"Ow!" Wash yelped as he stubbed his toe on yet another rock.

"Oh, quit yer bellyaching," Mal called back from up the trail, "It ain't that hard."

Jayne came up behind Wash, dancing down the hill like a goat. "All ya need t'do is keep momentum. Y'know, the faster you move, the less likely it is that you'll trip. Dong ma?"

"No!" Wash said indignantly. "That doesn’t even make sense. Faster is just more dan-ger-ous." He enunciated each syllable of the last word to make sure his point was clear.

Jayne shook his head. "No, cuz if you have the momentum, yer feet keep movin', y'see. Then when one gets tripped up, the other keeps right on goin' an' ya don't fall." He nodded proudly.

"I reckon that's how you do everythin', Jayne. With a great deal o' momentum." Zoe said. "It actually does make some sense."

"Damn right it does. I figured it out." He grinned crookedly and shoved Wash to make him walk again.

Wash grumbled some more, but had to admit (only in his own head, of course) that Jayne was right about the momentum thing. But he grumbled to himself. He grumbled about why he had agreed to come to this desolate rock in the first place.

"I was meant to fly, y'know." He called to the other three who were now quite a ways ahead. "This walking stuff is not my thing."

"Jist try'n keep up. We'll be there soonly." Mal said.

"Yeah. Sure." Wash kicked fiercely at a stone in his path but only ended up stubbing his toe again. He cursed quietly in Chinese as he plodded the rest of the way up the slope.

The world was Brieses; the job: an Alliance cache left over from the war. The planet was bleak. Very little vegetation grew. The sun beat fiercely upon hills and their jumble of rocks and anything trying to move across them. They had walked because the rocks were not navigable for the mule and it was too risky to bring Serenity for an air lift. So the four of them were to carry back whatever it was they were sent to get.

Mal wasn’t lying when he said they were almost to their destination. Wash finally topped the last rise to see a little hollow between two tallish hills. The others were already halfway down the side toward the little town nestled in the valley. It was because of his superior vantage point that Wash saw the danger when they did not.