Chapter Forty-two: 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. "How many times do you think you can come between now and then?"

The answer, under his expert handling, turned out to be six.

"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.