Chapter One: New Melbourne (In Which Exposition and Plot Strike an Uneasy Truce)

****

Serenity settled on the massive floating platform that served as a landing platform, spaceport, general market and dock for the Whitsundays and Victoria’s Island, as most of the people onboard braced for impact. Those who didn’t or hadn’t yet found their sea legs (mainly off-worlders) found themselves thrown off-balance by the sudden sensation of sinking. Which they were, although not very far. In the absence of the powerful anti-grav drives employed on similar, government-funded docks the world over, the cash-strapped fishermen of the New Whitsundays had fashioned massive pontoons from salvaged aluminum to supplement the long, strong cables that tethered the platform to the bedrock deep below the waves. They did the job and kept the surf from disturbing business too much, but the added weight of a Firefly displaced nearly 2000 cubic meters of water. The two men standing just out of range of the heat from Serenity’s thrusters merely swayed slightly as they waited for the cargo bay doors to open.

**

When the New Melbourne United Terraforming Company set out from Londinium to melt the crust of ice blanketing the moon that would soon become the fishing capital of the ‘verse, they came prepared. By the time they reached the Outer Rim, terraformers were very, very good at predicting what the long, invasive process would do to a world, and with all the water ice and large areas of low altitude on New Melbourne, the usable land space was going to be minimal. They could have evaporated off all that water and cast the moon the same lot as so many others: a future as an arid prairie of a world. But the Board of Trustees was too profit-conscious for that and sent ships full of sodium, gold, nitrates, and the millions of nutrients required to generate seawater that would support the hundreds of thousands of fish and mammals cloned and frozen in an embryonic holding tank. The stock of building blocks of a successful oceanic ecosystem, the planktons, diatoms, invertebrates, algae and plants was so large they had a huge carrier ship to themselves. Not that they appreciated it much.

In contrast, the plant species set aside for transforming the bare, black rock that became New Melbourne’s land masses was surprisingly sparse. Enough trees, (mainly scrubby, hardy little things like acacia) to support the atmosphere and climate, grasses, lichens and a few cereals to feed the laborers. The animal species were likewise spare: a few small mammals, hare, voles and the like. Eventually the import of sheep and beef proved to be profitable on the larger islands (too puny to be called continents with a straight face), if one could stand the cost of converting seawater into fresh.

That was the Company’s one serious oversight: after the minerals and heat had done their work on the ice coating the little moon, there were very few untainted supplies of fresh water on the ground, and no natural springs (the world having been a cold chunk of rock just a few decades earlier). In the end, New Melbourne was cast that unenviable lot: water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

But human beings are immensely adaptive (it’s one of our least endearing qualities), and people adjusted. Rain fell often enough that collection systems were worthwhile in some areas, and in others, there was always the sea. Seawater converts to fresh, eventually, at great cost and after a lot of hot work. Heating the seawater and collecting the evaporation was easy enough; most early settlers did it with nothing more than a few pots and some plastic sheeting. But doing it on a scale to quench the thirst of even a small population of sweating, snorting beasts was cost-prohibitive without massive machinery. The first industries to turn a profit on New Melbourne were those who sold the settlers the giant evaporation devices that did the heating and catching. So by the time the moon was deemed habitable (by “civilized” folk at least, the terraforming laborers had been there for generations) New Melbourne was a world not fit for much. Except fishing. So, soon after a few of the larger corporations took an interest in the moon (mainly as a market for imported foodstuffs and finished industrial goods) the New Melbourne United Terraforming Company became the New Melbourne Colonial government and promptly set up protective taxes on the on-world sale of locally grown cereals and tubers (about all the soil and climate was good for) and local manufacturing, keeping the population heavily dependant on protein packs and subsistence farming. Any fish caught using non-Company methods or equipment could be sold quite easily on the planet, but getting it off-world was so expensive that many small fishermen didn’t bother. This, of course, gave rise to fairly lucrative opportunities for any enterprising man with a quick ship and little care for the legalities of the thing. Like Malcolm Reynolds.

***

Harry and Charlie Devoy stood side-by-side on the platform, their large frames obscured by their coats flapping in the stiff wind. The brothers Devoy were similar in shape and in political leanings, but there the resemblance ended. Harry’s handsome, unlined face seemed to shine with some secret joke and his hand rested lightly, if slightly uneasily, at his hip, inches from an ancient, but serviceable revolver. His sandy hair was cropped short and his face clean-shaven, increasing the illusion that he was far younger than his 33 years. His brother’s face was half-obscured by a thick growth that could most accurately be described as a beard, although that word seemed inadequate for the mat of graying brown. His small, bright blue eyes pierced through the web of wrinkles surrounding them, indicative of much time spent squinting into the glare of sun on the sea. His pistol was securely and discretely carried in his shoulder holster. Both brothers wore tattered, brown leather coats.

***

Dr. Simon Tam stood with his arms folded on the railing of the catwalk, watching the proceedings below him. The movements of the crew, preparing the cargo for unloading, dragging crates back and forth, managing not to run into one another and chatting as they passed, seemed like an elaborate dance, the patterns of which never repeated twice. “Nice landing, Wash,” Mal managed to grunt out as Jayne dropped his side of the crate they were loading onto the charred mule a little prematurely.

“As always. ‘Course landing on the ass end of a bunny rabbit might have been easier, but hey, I love a challenge.” Wash smirked and wrapped his arms around a heavy crate, grunted quietly and hustled to the mule, relieving himself of the burden quickly, before his wife could wave him away.

“Don’t seem a fair trade-off, Cap’n,” Kaylee mused, idly scraping carbon from the mule’s frame. “All this good produce, not to mention a fair bit of cash, just for some smelly old fish.” Mal shot Zoe a glance over Kaylee’s head. Zoe shook her head almost imperceptibly.

“I ain’t arguin’,” Jayne insisted. “Folk want to throw away their cash on some frozen trout what don’t taste any better than that protein mush Zoe cooks up, I prefer they throw it my way.”

“Did you see that?” Simon muttered, never raising his eyes, posing the question vaguely in the direction of the slim figure in silk standing next to him. Inara shook her head as the good-natured teasing regarding her cooking made Zoe laugh below, easing a little of the tension in her stance.

“I was distracted by the ape in combat boots. What is it?”

“They’re bringing something on!”

The excited voice of his normally-dreamy sister startled the doctor into spinning on his heel to see her standing behind him, closer than entirely comfortable.

“River!” The girl was shifting her weight from one foot to the other, practically vibrating with the look of a child with a secret. “I know something you don’t know,” her body taunted.

“What are they bringing onboard, sweetheart?” Inara asked kindly. River drew herself up, eyes shining and spat out,

“Fish!” Simon smiled indulgently and squeezed her hand briefly before picking his way over the grating and to the stairs with Inara following. River dropped into a picture-perfect curtsey as they passed and whispered, “Sure and they’re bringin’ fish and freedom.”

***

“There it is Charlie, every orange and banana, every last cabbage and carrot packed full of wholesome vitamins.”

“You’re a brick, Mal.” Simon watched the two men standing solidly in the face of New Melbourne’s winds, who were in turn watching the local boys hired for the occasion. They were a conglomeration of ages, but every last one was absolutely massive in size. They were helping unload Serenity’s cargo onto the Devoy family ferry and directing the huge cold crates of fish on their wheels into the hold. Simon observed that they exercised near-excessive caution with the refrigerated units. His curiosity was piqued, but he reconsidered interrupting the captain in his final negotiations with the older Devoy brother. After all, if he did and things didn’t “go smooth”, the doctor would be the one on the receiving end of Captain Reynolds’ ire. Besides, perhaps the men were just unused to having to be conscious of a box’s electronic components. Most of the standard wood or plastic units used for transporting goods out on the Rim were nowhere near as complicated.

“Now, Mal,” Simon heard Charlie say faintly, “I want this to get to the right customer, yeah?”

“Come on, Devoy,” Mal smirked. “it’s just fish.”

“Be that as it may, Mal, it’s illegal where it’s going and that makes everybody a bit twitchy,” Harry cautioned, glancing back to the ferry, where the cargo was being secured. He sighed, increasingly unhappy with the news he was going to have to give to the volatile captain of Serenity. The Devoy boys were homebodies and had spent the Unification War on New Melbourne, fighting a local insurgency, rather than openly joining the Independent faction, collecting their homemade body armor, temperamental firearms and cans of beans and being shipped off in troop carriers to Hera or Shadow. As a consequence, neither Harry nor his brother knew Mal very well immediately after the war, but he came highly recommended, and they had been using his ship to move their illegally caught salmon for two years. In those two years, Harry had learned something about Malcolm Reynolds: he hated surprises.

A suspicious glint came into Mal’s eye as he shifted his glance from Harry to his older brother.

“All right, boys. What’s got two hardened dynamiters like you looking at me like nervous punks in front of the magistrate for their first offense?” Charlie sighed. There was no way this news was going to go down well.

“Well, Mal, the customers on Hibernia insisted on sending someone to-” As he spoke, he noticed the captain’s eyes sliding to the right, to a tiny figure hauling an enormous military surplus duffle behind her, an acre of red curls tied back from her face and smiling a broad grin. She shouted ahead of her as she stepped (leaped, really) from the ferry, interrupting Charlie at the most inopportune time.

“Sarge!” she shrieked, and as Mal strode forward to shake her hand, both Devoy brothers stared, confusion slapped all over their faces.

“-Supervise.” Charlie finished.