19. I Miss Out on All the Fun

Li Shen’s establishment on Whitefall had been the center of a sprawling farm operation. Shen had once worked for Mal’s mother, on his family’s ranch on Shadow; after the war, he had set up here, in a temperate spot halfway between the equator and the pole, farming corn, soybeans, apples, and smaller fruit and vegetable crops, along with some livestock. He’d become hugely successful, taking in strays from all over after the war and creating a community of free folk of all sorts, in a neat cluster of homes and outbuildings that was almost entirely self-supporting, as well as highly profitable. Every year in the fall, if Serenity had no other business, they could stop at Li Shen’s and stay a few days, or a few weeks, helping harvest whatever was ready and shipping any cargo that would keep to various offworld markets.

Now, the entire community was a scorched ruin, like Shadow after the war.

It was winter in Whitefall’s northern hemisphere; the creeks that watered the farm were frozen, and several inches of snow disguised the burned-up earth and rendered the wrecked buildings almost picturesque. The cold, Mal figured, might have also preserved the bodies here a little better than in other places. And it was also important that Li Shen’s thriving community had been made up of all sorts of people. Mal didn’t have the whole ‘verse to search through, the way the Alliance did; he needed to find bodies that were an approximate match for three men and three women of varied ages, sizes and complexions, and this was his likeliest spot.

He and Zoe watched through the bridge windows as River settled the ship in the middle of a snowy and frozen pasture.

“Wash and Inara ain’t here,” Zoe observed.

Mal had noticed that, too, and it worried him just the slightest. “Probably nothing to fret over,” he said. “Maybe . . . maybe they just fell madly in love and ran off together.”

Zoe frowned at him. “Is that supposed to be funny, sir?”

Mal cleared his throat. “No. No, of course not. Nevermind. I’m sure they’ll be here real soon.” He punched the intercom, and ordered everyone to the cargo bay.

The crew were as horrified when he told them their business on Whitefall as they had been when he ordered them to disguise Serenity as a reaver ship. He had threatened, then, to shoot anyone who balked. Not this time. This time, he simply handed each one a copy of his or her own fugitive bulletin, and said:

“These are the people the Alliance wants to visit retribution upon, over the Miranda broadwave. Every single one of you now has a price on your head you could never pay – but maybe, just maybe, you got a friend here on Whitefall can pay it for you. A friend, I say, and I mean that – someone you’d gladly do the same for, if your positions were reversed. Each and every one of us has to find an approximate double here; when Wash and Inara get here, Simon’s going to use the Alliance’s own equipment to make them look as much like us as possible. We make this work, maybe these posters go away, and we can start to walk among the living again, instead of the dead.”

They dispersed without another word.

**

Sihnon. Normally, Coles loved Sihnon – a civilized world, with all his favorite entertainments readily available. But by the time Polyphemus had arrived in Sihnon orbit, this trip, Coles felt as though he had paced at least twice the distance the ship had flown from Haven, and he was in no mood for entertainments of any sort.

Reynolds wouldn’t be here, of course. Reynolds would be long gone, despite the DomSec monitors constantly pinging in the city below. This would, no doubt, be another ruse.

Coles was tired of being a step behind. It was about time for him to get a step ahead of Reynolds. And that meant figuring out not where Reynolds had been, when the first Dom Sec alarm had pinged, but where Reynolds was now, and where he was going from there. But Coles had been through the files, endlessly, ad nauseum, until his eyes blurred just looking at Reynolds’s face and refused outright to focus on the many irrelevant details. He needed something new.

There was at least one bit of information about Reynolds still out there, Coles reflected, that he had some legitimate claim, but no access, to.

He ‘waved his friend Danzig. Danzig was an analyst, high up, but worked out of a recruiting office on Londinium.

He looked surprised to see Coles. “Terrence! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“My deep cover agent on Serenity,” Coles said without preamble; his obsession precluded small talk. “There was one conversation with him that I didn’t get to have, and never got to hear. I want it.”

Danzig looked troubled. “I owe you a raft of favors, Terrence . . . are you sure you want to spend them on this?”

“Yes.”

Danzig shook his head. “You got it. Just give me a little time. Danzig out.”

Coles’ intercom beeped. “Mission accomplished,” said one of his aides dryly.

“I’ll meet you in the shuttle bay,” Coles said. The console beeped again; communiqué from Danzig. Man says a little time, he means a little time, Coles marveled. He opened the file. Let his aide wait; he wanted to see this.

The file was the promised conversation between Van Soren and Ensign Carmelito. Ensign Carmelito was asking Van Soren about Serenity’s safe harbors. And getting them.

He didn’t ask where Serenity might be headed.

Why? Coles wondered. If what you wanted was what I want – to be a step ahead of Reynolds, wherever he might go – why not just ask where they were headed?

Coles stored the file, and left to meet his aide in the shuttle bay. He did his best thinking while he walked; always had. Might as well walk to someplace.

His aide stepped out of the shuttle as Coles entered the bay, walked up to him, and saluted smartly. Then he raised his left hand, and Coles saw what he was carrying.

It was a dead pigeon.

“What,” Coles demanded, “is this?”

“This,” his aide replied wearily, “Is why it took Sihnon lawforce four days to locate Hoban Washburne’s prison ident chip.” He took the pigeon’s body in his right hand, and flipped it on its back.

Washburne’s ident chip was wired to the bird’s leg.

“Thing’s been tripping DomSec monitors all over the city park,” the aide said.

Coles grabbed the bird from his aide, and flung it against the shuttle. It hit with a satisfying thunk, and dropped with a squish to the deck.

I may have to start doing my thinking while I’m throwing something, Coles realized. Because just like that, he had it.

Carmelito hadn’t asked where Reynolds was going, because he meant to destroy each and every possible destination, leaving Reynolds nowhere to go.

Which meant that now, when he wasn’t showing his very recognizable face in places like Beaumonde and Sihnon, Malcolm Reynolds must be living among the dead.

**

She hadn’t thought of sheets. Or pillows.

Inara had brought clothing, toiletries, food, fresh water, even some pleasure reading aboard the decoy firefly, but she had not thought about the fact that, being uninhabited, it would lack sheets, pillows, and all other sleeping comforts. Most of the beds lacked even mattresses, and of those that had mattresses, Inara wasn’t sure they were anything she wanted to actually come into contact with. She’d been through all of the crew’s quarters, and all of the passenger bunks, and literally found no place to lay her head. And it looked like she was going to need one – this ship was far, far slower than Serenity. Wash had complained that the best speed he could get out of her was not but two-thirds of Serenity’s normal cruising speed. They could be days getting to Whitefall. And no way to tell Mal, either, because according to Wash the broadwave was also non-functional. Add to that the fact that there was nowhere to even sleep, and Inara was starting to wish she had taken Mal up on his offer to return her to the training house.

She made her way back to the bridge, where it took her a second to locate Wash. He was lying on his back underneath the pilot’s console, surrounded by pieces of its innards. That can’t be good, either, Inara thought.

“Where were you planning to sleep?” she asked.

“Wha--ow!” Wash said, cracking his forehead against the underside of the console, and Inara felt badly for having startled him. When she reconsidered her phrasing, she realized that she might have startled him in more ways than one.

“I dunno, probably in the pilot’s chair,” Wash said, pulling himself out from under the console and sitting up. He rubbed his forehead ruefully.

“You can do that?”

“Sure, I do that all the time. And right now, I probably don’t have any real choice, if we want to keep flying,” he said.

“Why?” Inara felt a surge of worry. What else was wrong with this boat that Wash’s seemingly thorough inspection had missed?

“This ship has some serious electrical problems,” he said, looking up at her from the floor. “Different systems keep cutting in and out on me.”

Inara had noticed the lights flickering a few times, but nothing else untoward. “Which systems?” she wondered aloud.

“Well, life support went down a little while ago.”

“It did?” Now Inara really was worried. What had Mal gotten them into? Days? On a boat with unreliable life support? What if they lost the engines? With no broadwave, how could they send a distress call?

“Yeah, for about half an hour. I got it back up, but –“ the lights cut out before he finished.

“Great,” Wash said.

Inara stood in the darkness lit only by stars and some of the telltales on the pilot’s console and tried to make herself ask past the lump in her throat, Are we going to make Whitefall? She couldn’t do it.

Inara’s stomach suddenly lurched, and her feet lifted off of the floor. She screamed, flailing in sudden weightlessness.

She heard Wash cry out, “Whoa!” Then he laughed. He floated over and took hold of her, steadying her. “Zero G is great for dancing,” he said, wrapping one arm around her waist and taking her opposite hand in his. He spun them around, laughing, dipping her upside-down, until she told him angrily to quit.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just all so ridiculous. I mean, we have no gravity.” He was still laughing.

“What do we do when it comes back?” she demanded.

“Ahhh . . . well. . . might be a good idea to stay close enough to the floor that we don’t break any bones when it does,” he suggested.

“Wash!”

“Well, what else did you want me to do?” he said.

“Get back down there and fix it!” she said. Great gasping Buddha, there really were worse things about this ship than ancient mattresses of unknown provenance, and no sheets. And Wash did not seem to be taking any of this near seriously enough!

“All right, all right,” he said. To Inara, he sounded insufficiently contrite. Still chuckling, he pulled himself down toward the floor.

**

Six bodies lay under blankets on the icy surface of the creek. Mal had ordered them laid there in the hope that the cold would further preserve them. Right now, Mal and Jayne and Zoe were heaping snow on top of each one. Mal had let Kaylee return to the ship; their grisly errand had taken a lot out of her. Simon was supposed to be somewhere finding out whatever he could about the duplication process before he actually had to do it.

River was on the bridge, because Wash and Inara’s failure to appear on schedule was making him a mite jumpy, and he wanted to be ready to go if they had to.

So jumpy, in fact, that he did jump when River’s implacable voice issued from his commlink. “Captain, Wash is on the broadwave for you.”

Zoe looked up sharply. The last broadwave from Wash had been a disconcerting one, and Mal suspected this one might be so too. But if he was ‘waving them, he was at least alive, which eased Mal’s mind a bit. He hoped it eased Zoe’s, too. “About gorram time,” he groused, as stuck his shovel into a snowdrift.

Mal slogged back to the ship, pounding his boots on the cargo bay deck to shake off the packed snow. His feet were freezing. They were running late, he wanted to be away from here, and where was Wash?

It was his first question, when he reached the bridge and saw the pilot on the broadwave. “Where in all the thirty blazing worlds are you, and why are you not here?”

"Sorry, Captain. We’ve, ah, run into a few problems. Like, this bird? Top speed is only about two-thirds of what I can get out of Serenity on a bad day. Also" the transmission broke up, hissed, reformed "-- electrical system that means different operations keep cutting in and out on me -- one minute we have lights and air, next minute, just air. Next minute, no gravity -- that one's fun, trust me! And the broadwave was out until I got it working just now. So, anyway, we're not going to make that rendezvous on Whitefall. Not anything like on time, anyway."

Mal ducked his head and thought for a few seconds. "All right," he said, "We'll meet you in the air. Find a set of coordinates between here and our destination that will work -- someplace you can get to in that tub -- send it to us. We'll lift off as soon as we hear from you."

"Copy that," Wash said. The transmission ended.

“Come on, let’s get those bodies aboard,” Mal said to River. “I want to be out of here yesterday.”

**

Dierdre and Thom were in Thom’s bunk, just getting to the point of the matter, when the broadwave demanded Dierdre’s attention.

She ignored it.

It blinked again, insistently.

Thom spared a glance at it. Shoving her shoulders back away from his, he said, “You’d better take this.”

Dierdre glanced at the ‘wave screen, and swore. What could possibly be that urgent, out here in the distal farking phalanx of the ‘verse? In the eight months she’d been in charge of this free-floating police station, she’d had almost nothing to do but shag the ever-willing Thom and chew her fingernails. Locals never called on Alliance to solve their problems, and the arrogant military tended to look down their snooty noses at the lawforce folks, never letting them in on any of the fun. Could some sort of real excitement finally be headed their way? Dierdre rather hoped so. She sat up, ran both hands through her hair and leaned over the side of the bunk to snag her uniform jacket off the floor. She pulled it on, buttoned it quickly, made sure Thom was out of the camera’s view and punched the “accept” button.

“This is Lt. Yazvac,” she said, trying to sound businesslike and brusque instead of breathless. The screen identified the man on the other end of the wave as a Commander Coles. “What can I do for you, Commander?”

“I need you to check something out for me,” Coles said. “Quickly. A matter of the highest urgency that must be undertaken with . . . the greatest discretion,” he said, eyeing her doubtfully. Dierdre suppressed a smile. You have no idea just how dull it is out here, Commander. “Do you have a small ship you could send?”

Dierdre sighed. This was nothing near the excitement she’d let herself get all hopeful for. Oh well. “Sure,” she said. “I can send a patrol cruiser.” We only have the one, but hey, not like it’s busy right now. “Quickly. And discreetly. Where am I sending it?”

“Whitefall,” Coles said. “I’m uploading the coordinates to you.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Firefly-class transport. All I need to know is whether it’s there. Don’t let it see you if it is. I need to know as soon as possible.”

“Soon as possible, copy that,” Dierdre said.

“Coles out.”

The man on the ‘wave disappeared. Dierdre smiled down at Thom. Well, there was at least one way to add a little interest to a milk run like this. “Shall we continue our conversation in the cruiser?” she said.

Thom grinned, and reached over the side of the bunk for his clothes.