It's judgement day, mother fucker.  See you in hell."

chapter one

VOICES

 "Come on, Riddick... there must be some part of you that wants to rejoin the human race?"

  "Truthfully?  I wouldn't know how."

  Everything exploded in a warm, clingy erruption of blood.  It splattered him with hot droplets of warmth and trickled down his body like a thousand tiny, rolling, crawling insects.  He looked down at his hands and staggered backward, they were drenched in blood.  His eyes went wide with shock and his mouth formed one silent word.
  "NO!"

  He woke up, throwing himself forward with a gasp.  His body was wet, slick and warm.  He looked down to see his chest glistening in the light of the stars coming through the oval window above his bed.  His sheets had been thrown off.  He leaned in, checking his body as the wisps of his nightmare continued to tease him at the edge of memory.  It was only sweat and he sighed deeply and heavily, breath after breath fighting back to a normal rhythm.

  It had been two years since the Hunter-Gratzner had crashed on a hell world.  Two years since he had first met Caroline Fry, the beautiful young pilot who had held everyone together.  Two years since he had felt the first stirrings of something he had not felt in what seemed like many lifetimes.  Two years since Caroline had been taken from him.

  In all that time not one night had passed without her standing before him, pleading with him to atone for his past and to help her save the remainder of the passengers of the doomed transport vessel.  Just a couple of people hiding in a split in the side of cliff.  Two years since that action, that act by her of compassion and loyalty that had ended her life.  The feeling she had evoked from within him continued to haunt him just as she haunted him.

  She had come back for him when no one else would have, and she died for him.

  He ran rough hands over his shaved head and looked about the room with his enhanced vision.  It was as bare as he felt his heart was.

  The room contained nothing more than a few simple items.  A single cot upon which he lay, connected to the wall by a series of iron brackets. A steel table by his bed.  A wardrobe built into the ship bulkhead near the door, and a single mirror.

  He shifted his bulk off the narrow bed and planted two feet firmly on the cold metal deck.  The cold somehow soothed the heat that was pouring out of his body.  He turned to stare out into the darkness of space, for a moment welcoming the thought of the oblivion that awaited a meter beyond the armoured hull of the frigate.

  He had killed a number of people in cold blood, and sometimes he even felt remorse for that.  Not as often as Iman would like, probably, but now and again.  Now he wondered what that sweet absence of everything would be like as he stared into the black heart of the galaxy?  It had become a dark and fucked up place, and maybe all it needed was another big bang, one huge purge.  Riddick chuckled under his breath as he imagined a huge, universal sphincter muscle spasming and then crapping out everything humanity had come to know.  It couldn't hurt.  Life was not good for many people, the gap between the have and the have not's had been widening since the 20th Century and no one seemed able to stop the spreading chasm.  Unless you were one of the elite, life was a struggle that unfolded slowly and painfully into the unknowable future.

  He looked at the small digital clock on his bedside table.  It flashed 0400 hours, still early morning according to ship time.

  They had emerged from cryo-sleep four days earlier, and were simply awaiting their arrival at a non-descript, fairly average hunk of rock that masqueraded as a planet in the deep reaches of the Outer Fringe Territories.

  It would be an hour until the crew of the transport he was riding on emerged from their quarters for breakfast.

  Riddick walked to his wardrobe and pulled out a sleeveless top to throw over his muscled torso, and pulled on a pair of workout pants and sneakers.

  For two years now he'd been jumping from one ship to other, crusing through the back lanes of space searching.  For what he did not know and wondered if he would ever know, but he was compelled to try to find something that seemed to lay just beyond his grasp.

  Some nights, before his dreams took him back to that point, that event that changed his life, he would hear his heart pounding as if he'd just run a marathon.  But when he listened to his heart beat, when he quietened his ragged breathing, when he found the rythem of his body, he could make out a voice.  A woman's voice calling him.  Not Caroline, not anyone else he'd ever met, but a voice that was so familiar and haunting he felt as if he had known it his entire life.

  It was filled with wisdom and compassion, and seemed to be carried on the air.

  It calmed him.

  It released him from the tension he felt every night as he made ready to swim once again in the memories that stained his past and haunted his future.