41.
Jarvis: Dissociative States
"I appreciate your cooperation in this matter, Captain. Thank you for calling us."
The captain in question gave Jarvis a sour look. "Meaning no disrespect, Sir, I wish you had notified us back when you first learned Riddick was on the planet."
Jarvis sighed and glanced at Aspen. She looked slightly amused. He turned his attention back to the police chief. "If we had let you know and you had attempted to arrest him, Captain, how high do you think his body count would have been?"
Another sour look, but no retort. They proceeded to the station's conference room in silence.
He heard Aspen's quick indrawn breath as they entered and got a look at the three people inside. He managed to contain his own surprised response.
Oh good God...
A man and two women were seated together at the conference table. The man was small and overweight, with a face that seemed to spend all of its time in obsequious expressions and was perpetually ingratiating. But the women...
One was a petite thing, sweet-faced with blue eyes and short, dirty-blonde hair. She looked extremely familiar to him. The other looked very much like Jack Kowalczyk, physically. The nose and eyes were different, and the mouth was a little fuller, but he knew that if he'd passed her on the street he would have turned around for another, closer look, his heart racing.
He already knew that the two women were prostitutes. He already knew that Riddick, apparently, had spent time recently with both. Nausea rose in his throat. Now he remembered who the first woman resembled: Carolyn Fry, pilot to the Hunter-Gratzner, who died in the aftermath of the crash. Adroit questioning of the Muslim cleric had revealed that she'd been alone with Riddick when she died, although the holy man insisted that the planet's indigenous predators had killed her.
But had they?
This was horrifying. Riddick appeared to be acting out some bizarre sort of necrophilia with these women...
Both women were pale and looked deeply frightened. Jarvis glanced at Aspen and nodded. They were on her turf here. She nodded back and stepped forward.
"I am Dr. Aspen, and this is Lieutenant Jarvis. We are heading the task force investigating Riddick's activities in New Paris and on Troubadour. I understand that you may be able to help us?"
"Help you?" The counterfeit Jack exploded, her voice charged with fear. "We came here because we want you to--"
"It's okay, Karen," the rotund man interrupted soothingly. "They're going to help us. Don't worry. You're safe now. They just need to ask us some questions."
"We'll never be safe again," Karen replied, her voice almost a sob. The false Carolyn was staring at her hands, which trembled slightly.
Aspen moved to sit down at the table across from the trio. Jarvis followed her and took a seat beside her.
"Perhaps you would like to begin, Mr...?" She prompted, looking at the man.
"Francois Barbour," he replied, bowing his head her way. "I am manager of the Moulin Rouge."
Of course. What else would you call a brothel? Jarvis thought with concealed disgust. Bryan, you've fallen far and hard, haven't you? Is there anything left of the boy you were?
He already knew the answer to that. The last vestiges of Richard Bryan Riddick were long dead. The thing that remained in their place was a monster. He forced his attention back to the trio before him.
"The man we believe to be your Riddick began coming to our establishment more than four years ago. We would not see him for months at a time, of course, but it was clearly the man pictured in the paper. He told us his name was William Fry."
Jarvis made a quick note on his electronic pad. Used first name of mercenary who had custody of him on HG; used last name of HG pilot.
"Go on," Aspen prompted.
"He described the physical characteristics of the woman he was seeking. They were almost a precise match with Marnie, here. She can tell you more about what he wanted." He nodded to the blonde who so closely resembled Carolyn Fry.
She took a deep breath and began speaking. "The name he wanted to call me by was 'Carolyn.' He told me to call him 'Riddick.' We'd all heard of Riddick, of course, but we never thought he really was him..."
She swallowed hard, twisting her fingers around each other, knuckles white.
"He... liked to dominate. A lot of the things we did involved me being... caught alone with him in some small place. I was supposed to be afraid of him, but after we had sex I was supposed to tell him I loved him and that this time I wouldn't leave him. One time..."
She swallowed again.
"One time, when he was climaxing... he said to me 'Don't die, Carolyn. Not for me.' I asked him about it afterward, and he told me that the real Carolyn had died saving his life and that he missed her."
"So you knew that you were playing the role of a dead woman," Aspen said quietly.
Marnie nodded. Her eyes were glittering with suppressed tears. "It never occurred to me that maybe he'd killed her or something. I didn't know he really was Riddick..." She looked up at them, face full of vulnerability. Her voice, when she spoke again, was full of a desperate need for reassurance. "Did he kill her? Would he have killed me, too, eventually?"
"We don't know," Aspen told her gently.
"Because, when he showed up this last time, he was different," Marnie continued, her voice ragged. "He didn't want to do the usual things anymore. He just wanted to... to fuck me and leave. He wouldn't even look at me half the time. First night he was back, it was mostly normal, initially..."
She took a cigarette out of a small case and tried to light it. Her hands were shaking far too much and she handed it over to Barbour with a pleading expression. He lit it for her and gave it back to her. She took several long drags on the cigarette before she was able to continue.
"But about halfway through our first... encounter -- usually we'd have sex three or four times before he was done -- I heard him say 'go away, Jack.' I had no idea what it meant, but suddenly he was having trouble, which was a first for him. Usually he was so..."
"Virile?" Aspen prompted. All the Phase II Operatives were well-known for their intense sexual appetites.
Marnie laughed shakily. "Good word. Yeah, he'd never had trouble before. When he finally came... afterwards he wouldn't say anything to me. He just got dressed and left. Paid for the full night, but he wasn't even there for an hour. And after that he just got more and more... perfunctory. I finally told him I didn't want to see him anymore."
Jarvis blinked in surprise. Marnie noticed and glared at him.
"Look, mister, I know what you think you see here," she snarled. "A cheap whore, right? Spreads her legs for anybody with the cash? That's not what I do. We're licensed professionals at the Moulin Rouge. My clients pay two thousand New Francs a night for time with me and in return I make their fantasies -- whatever they are -- come true. Some of them don't even want to fuck. They just want someone they can talk to who doesn't judge them. I'm probably almost as good a psychologist as your lady friend there. And I have the right to tell any of my clients if I don't want to see them anymore."
Aspen gave him a look of irritation. He nodded apologetically at Marnie. "I'm sorry. Please continue."
She sighed in irritation. "That's pretty much it. I told him I didn't want to see him anymore and I figured I'd never see him again. But a few nights later he showed up and negotiated to spend his nights with Karen. When I heard that he called her 'Jack,' I figured that he'd just grown attracted to an actual, living woman, and I just didn't do it for him anymore. Karen can tell you the rest."
An actual, living woman, Jarvis thought with horror. Oh God. I wish to God that's what it had been...
Dr. Aspen made some notes in her book before she turned her attention to Karen. It took the younger prostitute a moment to find her voice.
"He was really nice at first," she said quietly. "He didn't even seem to know what he wanted to do. We tried all kinds of things, nothing too weird, the first two nights. He had this one idea where we took a shower together and afterwards he had sex with me in the stall... twice, actually. He was very... gentle, most of the time. But, like Marnie said, he did like to dominate. He asked me to wear these clothes, the kinds of things a teenage girl would wear, one who didn't have a lot of money, and he said that she dressed like that when he first saw her again."
A nauseating shiver passed through Jarvis. Just how sick had his boy gotten?
My boy is dead, he reminded himself. Bryan has been dead for years.
"The third night..." Now it was Karen's turn to swallow hard. "When he showed up I thought it was going to be really nice. He even gave me a gift, a bottle of perfume... Charmante, which costs a fortune. He said it was her favorite."
"Excuse me for just a moment, Karen," Dr. Aspen said. She leaned over to Jarvis so that he would be the only one who heard what she said next. "According to our investigation, Charmante-scented toiletries are what Angelica Porter purchased the day before the space battle. She spent about six hundred New Francs on a complete set of them."
He turned to her and murmured back. "Jack never wore Charmante, as far as we know. She couldn't afford it."
"Maybe she as wearing a knock-off version of it when they were reunited. Who knows?"
Jarvis nodded. None of this made the matter any less disturbing. He and Aspen turned their attention back to the pale girl across from them.
"I'm sorry about that, Karen. Please continue," Aspen said gently.
"Well, he had a new fantasy he wanted to try. He was going to frisk and strip-search me..."
Oh, God, Jarvis thought, his stomach sinking hard. Riddick had probably done exactly that to the real Jack when they were reunited. Somehow, during his search, he must have detected the implanted tracer. Jack had thought it was a hormonal regulator; she would have objected if he tried to remove it. Was that how it began? Did he decide she'd betrayed him when she tried to stop him?
He buried his face in his hands for a moment, pain overwhelming him. My fault, he thought yet again. He could actually see it in his mind, an already-humiliated Jack struggling against her captor, trying to reason with him, only to awaken the latent beast within...
"So we started playing it out, and I figured he might get a little rough because he told me I might need to use the safe-word. Usually I pick the word, but he insisted on choosing it and it was a weird one, too--"
"What was it?"
"Hunter-Gratzner," Marnie answered softly. "He had me use it, too."
Karen nodded. "Everything was going okay, and we were about to have sex, when the son of a bitch kissed me on the mouth! I don't let anybody do that except my girlfriend. That's her personal territory. And I'd told him he could never do that, and he'd agreed to it. I got so mad I hit him!"
She wiped at her eyes and sniffed. "I was so upset I couldn't even remember his stupid safe-word. He got excited after I hit him... he pinned me to the bed and fucked me really hard, even though I was yelling at him to stop, and he was loving it!" She wiped at her eyes again. "It was awful..."
Her breath hitched and she stared down at the table. Marnie's arm went around her gently.
Jarvis almost felt like throwing up. He could suddenly imagine that Riddick had done exactly that to the real Jack at the beginning of her ordeal. Karen had no idea how lucky she'd actually gotten in comparison. If Riddick had decided to relive the entire experience, she'd have had to be identified through dental records and tissue type too...
Next to him, Dr. Aspen looked extremely pale.
Karen finally got control of her voice enough to continue. "I threw him out when he was done, and Monsieur Barbour told him, when he came in the next night, that he wasn't welcome anymore." Her eyes fixed on Jarvis and Aspen, full of desperate pleading. "Is he going to come back and get us now? He told Francois to give us his apologies, but I'm so scared--"
"We won't let him get either one of you," Jarvis said firmly. "He's on his way to Earth right now. And I promise you that we'll make sure he can never come near either one of you again."
He'd make all the necessary arrangements. As much as he hated the insights they'd given him into Riddick's condition, those alone were worth the outlay for a state-of-the-art security system to keep the women safe. And if, somehow, Riddick ever did find himself drawn back to them, Jarvis would be sure to catch him before either woman was so much as touched.
"We appreciate the help you've given us," Aspen was saying. "As gruesome as it sounds, knowing that he has been sexually obsessing over dead women may well give us the key to his--"
"DEAD?" Karen gasped. "What do you mean? She's dead? But... he told me she was alive! He said he just couldn't have her! Oh my god, are you telling me he killed her?"
It took both Barbour and Marnie to calm her hysterics. Jarvis excused himself quickly, running for the station's men's room. He barely made it in time, vomiting his breakfast into one of the toilets. He continued to dry-heave for several minutes thereafter, his head spinning. When he finally emerged, Aspen was exiting the ladies' room, wiping at her own mouth.
"Tell me this is just a horrible nightmare," she begged him.
He groaned and leaned against the wall. "I wish it were. Oh God, I wish it were. You know what this means, don't you?"
Aspen nodded grimly. "He's gone dissociative. His mind is fracturing completely."
"He doesn't remember killing her. He tortured her to death and he has no memory of it. Oh God."
"We knew this could happen," Aspen said raggedly, leaning against the wall next to him.
"We knew there was a very slim chance it could happen. That's different," Jarvis insisted. "We have to let Baldwin know right away. The other operatives--"
"They may never have that problem; you know that! Don't forget that Riddick's brain underwent a very unique transformation that none of them experienced!"
He glanced over at her. "Do you still think that's the root cause of his problems?"
"I think it's very likely," she answered. "You know he was different afterward. His IQ jumped sixty points after he recovered. You tested him yourself."
"Yes, I did," Jarvis admitted with a groan. "But you know that IQ tests are often inaccurate... and he'd practically been off the scale even before the incident occurred. I just figured we were tracking some statistics that had been missed the first time--"
"Jarvis, you were expecting him to come out of the ordeal a vegetable, or at the very least with impaired cognitive function. Instead, his IQ jumped sixty points!"
"He was only seven years old! You know the tests are only partially reliable at that age!"
Aspen rolled her eyes at him and stalked away to the conference room. It was empty of the others when they reached it. She closed the door behind him and locked it before she turned around and glared angrily at him.
"Goddamn it, Jarvis, you need to stop this double-talk! I read the files! His foster father beat him nearly to death! When you were contacted and ordered to Earth, all of the EEGs showed that Riddick was brain-dead! You had to come to Earth because none of the subjects could be terminated unless you were physically present! And by the time you arrived--"
"When I arrived, the EEGs showed that his brain cells were spontaneously regenerating. He didn't even need life support by then. He woke up two days after that and knew who he was." Jarvis sighed. "I remember. You don't know how happy we all were..."
It was impossible to describe the sheer joy and hope everyone had felt at that time, nor the way it had been dashed to pieces seven years later.
"None of the other subjects went through anything remotely like that. And none of them went anywhere near as crazy during puberty as he did," Aspen whispered. "Whatever your beloved 'Charybdis Factor' did to his brain cells, that's what's responsible for his madness. I've been telling you that for three years now."
"I know that, Aspen. We were researching whether or not a treatment for ordinary humans could be made using the technology, to heal brain damage. We shut that inquiry down after Riddick went crazy. File FP74E. Look it up; you're cleared for it." Jarvis buried his head in his hands. "You know I agree with you, Martina. The whole Project should be scrapped. It should have been scrapped after Phase I went bad."
"What's the official death count these days, Jarvis? How many people have died thanks to this Project?" Martina Aspen sat down next to him, looking miserable. She was his fault as well. He'd brought her in three and a half years ago, to help profile Riddick and his involvement with Jack Kowalczyk. Now she was trapped. There was no way out of the Charybdis Project once it sucked you in. Like the whirlpool in the Messina Straits on Earth; once it grabbed hold of you, it had you until you died.
"Seven hundred forty three. That includes the subjects themselves, all forty-two of them who died."
Aspen laughed humorlessly. "How much higher does it have to get before the goddamned thing is shut down for good?"
"Minimum of nine hundred," he replied sourly.
"Where do you get that number from?" She glanced at him in surprise.
"Well, there are one hundred fifty seven of us with full clearance to the Charybdis Project. I figure that if it actually is ever shut down, every last one of us will meet with an untimely demise. Anybody lower down than the Board itself will be viewed as an unnecessary risk to Interplanetary Security."
They were silent for a long time, contemplating.
"So has any of this shit been worth it to you, Reg?" she asked a few minutes later, her voice sad.
"Oh yeah, sure. My wife and kids got sick of the way I was gallivanting all over the galaxy and stopped using the Conjugal Cryo-Chambers. Six years ago, Melanie finally got around to divorcing me so she could marry some guy her own age. She was three years younger than me when we met, and now she's fifteen years older than me. I'm a grandfather and I've never seen my grandchildren, and my daughters don't want me to show up. And the closest thing I've ever had to a son is on his way to Earth right now, and he's turned into a rabid animal. This Project kills everything it touches, Martina. I'm sorry I let it touch you."
"So what do we do now?"
"We go, and we report to General Baldwin what we've learned. And then, I don't know about you but I plan to get very, very drunk."
"You want company for that?"
"You're on, lady."
The two of them rose and left the conference room. Jarvis almost imagined he could see the swords floating above the both of them, waiting to fall.
42.
Jack: Soft Landing
"You should know that it looks completely fake."
Riddick glanced over at Jack where she was curled on their bed and gave her an amused grin. "Hang on, kid, I'm only just getting started."
He was building a curly-headed wig for himself, using a special custom head-form. Jack was fascinated by the process. The most impressive part, to her, was how dexterous Riddick's large hands actually were, capable of feats of great delicacy that by rights should have been beyond them. She watched him manipulate the locks of hair down onto the soft vinyl "scalp" and fix them in place, marveling at the precision of his minute movements.
"So is that the reason you shave your head?" she asked. "So you can wear all kinds of disguises?"
"One of the reasons," he replied, concentrating on his work.
"Why else?"
"So I can rub my own head for luck," he muttered.
Jack rolled her eyes and made a rude noise. "C'mon. Why do you do it?"
He glanced over at her again, eyebrow raised. "Don't you like it?"
"I love it." Frankly, Jack had a hard time imagining him with hair. Whenever he was in disguise, he always looked odd to her. Hair on Riddick's head just seemed wrong, somehow. "But you didn't start doing it for me. When did you start doing it?"
"In Slam, back in Texas. Place was infested with whole ecosystems of parasites. You had hair, you always had head lice and shit. Easier just to shave it off, if you could get hold of a knife. I always had a few. They'd confiscate 'em and I'd make more. And you could shave with any of 'em," he finished proudly.
Jack laughed. Riddick's predilection with blade-making was one of his most interesting quirks. Anything that could hold an edge he could make into a shiv. But it went beyond that; his shivs were often works of art. They curved into the user's hand as if they had grown there. He talked about some of them as if they had personalities of their own, and she believed him a little. He imbued them with something unique when he made them; a piece of his own craftsmanship, his own soul.
"Why didn't you grow it out after you broke out of Nereid?" she asked, returning to the topic of his hair.
He chuckled. "Tried a few times. It just felt wrong. So I figured, hell, if I need hair I can wear a wig. Glue it right onto my scalp and who'll know? Bought a few, learned how to make 'em. It's kinda fun." His mouth pulled into an ironic grin. "Zen and the Art of Wig-Making."
Jack sighed, and turned her attention to the miraculous work his hands were doing. Under them, the wig was slowly shaping itself. She knew that, when he was finished, it would be flawless, utterly convincing on his head. Nobody, seeing him in it, would believe for a moment that it hadn't grown there. He was a gifted builder of all sorts of things. Ironic that the rest of the galaxy saw him only as a destroyer.
"Maybe I should shave my head and wear wigs, too," she joked.
"Don't you dare." He fixed her with a mock-glare and she pretended to cower from him. He grinned, his eyes traveling across her body. "I like your hair. Anyway, only one cue-ball per ship, Babe, and that's me." His silvery eyes twinkled in response to her snort of laughter.
"So what is your natural hair color?" She was pretty sure his hair would be jet-black, but he'd never actually let his stubble get long enough to confirm it. The other hair on his body seemed to back that up--
"Pink. Bright, shocking, Barbie Doll pink."
"Thought so," she chuckled. Ask a silly question...
The fun part was that Riddick's silly answers were always worth hearing. He smiled over at her with mischief in his eyes and kept the madness going. "With one lime-green stripe down the back of my head, like a skunk. A preppie skunk."
"What's a preppie?" She'd heard the word in passing somewhere, but she couldn't place it or its meaning.
"Indigenous species to Earth. Passes as human but no human being could have such tragically bad taste. Been around since the Twentieth Century at least." He turned back to the wig and continued working. "They play a lot of tennis and golf, for some reason. I think the golf proves conclusively that they're not human. Earth was invaded by aliens long ago."
Okay. Apparently, the translation of this particular bit of Riddick-speak was that "preppies" were the idle, tacky rich. She wondered if they really existed, or if he was just pulling her chain again.
"You know, if Dr. Aspen heard that, she'd rip up all of her profiles and do new ones."
"'Richard B. Riddick, Paranoid Schizophrenic?'" he laughed.
"Could be."
"Remind me to write her a letter about preppies. Been too long since I messed with anybody's head."
"Really?" Jack pushed at her own extremely-tousled mane. "I could've sworn you were doing just that less than an hour ago."
He smirked. "Gonna do it again as soon as I finish up this wig, little girl."
Sometimes it seemed like neither one of them could stop. They'd managed to get a little sleep, but neither one of them seemed to need more than a few hours. Jack knew that she was far too... well, too damned horny to hold still. Just looking at him filled her with wild thoughts and impulses. Their attempts to prep the ship for their return to Troubadour had been full of constant interruptions as one or both of them would suddenly be unable to wait another second. They'd christened practically every substantial surface of the ship -- walls, floors, tables, chairs, the food-prep counter -- with their frenzied coupling.
Jack had given up her attempts to keep track of how many times they'd made love, let alone how many times Riddick had made her come.
Deliberately she stretched her body, pleased when she heard the way his breath caught for a moment. "How much longer?"
He chuckled and glanced down at the bulge in his pants. "Me or the wig?"
"How soon is it gonna be done so you can start doing me?"
"Do you ever think of anything else, Jack?"
"Not recently," she smirked. He shook his head, chuckling, and turned back to the wig.
"Well, the sooner you stop distracting me, the sooner I'll be done." He turned back to the wig, laughing softly. She watched him in silence for another fifteen minutes. Finally he stood back, looking pleased.
"You done?"
"Almost. Just gotta let the cap cure and it'll be ready to use." He switched on the heating element in the form and began cleaning and putting away his tools.
That was another of his little quirks. Riddick wasn't precisely a neat-freak, but he liked to have everything put away whenever possible. She'd begun picking up the habit a little. His only explanation, when she asked, was that nothing would break if nothing was loose. Ship rules. At least he'd told her she didn't have to wear anything to bed anymore.
Actually, what he'd said had been: "Anything you wear in bed with me is gonna end up shredded."
Riddick glanced down at his chrono and smiled. "Figure we have about half an hour before we reach Troubadour's space traffic control radius. So..." He began stalking towards her. She crawled backwards toward the head of the bed, pretending to flee. Suddenly he leapt, landing on the bed astride her body.
He lay down on top of her, pressing himself against her, and put his lips to her ear. "Just how hard do you think you can come between now and then?"
The answer, under his expert handling, left them both astounded.
"You ready for this, kid?" he asked her with a grin.
They'd managed to get themselves put together before they were hailed. Now Jack strapped into the pilot's seat, nerves tingling.
"I don't know, Riddick."
He reached over and squeezed her hand gently. "You'll be fine."
She took a deep breath and opened the channel. "Control, this is the Audrey II out of Seti Station requesting permission to land."
"Audrey II, this is Control. Please transmit your permits now."
Jack glanced over at Riddick. He nodded; the terminal was ready. She hit SEND and sped a small prayer of her own on its way at the same time.
The data they were sending would identify the Audrey II as a light merchant vessel primarily involved in agricultural product shipping. It listed their ultimate destination for this trip as the Rosette Nebula, to deliver supplies to the frontier planets there and ferry back the exotic vegetables that region of space had become famous for. Riddick had picked that latter cargo because it might explain away the plasma burn on their hull; pricey merchandise like that would attract pirates.
"Audrey II, this is Control. Please verify your crew complement data."
"Two of us, Control. Jennifer Owens, Captain. My brother Matthew is my First Mate." She smirked at Riddick and was rewarded with a leer.
"Do you have any cargo on board at this time?"
"Negative. We just came off of a maintenance break on Seti Station. We want to resupply for the trip to the Rosette." She glanced at Riddick again. He looked pleased and gave her a slight nod.
"Very well. The Orleans spaceport is currently full, but we can set you down in the Montmartre port. It's kinda far away from the markets, but it's the best we can do right now."
"That's fine," Jack told him, and managed a laugh. "So what's going on down there, a convention?"
"No, we had some big trouble a few days ago. Public Enemy Number One was in New Paris. Richard Riddick himself. Now the planet is crawling with military people."
Jack glanced over at Riddick once more and spotted a smug look on his face. She covered the microphone for a second. "You just love your own press, don't you?"
"Gotta admit, it's a bit of a thrill," he chuckled.
"Wow," she gasped for the Controller's benefit. "Is he still here?" She let a little quaver enter her voice.
"No, ma'am, he's headed to Earth now. But these uniforms are all over us, trying to figure out what he was doing here. You'll see what I mean when you land. They're sniffing into everything."
Jack threw a worried glance Riddick's way but he seemed unperturbed.
"That'll be quite a sight. I imagine there are a lot of people who aren't too thrilled to have them around, though."
The controller chuckled through the speaker. "Yeah, well, they're not trying to mess with our customs too much. I'm sending you the coordinates of your landing grid. Have a pleasant stay in New Paris."
"Thank you, Control. Audrey II out." She turned off the transmitter and checked to see if the coordinates had loaded. Once again, she glanced over at Riddick. "You sure about this?"
He nodded serenely. "You're ready."
Jack sped another prayer out into the firmament and began the descent. Beside her, Riddick sat calmly, not even touching the backup controls. She couldn't believe he was letting her -- making her -- do this...
This is what I've wanted to do for years, she reminded herself. I'm going to be a pilot. I'm going to be a fucking good pilot!
She felt the exact moment that they hit the outer edge of the atmosphere. She had the ship angled a little too steeply and corrected it, managing to exhale after she was done. Riddick was calm and silent beside her, his hands still nowhere near the backup controls.
If something went wrong, he could probably take over in a split second, anyway. The fact that he wasn't bothering to touch the controls was just intended as an added vote of confidence in her. She knew it, and she loved him all the more for it.
With grim concentration, she kept the ship in their descent window, nudging it slightly every now and then to center it better in its path. Her fear peaked out and began to recede. She could do this. She would do this.
Something buffeted at the ship and she flinched.
"Just a thermal," Riddick purred from beside her. "You're handling it fine."
She adjusted the descent angle a little and took another deep breath.
The heat envelope around them began to dissipate and she could finally see out the window. The view was perfect, a dead-on match with the instrumentation. New Paris sprawled below and ahead of them as they descended. Jack altered their course slightly, homing in on their landing grid's beacon. The fear was gone now, replaced with bubbling joy. A huge smile spread across her face as she began their final descent.
The last part was the trickiest, as she switched to repulsors for the final vertical drop to their landing grid. The craft shook for a moment as she made the switch, wobbling slightly, but Riddick's hands in the corner of her eye made no movement toward his controls. Slowly, breathlessly, she set the Audrey II down on the grid.
She began powering the craft down, feeling an amazing burst of coruscating delight pass through her body. She had done it! Without the slightest bit of physical assistance, she had landed the ship! Landings were the most dangerous part of any spaceflight, and she had done her very first almost without a hitch!
She took a deep breath and released her straps. Gravity seemed to have no hold over her at all as she bounded out of the chair and let loose a scream of victory. The next thing she knew, Riddick had lifted her up and was whirling her around him, their bodies pressed tightly together as they laughed into each other's faces.
"I did it! Riddick, I did it!"
"Yeah, Jack, you were brilliant!" He whirled her around again and crushed her lips against his.
A long moment later they released one another's mouths. Riddick pressed his forehead against hers.
"Jack, you just graduated to full partner." He pulled his face back and gave her a tender smile. "Congratulations."
Neither one of them bothered to actually see the planet for another few hours.