The Chronicles of Riddick - Alan Dean Foster [5]
“Sit on it a minute, willya, Doc-T?” Holding his weapon a little tighter, Codd checked to make double sure there was a high-explosive shell in the launching chamber before moving past the stain. Beyond, in a slightly protected hollow, he found something more impressive than blood. A footprint, clean and made too recently to have been filled in by following snow. Its appearance was formidable.
“Christ, all we need . . . Like this job hasn’t already been trouble enough.” Remembering the querying voice in his ear, he raised his voice above the wind as he spoke toward the communicator’s pickup. “Hey, Johns, you know that big extinct thing? The one Preliminary kept talking about? Well, it ain’t. Watch your spine, and I don’t mean when it’s held up in front of you. Between this and our other problem—”
He broke off. Was that a shape, moving within the storm? Quickly, he checked his scanner. Nothing. Shit, a man could get twitchy out here. Even someone as experienced as him. He took a step forward. Good thing he knew how to—
His scanner wailed at the same instant he did. Before the feeble lavender light of this world’s sun went out permanently, he had a brief glimpse of something behind him. It was massive, and white, and perfectly horrible. Its mouth flashed lethal ivory.
The communicator’s earpiece crackled in the snow. There was no one to hear or respond to the increasingly fretful queries it emitted, even though it was still attached to an ear. Unfortunately, the ear was no longer attached to anything except the earpiece.
II
Johns spat snowflakes out of his mouth, took a sip from his hotflow, and adjusted his communicator. It didn’t matter how much he fiddled with the controls. Codd had gone cold, a deafening silence most likely caused by something other than the enchanting local climate.
“Say again? Codd, say again. Talk to me, buddy.”
The communicator was nonresponsive. Or rather, it crackled and hissed, popped and hummed. It was the absent Codd who had nothing to say.
Equipment trouble, Johns told himself. He kept telling himself that as he plowed on through the snow, in the hope that sheer force of repetition would render hope into reality.
Snow gave way to ice. The fall was a shattered jumble of nearly transparent blocks and boulders, the water from which it had formed as pure as the women Johns could only dream of. Turning slightly, he followed the icefall eastward, searching patiently for an easier way over or through the new barrier. Snow continued to swirl around him. He fought to keep focused on the task at hand as his thoughts drifted toward memories of warm surroundings and solid food instead of the nutrient soup the hotflow provided.
The face behind the ice startled him badly. Though blurred, there was no mistaking it for a trick of the purplish light. Almost as of their own volition, his hands raised the rifle and his finger contracted on the trigger. The double shot blew a jagged hole in the icefall in the vicinity of the unexpected visage, sending stinging fragments of ice in all directions.
When the frozen equivalent of the dust had settled, he squinted into the cavity his weapon had so violently excavated. A few lingering shards broke free and fell from the roof, clinking against the uneven floor. He ignored them as he activated a light and eased tentatively forward. The gap in front of him was bigger than anything his weapon, destructive as it was, could have created. He’d blown a hole into a larger void.
At first glance he couldn’t tell if the hollow was natural or had been melted by artificial means. Regardless of origin, it had clearly been turned into temporary living quarters. Better, he told himself, to think of it as a lair. He had a bad moment when his light revealed an Urzo giganticus . The air he’d sucked in went out of him in tandem with the tension when he saw that the monster was not moving. Nor would it move again. For one thing, it was missing its feet. For another, it had been neatly and efficiently quartered before being hung from the roof of the ice cave by its massive