by Steven Brust
Wash’s voice came over the comm. “Kaylee, you there?”
“I’m here, Wash. How…how are you?”
“Mal is looking for someone to kill, and Jayne took a bad one, but everything is fine other than that. Have the doctor standing by. We’re coming in. Locking in three…two…One…locked.”
She wanted to know if the Captain knew about her involvement, but she couldn’t think of any way to ask the question. She thought about getting up and going to meet them as they left the shuttle; she thought about going back to the engine room and waiting there. In the end, she just notified Simon that he had a patient, then sat in Wash’s chair and waited.
Sakarya’s office
The security forces had vanished, no doubt down the stairs. He felt rather like patting himself on the back; four of them had held off more than thirty, and even made them run. But in all conscience he couldn’t, because he knew they had the superior position, and he knew just who joined those security forces and what sort of training they had never received, and because now he had to deal with Miss Wuhan.
Miss Wuhan was staring at him. “You!” she finally managed. “He trusted you, and you betrayed—”
“Miss Wuhan, you have three choices. You can be bound by law, you can force me to shoot you, or you can walk out of here right now. I’d prefer you didn’t take the second option; I don’t much care about the other two.”
“You’re a federal agent.”
“That’s right.”
“What you did was illegal.”
“In fact it wasn’t. I got the evidence to convict, and I can show probable cause. Of course, if I’d failed to get the evidence, you might say I’d have been breathing metaphorical vacuum. But I got it, so all is well and happy. Now, do you want to go down with him, or go down for good, or go away?”
“The security forces will be back soon. They’ll kill you before you can—”
“Not before I shoot you if you’re still here when they arrive. I’m not big on shooting little old ladies, but I will. Trust me.”
The little old lady hesitated, then without another word headed out the door.
He sat in the chair and waited.
Security forces? She had no idea what the real danger was. To hell with the gorram security forces, there wouldn’t be more than thirty of them. But there were two Special Deputies coming; that was the real problem.
He heard a faint scuffling and raised voices coming from some distance away, no doubt down the stairs. He leaned back in the chair, and took a couple of deep breaths. He kept his pistol in his hand, out of sight beneath the desk.
There were two of them, as expected; except for odd, skin-tight blue gloves, they were dressed simply, much like he was; they could have worked in the office with him and would have fit in nicely.
“Good day, gentlemen,” he said, before they could speak. “I’m Kit Merlyn, Anglo Sino Alliance Security, Investigations Department, Identification number six three dash four one seven, reporting to Commissioner Gerald White. I’m not expecting you to identify yourselves; I know who you are and why you’re here.”
He felt himself come under intent scrutiny. The other, shorter one, spoke in a pleasant, almost melodic voice: “Agent Merlyn, why do you have a weapon concealed under that desk?”
He’d been expecting that question. “Because I know how you gentlemen work, and I have no intention of letting you kill me if I can prevent it. I have a man to prosecute, and—”
“You think we’d kill one of our own with no reason?”
“No, you’d need a reason, but I have no idea what you might decide is a reason, so I’m playing it safe.”
“Very well,” said the thinner one. “Then where are they?”
“Simon and River Tam left the world twenty-four hours ago in a Firefly class transport. They made a rendezvous in close orbit with an as yet unidentified Seagull-class transport, transferred to her, and left the world. The Firefly, Serenity, landed back here. I temporarily commandeered and searched her in order to complete my own mission. I’ll be filing a full report—”
“Did you speak with the Tams?”
“I had no contact with them at any time, only with a crew member of Serenity who intended to give them up.”
“That would be a Mister Jayne Cobb?” said the other.
“That is correct, yes.”
“And where is he?”
“To the best of my knowledge and belief, he is a fugitive somewhere in the world, having escaped the local lockup.”
“How did he escape?” said the shorter of the two.
“He had help. I don’t know more that that; it doesn’t fall within the purview of my investigation.”
They looked at each other. “We aren’t going to kill you,” said the thinner one.
“Then I’ll be equally polite,” said Kit.
“Is there anything else you can tell us?”
“The Seagull was on a heading for New Hall. They have a day’s start, but they aren’t fast.”
“You could have reported that yesterday.”
“Not my job,” said Kit.
The thinner one nodded. “When you make your final report, see to it a copy comes to Special Operations. Mark it ‘Attention Headwater.’”
“All right.”
The two of them nodded and walked out of the room, and Kit started breathing again. However, he didn’t move for a good five minutes, just in case. But they were well and truly gone; the only thing left would be carnage downstairs. He wished there were a way to walk past it without seeing it. For one thing, he didn’t relish deciding if he were obligated to put it in his report.
He used the comm equipment at the desk to arrange for transport.
Serenity: Med bay
“Sit over there,” he told Zoë. “I’ll get to you in a minute.”
“I’m fine,” she said, but he barely heard her; he was already concentrating on Jayne, who lay on the table, face down and sleeping; the bleeding had stopped for the moment.
Simon prepared his tools, then made his first examination. Pulse all right, blood pressure good—and there it was: he could see the exit wound in the trapezius. He studied the entry point, looked at the angle, and decided the bullet hadn’t done any bouncing around, which was good.
“I think he’ll be fine,” he said aloud.
“You going to fix him, doctor?” asked Mal.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Simon might have replied, but he was too busy, and the question was too stupid to deserve an answer anyway.
Chapter 17
My Own Kind of Truth
Serenity: Med Bay
IN A moment of relative lucidity, he realized he’d been shot again. That he was back in Serenity’s med bay again. He tried to put together the events of the last few hours, days, but he couldn’t make things fit, and it was too much effort to try. Shortly after that, things went fuzzy again.
Some indeterminate time later, he saw the doctor’s face peering at him. He tried to ask if he was going to live, but he couldn’t make his mouth work right. “You’re back on Serenity,” said the doctor, as if that had been his question.
“Where else would I be,” he tried to say, but it wouldn’t come out right. Not that it mattered.
Serenity: Engine Room
Zoë’s voice came through the speaker. “Captain wants everyone in the dining room.”
Kaylee, leaning against the port battery casing, stared at the box. It was a technology that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years: a thin membrane set to vibrating by the motion of electrons through insulated wires. Power requirements: almost nil. Control. It was all about control, about fine tuning, about precision. It was the same sort of precision control, in a different way, that let Wash do what he did. And the Captain do what he did.
Big things, turned into small things, then moved and turned back into big things.
She stared at the speaker.
“Kaylee?”
“I’ll be there,” she said. Her voice sounded odd in her ears.
The speaker went dead. “I have to be there,” she told the empty engine room. “It’s my job to keep Serenity running.”
Serenity: River’s Room
Sometimes it seemed it was just a matter of keeping her balance. Too far in one direction and she would see anything; would just sit there for the rest of her life like the cat-tails in a still-life. Too far in another direction, and it would all rush in on her at once so that she would burst and become nother. Too far in another direction, and she would become nonexistent. Too far in another direction, and they would find her and take her back. Too far in another direction….
The problem was there were too many directions, and you had to stay balanced among all of them. It was like dance; if you could find the balance point, you could do anything.
That was the beauty of flying. She would have to ask Wash he how did it, how he made it like a dance. The way Kaylee made Serenity dance. The way Simon danced with his hands, when he was operating. The way Mal danced between disaster and triumph. The way Zoe danced around between Mal’s orders and Mal’s wishes. The way Jayne...
Jayne.
Jayne was the only one who didn’t dance.
He had no balance. That’s why he did all of those things, he couldn’t find his balance point.
She got up, then, and walked to the Med Bay. Simon looked up and said, “What is it, River?” but she ignored him. She went over to Jayne, who had was looking upward with fractured shards of consciousness coming and going like his breath; wrung out, shot full of drugs and holes with his life flowing through tubes and his spirit spreading through the ship like the ghost locked up in the hold.
She stared down into Jayne’s half-open eyes. “Boxing is just like ballet,” she told him, “except there’s no music and they hit each other.”
Then, satisfied, she turned and went back to her room.
Serenity: Cargo Bay
She walked away from the speaker and took another glance at Sakarya. He was well secured to the stairway with steel cuffs. There was nothing within nine feet of him. He looked back at her; his eyes were dead things.
“Food, water, and toilet break in an hour,” she told him. Then she turned back to the speaker, punched a button and said, “Wash, surveillance check.”
“We’re good,” he said. “Dining room?”
“Yes.”
“All right, I’ll be there as soon as I’m sure nothing is coming to eat us.”
She looked at the prisoner again, wondering why she didn’t hate him; wondering if there was something that had died, somewhere along the road.
Someone said, “So, did you think it was a good operation?” Zoë recognized her own voice, and wished to hell she could take the words back.
“Quite professional,” he said. “Do you actually care what I think?”
“Evidently.”
He nodded a little. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“No, I mean, why was it important to ruin me?”
“We were much too late for that, Colonel.”
“Glad to have given you the opening for the line, but you know it doesn’t answer the question.”
“Yes it does,” she said, and turned and headed up the stairway, hearing her boots clank loudly in the wide, empty space of the hold.
Serenity: River’s Room
“River,” he told his sister patiently, “we need to get to the dining room.” He wanted to ask her what she had meant when she spoke to Jayne, but he was afraid she might tell him.
“It’s not that far,” she said reassuringly, but made no move to get up from her bed.
“Mal is expecting us to be there.”
She gave him a look he couldn’t interpret. “Yes. He’s going to ask questions, and he’ll want answers, only the answers he wants won’t be there.”
After some hesitation, he asked it. “Where will they be?”
“In the cargo hold,” she said, as if it should have been obvious. “Where the ghost is.”
Simon made a few connections in his head, put a few things together, and nodded slowly. “You see, River, we can’t always tell when you’re speaking in metaphors, and when you’re being literal. That makes it hard—”
“What makes you think I can tell?” She sounded genuinely curious.
“To use a metaphor, or a simile, requires activating a part of the brain that…” he trailed off. “It isn’t that you can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy, it’s that you can’t express the difference. The language centers…I might have something.”
“But what about seeing the future?”
He frowned. “You see the future?”
“I see my future. I see more tests.” She stuck her tongue out at him.
“What else can I do?”
“You want me to remember.”
He nodded.
“I don’t want to remember.”
“I know. But . . .” he looked for the words. “I think you’re in a state of lucid dreaming, while you’re awake.”
She was quiet for what seemed like a long time, then she turned her deep eyes on him and said, “But how can you do anything about it?”
“I’m a trauma specialist,” he said. “Come on, let’s go to the dining room.”
Serenity: Bridge
He felt a hand on his shoulder and knew it without turning around; had known when he heard the footsteps.
“Everything is all right?” he asked, and felt her hesitation.
“Did you hear from the feds?”
“Agent Merlyn said he’d be showing up sometime in the next hour.”
“Good.”
She stood there behind him, just touching him.
“Sweetiekins, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know how this is going to come out.”
“You mean, Mal?”
“What we did—”
“What I did, you mean.”
“The Captain won’t like it.”
“Then we’ll have to stage a mutiny.”
“Wash, that’s not funny. That’s almost what we did.”
He stared out at the light blue cloudless sky of Hera.
“Did you see another choice?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Why not? It’s what you’ve been doing for the last six years. And Mal too. When you don’t have any choice, you do what you have to.”
Her hand still rested on his shoulder.
“Then what?” she said softly. “What happens after that, Wash?”
He locked on the autopilot and stood up. “Maybe I can find a job performing with finger-puppets.”
She wrapped her arms around him. “And what would I do?”
“Cook my dinner and rub my tired fingers. Ouch.”
She shook her head, smiling. “Some things, you and I just ain’t cut out for.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“The Captain—”
“This is our home. He knows that. And it’s his home because we’re here, and he knows that too.”
“If he gets pushed too far—”
“You know, for someone who’s known Mal longer than any of the rest of us, you don’t have a lot of faith in him. Come on, let’s not keep them waiting.”
Serenity: Dining room
They were sitting around the table. On his left was Kaylee, looking at the table in front of her; then Simon, looking at Kaylee; then River, looking at nothing; then Wash and Zoë, who were involved in some sort of whispered conversation.
“All right,” he said, looking at each of them one at a time. “I got a bit of mad I ain’t used up yet, so now’s the time. Wash, maybe you can start by telling me how it happened that you concocted a plan with the fed behind my back. I’d expect that from Jayne, not from you.”
Wash looked down at the table.
“Not good enough, Wash. I need an answer.”
Still nothing
.
He felt the knot of anger in his belly; he noticed his right hand, sitting on the table, was starting to shake. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t like Wash to do something like that; not, at any rate, unless it involved protecting Zoë, or—
“Kaylee,” he stated.
She looked up. “Yes, Cap’n?” There was a tremor in her voice.
“You got something to add to this?”
Her mouth opened and closed, and she glanced at Wash, as if for support. She got it, too. “Mal,” said Wash. “She was going to crash Serenity into the house.”
He looked at Wash, who was now staring back, and then at Kaylee, who had returned to studying the table-top. “Huh? Why?”
“Because,” said Wash, “she thought we were all going to die.”
“We weren’t going to die.”
“Yes you were,” said River. “You were going to kill the ghost, and then the wizard was going to kill you, and then Zoë was going to kill the agent, and then the security forces—”
“You weren’t even there!” said Mal.
He suddenly felt everyone looking at him.
“Which,” he continued less forcefully, “doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”
“Sir,” said Zoë, “you’ve been off your game. We’ve been covering for you. Sorry, but that’s how it is.”
“How long has this been going on?”
No one spoke for what seemed a long time, then Kaylee said, “Since Inara left,” and it was his turn to have nothing to say.
She wasn’t even there, and she was still complicating things. His anger flared, and he badly wanted to find something to throw or someone to hit.
“You can’t blame her.”
An acidic response came to his lips, then he realized that no one had said anything; the voice had been in his head. Great. Now I’m hearing voices.
