The Chronicles of Riddick - Alan Dean Foster [86]
Mere thoughts of what was advancing steadily behind them were sufficient to keep them from freezing. That, and the heat of their own bodies as they burned calories to keep running. And always out in front, Riddick leading, searching, scanning with glittering eyes that could see better in the continuing dark than any instrument. Eyes that saw only the immediate future, backed by a mind sharply focused on the moment, and not the morrow.
While the dawn, normally a bringer of life but on Crematoria a burning, fiery angel of death, continued to gain on them.
The thing about the man leading them, was that nothing seemed to slow him down. If the fissure yawning ahead was too wide to jump, he angled left or right until it narrowed sufficiently. If the hill ahead was too steep or too slick with volcanic glass to climb, he would race around it. Where they might have stopped to argue and discuss, he just kept going. For men who had spent much of their lives leading others, it was a relief for a change to follow someone else. Especially someone who clearly knew what he was doing. They knew without having to discuss it what would happen if he did not. So they sucked oxygen and water from their respective suit units and sent to their legs the energy that normally would have been spent on complaining.
They had a bad moment when the big man seemed to have vanished into thin air. Anxiety rising, they searched their immediate surroundings in vain. There was no sight of him to right or left. As for straight ahead, that was blocked by an impossible rock face.
On top of which Riddick stood, waiting when he said he wouldn’t wait. He continued to wait for them to scramble up to join him. No place to fall here, each of them knew. No time to slide back down and try again. No one looked downward, not because they feared the heights they were scaling, but because none of them wanted to see a place where they could never set foot again, and still live.
First one, then another, then Kyra and another, until almost all of them, panting hard, had joined the big man at the top. Slowed by his size, the Guv was last up, but he made it. As he did so, he shot a relieved look behind him. Something was tickling his shoulders, his upper spine, the back of his neck. Something persistent and creeping. It was the glow of the coming dawn. A rivulet of sweat coursed down his cheek.
He knew it would only be the first of many.
XIV
The escapees were not the only life-forms pantingly venting carbon dioxide into the thin atmosphere of Crematoria. Spread out within the transport tunnel, the fleeing guards were double-timing it up a rise, flanking the now useless sled rails. The ascent brought the tunnel, and those within, nearer to the actual surface.
It was the guard Anatoli who, after stepping around an unexpected headless body lying between the sled rails, noted the mole hole. Spaced along major and minor transport tunnels alike, capped with tough, heat-resistant alloy, these shafts allowed engineers and service techs to carry out the occasional quick and easy manual check of the terrain above the conduits. There was no reason to bother with one now, of course, but . . .
Anatoli hadn’t survived as a prison guard for as long as he had without taking every precaution in his work, even when precaution seemed superfluous. Now he slowed slightly, frowning at the shaft. No real reason to bother with it, of course. No reason except that years of experience had told him that the best way to keep one’s head on one’s shoulders was to use it when everyone else was ignoring theirs. Besides, carrying out a quick check couldn’t hurt anything, and those were the best, most reassuring kind