{A/N}: Read parts 1-4 if you haven't already, but bear in mind that part 3 is in the hangar for an overhaul since it has...issues. Thanks so much to everyone who has left feedback-- it helps so much! And it makes me grin when I get that little email that tells me somebody read my scribblings! _________________________________________________ “Alright, travelers, everybody strap in or grab onto something. We’ll be leaving atmo in… just under two minutes,” Wash’s voice came over the com. Though I don’t know where we’re heading after that, as our jing-tzahng mei yong-duh captain seems to have disappeared again, he continued mentally, a scowl twisting onto his face as he raised Serenity’s nose into the sky. If he could keep the ship just at the edge of the upper atmosphere until he could figure out where the cruisers the Alliance had undoubtedly brought in were orbiting, they might have a shot at getting out of here unnoticed. Having programmed his trajectory, Wash turned his attention to the map of Lakai and its few moons on the vidscreen. “How’s it look, husband?” The sound of Zoe’s voice behind him and the touch of her hand on his shoulder made Wash jump a little. “Not gonna lie, dear, it would be just a bit easier if I had any idea where the diyu I was taking this boat…” Wash’s gaze remained fixed on the map. There. That tiny moon. It was very small and orbited a bit further out than the others, but it was irregularly shaped, and if he could get them there, they could land until any orbiting Feds were on the other side of the world, giving Serenity a clear shot into the black. “Next stop is Malachi. Got cargo to drop. Not too picky how we get there, though, long as the trip don’t involve Feds.” Mal’s voice cut across the bridge as he joined them. “Whatever you’re doin’ hangin’ here in this excessively low orbit, do it fast. We’re burnin’ an awful amount of fuel fightin’ the world’s gravity.” “You said no Feds. I’m just taking a moment to make sure I’m not about to fly us straight into….ta mah de….” Not fifty feet above them hovered an Alliance cruiser. _________________________________________________ “Wuh duh ma huh tah duh fong kwong duh wai shung….” “We are so humped…” “Wait. Wash, pull up closer under their belly.” “Dung ee hwar…Mal, have you completely lost your…” “Sir, I think you have a problem with your brain being missing….” “Bi zui. Not close enough to set off their proximity alarm, but close as you can without them noticing. Ship big as that one has a big heat signature. Get up there ‘fore they see us and our bitty boat can hide in their shadow. Any kinda luck and they won’t notice we’re there.” Wash’s face was calm, but his knuckles were white on the yoke as he brought Serenity up as close as he dared to the big cruiser. “Now kill the power. Just what we need to breathe and match their orbit.” Wash nodded in response, hit some switches, and called back to the engine room. “Kaylee, go to blackout.” “Shi,” Kaylee’s tense voice crackled back over the com. A tense several minutes passed, as Serenity drifted, cold and silent, beneath the cover of the big ship. With each passing moment that went by without a hail from the larger ship, Wash relaxed in his seat a little more and Zoe’s iron grip on his shoulder lessened a little. There was only one problem. “Um, sir,” Wash asked tentatively. “How are we going to get out from under this beast?” _________________________________________________ The bridge was a pretty small place with the whole crew crammed into the area behind the pilots’ chairs. Simon was still in the infirmary, hovering over his as-yet-unconscious patient, and Inara was still planetside with her fancy gentleman, but seven people was plenty. Especially when one of them was a fidgety and disgruntled-looking Jayne. Somehow he made seven people seem like ten. Mal looked around at his crew. “Anybody got any ideas?” he asked. “Hey, don’t look at me, I came up with the hiding-on-the-small-moon plan. It’s somebody else’s turn to come up with a brilliant idea to save us all,” Wash replied. “Shoulda been long gone already…” Jayne grumbled. “We’re all well aware of that by now, Jayne, so unless you have anything constructive to contribute…” Mal’s angry retort trailed off as a small voice drifted from the back of the bridge. “Not a moon. It’s a space station.” “River?” Zoe moved to put an arm over the girl’s shoulders. “River, is there something you want to tell us?” But the girl just stared at her bare toes, looking confused. “That’s definitely a moon. There’s no skyplex or anything like that anywhere even close to here. And nobody could build something that irregular…. Wait…” Wash was staring at the vid screen, a small smile starting to form on his features. “That’s it! Girl really is a genius…” _________________________________________________ Commander Belton paced back and forth in front of the command tent, wondering what to do next. It was the waiting that got to him. Waiting for someone to move. Waiting for his men to find someone he could question. He forced himself to stop, take a deep breath, and take another swig of his coffee. He could hear some of his boys shouting back and forth as they worked to clear some of the rubble that was all that remained of the correctional facility. Sometimes he sort of missed the days when he wasn’t in charge—when all he had to do was follow orders and see the job get done. More shouting, along with scuffling sounds growing closer to the command tent, snapped Belton out of his reverie. He stepped around the side of the tent to see two of his men, Wilde and Ngyen by the look of them, dragging a ragged, kicking prisoner between them. Blood poured from the man’s nose and mouth and his hands were bound behind his back, but he was still alert enough to scramble and lash out with his legs and to twist angrily in the grasp of his captors. “Let him go,” Belton spoke quietly, but with authority. The two soldiers dropped the struggling man on his knees in front of their commanding officer and stepped back, ready to intervene should the man become more violent. Belton walked around the kneeling man, surveying him impassively. “What’s your name, son?” he asked. The man spat out a mouthful of blood on the ground, but said nothing. Belton frowned, turning to face his prisoner. “Wilde, may I borrow your baton?” he asked, still in the same chillingly calm and quiet tone. The soldier on the man’s left wordlessly handed Belton the ten-inch piece of steel and plastic that hung at his belt. Belton placed the baton under the prisoner’s chin, forcing his head up and back as he spoke. “I asked you the question out of courtesy, son. I’m going to assume your name isn’t Stephanie, so according to my records, you’re Charlie Masters. You see, son, there’s little you can tell me that I won’t figure out in some way, so cooperation will only make your life more pleasant at this juncture. Now there’s a fair number of good Alliance soldiers dead here, not to mention civilians, and there’s also a fair number of men here who suspect that you, as a survivor, might have had something to do with it.” Belton removed the baton and recommenced his circling pattern around Masters’ kneeling form. “I’m a fair man, Mr. Masters. I don’t want to see you punished for something you didn’t do. But I’m a just man, too, and I can certainly understand that my boys here won’t look kindly on a cop-killer. If I lock you up tonight without giving them some idea that you weren’t responsible for all this, that you just took off running out of, oh, I don’t know, blind panic, well, let’s just say that I don’t envy how you’re going to feel in the morning. If you’re capable of feeling anything by morning.” Standing behind his prisoner, Belton gave him a hard jab in the lumbar spine with the baton. “Stand up.” Masters rose to his feet awkwardly, nearly falling as he tried to balance himself with his arms still bound behind his back. “You and I are going to go into this tent and have a little chat. Mr. Masters, Wilde, Ngyen, after you.” _________________________________________________ “Space station? Genius? That don’t make no kinda sense. Crazy over there’s just runnin’ off at the mouth again.” Jayne declared, leaning back against the bulkhead. But Mal was leaning over the vid screen, looking at Wash. “That’s what, Wash? Whatever you’ve got in your mind just now, spit it out.” “All we have to do is wait. Big ships like this in low orbit dump their trash and let it burn up in the atmosphere as it falls. It takes time for some of the pieces to fall, though, and they usually dump right before they move to another area to stay out of the field of the bigger debris. All we have to do is wait till they dump, then float off with the the rest of the garbage. Wait till they get a ways off, fire off a crybaby to attract their attention, then cut and run.” “Float off with the rest of the what? Serenity ain’t trash, Wash, and you know it…” Kaylee interjected. “Sorry, Kaylee. I didn’t mean it like that…” “Settle down, Kaylee. Sounds like a nice enough idea, Wash, but what in the sphincter o’hell does that have to do with moons and space stations?” “I had a roommate back in flight school that loved old movies from Earth-That-Was. Big collector. None of us had the coin to own the original recordings, but sometimes he would find copies of copies of copies of old movies that would play on the cortex. There was this one that he just loved, watched all the time, Space Wars or Star Battles or something like that—“that’s not a moon, that’s a space station” was a line from that movie. Made me think of another part of the movie where they hide their ship up next to a bigger ship and float off when the big ship dumps its trash. Of course, they wind up nearly getting pulverized in an asteroid field, but we’re not going for a perfectly accurate reinactment here. And that last part might have been in a different movie anyway. I always liked the ones with dinosaurs better.” “Huh.” “Sir, we may want to land on that moon anyway. We can wave Inara and work out picking her up from there once that cruiser moves around to the other side of the world,” Zoe suggested. “Do it,” Mal nodded, turning to leave the bridge. “You’ve all got jobs to do. Let’s go do ‘em and let Wash do his. Ma-shong.” _________________________________________________ Simon sat in the infirmary, hunched over the countertop where he was poring over yet another scan of his sister’s tortured brain. With the ship mostly powered down, the lighting in the infirmary was low, but better than in other areas of the ship where the ability to see clearly was less critical to everyone’s health and wellbeing. Totally immersed in his work, Simon didn’t notice when the patient lying on the medbed slowly flickered her eyes open. Two rooms away in her quarters, River suddenly sat bolt upright in her bed, her sketch pad and colored pencils dropping, forgotten, to the floor. Through the blinding headache threatening to split her skull in two and the disorienting effects of the drugs running through her veins, Stephanie struggled to bring the dim room around her into focus. Even half-conscious and with no prospect of leaving her bed, her instincts took over, making her look for exits. She’d know exactly where every potential way out of this room was, even if she’d never reach any of them. Her eyes flicked from the ceiling to the doorway to the back of Simon’s head. She spotted the bag hanging by her head, dripping unknown substances into her right arm. No more. No more of the drugs, the needles, the treatments. With immense concentration, she found her left hand. Twitched her fingers. She summoned every ounce of strength and concentration she could find in her hazy mind to force her arm to rise and travel the immeasurable distance across her body. Worked her fingers around the injection port taped into her right arm, and with one effort, one uncoordinated flailing motion, tore it out. Her eyes closed in exhaustion as the alarm on the injection pump began squealing in indignation. Simon spun around in his chair to see blood running from the hole in Stephanie’s vein where her IV had been a moment before, dripping from her fingers and puddling on the floor to mix with the fluid running out of the disconnected IV line. Simon crossed the infirmary in one step to slap off the noisy alarm. Instantly cool and professional, he grabbed a piece of gauze and held it to Stephanie’s bleeding arm, turning toward the counter for a roll of tape. As he turned, she tugged her arm out of his grasp. “No,” she rasped through a parched throat and lips. “No more. No….more.” Her head rolled back and forth in the negative on her pillow. “No.” “I’m just going to tape up your arm. You’re bleeding.” He reached for her hand again, and she twitched it away. “No….Leave me alone,” her voice was growing stronger and more insistent. “Fine. No drugs, no shots, no treatments of any kind. Just let me clean up and bandage your arm,” Simon pleaded. Once, just once, he’d like to find a cooperative patient on this ship. One that accepted medical attention without assuming he had some ulterior motive, some sadistic enjoyment of poking needles into people. “Don’t…don’t touch me.” Just then, Mal’s head appeared around the side of the infirmary door. “Heard some kinda ruckus in here, Doc. Last I checked, doctors were supposed to fix their patients, not distress ‘em.” Simon glared up at Mal from where he stood at Stephanie’s side. “Yes, well, it’s difficult to treat a patient who won’t let me touch her,” he snapped. Mal crossed the distance from the doorway to the medbed in two strides and found himself staring into a pair of eyes that he remembered very well. “Now, I’m just going to wash the blood off of your arm and apply a bandage, so let’s see if we can lift your arm above your head, here…” Simon continued, grasping Stephanie’s forearm and carefully elevating it. But she wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. She was staring, abashed, at Mal’s face. “Mal?” she whispered. “No. Trick. Dead in the Valley.” His expression softened as he looked into her face and reached for her free hand, wiping away a smear of blood on her index finger as he did so. “No, Steph, no trick. I’m alive and you’re alive. The doc here’s gonna fix you up shiny, just wait and see. Gotta let him do his job, now.” Her eyes flicked over to the doctor, and a heartrending look of panic crossed her face. “No more drugs. Please, don’t let him. No more trials.” Mal brushed her hair back from her face in a display of gentleness Simon had rarely seen from the captain. The look on the man’s face was inscrutable. “You’re on Serenity, now, sweetheart. Ain’t a person here that’ll hurt you.” Simon finished bandaging Stephanie’s arm and returned to his paperwork at the counter, but Mal remained by the bedside, watching quietly, until Stephanie finally relaxed and fell into the exhausted sleep of slow recovery.