Unfinished Business

Chapter One

“Cargo’s stowed. Port fees are paid, everyone’s aboard, hatch is buttoned up. Take us out of the world, Albatross,” Mal said as he entered the bridge. “We got the release from navcom – guess we didn’t break any laws on this one,” River remarked as she checked the monitor, then started heating up the turbines. “Nah,” Mal disagreed. “Didn’t get caught breaking any laws. A subtle but important distinction in our business.” “I stand corrected,” River said absently as she cycled the gravity drive up. “What are we hauling this time?” “The cargo or the contraband?” Mal asked as he took off his great leather browncoat and laid it folded in half on the back of the pilot’s chair. The consoles in front of it were still festooned with plastic palm trees and a motley assortment of toy plastic dinosaurs, a memorial to the late Hoban Washburne, Serenity’s former pilot. Technically River sat in the co-pilot’s chair. No one save Mal would consent to sit in the chair where Wash had been killed. Since she had begun her tenure as pilot after the deadly Miranda incident, River had taken up residence in the co-pilot’s chair. It duplicated the controls of the pilot’s station – but not the history. She had only been flying Serenity for a month, now, but she had slowly been making the left-hand chair all her own. A few of her drawings had appeared taped to the console, and the hat she had picked up on Whitehall – a war-surplus leather cap with goggles, reputed to be a Independent’s tanker’s cap but similar in form and function to the traditional pilots’ caps from the ancient days of biplanes – hung on the back of her chair until needed. She donned it now, tucking her thick brown hair up under it. Sometimes she pulled the goggles down. Mal had never given in to the temptation to ask why. “Both.” “Lessee, we got six thousand pounds of premium industrial grade chalk in the hold, in lovely twenty-two pound blocks. Then in the super secret smuggler’s compartment we got two boxes of hovercraft master control cards, slightly stolen, an’ two cases of fine, Osirin cigars that may have escaped the attention of the port’s tariff inspector. Oh, and a case of that nasty fennel liquor they like so much on Santos.” River made a face. “Why did we pick that up? We aren’t headed anywhere near Santos.” Mal shrugged. “It was cheap. And the Swede wouldn’t let me take the cigars unless I took that God-awful stuff off his hands at the same time. You pick up stuff like that when you can.” “Aren’t you going to sit?” she asked, when Mal still hadn’t taken a seat. “Nope,” Mal replied, shaking his head. “Time for you to solo.” “Y’think?” “I surely do. You’ve pushed this boat through the sky through five landings and six launches. I haven’t had to do more than watch and look pretty. Time has come for you to take the wheel with no one at your back.” River looked at him thoughtfully, and even though he did not have her profound empathic abilities he could judge that there was hesitation, anticipation, anxiety and eagerness spinning around in her slightly scrambled brain as she mulled the prospect of being in total, undisputed control of Serenity. “’Kay,” she finally said, turning back to her pre-flight list. “I mean,” Mal said, feeling the occasion deserved some additional captainly advice, “you got a natural talent, no argument there. An’ this last month you’ve shown that you can handle the routine launchings and landings. You’re dead on as a navigator, probably on account o’ that premium brainpan o’ yours. Stands to reason you leave the nest by now.” He looked at her expectantly, as if she should jump up and down and gratefully thank him for the opportunity. Instead she deactivated the landing locks and tilted the turbines forward. “Yeah, okay,” she muttered. “Board’s green. We got clearance.” “Go ahead and announce it,” Mal ordered. River reached up and grabbed the intercom. “Attention, Travelers! We’re about to take off, and the weather is patchy, so we might experience a modicum of turbulence on the way through the atmo. Hang on to something tight. Not too tight, Simon, you’ll break her ribs,” she added before she signed off. “That a joke?” Mal asked. Wash usually ended his traditional pilot’s warnings with a quip. “Nope. They’re in the engine room, going at it again. Kaylee likes to be . . . doing it when the engines start to throb.” “I am so gonna pretend I didn’t hear that,” Mal mumbled. “You think it’s disturbing? Every time they do it, I gotta hear about it. In my head,” she said disgustedly. “It’s so gross! I mean, she’s my best friend and he’s my brother . . .” River Tam had once been a fairly typical super-genius child prodigy from the Core world of Osiris, but when she was fourteen she had been recruited into a super-secret government program, ostensibly to study high concept mathematics and other advanced, erudite matters. Instead she had been turned into a telepathic super-spy and assassin, and certain valuable and irreplaceable parts of her brain had been moved, removed, and augmented. It was her rescue from the facility by her brother, a respected trauma surgeon, which had turned them both into fugitives. But the program had been at least partially successful. As a result of their conditioning she remained a powerful reader of other people’s thoughts. She was also permanently mentally and emotionally scarred by the process. As useful as the talent had been upon occasion, it came with a high price: River was brain damaged and clinically insane. A little less so, since the Miranda incident, but she was still a good shouting distance away from what could rightly be called sanity. But she was a damn good pilot, considering she hadn’t been behind the stick for more than a month, Mal considered. Better than him by far. By that token, the question of her sanity didn’t bother him much. He had yet to meet a pilot worth their pay who was firing on both thrusters, mentally speaking. The lift off, with its attendant lurch as the gravity drive took over from the little moon’s artificial gravity, was as smooth as any Wash had made, and a damn sight better than his own. Mal didn’t know much about piloting himself – he had studied enough to qualify for his master’s license, so he knew how to take off, do rudimentary navigation, and land more or less safely – but he knew already that River demonstrated an aptitude for it that already eclipsed his own meager skills. It might have worried a lesser man to allow a brain-damaged seventeen-year-old with no formal training, no paperwork, and damn little experience take his ship into orbit, but Mal didn’t mind. He used the talent that came his way, and after losing Wash so brutally it felt a whole lot more natural to allow River a chance at the left-hand seat than try to find and hire a replacement. He didn’t even mind the fact that she insisted on flying bare-footed, her dainty feet pushing around the large steel pedals that controlled the ship’s attitude. Every pilot had idiosyncrasies, he noted, glancing at the plastic Jurassic menagerie on the pilot’s board. A wise captain learned to respect them and leave them be. The launch went smoother than promised: if the weather was a factor, then River didn’t let it affect her. In five short minutes they had punched through the thin atmo and had started their launch orbit. “Nice,” Mal commented. “You know what happens if you crack us up, though, don’t you?” “We all die horrible deaths from radiation exposure, third degree burns and explosive decompression?” “Well . . . apart from that. You get docked a day’s pay.” “I’m getting paid? Then I’ll keep that in mind. Now get outta here while I plot the course to Valhalla.” “You tellin’ me to get off my own bridge?” “No, I’m inviting you to tour the rest of the ship. Isn’t the Captain supposed to do that, anyway?” “Fussy, fussy,” complained Mal, good-naturedly, but he left as River began the process of plotting the course meticulously by hand. It could have been done faster using the navigational computer, but River had discovered what she called “glaring errors in calculation” that she could not abide – it was off by as much as a ten thousandth of a percent on some of its calculations, and she abhorred such mathematical inefficiencies. She didn’t trust the navigational computer very much anymore. He left her to it and began the rounds he was supposed to make every launch, but only actually accomplished when the ship wasn’t launching in an unexpected hurry with police, security, or irate business partners in hot pursuit. About a third of the time, that was. He strolled down the long neck of the ship, where the crew quarters were located. He paused briefly by #4, where Wash and Zoe used to live and where Zoe haunted, now. He had offered to switch rooms with her but she had refused. As painful as the constant reminder of her dead husband was in their quarters, she clung to it with all of her might. Zoe had lost plenty of friends in the war, and not a few afterwards. She was no stranger to death. She and Mal had survived impossible odds during the bloodiest – and last – battle of the Unification War, and had come out on the losing side for their troubles. She had used the piled corpses of her comrades-in-arms for shelter against gunfire before. She was no fainting flower of femininity. But the loss of her husband, happening right in front of her, was by far the hardest of them for the strong, proud woman to bear. Since the little Firefly transport had been cobbled back together after that disastrous day, his first officer had stuck to her room on her off-duty hours, and if Mal saw more full bottles descend and empty ones rise from her quarters, he wasn’t going to say anything about it. Yet. As he entered the spacious cargo bay he nodded at Jayne, who was securing the big pallets of industrial chalk to the tie-downs in the hold. Jayne was sloppy about most things – his room was a perpetual pigsty – but when it came to large heavy objects that could injure or kill him by flopping around the hold if the gravity went screwy, he was the picture of fastidiousness. You couldn’t rely on Jayne for reasoned debate or cultured conversation, but when it came to his own survival he could be counted upon utterly. “Mal, why the hell we gotta haul all this gorram chalk?” he complained, not unexpectedly. “We gonna find a convention o’ schoolmarms?” “’Cause if we get boarded I’d like to have a plausible explanation of just why we’re in the vicinity o’ Valhalla,” he explained. The tiny, icy moon was just coming out of the terraformation process, and the quarter-million souls who called the snowball home had little enough to suggest it as more than a fueling depot and an exotic ice-skating rink. But their nascent industries did need some off-world items, and the soil there ran more to raw rock than to chalk of any kind, and so the blocks of dirty white had some small value to someone. Not enough to justify the trip on its own to a larger carrier, but a perfectly respectable profit margin for the kind of low-key freelance work that ships like Serenity often undertook. Especially when they carried contraband to improve the bottom line. “Don’t know what they can make outa this fei hua,” he swore. “Big blocks o’ dirt, y’ask me . . .” “Don’t need to know,” Mal insisted. “And don’t wanna know. But this is one of the regular cargoes for this run. All you need to know is the mark-up on fine cigars and crappy liquor at the fleshpots of Valhalla is nigh unto a thousand percent. So we loose a li’l off the front end, make it up and then some on the back.” “Leastways it ain’t cattle. Don’t think I could abide the stink o’ another herd,” he grumbled. “Look on the bright side,” Mal called. “We could be moving mastodons from Wuhan. They poop a powerful lot more than cows.” He left Jayne to his mutterings and passed Inara’s newly-reoccupied shuttle. She had elected to rejoin the ship after the Miranda affair, not least because she had disturbed the wu of the training house at which she had been teaching with Alliance soldiers and a Parliamentary Operative assassin. Such things were not looked upon as benevolent influences on the impressionable young whores, Mal had figured. While not technically kicked out, she had been invited to take a long vacation until the memory of the disturbance had faded. Mal had graciously allowed her to move back in, after a brief stop at the House to retrieve her things. He hadn’t even discussed rent. Yet. But the door was closed and he didn’t feel like a confrontation at the moment, even a friendly one. In truth, he was still anxious about his crew in general, and her in particular. Too many deaths in too short a period of time had everyone acting strange, Inara included. She had taken her own toll during that final, painful battle, and she still struggled with the lives she had taken. To a Buddhist, even the cannibalistic, rapacious Reavers had the Buddha Nature. They ought to, Mal mused. They certainly ate enough Buddhists. The kitchen was empty, the scent of congee from breakfast lingering in the air, so he continued on through to the engine room, where a breathless doctor was just buttoning his shirt. When he realized that Mal was watching him with grim amusement, he had the decency to blush. “Uh, Captain, we were . . .” “I believe I know the steps to that one,” Mal filled in. “Had occasion to be familiar with ‘em, once upon a time. But it occurs to me that it might not be the wisest thing in the ‘verse to keep my engineer pinned to the floor in the throes of passion whilst we hurtle into the Black, a process which has more than once led to catastrophic mechanical break-down on this ship.” “Don’t worry, Cap’n,” Kaylee said, lazily, from behind Simon. “I wasn’t pinned. I was on top.” Mal rolled his eyes. “You’re missin’ my point, Frye. When we hit sky, I expect to have my mechanic payin’ attention to all these little gauges and dials and whatnot, makin’ sure we ain’t gonna crack up on account o’ – Oh God, Kaylee, cover up!” he said as Simon crouched to retrieve his shoes, revealing his half-naked – okay, three-quarter naked – mechanic. Mal quickly averted his gaze, but a blush began in him that colored his face nearly as completely as Simon’s. Kaylee grinned widely. “Ain’t like I got parts you ain’t never seen afore,” she said with an air of satisfaction. Then she paused. “Uh . . . do I?” “Yes, I’m plenty familiar with female anatomy,” Mal said carefully. Indeed he was . . . even if his knowledge was more like history than current events. But Kaylee was different – he’d seen Zoe naked aplenty in their long acquaintance, and he’d pay good money to see Inara unclothed, if he could do so without her knowledge – he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. But Kaylee, despite her sweet personality and obvious physical charms, was more like a kid sister than fantasy material. “I just don’t usually have to deal with it comin’ at me so unexpectedly!” “I’ll, uh, just go check on the, um . . . infirmary,” Simon said, beating a hasty retreat. “You do that, Doc,” Mal muttered. “We’re all gonna need inoculations before Valhalla. You decent yet, Kaylee?” “No,” Kaylee said with a sigh. “But I am dressed. What’s on your mind, Cap’n?” Apart from your breasts? “I was wonderin’ how the load held at launch. Is River puttin’ too much stress on the primaries?” “Naw,” Kaylee said, struggling to her feet. “She pulled it out just as nice an’ easy as you please. Every bit as good as . . .” she trailed off, and a tear began to form unbidden at the corner of her eye. “As Wash,” Mal finished, gently. Everyone was still sensitive about his death, and the engineer more than most. Kaylee and the late pilot had a special relationship, the kind of good working arrangement that every captain likes to see in his crew. As dear friends as River and Kaylee were, there was still much distance to cover before they even came close to that same level of confidence in each other. “Well, next time I expect you to have both eyes on the dials,” Mal chided. “Ain’t payin’ you to get your jollies on take-off.” “Sorry, Cap’n,” Kaylee said, sullenly. “Simon just brought me some lunch, and when we got cleared for launch, and those thrusters started to hum, I got a little . . . moist. Always has that effect on me. Only this time he was standin’ right there, lookin’ all cute and bitable—” “NO more details!” Mal insisted. “Don’t much care why you done it, just don’t let it happen again. I’m not fond o’ shipboard romances, I believe you know. I’m even less fond o’ them when they impede the workflow.” “And I got my workflow impeded but good!” Kaylee declared dreamily. “No details!” Mal repeated desperately. Then he sighed. “Look, I’m as happy as a whore on payday to see such a smile on your face, ‘specially after all we been through. I might have been hasty in gettin’ in between you and the Doc’s courtin’. Had my reasons, and they were good ones at the time. Glad they’re gone, to be truthsome. But there is a time an’ a place, Kaylee Frye, and the time is NOT when we’re takin’ off, landin’, or doin’ anything else that might require your focus. Just ain’t what you call professional. An’ the place ain’t the engine room. You got your room an’ you got Simon’s room, an’ you got plenty of off-duty time to play hide the sausage, or whatever.” “Oh, we were—” “For the love of Buddha’s hairy butt, Frye! I don’t wanna know!” Mal pleaded. “Your just jealous ‘cause I’m gettin’ it regular an’ you ain’t!” she whispered knowingly. “Kaylee, that’s not your concern,” Mal returned in a similarly low voice. “It ain’t like you couldn’t,” she said, conspiratorially. “She’s right there, in the shuttle. You know full well she didn’t come back to Serenity for the food.” “I’m sure it was the amusing floor show,” Mal returned, with his best don’t-mess-with-me-I’m-still-the-Captain look. “Just sayin’,” Kaylee finished, as she buttoned up her coveralls. “All you got to do is knock, an’—” “I’m not listening!” Mal insisted, putting his hands over his ears. “—she’d come runnin’ like a trained hunter on the scent, she would,” Kaylee continued, amused at Mal’s frustration. “Not listening!” Mal sang, as he began to walk away. “Lalalalalalalala. . .” “I’m just gonna check the coolant pressure an’ bask in the afterglow,” Kaylee called out to his back. “Lalalalalalalalala!” He kept it up until he was comfortably out of earshot, in the kitchen – where Inara was making tea. He stopped short. “You hear any o’ that?” he asked, concerned. “No,” the Companion said, curiously. “Why?” “Just some technical stuff,” Mal dismissed. “How was the launch?” “Smooth as silk,” Inara replied with a shrug. “River’s becoming an excellent pilot.” “That’s what I hear. Don’t bother you, her bein’ . . . clinically insane, an’ all?” “Just because she happens to have papers to cover her insanity doesn’t mean she rates special treatment,” Inara teased. “I don’t think anyone on this ship could be considered sane and well-adjusted by any objective standard.” “Now, that ain’t fair!” Mal protested with a smile. “We might well have our share o’ issues, but . . . well, take me, for example—” “You mean the egomaniac adrenaline junkie with the persecution complex?” “ . . . or Zoe,” he continued, unfazed. “Survivor’s guilt, profound grief and clinical depression? Oh, and whatever it is that makes her follow you all over the ‘verse? There has to be a clinical name for that. I’ll look it up later.” “Kaylee . . .” “Hypersexual nymphomania with a lack of discernable social boundaries complicated by a savant-like mechanical ability,” Inara recited. “Or Simon—” “Hyper anal-retentive with deep-seated mommy issues, transferred to his sister in a potentially unhealthy manner.” “And then there’s Jayne.” Inara just looked at him. “You really want me to go into Jayne? We can start with the anal expressive homicidal mania and spend the rest of the day working up from there.” Mal shrugged. “You got me, there. Okay, maybe River really is the sanest person on the boat – hey, what about you?” he asked, grinning. “Are you making a claim for sanity?” Inara blushed a little and shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous. Would I step one foot on this boat if I could?” “You tell me.” “No, Captain Smartypants, I don’t claim to be sane. I’m just at peace with that, that’s all.” “Sanity’s highly overrated, anyhow,” Mal agreed. “Never had much use for it.” “To completely change the subject before we get too personal,” Inara said wryly, sipping her tea, “when are we to make landfall?” “Day and a half, roughly. Should be pullin’ into Valhalla day after tomorrow sometime.” “And from there?” “Don’t rightly know. You lookin’ to land a client or three?” “I’m . . . considering the matter. I haven’t taken a real client since I left.” Mal’s brow furrowed. “You gettin’ long o’ tooth?” Inara flushed, then giggled. “Not at all. I just didn’t think it proper to entertain while I was teaching the students. Such situations can make it very . . . distracting. And that wouldn’t be fair to the girls.” “Wouldn’t want that,” agreed Mal. There was a pause, pregnant with anticipation. Since Inara’s rescue from the hands of the Operative, there had been . . . something between them. Mal couldn’t rightly name it, nor could he find a way to comfortably address it. So his brain froze up, and for a few awkward moments he stared at her in silence. Inara stared back, her face impassive but her eyes betraying a similar confounding muddle of thought in her mind. Finally, the silence stretched on too long, and Inara felt compelled to break it, lest it break them. “Tea?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. Mal swallowed. “That’d be nice, thanks,” he said, studying her as she hurried to finish preparations. “It’s not much, some passionflower over an Oolong I became fond of in the school . . .” “I’m sure it’s fine,” Mal agreed, way too enthusiastically. “I like tea,” he added, stupidly. “Yes, as do I,” Inara said, completing the circle of awkwardness. More silence as Inara brought him his cup. He held it to his lips and slurped it, never taking his eyes off of her. “Good,” he approved. “Glad you like it,” she said with a small smile. “Yeah, I do,” he said again. “I—” “Cap’n!” River’s voice broke in over the intercom. “You gotta wave coming in!” “Thank God!” Mal whispered. “I better take that . . .” “Right, you should,” she agreed quickly, likewise grateful for the interruption. “Might be a . . . a job or, or something,” he said as he downed the remainder of the steaming tea and set the ceramic cup gently on the table. “Yes, you should . . . you should go take it, then,” she said, picking up the cup. “I’ll clean up.” For the briefest moment their hands touched, and it was as if an electric charge shot through both of them. They both quickly withdrew their hands, but the damage had been done. “I’ll just go get that, then,” Mal muttered, pointing his thumb over his shoulder. “In the bridge,” he added, and left. Inara waited a full minute before she allowed herself a self-deprecating chuckle. Of course, Mal had lingered outside of her line-of-sight long enough to hear it. With a heavy sigh he went back to the bridge, where River, still wearing her pilot’s cap and not wearing her shoes, was doing post-launch checks. “It’s Monty,” she offered by way of explanation, not looking up from the flexi she held. “Good news, I think.” “Great,” Mal said with relief as he slid into the pilot’s chair and tagged the wave console. The balding form of Monty – Cap’n Monty, he reminded himself – swam into view, complete with long fringe of hair tied into a sloppy pony-tail and six-month growth of beard. Once upon a time Monty had a full, lush, Santa Claus beard of which he was inordinately proud. He had shaved it in a moment of lust-induced madness just before wedding a girl he had met, Bridgett. The only problem was the same woman with a different name had “wedded” Mal back on the dipshit colony of Triumph in a simple ceremony Mal had mistaken for interpretive dance. Both men had come to regret their acquaintance – Mal had nearly lost Serenity to her machinations, and Monty lost his beard. Before that, Monty and Mal had been war buddies after the Siege of Dhu Kang, where Monty’s rattletrap roller unit (the Independents had always had a dearth of reliable armored cavalry) had supported Mal’s infantry regiment. They had continued their relationship after the war, both taking up the smuggler’s trade for lack of anything more productive to do. It had been a fairly lucrative relationship on both sides. Mal could trust Monty, and that was a rare and special thing in this business. “Monty! How’s things on your end o’ the ‘verse?” he asked brightly. “Oh, can’t complain, you ol’ scoundrel!” the big man boomed. “Don’t mean I won’t though! Where are you at?” “I’m in a magical, mystical parallel universe in which people don’t end their sentences in prepositions,” he said, dreamily. “Sorry. Where are you at, you asshole?” “That’s better. Just left the world, about a day and a half outside of Valhalla. Heard of it?” “Yeah, dropped a load o’ mining equipment there about three months back. Just before . . . y’know,” he said, nodding. Mal nodded in return. What Monty meant was ‘just before the broadwave that had come the closest to destroying the Alliance as anything had since the War, all thanks to Mal Reynolds.’ The fallout from the Miranda episode was still echoing around the ‘verse. There had been several riots, some assassinations, a couple of nascent insurgencies on some of the old Independent worlds, plenty of calls for political accountability, some Parliamentary hearings, and more than a dozen prominent suicides. The current caretaker government was limping along the best it could, declaring feebly that the political situation was just too volatile to hold elections just yet, and that folks should be patient. Folks were not being patient. There had been an outbreak of anti-Fed sentiment all over, but particularly among the former Independent worlds, some of which had only recently ended their occupation by Alliance forces and returned to civil administration. Alliance patrol boats and cruisers were speeding from one outbreak of violence to the other, attempting to stomp out the sparks of discord before they were fanned into the fires of open rebellion. They had been marginally successful. So far. “Well, we have a load o’ chalk and some . . . sundries to deliver, and after that we’re lookin’ for work. You got something in mind?” he asked, cagily. Monty wasn’t the most cunning captain in the Black, but he had an uncanny ability to find lucrative assignments where others went unemployed. He had to, of course – his ship was twice the size of Serenity’s cozy confines, a whopping hundred and thirty foot long Trojan-class medium transport called the Black Dog. Monty ran to a crew of eleven, and unlike his merry band of screw ups, Monty’s crew expected to get paid regular. “Well, yeah, but not like you’re thinkin’. Think you can make it to . . . Muir in a week?” Mal’s brow furrowed. “Sure. What’s there? Trouble with the IDC again?” “Nah, not hardly. They been real quiet since the . . . y’know. Just got word myself, thought I’d pass it along: there’s gonna be a Gather, under the auspices of the Rimworld Transporters Alliance. At least ten ships, so far. Can I count you in?” “Done!” Mal agreed, grinning. “Muir’s enough out of the light . . . so we’re the RTA this time?” The motley community of small time smugglers that made its living shuttling illicit goods between Rim world colonies – many of them former Browncoats, like him and Zoe – had come to meet together every two years or so, always under a different name to confuse the authorities. Mal had been to two such gatherings, one on Haven (the “Frontier Shipper’s Association”), two years before, and before that there had been one on St. Albans (the “Organization of Independent Freight Carriers”). Regardless of the name being used, the gatherings were known to their attendees (by personal invitation only – no one got in who wasn’t vouched for) just as “The Reunion”, an innocuous-enough sounding title over a wave. These gatherings were closely guarded affairs, de facto smugglers’ conventions where work could be had and brokered, merchandise could be bought and sold, and a gargantuan quantity of alcohol and drugs could be indulged in. Security was of paramount importance. The tight-knit unofficial community was wary of Alliance revenue agents. Or intelligence agents on the prowl for war criminals or signs of insurrection. Or enterprising bounty hunters on the lookout for fugitives. So the location of such gatherings was held close until the week or two before, far too short notice for the Alliance to mount a decent undercover operation, and the exact coordinates would not be shared until forty-eight hours before the scheduled start of the festivities. “Might could we make it,” admitted Mal. “Be a bit of a haul, but sounds like there might be some work in it. Truth, my people could use a party. We lost Wash, you know,” he said quietly. “And the Shepherd.” “I heard,” Monty said sadly. “Damn shame. Look forward to hoisting a tankard to them on Muir. Because you are coming, aren’t you?” “Pretty long haul, Monty,” Mal repeated, knowing already that he was going. “Then you’ll have plenty of time to patch up your dancin’ duds for the shindig. Kinda can’t take no for an answer, Mal. You were requested.” That brought him up short. “What? Who the hell requested . . .?” “A . . . mutual friend. Haven’t seen ‘em in years. Don’t want to say the name, but . . . there’s a distinctive scar across the one ear you might could be familiar with,” he said carefully, tugging on his left earlobe. Mal caught his breath. “You’ve got to be joking,” he said. “Nope. Word through the grapevine is this person has some intel you might want to see.” “I ain’t in the intel business no more, Monty,” Mal complained. “I’m a humble merchant. My own master. Captain, not Sergeant. I don’t come runnin’ the first time anyone says to. Ain’t got stripes on my sleeve to make it a compellin’ request. And I ain’t likely to show just ‘cause someone I used to know in the War mentions me by name. Stubborn, you might call it. And I can’t help but resent the implication that I’m somehow obliged to—” “Thought it might go this way,” Monty admitted, interrupting. “So I was given a hole card. I was told to mention a name, if you were a might skittish about seein’ . . . scarface again.” “And just what powerful magical word is that?” Mal demanded. “It had better involve money, loot, or a classy set o’ tits—” “I was told to mention the name ‘Martin Royce Tessarollo.’” Mal just stared at the screen, a long time. Monty didn’t pressure him to speak – he recognized an opportune moment for thought, and gave it the respectful silence it was due. “See you in a week on Muir, Monty,” Mal said quietly. “Reynolds, out.”