The Chronicles of Riddick - Alan Dean Foster [84]
The prisoner behind him was nodding vigorously. “Traditional twenty-mile buffer zone. That’s thirty klicks to the hangar. Then you got to find a way in— if you still got water in you.”
“What is it?” another man was saying over and over. “What’s he thinking?”
As he stared outside, the first convict was shaking his head: slowly and with conviction. “Thirty klicks. Over that terrain. Even if it was dead flat and covered in grass—”
“Don’t talk about grass,” another convict growled despondently.
“It’d still be a tough slog,” the first man finished. “And me, I ain’t no runner.”
“Better alive in here than fried out there,” someone else declaimed fervently.
Riddick was busy collecting guns from the floor, as indifferent to the discussion as he was to the identity of the weapons’ former owners. Muscular arms almost full, he started to turn, hesitated, bent, and added a bag of nuts to the accumulated arsenal.
Trying to muster his own courage as much as that of his compatriots, the Guv gestured first at the blasted landscape outside, then at a surviving instrument. “Check out the chronograph. The terminator line’s moving in the right direction—toward the hangar, more or less. We travel with it, stay behind the night and in front of the day. In the tolerable zone.” Out of ideas, he turned to Riddick.
Black goggles surveyed the suddenly attentive convicts. “Gonna be one speed: mine. Anybody wants to tippy-toe their way is on their own. If you can’t keep up, don’t step up. You’ll just die.” He nodded toward the man who had indicated a preference for remaining behind. Clearly, his opinion was not an isolated one. “Dog that stays in its doghouse doesn’t get many chances at freedom.”
With that he started forward, brushing past Kyra. Her conflicted expression was almost as tormented as the terrain outside.
They had to blow a window. Designed to withstand the incredible extremes of temperature and the howling winds to which Crematoria was subjected, it could not simply be kicked out. Fortunately, one thing they now had plenty of was ammunition. Once some fringing, shattered shards of clinging acrylic was cleared, Riddick stepped through.
And out onto the surface of Crematoria.
No smooth-surfaced walkway or tunnel underfoot here. No comforting, protective walls. Nothing but black lava—mostly solidified ropy pahoehoe, with a sprinkling of dangerously sharp a’a.
Fuck geology, Riddick mused as he started forward without pausing. The bleak, blackened surface was something to be got over, to be crossed, to survive—not to be analyzed.
He was followed by three of the convicts; their mouths set, their expressions intense, their arms full of weaponry. Every man and woman dies someday, they all knew, and they were of a mind to do it fighting for their freedom rather than squatting in a hole in the ground waiting to be fed and toyed with like mice at the bottom of a well. If nothing else, they might get a chance to take one of their malevolent tormentors with them.
If they could catch up to the guards, or get to the hangar before them.
Another window got blown out. Kyra always did prefer to make her own way. Stepping through the new gap, she advanced to stand close to Riddick. As close as he ever let anyone, that is.
“I’m really not expecting this to work out, okay? Just looks like a cool way to check out.” She offered up a wan smile. “I was getting kinda bored with the lifestyle, you know?”
“Just one rule this time.” Digging through the gear he had scavenged, he tossed her an oxygen unit. “Stay out of the light.”
She nodded knowingly. “Kinda reverses things, don’t it?”
“Till I get my payday,” voice interrupted.
It was Toombs. Weapon in hand, grinning unpleasantly, he stepped outside. A couple of the convicts thought about intervening, but hesitated. Whatever they might think of the big man, this was his business to settle, not theirs. And the mercenary had already demonstrated a disquieting ability