The ship’s sensors picked the cylinder up from quite a distance away. “Mal, want to come on up here?’ Wash’s voice buzzed into the captain’s quarters. Mal, who had just found a spot on his bunk that he thought as comfortable, cursed his pilot in Chinese and pulled himself to his feet. “I heard that, Mal” Wash’s voice buzzed back. Here is where I’m going wrong, Mal thought. I’m getting out of bed. And I’m not going right back to bed. Whatever else happens today will follow from these two mistakes. He climbed the ladder out of his quarters and sauntered up to the bridge. “Is it an Alliance cruiser, Wash? A passel of hungry Reavers? Pirates? What did you find up here that was so astonishing you just had to share with me?” Wash looked up at his captain, a little hurt by this tirade. “Gee, Mal, I just thought you should see this.” Mal closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Wash, I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that,” he said. “I’ve got a headache.” “So go see the doc.” “No, I’m not going to go see the doc, it’s just a little headache, it’ll pass, they always do.” Wash wanted to argue the point, if for no other reason than he found it fun to argue, but Mal’s mood was clearly not right for an argument. “Now, what did you find?” “A box!” Wash said with a smile. “You dragged me out of bed for a box?” “Ah, but not just a box, but a very old box……as in and Earth-that-Was type old box.” Now he had Mal’s attention. This meant old box had just turned into old and valuable box. This also meant that Mal had forgotten all about being mad at Wash. “What would something that old be doing way out here, though?” Mal asked, mostly to himself. “See the painting on the side? That’s an old American flag. The box shows to be early to mid 21st century. But you’re right, that thing’s a very long way from home.” Mal walked through the commons area to the ship’s hold, where Jayne was doing bench presses with the Shepherd. “Jayne, get a suit on, we’re going for a walk.” “For what?” “For the exercise!” Mal barked at him. “Just get a damn suit on. We might have just found something valuable.” Something valuable equated to payment for Jayne, and that could only be good. And so it was that Jayne got to suiting up.

When they had brought the thing inside, River simply lost it. On her best days, she could be incomprehensible, but this was not shaping up to be one of her best days. Wild panic washed across her face in waves as she scrambled into a corner of the hold, screeching “Kill her kill her kill her” at the top of her lungs, which was doing very little for Mal’s headache. Mal stormed right up to Simon, who was dressed in a matching vest and pants, and white shirt that Mal found so irritating in its propriety. “Doctor, you silence that girl right this instant or I will have her muzzled and gagged,” He growled. “Captain, you can see she’s frightened out of mind--” “I can see she’s out of her mind most days, but today she is not helping my headache, so you shut her up, or gorrammit, I will!” Simon prepared a shot of something that lowered River’s volume considerable, to where the kill-her kill-her-kill-her was a soft singsong, which didn’t make it any less unsettling to Jayne, just more tolerable as far as Mal was concerned. “Captain, why don’t you let me give you something for your headache,” Simon asked after he had seen to his sister. “No, I don’t need anything, it’s just a headache, it’ll pass, they always do….Now, you’ve got one of those--encyclopedia things with you, right?” “Yes, in my quarters.” “Go on and get it, let’s see what we can figure this thing out to be,” Mal said, walking around his new found catch. The “box” was rectangular, like a coffin, almost, but about four times the size of a coffin. Solar panels ran along the sides of the thing, and below the painted flag, faded printing presented itself below the dust that had accumulated on the thing. Simon returned with his encyclopedia, and used the reference portion of the machine to snap a picture of the box, giving the computer a chance to match it up against something within the database. Jayne was wiping the locking mechanisms clean, which were fairly simple to get past. Apparently, the idea was to keep something in the box, not out. “Captain, this would appear to be a cryo-prison chamber,” Simon said finally. “A whado-what?” “In the 21st century, rather than use up dwindling prison space and manpower, these were built for the worst of the worst criminals, to be launched into space.” “Why would they do something like that?” Jayne asked. “Why not just shoot ‘em?” Zoe always admired Jayne for his directness. “because, by the 21st Century, they didn’t allow for that no more, did they, Doctor?” she asked. “That’s correct. According to this, it wasn’t used very often, only on the very worst offenders who were a danger even in a room all by themselves. There are only 11 of these cryo-prisons listed.” Jayne had the printing cleared away, and called the Doctor and Book over. “What’s that say,” he asked. “I never learned to read English so good, I sorta stuck to Chinese.” “Do not open under penalty of law, contents extremely dangerous,” the Doctor read. “Here is contained Jason Voorhees, convicted of 387 counts of murder.” “Wow,” Jayne said. “That boy was busy!” The captain and Book both looked disapprovingly at Jayne. .”What?” he said. “Look that name up, Doctor,” the captain said. “And let’s get a gander at our bad boy inside.” The four locks gave way easily, and the cover swung up on hydraulic pistons without any effort at all. Smoke and steam cleared, revealing the man inside. The first thing that everyone’s eyes were drawn to, of course, was the mask on his face, beige with red slashes and breathing holes on it. Past that was just the sheer size of the man wearing the mask. Better than 2 meters tall, and no less than 140-150 kilos, he was an absolute monster of a human being. Jayne reached forward to touch the mask, and Simon slapped his hand away, with the admonition, “Touch him and you might stick to him. Early cryogenics was based on flash freezing the subject with liquid nitrogen enough to suspend all activity down to a cellular level. Some survived it, some didn’t. there’s no real way of knowing with this one.” “Look at the size of him,” Wash muttered. “he killed almost four hundred people?” “I would discourage waking him up to let him up that count,” Mal said. Unconsciously, his right hand had inched closer to his holster, and as he looked at Zoe and Jayne, they had done the same. This just felt……….bad. Like an old and angry bad, the kind that got shut down once, and would love another run at being bad all over again.. “Captain, I would have to commend you on your insight,” Book said. “According to Doctor Tam’s encyclopedia, Jason Voorhees was something of an anomaly to 21st century science. It claims here that repeated efforts were made to execute his, from firing squads to electrocution to poison. It says here they even tried hanging him once, until he reached up and broke the chain,” book look up at everyone. “Chain that they had used to hang him with.” “We read about a creature in that time frame who had regenerative capabilities, who could withstand just about any sort of an attack and just keep going. There was a rumor that this was an early government experiment at a bio-weapon that got loose,” the doctor added. “Trust a government to think of something like this,” Mal said. As the crew talked, awareness had begun to seep back into Jason’s consciousness. He was not concerned with where he was or what had happened to him. His mind went to its first drive, and that was his enraged drive was to kill. Jason only had one working eye, his right one, and it darted back and forth, taking inventory of who was gathered around him. His body was not responding to the commands sent from his brain, and this only enraged him further. “Captain, it would seem to me that the best course of action would be to put him right back where he was,” Book said. “Someone went to great effort to send him this far form Earth-that-Was for a reason, and I don’t think we should interfere with that.” Jason could almost feel his fingertips again, and his programming told him that further feeling would follow. With feeling would come mobility, and mobility meant he would be able to return to his primary function. “Anybody here got a big problem with that?’ the Captain asked? Jayne had taken several steps back, and now his hand rested directly on the butt of his pistol. Zoe had done the same. Book, also, was keeping his fair distance from the chamber. They were spooked, not bad spooked, not yet, but they would get there before much time came and passed. River, doped to the gills as she was, still turned her head back and forth muttering about “kill her kill her kill her kill her”, and he muttering was getting louder. She was bad spooked by this thing in the box. Jason knew he was only moments from mobility. He would kill the big one first, eliminate the worst threat to his own safety. Jason did not really grasp his ability to regenerate his own tissue and flesh, he only knew that no one been able to kill him. Slow him down, yes, put him to sleep even, but never kill him. “Then let’s button this thing up and put it back in the airlock, let the black swallow it up. Wash, I want a short, full burn after we send this thing on its merry, I don’t want it sucked to our grav.” Mal brought the cover back down, and had two of the locks secured when the first BANG came from inside the box. Jayne swore loudly in Chinese and said “How can he be alive. That ain’t possible except for some kinda ghost, That ain’t really happening!” Zoe, the opposite of Jayne, jumped onto the third lock and secured it, while Mal did the fourth. The BANG-ing got louder, Jason was trying to free himself from his metal cell of ice. “Jayne, quit screwing around and help me push this think!” Mal shouted. Jayne, Zoe, and Book and Simon all joined mal in shoving the box into the ship’s cargo hold airlock. As they did so, the box was beginning to rock back and forth with its occupant’s efforts. Shutting the hatch behind them, Mal slammed his hand down on the button opening the airlock. Warning lights and buzzers announced the opening of an airlock door, and Wash let them know from the bridge that the metal cell had been succesfully spit away from them. The solar panels recharged themselves, and the freezing process began once again. Jason let himself shut down again, until he would be brought back for more killing. Mal looked at the crew members around him. “Let’s just stick to simple thieving to make a living. I don’t want to do any more historicalizing..” No one gave him any argument to that.