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Faint Premonition	By : ehiltebe Category: M through R > Pitch Black Views: 2132 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: In no way do I own any part of Pitch Black, its setting, or its characters, and I make no money from this work. I just get to play with them.

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Faint Premonition

A Pitch Black Alternate Universe

Chapter Five

Crash Site
(Shazza)

“Comfy up there?” Shazza wrinkled her nose in a rare show of disdain as her husband yelled at Ogilvie. The smaller man had found a folding lawn chair, a small table, and a big umbrella somewhere in the cargo pod and set them up on the highest flat part of the wreckage, taking a bottle of booze with him and declaring that he’d be their lookout.

“Oh, yes.” The faint New British accent made his voice more recognizable. Fry, Jack, and Bergenhaus didn’t have accents as far as she could tell, and the rescued man wasn’t awake yet. The imam had an Arabic lilt and cadence, while Johns seemed to savor every word in what she knew was a Southern drawl—a label that had migrated from Old Earth without sticking to any planet in particular. “It’s amazing how you can do without the necessities, provided you have the little luxuries.” He raised his drink.

“Little puff pastry wanker.” Zeke grunted his agreement as they dragged away the piece of sheet metal bearing the older spacer’s corpse. Poor bastard had still been in his cryo-chamber when the ship was hit and he died.

“Just keep your bloody eyes open!” Aborigine ancestors had contributed to the size of her lover’s lungs. When he shouted, it could be heard for quite a ways. “I don’t want that dog sneakin’ up on my bloody ass.” It sometimes made for… awkward situations during their brief and usually rare forays into civilization.

“Yes, well, you dig the graves. I’ll hold the fort, old boy!” When she glanced over her shoulder to grumble about the pompous merchant, Shazza saw something to put a grin on her face.

“That Jack kid’s sneakin’ up on ‘im, luv.” He raised an eyebrow. “How high d’you think the little weasel’ll jump?”

(Paris)

“Christ!!” The cool edge against his throat scared him out of ten years of his life.

“He’d probably get you right here, under the jaw, and you’d never even hear him coming.” The breath Paris had drawn to scream whooshed out of him in a sigh of relief. It was only the brat with a hunting boomerang. At least the other three boys had gone off with the others. “That’s how good Riddick is.”

This is why I do not, and will never, have children.

“Yes, well…” He pushed the wooden weapon away from his neck with two fingers. “Now, did you run away from your parents, or did they run away from you?” The offended huff was amusing. “Aren’t you supposed to be keeping a weather eye on that poor chap we found out in the debris?”

“He’s awake.” The boy’s voice turned snappish. “I’m giving him a little privacy.” Jack turned and waved at the miners. “Being polite, if you even know what the word means.” He didn’t wait for a response, turning and jumping off the edge of the makeshift patio to leave Paris alone again.

“I’d’ve abandoned him myself.” The antiquities dealer shakily raised his bottle for a bracing sip of chardonnay.

(Jack)

“Dr. Sean O’Connell, astrophysicist.” The big, bruised, black-haired man extended a hand when she reentered the trashed passenger section. It got a cautious but firm handshake.

“Cool. The captain said we got hit by something, a meteor shower or a rogue comet, knocked us out of the lane we should have been in.” Her irritation with Ogilvie and his condescending attitude faded as Jack assessed the rescue. “One of her crewmates died in his tube, and the other one died just after the crash. Lucky one of the other survivors had a med-kit with Anestaphine; the ship’s med-lock is probably buried somewhere around here, now.” Hopping up on another locker put a little distance between them, and she relaxed a fraction. Just a fraction, though. “So, you know all about stars?”

“My life’s study,” the man affirmed. “How things work out in the great blue yonder.”

She squinted at him from behind the sunglasses Eileen had provided, thrown by the nonsensical phrase. “We’ve got not one, not two, but three suns here, red, yellow, and blue. First two are a pair, I think, set not long ago. Any idea where we are?”

“Not a one.” The doctor shrugged, after a moment to think. “Stable trinary systems are rarer than hens’ teeth, and I can’t think of one off the top of my head that includes a binary pair.” A lot of his phrases didn’t make a gram of sense to her, but surviving to be rescued was more important at the moment than figuring it out. “How many of us are left?”

“You’re magic number thirteen. Paris is topside, pretendin’ to be lookout and gettin’ himself drunk.” She began ticking the others off on her fingers. “Shazza and Zeke are givin’ proper honors to our former crew. Johns, the captain, the holy man, the three boys, and Eileen went lookin’ for a water source where we can camp out ‘til help comes. And, well, we don’t know where the other guy is.” There was a bit of an uncomfortable pause. She didn’t want to scare the guy half outta his mind by tellin’ him Riddick was alive and unaccounted for. “I’m Jack, by the way. Jack B. Badd.” She was really starting to like that name. Then she motioned to the things she’d left near him when he started to come around. “Don’t leave shelter without shades and a good layer of sunscreen. You’ll need the breather, too, ‘cause the air’s kinda thin for us.”

Contrary to her expectations, Dr. O’Connell simply nodded and followed Jack’s suggestions.

(Shazza)

Getting Owens out to the gravesite was worse than the old guy. Not physically; if anything, Shazza figured he massed less, which meant they didn’t have to work so hard to get him out there. No, it was because they’d seen him alive, first. He felt more like someone who’d been taken away than a… a broken thing. She knew what his voice had sounded like, even though he’d been screaming in pain at the time. At least Eileen had been able to free him of that hurt at the end.

She wasn’t sure why the smaller and younger-seeming woman had gotten her bags packed in the cryosleep chamber with her, if it had been paranoia, bad timing, or a combination of the two. It sure seemed a bit like she felt others were out to get her, though maybe there was a reason for that behavior. But if that was true, then it made no sense at all for her to leave most of her stuff in the wreck while she went with the scouting expedition. The criminologist was something of a puzzle.

“Wot the bloody ‘ell?” Dropping her end of the cable they were using to drag the sled, she joined Zeke in lifting the collapsed corner of the tarp over the grave. No body inside and there was a dark, gaping hole in the pit’s wall.

“That’s… odd.” Yeah, Riddick supposedly stuck to darkness, but she didn’t think he had a reputation for cannibalism. Not like the bloke she’d read about in her Old American Literature class. What had the author named him, Hannibal Lecter or something like that?

Nodding silently, her husband shed his tool belt, pulling the line out of the holes in the sheet metal and tying one end into a harness. Shazza automatically anchored the other end to a rock and returned the tarp to its supporting pole. Spelunking probably wasn’t the best idea, but how else were they supposed to find out where the corpse went?

Johns’ pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other, Zeke went in. The rope slid through her loose grip as he crawled further. It stopped for a moment.

“There you are, you bloo—Aaaugh!!” The yell startled her into clamping her fingers around the cable as it jumped, and she was nearly pulled over the edge of the grave before she could brace herself. But Shazza leaned back against the pull as the gun started blasting away at something.

“Help! Paris, you eedjit, HELP!!” She screamed at the top of her lungs, trying to drag her partner back out where she could see and help him. Her arms began to burn before she’d reeled in two meters of cable. He was too heavy, and his pained shouts were starting to get fainter.

The movement from the other side of the excavation barely registered before a solid mass knocked her off her feet and the impromptu safety line was seized by someone else. Someone who started hauling on it like there wasn’t more than twenty kilos on the other end. Zeke came flying out, limp as a rag doll, and she blacked out, the last thing she saw being a loop of cable drawn tight below a blood-spurting stump.

(Riddick)

I curse under my breath as th’ bushwhacker I’d knocked over passes out. That damn woman, makin’ me go soft by callin’ ‘em ‘children.’ I put another turn on th’ make-do tourniquet an’ get th’ bleedin’ remains of the man’s forearm down to a sluggish flow.

Hear feet headed my way. It’s a real kid, eyes wide, tube clamped in her mouth, an’ a Company-issue field medic’s kit in her arms. Looks like a boy, but the nose don’t lie t’ me; she’s buildin’ up t’ bleed. She skids to a halt in th’ loose dirt, glancin’ from th’ woman t’ me an’ then th’ casualty.

“Gimme a coagulant.” She fumbles with th’ lid, then looks inside blankly an’ back up at me.

“I… I don’t know what—”

“Bright fuckin’ orange.” Good thing about havin’ someone else doin’ the lookin’ is that I can’t see color anymore. Not since Pope Joe, Butcher’s Bay, an’ that freaky hallucination. A tube comes flyin’ towards me, an’ I hold th’ cable in one hand an’ catch with th’ other.

It’s the right size an’ shape. I don’t fuck with the cap, just tear th’ flattened end off with my teeth. Faster, an’ it lets me get a good whiff of th’ contents.

Girl’s not half bad.

I smear th’ goop on th’ raw meat left by whatever’s down th’ hole.

Idiot lost a hand and half his forearm ‘cause he went dirt-divin’.

Without askin’ for directions or waitin’ t’ be asked, kid tosses me a roll of gauze, followed by a roll of tape. I make sure t’ wrap things up good an’ tight, just in case th’ gel’s gone bad, even though it smelled fine. Can’t be too careful with big injuries like this.

I lift th’ dumbass an’ gently roll him onto th’ ground next t’ what musta been meant as a grave. I can smell a corpse nearby. Just ‘cause th’ man did somethin’ idiotic don’t mean I’m gonna bang him up when he’s half dead… especially as it’s th’ plain truth. Regardless of what th’ Company wants people t’ think, I don’t kill without a damned good reason.

I haven’t let th’ suits an’ uniforms tell me what t’ do or who t’ be since I got sent back down to Sigma 3 after Drift an’ Callahan taught me everythin’ they could.

(Jack)

The warm metal Jack had recovered from the bottom of the pit rubbed uncomfortably against her backside as she walked. There had to be some way to close it back up, but she couldn’t figure it out. Better to let Eileen handle it.

She trembled with nerves, bringing up the rear of the small group. Aside from Shazza and the out-cold Zeke, they were keepin’ a bit of distance between themselves and the convict. Jack wasn’t exactly afraid, though fear was part of what she felt.

Without words, she knew she’d done exactly the things Riddick had needed her to do. The entire time, she’d fought tooth and nail against freezing up, hyperventilating, throwing up, or more than one of those. Running away from the sort of things that had occurred at the foster home was well and good, but avoiding gore outright was another thing altogether. She wasn’t a fuckin’ coward.

It was only as the prospector was laid out on the sideways locker that she thought about how clearly she’d heard the pistol. Thin air carried sound farther.

“The others probably heard the shots.” She stiffened as eyes moved and focused on her. “How much d’you wanna bet they come runnin’?”

Canyon

The narrow opening on the sunrise side of the boneyard was, as I’d guessed, too small for even the youngest of the late herd members to have escaped through it. They’d gotten themselves stuck in a dead end, both literally and figuratively. The path between cliffs wound back and forth, around seven or eight meters wide and probably ten below the main surface above. Old high water marks scarred the walls near the level of my shoulders.

Not long after the path began climbing, we passed under the ribcage of something that had died straddling the canyon. Already, we walked perhaps five meters below the edges of the cliffs. Then we left them entirely, cresting a hill to find a heartening sight.

A settlement of some sort lay straight ahead, looking like a bunch of converted shipping containers. The near side gaped around an open area that contained an arched cloth canopy with dry, dead hydroponics plants underneath it. A couple meters away, a battered and slightly bent moisture collector reached toward the sky.

The Abdullah boys scampered down the slope ahead of us to explore. They stayed at the edge of the village, though, waiting for the adults. The oldest cupped his hands around his mouth, calling out.

“As-Salaam ‘Aleykum!” As his brothers added their voices, I wracked my brain. I’d learned a few basic phrases from several languages when I started with MM&T, and I thought the call was a greeting of some sort. No response came, just the flapping of tattered, light-bleached clothes on a line. I went into prowling mode again.

Something was wrong with this place. I couldn’t put my finger on it, though, and that bothered me. If the former inhabitants had left, then why was their old laundry out to dry? My flesh crawled as though something malicious watched me, something I couldn’t see or smell.

I found a larger structure near what I figured was the center of the town. Special care had been taken with it; nearly armor-quality sheet metal was bolted together to form the walls, and there was no sign that it had ever been part of a spacecraft. The materials to build it might have been brought in the converted pods when the settlers arrived, though. I found a pair of heavy doors and a label painted beside them.

Coring Room

Geologists, then. They tended to hop from one rock to the next, taking their families with them. Study a planet to the satisfaction of their superiors, pack up, and move on. The only problem lay in the fact that they usually packed up everything they’d brought, leaving only their coring pit as evidence that they’d been there.

Tugging on the handle of one door produced nothing but the rattle of chains. So I tried the other, and received the same puzzling result. Locked from the inside? I circled the building, looking for other exits. In some spots, smaller containers had been attached to the building, perhaps for use as workrooms or labs, but the most any of them had were windows with louvered shutters blocking any view of the interior.

As I checked another offshoot, I caught sight of a gap in the wall of the Coring Room itself. Where it joined the shipping pod, one of the heavy wall plates had been peeled away like a banana, ragged edges showing where the bolts had originally held it to the framework. Ten men working together wouldn’t have been able to do that to the two centimeter-thick metal. Nor could a single adult fit through the hole. A child, though, might be curious enough to take a look-see.

A nearby crate provided a handy solution; one side had come off at some point, which would make it easier to close up the breach. I threw all fifty kilos of my mass against the object, but it barely cooperated as I shoved it toward the opening. That was good, since none of the kids would be able to budge it. A soft ‘clunk’ told me I’d reached my goal, and a quick check revealed that, aside from the drag marks in the dirt, the crate appeared to have been there all along. The tracks were easily scuffed out with a few kicks.

“Helloooo New Mecca!” Fry’s shout snapped my head around toward the sound, and I headed in that direction at a trot. Only one hit from the breather was needed; I figured I might be acclimating to the less oxygenated air of the planet.

“It’s out of juice, looks like it’s been laid up for years.” The implied subject piqued my curiosity as I rejoined the group. “But the wings can be patched, and we might be able to adapt the skiff’s electrical system so it will take the ship’s power ce—”

“Shut up!” I’d heard what Johns wanted the silence for. The merc tensed for a moment, then relaxed. “Sorry, I thought I heard something.”

“Like what?”

“Gunshots.” My flat statement staggered the pilot and the imam. “I heard ‘em, too.” Both blonds took off at a run, breather hoses in their mouths. “You stay here, get that collector going.” al-Walid nodded, and I hit the trail of the other two at the best sprint I could manage on the available oxygen supply.
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Faint Premonition