**

Chapter 3: Journey

In Which There are Revelations and Requests.

**

She knew. She saw them lying coiled in ice and knew. And Daddy knew too. Five hundred and fourteen of them, scaled and cold like hibernating snakes. She tried to tell Simon, but he didn’t get it, as usual. Instead he sat by her side, murmuring platitudes when sleep eluded her because, lao tian ye, the snakes were more important than sleep.

Then she knew something else. She saw flames and sparks, but not destroying, no these were banked and warming, comforting, with the cloying sweet smell of burning turf. The warmth that would revive those snakes and turn them into nourishment. So, fine, fang xin, everything’s ok. And she got up, she smiled, and she tried once more to tell Simon, but by then it didn’t matter. Because it wasn’t snakes they were bringing on. It was fish, healthy and nourishing in the hands of the right cook. And when sleep finally took her in the afternoon, it was sweet and good and natural, without drugs and she woke to the scent of daffodil stems in the sun.

**

After dinner, Zoë herded the Captain and Saoirse away from the kitchen saying “Ok, folks. Time for that chat.”

Mal closed the bridge door behind them and flopped into the pilot’s chair. Wash wasn’t too happy about being banned from his domain, but it was one of the few places to get privacy on a ship as small as Serenity.

“Ok, Miss O’Malley. Now, you know how your ideas usually work out.” Captain Reynolds opened conversation with a cautionary tone.

“Yeah. Flames, death and recriminations. Usually the flames and death for the purplebellies, and the recriminations for you and me. But this ain’t one of my patented ‘Reckless Requisition Runs’, Sarge.”

“Well, hell.” Zoë smiled as she took a seat on the pilot’s console. “I always liked those. As least they ended with food in our bellies and ammo in our guns. Can’t say that about most of the authorized missions we ran.”

A harried version of Saoirse’s broad grin flashed across her face before she schooled her face into a look more serious than Mal had ever seen on her. She pulled a battered packet from her shirt pocket and pulled out a nice, machine-rolled cigarette (obviously a luxury. Tobacco was often wild on the ground on any decently warm planet, but Mal had rarely seen ‘regular folk’ with a manufactured cigarette. Those what couldn’t afford them rolled their own. Saoirse had never even been able to afford rolling papers.)

“Don’t light that.”

“What?”

“Kaylee don’t allow smokin’ on the ship. Clogs up the air filters. And I don’t wanna have to listen to her whine about cleanin’ ‘em, so just don’t. If you gotta, the shuttles have independent filter systems.”

The redhead glanced down at her hand and shook her head, a self-deprecating chuckle escaping her lips.

“Oh, hell. I hadn’t even noticed I took one out. Maybe I’ll quit. Becomin’ a slave to ‘em, and I won’t be slave to anything.”

“Thus speaks the Browncoat,” Zoë quipped. “Now, about this job…”

“Right, right. Well, listen, I got a wave from home this mornin’ and we got a little trouble. What do you two know about what I’ve been up to since the war?”

Zoë and Mal shared a look. They knew a little more than they were comfortable with, thanks to old friends and news reports on the CV.

“A fair bit,” Mal said guardedly. “For one thing, you being connected with the cargo we’re carrying tells me a lot. And the insurgency on Hibernia makes the news shows a couple of times a month. Saw something about a skiff full of Royal Hibernian Constabulary inexplicably blowing up after their unit had engaged in a little creative crowd control the day before?”

Saoirse looked up sharply from flipping her packet of cigs over and over in her hands. Her sherry-brown eyes were narrowed.

“Creative crowd control, sure. They shot three Protestant women who were waiting for their pills. Like ‘responsible citizens’, good little girls, ignoring the peaceful protesters shouting at them and waving signs. Those xi niu Sasanach couldn’t even work out who the gorram offenders were. How did you-”

“Come on, Saoirse,” Zoë sighed “No evidence of tampering, probably mechanical failure. So inconspicuous that it’s suspicious. It’s got ‘Saoirse O’Malley’ written all over it.”

“In big red, neon letters, if you know what you’re lookin’ for.”

She laughed then, a little shame-facedly. “Yeah, suppose so. Good for me that none of the damned RHC served with me, eh? At least, not the officers.”

“So, you’ve established that we know you’re…involved with the AIH or some similar organization. What’s this job?” Mal brought the subject back around to the subject he was most concerned with: his payday. Not that he didn’t respect Saoirse’s continued attempts to free her home world, but he had a ship to run and mouths to feed.

“The Association for an Independent Hibernia? Gorram cowards. The lot of them. Oh sure, they’ll drill and march and generally try to show how tough they are, but ask them to get in it? Shoot an informer or strap a little CP-HE to a G-man’s flyer, they go all diplomatical. No, I’m IHB.”

The captain and first mate shot wide-eyed, raised-eyebrow faces at each other. The Independent Hibernian Brotherhood was a thoroughly illegal organization, who eschewed political debate and non-violent protest as means to secure independence. They maintained that physical force was the only thing Londinium and, by extension, the Alliance, would understand and they practiced it. Discerningly, and with great concern for innocent bystanders, true, but they would pop out of a crowd, blow a man’s brains out and fade back into the crowd, changing their coat, popping on a trilby hat and becoming an upstanding citizen again. Not that Zoe or Mal exactly argued with the main philosophy, but they certainly suddenly found themselves deeply concerned that their old friend would get herself bound by law. IHB members were not popped in a nice jail cell with three squares a day and CV access for the rest of their lives. They were shot against walls.

“Pretty high up, too, although I’d take it as a kindness if you’d forget I said that. Thing is, I tend to slip through the authorities’ fingers. They’ve never held me more than a night, and I never go out wearing me own face. Wigs, hats, sun shades, hair dye. So no enforcement agency can find me. But they sure as hell found my brother.”

“Son of a bitch! Pat?”

“Oh, hell no. Pat would be long dead by the time we got there if they ever caught him. He’s president of the IHB supreme council now. No, my youngest brother, Ruadhri.”

“Well, you’ve got so many, you should specify which one,” Mal cracked.

Saoirse stood, running her hand nervously through her loose hair and beginning to pace. “They got Ruadhri late last night. He was seen in the company of two of my boys, having a pint at Vaughn’s Pub. I told him never to go anywhere in public with any identified member, but does he listen to me? No, he’s eighteen, he just says “You’re not Ma!” and does what he was gonna do anyway, whether it could get him killed or-”

Saoirse was pacing three strides to the bridge door and three back to the pilot’s chair. It was making the captain a little dizzy. Zoë could see her working up for a good long diatribe regarding her brother’s age, intelligence and her doubts about his parentage and tried to head it off.

“So, it’s a jailbreak?”

“What? Oh, yeah. The job. Yeah, I want to get him out before they move him.” She slid down into her favorite position, sitting cross-legged on the deck as she spoke and took a deep breath to calm herself. “See, they took him in Dun Laoghaire, and since it’s in a different administrative district than Dublin, where they do political trials, they’ve got to hold him for two weeks. And Dun Laoghaire Regional Jail is a joke. Hibernian Planetary Penitentiary is not. Key codes, verbal passwords, retinal scans, not to mention the fact that I’ve never been in it myself. Now Dun Laoghaire Regional, sort of a second home for me. And that’s, well, it’s nothing better than a drunk tank, really. A couple of old-fashioned key locks, iron bars. Painless. And there’d be payment.”

“Payment from whom?” Zoë asked. “’Cause anything that could be tracked back to the IHB, so soon after this run, would just be trouble for us.”

Saoirse shook her head. “This job ain’t coming from the IHB. It’s for me. I won’t have my little brother sent to jail or the firing squad when I’ve worked hard to keep him out of it. And you know I’m good for it, Sarge. I’m never short.”

Mal smiled at that one. “Not if there’s anyone around you can beg, borrow or steal from.”

“What are they charging him with?”

“Always pragmatical, eh, Zoë?” Saoirse smiled. “Treason, sedition, conspiracy, murder.”

“Ah.” Zoë dead-panned. “The usual.”

“It’s ridiculous. Ruadhri’s never killed a man in his life. Sedition, sure. Treason, maybe. Conspiracy, definitely. But my little brother’s never even raised his fist in anger.” “All right,” Mal grunted, heaving his body from the chair. “Zoë, I say we sleep on it. Talk it over with the crew. We’ll decide tomorrow. And you-” he squatted next to Saoirse’s left knee and looked her in the eye. “-try not to worry too much, all right?”

She nodded and started to stand.

“Mal? You know if you don’t help me, I’m just going to do it myself. And I’ll do it alone. I can’t involve the IHB or any of our agents, it’s too risky.”

“Well, Miss O’Malley? Are you tryin’ to blackmail me into doin’ what you want?” The twinkle in Mal’s eye belied his stern tone.

“Yep!”

“Huh,” Zoë sighed as she shooed Saoirse out of the bridge. “just like old times then.”

**

“What do you think?”

“About the job, sir? Sounds like something we can handle. And you know she’s good for payment.”

“Not that. You’re right, it’s solid. Probably blow up in our faces, ‘cause that’s what happens to us, but I don’t foresee any major disasters, we plan it right. About Irish. She’s different.”

Zoë sighed. She was.

“I mean, come on. Used to be you couldn’t walk past her patch of mud without tripping over a roll of det cord.”

“Dangerous.”

“Well yeah, a bit. But I’m a little concerned that she hasn’t blown anything up yet.”

“Personally, I’m pleased. Demo’s a risky hobby. Especially in space.”

“Not what I meant.”

“I know.”

Memories flashed through Zoë’s mind. Saoirse flinging her body through the window of an Alliance supply truck to ‘commandeer’ it. Sitting in a crowded, noisy mess tent, laughing her fool head off and singing “Sister Josephine” loudly and drunkenly. Surveying the loot from her latest “Reckless Requisition Run” as Mal had termed them. Whipping that lieutenant’s stupid hat off Mal’s head and kicking him right in the ass for scaring her by showing up with a prisoner. Triumphantly returning after disappearing for three hours, with a pack full of cookies, tea bags and cigarettes to pass out.

The woman who had nearly exploded at the thought of her brother in front of a firing squad was the same girl who had kept Tracey in beans, Mal in bullets (which he went through alarmingly fast), and her own self in tampons. She was also the same girl who had gunned down six purplebellies, lying flat on her back at Du-Khang, after which she was medically discharged with seventeen new holes in her hide and shrapnel in her left knee. But now she was…

“Focused.” Zoe muttered.

“What’s that?” Mal asked as they descended the stairs from the bridge.

“She’s focused. She’s not the scatty little girl who’d do nearly anything for the thrill and a couple of beers anymore, sir. She’s got a purpose.”

The irony of his good friend having found her purpose after the war was not lost on Mal.

“Glad someone does,” he muttered.

**

A/N: It occurs to me that anyone unfamiliar with Irish names might have some trouble. Here’s a little pronunciation guide. It’ll get bigger. ;)

Saoirse: Sayr-sha Ruadhri: Rory Dun Laoghaire: Dun Leary

Also: Sasanach was a derogatory term for the English in Ireland. It basically means stranger.

Also: I promise to have scenes including on BDH’s eventually, lol. I just want to establish Saoirse as a character first. After all, we know the crew pretty well by now, don’t we?