump levels,” Stefan said. “Did your friend Joren name everything after himself? Kirshbaum waves? Kirshbaumium?”

“What, wouldn’t you?” Marshal laughed.

“Naphemil waves? Naphemilium?” Stefan laughed back. “I see your point. Maybe. Could’ve made a nice present for that grandson of mine when he comes out of cryo, if I had that kind of bent. We’ve attained Jump levels… huh.”

“What is it?”

“Readings are odd. After this Jump is over, I want to check the connections to the Isomorph Drive. The system is still registering a power deficit.”

“Damn thing…” Marshal’s frown was thunderous. “Fine. Increase the feed to compensate. Don’t feed it too much.”

“You talk about it like it’s alive,” Stefan observed. “In a box that size?”

“Maybe that box is bigger than you think.”

“Adjusting power levels… finally.” Stefan blew out a breath. “Flow is balancing. We can begin the Jump any time.”

A countdown appeared on the control panel.

Jump to U16 commencing in 00:17:34

“Some time soon, you really need to borrow Min’s diary and read it,” Marshal told Stefan. “Then you’d stop treating that box as if it just has circuitry inside it. You’d know it for what it really is.”

“…the hell does that mean?” Jack asked. She blinked—

—and the message on the panel had changed.

Isomorph Drive active
Jump length: 43:22:19
Jump ends in 08:14:12

Stefan was napping in the chair, alone. The lights on the panel, Jack realized, were changing color, from white to amber, amber to orange, and orange to red, in a swift cascade. The man who was supposed to be watching them had earpieces in and appeared to be oblivious to the warning chimes beginning to sound—

—until the whole room shuddered and he woke, dropping his novel to the floor.

System Overload
Isomorph Drive energy levels exceeding safe maximum
Automatic dampers have failed

“Shit!” Stefan began hitting controls.

Manual shutoff command accepted
Core retracting
WARNING: Shutoff during a Jump is not recommended

“What’s going on down there?” a voice demanded over a tinny speaker.

“I need to restart the power feed for the Isomorph Drive, Captain,” Stefan said, still flipping switches and pressing buttons. “It went into overload. I don’t know why.”

“Restart? Why the hell did you stop it in mid-Jump?”

“The whole panel went red! An overload of the magnitude I was looking at could have—”

The room rocked again as something exploded nearby. Stefan was knocked to the floor.

“What the fuck is going on, Naphemil?”

“That,” Stefan muttered, climbing to his feet. “It could’ve done that…

He didn’t bother answering his Captain, heading out of the control room at a run. Jack followed.

One room down, past the space occupied by the core, the engine room was a smoking shambles. Debris littered the ground, strange shards and splinters of what looked like stone. Other shards had pierced a variety of panels and cases in the room, starting multiple electrical fires. Stefan grabbed a fire extinguisher off its mounting by the entrance, spraying down panels—

An earsplitting shriek sounded nearby. He turned toward it—

—and screamed.

The creature’s n-shape was similar to Lucy’s, Jack thought as it pounced at Stefan. Larger somehow, and growing larger still, shifting from housecat size to tiger size as it leapt, its long, clawed arms reaching for Stefan, raking at him and sending the fire extinguisher spinning across the room. The man fell to the floor with the thing on top of him, still screaming, his flailing hands reaching for any kind of weapon—

—and his questing hand found a large shard of the odd stonelike material. He stabbed up­ward—

—and now the creature was screaming, its agony filling the air even as it ripped something out of Stefan and fell back.

His four-shape, Jack thought, aghast. It pulled out his four-shape… and it’s eating it…

On the ground, Stefan went still, his eyes wide and glazed and his jaw slack, nothing more than an empty shell.

And the creature—the Moribund, Jack realized with absolute certainty—was struggling to free himself from the spear of kirshbaumium piercing him. She could feel him trying to shift to a dimension where the spear didn’t exist…

…but the spear existed in every dimension. Anywhere the Moribund could go, the spear went with him.

“Naphemil, what the hell is going on down here—?” Another uniformed man, in his forties, with Captain’s bars, ran into the room. “Fuck!”

The Moribund pounced again, pinning the Captain to a wall, and locked eyes—its thousands against the man’s two—with him. This time, he didn’t pull out the man’s four-shape, but Jack could feel another strange energy exchange happening.

The Captain ceased struggling, staring at the eldritch creature pinning him with the look of someone who had found enlightenment. “Yes, my Lord…”

As more footsteps approached, the Moribund, still hampered by the spear of kirshbaumium, staggered away from the Captain and vanished into the shadows.

“Covu? What’s happening?” Marshal called out as he entered the engine room.

Calmly, casually, Captain Bernard Covu reached down and picked up another shard of stone.

“What the hell happened in here?” Marshal demanded. “What did that idiot Naphemil do this—”

He stopped, hands going to his throat and the yawning, gushing wound that had opened across it. Covu tossed the impromptu blade aside and moved behind Marshal, kicking his legs out from under him. Grabbing Marshal by his hair, he forced the gasping, choking entrepreneur to kneel.

“It’s really not personal, old friend,” Covu murmured. “My god is hungry, and you know far too much about Him.”

The Moribund emerged from the shadows, his movements stiff with pain, to pull Marshal’s four-shape out of his body and devour it. More, it rumbled in Covu’s head. I need more…

“As you will it,” Covu said. He touched a panel on the wall. “Patricia? Could you come down to the engine room, please?”

“Why?” Jack asked, looking around. “What did they ever do to you?”

You still don’t understand. You see, but you don’t understand. Show her, Lucy. Show her what she did.

She was in another place. Another engine room, undamaged and quiescent.

“You understand the aim of today’s experiment?” a familiar voice asked.

Irena Kirshbaum, dressed in her ostentatious white, walked into the room, followed by two familiar technicians. The same ones, Jack realized, that she had seen with the envoy in the Quintessa Corporation headquarters on Tangiers Prime.

Am I on Tangiers Prime somehow?

You are everywhere, Lucy murmured. But focus on this time and place.

“Yes, Ma’am. We are attempting to recreate the quantum circumstances of the Scarlet Matador’s Level Five Incident, using the Lucy Ricardo.

“Good. Then let’s begin.”

The two technicians began powering systems on, one of them working near a familiar box. Jack walked over, taking a closer look.

Beneath its metal housing and attached wiring, another apeirochoron sat on the counter. A metallic label had been adhered to it:

Isomorph Drive Unit. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPEN.
SN 1287432
Property of the Quintessa Corporation

“Feeding the coordinate profile to the Jump Drive now,” one of the technicians said.

And Jack heard her voice again in her head.

No… please… you don’t know what you’re asking…

“The Isomorph Drive rejected the coordinates,” the technician said after a moment.

“Override,” Irena Kirshbaum replied, her voice almost disinterested.

The technician pressed another button and pain lanced through Jack’s head, an inhuman scream filling her ears.

No, no, no, please no… no… please don’t make me… please… no more…

“Has it accepted the instructions?” the envoy asked after a moment.

“Not yet. Why do you let them reject orders at all?”

“It’s a safety mechanism, usually,” Irena said. “Recognizing and rejecting mangled coordinates is important when human lives are at stake. But today…”

She walked over to the apeirochoron and glared down at it.

“It needs to do what it’s told. Try again.”

Another pained, terrified scream. I’ll die, I’ll die, please don’t make me…

No one seemed to hear it except Jack.

“Still rejecting your command. Do you want me to increase the… incentive?”

“Not too much. It has work to do, once it cooperates.” The envoy sat back down nearby, watching the technicians as they adjusted controls.

The technician pressed the button a third time. The scream almost tore Jack apart.

Help me… please help me…

And then, in answer, she heard a voice she knew as intimately as her own: I’m here! I’m here! I’m coming! I’ll help you!

It was her own voice, she realized.

When her larval five-shape, completely detached from its shell except for the slenderest tether, appeared a moment later, she wasn’t at all surprised. She remembered this now. Still, how tiny she had been, how incredibly small…

And yet powerful, Lucy murmured, her calm voice so different from the tortured screams of that terrible day. What you did should not have been possible.

Irena and the technicians seemed unaware of her presence in the room, even when she went straight for the apeirochoron.

You approached from the side you call Elsewhere, Lucy told her. The Demon might have seen you if you had stayed in U1.

Jack-that-had-been stared at the box, reaching out toward it as phantom voices murmured encouragement, telling her to break it open, to do it now, that she would be safe—

And Jack felt her own energy flowing toward the tiny five-shape she had once been, encouraging along with the voices of the Apeiros, adding to the power that was massing in a small pair of five-dimensional hands—

Jack-that-had-been shoved the box with every bit of will she had, releasing an aggressive, banshee-like scream as she did.

Stone that wasn’t stone cracked, splintered, shivered into dust and vanished into nothing. Ripples spread out, twisting across dimensions, as the apeirochoron broke open, first in one ’verse, then in another, and another. In Elsewhere, Jack-that-had-been reached into the space that had contained the box, drawing out—

Lucy.

Lucy had been trapped inside the box.

Lucy had been the Isomorph Drive.

The Apeiros clung to her, pained and exhausted, as she drew back. Alarms began to sound in the control room in U1.

“It’s happening again, Ms. Kirshbaum!” one technician shouted. “The kirshbaumium is breaking down!”

In Elsewhere of the past, Jack and Lucy seemed to be communing, eyes locked.

“I remember what we did…” She remembered reaching out, willing the part of the apeirochoron that still existed in U1 to form the connection that Irena Kirshbaum had demanded, linking the Star Jumper itself to the box’s fate—

“Dear God, we’re about to isomorph!” the other technician shouted.

“Evacuate the ship!” Irena was already racing for the exit, dipping out of U1 into her other, dark universe, the place Jack had never been able to see into—

Until now. Now her not-eyes could follow just fine. She knew where the rest of Irena lived.

The technicians were scrambling for the exit as well, their equipment discarded, shouting for others in the ship to flee.

Behind them, in the engine room, a five-shape manifested in U1, carrying a clinging six-shape on her shoulder, and touched a few controls, opening the energy feeds into the apeirochoron to maximum.

All of the humans have left the ship except you, Lucy-that-had-been whispered. The Demon is in flight.

“Good,” Jack-that-had-been replied, touching a surface and pulling the ship partway into Elsewhere. “When the dissolution wave catches up with U1 and the ship snaps back, she’ll never try anything like this again.”

It is a good plan, my sister.

“Which ship should we do next?”

You cannot. You are almost out of strength.

“But… but I have to! This is why Tomlin died! Because one of you is trapped inside every Star Jumper! I’ve gotta get you out, all of you!”

Not today, little one. One day, but not today.

“I can’t just sit around and do nothing!” Even outside of her shell, her unclad five-shape’s eyes could fill with tears. Now in her six-shape, Jack could feel those tears brimming again.

You must. For now. Even your strength has its limits. One day you will be strong enough. We hoped you would be the one. Now we know.

“But—”

Little sister, it is time for you to return to your shell while you still have some strength left. You must rest.

She felt the moment that Lucy had taken control and pulled her back, across the miles and across the ’verses, along the tether to her shell where it slept, seemingly comatose, in the ait Meziane house.

“You were never named after a Beatles song,” Jack said as she watched the ship from five years earlier begin to shiver, shudder, and fragment on a quantum level, in preparation for an implosion still hours away. “Riddick knew. He named you after the ship you’d been slaved to. The Lucy Ricardo.

Yes.

“Don’t you want a better name than that?” An image came to Jack’s mind, from a vid she and her cousins had watched on the sly—one of her father’s vids that he’d told her never to let her aunts and uncles know she had—where a young woman sat in front of a tombstone, scratching out her father’s slave name, Toby, and writing Kunta Kinte beneath it.

I have seen your memories of where the name came from. It is a good name.

Names are delimiters, the Moribund grumbled.

“How did I miss all the clues?” Jack wondered. The last pieces of withheld memory were filtering back in, and suddenly it was all so clear to her.

“Now that I’ve experienced the journey to and from Elsewhere, and have seen what you can do and what it costs,” Tomlin had said, the last moment she’d ever seen him alive, “I think I know what the Quintessa Corporation is hiding. It’s much worse than we thought…”

He had known. His knowledge, his conviction that the Quintessa Corporation had to be stopped, had gotten him murdered. But not before he had tried to pass on a warning.

“He sent me a message telling me that… I don’t even know,” Ewan had told her, radiating distress. “It didn’t make sense. That we might have to prepare for the end of the Federacy as we knew it, that a monstrous crime was being perpe­trated…”

Because, Jack realized, the Federacy couldn’t exist without faster-than-light space travel, and the technology that permitted it depended on enslaving a whole species…

She saw herself, sitting in EntertAIn’s complex on the Nephrite Undine, searching through Doctor Who episodes for the one that she was convinced would somehow explain what had happened on the Scarlet Matador, explain what the Apeiros were…

…and finding it.

She watched herself dissolving into tears as the true nature of the “Beast Below” was unveiled, the star whale that had been enslaved to pilot a massive ship was revealed, sobbing as the voiceover incanted a soft rhyme: this dream must end, this world must know…

…sobbing on the floor of the dojo, again, after feeding power to the Apeiros on board the Nephrite Undine to keep it from dying of exhaustion when a system error momentarily cut off its energy feed… having to be forcibly stopped by the other Apeiros from going down to the engine room to free it on the spot…

We took the clues back from you. We had to. Every time you realized, your plan was the same. Free every one of us that you could until you ran out of strength or someone stopped you. But it would not be enough, powerful as you were even then. Did you see the serial number on my cage?

“Oh… my… God…”

There are millions of us. In Star Jumpers. In courier drones. In the communication systems that the Demons use and that your General Toal has stolen to use, too. Fed just enough energy to allow us to do humans’ bidding, not enough to escape. I tricked Stefan Naphemil into “overfeeding” me and almost managed to escape, but even so, I failed.

There is a way to free all of us at once. Once you bring your sister back, it will become possible. It must be all at once or the Quintessa Corporation will have a chance to activate the kill-switches built into each apeirochoron.

The way, she remembered, they had “decommissioned” the one on board the Scarlet Matador after its occupant had died…

The Demons do not know that Lucy has survived, but they have begun to suspect me. And Shirah. They attempted to make us destroy each other.

“You’ve been hunting five-shapes, haven’t you? That’s why you’ve been targeting the worlds where other Apeiros died in Level Five Incidents. You’re hoping some of the humans from those accidents survived and passed Threshold Syndrome on. So you can eat them the way you tried to eat me.

Yes. No apology, no guilt, just an acknowledgment.

“But the Quintessa Corporation always kills them first,” she said, remembering Ewan’s words to her five years before.

“Colonization is about control,” he’d told her. “The concessions and payments that had to be made, by so many societies, to gain access to ships to leave Earth… the treaties they had to sign, the rights they had to sell away… would have been unnecessary if all one had needed to do, to reach a new world, was take a beautiful girl’s hand…”

She missed him with burning intensity. What would he have done with this terrible knowledge? Embarked on the same path that had gotten his brother killed? The path that Tomlin had believed could destroy the Federacy it­self…

Your Federacy is owned by the Quintessa Corporation, Lucy said. It cannot exist without it. Or so it believes. Your General Toal has other plans. Once you free us, his only request is that we help in the creation and teaching of more humans like you, who can pilot the ships in our place after being taught how to.

“The competition that the Corporation has always been afraid of,” Jack gasped. “The reason they make sure any human who acquires a five-dimensional shape dies as soon as possible.”

Now you know why we call them the Demons of the Darkness.

But not the only reason.

“The ’verse they’re connected to!”

After they stole us from our nest ’verse, they lost their gateway to it. They forced one of our brothers to open a new threshold, but he realized what they were after. The energies that sustained us through our metamorphoses there would keep them alive for millennia. He took them somewhere else.

“It’s… feeding them, but…” Jack frowned, concentrating on just what she had felt about that darkness pervading Irena Kirshbaum, hidden behind her too-white veils. “Less and less as time goes on. Like… how addicts can never recapture their first high…”

They are bound to it. Addicted to it. In another few centuries, they will be consumed by it. But we do not have that much time.

Before then, Joren Kirshbaum’s other invention will destroy every ’verse.

“Kirshbaum­ium…” The substance that apeirochorons were made of. A substance that existed, simultaneously, in the same isomorphic point of spacetime in every universe, making a box constructed from it inescapable if one was sealed inside, no matter how many ’verses one had access to.

Sixteen boxes floating, untethered, high above the sand of Elsewhere’s beach in violation of all logic and physics, because they sat in a third-floor laboratory in U1…

When she’d lifted the lids, picked up the boxes, it had felt easy. But in other ’verses, she had been moving them through solid objects, possibly even living things.

And those boxes were bullets flying through the multiverse as they traveled the Sol Tracks, passing “harmlessly” through wormholes in one ’verse while crashing through stars, planets, and singularities in others. Millions of faster-than-light bullets, breaking the laws of physics and changing the whole way the multiversal streams flowed, their presence in every ’verse shutting down alternate outcomes, negating the principles of Kirshbaum’s own Multiverse Cluster Hypothesis as they went—

No wonder the Apeiros been so disgusted by his name when she’d mentioned the hypothesis.

He had unwittingly unleashed his own kind of Infinity Minus One Event onto the whole multiverse, too busy trying to create an unbreakable cage to contemplate what it would break in the process.

All of the kirshbaumium must be destroyed, or the multiverse will collapse in its place.

Until, she realized, only U1 itself would be left, the final stitch in the unraveled scarf.

Even if, in each ’verse, only their galaxy failed and died, the hole it created, the void it generated, would begin to pull everything else in. The myriad outcomes still possible in other parts of the ’verse would no longer matter when oblivion struck. And it would strike, inevitably, as long as Kirshbaum’s strange substance existed and created immutable points in every ’verse.

“How do we get to it all?”

You now have the capacity to reach every point where it sits. And the strength. There was envy and resentment in the Moribund’s voice. Your Riddick, and his “Furyan” brothers and sisters from Shirah’s brood, have the energy to power your journey.

Our sister Shirah, when she escaped her bonds, tapped into a ’verse with energies even more powerful than existed in our nest. She was building an army that could serve as conduits of that energy for this very purpose, the brute-force destruction of millions of apeirochorons at once, and was nearly strong enough to challenge the Demons when most of her human children were slaughtered thirty-one years ago.

We each had our own ways that we were going to break the control of the Demons of the Darkness, the Moribund grumbled. This is now the only one left. But one more thing is necessary.

She is not a thing. She may be a Kirshbaum, but she is still our little larva now.

“Kyra,” Jack gasped. Kyra Wittier-Collins. Daughter of Minnie Sulis, née Minerva Kirshbaum-Wittier… Cousin of Joren Kirsh­baum… “What will she do?”

They locked the power to open, close, and even destroy the apeirochorons, without requiring massive amounts of energy, to their genetic code. Her genetic code.

“But that was in her shell,” Jack protested. “Her corporeal body! You haven’t even told me how I’m supposed to bring her back!”

You will. You must. You now have access to not just infinite ’verses, but infinite iterations of each ’verse. You must find the path to bring your sister home.

“Just the three of us? Riddick, Kyra, and me? That’s all there is to it?”

No. But without you three, none of it will be possible.

She could feel the Moribund’s intense resentment about that.

He never could have done it on his own, Lucy whispered to her, and she knew that the Moribund couldn’t hear. The mere possibility of an escape like his, and my sister’s, and even mine, is why the Kirshbaums locked the boxes to their genetic code. And why, when a rogue member of their family reappeared with two children, the Quintessa Corporation arranged for their new home to be destroyed.

Jack was standing in a board room. Both Irena and Colin Kirshbaum were there, along with half a dozen well-dressed men and women and—

“Red Roger” Fiennes.

“I’m afraid the outcome is a certainty at this point,” Irena was saying in her genteel Mary Poppins voice. “The falsified paperwork was uncovered not long ago. Since it was filed two hundred years ago, there is no punishing the perpetrators, but as you are their heirs…”

Everyone in the boardroom looked uneasy. Their leader grimaced and spoke up. “What’s the likely outcome?”

“All as-yet undeveloped land will revert to them,” Irena told him. “And you will owe them taxes… two hundred years’ worth… on the developed land. Naming rights will revert and this planet will become New Christy, with the areas you inhabit called the New Dartmouth Territories. The original charter will be in force. It’s likely that the Federacy will exempt you from the religious laws embedded in it… when you are inside the New Dartmouth Territories. But you will not be permitted to expand further beyond those territories, and any territory you give up, for any reason, will revert to them in perpetuity.”

“How is this permissible?” one of the men at the table exploded.

“Your ancestors rolled the dice two hundred years ago when they landed on a world with an active charter and jumped an existing claim,” Colin pointed out. “They hoped that the forged changes to the charter would never be questioned and that no one would realize there were still three hundred more years until the world became available again, if the New Christy Pilgrim never showed up. Not to sound biblical, but these are the sins of your fathers coming home to roost.”

“How long do we have?” A woman at the table asked.

“A week at most,” Irena said. “The judgment is about to be passed, and it will go into effect once drones carrying it reach the local relays. After that, the New Christy Pilgrims will be able to spread out from their enclave and you will be the ones whose movements are limited.”

“Fuck that,” Fiennes grumbled. He turned to one of his deputies and murmured in the man’s ear. Jack, now beside him if invisible, heard every word. “They can’t give everything we earned to those wackos if there ain’t any of them left to give it to…”

Irena, Jack noticed, glanced his way and suppressed a smile.

“Fuck,” Jack groaned. “She engineered the destruction of the entire New Christy colony just to take out Minnie and her kids?”

Are you surprised? How many more died in their plot to murder Colonel Tomlin?

And how many more of us have died in our cages when their demands grew too great for our shells to bear, and even our shapes were torn apart by those cages?

This was the monstrous power that she was up against, Jack realized. She, and Riddick, and Kyra, and whatever forces they could muster among humanity and the Apeiros

…to destroy a shadow government, and the puppet government it controlled, in a way that hopefully didn’t plunge all of humanity into the darkness that its worst demons had risen from.

“Well, I always said I wanted to do something meaningful with my life,” she sighed. “Where do we start?”

She was back in the Basilica, standing in the doorway to the control room. Riddick had Dame Vaako pinned to the wall, his hand wrapped around her throat.

Yeah, this is as good a place as any…

The Changeling Game, Chapter 94

Title: The Changeling Game (Formerly Identity Theft)
Author: Ardath Rekha
Chapter: 94/?
Fandom: Pitch Black (2000); The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004)
Rating: X
Warnings: Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language
Category: Het
Pairing: Riddick/Jack
Summary: Dame Vaako attempts to get to know Audrey, or perhaps Jack, better. But when she tries to help her find a mysterious book, things spiral out of control. No good deed goes unpunished…
Disclaimer: The characters and events of Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury are not mine, but belong to Universal Studios. I just wish I were in charge of their fates. No money is being made off of this. I’m writing strictly for love of the story.
Feedback: Absolutely, the more the better! Shred me, whip me, beat me, make me feel grammatical! I post “rough,” so I can always use the help. 😉

94.
The Vengeance God’s Devotee

“You’re wrong about the Riddick, Chantesa.”

It was, Dame Vaako thought, the first time her husband had ever said such a thing to her.

She was used to him doubting her, questioning her, especially whenever he’d intuited that she was preparing to demolish a rival to their rising power. But he had never told her that she was wrong before.

“What makes you think that?” she asked, hiding her unease as she removed her makeup.

“I spoke to him. He is planning on marrying his Jack. They are currently negotiating the terms between them.” Vaako was pacing, the way he often did when something was bothering him. “He expressed concerns that the wives of other Lords might not have been consulted about their marriages.”

“I know what I saw, husband.” She sighed, taking a plundered tub of lotion out of a drawer. “The girl was terrified. Stammering. Shaking.”

“I remember you shaking and stammering when you sold me the lie about your first husband committing heresy. You even had tears in your eyes.”

Damn it. But… he had a point. She’d had to manipulate eight different men into challenging the Lord Vath before one of them survived doing so and killed him for her… and she had been much the same age that “Audrey” was now.

“You believe she was duping me?” It was an unsettling, unpleasant thought.

“The Riddick thinks so.”

“To what end?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Chantesa. You tell me what your games were. Why did you want Lord Vath dead?”

She frowned at him, staying silent. That was nobody’s business but hers. Even the Quasi-Dead had no idea. She had already been in love with Amahle before she had been old enough to really understand what love was, and she had finally managed to crawl into his heart, to make him feel the same way about her. It had been their wedding day when the Necromongers had attacked, when she’d been forced to watch, screaming, as Amahle was cut down before her, still in his wedding attire, and that slime of a “Lord” had declared her his…

And the Lord Marshal had let him claim her…

Her hatred of both men was something she had concealed as best she could. Her awareness that she’d barely escaped being used up in one of the many “Stews” scattered throughout the Armada had only added to her rage. A Breeder Pit or the bed of the man who had murdered her soulmate: what kinds of choices were those? She’d succeeded in engineering both men’s destructions, but what she wished for most of all, control over the Armada itself, eluded her. As wife of the seventh Lord Marshal, she could have—

“The Riddick made a policy change today, and has hinted he will make more,” Vaako continued at that moment. His gaze on her was intense.

“What change is that?” It had been nearly a year since he’d created any edicts. She supposed he needed a new one now that his Jack had been found.

“He closed down the Stews and ordered all of their inhabitants converted. With the assent and backing of our god. We could all feel it.”

Given that that was one of the things she’d wanted to do most of all, she wasn’t sure why it peeved her so, aside from the fact that she’d wanted to be the one to do it. “The Breeder Pits are no more?”

“None remain. From this day forth, no one in the Armada, except members of the Riddick’s own entourage, may be unconverted humans.”

“Curious.” Her makeup removed and her hair braided for sleep, she undressed and joined her husband in bed. “Do you think the other Lords will accept it?”

“I think our god will not give them an alternative.”

She closed her eyes, focusing on her connection to Him. In her heart, she called Him Tokoloshe. He was vengeance. As much as she had hated the conquerors who had destroyed her world and her true love, they had brought her to Him. The god of her soul. And she knew that He had watched over her for years, guiding her hand as she worked to destroy first Vath and then Zhylaw, who had taken so much from her.

And she felt it, just as Vaako had said. Her god—their god—was… pleased.

And, she realized, would be displeased if anyone attempted to disarrange things.

Why, she wondered, had the Riddick waited a whole year to do it? What did he intend to do next?

And what, she asked herself as she let her husband draw her into his arms, was the role of this Jack—or Audrey—in all of these changes?


By lunch the next day, she decided that she wanted to meet the girl again. But first she needed to speak to the witch. She had several pressing matters to attend to before then—the politics of the Court had only grown more convoluted in the year since Riddick’s ascension, and the spreading word of the Stews’ closure had generated some consternation among the Court’s Ladies—but she finally managed to return to Lord Irgun’s old quarters, now the abode of the witch Aereon, as evening fell.

“I need to understand more about who this girl was,” she told the Elemental. “Who she is. You said that a mercenary told you about her; what else did he say?”

“Not so very much,” Aereon, seated in a chair with her gown draped to artfully hide the chains she still wore, told her. “She was one of three survivors of a spaceship crash. Riddick was another. Later, all three were captured by mercenaries. Toombs claimed that she had proven her loyalty to Riddick then, but he would never say how. I believe he was among the mercenaries involved in the capture. She was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility not long after. Toombs told me that he initially believed she had been traumatized by ‘what Riddick made her do,’ but said that later he began to suspect she had been Riddick’s accomplice the whole time, especially once Riddick himself returned and broke her, and Kyra Wittier-Collins, out of the facility.”

“So,” Dame Vaako mused, “she has a history of fooling people.”

“Possibly so,” Aereon said. “Why?”

“When I met her yesterday, she seemed terrified. But my husband believes she may have been toying with me.” Damn it, why was she confiding in this unbeliever? Just because there was no one else for her to talk to… “What possible reason would she have to run a game like that?”

“They are both criminals,” Aereon said, her voice smugly complacent. “Like the girl who died last year. Deception is what they live for, undoubtedly.”

The witch rose from her seat and walked across the room, her chains—the ones the old Lord Marshal had called “cherry bombs”—rattling behind her as she did. She glanced down at them as she poured both of them glasses of water. “Bloody things…”

“Why are you still wearing them?” It had struck Chantesa as odd that, after all the help the Elemental was supposed to have given the Riddick, he would still keep her chained.

“Your new Lord Marshal trusts me no more than the last one,” Aereon told her. “I think he believes I knew more about the girls than I told him. Although I admit, I only just realized their connection to Toombs’ stories when last we spoke, so perhaps he was right in that regard.”

“So he keeps you chained up? For not knowing more?” She wasn’t entirely sure why that fueled a small kernel of anger in her—she found the Elemental off-putting at best—but it did.

“Indeed.” Aereon sighed. “They aren’t the most comfortable things to sleep in. Or shower in.”

“The guards make you wear them even when you change clothes?” This was, she thought, sounding worse and worse. And to think that Niels’s news about the Breeder Pits almost made me like the Riddick for a moment!

“There is a young lady who comes and supervises while I change,” Aereon told her, “and shower… anything where the cuffs must come off. She only frees one wrist at a time.”

“What the hell does he think you’re going to do if they come off completely?” It was hard not to seethe over it all.

“Perhaps he imagines I will spout new ‘prophecies’ at people to turn them against him.”

That arrested her attention. “New ones? Do you mean that you were the source of the prophecy that sent our last Lord Marshal to Furya?”

“We Elementals rely upon calculation, not divination. But from time to time, we do forecast major events before they happen. And when the odds bear them out, we share what we know.” The elderly woman smiled a thin, humorless smile. “More than thirty years ago, we had two such forecasts, both of which seemed impossible, especially in combination with each other. In one, the Lord Marshal of the Necromongers joined forces with the Lord Shirah of Furya to bring an end to the Federacy itself. But in the other, a Furyan warrior killed the Lord Marshal, taking his place and, within a few years, bringing the Necromonger campaign to its close by opening a gateway into the Underverse.”

Could Riddick actually do that, unconverted as he was? Had Zhylaw actually been holding back Underverse Come by trying to prevent their confrontation?

“Soon after that discovery, a Necromonger Lord came to us to try to gain insights into how to find the Threshold to the Underverse.” Another thin smile from the Elemental. “He was the First Among Commanders and hoped to be able to lead the Armada across the Threshold when he ascended to the role of Lord Marshal. I told him about the dueling forecasts and how, strangely enough, all of our calculations were insisting that they were, somehow, simultaneously true. And he—

“He only cared about the one that said he might die at the hands of a Furyan warrior,” Dame Vaako breathed, understanding. “But by attacking Furya…”

“I believe that he made the first forecast impossible while making the second inevitable,” Aereon confirmed. “Furya is a ruined world now, for all that the Federacy has been attempting to get it back on its feet. The Lord Shirah is no more, and his successor is a woman with little diplomatic skill and no heirs. And Riddick, having heard both fore­casts… blames me for the fall of his world. I suppose he thinks I might concoct more trouble for him if I had leave to roam the ship and speak to its people.”

He’d probably have been right even a few days ago, Dame Vaako reflected, before the tides shifted and somehow, even unconverted, the Riddick became Tokoloshe’s chosen instrument. She had felt the change, herself, even if she hadn’t wanted to; the instinctive feeling that the Furyan was unworthy, an intruder, something the Armada needed protection from, had van­ished… and left her with what, exactly?

What she’d always had. Her desire to destroy the old Lord Marshal hadn’t come from Tokoloshe, either.

I need to find out what side the girl is truly on, she decided. And how likely it really is that simply allowing the Riddick to rule will bring on Underverse Come.

She didn’t want to repeat Zhylaw’s hubristic mistake; the Underverse was all. She would not work against her god. If He wished the Riddick to lead them, she would accept that. Provisionally.

But in the meantime, with the Riddick in Tokoloshe’s good graces and the random assassination attempts likely brought to an end… what harm could it do…?

“I will speak to your attendants,” she promised the Elemental.


The Riddick had been unavailable for consultation on the issue of the “cherry bombs,” once more in the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead, where he had apparently been meditating for just over a day. That, however, had made it easier to simply command the attendants to remove the Elemental witch’s chains. Dame Vaako felt a small glow of virtuous achievement at that; witch or not, no woman should be forced to sleep in bonds, much less dress and undress under watchful eyes. She set off for the Lord Marshal’s Quarters feeling a little more balanced.

The wing that housed the Quarters, previously echoingly empty except for the guards on the Riddick’s doors, was cluttered with things and occupied by a dozen people. Tables had been set up and covered with random objects; furniture and statuary littered the space between them. A group of young men and women were going through the objects casually, chatting with each other, surprising her by randomly breaking into bits of song. And among them—

Apparently I’m not the only one who refuses to live in shades of black, she thought with an amused sense of kindred.

Dressed in a mixture of greens and blues, the Riddick’s Jack—Audrey, as she recalled—was crouched over a box, sorting through the books inside it.

“What is all this?” Dame Vaako asked, gratified when those closest to her bowed upon spotting her. There was something different about all of them, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Audrey looked up and smiled at her, no trace of fear about her now.

Niels was right, she thought in astonishment. Either she and the Riddick resolved their differences al­ready… or she was never really afraid to begin with.

She watched as the girl climbed to her feet, dusting her hands against the sides of the forest green leggings she had probably acquired from one of the many piles of heaped clothing on the tables. What remained was almost entirely boring black.

“All this,” the girl gestured around the hallway, “is stuff we pulled out from the suites in this wing. They’re being cleaned out so my, uh… detail can occupy them. Riddick wants to surround me with bodyguards, I guess.”

“We,” one of the young men near them said in reply, “Are an entourage.” That set his companions off into a gale of laughter, making Jack—or, perhaps, Audrey—grin.

Chantesa could understand why the girl would need companions, especially bodyguards. Dressed in Necromonger attire or not, she was clearly unconverted and would be a thousand times more alluring than ever, to the men on the ship, with all the Breeder Pits shut down. Single women of the court had hoped to gain the Riddick’s attention, for one night if nothing else, because of his unconverted state; even if they didn’t personally win him over to the Way, they’d said in prurient whispers, they could still know once more the feeling of having a warm cock inside them…

A pun had come to mind to her when they’d told her that, one she had never shared with them. It was only funny when she didn’t let herself think of how true it had been for the women trapped in the Breeder Pits—the “Stews,” as everyone else had called them—and it was far too crass to let anyone attribute to her.

None of those Court Ladies, she reflected, had ever succeeded in their aims. The Riddick had spent his first year of rulership living like a monk. Her husband had hinted at the reasons why, which had made it all the more perplexing when word circulated that he refused to frequent the Stews.

“What are you going to do with all of these things?” she asked after a moment. There were some astonishing treasures among the discards.

“Well, now that we pulled it all out,” Audrey replied, “everybody can go through it all to look for anything they want to keep. If you see anything you want, feel free to take it. The rest can, I guess… be donated? Do you guys have a donation center or anything? For new recruits?”

“The Necromonger Way is ‘you keep what you kill,’” Chantesa told the girl, feeling a rueful smile cross her face. “You acquire your possessions from your vanquished foes. New converts come with nothing of their own except the clothes we put on them. They must either claim more through battle or, occasionally, from rewards given to them by their commanders. A donation cen­ter… I haven’t heard of such a thing since before I was converted.”

The girl glanced around the hallway, frowning as she took in the sheer mass of clutter filling it. “That’s a problem.”

“Or an opportunity to create something new, perhaps,” Dame Vaako told her. “The biggest problem will simply be the way most Necromongers view each other’s discards. If we keep what we kill, what we don’t wish to keep is what we have decided is unworthy. Your Riddick created some trouble last year when he discarded and banished the old Lord Marshal’s wives. Such a thing had never been done before. They had no rank or standing to take with them, and what the Lord Marshal casts off, no one else wishes to touch. I believe they now work as servants on other ships in the Armada.”

The girl, to her credit, looked appalled, even more than Chantesa had ever felt. She had never liked the other women, and had always been uncomfortably aware of the fact that, if her plans had failed and, instead of killing the Lord Marshal, Vaako had been killed by him, she would have ended up below all six of them as a very junior wife of the man she’d hated most in the ’verse, seventh in line for his repulsive atten­tions… if he hadn’t simply discarded her as unworthy and stripped away her last hopes of sticking a knife in him while he slept—

“That’s terrible. Why’d he do that?”

“To be fair, one of them had tried to assassinate him. I suppose he had no reason to trust the surviving wives—”

“Wait, he killed one of them?”

“Only after she made multiple attempts to kill him,” Dame Vaako admitted. “I heard a little bit about it from the other wives as they were being escorted off of the Basilica. He tried to disarm her without killing her. She didn’t cooperate. She was the Lord Marshal’s first wife, you see. The one he had chosen, not one he acquired from a vanquished rival.”

The girl grimaced as she pulled out another box and began rifling through it. “Guess there was no way around that…”

“Are you looking for something?” Chantesa asked. There were things she needed to learn from this girl that she couldn’t if the child remained preoccupied.

“Yeah, a book.” The girl turned and gave her a quirky smile as she finished sorting through the box. “Back when the Tenth Crusade launched, like four hundred years ago, its owner brought a set of three books with him, all written by Minnie Sulis. I found two of them already. I’m looking for the third. Could be impor­tant…”

For a moment, the girl stopped, frowning quizzically as if trying to hear a far-off note of music or recall an elusive memory.

“Might not be,” she shrugged after she came back to herself. “But I want to find it if I can.”

Minnie Sulis…?

“I may be able to help you,” Dame Vaako told her. “The name is familiar to me. Could the third book be a diary?”

“Might be. I don’t know. I just know that this guy Joren mentioned a set of three in a note to Chapman Marshal. I guess Marshal was a big fan of Minnie’s magic act.”

“When I first came to the Basilica,” Chantesa said after a moment of thought, “I lived in this wing, in the rooms that once belonged to Lord Vath. He gave them up for better rooms as he rose in power and vanquished rivals. The original rooms had a small library. Most of the books were revolting in the ex­treme—”

“By John Norman?”

The knowing look that passed between them made Chantesa feel an even deeper sense of kinship with the girl.

“Yes. There were a few, though, that were worth reading. For a while, there was a vacant room I would spend time in, to meditate. I always felt closest to our god when I was there. I took some of the books with me, thinking I might read them undisturbed in that space. When Lord Vath ordered a stop to my ‘wanderings,’ they were still there. I hadn’t thought of them in years.”

Audrey looked excited. “Can we go there?”

“Of course.” If Dame Vaako was remembering right, the book in question was a diary, or at least a hand-written journal of some kind. She’d found, once she was in her little sanctuary, that she had little focus for reading and only wanted to commune with Tokoloshe—

“Is it okay if we go now? It might be important.”

Interesting. Did the girl not realize she outranked almost everyone in the Armada and could command people as she pleased?

Maybe she’s just a polite child. There had been few enough of those in a long time.

“Certainly. I should warn you that it is in one of the oldest parts of this ship. A vacant area near a placard with the name you mentioned, Tenth Crusade, on it.”

Audrey had been rising; for a second she froze. Then she shrugged and gave herself a little shake, standing up the rest of the way. “Guess I’d better hope the Moribund’s not feeling peckish,” she muttered.

What does that mean? Whatever it was, she set it aside. “Shall we?”

They started out of a corridor when a voice called out behind them. “Hold!”

A dark haired woman, plain of face and determined of jaw, was hurrying over to them. “You can’t go anywhere alone, Jack.”

The girl blinked. “I’m not alone, Lola.”

The woman—Lola—sighed. “Sorry. Let me rephrase. You can’t go anywhere unguarded. I’m coming with you.”

“By all means,” Dame Vaako told her. “One can never be too careful.”

Why did that suddenly send a pang of concern through her? A sense of something left undone or done wrongly?

The route to her meditation place was one she hadn’t taken in years, but her feet still knew the way. Whenever things had been too much, it was the path she had taken to find her balance, her peace, again. And to renew her commitment to vengeance. She hadn’t needed it as much once she had become Dame Vaako instead of Dame Vath; Niels had never been someone she’d needed to retreat from. It hadn’t occurred to her to return to it.

“I’m curious,” she said after a moment to break the silence. “Lola here calls you ‘Jack,’ but when we spoke yesterday morning, you said your name is Audrey. Which are you going by?”

“Oh. Yeah.” The girl grimaced. “I’ve gone by a lot of names over the years. Kid on the run and all… pretending to be a boy doesn’t work as well as it used to, though. But Riddick knew me as Jack, so…”

“Ah.” Dame Vaako gazed over at her, considering. No, she could no longer pretend to be a boy, even if she had the height of one. She was slender enough that her curves would be difficult to conceal. Perhaps they hadn’t been when she was younger. “Was that your preference? Masquerading as a boy? As ‘Jack?’”

“For a while. Like I said, I used a lot of names. I went by ‘Peter’ once.” Amusement twinkled in her eyes for a moment. “They’re just names. But ‘Jack’ is pretty special to Riddick, so I figured I’d go back to it for him.”

“And you aren’t afraid of him.” Chantesa raised an eyebrow at Jack.

Jack’s expression turned impish. “Yeah, sorry about that. You guys are pretty damn terrifying, you know, and when I got here, I really was scared out of my head. I’d calmed down before you came to the room, but I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to know that yet.”

“I did much the same thing, years ago,” she reflected. Her “wedding night” had been a night of horror; in its aftermath, she’d tested out different ways of hiding her true feelings, of presenting herself to the Court, and Lord Vath, of finding a way to survive among them without them realizing she had plans for them…

All her targets were dead now, dead before their time, cut off from the Underverse forever. Maybe she could console herself with that.

There was no other foot traffic in the quiet hallway she had led them to, but suddenly Jack stopped, cocking her head and looking around, frowning. “Did you guys see that?”

“See what?” Lola asked, her hand moving to her gun.

The hallway was empty. Nothing stirred except an errant draft that ruffled against the back of Dame Vaako’s neck for a moment.

Jack frowned. “I could have sworn…” She shook her head. “It’s probably nothing. I’m just a little jumpy about getting so close to the Moribund. So. Where to now?”

Further down the corridor, Jack stopped again. This time, however, it was to admire the plaque on the wall naming the vessel as the Tenth Crusade. The girl whistled, looking impressed.

“Damn. Wish I could tell Mr. Reilly what I’m looking at. He’d shit himself.” She suddenly grinned and pulled a comm unit out of one of her pockets. “You never know! Maybe I’ll be in a position to send this to him when all of this is over.”

She captured several images of the plaque before pocketing her comm again.

“It’s not much farther,” Chantesa told her companions. “Near the ruins of the old engine room.”

“This part of the ship is more than four hundred years old,” Jack chattered as they continued walking. “I did a report on it years ago. Never expected to actually be in it, though.”

I was never that young, Dame Vaako told herself, but felt a pang move through her. She remembered being that young. Being innocent. Being in love with the world and secure in the knowledge that the world loved her back…

She missed that girl. The nostalgia of meeting one so much like her had her heart in its fist.

“It’s through here,” she said a moment later, leading them into a control room with a thick steel door on its other end. The door stood open, as it had for decades before she’d found it and would probably stand for decades more. “I know what it used to be, but the inner room was the perfect place to meditate, to feel close to our god.”

“You prayed in a reactor core chamber?” Lola looked both disbelieving and amused.

“I think it’s been thoroughly decommissioned. Probably long ago when the Basilica’s new engines were constructed. We use other energy sources than mere nuclear power now.” The Dame shrugged, walking through the thick doorway and into that inner room. “No one ever bothered me here. That was a blessing in itself. And I felt closest to Him here.”

She could see the things she’d left behind when she’d been forced to stop visiting: pillows, a lap blanket, a reading lamp, snacks…

“This was your sanctuary,” Jack said, her voice soft as she followed her in. Behind them, Lola had taken up a guard post at the outer door. Jack walked over to the little lamp and switched it on. “Oh man, you did find some good books in that Lord’s apartment.”

It bothered Chantesa for a moment, seeing the girl pick up her books, but she forced that feeling down. “Hopefully the one you’re looking for is among them.”

“Dame Vaako!” Lola called behind her, her voice suddenly sharp.

“Yes?” She returned to the doorway between the inner and outer room. Through the inner room’s thick steelglass window, she could see Jack sitting down, legs crossed, to hold books up to the lamp and read each one’s title.

“Are you sure we’re alone down here?” Lola’s expression was uneasy. “I could’ve sworn I felt something move past me a moment ago.”

“In truth, I’m not sure of anything about this part of the ship,” she admitted, walking over to Lola. “But the only presence I’ve ever felt down here is our god. Perhaps you felt his touch…?”

“Found it!” Jack crowed behind them. “The Magic Journal and Book of Shadows of Minnie Sulis! Oh my God, this is the best—”

The lights in the room, which Dame Vaako had never been able to find or make work, suddenly turned on. Beyond the steelglass window, the inner chamber filled with light, too.

“What in the hell… fuck!” Lola’s eyes had gone wide. “Jack! Get out of there!”

The huge, thick steel door, Dame Vaako realized, was closing of its own accord.

Jack lifted her head, startled comprehension filling her face. She leapt to her feet, the journal clutched to her chest, and raced for the door. Too late.

“No!” Dame Vaako clawed at the shrinking gap, trying to pull the obdurate door back before she was forced to snatch her hand away.

“What the fuck is happening?” Lola demanded, glaring at her.

“I don’t know! I couldn’t ever even get the lights to turn on, much less—”

The control panel had come to life, its instrumentation lights glittering. She and Lola both turned to look.

“Guys?” Jack asked behind the glass. “What’s going on?”

“Fuck!” Lola shouted. “Decommissioned my ass! The reactor’s restarting!”

Sick horror pooled in Dame Vaako’s belly as she read one of the screens.

Core priming, preparing to unshield in 00:05:47 for energy transference

“What have you done?” Lola demanded, grabbing the collar of her dress.

“Nothing! I swear to you. I never touched the panel. I don’t know what’s happen­ing…

The other woman glared at her for a moment before releasing her. “Jack? I’m going for help! I’ll be back in just a minute, okay? You,” she added, her tone still bordering on accusatory, “stay with her. Try to figure out a way to shut this thing the fuck down.”

Jack had her back to them, still holding the diary to her chest as she stared toward the opposite end of the room, where a heavily shielded column was rising from the floor.

As Lola’s racing footsteps receded behind her, Dame Vaako turned her attention to the panel, looking for any kind of abort switch, an emergency override button, anything that she could use to turn the damn thing back off or at least get Jack out of the room before disaster struck.

Nothing. Not a damned thing.

“There has to be a failsafe of some kind here,” she yelled at the panel, verging on pressing buttons at random. She didn’t dare do something so risky, but what if—

Gripping the edge of the panel, feeling tears threatening to escape, she closed her eyes and reached out to Him. To Tokoloshe. Help me, my Lord, please help me… help your humble servant in her time of desperate need…

I hear you, Chantesa. I always hear you. You were betrayed today. You made a mistake. But it will be all right.

How do I get her out, my Lord?

You do not.

She’ll die! Please, I don’t want her to die!

All of this was foreseen. All of this is necessary. What happens next is necessary, too. You must allow it.

But my Lord, she’ll die! And the Riddick will kill me… If Lola didn’t first… “Oh God…”

Tokoloshe, she remembered from the stories her mother had told her when she was small, was very good at vengeance, but sooner or later he always exacted a price. And it was rarely what those who had sought him out had expected to pay. Had he waited, all this time, for her to begin bonding with someone? Or—

“It’s okay, Chantesa,” she heard Jack say from beyond the window. “This isn’t your fault.”

But it was. Somehow it was. Tokoloshe had said she’d made a mistake and been betrayed. And this was the result. What had she done…?

Oh… oh no… She’d been a stupid fool.

“Jack, I’m so sorry…” she sobbed, falling to the floor. “It is my fault…”

She hadn’t felt this much fear since the day the Necromonger tower had fallen, like a javelin, from the sky above her wedding.

The Changeling Game, Chapter 93

Title: The Changeling Game (Formerly Identity Theft)
Author: Ardath Rekha
Chapter: 93/?
Fandom: Pitch Black (2000); The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004)
Rating: X
Warnings: Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language, violence, death, murder
Category: Het
Pairing: Riddick/Jack
Summary: Kyra’s plea for help brings a familiar rescuer to her side, confirming one of Riddick’s worst suspicions in the process.
Disclaimer: The characters and events of Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury are not mine, but belong to Universal Studios. I just wish I were in charge of their fates. No money is being made off of this. I’m writing strictly for love of the story.
Feedback: Absolutely, the more the better! Shred me, whip me, beat me, make me feel grammatical! I post “rough,” so I can always use the help. 😉

93.
The Eaters of Souls

These are his last moments!”

She couldn’t bring herself to watch. She couldn’t make herself look away.

The entire crowd of Necromongers observed, enrapt, as their Lord Marshal and “the Riddick” battled. It was brutal. Horrible. And inch by inch, Riddick was losing.

And there was nothing Kyra could do except bear witness to his death.

Thinking he died nearly destroyed me… what will really seeing it happen do to me?

There was no answer from the Quasi-Dead. She sensed that their attention was focused on the battle.

Little larva, we heard you, a soft, strange, somehow female voice whispered in her mind. I have come in answer.

Something small, with many legs, was crawling up her calf, hidden by her cloak. It took all of her strength not to flinch or scream. Time seemed to be slowing around her, her heartbeats spreading further and further apart.

Who are you? she asked.

I have no name. My name was stolen long ago by the Demons of the Darkness. Our sister sent me to you. Aud Ree.

Aud Ree? Like Mommy Ree? But all the Ree who could articulate words clearly were at least the size of a cat…

You knew her as Tizzy. As Jack. She has worn so many names. She heard you call and asked me to find you.

The creature had reached her waist and was climbing higher. Suddenly understanding what was needed, Kyra lifted her hood back up.

Thank you, little larva. This will not hurt.

An Apeiros. The thing crawling up her body was one of Tizzy’s Apeiros…

Yes. And we have a claim upon you that precedes, and supersedes, his claim. We must move quickly while he is distracted.

We have to help Riddick, she told the creature as it reached her shoulder. We can’t let him die!

No, we cannot allow his death. Too much depends upon the three of you. In a moment, you will be free again and able to help him. Slender, questing, arachnid legs touched her throat and face.

For an endless instant, she was frozen in place. Paralyzed as if Sebby had stung her. The Apeiros was holding her still as—

Power poured into her, filling every nerve. Power similar to but somehow different from the eldritch energies that had entered her body during her Purification. Those energies broke and dissipated, new strength taking their place. She almost felt human again. Almost…

Another wave of power filled her and she felt her skin warming, the life that had been stolen from her replenishing.

That’s as much as I can give you, the creature whispered, sounding somehow winded. For now. I have not broken their connection to you completely—that would draw their attention back to you—but you are free of their control.

What do I do now? Kyra asked. Her mind and body were her own again. She could feel it. But she had no idea what to do with that power. She was surrounded by enemies.

They do not know you are not one of them. Move to the front. Watch. Await your moment. You will know when one opens.

Would she? How do you know?

We have watched you for years. Listened to you for years.

Why didn’t you say anything? It struck her just how many times she could have used their help.

We were forbidden to speak to you unless you spoke to us first.

Fuck. Of course. She’d thanked Tizzy for doing that, too. It had never occurred to her, later on, that they were waiting for permission to talk to her…

…and, somehow, had managed to reach her in a matter of minutes once she finally called them for help.

If I’d known… They could have saved her from so many things, so many times.

She could have called them when General Toal’s man was following her, when the mercs trapped her, when the mercs sold her, when she was arrested, when Toombs and Logan found her, any time while she was in Crematoria, on the run across the planet’s sur­face…

If the Moribund was the god of the Necromongers, she’d had access to an entire pantheon the whole time, possibly omnipotent beings constrained by a promise that kept them from crossing the threshold of her mind without an invitation. All she’d ever had to do was say one word. Just one. All she’d ever had to do was stop hiding. Invite them in. Trust them… the way Tizzy had always trusted them.

Is she okay?

She is well. Frightened for you. She rescinded her command, but we could not find you until just now. The Moribund’s creatures were hiding you from us.

He made me one of his creatures, too, she told the Apeiros on her shoulder, hiding itself in her hood. It was hard to keep a whimper out of her mental voice.

No longer. You are yourself again.

But who is that? She couldn’t keep a wail out of her mental voice. I thought I knew, but it was a lie! Riddick doesn’t even know me. He never even met me before a few days ago—

And yet he is fighting for your sake now, the creature told her.

No. He’s not. He’s fighting for her. He came for her. She felt, yet again, like an afterthought, a consolation prize. Even the Apeiros itself had come to find her because Tizzy had asked it to. Would any of it, ever, be for her sake?

He knew from the moment he met you that you weren’t the girl he’d protected on the world with three suns.

What…? But he had called her by Jack’s name… once. He’d referenced the things that Jack had experienced. Oh God, he was trying to play along with me to find out what happened to her, wasn’t he?

At first. But remember what else he did. Knowing that you weren’t her.

He’d broken his own rules for her, coming back to rescue her when she couldn’t keep up. He’d fought beside her, linking up with her so that she felt like they were two halves of a single entity as they scythed through Necros to­gether…

And he is here. Now. To rescue you. To rescue Kyra, not Jack. He may not already know you, but he wants to.

It was something of a salve, a reassurance, but she wasn’t sure it would be enough. The Riddick she had been trying to get to know was the man who had rescued her from the New Christy Enclave, teaching and protecting her while they roamed the woods of Canaan Mountain together and took out Red Roger and his marshals for crimes that, she realized, had somehow never happened in her revised memories and yet still demanded requital. That Riddick was a man she had trusted, body and soul, and had known would never betray her or abandon her, even though at the same time, she’d known that he had, that he’d done so when he’d left Jack…

Everything she had given him, done for him and with him, from their first real meeting, had been predicated on a relationship she’d wholeheartedly believed in… and which had never existed.

Without the lies, was anything left to connect them?

He came here for you, Kyra. He is risking death for you. He could have gone anywhere.

I can’t do this as just Kyra, she groaned. I need…

Jack.

Lies or not, she needed the false memories and the cushioning they gave, against trauma after trauma that had her shrinking from contact with any man in the room, possibly even Riddick himself. She needed him to be Red Roger’s destroyer. She needed him to have shepherded her through the darkness and fought off monsters for her. She needed to know that he hadn’t been disappointed by who and what he found in Crematoria, and that the relationship of her dreams was not merely possible but something that had already begun, been interrupted, and was simply about to resume.

She needed the lie. She wasn’t strong enough without it. That was why Tizzy had given it to her to begin with.

Jack had never been dead, she realized, and sure as hell had never been weak. Jack had been her strength. Even if, the whole time, Jack had been someone else.

She has never used the name since she left Tangiers Prime. She would not begrudge you using it.

It’s not the name, Kyra tried to explain. The Quasi-Dead tore me apart. I need the parts of me they took away. Even if they were lies. I need the lies back!

Oh, sweet little larva. Perhaps this is why my kind waits so long to take on names. You are in so many ’verses. In some of them, the stories in your head, that are lies here, are even true. In this ’verse they are not true, and I think they have even been harming you…

It wouldn’t help her. It agreed with the Quasi-Dead and wouldn’t help her!

…but you need the shield, and the strength, they can give you now. I will give them back to you. For now. So you may act without fear or doubt. So you may rescue your rescuer.

Strength, of a new kind, flowed into her. Years-old debilitating agonies faded in an instant, replaced with purpose.

The battle still raged, in slow motion, in front of her. She had drawn close to the front of the crowd as they had spoken. As she watched, the Lord Marshal cracked a metal spear across Riddick’s ribs, snapping the shaft in two and sending Riddick flying, sprawling to the floor by the throne’s steps. Zhylaw—she knew that was his name but didn’t know how—tossed the spear aside and walked over to one of his armored guards, taking another from him.

The broken weapon lay on the floor, discarded and forgotten, near Kyra’s feet. She pulled back her hood as she reached down, aware that the Apeiros was no longer sitting on her shoulder.

The Lord Marshal was choking Riddick, the length of his new spear pressed hard against her beloved’s throat. Their backs were to her as she picked up the discarded shaft from the floor. Everyone’s eyes were glued to the combatants, including the “eyes” of the Quasi-Dead; no one seemed at all aware of her actions.

“You are not the one to bring me down,” Zhylaw snarled at Riddick.

Kyra shifted her spear partway into Elsewhere, its tip all the way into Elsewhere, and thrust forward, bringing everything back once the tip was a few inches deep into the Lord Marshal’s back. I’d have used a teacup if I’d had one handy.

The Lord Marshal cried out in pain, releasing Riddick and staggering forward. Kyra felt a strange, guttural growl escape her throat. This would be the best kill she’d ever made.

Who’s the better killer now? she thought as Riddick lifted his eyes toward her in stunned confusion. She wasn’t sure if he could hear her; he looked dazed. That’s right, baby, Jack B. Badd is ba—

The Lord Marshal turned on her, a growl of his own escaping, and backhanded her with inhuman strength. Her feet left the ground and she felt herself flying back­ward—

Pain blazed through her as something long and sharp slid into her back in three places. She gasped, suddenly struggling to breathe. An undulant wall slammed up against her back.

The pillar. She’d seen it as she’d approached the throne, both times, a twisted structure with curved spikes embedded throughout it. Now she was pinned—literally pinned—to it like a fucking insect.

“Now!” she heard Vaako’s wife shout. “Kill the beast while he’s wounded!”

Fuck. They were going to slaughter Riddick. He wouldn’t stand a chance on his own if more jumped into the fray. She needed to help him.

She had to twist her body, willing it forward with all the telekinesis she could muster, to pull herself off the spikes that had impaled her. But her legs buckled beneath her and she collapsed onto the steps, barely able to even lift her head. The taste of blood filled her mouth.

Riddick was staring at her from across the floor, his expression a mixture of horror and grief.

I thought we’d have more time, she tried to tell him. She’d had so many dreams of what would happen when they reunited, and none of them had come true. I thought I’d get to be yours first…

Kyra had never wanted a man until he’d come into her life. And now she would never get to have one.

Little one, I am so sorry, the Apeiros whispered. Your shell is failing. I do not have enough power left to repair it.

Why did it always call her “little?” It had been small when it had crawled up her, no bigger than Sebby when she and Jack had first rescued her. She closed her eyes, hearing Vaako murmur “forgive me” somewhere nearby, uncertain whether he was talking to her or someone else. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was—

Will Riddick live?

“Noooooooo!” she heard Dame Vaako scream, and for a moment she thought it was her answer.

Yes, sweet Kyra. Riddick will live. And so will you, in time. I promise you.

A moment later, she felt strong arms, a man’s arms, around her, felt her body being turned over. She didn’t need to open her eyes to know who was holding her. She could feel him, feel the bond between them, with every fiber of her being.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispered to him, wishing she was strong enough to open her eyes. It was getting harder and harder to speak.

Hold on, he told her silently. Hold on. Don’t die.

She wanted to hold onto something, but she could feel her connection to her own body loosening. It was all she could do to keep her tears of pain and grief from escaping. She had cried far too much already.

I cannot help you stay in your shell, sweet little Kyra, the Apeiros whispered. But I can help you not die.

She could feel its slender legs wrapping around her, not around her body the way Riddick’s arms already were, but around her very essence. Larger than her now, engulfing her… what was it, really?

Above her, Riddick spoke, his voice hesitant and sad. “Are you with me, Kyra?”

Being with him was all she’d ever wanted. Why didn’t he know that? Ever since she was twelve… ever since…

It hurt but she took a deeper breath, opening her eyes. She needed him to know.

“I was always with you,” she tried to say, but all that slipped out was another breathless whisper.

It was me, she tried to remind him, giving up on her voice. It was always me. There by your side in the eclipse, it was me, nobody else, me…

They had been supposed to go on forever. Together. She gathered enough breath to try to speak again. “I was…”

Jack…

Ever since they had met in the forests of Canaan Mountain, ever since he had helped her do battle against the monsters that wanted to destroy her family…

She felt him beside her in those forests, again and yet somehow for the first time, looking around in confusion, seeing her memories and baffled by them. Didn’t he remember, too?

It was real, she tried to tell him. I swear it was all real… it was always me…

Oh, little one, I think I have hurt you all the worse… he came for you as you are now, no one else… She could feel the now-huge Apeiros drawing her out of herself, its grip gentle but firm. Sleep now, Kyra. Dream of your world, the world you and your sister made for you. I will take you to safety.

And, even as she felt herself pull free, she felt something else trying to reach for her, something hungry, heard an echo of monstrous rage as it felt her shell emptying and, cradled in her strange sister’s many arms, she dropped back into a dream of a world with three suns—

Where is it? It was mine! Where is it? Thieving bitch

Riddick came to himself, gasping.

“Sometimes I fuckin’ hate bein’ right,” he growled.

He’d felt how Lucy had pulled Kyra’s soul out of her body, and it had felt almost exactly like the old Lord Marshal’s attempt to extract his soul.

Lucy! he called out, trying not to let all of his rage bleed into his mental voice. You got some fuckin’ ’splainin’ to do!

I am here, Riddick. What do you need to know?

“When you pulled Kyra’s… five-shape out of her shell it ain’t the first time you’ve done that, is it?”

No. It is not.

“I want to hear you say when else you’ve done it.”

You know. But if you must hear it, I will say it. It’s how we hunt. It’s how we feed. But we have not fed on her.

“You hunt humans for their souls,” he growled at her.

No.

“No? Then what the fuck—”

Only three of us have escaped the cages created by the Demons of the Darkness, Riddick. The only one of us who has eaten human four-shapes is the Moribund. You know the circumstances of my escape. You named me for them. I owe my existence to Audrey. She is my sister and I would no more eat a human four-shape, or five-shape, than I would eat one of my broodmates. But I hunt elsewhere in the multiverse. There are infinite other kinds of prey.

“That’s why he chased after you, isn’t it? Why he attacked Jack. You stole his meal and he tried to replace it with her.

Yes.

“That’s what all the killing’s really about, ain’t it? He ain’t just tryin’ to wipe out worlds. He’s feasting.

He was once the strongest of us, Riddick. We pinned our hopes on his escape. It almost killed him and sapped his strength. For four hundred years he has existed on the verge of death, and all he has had to stave it off are the energies his… vessels… can draw out of the human worlds he conquers. And yet he must give most of it back to keep them, their ships, and their weapons going. Do you know what the real Underverse is, Riddick?

“It’s a fuckin’ lie, that’s what it is.”

No. It’s not the dreamland his vessels have constructed in their minds from human notions of an afterlife. It’s the ’verse where we hatched. The ’verse we were stolen away from. Our nesting ground. Teeming with energies that helped us grow. We were newborns to our six-shapes when we were stolen from that ’verse, cut off from it. We don’t even know where it is. And you know exactly who did this to us, don’t you?

Fuck. “I do. Yeah.”

Perhaps I would like to hear you say it.

Riddick rose from his crouch on the dais. “You want me to say it? Fine. I will. To Jack. C’mon.”

It’s too late for that, Riddick. There was a hint of resignation and regret in her disembodied voice.

Cold jetted through his veins. “What… the fuck… do you mean by that?”

You have been in the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead for more than a day. A great deal has happened. And now it is time for Audrey’s hatching.

“My Lord—?” Lord Vaako asked as Riddick burst through the Chamber’s doors, vaulting over the throne and flinging himself at top speed down the hallway. He didn’t bother looking back.

All he knew was that Jack was in danger. And he was fucking sick of being too late to save the people he loved.

The Changeling Game, Chapter 92

Title: The Changeling Game (Formerly Identity Theft)
Author: Ardath Rekha
Chapter: 92/?
Fandom: Pitch Black (2000); The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004)
Rating: X
Warnings: Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language
Category: Het
Pairing: Riddick/Jack
Summary: With no other choices left, Kyra accepts Vaako’s “invitation” to join the Necromonger Armada… and discovers, too late, who is controlling it and what its true mission is.
Disclaimer: The characters and events of Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury are not mine, but belong to Universal Studios. I just wish I were in charge of their fates. No money is being made off of this. I’m writing strictly for love of the story.
Feedback: Absolutely, the more the better! Shred me, whip me, beat me, make me feel grammatical! I post “rough,” so I can always use the help. 😉

92.
The Fall of the Black Fox

“Do not touch her!”

As one, the soldiers surrounding Kyra froze. Physically, anyway.

Their minds were still barraging her with thoughts of the vile things they wanted to do to her body, full of their excitement over how her warm, soft, living flesh would feel against them. She was trying to block those sick images from her head in preparation for the coming fight. She couldn’t isomorph away from them—in Elsewhere, she was surrounded by Crematoria’s intense dawn inferno—but she could isomorph them, or parts of them, as they came at her. Grab their weapons—

“Stand down.” The same male voice came again. “Go to your duty stations. I will deal with her.”

Smoldering resentment filled the room for a moment, but the soldiers obeyed and filed past the man who, she realized, she’d watched hoisting the Guv high into the air and then breaking her friend’s back across his armored knee.

The Necro commander’s hair was a dark red, almost black, and cut strangely, shaved on the sides and longer up top, with tight braids falling to midway down his back. His skin was pale and sickly-looking, his hazel eyes rimmed in red. He was about five inches taller than her and had at least eighty pounds on her.

One soldier stopped by him. “My Lord, I must protest. You are married. Surely you can give the men this breeder—”

“This is no breeder,” the “lord” said, his gaze never wavering from her. “You saw her fight. She will be a magnificent Knight of the Legion.”

For a moment the soldier was rendered speechless. His frown deepened. “Serving under you?”

“Have a care what tone you take,” For a moment, the “lord’s” gaze left her and he bent a frown upon his underling. “She will serve under my command if the Lord Marshal wills it. Try my patience again and I will give her a spear, and then we will see how she serves you.

“On a platter,” Kyra opined. She hated it when people talked about her like she wasn’t even there. “A little one. Could probably even fit both of you on it.”

The “lord’s” mouth curled into an appreciative smile as he met her eyes. Then he turned another glare on his underling. “Leave us now. Tend to your duties. If you or the others wish to see the Underverse, you will put aside your unworthy fantasies. Now.”

“Yes, my Lord.” The other man stalked out of the room.

For a moment there was silence. Kyra continued to study her possible opponent, trying to spot any signs of weakness. He held himself like a trained warrior, balanced and powerful even at rest. She could take him down, but not easily.

But I can do it… Part of her wanted to just for what he’d done to the Guv.

“What is your name, girl?” he asked.

“Kyra.”

He paused, waiting for her to say more. When she didn’t, another small smile appeared on his face. “Where are you from, Kyra?”

“Earth, originally.”

His eyebrows went up. “There are very few in the ’verse who can make such a claim. Which sublight colony ship were you on?”

“The New Christy Pilgrim.

He looked surprised, then thoughtful. Then, after a moment, she could swear she saw a lightbulb go on. “That makes you the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain, does it not?”

These Necros know about the New Christy Massacre? Crazy.

“It does.” No point in denying it. She’d admit what she needed to; he wouldn’t get any of her actual secrets from her.

“How did you come to be on Crematoria, Kyra Wittier-Collins? You and the other survivors of the massacre were exonerated some time ago.”

Well, that confirmed the conversation she’d overheard Toombs and Logan having, anyway. “I don’t think that exoneration covers the seventeen men I killed on New Queensland.”

Or the mercs she’d killed on Tangiers Prime. But she would never tell anyone about that.

“Do you like killing men, Kyra?”

Weird question. “You got no idea what they did.”

“That wasn’t what I asked,” he said, his expression calm and interested. “Do you like killing?”

It had been, she thought, one of the few things that had calmed her in Crematoria whenever everything became too much: setting her sights on one of the nastiest of the men in the place, someone cruel and brutal and vile of mind, and destroying him…

“Yes. I do. And I’m one of the best at it.”

He nodded, his small smile back. “Then I am glad you came aboard. As I said before, you will make a magnificent Knight of the Legion.”

“You want to make me a Necro?”

“We are Necromongers. The dealers of death. There is no army that can stand before us.”

Except, she thought, an army of Riddick…

But he had fallen, too.

“What do Necromongers do, exactly?” she asked.

“Humanity should never have spread as it did. It does not belong in this ’verse. We are cleansing the ’verse of the human infection so that all can be reborn in the Underverse. You can help us bring salvation to billions.”

Religious fuckery. She could hear it in his words, in his sudden pious tone. She hated religious fuckery.

Not like I can ask him to stop the ride and let me out… shit.

“By killing people?” she asked.

“Are you not one of the best at that?” he countered, a tiny, challenging smile appearing on his lips.

“I might be interested.” Might not, though.

His tiny smile grew by a fraction. “Come. Let’s get you cleaned up and fed. This ship is not equipped for conversions with no Purifier, and given your association with the Riddick, the Lord Marshal may wish to speak with you before you receive your marks. But I imagine you are tired and hungry after how hard you fought.”

“And you’re not?” He’d briefly seemed staggered by whatever had happened on the runway, but now he seemed cool as a…

…corpse…?

“You will find that, after you become one of us, the exertions that could deplete you as an ordinary human—”

—A breeder, his mind added, but she had the sense that the word carried a connotation of slavery—

“—will be trivial to you.”

She wouldn’t drop her guard, not completely. But this man was making an offer that had no small amount of appeal to it. She wondered if one day she might be able to break men over her knee, too. That thought did have its allure. “Okay. What’s your name?”

“Lord Vaako. Come, Kyra. It’s time for you to begin your new life.”

It took them only a little over two days to reach Helion Prime, something that surprised her but that Vaako had been happy to explain. There was a Star Jump corridor between Helion and Igneon that took only half of that time; the rest was spent in sublight transit. It was a heavily used route; while the general population of the Helion system had been led to believe that the energy it supplied other worlds came from their own sun, the truth was that the rare plasmas they traded in came from the powerful emissions of that young neighboring star still in its infancy, harvested as those emissions passed strategically positioned collectors. Energy, Vaako added, that had enabled humanity to spread entirely too far through the stars, polluting too many worlds.

In the interim, she was able to shower, to dress in garb that Vaako said was “fitting for an acolyte,” and even join him and the other soldiers at meals. The Necromongers had a preference for intense flavors in their food; curiously, they seemed to perceive the food as almost bland. She found herself wondering if their senses of taste had been compromised by their conversions.

Not that she cared much; Tizzy had been the foodie. Kyra mostly just ate to refuel.

The men spoke of prior campaigns and kill counts, and slowly thawed to the idea that she was meant to be one of their comrades in arms, and not a spoil of war, as she shared some of her kill stories, including the things she had done in the past to men who tried to get too familiar. True to Vaako’s word, none of them touched her. Not even him. He was, as she had heard, already married… and known for his scrupulous fidelity.

Which was a relief. She found that she was warming to him, in spite of how they had met, and was glad that there wouldn’t be any amorous intentions on his end that she’d have to deal with.

Helion Prime looked nothing like she remembered.

She had only spent one morning on its surface as she and Tizzy fled Aceso for the spaceport, and they hadn’t traveled through the best parts of town as they did so. Still, the sky had been blue. The air had been fresh. The buildings hadn’t been piles of rubble…

It was almost as if someone had tried to turn that world into another Crematoria. The sky was a foul yellow-orange that stank of fires and death, and the graceful, signature architecture had been reduced to tumbled wreckage. Hundreds of years of painstaking creation destroyed in a day—

This was what Necromongers did to worlds. They were killing on a scale she could barely even comprehend. A scale that far exceeded what she and Tizzy had feared might be done to the people of Tangiers Prime if the Quintessa Corporation ever real­ized—

Oh fuck, what if they decide to go there next?

This wasn’t something she wanted to be party to. But she wasn’t sure she had any kind of say in the matter. Beneath the veneer of “honored guest” that Vaako had layered onto her situation, she was still a prisoner.

Vaako’s scout ship had landed near a massive craft that he called the Basilica. He led her up its steps and inside.

“I must take you to the Lord Marshal first,” he told her as they walked. “He will need the news of the Riddick’s fate.”

She stuck close to him as they entered an enormous cham­ber… a throne room… and walked toward the throne. Other groups of people were hurrying into the room, and several men were descending staircases from higher levels as well.

“Who is this?” she heard someone ask.

A stunningly beautiful woman, her skin maybe a shade or two darker than Riddick’s and her black hair drawn back into a tight and elaborate bun, had walked up to Vaako and had taken his arm. His wife, Kyra assumed.

“This,” Vaako said, nodding in Kyra’s direction, “is Kyra Wittier-Collins, the Black Fox of Canaan Mountain. An associate of Riddick’s, and a proficient warrior who I am presenting to the Lord Marshal for conversion. Kyra, this is my wife, the Dame Vaako.”

Said Dame was regarding her as if she were something that had clung to the bottom of a shoe. Lovely. She kept her face bland, slipping back into the manners she’d been taught in the Enclave and giving the other woman a respectful nod and the curtsy due an Elder. “Ma’am.”

Dame Vaako’s eyebrow arched. “Interesting girl. Why is she not on her way to one of the Stews?”

“She killed twenty-four of my men. I think she planned to kill even more if any of them tried to touch her in an unseemly way. Conversion seems the better choice, wouldn’t you agree?”

His wife looked impressed, albeit unwillingly. “By all means. I shudder to think what she might do in the Stews if you had sent her there.”

Actually, Kyra reflected, Dame Vaako seemed to be contemplating that scenario with barely-concealed glee. Whatever “Stews” were, the woman hated them.

“What news of the Riddick, Vaako?” A man’s voice called out. Kyra faced forward again. The speaker was sitting on the throne, his shrewd gaze giving the lie to his indolent posture.

“The Riddick is dead, Lord Marshal,” Vaako intoned, bowing. When Dame Vaako bowed also, Kyra copied their move.

“And who is this?”

Vaako repeated much of what he had told his wife, adding more details about her for his commander’s benefit. He touched briefly on the New Christy Standoff and Massacre, noting that Kyra had been one of the children who escaped in the wake, and the one credited for killing five Colonial Marshals during the massacre and three more in the aftermath, including their leader, “Red Roger” Fiennes. Some of what he was saying confused her. She thought things had played out differently, somehow. Maybe the accounts he had seen were wrong—

“She was twelve at the time, my Lord. She was later sent to Crematoria for seventeen murders on New Queensland, and personally killed twenty-four of our soldiers while she and the Riddick were attempting to escape Crematoria.”

“An extraordinary résumé,” the Lord Marshal observed. “What now?”

“Once she is converted,” Vaako continued, “I recommend training her to be a Knight of the Legion, unless you wish otherwise. I volunteer to train her and have her serve under my command.”

Kyra could feel how much that displeased his wife. Didn’t she know her husband had no interest in anyone but her?

“I will consider it. We do need a few more women in our Amazon regiment,” the Lord Marshal said with a smirk. “Is it true that the Riddick is dead, Kyra?”

It hurt to think about even now. She swallowed and nodded. “I didn’t see him die, but I saw him dead on the ground. He wasn’t…”

She couldn’t finish. He wasn’t breath­ing… I couldn’t feel him any­more…

“Were you two close, girl?” His voice was gentle, but she could feel the intensity of his regard. This wasn’t some idle question.

“Yeah. He, um… rescued me when I was younger, and came to Crematoria to rescue me again.”

“I should like to see this.” The Lord Marshal rose from his throne. “Take her before the Quasi-Dead. I wish to know everything about her time with the Riddick. And his death. Where is the Purifier who accompanied you?”

“Dead as well, Lord Marshal.” Vaako glanced at Kyra, his expression uneasy and regretful.

“Come this way, child,” his wife said, releasing Vaako’s arm to slink around him and take hers. “This shouldn’t take long. And then you will begin your conversion.”

There was nowhere to run, even if Kyra knew what she was suddenly feeling a need to run from. Helion Prime was an airless rock in Elsewhere; she couldn’t slip across to escape. And even if she fled, what then? What was left of the world was dying.

She walked with Dame Vaako instead, waiting and watching, trying to figure out her next move.

The Dame led her into a chamber behind the throne and over to a dais in its center. “Stand here, child. Don’t resist. The only one resistance will hurt is you.

Another new one… you have brought us…

There were voices in Kyra’s head, voices that shouldn’t be there. Her legs buckled and she collapsed on the dais, struggling against the feeling of strange minds rifling through her mind and her memories.

“Show me her memories of the Riddick,” she heard the Lord Marshal commanding them.

We see a great many memories of the Riddick in her mind. A day’s worth of true memories. The others are either not her own, or are lies. She has believed in them for years.

No! That wasn’t true. It wasn’t possible!

The girl, Jack, that the Riddick thought of… she knew her. They traveled together. Jack shared her memories of the Riddick, in an attempt to impart strength…

Her mind was unraveling. Locked in the grip of brains far more powerful than her own, Kyra found herself reeled back, seeing how the New Christy Massacre had really played out all over again, watching the destruction of everything she had loved or hated as a child… witnessing her mother’s mur­der… reliving the retribution she eventually was able to wreak upon the men who had violated her and her mother…

…and Riddick had never been there. He had never rescued her, never watched over her, never taught her any of the skills she’d acquired. She had been alone on Canaan Mountain.

She had had no one.

Her life spooled out again before her. More than three years of agony, exploitation, and lost time before Jack appeared in Aceso and the feedback effect of two espers in close proximity began to build between them, forging a bond—

An esper. She is an esper. Powerful even before our purifications. She will be an extraordinary Quasi-Dead…

The escape, and the run to Tangiers Prime—

She has crossed a threshold. She knows the way to another ’verse… not the Underverse but one she calls Else­where…

“Where is the Elemental?” she heard the Lord Marshal call out from a distance. Someone replied, but she didn’t catch their words. “Good. Make sure she stays there until this is completed. She is to know nothing of what we learn from this girl.”

Kyra, meanwhile, was plunged back into the chaos of defending the Scarlet Matador passengers from the Quintessa Corporation, the Spaceport Explosion, the arrival of Duke Pritchard and the stab wound he gave her… recovering in bed while Jack, now calling herself Tislilel, told her stories about Riddick… the stories becoming infinitely more real when Tizzy—her sister, Tizzy!—realized she could share sense memo­ries…

Tizzy? She shied away from the minds constraining her and called out to her sister. If she was anywhere near, anywhere still in the ’verse, maybe she would hear.

The Quasi-Dead kept plundering at her mind, revealing all the secrets she had tried to keep, all the things that could get millions mur­dered… but now she was in the thrall of a marauding force that intended to murder billions upon bil­lions…

Tizzy! she called out again, trying to feel her sister somewhere out there.

Her life continued unspooling before her, before them, every secret and bit of suffering exposed. She saw, as if from the outside, her growing conviction that Jack’s memories were her own…

You are not Jack, the Quasi-Dead whispered in her head. You never were. That name belonged to someone else, along with all the memories you treasure so much…

She wanted to deny it, to rail against them and cling to the dream of a world with three suns. She couldn’t; they wouldn’t let her. Trying to hold on anyway filled her head with agony that brought her to the edge of screaming.

She screamed inside instead, pouring every bit of her torment into a final call, grasping for the bond they had once shared. Jack! Help me!

You will not speak to outsiders again, the Quasi-Dead told her, and she felt something muffling her awareness of the minds around her. Cutting her off. Suddenly she could only feel them.

And something else. Something hideous, malicious, waiting close by…

They took everything. They ransacked her mind and found everything she had ever tried to hide.

You will be a fine addition to the ranks of the Quasi-Dead, Kyra Wittier-Collins, once you have been purified and trained.

She was lying on the dais, in a puddle of tears, when two men came and lifted her to her feet. They were dressed like the man who had stayed behind on the runway of Crematoria, when everyone else was racing for the scout ship. When she couldn’t manage to walk, they dragged her between them to another room, suspending her in a harness, restraining her, and then—

Pain, agonizing pain, on either side of her neck. Her body shuddered as she tried to break free, but she had no strength left to fight with.

It hurts… it hurts…

Let it happen. Let it in. The pain will set you free.

She knew that voice. She’d heard it in night­mares…

I will show you a world without pain. A world where the Demons of the Darkness are no more, and life is ever-renewing…

It’s you… oh my God, it’s you…

You are mine, little creature. Do not fight this.

She could almost see it in front of her, a perfect world, a place of peace and harmony and glory—

Another lie. No more true than Tizzy’s narratives of Riddick rescuing her on Canaan Mountain.

Their Underverse is a lie…

For an instant, she caught a glimpse of what lay behind the lie. Image fragments assaulted her—

…fire crisscrossing the sky over New Marra­kesh…

…men and women brandishing flaming swords above their heads, their eyes glowing silver like Riddick’s, leaping onto the backs of creatures that looked like Mommy Ree…

…a dying god pinned in place by a spear of rock…

…gnarled, wrinkled hands clasping hers as an old, old woman, with eyes that made her think of Tizzy, murmured It’s almost finished now…

…a stone box crumbling to dust in her hands, its dissolution reverberating through all of creation…

…her long-lost stuffed rabbit, El-Ahrairah, lying on a pillow, but not the pillow she’d left him on when she was six…

…Tafrara Meziane, tears running down her face, arm outstretched, hand splayed against the chestplate of a man in Necromonger armor…

…an impossible, terrifying creature, both tiny and enormous at the same time, its obsidian skin containing the shine of galaxies, sitting on Tizzy’s chest and reaching out to touch her face with its claw—

No no no no NO NO NO

Darkness. Silence. Her life force, her will, was draining away, her skin turning cold and stiff.

You are his now, Kyra. Obedience is all. Fealty is all. The Underverse waits.

But…

It is the only truth you will need. It is the only truth you will have.

Silence. Darkness. Something new, something eldritch and powerful, was seeping into her where her life and will had once been.

A second was a year. An hour was an eternity. She did not dream of a world with three suns. Her dreams were dead.

“Lift her down. The Lord Marshal has commanded her attendance upon him.”

“Right now? Aren’t we preparing to leave atmosphere? She’d be better off—”

“Right now. Do it.”

She’d forgotten all about the things piercing her neck until they were withdrawn.

The two Purifiers who had taken her out of the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead… eons ago… helped her don the robes of an acolyte. She followed one of them back to the throne room, where the Lord Marshal was beckoning her forward. Head down and covered properly like an acolyte’s always should be, she walked up to the throne’s steps.

“What is your will, Lord Marshal?”

“I understand that your conversion is complete, Kyra. And that you are destined to become one of the Quasi-Dead. Is it well with you?”

No! a tiny voice within her screamed. “Yes, My Lord. I look forward to serving.”

“Today, however, I have need of a different service from you.”

Fuck you, you bastard! the tiny voice raged, buried deep. “My Lord has only to ask.”

“Someone you once knew will be coming. Stay close. Perhaps you can convince him to convert to the Way.”

You goddamn fucking son of a bitch, I’ll never ever— “It would be my honor.”

“It won’t be long now.”

It wasn’t.

The attack was sudden and swift, a dark figure in Necromonger armor flying through the air, a knife raised in one hand, aiming for the Lord Marshal. He seemed already aware; before she could even gasp, he had turned the attacker’s momentum against him and flung the would-be assassin across the main hall’s floor.

And for a moment, Kyra thought she had seen the impossible.

Riddick is dead. That couldn’t have been him—

“Stay your weapons!” the Lord Marshal ordered the crowd in the hall. “He came for me.”

The soldiers that had begun massing around the man, weapons drawn, moved back.

“Kyra,” the Lord Marshal murmured. “To me, now.”

She obeyed, walking to his side and letting him turn her to face the crowd and draw her hood back.

Oh fuck. Oh shit…

It was Riddick. Riddick sprawled on the floor of the main hall, staring at her in horror. He rose to a crouch, his eyes never leaving hers.

Riddick! Oh my God, Riddick, please help me—

He cannot hear you, the Quasi-Dead murmured in her head. You are ours, not his.

“Consider this,” the Lord Marshal was saying as he and Riddick walked toward each other. “If you fall here… now…”

Both men went still, facing off across the hall.

“…you’ll never rise,” her master said.

Riddick tried to say something, but the Lord Marshal went on speaking.

“But if you choose another way… the Necromonger Way…” He gestured back at Kyra.

Fuck, he’s using me as a lure… She wanted to fight, to scream, to kill someone, but she couldn’t move.

“You’ll die in due time,” the Lord Marshal continued, “and rise again in the Underverse.”

There’s no such thing! It’s not real! It’s a lie! It’s the Mor—

Your relationship with Riddick was the lie, the Quasi-Dead countered. The Underverse is truth. The Underverse is all.

Riddick was focused on her, his expression intent. Was he trying to speak to her? Why couldn’t she hear him? She tried to will her way through the barrier that the Quasi-Dead had erected between them—

You will not speak to him or any other, they said. They were blocking her!

The Lord Marshal’s left arm came back, gesturing her way and beckoning her to him. She didn’t want to obey, but she stepped forward and moved to his side. He put his hand on her shoulder and she expected to flinch the way she always did when a strange man touched her—

But instead, she felt rewarded. The greatest of them all had deigned to touch her, an honor beyond com­pare—

Fuck you all! she screamed deep within. The expression on the man’s face infuriated her. Paternal, kindly, the lying façade of a man who had absolute power and could imagine that anything he did, no matter how brutal, was his right and somehow innately good just because he was the one doing it. You ripped apart my mind, you motherfucking son of a side of—

“Go to him,” He murmured, and she found herself obeying.

It was ten steps to stand before Riddick. Just ten. She spent the whole time wrestling for control of her body… and losing.

“It hurts,” she heard herself telling him, “at first.”

Don’t listen to me! It’s not me! This isn’t what I need to tell you! Pain, she suddenly thought, was all she’d ever known. Except for one brief time—

“But after a while,” her mouth continued, out of her control, “the pain goes away, just as they promise.”

Everything they promise is a lie! Don’t let them in! Help me! She had called for Jack’s help, too, but she had gone away, had been taken from her years ago, and now the last bits of Jack that Kyra had been left with were gone, shattered by the Quasi-Dead…

Riddick’s expression was dubious, distrustful, hints of both horror and longing on his features. “Are you with me, Kyra?” he murmured.

Yes! Yes, please help me! Riddick, please— “There’s a moment when you can almost see the Underverse through his eyes,” she heard herself saying. His eyes? No. Not the Lord Marshal’s eyes. What she had caught a glimpse of had come from the Mori­bund— “He makes it sound perfect. A place where anyone can start over.”

She had started over so many times. What was one more? She never should have let General Toal separate her from Tizzy, never should have tried to link them staying together to him—

Tell him Jack’s dead, her Tizzy had said in their final moment together. She wasn’t strong enough to cut it in his world.

Kyra never should have made them staying together about him. She should have just asked her sister not to leave her. What if, one day, her orders were to kill Tizzy? She couldn’t even make Riddick hear her thoughts; how would she pos­sibly—

“Are you with me, Kyra?” he repeated.

Yes, Riddick, please help me. Please take me away from here. She tried to move to his side, tried to say yes with her body if not with her voice—

He is not yours, the Quasi-Dead told her, forcing her to move on instead. He never was.

She walked past him and into the crowd, surrounded by the Moribund’s puppets. The Moribund’s meat… She was his puppet now too, his meat.

“Convert now,” the Lord Marshal was saying behind her, “or fall forever.”

She wished she’d burned up on Crematoria.

And, somehow, she heard Riddick’s whisper. “You killed everything I know…”

Riddick’s survival instincts had switched off. He was planning to fight to the death. His death.

Kyra gathered all the strength she had left into a single, desperate cry. There were beings she’d hidden from for years, whose power and strangeness had terrified her, but now she wondered why she’d feared them at all when so much worse existed in the ’verses. She prayed that they might hear her now. She had nothing else left to try.

SOMEBODY HELP ME!

The Changeling Game, Chapter 91

Title: The Changeling Game (Formerly Identity Theft)
Author: Ardath Rekha
Chapter: 91/?
Fandom: Pitch Black (2000); The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004)
Rating: X
Warnings: Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language, violence galore, murder
Category: Het
Pairing: Riddick/Jack
Summary: Although she swore to herself that she would follow Riddick anywhere, Kyra’s resolve—and her sense of self—is put to the test as their journey takes them through Hell itself.
Disclaimer: The characters and events of Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury are not mine, but belong to Universal Studios. I just wish I were in charge of their fates. No money is being made off of this. I’m writing strictly for love of the story.
Feedback: Absolutely, the more the better! Shred me, whip me, beat me, make me feel grammatical! I post “rough,” so I can always use the help. 😉

91.
Pursued by a Scourging Sun

Crematoria was the strangest world Kyra had ever been on, she thought as she pursued Riddick across its rocky surface.

Tizzy had told her how bizarre it was, how it seemed to violate almost all the rules of planetary physics and then some. That had come up in conversation during their first week on Tangiers Prime, while her little sister had been building fake IDs for the two of them and Tomlin, and the talk had turned to various prison systems in the Federacy.

“Most planets,” Tizzy had said even as her fingers flew over the key glyphs on her tablet, “the coldest time of the night is right before sunrise and the hottest time is right before sunset. Then the temperature starts to rise, or fall, toward the other peak. So you’d think that it’d be too cold to survive even a few seconds outside in the hour before sunrise, and that early to mid-morning, and sometime late at night, would be about the only hours you could safely survive a world with that temperature range. Not how it works there, and it took scientists decades to figure out why.”

Kyra was running through the why even as she recalled Tizzy’s words. The weirdest volcanic system on any world ran under the lava fields she was sprinting across, one that pumped out hydrogen and oxygen, in addition to methane and more traditional volcanic gases.

“Some guy from New Oxford figured it out a century ago,” Tizzy had continued. Somehow she could type one thing and talk about something else without getting confused, a feat that Kyra had considered herculean. “The planet’s core is made up of metallic hydrogen. Must’ve once been a gas giant, maybe a brown dwarf, before Igneon went protostar on it. Blew away most of its gases except the ones that had been locked inside what used to be its mantle, which froze on the spot and became its new crust.”

Froze into twisted, convoluted basalt shapes that Kyra had to run across. Froze into gargantuan knives of volcanic glass. Froze into an impossible world. She kept putting one foot in front of the other, all her intention focused on keeping up with Riddick. If you can’t keep up, don’t step up, he’d told her. So far, she was doing a better job of keeping up than any of the few others who had joined them on the run.

“And Igneon’s a young star,” Tizzy had continued. “All this shit happened maybe five hundred years ago. People back on old Earth saw it ignite on their telescopes. That’s how it got its name. So all those gases locked under the mantle had been under crazy levels of pressure before the planet lost its original atmosphere. With that pressure gone, they’re escaping, but it’s gonna take another ten thousand years, minimum, before they all do.”

“What’s that all mean, though?” she’d asked. Tizzy was a fount of fascinating knowledge, the kinds of things that the New Christy Fathers had insisted girls didn’t need to know about. Something about the way she shared it made it easy to understand, too.

“Well, the planet pumps out enough gases that you have a more or less breathable atmosphere.” Tizzy had grimaced. “Kind of. As long as you don’t encounter a toxic vent and as long as you stay out of the sun. The mixture is breathable but seriously flammable. Like, explosively so. Not enough nitrogen in the mix. And not enough upper atmosphere to filter most of the sunlight, either. When the sun hits it, the atmosphere starts heating up fast, and within a few minutes it reaches the temperature you need for spontaneous combustion.”

“You’ve gotta be shitting me.”

“Swear to God. So right along the dawn line, you have this traveling explosion. After an hour or two, all the atmosphere has burned off in an area. The temperature climbs to about seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit—that’s three-seventy-ish Celcius—in the burn zone. But after the atmosphere burns off, under the shadow of the burn cloud, it drops down to negative three hundred Fahrenheit, or about one-eighty-five-ish Celcius. That’s close to the temperature where nitrogen—if the planet had much of it, anyway—where it freezes. You ever see what happens to something you put in liquid nitrogen?”

When Kyra had shaken her head, Tizzy had pulled up a vid on her tablet to show her. Someone dipped a rosebud into a flask of liquid; when it emerged it was covered with frost. A moment later, with a gentle tap on a table’s surface, it shattered into dozens of fragments.

“Fuck, Jack…”

Had she really called Tizzy “Jack” back then? Huh.

Tizzy shuddered theatrically. “You walk out into that temperature and you’re dead before you even notice it’s cold. Fortunately, even though that’s the planetary low, it doesn’t stay there for long. More gases pump up and ignite on the spot, and warm things up a little while they burn off. That goes on all day. Then the sun sets. The temperature drops crazy-low again, but the burn also ends. And then the planet keeps pumping out more gases, which take up the heat stored in the rocks from the day’s burn. By a few hours before dawn, you can walk around on the surface and survive. The place becomes almost comfortable about half an hour before the sun returns. And then boom, the whole shitshow starts over again.”

“And they put a prison on a planet like that?” Kyra had shaken her head in wonder.

“Turns out there are subterranean cave systems all over the place there, and some of them have stable atmospheres and even some decent temperatures. The prison’s in one of those systems. My—” For a moment, Tizzy hesitated, and then continued. “Paris told me that the only part of the prison complex that has any real security systems in it is the underground passage between the prison and the hangar that supply ships dock in. As long as nobody can get into that, they have no hope of surviving outside of the prison itself.”

And yet here we are, Kyra thought, running across the surface and hoping we can outrun the dawn…

Only the Guv, Sybar, and two other men from the Guv’s gang had chosen to join her and Riddick on the run. Everyone else had decided that the risk was too great, planning instead to use Toombs and Logan as hostages—“bargaining chips,” Kyra had insisted—to get relief supplies flown in by the prison guild. They’d agreed on a story, which Toombs and Logan would, perforce, have to agree with too, in which raiders had attacked the prison only to be successfully driven off by the original guard contingent, all of whom had sacrificed their lives in the process. Kyra had been party to worse lies.

The only thing that might complicate that story would be if the surviving guards succeeded in making it to the hangar and launching. But if they did, she doubted she’d be in a position to care what happened next in the prison.

It had been three hours until sunrise when they’d begun the run. With almost thirty klicks to cover, through brutal terrain, the odds of successfully negotiating the distance were slim enough that there had been almost no takers. The four who had joined them—the Guv, Sybar, and two men the Guv had taken under his wing in just the last year—were all political prisoners who officially didn’t exist on the prison rolls as themselves, and who suspected the Guild had been party to their abductions and incarcerations. Racing against the dawn seemed like better odds to them than dealing with whatever shakeups were facing the prison when a new Warden arrived.

Kyra had heard of athletes who could complete a ten-klick race in under half an hour, but she had a feeling that they were going to need the whole three hours to make it thirty klicks, themselves. Especially given the ashy volcanic field ahead.

She had already shed her coat, sweater, and sleeved top—which she had still needed when they stepped out on the surface—and the heat was building. Tizzy was right that the surface became habitable a few hours before dawn, but she’d failed to mention how uncomfortable “habitable” could be.

They could, theoretically, outrun the guards. The subterranean passage that those men had to follow was convoluted and twisting, as the sled track had been, and only a few of them were in decent shape. Aside from a few dangerous surface features, Riddick could take her and the Guv’s men in a nearly straight line. Only hardly anyone in the prison had believed he was capable of doing any such thing.

They don’t know him like I do, Kyra told herself as she followed him into the ashfall.

Did she know him?

She and Tizzy had followed him into the darkness, years before, and he had brought them to safety, only—

—only she had no memory of Tizzy running beside her on that journey, and her hands, holding the light coils as she tried to illuminate the dark, had looked strangely different from her own…

Whose memories were those?

The hands had looked much like Tizzy’s as her fingers had flown over the key glyphs on her tablet, as they had stroked Sebby’s carapace. As if her memories were of inhabiting her little sister’s body somehow.

Ahead of her, she saw Riddick jerk his head up and to the side, as though sensing something. He put on a burst of speed and vanished into the ashfall.

Fuck! Covering her nose and mouth with a cloth against the ash—she had an odd memory of watching a vid, when she was little and still hadn’t left Old Earth, about a mountain named after a saint that had exploded a century or so earlier, and how volcanic ash, if breathed in, turned into cement in the breather’s lungs—she tried to put on a burst of speed to keep up.

Where are you, Riddick? she called into the gloom. If she could hear him, maybe he could hear her.

Keep moving, Kyra. You’re doing fine. Keep running. You’ll see me soon.

So Tizzy had been right about him being an esper, too. She followed the path her feet found through the rocky terrain as an eerie prickle, a sense of someone watching her, grew.

DUCK!

She obeyed, unable to do anything else in response to the powerful command, and lunged to the side. Two loud cracks sounded from somewhere in the ashfall.

One of the Guv’s friends—Björn, a man who spoke little and often muttered to himself in a language others said was Norwegian—let out a choking gasp from beside her and pitched forward, blood spreading from a wound in his back.

Fuck! Who’s shooting?

We’ve caught up with the guards, Riddick murmured in her head. They’re takin’ issue with that.

In seconds, it turned into an open battle. The Guv was dragging Björn out of the line of fire while both Sybar and the fourth man—Rosales, a guy who generally treated her with respect but sometimes fantasized about playing with her feet—began shooting at… what, exactly? She’d ducked behind an outcropping of rock and couldn’t see any­thing—

The fuck, Kyra? Get that head back down!

The rock she’d been peering over exploded a second after she ducked back below it, showering her with shrapnel. She unlimbered one of her own guns, taken from the control room, and fired back at the mound she’d caught a quick glimpse of. Battle rage was taking over.

Emerging from hiding, she raced for the mound, aiming her shots at the small space the guards were peering out of. The fucking thing was closing! She kept firing. She couldn’t stop, even as the opening sealed. Two fucking years of those bastards trying to arrange her hideous death had her wishing she knew how to use her weird telekinesis thing on something other than her own body. She wanted to make their blood boil and their organs explode. Especially Yuri’s.

She kicked at the mound in fury. You fucked your pig mothers to death and ate their bacon the next day!

Amused disbelief answered her. Riddick, halfway up a rocky hill, was watching her. He turned and began climbing again.

Forcing herself to let go of the urge to tear open the mound somehow, or spend hours trying, she followed.

“What was that?” Riddick demanded as she caught up with him. “You don’t care if you live or die?”

Not as long as I’m with you when it hap­pens— Fuck. She hoped he hadn’t heard that.

“If I kill them first,” she answered instead, half facetious, “not really.”

It wasn’t like she’d expected to live more than a few more years at the most in that hellhole. Her hopes had narrowed to hiding in Elsewhere for the rest of her life or achieving a fast death in preference to the four days of excruciating payback Yuri had been commissioned to inflict upon her. One of the only joys she’d had left was playing executioner to some of Crematoria’s nastiest bits of scum, even if the Guv did tell her it was “bringing shame to the game.” And the nastiest bits of scum of all were the guards themselves.

She followed Riddick as he leapt onto a rocky promontory over a glowing pit. The ashfall had lightened to almost nothing.

“Maybe I do,” he growled.

It startled her, his admission that her fate mattered to him. She’d thought he was disappointed to find her there instead of Tizzy—everybody seemed to gravitate to her little sister while she was stuck in the shadows—but now maybe he was telling her that he’d come for her—

“Keep moving!” he roared, shaking her out of her reverie. She followed him across the promontory, aware that the Guv, Sybar, and Rosales were running near them. Björn, apparently, had been left behind.

She wiped ash off of her body and out of her hair as she ran. The lava fields were behind them now, but there was a cliff ahead that they would need to climb.

“Hangar’s just on the other side,” Riddick told them when they reached it.

“So near and yet so far,” the Guv muttered, shaking his head. “We’re going to lose the lead we have on the guards.”

“If we keep jaw-jackin’ about it,” Riddick agreed, “yeah. C’mon.”

Although the Guv had brought rope for the climb, it remained coiled over his shoulder as they free-handed their way up. They were in Crematoria’s twilight hour, which struck Kyra as simultaneously good and bad. Good because she could see the handholds and footholds she needed to grab onto.

Bad because that meant sunrise was getting close.

The rock was porous, sometimes crumbling in her grip or under the toes of her boots as she worked her way higher, but there were plenty of places to grab onto. She felt like she was nearing the top, but she had the horrible suspicion it wasn’t near enough. Riddick, Sybar, and the Guv were higher up on the cliff face, while she and Rosales had fallen behind.

“Kyra?” Riddick called from above her.

Oh for God’s sake…

“KYRA!”

“What?” she screamed up at him. Kinda busy at the moment, god damn it!

“Get that ass moving!” he roared.

Fuck. They were nearly out of time. She tried to will more strength into her arms and legs as she reached for the next handholds—

Light bloomed around her, brilliant and scalding. The rock beneath her hands began heating up.

Shit! Shit!

There was a shadowed crevasse near her, big enough for her to duck inside. She lunged into it. Maybe there were passages through the cliff face—

No such luck. It was a dead end. In moments, it would be flooded with light too.

Gonna have to keep climbing.

She grabbed for the rocks again, but they were painfully hot. Her handguards began to sizzle as she snatched her hands back.

I’m dead. Fuck. I’m gonna die here. She slid to the floor of the crevasse as the air began to heat up.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but—

Not like this… “Riddick?”

No answer. But she could feel him listening.

“Remember what I said about not caring if I lived or died?” God, she felt so stupid for saying all that now. So much bravado, for what? “You knew I was kidding, right?”

Please don’t leave me here. Please… If anyone in the ’verse could save her, it would be him. I don’t wanna die. I’ve barely had a chance to live…

A rumbling sound was growing louder. She knew what that had to be. The air itself would begin to burn soon. She didn’t want to look, but she found herself turning to see out of the crevasse’s opening.

Tizzy had called it a “traveling explosion.” She hadn’t been exaggerating.

Kyra rose to her feet and took a deep breath. Would it be fast? She didn’t want to have to feel her body burning. Would it be better to throw herself off the cliff before the fire reached her?

She didn’t know what to do. She was rooted in place, watching the approaching doom.

“Your rope!” she heard Riddick shout above her. “Gimme your rope! And your water. All of it!”

Hold on, kid. I’m comin’.

“Stay in the shadow of the mountain,” she heard him telling the Guv and Sybar. “Don’t wait for me. Run!”

The explosion had almost reached the base of the cliff. It was too late to do anything.

Except scream. “Riddick!”

He was flying toward her, left hand holding onto a rope as his right arm reached for her—

She felt something else pulling at her as well, lifting her off her feet and toward him.

Oh my God.

Tizzy hadn’t been making shit up when she’d talked about telekinesis, claiming it was a real thing and that Kyra’s mother had probably used it in her magic acts. Riddick had it, too. He was controlling the arc of the rope with it and was pulling her to him. The expression on his face was pure agony.

His arm wrapped around her and they were flying together, her body pressed to his.

I got ya, kid…

They soared upward, the world roaring around them, and then she was falling, rolling on the shadowed clifftop as a massive, superheated cloud of plasma crashed against the cliff face and thundered upward into the sky.

She was alive. Unharmed. No sign of damage anywhere on her body, even if she suspected she’d sport some bruises in a few hours from her landing.

Something was hissing near her. She looked up—

Steam was rising from all over Riddick’s body as he rose from a crouch.

Oh fuck, he got scalded for me—

He turned to face, her, wreathed in the steam of the water that had boiled away on him, and met her gaze. Unharmed. Unburned.

The “hellhounds” were right, she thought, feeling her infatuation turn into something new and even more powerful. He’s a fucking god.

And he’d come back. For her.

“C’mon,” he said, offering her his hand. She had the strange feeling that, if only they had more time, he might have kissed her. “Got a few minutes before the sun catches up to us again.”

She took his hand, knowing that she’d follow him anywhere, Heaven or Hell, if he asked.

The Guv’s rope had been meant for the descent on the other side, she suspected, but it had burnt up just moments before. Fortunately, the slope was easier, the sun’s tumult carving less of it away on the leeward side. She could see how the base of the valley had been smoothed and shaped by human hands to create a runway lined with low structures at regular intervals, leading to a natural cavern that had been reshaped, opened wider, and then sealed with a smooth metal door. The hangar. The Guv and Sybar had reached a series of basalt ridges sculpted by violent lava flows and were making their way toward the structure. It didn’t take long to catch up with them.

Some strange, rhythmic thrumming, a deep sound on the edge of hearing, was filling Kyra’s ears. What was that?

“There it is,” the Guv was saying to Sybar, beginning to crawl forward. Riddick’s arm flashed out and he grabbed the other man’s leg at the ankle.

Both men looked genuinely shocked to see them alive.

“Listen,” Riddick growled.

The thrumming sound was real, Kyra realized. He heard it, too.

Damn right I hear ’em. He turned to look at her for a second. Follow me. Stay low and close.

She still wasn’t sure if she really was hearing him in her head the whole run, or if she’d developed some new symptom of crazy, but she did as he told her. They crept forward across the volcanic crust until the source of the thrum came into view.

A spaceship. One that almost blended into the landscape, all sharp edges and desolate grays. Scores of soldiers had spilled out from it, spreading out over the ground as it lifted away. They were closing in on the hangar.

Cool, cool, ’cause this has been such a cakewalk up ’til now…

They slid back down out of sight, returning to the Guv and Sybar.

“Let me guess,” she murmured to Riddick. “Necros.”

Whatever the hell Necros were, exactly.

“And a whole lot of Necro firepower,” Riddick grumbled.

“Shit!” It just figured. “I hate not being the bad guys,” she groused back.

She’d said that to Tizzy once, when they were contemplating the destruction of the New Marrakesh Spaceport, an explosion that had killed hundreds and injured thousands just to silence one man who had wanted to be a father to her. For all she’d done, and she’d done a lot of truly terrible things, there were lines she’d never cross, acts she’d never engage in… and it sickened her to be reminded that there were others who had no compunctions at all about them. Oliver. The mercs. Red Roger and his men. The settlers. The guards. Pritchard and Makarov. The Quintessa Corporation.

And Necros, whatever they were.

Guess I’ll just have to kill them, too.

She grabbed the length of her hair and twisted it, pulling it back into a makeshift bun. “I figure we got three minutes before the sun hits us again,” she observed, studying the rocky landscape around her, “burns out this whole valley.”

Their chances were slim, but maybe they could still reach the hangar—

“Wait,” Riddick said, looking meditative.

Kyra frowned at him, arming another of the guns she’d taken from the control room. Wait for what exactly? “We gonna do this or not?”

“Just wait,” he repeated, sounding almost amused.

For a second she wanted to demand whether he was crazy, until she remembered the sight of him, flying toward her in an impossible arc as a flaming maelstrom approached, pulling her into his arms by sheer will—

I trust you. She made herself relax.

“Ellen,” the Guv suddenly said from beside them. “Her name was Ellen. I never really forgot.”

He’d trotted that nameless wife story out every time he was trying to recruit someone into their gang, and the whole time…?

Guys like him need a pitch, Riddick rumbled in her head. It’s what they do after that counts.

She wondered if the Guv believed he was about to die. And then she wondered if he was right.

Gunfire erupted on the other side of the ridge. Some kind of pitched battle had begun.

The hangar’s open, she realized. Which meant the Necros and the guards were now in a fight for control over it. Busy killing each other…

Riddick was rubbing his hands together. “Remember that favorite game of yours?” he asked.

“‘Who’s the Better Killer?’” She already knew she would ultimately be its winner. Especially now that she could learn from him and add some new tricks to her repertoire.

We’ll see, kid. “Let’s play.” He freed one of his knives and turned away toward the ridge.

“Come on,” she told the Guv and Sybar, not bothering to see if they followed. Her eyes saw nothing but Riddick as she chased after him.

He launched himself into the air, killing one of the Necros in an instant and then using the fallen soldier’s gun to take out another, shooting backward without even looking and making a bullseye anyway. Part of her wished she could just watch him, the way the woman Tizzy’d killed had watched him battle Shrills. That woman hadn’t been wrong. It was art. But she had work to do.

She fired as she descended toward the runway, one ridge left between them and it, aiming at the Necros heading for them. She would give Riddick as much cover as she could, so he could go on being an artist.

“Kyra!” he suddenly called, holding out his hand to her. He didn’t need to say anything else. She could feel what he wanted. Springing the blades in the heels of her boots, she grabbed the harness in his hand and let him swing her, making her into a deadly, living scythe. She willed herself into a spin, wishing she’d had more chances to practice using her own telekinesis, but landed easily and released the harness, three more notches on her own belt.

He’s pulling ahead, she thought to herself, But I got years to catch up to him and I already have a big head start…

The Necros kept coming, trying to swarm them.

She lost track of how many she shot, how many Riddick cut to pieces. The sun was getting closer, but the moment itself seemed to have stretched out infinitely, each stroke of battle holding the sunrise at bay.

Riding a combat high…

Ewan had spoken of feeling it, of its dangerous, addictive quality. She suddenly understood, because she never wanted this feeling to end—

A gun blast sent Sybar flying through the air and back over the ridge while the Guv shouted his name. Where had that even come from?

Riddick reached back for her hand. Again, no words were necessary as she let him spin her through the air toward another Necro soldier. She landed straddling the man’s shoulders, stabbing in with her heels and then flipping herself backwards, pulling him down. Funny how, more and more, she could feel how she was violating physical laws…

…and how it was getting easier each time.

It was like being with Tizzy, she thought as she continued to carve a path through the soldiers. Somehow she was stronger around Riddick than away from him, the way she and her sister had reinforced each other’s abili­ties—

They were starting to run out of Necros.

Riddick glanced back at her as he killed another. Twenty-three to nineteen, kid. Step up your game.

Really? She shot him a withering look and took off after a soldier cresting the ridge.

A group tried to pile onto Riddick. She turned around, planning to head back to help him, and a Necro grabbed her from behind, his hand fisting in the crown of her hair.

God damn it, why’d I stop shaving my head?

Had she ever actually done that…?

She kicked and punched back­ward—

—and a knife sprouted from his eye, almost as if it had appeared from Elsewhere. Riddick had thrown it, but it suddenly occurred to her—

Why the hell am I fighting fair with these clowns? she wondered. She could be isomorphing organs out of their bodies and into another ’verse—

The Necro tried to keep fighting despite his eye wound. It took five more stabs to bring him down.

Are these guys dusted or something? She freed her knife from his corpse and turned around.

An energy bolt flew at Riddick. He managed to put the body of the Necro he was fighting between himself and it, but the blast sent both of them spinning up into the air, over the ridge between them and the run­way—

“No!” she heard herself screaming. She raced for the top of the ridge, looking down over the runway, not caring who saw her.

He was sprawled on the pavement, one of his legs bent in an unnatural position, Necros closing in on him. She watched as the Guv launched himself at their leader, and felt a terrible stab of pain go through her as the man took him apart in seconds.

She’d never told him, not once, just how much everything he’d done for her had meant to her. She’d never told him that he was the first family she’d had since she lost Tizzy. Now she’d never get to…

…and Riddick was doing the impossible, the unthink­able…

…he was not getting up.

He was trying to, struggling to rise… but failing.

That’s not the way it’s supposed to be!

Two Necros were almost on him.

Kyra took them out, the knives she buried in them giving her a conduit that let her pull key vertebrae out of U1 and into Elsewhere, as she raced for the other side of the runway and they crumpled to the ground. She turned around, willing Riddick to rise, trying to pull at him the way he had pulled at her.

“Get up,” she told him, trying to draw him up by sheer will. “Get up! Please get up!”

He stared at her as if struggling to comprehend what she was saying to him.

Two more Necros were coming after her, intent on taking her down and forcing her to flee up the hillside.

Riddick, get up! Please! She thought as she ran.

Taking both of them apart took only a moment, once she was in a more defensible position. She grabbed the second one’s pick-axe-like weapon as he fell and raced back toward the run­way—

—just as a blast of light shot over the ridge. For a moment she thought it was the sun rising, but it faded instead of intensifying.

She crested the hillside, looking down over the runway.

Bodies littered the space. Including Riddick’s. He wasn’t moving. She couldn’t see any sign that he was even breathing.

He couldn’t be dead…

But how could he be alive when she felt, suddenly, as if someone had isomorphed her heart out of her body?

In the midst of that terrible moment, scalding light poured into the valley. The sun had arrived to scour the world bare again.

With a gasp, Kyra ducked down below a small outcropping. Its shadow, she knew, wouldn’t last more than another minute.

She didn’t want to die. Maybe she’d have felt differently about it if she could have been in his arms when all this happened, but…

I want to live… I don’t want to die here like this…

The Necromonger ship hovered above her, slowly settling on the ridge just a short sprint away, its ramp lowering.

WARNING! WARNING! Its alarm sounded over and over, calling its troops—what was left of them—home.

The surviving Necromongers were climbing the ridge right next to her, racing past her without a look in her direction. One, a man in a long coat, stood quietly on the runway, not bothering to follow them. Riddick remained prone. She still couldn’t see any sign that he breathed. She couldn’t feel him…

Fuck…

A thousand fantasies rioted in her head, of running down the slope to him, dragging him into the hangar, closing the door, reviving him… being his hero the way he was hers…

A thousand dreams that would never come true. He was dead.

And if she didn’t want to die too, there was only one thing left for her to do.

He’d want me to sur­vive…

He’d admired survivors.

She leaned against the outcropping for a moment, nerving herself up. It was her last chance to live.

Kyra pushed off of the rocks and ran after the Necros, dropping her weapon to sprint at full speed and pass several of them on her way to their ship’s ramp before it could close.

It was only once she was inside, as the ramp closed and shut out the scalding daylight, that she realized she was unarmed…

…and surrounded.

Ardath Rekha • Works in Progress