The Chronicles of Riddick (7 page)

The Purifier did not respond. There was no point in trying to apply reason to absolutes. Also, by questioning the Lord Marshal he had performed a useful service. Arguing further with him would gain nothing. Except, perhaps, consideration of a new senior purifier. This man might really be the last lord marshal. His vision might be true. If so, there would be no need for additional purifiers. As for himself, he had no intention of surrendering his office prematurely.

I
mam slowed as he neared the plaza. Ziza was walking on her own once again, holding tight to Lajjun’s hand, her small fingers entwined tightly in the woman’s stronger ones. The delegate turned to them both.

“Ahead—just ahead.”

Exhausted and filthy, they slowed to a walk. The next corner brought the broad plaza clearly into view.

It was empty.

Buildings lay flattened on its perimeter. The trees and flowers that had decorated the broad, open space in patterns of green and gold and crimson had been snapped in half or blown away. A few frantic shapes appeared on the plaza’s far side, quickly vanishing into the rubble. Normally crowded with hundreds of strollers and businessfolk on break, the circular meeting place was deserted.

Too young to be intimidated, too bold to keep silent, Ziza tugged on her mother’s hand. “Where is everybody? This is
spooky
.”

Her father shot her an irritated look, but said nothing. The eerie silence was compelling.

It was almost as silent in a back alley nearby, where debris and dust were rising from the ground, caught in the fringes of a gravitational eddy. Abruptly, armored figures scattered the dust, riding their unloading field to the ground. Armed and ready, the platoon was but one of many being disgorged by the transport craft that was advancing slowly over the rooftops nearby, seeding armored death as it passed.

Once assembled, the platoons split up and headed off in different directions, each on the lookout for resistance. One of them carried a device that was a miniature of the conquest icon. Far too small to serve as a launching pad for warcraft, it had another, equally disturbing function, albeit on a smaller scale.

Blade concealed but ready, Imam took a deep breath and headed out across the plaza. Though the sky was still full of fire and destruction, both had lessened considerably in volume and intensity. Nothing fell on him, nothing descended to wipe him from the pavement. Fast as they had run, he knew that the time remaining to him and his family was finite.

Reaching the central rotunda, he crouched low and performed a circular scan of the immediate vicinity. In better times, music had blared from this small, decorative structure. Better times might come again, he felt, but not soon. And that would not matter, if he and his wife and daughter were not around to witness it.

Satisfied that the area seemed safe, he straightened and motioned across the empty pavement, beckoning Lajjun and Ziza to join him. They could wait in the rotunda until he had scouted out the other half of the plaza. He started to rise.

It was difficult to tell who arrived on opposite sides of the plaza first: the platoon of Necromonger soldiers or the brigade of Helion fighters. Though outnumbered and outgunned, the Necromongers did not hesitate. Nor did they attempt to take cover. Instead, they unlimbered their sidearms and rushed straight toward the much larger number of Helion defenders. To someone trained in conventional military tactics, it would have looked like a suicide charge. Initial developments did nothing to dispel the validity of such an observation. In no mood for a display of politesse, the Helions opened fire immediately.

Ignoring the burst of gunfire and waving his arms wildly, Imam started toward the ruined building where his family awaited. “No!” he screamed as loudly as he could. “Keep back, stay there, don’t—”

The furious fire from the Helion defenders would have tracked and eradicated him as a possible enemy combatant had not a pair of hands grabbed him and pulled him down. He fought briefly against the pull, and futilely. It was as if he had been caught and dragged down by limbs of metal instead of flesh. Effortlessly, but with care, they slung him into the deep shadows of the rotunda. He still held the knife. Rolling furiously, he started to come up and face whoever had tackled him. A flash of dim light on goggles stopped him. He knew those goggles.

Crouching opposite Imam, Riddick quietly contemplated his old acquaintance. As always, it was impossible for Imam to tell if the big man was irritated, angry, or merely indifferent.

“Are you following me?”

It would not have mattered if Imam had been able to come up with a sensible answer. Anything he might have said would have been drowned out by the roar of gunfire as the Necromonger platoon clashed with the much larger Helion force.

Attacking with what seemed to be more bravery than military sense, the Necromongers pushed in on the Helion soldiers—and were cut down, one by one, as repeated shots reduced armor and bodies to ruin. In the end, only the soldier carrying the small conquest icon survived—just long enough to plant his burden in the ground and deploy a release mechanism. There was a soft
poomph
as the head of the icon cracked open. Something missiled out and up, to pause overhead.

Wary but increasingly confident, the Helion soldiers advanced beneath it. Spinning, levitating, the lambent orb of pale energy resembled some kind of aerial marker, or perhaps a distress signal. If the latter, it had been deployed too late. Every member of the Necromonger platoon lay dead or dying on the plaza. Watching their perimeter, the Helion force continued to advance across the devastated plaza.

Within the shadows of the rotunda, Imam struggled to rise. “Lajjun and Ziza—they’re out there.”

“Out there where?” Riddick asked him.

Restrained in the big man’s grasp, the delegate could only flail helplessly in his family’s direction. “Southwest side, under a broken roof. I’ve got to get to them. They don’t know what’s happening, don’t know where I am. Just let me—”

Riddick held him back, the way an owner would a puppy. “When it’s over.”

“When it’s over?
When it’s over?
” Rising as much as Riddick would allow, Imam gestured in the direction of the recent firefight. “Didn’t you see what happened? This group of invaders, they’re all dead. It is over, at least for the moment.” He struggled to rise. “
Let me go
. I need to be with—”

“When it’s over,” Riddick repeated. Despite what Imam implied, the big man had seen what had happened. And it hadn’t made any sense to him. No thinking fighter, however well motivated or brain-washed or drugged, went marching stoically into the face of visibly superior firepower without some purpose in mind. Distraction, perhaps. Something more—they would know, as he had told Imam, when it was over. Which to Riddick’s way of thinking was Not Yet.

The rotating energy orb did not dissipate, nor did it change position. Increasingly convinced that, whatever it signified, it might be something more threatening than a distress signal, the officer in charge of the Helion unit ordered his troops to back off. They would go around the plaza. Standing out in the open any longer than was necessary was an invitation to attack. Voices crackled in his suit communicator. Something about something—behind them.

The Necromonger soldiers who had appeared behind the Helion brigade had materialized as silently as their comrades in the plaza had died. Now perhaps a hundred of them blocked the street the brigade had used to enter the plaza. A check of another street revealed another hundred or so of the enemy had already taken up defensive positions there.

Approaching from across the plaza came a third group. Threatening and unexpected, but not invincible. All they had to do, the Helion commander realized, was attack any one of the three columns and reduce it while defending themselves against the other two. They were outflanked, but not outnumbered or outgunned. Inclining his lips toward the pickup in his helmet, he prepared to issue the necessary orders.

At the front of the Necromonger column that was advancing on the plaza, a senior officer halted. Vaako was a favored commander, unusually young to have achieved such a high rank. For an instant, he observed the preparations taking place among the Helion force. It appeared that they were going to make a charge, in his direction. Another officer in a similar battlefield situation might have been concerned, might have rushed to prepare his own troops to withstand the frontal assault.

Instead, Vaako removed from one pocket a compact signaling device. It was small in size, but not in import. Unhesitatingly, he raised his gaze until it was focused on the pale orb of energy that continued to drift above the plaza. It was significant not for what it displayed, but for what it represented. He pressed the single button on the mechanism, transmitting a certain signal to his assembled troops.

Strange thing, gravity. Abstract in concept to all but mathematicians and physicists, when wielded by guiding instrumentation it could move mountains. Or crush them. The Necromonger soldiers who had encircled the area fired—not on the Helion defenders they had surrounded, but toward the hovering orb. Absorbing the combined energy of the discharged weapons fully activated the device. When the sphere of now massively increased gravity descended, it punched a neat, perfectly round hole in the plaza to a uniform depth of half a meter. Within its circumference, everything was crushed to a thickness of less than a millimeter. It was as if the ground had been painted with a smeared combination of metal, pavement, bone, and blood—an abstract vision of ghastly color gratefully muted by the night sky. Within that circumference had been decorative paving stones, railings, and every one of the Helion soldiers. Now all that remained was a multihued stain barely thick enough to scrape.

Having raised his head just enough above the rim of the rotunda to witness the shockingly sudden massacre, Imam found himself stunned and sickened by what he had seen. In contrast, Riddick was nodding slowly, his expression neutral, his opinion of what he had seen wholly unemotional and professional.

“Beautiful. Clean, quick, no mess.”

Sitting on the hard floor of the rotunda, his back pressed against the curving inner wall, Imam stared at his companion. He really didn’t know anything about this man, he realized. Drawing him here had been an expression of desperation leavened with faint hope. A last-minute thought before the darkness descended, as it was doing even now. And very possibly, a waste of time.

Time. Time was something he had always had, but was now rapidly running out of. But what to do next, how to proceed? Especially given the horror he had just witnessed.

Unexpectedly, Riddick had a suggestion. He was not one to dwell on the past, even if that past was only a matter of days. Understanding, if not sympathizing, with why Imam had conspired to draw him here, he rested an arm on one knee while dividing his attention between his companion and the mob of Necromonger soldiers that was forming up to leave the plaza.

“I’ve got a ship; she’s ready to roll. Come ride bitch if you want.”

Didn’t the man realize he had other concerns? “No, no, I’ll stay to fight. This world has been good to me, and I owe it that much. But I just need to get my family across the river first. There’s an underground facility there, built to shelter citizens displaced by severe weather, where they’ll be safe.”

Impatient, Riddick interrupted him. “You’ll never get there.” He jerked his head in the direction of what had once been the Helion system’s center of power. “Too many ships, too many scans. Too many guns. If one of them doesn’t shoot you, one of your own’s liable to.”

Imam looked at him: pleading not with words, but with his eyes. “I have to try. I could go with you, but they can’t.”

The unspoken implication behind the man’s words being, Riddick knew,
You take too many chances, I
don’t really trust you with my family, and what kind
of existence would they have in your company anyway even if you could make it out of here?
The big man was not offended. Reality never offended him.

“You know, I’m sure God has his tricks. He plays them often enough. But getting outta hellified places no one else can? That’s one a’ mine.” He smiled thinly. “I prefer practice to prayer.” He glanced briefly over the rim of the rotunda before nodding tersely in the other man’s direction. “Get your family, Imam. Stay low, move fast, and tell ’em to keep their mouths shut.”

No one thought to recheck the rotunda that sat in the center of the plaza. It was too small to provide a refuge for Helion soldiers, and civilians were not yet a prime interest of the invaders. Having assembled an appropriately impressive ground force from the three columns of soldiers, Commander Vaako was now leading it across an approach bridge. On the other side lay the capitol dome, purposely left intact by his forces. An appropriate place for accepting the capitulation of the planetary government.

He could have surrounded the place with drop-ships, but marching up in good order across the bridge would be far more dramatic. It would also serve to testify to the complete dominance of the Necromonger force, and to its indifference to any defense the locals might still think of mounting around their capital. Show was important, Vaako knew. The idea was to crush resistance as quickly and ruthlessly as possible, so as to preserve as many enemy fighters as possible. Preserve them for purification and incorporation. A good many of the troops now formed up behind him—armor glistening, weapons at the ready, were converts from previously conquered worlds. Soon Helion Prime, too, would contribute its share.

A quick, efficient glance at his surroundings showed several gravity orbs still circling above different parts of the city. From time to time, a deep-throated booming would echo over the streets as one was activated and dropped. The Helions were good fighters and there was still some resistance. All the more reason to secure the government’s unconditional surrender as rapidly as possible.