A Thousand Shades Of Black

Chapter 11 – The Long Dark

Riddick lay back in the pilot’s chair and tapped in the final calculations: the strings of numbers that would take him home. It was a strange thought, that one – home. He’d never really had one of those before.

How, in such a short time, had he gone from a loner without any ties at all to suddenly being a mate, a big brother, a friend and a protector? Wasn’t he the bad guy? Wasn’t he the bogeyman who frightened children? Behave or Riddick will shiv you in the night. The most feared felon in the galaxy and here he was, nursemaid to a bunch of ex-Necros, one escaped teenage convict and an Elemental. It was the inverse of what should be. He shook his head, when had he gotten so damn philosophic? Things were as they were, no point in worrying over it all.

The computer beeped and he sighed. He ran his hands along the boards and set the craft in motion. He sat back and watched the stars distort as they headed off into the big chill. They were going to Furya at last, with the whole strange tribe.

Kyra bounced around the Salle with a fierce grin. Beating up on Joisa was turning into one of her favorite pastimes. Joisa was near her own height and weight, though with short-cropped auburn hair and green eyes. They were nearly the same age as well, so she almost felt like she had someone to relate to. If only they had had anywhere near the same kind of life experiences, they would have been fast friends. Even so, Joisa was the closest thing to a girlfriend that Kyra had ever had.

She and Freet were also the only people onboard that she could easily beat in a fight, which is why Sturm had assigned them to be sparring partners, no doubt. While Sturm whaled on Freet, Kyra got to pound on Joisa. Riddick got three whole ex-Necros of his very own to thug on which was almost enough for him to work up a sweat, though only because he had to work so hard to not accidentally kill them.

“No fair!” Joisa frowned as Kyra sidestepped her lunge and ducked out of range.

“You gonna say that to some scary bastard in an alleyway, Joisa?” Kyra laughed.

“Most scary bastard I know is Riddick and he doesn’t lurk in alleyways,” she retorted and attacked again. Kyra spun on her heel and kicked Joisa in the side as she shifted. The other girl went down with an expression of shock. “Damn, you move so fast!”

“Riddick isn’t the only dangerous person in the galaxy, Joisa; there are plenty of ruthless assholes out there.” Kyra extended a hand and pulled the rather winded redhead to her feet.

“You wouldn’t think it but being a female Necromonger is actually a rather sheltered existence,” Joisa panted.

“No, really?” Kyra grinned evilly. “I never would have guessed.” Joisa made a face and dropped back into stance. Kyra let her face go blank and expressionless, not wanting to give away her intentions in the coming bout.

Joisa moved first again, her impatience always getting the better of her, and Kyra countered the blows easily. Too many years spent fighting for her life had left her with little technique but a lot of speed and savagery. Sturm was teaching her the technique she’d never mastered and it was only making Kyra more deadly. She might have grown cocky except that Sturm and Riddick still threw her around with contemptuous ease.

Kyra dodged a kick and rolled across the black mats. The only problem with the ship was the color scheme, Kyra decided. She liked black as much as the next girl but this place was sadly monotonous. It was rendered even more so in comparison to New Mecca which took bright and colorful to new levels. After weeks of living there, she felt almost sensory deprived in the grays and blacks of the Death Bringer. With such a charming name too, she thought with a grimace. She dodged a hand strike from Joisa who was getting frustrated by her lack of success.

“Focus, Kyra.” Sturm’s quiet rebuke made her flush. She had been letting her mind wander because Joisa wasn’t much of a challenge but that was a dangerous habit to get into.

She attacked Joisa with a flurry of blows at half-strength. Had she not pulled them, she could conceivably have killed or at least crippled the other girl and she liked Joisa. Even so, one blow caught the side of her head and the redhead tumbled over backwards with a dazed expression.

“Joisa?” Kyra cried out, mortified that she might have seriously hurt her. Sturm materialized next to the fallen girl with a med pack and a reader.

“I’m fine.” Running hands across her head and then cracking her neck, Joisa sat up slowly. “Damn, girl, you are strong too.”

“I’m so sorry.” Kyra was on her knees beside Joisa with Sturm on the other side, checking the girl’s vitals.

“No permanent damage,” Sturm murmured and stood again. “I think we are done for the day, however.” Kyra gave Joisa a hand up and tried very hard to read Sturm as she did so. Was she angry that Kyra had hit her sparring partner so hard, was she concerned for their health? How did you tell what Sturm was thinking?

Having a psychic link of some sort must be the only way to know for sure ‘cause only Riddick seemed to have no trouble puzzling out the enigmatic Furyan.

The women broke apart and Joisa and Freet headed off to their rooms to shower and change. Kyra fell into step beside Sturm, determined to get to know the woman better.

“So, where were you born?” She decided direct questions and a lot of pestering was going to be her only option with Sturm.

“In a hospital.” Sturm had that ability to render a sentence so devoid of emotion or tone as to seem almost robotic. It was really annoying.

“On what planet?” Kyra stuck to her plan, dogged persistence was her only hope.

“You interrogating me?” There was a touch of menace there but Kyra knew without a doubt that Sturm wouldn’t hurt her.

“You are with my big brother so yeah, I am,” Kyra retorted cheerfully. “So, what planet?”

“What planet were you born on?” Sturm countered and Kyra grinned. She could play this game.

“Earth. Your turn.” She followed Sturm into the quarters she shared with Riddick and plopped down in a chair ready to stay forever if necessary. Sturm eyed her for a long moment and then sighed.

“He was right, you are stubborn.” Kyra grinned at the comment. Sturm dropped into another chair and regarded her levelly. “Kingdom Come.” Kyra’s jaw dropped, KC had been a religious colony founded on the principals of Christian love and fellowship. They had had no central government, no police, and no military. It had been intended to be a paradise of peace. What it rapidly turned into was an anarchistic hellhole of crime and vice. Few ships went near there anymore because of the rampant piracy and no one escaped that world after they landed there.

“How the hell did you get off that shithole?” Kyra asked in wonderment.

“I hijacked a ship,” she responded with a tiny smile and Kyra whooped in laughter.

“The only ships on KC are pirate ships!” Sturm nodded slowly and Kyra laughed again. “You hijacked a pirate ship?”

“How did you end up on the Hunter-Gratzner?” Sturm countered with a quiet intensity. Kyra sighed. She hated looking back that far. Still, she had started it.

“I ran away from the foster home I was in,” she answered honestly and then gave Sturm a sly look.

“Do you love Riddick?” Sturm looked like she’d been turned to stone by Kyra’s question.

“Do you?” The black-eyed woman countered quickly. Using questions to deflect emotional revelations, Kyra thought smugly. When she’d been ten, Kyra had been sent through state-ordered therapy. She’d already known what was wrong with her but she learned all the other ways to dodge revelation during her time there. Sturm was using one of the older tricks.

“He’s my big brother Yeah, I love him. I died for him, remember?” Kyra pointed out with more gravity than she had intended to. It was hard to protect yourself and ask for openness from another.

“I wasn’t there for your death but I saw the aftereffects,” Sturm returned with her face still expressionless. Kyra knew she was being diverted and sighed.

“Do you love him?” she persisted. Sturm pushed up from the chair and began pacing.

“Ask me a different question,” she commanded and Kyra blinked in surprise.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to discuss it with you before I’ve discussed it with him,” Sturm muttered.

“Wait – you guys are together in some weird linked thing and you haven’t told each other what you feel?” She paused and frowned. “How can you not know?”

“I know. So does he. We just don’t talk about it.” Sturm shrugged, her back to Kyra as she looked out a viewport at the stars.

“Oh.” Kyra tried to imagine Riddick reading poetry or talking about his ‘feelings’ and her mind stuttered to a halt. Sturm was equally impossible to visualize as a romance novel heroine with flowers in her hair. The two of them moved on some sort of primal instinctive level that seemed both above all that and also subtly different. Must be a Furyan thing, Kyra guessed.

She cocked her head at Sturm and sighed. Before she could ask another question, Sturm beat her to it.

“Why’d you run away?” The short black hair and jumpsuit blended in with the black of space. Sturm seemed to be more of the void than of the real world, her voice drifting to Kyra from the depths of space. Kyra sighed and tried to pull up her tough girl façade to protect herself from the memories of her childhood.

“Because the ‘dad’ of that psycho family thought I was a really cute piece of twelve year old ass.” She answered honestly. “He got me once in the laundry room and the next night I packed everything I owned, cut my hair and ran for it.” The memory burned in Kyra with a lesser fury than it used to but if she ever ran into that bastard in a dark alley, he’d be one cold slab of meat.

“Sensible and brave response.” Was that a compliment? From Sturm? Did Sturm give compliments? Kyra kept her oh-so-cool demeanor by sheer force of will.

“I thought so,” she tossed off. “So how’d you meet Riddick?” Time to put this discussion back onto Sturm. Besides Kyra was intensely curious about how the escaped felon had hooked up with Sturm.

“We were both captured by the same Mercs about three years ago. I jacked the cuffs and he piloted us out of there,” Sturm replied with a slight smile tugging on her lips; a fond memory for her, obviously. Kyra wondered which of them had killed the Mercs but decided it wasn’t important. “How’d you end up in Crematoria?” Sturm came back with her next question.

That was quite the loaded gun of emotional scattershot. Kyra tried to figure out how to answer that without looking like a total idiot or bursting into tears. There probably wasn’t an answer that wouldn’t make her look like a spoiled brat either, she grumbled to herself. Best just to be honest and hope Sturm had some respect for her left at the end of it.

“Riddick left me safe and sound on New Mecca, then took off to lead the Mercs away from me. I couldn’t adjust to life there.” She paused, remembering the patience and goodness of Imam as he tried to help her. She’d been a stupid ungrateful little horror. “After all we’d been through, I couldn’t make friends with kids my own age. The only person who’d ever treated me like I was great just the way I was had just left me on a planet that seemed to be always judging me.”

“Post-traumatic Stress Disorder wasn’t common on New Mecca before the Necromonger invasion,” Sturm murmured softly and Kyra nodded. The planet had been wholly unprepared for a bitter, angry, hurting teenage girl with a marine’s vocabulary and a tendency to settle things with her fists.

“Yeah, so I signed on with a Merc company,” Kyra continued with a wince, waiting for the furious retort from Sturm. There was a long silence and when she risked a glance at the other woman, there was such compassion in her face that Kyra almost wanted to cry. “I had to get away from that planet.” She wanted to explain it to Sturm, to make her understand.

“That bad, eh?” Sturm asked in a gentle tone that Kyra had never heard before in her voice. Obviously, Sturm already did understand and Kyra felt the warmth radiating from the woman she had thought so icy cold.

That was the last straw and all the years of grief and anger came bursting out. Kyra exploded into tears. Gasps, whimpers and strangled noises were coming from her that she hadn’t even known she was capable of making. Sturm was there beside her in an instant with arms around her, holding her and stroking her hair in silence. Kyra could feel no judgment coming from her, no disdain for her weakness, just a boundless sea of compassion that one could curl up into and be safe.

The tears seemed to last forever and Kyra felt like her emotions were tearing her apart inside but finally it began to subside. She found herself leaning against Sturm who stood beside Kyra’s chair, with her arms around the older woman’s waist. Kyra had her face pressed against a black t-shirt, feeling gray and empty, like her grief and rage had been a tsunami that had washed through her, sweeping everything away and leaving nothing but bare space behind.

Sturm patted her hair and moved a little bit away. Kyra released her with a sudden feeling of awkwardness. Here she had come after Sturm to interrogate her and she had found herself crying on her like a baby.

“Feeling better?” Sturm asked not unkindly and Kyra realized that she did feel better. She shot a rueful look at the Furyan woman.

“So much for the interrogation,” she muttered, abashed. Sturm’s lips curled up into a small smile that eased Kyra’s embarrassment.

“What did you really want to know?” Sturm offered mildly. Kyra tried to think about that for a moment.

“I guess I wanted to know that we could be friends too. I know you are important to Riddick and he’s important to me. I want us to be a family, I guess.” Saying it aloud made it sound silly to her and she blushed a little.

“We are family, Kyra. More than that, we’re pack-mates.” Kyra’s face must have registered confusion because Sturm chuckled and continued. “Furyans have a strange sort of society. I think it’s because of all the animal genetics they used to build Project Atlantis.” There was a pause as Sturm ordered her thoughts. “We have a democracy, of a type. You choose an Alpha and attach yourself to him or her and that person is your leader. You can choose to follow a different Alpha, if yours is tyrannical or cruel, or you can go lone if you can’t find an Alpha worth following.” Another pause. “I always thought I would stay lone all my life.”

“Riddick has a way of making you re-think what is and isn’t possible.” Kyra grinned with a sudden empathy for Sturm. He had knocked Kyra out of her chosen orbit as well.

“He does at that.” There was a rueful look there that told Kyra all she needed to know. “The point is that an Alpha builds a pack.” A frown now. “An Alpha without a pack goes a little crazy.”

“That explains a lot.” Kyra’s smile was rather tight now. While in prison, she had heard things about Riddick that had changed her understanding of him. She had never stopped loving him but she’d become aware of how rare his regard truly was.

“Doesn’t it just?” Sturm agreed with a fond smile. Kyra had to pause and remember that Sturm had killed a lot of people as well. To her, his past as a ruthless murderer probably scanned a little differently.

“So he’s got a pack now?” Kyra thought about the ex-Necros who followed him, the way the planet of Helion Prime looked to him for safety and leadership. It looked like his pack was huge.

“All of us here as well as Lajjun and Ziza – we’re his pack,” Sturm replied with a quiet contented smile.

“So that’s good, right? He’ll be better with all of us around him?” Kyra never wanted to see him tied up and hurt again. She didn’t want the man who would have left her to die on that world to come back again.

“Yes, it’s good. We’ll all be better now,” Sturm answered. A thought hit Kyra.

“Does that include Aereon?”

“Who knows what an Elemental thinks?” Sturm shrugged. “She’s been drawn into his orbit as well but they aren’t like other races. Elementals are even less human than Furyans.” She turned away to look out the window again and it occurred to Kyra that this was the first time she’d had a conversation with Sturm where she felt like she’d gotten closer to her. She’d been let into a place very few had ever seen before and she was sensible of the trust being shown.

“So, can we be friends?” she asked tentatively. Sturm looked back over her shoulder and smiled.

“We already are, Kyra.”

She felt a surge of relief and happiness at the black-haired woman’s words. She had a family now, a pack even. The thought made her giggle. She felt so strange thinking in Furyan terms but it felt right.

“You should shower and change and get down to the mess before all the food is gone.” Sturm shooed her out of the chair with bright eyes and suddenly began to nudge her out the door. Kyra was surprised by the sudden shift in attitude.

Riddick appeared at the end of the hallway headed towards the bedroom and Kyra grinned broadly. He had a look on his face that was easily interpreted and Sturm was looking a little flushed.

“Absolutely, I have to get going right now.” She agreed and darted away laughing.

Vaako inhaled the food, feeling half-starved from the hard day’s work he had put in. A ship the size of the Death Bringer normally had a crew of twenty and between the eight of them they all had to cover a lot of positions. Add on to that the mandatory weapons and hand–to-hand combat training the two Furyans were running them through and he fell into bed every night with relief.

Kyra came in with a smile on her face and he found his own mouth curving up in response. She was a really beautiful girl and her strength and loyalty would be a great treasure to some man some day, he thought. Of course, any man trying to get near to her would have to get past Riddick, which was a daunting prospect.

“Hey, Vaako.” She grabbed a tray from the machine and plopped down across from him. “Where are Joisa and Freet?” He noted idly the way her chest bobbled as she sat and turned his mind away to safer contemplations.

“They ate and went to bed already. You’re late.” She frowned and her mouth briefly fascinated him. What was wrong with him? The doctors had told him that reversing the Purification process would open him up to new feelings and experiences; they hadn’t told him it would make him horny as hell.

“So are you then. Get caught in engineering again?” she asked around a forkful of rice.

“Naw, Riddick had the urge to beat the hell out of someone and I was his first choice.” Vaako shifted a bit gingerly on the chair. He was somewhat bruised from being flung around like a rag doll.

“Damn, I’m sorry.” Kyra grinned at him. “But better you than me.” Vaako made a face at her, forgetting his dignity for a moment. She brought out the parts of him that he’d thought were dead forever – the warmth and spontaneity and the ability to laugh at himself. He noted again the way her hair curled against her shoulder and reined in his libido with an effort. Seventeen, he reminded himself. Seventeen and Riddick would gut him like a fish for even looking.

“Well, I must admit that I am learning more about combat from him than from any of the twenty or so teachers I had before,” Vaako admitted sheepishly. If only the Necromongers had been able to absorb the Furyans instead of trying to slaughter them. Well, that was water under the bridge, he decided.

“Sturm is doing her best to break me as well so don’t think I’m getting off easy,” Kyra responded, grabbing a fruit juice bulb and sucking at it. His mind derailed entirely and he dropped his eyes to his plate hastily. Think about Riddick shiving you and get your mind off the little girl! She sure didn’t look like a little girl though, his treacherous body informed him, and he groaned inwardly. Riddick, remember? He’ll slice your spine out of your body and feed it to you.

“Vaako?” She waved a hand in front of his face and he forced a smile onto his lips.

“Sorry, I’m getting tired.” He apologized for the long silence. She nodded back at him.

“I understand. Maybe you should go to bed.” Vaako felt himself responding to the siren call of sleep and it overrode his sex drive, bringing him relief from his tormenting thoughts.

“You are absolutely right. Bed sounds wonderful right now.” He smiled at her and to his surprise saw a slight flush to her cheeks. He quickly squashed the tiny thrill that went through him and dragged himself from the table. “See you tomorrow, Kyra.”

“See you tomorrow, Vaako.” Perfectly normal tones there, no hidden shoals of meaning. See? She wasn’t interested. Go to bed, you big idiot.