Mal Reynolds was no particular stranger to acting quickly in a crisis, and even though the shuttle, (and Inara and himself,) were only some seconds away from getting smashed into the surface of the moon, he didn't panic for more than an instant. *Even got a kind of a plan forming,* he thought to himself, quickly accessing the scanner and pulling up a heat reading on the other ship clamped to them, the one that Jesse Sanchez had gotten ahold of to pull this trap.

Inara glared at him, but Mal didn't think that this violated his vow to 'keep his hands off the controls' - that only applied to the piloting gear. He'd already worked the communicator, after all, and didn't see much of a difference between that and the scanner. Plus, it was a gorram crisis! However, the next part would have to be up to her. "Alright, Inara, I want you to spin us around," he said, fastening the harness straps in his own seat, and then moving on to secure Inara without even thinking about it. "Or flip us, really, so that we're further away from the surface and Jesse's closer."

"But... but he won't let us, he'll compensate..." Inara started.

"He can't compensate for that," Mal assured her, "Not if you go clockwise. He lost one maneuvering jet - probably when he was clamping us. That was a hell of a maneuver, because he was coming away from Ares to start, but wanted us both to be heading back towards it when all was done." Inara nodded some agreement to what he'd said. "And the other jet that he'd need, it won't fire, or won't fire right, because our hull is right up against it." Mal hoped that there was some sort of safety on those jets, otherwise Jesse might fire them anyway and cut the grapples, sending himself flying free and pushing them even harder into Ares. "But you've got to do it now!"

"Right," Inara said, engaging her own maneuvering jets. "That way, he'll stop pushing down, because he's only going to hurt himself." The flip finished, and Mal felt himself hanging upside down, because they were under Ares gravity now, not artificial gee inside the cockpit.

That same gravity was pulling both ships closer to the surface now, and momentum was pushing them the same way, as was the shuttle drive, since Inara had been trying to push up, and hadn't corrected that when she did the flip. For Sanchez's part, he'd been confused enough at their maneuver that he'd cut his own drive, not realizing that the same vector that had been pushing them down would have helped to save him now.

And the roof of his ship touched down on rough ground and started to drag. Mal felt like he was getting shaken to pieces, even though their shuttle was being held up in the air away from the impact, with the magnetic grapples still holding strong for now. It seemed like about a minute or more of crash-landing, and at the end of it, suddenly the shuttle cockpit was teetering back to its usual orientation - one grapple was letting go first, Mal realized, letting the ship flip back around like a lever. "Hold on," he muttered, and the flip completed itself when the second grapple let go, dropping them fifteen feet to the ground next to Sanchez's wreck.

"Are - are you okay?" Inara replied once it was all over.

"Umm... yeah, I think so," he muttered, and then repeated the sentiment more loudly in case she hadn't been able to hear. Scrambled to release the harness straps and take a good look around. "Ai-yah tyen-ah!" All of his carefully stocked supplies, of course, had been tossed around the back of the shuttle by the recent excitement, of course, and a lot of them were piled haphazardly up against the main thruster - which had just set itself, and a lot of the flammable packages on fire. Mal charged forward into the gathering smoke, trying to remember where the fire suppresion units were mounted. The first small cylinder he found emitted only a pale puff of white cloudy soot, which wasn't helpful. "Gorram, gorram, gorram..."

It was Inara who managed to find a working supressor and put out the supplies and the visible parts of the thruster, which just pretty much figured. "I... I can handle things in here," she managed to assure him, coughing somewhat from the combination of smoke and supression foam. "Shouldn't you, err, check the other ship?"

"Oh, right," Mal muttered. Yes, they had been brought down here by a man who had nothing to lose, and apparently felt he had no objective either but revenge. There was a small chance at least that he'd survived the crash, and Mal needed to find out if he was still able and willing to cause more trouble. "Right." But before leaving her side, without knowing quite why, he gathered Inara into his arms and kissed her.

She was an incredibly good kisser, even caught by surprise in such a tense situation, and there was something about the touch of her lips on his that was satisfying in more than just the usual physical way. *At least I'll remember this one until the end of my days.* But it was the WHY of that kiss that shadowed Mal as he headed over to the shuttle airlock. Had he just felt that he might possibly die at Sanchez' hands, and wanted to kiss her again before he died?

The air outside the shuttle was nicely breatheable, if oddly thin, very cold, and there was something about it that made his skin prickle and his hair stand up on end. (Or was that fear?) The Serenity shuttle was clearly in bad shape, and Jesse Sanchez's ship was already a pile of burning scrap. The chances of him surviving to pose a danger seemed less and less likely. Finding enouch of Jesse to prove that, however, was looking like a problem, however, especially as most of what was left of the ship was still upside down.

When he found what was left of Jesse, with the ship's front viewport between Mal and a fiercely raging fire sweeping through the cockpit, it was clear that the Sanchez brother had died a very grisly death in the crash. Mal lost no time in getting back to the shuttle and Inara, to find out that she'd started to take charge in there.

"Okay, well, we won't get a single inch further in this girl," Inara said sadly, running an hand over the inner wall of the room. "But Kazia's estates are only around twenty-five miles away - we should be able to get there on foot, especially with the lower gravity. It's still Ares night, and pretty cold out there, right? So I've gotten some good warm clothing for each of us, and a pack of essentials. The gravity is lower than normal, so it'll be easier to cover ground..."

"Do you have practice in walking long distances in low gravity?" Mal asked. "It's not as easy as it looks."

"I know," she insisted. "I haven't hiked, but I've gotten enough practice in getting around on the smaller moons I think. Paquin was nearly as light as this."

"Oh, right, yeah." That had been one of the more interesting parts of the fight with the Operative...

So they dressed up in the heavy snow pants and winter jackets, and Mal went through the pack to see what Inara had considered 'essential.' He also grabbed some food, figuring that fighting off cold weather required caloric energy. "Of course, once the dawn comes, we won't want these heavy clothes, but that won't be for seventeen hours or so," Inara admitted. And then, she very casually took off her skirt, fished in the pile for a pair of light pants, (were they his? No... something of Kaylee's he'd grabbed without really having any clear idea why,) to put them on underneath the heavier insulated pants. Max couldn't quite keep himself from staring at her shapely legs until they were covered up once again.

The cold bit much more fiercely once they had actually started away from the wrecked ships - a combination of being away from the flame and heated metal, and the adrenalin rush of the near escape and crash landing fading away. One thing that neither of them had said much about out loud was the notion of sending a signal for help - the medium-range communicator wasn't functioning, and Sanchez's ship still had its radio jammer working - which would mean that no emergency beacon would have gotten through. The only working communicator that Max had been able to find was a short-range wrist unit, which he would see if it was any good once they had walked out of range of the jammer. They walked on through land that seemed like a mix of bare earth and spotted grasses, under about two inches of loose powdery snow. "Should we start talking about our past again?" he asked out loud.

"I... I'm not sure if I want to hear any more about the war or things like that," Inara admitted after a moment, and he caught the hood of her jacket move, imagining her eyes looking up into the brilliant stars of the night sky. "I... I meant what I said about standing behind what we did with the truth of Miranda, Mal, but I'm also scared now. Will there be war among the worlds of the 'Verse once again? I... I never appreciated how horrible the war of Unification was until... until I heard about your experiences, and Zoe's. To face the thought that our own actions would bring on a war of De-Unification, just as bad..."

"I - I don't know what will happen next," Mal said, honestly enough. He still found it hard enough to believe that his own actions had led to something that was changing so many lives, all across the worlds. So he did what came naturally enough - he changed the subject. "Not particularly sure that I want to hear more about Companion 'temples' just at the moment, either."

"What... what is THAT supposed to mean?" Inara spat out, all of the ill temper she could cram into the words dripping out.

"Well, after this much, the hypocrisy of the whole setup is just starting to rankle," Mal went on, willfully disregarding the voices of caution. Keeping a lid on honesty wouldn't do any of them any good, and maybe getting Inara hot with anger and frustration would help keep her warm for the trek. "The companions use every bit of the trappings of religion, of faith and belief in something outside the material world, that they can - your glossary reeks of it. Temples and priestesses, taking vows, novices and initiates and so on. But when you boil that rhetoric away, there's nothing at the heart of your 'order' than the love of money, and there is nothing that I despise worse than those who take advantage of faith to richify themselves."

"That's hardly fair," Inara insisted. "Whatever you may think of our practices, we make no-one among our clients believe in our faith or proselytize to them."

"No, but you indoctrinate the new girls," Mal remarked acidly. "The ones who become new companions, and pay a certain cut of their take to their Temple and the Guild hierarchy, I don't doubt. Just what *are* the beliefs of the Companion order, anyhow? Nothing that'll interrupt the steady flow of cash money, I suppose."

"Outsiders are not told the tenets of our faith," Inara replied huffily. "But you're right in one thing - the flow of money, as you say, does not stop - or at least the majority of it does not stop, with the Companion herself or the Temple priestess or even the Guild council. Where from it flows after passing us by, I'll leave up to you to imagine."

"Now, that *is* an interesting notion," Mal admitted, plodding on through the snow. "Does it keep going on up, then - to some organization that's just using the Guild as a fundraising source??"

"No, no, it's nothing like that," she countered. "We're very much in control of the money, but we're not using it to buy luxuries for ourselves. It's being used on something much less... temporal."

And Mal couldn't think of a reply. The tactic was starting to turn against him - he could feel Inara's cold shoulder from here.

-----------

"He's not far away," Jayne muttered, and Zoe nodded, looking at the little sensor-device in her hand. "Expecting company, though. Better to wait it out right here and try to catch him come nightfall."

"I don't object to that plan, if it just comes down to us and him," Zoe muttered uncertainly. "Just wondering about the other ships in the area, though. Nobody's close, but they'll have seen us land here. Even if nobody wants to come up against us directly, I wouldn't rule out a swoop 'n' snatch."

"We can keep an eye on them," Jayne said indolently, stretching out with his butt resting on an old tree stump. "So, anything new in the plans of Zoe? I mean, you just goin' to stick with the ship, and with Mal, whatever he leads to next?"

"Hmm? Well, I suppose." Zoe sighed. "That was the plan from the beginning. Never... never expected that I'd find a guy like Wash by serving as Mal's first mate, but... but I did, and in the process I found myself a home. Now - well, Wash has gone on, to fly free wherever, but I still have that home. Don't see myself turning my back on it while it's still there."

"Gorram it," Jayne muttered under his breath. Zoe looked over at him, her sharp ears not missing that grunt, but she didn't pursue the thought. "I guess your home on Hera got torn up pretty bad in the war."

"Hera?" Zoe looked up at him a bit oddly. "I have kin on Hera, and I was stuck groundbound with them for a while when I was little, but that was never home." She sighed. "I was born on a ship, grew up on a ship, and didn't ever appreciate ships so much as when I was stuck without one."

"Like when you were in the war," Jayne supplied. "Most of the fighting was planetside, yes?"

"Most of what I saw, yes," Zoe admitted. "I applied for a command post in the Independent Deep Navy, but didn't get accepted, so took career army. Saw a few scraps as part of a Marine detatchment - fighting off a boarding party or going along with one, but soon they started sticking us with ground missions."

"Okay," Jayne said, no longer too interested. "And Wash - do, do you really believe that there's some part of him - some part of anybody, that don't die? I've wondered about such a thing - talked about it with the Preacher man, but still... always figured that if there were such a thing as souls, somebody would have figured out a way to stick around and haunt me for makin' him a ghost by now."

"It's not that easy to stick around here when you're... like they are," Zoe said, unable to keep from laughing. "But yeah, I do believe in souls, and an afterlife, though I guess I'm not sure about what it's like. Consciousness... the way that people are able to think, and to be aware of what they're thinking, that's so incredible a thing that it can't just be tied to these mortal bodies of ours, and gets snuffed when the heart starts beating."

"Hmm." Jayne thought about that. "What did we bring to eat, and do you think it's worth a try to hunt something meaty around here?"

"You can go chasing the wild mountain goats if you want, Jayne," Zoe said with a bit of a groan. "I wouldn't say no to some flame roasted chevon. But I'm going to keep watch here, just in case."

"That works for me, yeah," Jayne admitted. "Got a lead on any goats from that thing?" He went to the shuttle, came out carrying a fairly slender rifle, and followed Zoe's outstretched arm pointing out of the clearing.

------------

"I... I'm not sure that I can go much farther, Mal," Inara said, after he didn't know how much silent walking. (It was over three hours since they'd left the ship, according to his chrono, though they hadn't been quiet all that time.) "It... it's so cold, and I'm tired."

"Is only going to get colder, as the night gets longer, Inara," Mal replied, sympathetically. "And the best way to stay warm is to keep moving." There was a despairing sigh from her. "Okay, well... we might as well slow down to a meander, though, for a little bit, and grab some grub. Need to keep the body stoked with fuel to keep warm in this kind of weather. And then we keep right on going, understand?"

"Yeah, as long as I can sit down for just a minute or so," Inara insisted. "Just long enough to get some cold water out of these boots."

"Alright, reckon I could do with that, though I think that the water in my boots must be nearly at body temperature by now," he decided.

So they had a rough break for provisions - small rolls of bread, and self-warming bottles of hearty chicken soup that Mal found very reviving, and artificual baby carrot sticks. He took a drink of the triple-filtered water, since Zoe had told him once that eating snow on frozen worlds wasn't a good idea. Once the day broke, they'd be able to find some water source, and Inara had packed a purifier kit.

"Okay, I guess we might as well talk about something as we go, and I'm sorry I brought up that stuff about the Guild," Mal muttered, tromping along. "You're right that I don't understand everything about the Guild, though you can't blame me so much for jumping to conclusions when you keep so many secrets."

"Then I accept your apology, if you move off to a new topic," Inara said.

All of a sudden Mal found himself blurting out the last thing he'd ever have expected to say. "What - just what do you feel for me, Inara? I... I'd want to have you as my own lady, to have and to hold only to you, until death parts us, but I somehow can't imagine that you'd ever stand for that. You may like me a whole bunch, but that isn't a match for how much you love the Guild li... well, could you?"

"To... to retire from the Guild, and marry you?" A wistful smile crossed Inara's face, as she turned towards him, with snowflakes clinging to the furry fringe of the hood and to her amazingly long eyelashes. "No, though the idea does have some appeal, I - I'm not sure I'm ready for that - for that life."

"Now, what do you mean by that?"

"Well, let me turn it around on you," Inara countered. "If... if I said that I would do all that, on the condition that you - that you had to give up Serenity and settle down to some other job -- how would you react to it??"

"What??" Mal was surprised. "Would - would that really make a difference? I thought you loved 'Serenity' near as much as I do... and the gang..."

"I... I do, as an independent woman, with my own calling," Inara said softly. "Most of the time at least. But... but to be married to a ship captain taking dangerous criminal jobs... I'm not sure I could deal too well with that. And - and what else would I do on board ship if I weren't your 'ambassador'? I don't want to be just arm candy, and I don't really have the skills to fill another role on board. On a planet, I could find other work, I expect... not that I'm saying I'm eager for that, you realize..."

"Yeah," Mal muttered, sighing. "It was just a hypothetical. But... short of that, you didn't answer my question. If... if we don't get wed - if you stay in the guild, then what do you want of me?"

"I... I can't even say it out loud, yet," Inara muttered apologetically. "Not all of what I want. But I'd settle for having you in my bed - once we get back to a bed, I mean."

Mal raised his eyes. "You'd take me as a lover, then?"

"Yes." Inara's cheeks were brilliantly red, and he knew that that wasn't a reaction to the bitter cold. "We... we would have to keep it secret. It's considered undesirable for a Companion to have a consort of her own, openly."

"Scares off the prospective clients," Mal muttered.

"Essentially, yes."

"Sneak around on ship, keep it quiet from the other members of the crew, even?" Mal wondered out loud. "It's hard to keep such goings-on quiet in a small space, where there's only so many places to look for someone."

"Yes, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve." Inara sighed. "You could confide in Zoe if you want - she's discreet. Most of the others might slip up at the wrong moment, I'm afraid."

"Okay." Mal kept on tromping through the snow, and their path took them down a gentle rise. Now that they'd said so much out loud, he was having to fight off an absurd urge to sweep Inara up into a passionate embrace, right here and now, but it was definitely not the time.

"I... I'm not sure it's a good idea to go on any longer, Mal, no matter how good for the cold exercise is. My core temperature is dropping. Maybe we should just set up a makeshift shelter and try to hunker down for the rest of the night, or at least a good while."

"What d'you mean, your core temperature is dropping - you can't tell such a... or is that a part of Companion training too?" Mal looked at his chrono again, surprised to find it was nearly two hours since they'd eaten. Where had the time gone?

"Well, we're educated in sensing a lot of things about the condition of our own bodies, for obvious reasons," Inara muttered. "And all of the traditional symptoms of mild hypothermia are showing up too... strong shivering, numb hands, shallow breathing, goose bumps. I... I'm feeling confused, and have a strongly paradoxical urge to take off the winter clothes - that sort of confusion of thought is characteristic of stage two..."

"Okay, okay, I'll take your word for it," Mal muttered, wondering if he was starting to die of the cold too. "But - but we don't have much for shelter making, and if we're to stay alive without keeping on the move..."

"We've got our clothing, and some to spare," Inara said, starting to sweep some snow clear from a shallow hollow in the ground. "We can layer that beneath and above our bodies, and huddle together naked to share our body warmth. I... I think that that'll be enough. And - and there's the ignition ray - no wood to gather, but we could use that to warm a rock a little and that'll help a bit."

Mal paused, and wondered just fleetingly if his befuddled brains were being swayed too much by extraneous notions - and whether the prospect of being naked with Inara was something he should be looking forward to, or scared of. "Okay, let's give it a try."

But they didn't do it right away, because once the basics of the camp had been set, both of the weary backpackers were eager to eat again. Inara used the ignition ray to good effect, though Mal had to warn her against not wasting its charge - they might need more heat later, and possibly even to actually use it to light campfires. In his own pack, Mal found a small powered saucepan, which would use microwaves to warm or heat anything water-based placed inside it, so he eagerly served out some baked beans as an appetizer, and then melted a small batch of snow and added a package of 'instant dehydrated synthetic stew' to it. The results were actually verging on cheerful, which probably just was from contrast to how the rest of the day had gone. They chatted a bit about the others while they ate, how Kaylee and the Tams were probably living it up in the big city, and how Zoe and Jayne might be eating campfire food too, but at least they'd been better prepared for it.

Mal tried melting a bit more snow, just to the point where it was still cool enough to drink comfortably, and then Inara produced some herbal tea packets and infused them into hotter melt-water. Mal was feeling like he'd been warmed enough by all of this that he could probably stand to walk along further, but Inara seemed determined to turn their camp into her snug-shelter. Mal was actually a bit disappointed that he didn't get any kind of a chance to look at Inara without her clothes on, but given that the point was NOT to get exposed to the cold weather, that did make some sense. She stripped off under the layer of warm clothes that had already been spread out on top, and then told him to come on in and join her.

They ended up with Inara spooning him from behind, the warm rock, (which Mal had had to talk her again out of boosting with the ignition ray so it would be even hotter,) at her back. "You... you don't mind that the rock's on my side, right Mal? I think it's easier for the cold to get at me, because I don't have as much body mass, and if I'm warm, I can warm *you* up better."

Inara definitely felt warm, pressing herself against the full length of his body, her breath feeling nearly hot against his neck and one ear. Warmest of all, perhaps, was her passionate bosom. "Yeah, I think that that's working alright." Since they'd declared their intention to be lovers, though this wasn't the right time perhaps, he felt inclined to reach a hand back towards her, though the position was awkward - he did manage to caress the smooth skin of her hip - at least, he figured it had to be hip.

Inara was able to respond with her own hands to better effect. "Oooh, there's a good heat source right here," she muttered, wrapping her cool fingers around the stiff pole pointing out from behind his legs. "Yeah, this is comfy. We should get some sleep while we're here."

"Sleep?" Mal croaked out. "Do... do you really think that I could sleep, feeling like this??"

"Oh, I wouldn't be surprised." And then Inara's hand was moving up his body, massaging in a deeply relaxing way, instead of an erotic touch. Before Mal really understood what was happening, he did suddenly fall...

-------------

"You know, River, you're more than a little bit weird," Derek mentioned idly. River broke out into hearty laughter, but she did keep the thought that came to her silent. *Dear boy - you have no idea of a quarter of it!*

"Yeah, umm... I..." She had a hard time thinking of something to say, which was just making the problem worse in general. "Good thing I'm more than a little bit cute too, huh?"

"Actually, yeah, I guess you've got a point." They were sitting together on a rough wooden bench outside a run-down riverside cabin that he'd told her wasn't anybody's in particular anymore, and that he always loved coming out here. "And now your face is going all quiet again. I like to know what weird things are going through that cute head of yours."

"Umm... wondering what birds think about," River muttered to him, her eyes tracking a small songbird with a red mark on its breast flying past. Pheucticus ludovicianus or a variant species? Heck, maybe nobody had ever made a formal taxonomic survey on a world like Boros, to settle the matter. And 'wondering' was not really the right word - she'd never had the opportunity to really use her mental talents on anybody but people once she'd finally got some kind of control over them. People and Reavers, if you made a distinction between them, which River had to admit that she did. She had a vague memory of cow thoughts from Jiangyin, but cows didn't really have that many interesting thoughts, even the ones who were pastured out on the range or had many fields to range over.

Birds, on the other hand, even though their minds were smaller and somewhat less intense than larger mammals, were wild - at least, all the birds here were, and River hadn't nearly stopped getting surprised at what would pass through their flighty little attentions next.

"Probably a lot about food, and mating, and watching out for anybody who might be hunting them, and safe places to nest and sleep," Derek pointed out sensibly, and River nodded, since that did cover a lot of what she'd received. Suddenly, there was a loud smack, and a tiny spark that River hadn't even realized she was sensing had been snuffed out. "I wish that there were more who thought that the skeeters were good eating."

River turned around to look at Derek, who was rubbing a bit of a dark smeary something off of his bare forearm. "You... you killed the bug?"

"She was ettin' on me!" Derek protested, in a different dialog than she was used to hearing him talking. "I... you're not some 'hurt none of the 'verses creatures... umm, fanatic, are ye? Because - well, I appreciate the sentiment about not trying to hurt animals for no good reason, but critters like that... it's not the blood that I mind losing, really, but they can spread diseases, and no way left to keep them from comin' at ya but... well, you know."

"Hmm." In the spirit of inquiry, River put out her arm just as a large mosquito was buzzing past, and sure enough, it swerved to take the bait. River waited just a fraction of a second as it prepared to bite, and then flicked it off her with the first finger of her other hand, not hard enough to really hurt it. "That was your first warning," she muttered, trying to send the message into the tiny little cluster of nerves that served the bug in place of a true brain. "Find somebody else to snack on."

But the bug swerved around, its attention focusing on her bare legs, down near the ankle. For an instant, River caught a trace of thought, an instinctive impulse so simple that it could not be turned aside, and also realized that the determination to hunt was not for this bug herself - she would be using the blood to lay eggs, not to nourish herself. As it landed on her leg, River reached down and smashed the strongest part of her hand into it. "Sorry, bug," she whispered. "If you're not going to learn, about not hurting people, then you'll have to get swatted." Perhaps that was a lesson that could be carried over to somewhat higher life forms than mosquitos - like some of the people who the crew of Serenity had met in their travels.

"You haven't told me anything about you, River," Derek insisted.

"Well, neither have you. Isn't it more fun this way? We can make up all of the details we never heard ourselves, later, after this one enchanting moment is over with."

"Aiya, you can make up stuff about me if you want to, but I'd rather have some of the details straight from you." Derek sighed as he looked around.

"Umm, okay - I'm here on Boros with my brother and his... his wife Kaylee. We were - were supposed to be going to Paquin, but there were warnings of danger - pirates or something, because of the Miranda wave. Boros was the nearest place that the captain thought he'd be safe."

"How many people on board the ship? Are your relatives crew?"

"Yeah, Simon's a medic and she's an engineer. It's a pretty big hauler - thirty people in the crew, maybe more." River wasn't quite sure why she was still making stuff up in terms of these minor details, maybe it was just fun on some level to suggest possibilities that had never been this way.

She was starting to think that it was about time that they went back to the city - the sun had nearly set, and the man looking for her, whoever he was, had almost certainly moved on. Simon and Kaylee might be worrying about her - she'd been gone from the ship much longer than she planned to. However, another mischievous idea was forming in her head - Derek had been very nice and sweet to her, helping out when she really needed a hand, and she wanted to find some way to give him a proper thank-you. Dipping into the boy's head and carefully extracting a few daydreams about being alone with a pretty girl in this sort of situation wasn't hard, and she was a bit surprised at how sexually intense most of them were. Oh well, there was one scenario that seemed doable.

She turned to face Derek, took a deep breath, and wrapped her arms around his neck. "You... you'll probably never know how much you helped me out when you gave me a life out here, Derek." And she brought her lips to his. Kissing wasn't like she thought it would be, and it was probably a good thing that Derek had some practice himself, so that River could pick up on the technique from him. "Thank you."

"Okay, so..." He gave her a wide grin. "So I'm the knight in shiny armor, then, rescuing you without even knowing how much danger my blushing damsel was in."

"Some - something like that. And as I understand it, there are certain privileges to making a good knightly rescue."

"I... I don't want to go through with something like that just because you're stressed and grateful. I'd prefer you kiss me because you know me and like me for me..."

"Oh, come on, give me a break!" River exclaimed. "You... you get full points for chivalry, but - I'm the mystery woman, really I am. When you take me back to the city tonight, we'll never meet again. Don't you get off on that at least a little?"

Derek locked his gaze on her, and then he returned her kiss, holding her tight and letting his lips drift up to nuzzle her ear. "Okay, but let me know before I get too far. I really don't think I have that much gratitude coming to me for what I've done."

"No, not that far," River admitted, loving what his tongue was doing to her skin. "I'm nervous about this kind of thing too, and you're a good teacher," she admitted. "How about this?" She grabbed his wrist in her hand and brought it to her chest, cupping from outside her simple dress.

"Wow, I'm not sure I've graduated that far, but thanks..."

-------------

"Mal, wake up." Something soft was nudging him, and it didn't take Mal long to realize that it must be Inara - or part of her. "We need to get up - head out on the move again."

"Hmm??" Mal managed to open his eyes and peek out through a very small crack in the clothes that covered them in their shelter. It was still very dark out there, and seemed very cold, but he felt warm and comfortable here with the woman he dearly loved. And he didn't want to think any further about moving. "No, stay here. Dawn hasn't come yet, it's the coldest part of the night. Comfy, warm here with you."

"Mal, this is important," Inara said, using a strident tone. He could feel her moving, and realized that she was struggling to find and pull on her clothes. "Something's very wrong, and we need to at least get up and..."

"No, nothing's wrong." Mal wasn't sure about that... something seemed a bit unnatural about the fog that lay on his brain, it wasn't just the usual sleepiness. Hangover, or the effect of something like the goodnight kiss? Possible, but they hadn't been drinking, (he knew that the warmth of booze in cold weather was an illusion,) and he didn't figure that Inara had used anything chemical to put him to sleep - because that would lead to this sort of situation in getting him up. "Or... I just want to go back to sleep..."

"I think that that's part of it," Inara muttered. "I feel it to, but something - something's not..."

"And you were the one who wanted to lay down and snuggle up together naked," he rambled groggily. Suddenly there was a lot of movement, and the next thing, Inara, (who hadn't finished dressing warm enough for the outside weather herself,) had pulled his head and shoulders out of the shelter. "Do - do you see that, back the way we came from?"

"I... I can see a kind of reddish glow against the sky," Mal muttered.

"The woods are burning, Mal," Inara told him. "Probably one of the ships started the fire."

"Okay, that makes some sense," he admitted. "But why is that a problem? There's no forest near here, and fire can't spread easily through grass with snow on the ground..."

"It's the air, Mal," Inara lectured. "The atmosphere here on Ares is very thin, and it's almost all oxygen. No nitrogen to help smother a fire. That means the breathing air will be quickly used up. I think that the air here is already pretty stale, and it's only going to get worse."

That managed to cut through Mal's fog. Bad air was always something to worry about - it had nearly gotten him before, along with a gut shot... "Carbon dioxide, from the flames??"

"Yes, and worse," Inara said, pulling on her top and throwing him a sweater. "In this atmosphere, I'm worried about monoxide - that strangles forty times worse than dioxide. And the symptoms are a lot like a viral infection - you just feel sleepy and have no energy..."

By then, even though Mal was feeling very much like he had no energy, he was scrambling to dress himself, and trying to figure out how much they needed to pack up before they could leave. The heat of the fire couldn't have spread this far, because it felt VERY frigid. But if they could walk, that would warm them up...

Inara did more packing, and they hadn't left much out of their backpacks except for the spare clothes. It was hard to get moving, and even harder to keep putting one foot in front of the other after the first minute, but the two of them leaned against each other and kept going.

"We... we don't have any oxygen masks, do we?" Mal muttered. "I know I put them in the shuttle."

"No, sorry," Inara muttered. "I didn't bring them along in the backpacks - didn't realize that we'd need them."

"Well, I guess it's too late to go back and fetch them," Mal said dryly. Inara broke out laughing, then gasped and coughed, and swatted him. Mal made a mental note to be careful not to make her laugh until the breathing was easier.

Whenever that would be.

And then he forgot about laughter completely. Just... keep... moving...

TO BE CONTINUED...