The Changeling Game, Chapter 76

76.
Wholly Half-Dead

Riddick felt the moment when the creature in the dark tried to go on the attack, the cold pull as it reached for him, and the burn on his chest as Her handprint flared to life in answer. The unseen eldritch presence surrounding him snapped back as if he’d stung it. He could still feel its louring rage around him. This thing knew how to hate.

I do not answer to you, filth.

“You might want to reconsider that,” Riddick said, smiling in the direction where he’d last caught a glimpse of the Moribund. “I know what you are, and I know what it’d take to end you. Don’t think you want to end yet… do you?”

I will not die alone.

“Plannin’ on takin’ the whole ‘Legion Vast’ with you? All that pompous bullshit they spout, that ain’t you. Is it?”

What do I care what they say, as long as they serve my will?

They’d built a whole religion around its dominance of their bodies, minds, and souls, and it didn’t give a fuck. Nice. Almost like an actual god.

“So let’s make a deal so they can go on serving your will,” Riddick said, leaning against a scorched panel. “And you can get what you really want.”

You know nothing about what I really want.

“You want the ‘Demons of the Darkness’ on their knees, begging you for mercy. You want to make ’em suffer. You want to break their power and give ’em your pain. How’m I doing so far?”

I will listen.

It was a creature of few words. He liked that about it.

“Then here’s the deal. I’m the new Lord Marshal, and you stop throwing your replacement candidates at me to try to take me down. I ain’t converting, ain’t getting ‘purified,’ but I’ll lead your armada and drive it right down the throat of your real enemies.”

Acceptable. So far.

“I’m taking back a handful of your converts, too. Un-purifying them. They’ll be mine. You have plenty; you can spare a few.”

If you think they will live parted from my influence.

“Oh, I know they will.”

Then take whichever you wish, with the exception of the “Quasi-Dead.”

“Which brings me to my next condition. Jack. Audrey. The ‘Little Larva’ you like to call ‘filth.’ She’s mine. You don’t touch her, you don’t influence her, you don’t ‘purify’ her, and you absolutely never try to kill her again. Understood?”

Silence.

Riddick knelt down and picked up a long, sharp sliver of stone from the floor, turning it over in his hand. He knew exactly what it really was. What it could do. And so, he knew, did the Moribund. He balanced it, twirled it, gave it a spin. “Understood?”

I will accept this.

“That includes never sending any of your people against her. What any of ‘your’ Necromongers do, that’s you doing it. Ain’t it?”

I will prohibit it. I do not much care what they do with their time when they are not needed to fulfill my will.

“I figured. You don’t pay much attention to what they’re doing, either. Did you know that they’ve been keeping people from you? Not converting everybody they capture?”

He felt the Moribund’s sudden fury.

“Didn’t think you knew. I’m sure you won’t have any objections if I put a stop to that.”

Why do you care?

“Because out of death, conversion, or what they’re doing… either death or conversion would be better.” The breeder bullshit would finally end. “When I make my move, you’re gonna back me.”

You are the Lord Marshal.

He figured that was as close as the Moribund would get to acquiescing. It was enough.

“Last thing. You’ve been collecting apeirochorons lately. I want ’em. All of ’em.”

I care nothing for what happens to them.

Well, maybe I care, Riddick thought, careful to keep his thoughts thoroughly shielded from his “chess partner.” He shrugged and smiled instead.

Do what you will with them.

“This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” he told the shadowy creature in the darkness, setting the sliver of kirshbaumium back down on the floor.

We shall see, Lord Marshal.

He could see the change immediately, the new level of deference that the Necromongers in the hallways displayed as he passed. He’d completed his first step. Soon it would be safe for Jack to wake up, hopefully with her mind and memories intact and in order. Soon, they’d be able to talk again, and maybe she’d know enough—remember enough—to be less afraid of him.

Maybe she’ll try to take me out, he thought with amusement. She was one of General Toal’s trained Operatives, after all, and she’d been trained by a Furyan.

He doubted it, though. That wasn’t Jack. She’d killed, three times, but she wasn’t a killer.

Which was why he needed to do a few more things to ensure that she would be safe on board this flying viper pit.

He walked into the chamber of the Quasi-Dead, drawing them forth.

Yes, Lord Marshal?

That was the first time any of them had called him by the title. Yeah, things were changing.

“I’m gonna visualize a series of people. If they’re converts, I want ’em found and brought to me.” One by one, he conjured faces that he’d seen in Jack’s memories. People she’d known, albeit briefly, while on Helion Prime, and who shone warmly in her thoughts.

He couldn’t give her any of the four she’d known best, though.

It burned at him, even a year later. He should’ve grabbed Lajjun and Ziza and put them on board the ship he’d taken from Toombs. Not just left the Holy Man’s necklace hanging on their doorway while he boarded the Basilica. In the hour that followed, while he searched the ship for signs of Kyra and then moved into position to take the fight to the Lord Marshal himself, he’d had no idea that, moments after the ship’s bulkheads had closed behind him and the Basilica rose from the ground, that undead fucker had detonated something that had wiped out all life on the surface of the planet.

Including Lajjun. Including Ziza. Including thousands of the motherfucker’s own troops who hadn’t made it back on board their ships in time, and who the fuck knew how many thousands, or even millions, of other civilians huddled in the still-smoking ruins.

There wasn’t much about that day that Riddick didn’t regret.

He didn’t mean to call up Kyra’s face—

That one is lost to us. We have only her memories.

“You have what, now?”

The memories of the one called Kyra. We have them.

“Good. I’ll be back later to see them. How many of the others have you found?”

All but the one called Carmouche. His face is unknown to any of the Armada. He may have left Helion Prime before we arrived.

Probably on one of the all-expense-paid travel adventures Jack and her friends had dreamed up, to entice out-system as many people as they could before the invasion. More power to him if he’d gone.

“Have the others sent to me as soon as you get all of them on board this ship.”

Yes, Lord Marshal.

“Now, I don’t wanna be sent either of these next two. I know they’re not converts. I just wanna know what’s happened to ’em.” He conjured up two more faces in his mind.

The first died eight months ago. The second lives in the “Greensleeves Stew.”

“I’ll be back.” He turned and walked out of the room.

Do you need direction to her?

“I know the way.”

It was a corridor he’d never planned on entering again, but now he had enough muscle on his side—the Moribund itself was on board for this—that he could do what he wished he’d been able to do a year ago. Part of it, anyway. The most important part.

He’d tried to get to know the people he’d apparently conquered, especially once he was sure that he couldn’t just step down as their leader; no new leader could rise in his place without vanquishing him first, so unless he wanted to die, he had to find a way to rule these fuckers. Their women were eager to “show him the way,” and a lot of them were damn beautiful. He’d thought that part, at least, would be fun.

He had been so fucking wrong about that.

The whole lot of them really were half-dead. And necrophilia just wasn’t his kink.

Damn near had made him puke his guts out, if he was being honest.

Just try phrasing that in a way that doesn’t give offense to anybody, though…

The Great Lords of the Court had figured it out anyway, and most of them had seemed unsurprised. Lord Vaako had shrugged, telling him that he would find it easier once he converted, himself. Lord Toal, who seemed to have no Lady or Dame by his side—and Riddick was pretty sure he knew why now—had shrugged as well and said that the life of a warrior need not require such distractions. And one of the other Lords had smiled and said that he knew exactly what Riddick needed.

Several of the Lords—Riddick soon noticed that Vaako, Toal, and Scales had all excused themselves from the group—had led him deep into the under-levels of the Basilica, beneath the Necropolis… to a brothel.

At first, it had seemed normal enough. The ladies within, he immediately realized, weren’t converts. No marks on their necks. No sickly pallor to their skin. They lined up, smiling, posing for him in their negligée, all of them beautiful. Most of them didn’t make eye contact, but there was one woman, with flaxen blonde hair and crystal-blue eyes, who kept looking right at him.

“Her,” he’d said, pointing at the woman. “I’ll take her.”

It went wrong almost immediately.

“Riddick,” she’d gasped, putting her arms around him. “I knew you’d come for me!”

He pulled back, staring at her in confusion. For a moment, the way she was acting, he thought somehow he had found another strange fragment of Jack, as if the girl had been shattered and her pieces divided among countless strange women he’d never met before. The woman before him—maybe a little over twenty years old, with eyes that were far too old for the rest of her—smiled at him. There was something off about the smile. Not quite sane.

“It’s me, Riddick! Stacey! It’s me!” And she tried to press her lips to his.

There was something familiar about her, but he couldn’t place her. He unshielded his mind a little, brushing against hers—

—and recoiled, his gorge rising and his mental shields slamming back up against both her and the whole establishment around him.

This ain’t a brothel. It’s a fuckin’ rape room.

And this woman he’d picked was in on it all.

“I know what you’ll like,” she told him, her eyes lit up with strange fervor. “See that girl over there? I’ve known her for years. I can show you what makes her cry…”

“Get the fuck off me,” he managed, pushing her away and retreating toward the door.

“Riddick!” She tried to follow him, but one of the attendants held her back. “Don’t leave me! You’re supposed to rescue me!”

He turned toward one of the Lords, most of whom were still in the process of selecting their own companions—victims—for the evening. “You brought me to a fuckin’ rape room!”

He had felt it all in the moment he’d made the mistake of unshielding: the unrelenting horror that the women endured every day and night, praying that the walking corpses who visited would just want a quick fuck and nothing more from them; the sick delight that the Lords took in the soft, warm, living bodies beneath them; the dark games that Stacey liked to play, and had encouraged the Lords to play with her for the last two weeks since she’d been captured, orchestrating especially perverse hells upon her fellow “breeders” even more for her own gratification than the Lords’…

The man frowned. “Don’t be ridiculous. They’re not of us. They’re just breeders. We can do whatever we wish to mere breeders.”

Seconds later, his head rolled across the floor, stopping at the feet of one of the captive “breeder” women and making her scream in terror.

“Choose carefully, Riddick,” Lord Navok said, rising from the seat he had taken and drawing his blades. Throughout the lounge, the rest of the Lords had drawn theirs. “We know you’re deadly, but there are twenty of us. Can you kill us all before one of us kills you? And how will you fight your way out of the Basilica if you do? This is part of the Necromonger Way. Do you really think you can change us? Will you die trying?”

He had to get the fuck out of there, he realized, and fast, before he got himself killed over something he couldn’t stop, couldn’t change… and it all went on anyway. He wasn’t the self-sacrificing type. As much as he wanted to ghost every man in that room, and one woman in it…

Now ain’t the time.

He turned and walked toward the exit.

“Riddick!” Stacey called after him, her voice pleading and sounding, for an instant, like Jack’s. Jack, begging him not to leave her behind…

Keep walking. Keep walking…

“Riddick!” she called again, and then cried out in pain.

“Be silent, breeder! Know your place!” one of the Lords shouted.

Fuck! Fuck… keep walking… Do not look back…

He’d left the “brothel” and stormed deeper into the bowels of the Basilica, seeking out the engine rooms, possessed of a sudden desire to send them into meltdown and ditch the ship before it exploded. But there had been something down there, dark and eldritch and malicious and waiting for him, that he’d found himself equally unwilling to sacrifice himself to. What he now knew was the Moribund.

That night was the first time he’d awakened, his heart pounding, from a nightmare in which he found not Stacey but Jack, herself, trapped in a Necromonger “brothel.”

He’d found all of them, on each and every ship in the fleet, making their keepers show him every woman they had, but Jack had never been among them. He’d shown her face to the Quasi-Dead and demanded they search their memory stores for any sign that any Necromonger had seen or touched her, any sign that she was among the Armada’s converts. There had been a small handful of women who looked almost like her, but none had been her. The nightmares hadn’t stopped until he’d put out an edict, making the Quasi-Dead share images of Jack’s face with the masses, instructing the entire Armada that any girl or woman who resembled her had to be brought before him immediately upon discovery, before anything else was done to her.

And Alexander Motherfuckin’ Toombs drove her right into the teeth of my raiders…

He had her now. That was what was important. But the rape rooms had gone unchecked for a whole fucking year and the woman, Stacey, had died during that time. That last part wouldn’t have bothered him before, but he now recognized her, although he still couldn’t figure out how she’d known him.

She had been the vicious girl who ran the Killer’s Club from the shadows, when Jack had been locked in the Aceso Psychiatric Hospital. The girl with the violent porn collection, with his picture on her wall—

Not just his picture, he realized. Pictures of other “criminals,” too, or what Jack had believed were criminals. He stopped in the hallway, closing his eyes and visualizing that wall again.

He knew all those faces. He knew all the men Stacey had enshrined on her wall and idolized. Criminals, yes, but something else as well, and he knew exactly where she had to have met them, and him… and when.

“They call us the Suicide Squad, boy, after some bad twenty-first century movies about a bunch of sons-o’-bitches who had to do what we do, only they got to do it with powers…”

He’d been seventeen, and although nobody else in the group had known it about him, he had powers. He’d been pulled off the streets and Quantified at fifteen, chipped, subjected to two agonizing years of conditioning, and this was his test-run, paired up with a group of Service Crims who had been too high up in the clearance chain for a dishonorable discharge and whose skills were too valuable to just let them rot in cells. Most of them were twice his age. They were being sent after a crime kingpin, who was staying at his favorite casino-cum-brothel on Helion Prime and, while he was supposed to be taken out, they had strict instructions that the facility itself was expected to come through undamaged.

In they’d gone, stealthy as could be, quartering the place in the dead of night.

They’d found the cop first, a woman, stripped naked and chained to a bed with her own cuffs. Didn’t look like anybody had touched her yet. None of them did, either. They’d kept moving. It grated at him. Why the fuck wasn’t freeing her part of their mission?

“Stay on task,” one of his companions had muttered when he’d paused, looking back at the room. “Ain’t no room for improvising in this gig if you want your head to stay on your neck.”

They all, he’d realized, had explosive trackers. Apparently another thing they had in common with the sorry fuckers in the old movies.

The kids were next.

There was a whole suite full of them, and the main room almost looked like a daycare except he could see terrible knowledge in their eyes and in the way they posed flirtatiously for the team.

Fuck, he’d thought as they moved on again. Fuck, fuck, fuck!

What good was anything he did if it didn’t involve saving those kids? What good was the Federacy if it didn’t give two shits about ending that kind of monstrosity, and just wanted to take out one in a long line of people who perpetuated it?

He had no problem with taking out their target. The man owned that shithole. He was culpable in everything that was being done in all those rooms. Riddick was fine with completing the hit. But leaving the kids behind… leaving a lady cop chained up, naked, for mauling… letting the place stay standing…

It was almost impossible to use his abilities without specific orders. Excruciatingly painful. But he opened his mind to the other soldiers…

They were thinking the same things. Some of them were fantasizing about fucking the cop, true, but none of them were happy about the kids.

There was something he could do, and he wasn’t even sure how he did it but he knew he could… It was going to hurt like a sonofabitch but it’d be worth it…

When they hit a blind junction, no cameras, he called it up inside him and let it blast out, frying all of the comms. Pain exploded in his head as his conditioning kicked in, but he took a deep breath and pressed forward against the agony and the nausea. There was a beautiful, glowing woman he could catch a glimpse of sometimes, whose hand on his chest felt almost orgasmic, and the thought of her helped push the pain back down.

“What the fuck?!” Corman, their point man, shouted.

Riddick pulled out his knife and went digging. It was hard not to scream, but a moment later he had the explosive tracker out of his neck. His trainers had fucked up by inflicting so many worse torments on him. Still, he very nearly puked. He wiped his blood off with his shirt and put the tracker in his pocket, approaching one of his colleagues. Demme. A guy who’d ended up in the glue for refusing to bomb a refugee camp and turning his missile on his commanders instead. He liked Demme.

“We got about two more minutes until they get a signal lock on us again. Who wants out of this shit?” he asked.

Demme tilted his head, nodding.

“Hold on, man, this ain’t gonna be subtle.” He cut into Demme’s neck, unerringly going for the tracker while his friend groaned and struggled to stay still.

“The fuck are you doing, Riddick?” Corman yelled.

“Gonna rescue those kids and that cop,” he said. “You wanna stay on mission, go ahead. It’ll give us cover. Any of you who want out of this psycho-fuckery, though, this is your one and only chance.”

“Gonna get all our heads blown off,” Nicholson muttered.

In the end, two thirds of the squad had decided to go forward and stay on mission. The rest joined Riddick in strategically placing the explosive parts of their trackers inside the confines of an armory by the junction and carrying the locator parts with them for disposal later. None of the ones who had stayed with him, thankfully, had been imagining fucking the cop. He wouldn’t have to kill one of his crew.

They doubled back to the “daycare.”

“Get the kids dressed in whatever they have that’s closest to street clothes, and get ’em ready to evac,” he told his brothers. “I’ll be back in five.”

Then he went and got the cop.

By the time he had her put together, and ready to lead the kids out of the building, all hell was starting to break loose. He and his comrades had undoubtedly been threatened repeatedly to get back on mission via their fried comms, and then the armory exploded. He’d promptly smashed his tracker, as they’d planned; let HQ think they’d actually died for a little while.

“Kids,” he said, bringing the cop into the ersatz daycare, “this is Officer Lola. She’s gonna take you out of here to someplace safe.”

Until that moment, he was pretty sure the cop had been expecting him to do something nasty to her and was trying to figure out a way to turn the tables on him. She stared at the kids, and then at him, her mouth dropping open when he handed her back both of her confiscated sidearms, fully loaded.

“You get ’em out of here. Take ’em out of this room and turn right, down the long corridor to a T-junction. Turn left, go all the way to the end and out the door. Its security is disabled. Just push it open and go on through. You’ll be in what looks like an impound lot. Get the hell out of there through the hole in the chain link fence and keep going until you hit a main road. You won’t be safe until then. Got that?”

She nodded, all fear of him gone. “What about you?”

“You don’t worry about us. Take care of the kids and we’ll clear you a path. You ain’t never seen none of us. You heard a racket while you were getting loose from your cuffs, found the kids, and got ’em the hell out of here, and you don’t know what else went down. Understood?” He looked around at all of the kids, directing his words at them, too. “You never saw us. That’s for your safety more than ours. Now go.”

The kids went quietly with her, all of them docile and accustomed to obedience. Riddick and his crew shadowed them, efficiently dealing with a small handful of goons who might have tried to stop them. A few of the kids had whispered thankyous to him and the others as they slipped through the fence. One, a little girl, maybe eight years old, with flaxen blonde hair and crystal blue eyes that were way too old and cold for her young face, had turned to look at him and his brothers, her expression adoring…

Stacey. That, he realized, was when and how he’d met Stacey.

His crew had scattered that night, once the kids were gone, and the only one he’d ever seen again was Demme. He’d done a run through the building to see if there were any other innocents who needed freeing, but hadn’t found anyone. Then he’d rejoined the main group, just long enough to make sure the brothers he’d abandoned didn’t get mowed down as a result of the team being cut down in size, and had taken off after it was clear that their mission would be a success. Two days later, his face had jumped to the top of Federacy “Wanted” posters, along with the brothers-in-arms he’d freed, with a dozen completely fabricated crimes attributed to him. It would take less than a year until they began to have real crimes to list in place of their lies.

He’d wondered what Officer Lola had made of that.

Wonder if she’s a convert…

He’d check with the Quasi-Dead when he was done here.

In the meantime, he pounded on the door to the brothel.

“Yes…? Lord Marshal!” The host gave an obsequious smile and bow. “Have you come for…”

“New edict. Courtesy of the Holy Fuckin’ Half-Dead itself. Nobody goes unconverted. You get all those women to the conversion chambers right. The fuck. Now.”

The man began to protest… and then stopped. He could feel the power behind Riddick’s demand. The force that both animated and depleted the Necromongers… was paying attention.

Your god is watching and is it ever pissed…

The women were soon marching out of the room and toward the upper levels. Celia Wyndham was the third out the door.

Funny. Her last name’s the same as the name of that city Jack was livin’ in… Small galaxy…

He’d let her be converted. She’d probably enjoy the experience, if she was still like Jack remembered, and if her masochism had helped her survive the “brothel” for as long as she apparently had. He wouldn’t add her to the coterie he was creating for Jack. They didn’t like each other… but he had a feeling that Jack would still be glad to know that Celia was… comparatively… safe.

The Lords had massed behind the brothel doorway, some confused, some angry, verging on demanding an explanation, none quite ready to draw on him. They could feel it, too… the wrath of their “god” coalescing around them.

“Every one of ’em’s about to become a Lady of the Armada,” he told the men. “This ‘breeder’ bullshit is over. Don’t you fuckin’ ever forget it again.” And be fuckin’ grateful I’m letting you keep your worthless heads.

The edict went out to the entire Armada. No one, outside of the Lord Marshal’s personal entourage, could be unconverted. And anyone who tried to enslave a “breeder” in the future would die “before their due time.”

Not even three hours in, not bad…

Soon “Officer Lola” had been located and was being summoned to him, along with the others. He returned to his quarters…

…in time to see Dame Fuckin’ Vaako slip out of the doors and scurry away.

What the fuck?