He Didn't Come

“Jack, what the hell are you doing?” she whispered to herself as she set foot, for the first time in five years, on Ichar Prime.

It was dark in New Mecca, and she was momentarily disoriented. Searching for something familiar, she recognized the bar where she’d met Russell and smiled. Some things hadn’t changed, at least. Time to practice an old skill. She lifted a money clip from a harried traveler and stepped inside the semi-familiar gloom. Yep, there was the same bartender who had been paid to off Russell, but had simply pocketed the money and let the merc live. What was his name? Jack strained her memory, and it finally came to her. Maurice.

She sat in the same empty bar stool and ordered a vodka and orange. She didn’t want to drink anything too strong. Though she drank alcohol when she was with Jason and afterwards, it had been a while. There hadn’t been any booze in Chap, and her tolerance was probably shot to hell.

Chapel Hall hadn’t been too bad, all things considered. The director, or the teachers and counselors for that matter, weren’t the hideous monsters Jack had been expecting, either. It was definitely better than anywhere she’d been on New Germany. The only real problem she had with Chapel Hall was that it was basically a factory for future mining employees. The girls at Chap got the standard education, reading and math and so on, but they also had to learn various mining techniques and production methods. It was all incorporated in the history program, but Jack saw it for what it was.

It wasn’t like the people of the Donli system were underhanded about it or were brainwashing the youth. It was simply a fact of life that unless you had the funds to get out of the system entirely, you’d end up toiling in the mines for a living. It was very rare that someone from Chapel Hall had the means or desire to go offworld, so it was only prudent to begin paving the way for future miners early on.

Jack didn’t hold it against them. Once she’d accepted that Riddick wasn’t coming back for her, she more or less went along with their game. She had no intention of staying on D6, so she didn’t try and fit in with everyone else. She just quit being the belligerent teenage bitch she had been at the time. She stopped trying to run away and focused on getting in the administration’s good graces. If she couldn’t escape offworld, then if she was lucky she could get the institution to sponsor her passage. It meant that she had to be a model citizen, though, which meant no more fighting and much better grades.

She was sixteen when she began her crusade to get the hell out of Donli, and it had paid off. Two years of busting her ass got her back in New Mecca, all right; sitting in a bar and drinking bad vodka.

She drained her glass, paid, and walked out into the night. She was grateful for New Mecca’s cool climate. Over the past five years she had grown just as tan as everyone on Donli, and she was looking forward to losing it. It was just another reminder of her abandonment. She wouldn’t have gotten tan in the first place if Riddick hadn’t ditched her.

She truly had no idea what she was going to do. She had planned on going to the local community college, but without Imam paying for it, there was no chance of that happening. She didn’t even have a place to stay, and pick-pocketing would only get her so far. Chapel Hall had prepared her for mining work, but that was about it.

She needed a job.

~*~

Five years ago he’d left her there. Not out of choice, but out of necessity. The hit went fine, and he had gone to a public terminal and confirmed with his contact. As promised, he was able to pick up the two thousand creds in less than ten minutes.

All the while he was buying food and other supplies, he felt someone tailing him. He tailed people all the time, so he knew the signs. A feeling, a prickle on the back of the neck. In a sudden lull of noise, a footstep slightly out of place. If you weren’t trained to pick these things up, you would be completely unaware until it was too late.

The job had gone smoothly, without incident. Riddick lured the mark into a bathroom in a little-frequented part of the station before killing him, but the whole time he felt uneasy. After subtly checking all around him for unwelcome eyes that may have been watching, he decided that it was just paranoia. It was his first time in civilization since his failed attempt to leave Jack on Ichar Prime. He assumed that his uneasiness was just part of the whole situation. He didn’t fully believe that everyone thought he was dead, and so it only made sense that he would jump to conclusions.

He hadn’t wanted to scare Jack, but when he became positive that they were being followed, he told her to split. He didn’t want her caught in his own shit. She obeyed him, to his extreme relief, and took off the way they had come. The shopping bags abandoned on the floor, Riddick began stalking his stalker.

The man tailing him realized that his quarry had caught on to the ploy, and tried to retreat. It was too late; Riddick was on the hunt. He’d smiled to himself, a dark smile that showed that Riddick the killer had taken control. He caught a familiar, subtle scent, one that had been with him all day. Smoke and boot polish mixed with sweat. He followed the scent until he caught sight of his stalker, who was trying to avoid attracting attention while heading as fast as he could toward his ship. A merc. He should have known. The merc had thrown a terrified glance over his shoulder and met the danger in Riddick’s eyes.

They both spotted Jack at the same time. She was running blindly, and Riddick saw a familiar detached look in her eyes.

“Shit,” Riddick groaned. He knew that he had to get Jack away from the merc. After what the last two he encountered had done, he was taking no chances with her. He caught up to the merc and broke his neck immediately, but the merc had already opened the ramp to his ship. Another man watched with an expressionless face as Riddick killed the young merc.

In an instant he had thrown the limp body of the unfortunate man at the older merc, hitting him square in the chest and completely bowling him over.

He hadn’t waited to see if it worked; he knew it would. Instead he sprinted toward Jack, grabbed her, and hid her in a nearby maintenance closet. He had attracted attention when he threw the merc’s body, and tried to disappear into the crowd of rubber-neckers. The last thing he knew before he blacked out was the sting of a hypo in his back.
He’d woken up chained in the merc’s ship. Caught, he thought as he snorted in disgust.

“Comfy?” the grizzled veteran of the trade asked from the pilot’s seat. “You know, you’re the last person I expected to see here, Riddick. Well,” he corrected himself, “I should say there. Oh yes,” he elaborated in response to the slight tense of Ridick’s neck muscles, the only indication of his surprise. “We left D7 a good six hours ago.”

His first thought was of Jack. He had to get to her. He couldn’t just leave her there. She couldn’t be abandoned again. She was just beginning to feel deep-down trust for the first time in many years. If she thought he ditched her, she might go right back to the dissociated cutter she’d been. Her sense of self-worth would crumble, and it would be his fault for allowing it to happen.

The merc on, “You were officially dead. Imagine their surprise when I notified Prison Moon.”

Prison Moon wasn’t so bad. True to its name, it was situated on a cold moon orbiting an uninhabitable planet. A maximum security slam, it was one of the ten prisons funded by the Alliance other than the actual Februus Prison, which was located on a moon of Februus Prime.

Well, at least he wasn’t on death row at Prison Moon. Life without parole; he’d be able to escape. He’d done it before.

The nameless merc hooked up the cryo apparatus to Riddick’s body, then his own. “Nighty night,” he’d smirked, before putting them both to sleep.