Category: One Rule: Stay in the Light

5.
Breaches of Faith

390 light years from humanity’s birthplace, out in the ghost lanes near the edges of explored space, floated the beak of the swan.

Albireo, the second-magnitude star of the constellation Cygnus, had long been considered one of the jewels of the heavens. In fact, it had turned out to be not one star but many.

Despite its Arabic-sounding name, Albireo came from a strange Medieval mistranslation of Ptolemy’s Almagest, which called it, in ersatz Latin, “ab Irio,” meaning “from Ireus.” Later scholars, aware that “Ireus” wasn’t a Latin word and assuming that perhaps it had been an Arabic term instead, began calling the star “Al-Bireo,” confusing things even more. The actual Arabic name for it was Minqar al Dajajah, “the Hen’s Beak.” From the moment the first telescopes were turned upon it and revealed blue and gold gems floating together in the heavens, it fascinated and confused astronomers for centuries.

Those early, weak telescopes had been able to spot its extraordinary properties and see golden and sapphire stars locked in an embrace. By the mid twentieth century, astronomers had concluded that Albireo A, the “golden star,” was actually a binary pair, an orange giant and a blue main sequence star. For a brief period, scientists posited that there were as many as four stars in that space: Albireo Aa, a K-type supergiant, sometimes described as a “red giant” despite looking more gold than red; Albireo Ac, a blue star much like Albireo B; Albireo Ad, a tiny red dwarf closely orbiting Aa; and Albireo Ab, briefly detected and then dismissed as erroneous data. Arguments over whether Albireo Ad really existed flared up periodically for a few hundred years after its discovery, especially after additional “sightings” of Albireo Ab occurred; nobody believed that the system could possibly be quaternary.

After an additional consultation with her brother, Sarah Dane decided to ignore Albireo B altogether and focus on the tighter trinary. The Z coordinates from the cut-off distress call pointed more directly toward it than the space between it and its distant companion.

Propelled by engines too powerful to safely convey living organisms, the four Dane Corporation probes arrived in the trinary just three days after the siblings’ interstellar comm call and began transmitting readings immediately.

One probe exploded within seconds of its arrival, far too close to the blue star. Another, emerging close to an intense gravity well in what seemed like it should have been empty space, imploded after sending a variety of confusing images. The third lasted a few hours, its data revealing that there was a fourth star in the system: either a neutron star or a black hole anchoring the orbits of the stars and several planets around its fulcrum, likely responsible for imploding the second probe. The third probe took several images of the golden giant and its red dwarf companion before a ringed gas giant appeared in the frame and, soon after, it burned up in that world’s atmosphere.

The final probe, which only managed to survive for a little less than a day, sent back the most complete data. It verified that Albireo A was, indeed, a quaternary system with its large neutron star or small black hole functioning as the central star. In addition to it being orbited by a blue star and a red-gold pair, three planets—probably stolen from one or more of the orbiting stars—had settled into stable orbits, everything held in an uneasy balance that defied common sense. The second planet out produced readings that suggested it could even support life.

Soon after, the last probe crashed into the surface of that planet, its final images revealing bleak and desolate terrain… and fields of enormous white bones.

---

“You might have told us about the girl’s condition sooner.”

Dr. Dane frowned, leaning back in his chair and doing his best to look unperturbed by the Station Manager’s remark. “Would you like me to violate your medical confidentiality as well?”

Rimbaud, the Station Manager, narrowed his eyes. “You know damn well any threat to this station—”

“I do,” Dane cut him off, “and as she poses none, the rules of confidentiality remain in effect. If any such risk had existed, we would have seen signs of it before now.”

“And yet you call it a medical emergency in your filings with the GCDC,” one of the board members, Dartmoor, said in a mild tone.

“Those who contract the disease,” Dane explained again, “are eventually driven to attempt suicide. One has already been successful. This is a blood-borne pathogen. In the absence of terrestrial parasites like fleas, ticks, and mosquitos, there’s no risk to anyone else unless a sufferer exchanges bodily fluids with another person. But people have landed on the planet of its origin at least twice now, and if someone traveled from there to a colony where those parasites were present—”

“I see.” Horvath, the board’s chair, spoke up at last. “So in essence, this had the potential to be catastrophic, but isn’t because the sufferers stayed here instead of traveling to an actual biosphere.”

Dane nodded, grateful that Horvath was as quick as ever to sort through the nuances. “Also making this station the best possible place to study the illness and develop a cure. Think of it as a test run. We have a disease with a low communicability level and a low fatality rate as long as the patients are diagnosed quickly and their pain is managed. Effectively managing this will prepare us for what we need to do if something more contagious, or deadlier, ever arrives on the station.”

“Are we managing it effectively?” Rimbaud demanded. “You could have told us days ago.”

“And I would have, if there were even the slightest threat to the station,” Dane replied. Keeping his voice calm in the face of Rimbaud’s obstinacy was a challenge. “‘Jackie’ has been isolated from everyone except Riddick and my medical team since she cut her wrists. The apartment unit where she did so has been thoroughly sterilized. Riddick lived in close quarters with both sufferers and has never developed symptoms; I tested his blood when he brought me samples of Jackie’s, and his was clean. Casual, and even close, contact with the girl poses absolutely no threat to anyone. If any of the preliminary tests had suggested otherwise, you would have heard about this immediately.”

The station manager subsided, grumbling.

“And your request for a Mercy Man trial?” Dartmoor asked, looking through hard copies of the paperwork. “I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of a convict being brought here.”

“We already have one,” Dane pointed out. “Riddick has volunteered to be my test subject. His completed forms were submitted today.”

With, he didn’t add, the stipulation that he was volunteering specifically for this protocol and no others. With the program on the verge of massive revisions, he just prayed that they’d gotten everything in place soon enough.

“I suppose that would be acceptable,” another member of the board, Bridgewood, sighed. “How will that affect his ability to work on the docks? He’s already been absent for several days.”

“I think it might be best,” Horvath said, “if his employment contract were transferred from the docks to the medical wing. Is that acceptable, Dr. Dane?”

Dane nodded. “Absolutely. I have worked with Riddick… before… and have no qualms about doing so again.”

A few people on the board exchanged uncomfortable looks. They all knew he was innocent of the charges that had led to his incarceration in the Pit, but reminders that he had spent several years imprisoned in the most notorious “slam” in known space always garnered those responses. They wanted to pretend that his life had been as blithe as theirs, with no detours into Hell. Especially because that detour served as a reminder that he knew things they didn’t, and that their expensive educations had never prepared them for, about how the harder parts of the worlds really worked.

The idea that he could look at Riddick and see something past the dangerous killer label confused and shamed them.

As well it should, he thought, as the board turned to other matters. As well it should.

---

Jack was still sleeping when the notice arrived, informing Riddick that he had been officially reassigned to the medical complex. That came as something of a relief.

He had plenty of time off saved up, but the more of it he used, the more questions it would raise. He didn’t want anyone asking too many questions, at least until all of Dane’s plans were in place.

In the meantime, he read over his new work assignment carefully, noting that his hours would coincide with the times Jack would be in classes once she returned to school. His initial duties would be similar to those of a hospital porter, although there was a nebulous duty, “assisting Dr. Dane with research,” that he expected had been included to cover any Mercy Man work he ended up doing.

Submitting that paperwork had been nervewracking, but Dane had been true to his word: he had volunteered for exactly one protocol and no others; if the program rejected his application for that protocol, they couldn’t assign him to any other. He simply wouldn’t be in the program.

Fingers crossed, he thought, setting the notice aside and punching in codes for the breakfast foods he knew Jack liked best.

So far, there were no signs that mingling her blood with his had done anything to him, but it was realistically at least a few months before he’d know. Far enough in the future that Dane could convincingly sell the idea that he was only infected after his acceptance into the program.

The food was almost ready when Jack appeared in the kitchen doorway, looking a little groggy and very tousled. Both were largely his doing. Although they still hadn’t consummated things, they’d played a little before finally sleeping. Her wrists had healed enough, and the pain from her unwelcome guests had receded enough, that her libido was revving up and she’d wanted to do some exploring. Over the last few days, they’d engaged in most of the acts that he’d only seen tantalizing pictures of when he was her age and hadn’t had a clue how to talk to girls. Taking her virginity was off the table until her wrists were fully healed, but she was game for almost everything else.

“Don’t you look beautiful?” he asked. Even just a week earlier, he’d have hidden his admiration, still afraid that it would repulse her.

She snorted. “I need a shower.”

“Hmmm.” He beckoned her closer. “C’mere.”

Even after everything, it always amazed him just how readily she trusted him, walking right over to his side.

He leaned in close, inhaling her scent. “You smell amazing to me. No shower needed.”

“I’m a sweaty mess!” she laughed.

“Maybe I like that.” He put his arms around her, drawing her close.

“Weirdo.” But she didn’t resist, leaning into him instead.

“It’s almost time to change your bandages, anyway,” he told her after a long moment of quiet. “After we eat. You want, you can shower before we put new ones on, and you won’t need any help in the shower.”

“Who says I don’t want any help in the shower?” she asked.

“I didn’t say want, I said—” Damn it, sometimes he could be so clueless. “I get in the shower with you, things could get intense. You sure you want to deal with that yet?”

“You’d never hurt me.” The absolute confidence in her voice surprised him anew. In all his years of life, the only other person who had ever trusted him so implicitly was Ian Dane.

The food machine chimed, announcing that breakfast was ready, before he could come up with anything to say.

Jack’s appetite was improving, he observed. She no longer picked at her meals the way he’d grown accustomed to her doing. Instead, she ate more like she had during their first few months on the station. He’d somehow assumed, when her appetite had subsided, that she was past the lion’s share of her adolescent growth and no longer needed to refuel quite as much. In fact, though, that was when she had begun to wither in earnest.

He hadn’t noticed at first, in part because Jack had always saved her sunniest, sparkliest side for him. If she was increasingly tired, sleepless, even sullen the rest of the time… well, weren’t teenagers supposed to be? Imam had certainly thought so, even as he withered into an increasingly taciturn man whose faith had seemingly deserted him.

It was amazing, he reflected, just how much an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment could lift someone back out of the darkness. The feeling it gave him, watching Jack recover herself, told him why—aside from the money kids in his part of town had been obsessed with when they talked about becoming doctors—people went into the medical profession.

His own power over life or death had only ever gone in one direction. Bringing someone back from the edge of the darkness, though, was intoxicating on a level he had never imagined. Especially someone like Jack.

“What’s on the agenda today?” she asked them as they were finishing breakfast.

“You know what day today is?” he asked, grinning.

“Monday.” A week had passed since her suicide attempt, which had been on a Sunday night. “Oh shit, am I going back to school today?”

“You’ve been keeping up, haven’t you?” He quirked an eyebrow at her. He knew she had been. They’d gone over her lessons and homework together as the week progressed, and for the first time he had realized that she had dropped out of the Honors track at the school and had been struggling to keep up in the “lower tracks.” Her illness had been robbing her of a lot more than he’d known.

“Yeah. Just… not really looking forward to having that slice of life back, you know?” She looked nervous, glancing at her bandaged wrists.

“Dane sent over some wrist braces last night,” he told her. “The kind designed for use when someone’s recovering from strain injuries. Nobody’ll be able to tell what’s under them.”

“I really am going to need a shower before I go there,” Jack grumbled.

“Okay, there’s something you aren’t telling me.” He could feel it, and he could see it in the uneasy look on her face.

She started to say something, hesitated, stopped, and then sighed. “I hate it there. Everybody’s treated me like some kind of mutant since Imam died. Every kid on this station, except me, has a normal nuclear family. Even if they have assholes for parents… they still have parents. None of them want anything to do with the Little Orphan Weirdo who lives with two—lived with two—men who aren’t even related to her.”

“Well, graduation’s what, three months away? You won’t have to go back ever again after that.”

“If they don’t make me repeat the year,” she muttered.

He frowned. “How bad is it?”

Her eyes began to fill. “I’ve had so much trouble sleeping for the last year, Riddick, I…”

“You’re just scraping by. Barely passing tests.” Damn it, he should have gotten involved sooner. Should have stepped up the moment she went mousy to find out what was wrong.

“Or not passing them.” She stared down at the table, unable to meet his eyes.

“Hey.” He reached across, putting his hand on hers. “I get it.”

She looked up, her expression questioning.

“You were using up everything you had to fight this thing off. You didn’t have anything left. We’ll figure it out.”

She bit her lip as the tears she’d been holding back escaped. “Thank you.” It was the tiniest thread of sound.

He got up and moved to her side. “C’mon. Let’s go take that shower. I know exactly what you need right now.”

“Is it that thing you do with your tongue?” she asked, her voice firming.

“It is now.”

---

In most ways, the space station was one of the most enlightened places Jack had ever encountered in the galaxy. At least, everyone on board seemed to be really smart about schooling hours and kids’ circadian rhythms. She wasn’t due at the high school complex until 9:30 am. That gave her plenty of time to get ready, which was especially necessary after she and Riddick spent a whole hour in the shower together.

Dressed and ready, wearing the cast-like wrist braces Dane had sent over to conceal the light bandaging still on her arms, she felt reasonably prepared to face her leery, judgmental classmates.

Every school, she reflected, had a weirdo. She’d never expected to be that kid.

Once, she’d been the epitome of normal. Well-liked. Popular, even. She’d been most of the way through her first year of Middle School when everything had crashed and burned around her.

Her mother had been acting odd for a few months, occasionally saying weird things, forgetting to brush her hair once or twice, getting sent home from work one day when she inexplicably arrived in her pajamas. In retrospect, Jack sometimes wondered what she could have done, who she could have talked to, to do something about that before everything went to hell.

She’d come home from school to find police cars, and a car with Child Protective Services emblazoned on its side, waiting in front of her parents’ house. There were other emergency vehicles parked nearby on the street and in their driveway.

“Jacqueline Halstrom?” a cop had asked as she turned onto her front walk.

She’d nodded.

He waved to a woman standing near the front door.

The woman walked over, her expression a carefully schooled mixture of sympathy and concern. “Hello, Jacqueline. Or do you prefer Jackie?”

What she’d really have preferred was someone to get to the point. She shrugged. “People call me Jackie.”

“My name is Anita Lewiston. I’m going to help you pack a bag.” The woman glanced over at the cop. “Are they okay with me taking her through the living room to the stairs?”

He shook his head. “They’re still processing it. They want you to use the back hall and the stairs next to the kitchen.”

“What’s going on?” Jackie asked. Confusion was growing. Around her, on other lawns, she was aware of neighbors standing around and watching the house.

“We’ll explain everything soon, okay?” Anita said. “Something bad happened in your house, and you can’t stay there tonight. We’re going to pack a bag for you.”

She couldn’t get them to tell her anything else. They let her go in through the kitchen but wouldn’t let her look into the rest of the first floor. She could hear people talking, voices on two way radios answering them, and the sounds of cameras. Anita walked her to her room, opening a large suitcase on her bed and instructing her to pack not just a change of clothes, but all the clothes she wore most often and any mementos she especially valued.

In the end, they had her fill three suitcases and Jackie knew she was never going to see the house again, but they still wouldn’t tell her what had happened. They left that to the grief counselor who came to see her after she and her suitcases had been delivered to a bedroom inside That Place—as her friends called it—where all the orphaned kids and wards of the state in the district lived.

“What’s going on?” she had asked the psychologist who finally appeared. Her suitcases sat out, unopened; she wasn’t going to open them until she knew what was happening, and had said as much to Anita when they’d arrived.

“Jackie, I have some very upsetting things to tell you. Please sit down.”

Her mother was tentatively diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The diagnosis had come much too late.

It had come after she had already been fired from her job for aberrant behavior and insubordination. It had come after she’d spent two weeks pretending that she still had a job to go to so that she could follow Jackie’s realtor father around—from open houses to private showings—and spy on him, increasingly convinced that he was an alien who had taken over her husband’s body. It had come after Jackie’s maternal aunt, concerned about the disturbing messages she was receiving from her sister, had come to town to talk to him about staging an intervention.

It had come after Jackie’s mother, observing the two of them talking about what kind of intervention to stage, came to the conclusion that they were both aliens planning to body-snatch her, and had tried to kill them. Unsuccessfully where her sister was con­cerned…

…successfully where Jackie’s father was concerned.

Her father was dead. Her mother was in police custody. Her aunt—the only relative of theirs on Carina Prime with them—was hospitalized and expected to spend several months recovering before she could be released.

She was alone. She had no one.

Overnight, she’d gone from being one of the “normal girls” at school to being one of Those Kids nobody wanted to talk to. She was still numb and disbelieving about her father’s murder, still struggling to process the reality of how her life had capsized, but what hurt immediately was the way all the kids she’d thought of as friends turned their backs on her.

She’d spent a year in That Place before she ran away and tried to hitch her way, on starships, to the Tangier System where her paternal grandparents lived. She’d almost made it to them, was nineteen weeks away from reaching them, when everything crashed and burned again, this time quite literally.

While she, Riddick, and Imam had been recovering on the station afterward, she had tried to reach out to her grandparents, only to learn that they were no longer in the Tangier system. Where they had gone—maybe to Carina for her mother’s trial?—she didn’t know. But once she knew Riddick planned to stay on the station, offered asylum and immunity by its owners, she decided that her wanderings were at an end.

But she’d always been haunted by the possibility that one day, like her mother, she would go mad.

Which, she realized, was part of why she’d been so afraid to talk about her strange symptoms once the first people she spoke to about them treated them as symptoms of madness.

The corridors to the high school were empty, weirdly so. Usually there would be other students making their way to its entrance. Was she late? Her chrono said she was on time. Early, even.

Her first awareness of what was happening came when she spotted the Principal, a security officer, and one of her teachers waiting in front of the entrance, their expressions both reluctant and grim.

---

“How the fuck did this happen?”

The hastily-assembled board had never once seen Dr. Ian Dane in a rage. He supposed that they might finally realize, today, why prosecutors on Earth had thought he could be capable of murder.

“We don’t know—” one of the board members began.

“Someone in here does,” he snapped, cutting her off. “Everyone who knew about Jackie Al-Walid’s diagnosis is in this room right now. Someone in here leaked it. I’m damned well gonna know who before anyone leaves this room.”

“Or what?” Rimbaud asked, frowning.

“Or I will have every last one of you investigated to find out,” he snarled, “and trust me, none of you would be this far out if you didn’t have something you wanted to keep hidden.”

“You would dare…”

“I would like to know the answer to this as well,” Horvath rumbled at the head of the table. “Aside from the fact that whoever did this breached a number of medical confidentiality statutes in the process, these board meetings are supposed to be closed to the public. Nothing from them is supposed to be shared outside of this room.”

“Exactly what happened today?” the woman Dane had cut off moments ago asked.

“Apparently, three hours after we finished meeting yesterday evening, the school board got a call from ‘a group of concerned parents,’” Bridgewood, looking over some notes on his tablet, volunteered. “They said that they had learned Jackie had ‘an exotic and incurable illness’ and they were worried she might spread it to their children. They also said that they were going to keep their children home from school if she was allowed to attend. This morning, only six other kids showed up for classes. Six out of a hundred twenty-three enrolled students. The news traveled fast. By the time Jackie arrived, the school board had panicked and ordered the Principal to bar her entry.”

“They graciously allowed her to clean out her lockers,” Dane seethed, still remembering the look on the girl’s face when she’d walked into the medical complex half an hour later, lugging all her school gear. He’d ordered the emergency meeting as soon as Riddick arrived to take over comforting her.

“It appears that the damage is done at this point,” Dartmoor said, sighing. “More than a hundred families on the station already know and appear to be in a panic over it. I’m sure they’ve shared what they believe they know with their friends.”

“The damage,” Dane told them, restraining the urge to shout, “is only just getting started, if the leak doesn’t come clean.”

Horvath, he was gratified to see, immediately looked alarmed. The chairman of the board knew exactly how much damage he could do. Others near him started to look uneasy as well.

“Please,” Rimbaud scoffed. “What is it you think you’ll do?”

“Well, it occurs to me that, if there’s so much panic over Miss Al-Walid’s condition, it might be prudent to put the station into full quarantine,” he said, keeping his voice mild. “Can’t be too careful, after all. Now, since it took approximately a year from infection before either Abu al-Walid or Jackie began developing symp­toms—”

“You wouldn’t!” one of the board members gasped.

“The panic over being in any kind of proximity with Jackie would appear to warrant it,” he continued. “Unless people have been misinformed and the source of their misinformation would like to clarify that?”

The room was silent.

“There’s also the issue of the school board’s conduct, in violation of a student’s rights to privacy and an education,” he continued. “Technically, what they did today disqualifies all of them from continuing to serve on the board. And the charter is pretty clear about what happens if no qualified board can govern the schools. It looks like Jackie might not be the only one missing her graduation this year.”

“What gives you the right—?”

“I’m following the law here,” Dane snapped. “If Jackie’s illness is dangerous enough to warrant her being isolated from everyone on the station, the way someone in this room with no medical degree has apparently decided, then obviously a full quarantine is necessary. If the school board can’t be trusted to protect the interests of all of its students against arbitrary pressure from misinformed parents, it’s not qualified to run the school and will need to be replaced, immediately, via special election. And if someone in this room doesn’t give me a good reason why these steps are not necessary, that’s exactly what is going to happen.”

Horvath took a deep breath. “Just so all of you know, there’s no way I am going to allow either of those things to happen. But if the person responsible for the leak doesn’t step forward, and agree to publicly recant the claims they made about Jackie and tender their resignation, before I walk out of this room…”

He stood up and began gathering his documents.

“…every single family that participated in today’s little boycott will be evicted from the station.”

Gasps sounded around the table.

“To prevent this station spending a year in quarantine,” Horvath said, “I’ll do it in a heartbeat. Does anyone doubt me?”

Three members of the board rose from their seats. Rimbaud slowly rose as well.

“I expect the four of you to accompany me to the newsroom,” Horvath said after a moment’s appraisal. “You will publicly inform the station that you misunderstood the confidential medical information you had access to and, in violation of both the law and human decency, shared your misunderstanding with others who had no right to know about Jackie’s illness. That you failed in your responsibility as caretakers of this station and are resigning your positions, effective immediately. If you do this appropriately, no charges will be filed and you can even remain on this station if you so choose, provided you never make any further statements, in public or in private, contradicting your PSA. Is this clear?”

All four nodded. None were willing to meet his eyes.

“Dr. Dane, please come with us as well. I will need you to give a brief statement about the truth of Jackie’s condition, as much as legally can be said, and why it poses no threat to the public.”

“Yes,” he said, wishing that this felt like a victory. It didn’t. “Of course.”

He wondered if it would make any difference, but he’d seen the devastated look on Jackie’s face. She might never feel safe on the station again.

Which, given that it was the only sanctuary Riddick had, was a problem.

---

Posted on the 25^th anniversary of the theatrical release of Pitch Black, February 18, 2025.