The Chronicles of Riddick - Alan Dean Foster [97]
Led by Riddick, Kyra and the Guv reached the near edge of the runway. Amazed that they had actually made it this far, the Guv offered an evaluation that emerged as a war cry.
“We might goddamn well do this!”
To an outsider, it looked as if they actually might. But an outsider would probably not have seen Vaako, who had positioned himself advantageously to unleash a personal withering crossfire on the three survivors. Sighting in carefully on Riddick, he fired his weapon.
In the split second between the time the commander’s finger tightened on the trigger of his rifle and the burst he let loose crossed the intervening space, Riddick moved. Just missing, the powerful blast from the heavy weapon slammed into the runway and blew him right off his feet, sending him tumbling hard to the ground. Seeing the fugitives go down, a pair of pursuing soldiers accelerated, closing for the kill.
Only to be intercepted by Kyra, howling defiance. Harried by the ferocious little harridan, they were forced to postpone the coup de grace to deal with her first. Letting them think they were forcing her backward, she continued to fend them off, leading them in the opposite direction, away from the two men lying on the ground—one dead, the other dazed.
There was another, however, who was not distracted. Rising and racing forward, Vaako rapidly closed the distance between himself and the big man. He could feel his quarry’s neck beneath his fingers, could anticipate the cracking of bones, could. . . .
Something slammed into him hard from behind. Surprised, he fought and rolled. The man who had knocked him down was nothing more than a convict, a lesser specimen of the human species. His expression as he fought with the Necromonger commander was an odd mix of resignation and determination, with just an inexplicable hint of amusement—as if death had been his companion for so long he had come to regard it as a companion and not an enemy.
Worn out from the debilitating run across the unsparing surface of Crematoria, exhausted by the exertions that had been demanded of his body, the Guv was no match for the energetic and rested Vaako. Finally lifting the other man over his head, the Commander brought him down in a move that was as simple as it was fatal, breaking his adversary’s spine. It had been an interruption, a divertissement—nothing more. Pivoting away from the motionless body, he turned once more toward his principal quarry.
He arrived as Riddick, tired and bruised, the wind knocked out of him, was still struggling to get to his knees. Nodding slowly to himself, knowing it was over now, Vaako advanced the rest of the way at leisure.
“So you can kneel. Not that it matters. You were given the choice, between the Way, and this way.” Drawing his sidearm, he stood over the wounded creature and unhurriedly raised the muzzle toward the big man’s head.
He was going to die, Riddick knew. It didn’t trouble him. He had been expecting to die ever since he had been a child. Everything he had done since then, every effort he had expended, had been a rear-guard effort to postpone that inevitability. Now that it was at an end, he had no regrets. He had done all that he could do. All that any one man could do. He ought to be resigned, to let it come. To welcome an end to all the running, and fighting, and killing. There was only one problem.
He was still mad.
In his madness, time and space itself seemed to distort. The movements of the man standing before him, the man who had come to kill him, appeared to slow. The terrain around him warped, twisted. Instead of bare rock, there was forest. Instead of a heat-sink of a sky, clear blue and white clouds.
He knew he was losing consciousness when a figure stepped through his nascent assassin.
It was a figure he had seen before, in a dream. Or had it been a dream? The voice was the same as well; familiar, soothing, somehow reassuring.
“Remember what they did . . . ,” it was saying.
Time frozen, space constrained, she knelt beside him. As on the merc ship, a hand reached out toward him.